The Dead Weather
Sea of Cowards

I Wanna Be In Their Gang, Their Gang, Their Gang

I have been cowering from the sun and seeking out shade like a thirsty vampire for several weeks now, this hot weather we have been having here in the UK is the very opposite of the Dead Weather in which darkness dwells; it is live weather and most people are stripping off and worshipping the sun, getting the barbeques out and generally having a good time. I am not. I feel like carrying an umbrella around with me as the sun is scorching my skin.

Just over a year ago I suffered a cardiac arrest and had to have all sorts of contraptions stuck into my heart to make sure that it doesn't act up again. I have also been on a course of drugs including beta blockers but the one that is presenting me with problems...

The National
High Violet

Confused and certain. Intense and modest. Confident and fearful. Playful and serious. Anxious and serene. Melancholy and hopeful. Cryptic and universal. They know how to build. They know how to release. They're the new Blue Blood. They're the Great White Hope. They're The National. And they're changing lives. I present our first double review for their fifth full-length album, the spectacular High Violet. - Danny Perkins

I don't have the drugs to sort it out.

Sorrow never sounded quite so magnificent nor so appealing as it does in the hands of The National. There is something which is incredibly moving about Matt Berninger's vocal delivery and the weight of his tombstone voice. It is both depressing and comforting at the same time but without fail, over the course of the...

LCD Soundsystem
This Is Happening

This really is happening, and it's about time

James Murphy is the unlikeliest of front men; he is not handsome in an obvious way, neither is he handsome in a subtle way. He is slightly overweight and not the sharpest of dressers and he usually looks as though he has slept in his clothes for a few days, has a hangover and does not possess a razor. Yet there are moments on This Is Happening where he evokes memories of, or perhaps even channels, some of the greats; David Bowie ("All I Want"), The Idiot era Iggy Pop ("Somebody's Calling Me") and Talking Heads era David Byrne ("Pow Pow") all receive a nod and a tip of the hat during the album's length. It is fair to say that these men have all been influences on Murphy, but then if we listen to LCD Soundsystem's breakthrough single " Losing My Edge" which reads like a list of cool bands that...

Deftones
Diamond Eyes

As many of you will no doubt be aware, Chi Cheng, founder member and bassist with Deftones, has been in a coma since 2008 following a traffic accident which led to the band shelving the album they were working on and releasing this instead, with a new bassist in the form of Sergio Vega, a guy who will never be able to fill Cheng's shoes and seems to be playing a similar role to that of Jason Newstead on Metallica's ...And Justice for All; he's there out of necessity, not choice. It is possible to feel a little sorry for Vega when you look at the band photo in the booklet as he is distanced from the rest of the band and, far from seeming thrilled to have joined forces with one of nu-metal's survivors, neither he nor the rest of the band seem that happy to be there.

It is impossible to separate this record from its context; it is the...

Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles

Roses can be quite different even when they don't go by another name.

Admittedly riding a pseudo-high of many repeat listens, I enter this review with a head full of songs that seem like somebody started playing Super Nintendo during a barely-lit basement rave. Crystal Castles burst out a couple years ago with Alice Glass singing desperately over a mix of house and chiptunes that was already infectious, but taken to a different energy through Glass’ yearning vocals. Since then they have carved out an image for themselves that is both mysterious and rowdy. However, on their self-titled follow-up to their self-titled debut, Crystal Castles seem to have ditched much of their rowdiness in favor of a somewhat darker, more contemplative approach to the mix of styles that proved so successful on their debut. The result is a follow-up that is more mature and of a consistently higher quality of...

Broken Social Scene
Forgiveness Rock Record

They Went Back.

Listening to Broken Social Scene’s sonic progression (side projects included) from 2001s Feel Good Lost to 2008s Something For All of Us is a little like watching Lost. The bedroom atmospherics of Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning on Feel Good Lost were the first season—an odd little trinket of sci-fi mood; excellent, but rooted in something much different than itself. 2002s You Forgot it In People was the monumental, world expanding excellent follow up. It proved that BSS were something much more than their premiere efforts suggested: capable of achieving beautiful transcendence… a note-perfect epic poem to indie-rock. Broken Social Scene was the first misstep: another world expanding effort, but this time into areas not welcome and seemingly random (K-OS, por ejemplo). It had notes of power (“Ibi Dreams of...

The Tallest Man On Earth
The Wild Hunt

Bob Dylan. There, I just needed to get that one in because someone from Sputnik is apparently running a competition to see which reviewer will mention Mr Zimmerman the quickest in their dissection of The Wild Hunt, and I like to win at things where I can. So that’s another trophy for the review cabinet, but from this point on I might be going against the grain because I don’t think that Kristian Matsson sounds that much like Bob Dylan, in fact if someone asked me who I was listening to before I knew it was The Tallest Man on Earth I might have guessed at Devendra Banhart of, at times, Van Morrison. That is who he sounds like.

The reason that Matsson is drawing so many Dylan comparisons is not because of the way he sounds but rather the way he makes you feel. From the first few lines of the opening title track it feels like the early 1960s,...

Gogol Bordello
Trans-Continental Hustle

You Know the Drill.

By now, I’m fairly certain that it’s been written in rock ‘n roll by-laws that one cannot discuss Gogol Bordello or their music without mentioning their live show. As with fellow “International” bands such as Finntroll, The Mars Volta, and Monotonix, the band puts on a show with a level of energy that makes the high-flying Warped Tour kids look like crotchety old men with bladder issues. There’s an almost palpable intensity that permeates everything these guys touch live, and it’s never the same twice. Once again, they’re making the festival rounds this year, so if you’re going to any of the bigger ones, make SURE to see Gogol Bordello.

But we’re not here to discuss the live show, are we?

No, we’re here to discuss the new album. One of the biggest problems that a band with such a reputation behind their live show faces is that...

The Hold Steady
Heaven Is Whenever

Love, Craig Finn

“I’m from a place with lots of lakes/ but sometimes they get soft in the center/ and the center is a dangerous place” might be the most straightforward explanation for why The Hold Steady’s Heaven Is Whenever exists in a world in which its lead singer/writer/poet also authored an album called Fiestas + Fiascos in a band called Lifter Puller. The line is one of those weird lines that only Craig Finn could come up with, and he’s probably the only person who’d get us to listen. Whether this is because of his past in the Minnesota scene with LP, the interwoven narratives that he probably takes out of that novel he’s yet to publish (note: this is purely speculative), or the rock revival he has summarily failed to create with the Hold Steady… well, none of that matters. All that matters is that we’ve reached a point where Finn can say a line about...

Toro Y Moi
Causers of This

Toro Y Moi is the half Spanish, half French stage name for the 23-year-old Chazwick Bundick, a boyish man and chronic vintage clear sunglass model from Columbia, South Carolina who makes smile-inducing, blissful electronica better than anyone else. The present situation, whether intentional or not, is that Chaz can now find himself at the forefront of a sort of pseudo, musical movement that catapulted from the Summer of 2009. A movement presently dubbed “chillwave”. This movement, a kind of neo, post-disco, psychedelic, ambient, alternative form of electronica, is the result of the emergence of artists like Washed Out, Memory Tapes, Neon Indian, and of course, Toro Y Moi. Now many people feel chillwave is not an adept, or even appropriate moniker for a man with such a wide-range of musical specialty as Chaz Bundick. They are partly right. Chillwave is not the appropriate definition of Toro’s sound because it isn’t the...

Meth, Ghost and Rae
Wu Massacre

Comic Book Action from the Masters

Much is being made of the fact that the much anticipated Wu Massacre only just manages to encroach on the thirty minute mark and is therefore not an album but an EP. But if you look at some of the other big albums doing the rounds this year, Gil Scott-Heron's I'm New Here or Fang Island's self titled for example, you will notice a trend of shorter, punchier albums that pack a lot into them without taking up too much of the listener's time. You could expand the argument back historically and point out that After the Gold Rush was only 35 minutes and Revolver was only 34 but this would be a dull argument so we'll just say that sometimes it's quality that counts and not quantity and hip-hop as a genre is often guilty of bulking out CDs to bursting point with sub standard bonus tracks and skits.

The...