Lykke Li
Wounded Rhymes

Lykke Li is the sort of artist who appeals to me for all of the wrong, non-musical reasons; she is attractive in an exotic way, her DNA falling somewhere between Portugal, Sweden, India and Manhattan. Not only is she attractive but she also writes and performs her own music. She also has the unattainable demeanour and personality that can drive a man to insanity but which also keeps him on his toes, and this comes across in interviews I have read this year. It seems as though she is something of an unfettered free spirit if any one of the forcibly posed and choreographed publicity shoots and videos are anything to go by.
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Rise Against
Endgame

There’s a moment barely three minutes into Rise Against’s sixth album Endgame that is, at first listen, a moment worthy of a double-take. Upon repeat listens, it becomes a moment that is unintentionally indicative of the album as a whole. I speak of the bridge in lead track “Architects” where lead singer Tim McIlrath comes within one word of repeating the chorus of Against Me!’s “I Was a Teenage Anarchist”. A quick fact check reveals that White Crosses was released in June of 2010, with the song in question making its first official appearance on a four-track EP in April of the same year. Endgame was recorded between September 2010 and January 2011. I refuse to believe that NO ONE informed McIlrath and the rest of the band of this coincidence, so I see only two reasons behind the word-for-word repetition of “(Do/Don’t) you remember when you were you young and you wanted to set the world on fire?”. ...

Kurt Vile
Smoke Ring for My Halo

To mark the occasion of my brother successfully completing the 27th year of his time on earth and to celebrate the beginning of his 28th I thought that I should get him a good present. This is a custom in my country which we have fondly named “birth days” as they mark the day of the year on which a person was born. You don’t really have much choice in the matter; financial restrictions are no excuse even though the person whose “birth day” it is might tell you not to put yourself out. If you show up without a gift on the occasion of someone you love’s birthday there will be an atmosphere for want of a better word.

However, I did want to get my brother a good gift and so, after time researching his various online accounts for ideas I set out with a list of records that he had shown an interest in. Unfortunately none of these records have...

The Strokes
Angles

So much has been written about the Strokes that has nothing to do with their music that I thought the best equipped writer to review Angles, their first record as a band since 2005, was me as I have only really discovered the world of the Strokes in the years that they have been lying dormant. I must admit, when Is This It was first released I probably wasn't cool enough to get on board with it as I was listening mainly to metal and trance music. It is possible that I was too cool for it, and, having been as unable as everyone else to escape from the overwhelming presence of "Last Night" on various student dance floors and MTV, had decided that these fashionable young upstarts who were apparently shagging their way around the globe with their nostrils stuffed with whatever dust came their way were too popular for me to care about.

Last year I finally bought Is This It and...

Dropkick Murphys
Going Out In Style

It just wouldn’t be March without the Murphys.

Massploitation is reaching a saturation point in American culture. The recent resurgence almost certainly started with The Departed and hasn’t stopped since. Denis Leary’s pulled seven seasons of Rescue Me out of his ass by transporting his chain-smoking Boston persona to the rough and tumble world of the NYFD. Hell, we even had two separate Oscar-nominated films this past year focusing on the seedier aspects of the Boston suburbs of Lowell (The Fighter) and Charlestown (The Town). Personally, I can’t get enough of the tales coming out of the greater Boston area, and based on the general success of Massploitation at the box office, the television ratings, and the fact that Whitey Bulger is still on the loose leads me to believe that America can’t get enough , either. One of the best side-effects of this surge of interest...

The Streets
Computers and Blues

“We make bangers, not anthems/Leave that to the Artful Dodger.”

So read Mike Skinner’s manifesto as written out over so many stanzas on the Streets’ groundbreaking debut release Original Pirate Material. Five albums later and the Artful Dodger, once a staple of Garage fans’ play lists, is no longer on the scene (to my knowledge) and Skinner seems to be making anthems, not bangers.

Almost exactly one year ago I remember thinking I had got a leaked copy of Computers & Blues and being very happy with what was, even then, being touted as Skinner’s swansong. The Streets have always had a special place in my heart; Skinner himself grew up near to where I settled and lived in the early noughties and many of the places and happenings referenced in his songs are things that I know well, such as “The...

Adele
21

A funny thing happened to me a few weeks back. Not only was I watching the Brit Awards, the kind of industry backslapping event that caters for the musically mindless or the lowest common denominator and gives the current It celebrities the opportunity to get drunk and make animals of themselves, but I was watching it with my parents as we sat around the television one Saturday lunchtime filling our faces with bacon. That is not the funniest thing though. The funny thing is that halfway through it Adele stood in the centre of the arena with only an accompanying pianist to hide behind and delivered "Someone Like You" to a crowd who sat and watched in stunned silence, struck dumb not just by intoxicating liquor and hard drugs but by the powerful beauty of her...

Yuck
Yuck

A few nights ago whilst I was picking a bag's worth of records to take over to my friend's house for our regular Monday night listening and Fifa sessions my eyes were drawn to Dinosaur Jr's last recording, 2009's brilliant Farm, but for whatever reason I didn't put it in my satchel. However, when I got to his house I requested it and was a little bit disappointed to find out that he didn't own that or any other Dino J records and I found myself suffering from a small withdrawal symptom; not the sort of withdrawal that a heroin addict suffers when his tri-daily fix is denied him, more like the withdrawal that an infrequent marijuana smoker feels when he thinks he is going to score but his dealer lets him down at the last moment. I felt a pang of sadness that I wouldn't be hearing DJ's perfect mix of noisy...

Deicide
To Hell With God

Outside of the Big Four, metal’s never had a huge share of the music market, and when one dives into the subgenre pool, that scale becomes even smaller. Death Metal proves that axiom in spades. Despite an unbelievably loyal fanbase, the genre’s never really popped outside of its own insular little world. Hell, outside of Cannibal Corpse’s all-too-brief appearance in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, I’d imagine that most people haven’t knowingly heard a death metal song that doesn’t deviate into any diluted form (Looking at you, Dethklok). Between the unreal speeds, the macabre subject matter, and the overwhelming sense of dissonance, there’s not a lot there for those citing Slipknot, Avenged Sevenfold, and Bullet For My Valentine as being the heaviest thing they can handle. Because of this us-versus-the-world mentality that bands like Deicide embody, as well as simply being ignorant of what death metal is...

Radiohead
The King of Limbs

These days the release of a new Radiohead album signals the beginning of a four stage process for many of the band's fans.

The first phase is the incessant chatter about the marketing and release strategies. Since Kid A with it's promotional animated videos sampling elements of the album set to crudely cut and icy landscapes, Radiohead have been toying with different publicity stunts which generate as much talk as the albums themselves. Most famous of these was 2007's In Rainbows which reshaped the way that bands chose to release their music and left the record labels reeling. For King of Limbs the band have chosen to spring the release on us with almost no warning causing a fervid storm of excitement. The physical release will be in the form of a "newspaper album" which we can only guess at the meaning of.

My initial thought is that the concept of a newspaper...

Toro Y Moi
Underneath the Pine

Just one look at that album cover and I am bombarded by images of 1970’s porno movies, ones that featured men in the central roles; big, greasy, hairy men who still had a certain air of romantic intention about them in stark contrast to today’s more common wife beating mongoloids. Usually these movies were still interested in conveying some sort of storyline, understanding that foreplay was as much about snatched opportunities in unlikely settings as it was about spreading a woman’s sphincter open so that the long lens on the camera could get a good shot. These men were often manual labourers who specialised in fixing various household appliances and office machinery, sported dubious and inadvisable facial hair and appeared in every scene lightly drenched in sweat. This is the immediate image that Toro Y Moi’s latest...