I find it hard not to buy new R.E.M. albums when they come out. I haven't been really into any of them since New Adventures in Hi-Fi, though, which is going back a few years. Up was pretty good, but Accelerate never made much impression on me.

Their new one, Collapse Into Now, is pretty decent, though. There is no doubt that each song sounds ( Read more... )

After last week's folky Americana, I seem to have gone for a country Americana album, by the Low Anthem. There is slowness and echoey pianos, and plaintive tunes, and gospelly stuff and hammond organs. Quite good.

I've heard a bit of Iron and Wine and thought it sounded like pleasant enough NuFolk that probably deserved more of a listen. So, with a new album out, it seemed like time to give them / him a go. I've listened to it a fair old bit this week, and still think it is pleasant enough Folky Americana, but have yet to find any depth to it. It seems ( Read more... )

Last week it was Deerhoof. What else but to go for the band that surely must come alphabetically next: Deerhunter. Time was, when I was about 15, I'd buy a record unheard just because it was on 4AD. That all stopped when I bought a His Name is Alive CD, but for a while it worked pretty well. I knew, though, this time, that I would like this ( Read more... )

Deerhoof vs Evil is this week's record. I was at a gig with my brother Mark a week or so ago, showcasing some unsigned bands. One of them was a twee band with a girly japanese singer. Mark thought it unsurprising that I quite liked them, as he knows my penchant for twee japanese indie pop. One might suspect that I like Deerhoof, then, with the ( Read more... )

Trying new things this week: Esben and the Witch, whom I had heard a little bit of before buying, and whom the guy in the record shop described as "quite like Siouxie and the Banshees ( Read more... )

This week's choice of record was based, to quite a large extent, on the band name. What's not to like about Sad Day for Puppets? The reviews that I read were also pretty promising, explaining how this Swedish band were a paean to late 1980 indie music, and so it proved, with a healthy dose of general shoegaze and definite notes of poppy Lush and ( Read more... )

A return to an old favourite this week, with Neil Young's latest, Le Noise. I listened to it a few times on a car trip up to Manchester, and my reception of it moved from thinking that it was a bit rubbish, to rather liking it. It has some pretty awful lyrics, both in terms of trite sentiment, and awfully contrived rhymes, but the songs are still ( Read more... )

This week I went for a band I'd never heard based on a moderately good review in the Observer. They are called Male Bonding and the album Nothing Hurts. Given the name of both the band and album, I was expecting something pretty noisy. It is quite punky, but that's overlaid by alternately poppy and broody songs, which are all fairly catchy and ( Read more... )

My choice this week was thrust upon me when I heard that Trish Keenan from Broadcast had died suddenly. I like Broadcast a lot. I think I first heard Come on Let's Go shortly after moving back to the UK from the US in 2000, and I had to spend quite a bit of time driving between my parents' place and Harrow... Driving in London meant I listened to ( Read more... )