The Fall’s 32 studio albums, ranked in order of accessibility for the new listener.
by Ed Biggs What a tremendous pleasure it is for anybody who was a teenager at the turn of the millennium to see Ash back on the scene! It’s been five years since the conclusion of their intriguing ‘A-Z’ project, a subscription collection consisting of 26 singles released one per fortnight for a whole calendar year from 2009 to 2010. It saw the band attempt to play to their strengths –
Continue reading…
by Ed Biggs It’s an oft-told story for British indie bands that doesn’t always end well – band finds critical and popular respect with first album, and carries on making hay while the sun shines with a similar second one. Band is knackered after constant touring and is confronted by an existential question – what do we do for our third? It’s a question that has stumped some pretty big names
by Matthew Langham Thee Oh Sees have become one of the US’s most consistent indie acts over the last five years. They have consistently put out great, stripped-down records and now onto their ninth record, lead singer John Dwyer return with his unique blend of fuzzy psych-rock. After a very brief hiatus that lasted all of a month, the San Francisco-based band returned with 2014’s Drop which featured yet another line-up
by Ed Biggs Seriously, what’s actually left to say about The Fall? The countless line-up changes, the on-stage fights, the record number of Peel sessions… it’s all been documented on so many occasions. But the brilliance of The Fall is that, while there may be little new to say about them in 2015, its leader Mark E Smith always seems to have something new to say about the world around him:
by Matthew Langham The elaborately named Australian psychedelic rockers King Gizzard & The Wizard Lizard have approached their new record with a different variation of psych-rock following the success of 2014’s I’m In Your Mind Fuzz. The four-track album Quarters! owes much more to jazz-psych sound in comparison to their all-out drug-inspired previous effort. The brakes are off for King Gizzard and, at ten minutes and ten seconds long per track
by Matthew Langham Cards on the table here – I’ll be the first person to admit that I’ve never really taken to electronic artists who solely use laptops – particularly in a live setting. I’ve often thought the physical art of making music and mixing has instead been removed by the laptop. For all I know they could be doing anything while pretending to DJ – I guess I just like
by Ed Biggs As Pitchfork’s Jeremy Larson has already pointed out, it’s hard to get a handle on Brandon Flowers as a pop star precisely because so much of his career has involved playing at being a pop star. As lead singer of The Killers, he’s rummaged through the dressing-up box of music to be, variously: new-wave Brandon (Hot Fuss); Springsteen Brandon (Sam’s Town); glam Brandon (Day & Age); and Bono
by Ed Biggs It’s strange to think an album by a fictional band could have such a sizeable impact, but the 2005 album Demon Days by the animated group Gorillaz, the brainchild of Blur singer Damon Albarn and illustrator Jamie Hewlett, helped to shape the direction of pop music today. For all its undoubted creativity, the project’s self-titled 2001 debut ultimately felt a tad sterile, like a laboratory experiment with a
by Matthew Langham Paul Weller; ‘The Modfather’; the changing man – he’s back with his twelfth solo album Saturns Pattern, and it’s pretty far removed from the classic Weller sound. So much so that this literate and passionate artist has forgotten to include an apostrophe in the title, which refers to the persistent hexagonal cloud formation around the planet’s north pole. The nine-track album encompasses the experimentation taken from records
