by Ed Biggs From the release of her debut album in 1993, Icelandic chanteuse Björk has been responsible for some of the most unique and forward-thinking pop music of the last two decades, and even before that as a member of The Sugarcubes. Groundbreaking albums like Homogenic (1998) and Volta (2007) helped shape the musical landscapes of the years that followed. Her last album, 2011’s Biophilia, was billed as a
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by Ed Biggs Portland’s The Decemberists scored a surprise Number 1 hit on the US Billboard 200 with their last album The King Is Dead almost exactly three years ago. Granted, it was during the traditionally slow sales month of January, but it was gratifying to see this intelligent and passionate indie group gradually gaining momentum and recognition in the decade since their formation, reflected in a Grammy nomination for
by Lauren James How do you like your metal? Thrashy? Doomy? Industrial? Or perhaps you demand that it be served from a longboat with side dishes of battle anthems and a very peculiar kind of headbanging? This unique combo belongs to none other than Sweden’s Amon Amarth, who’ll be invading Leeds University’s Stylus with their legendary live show tomorrow night. The headbanging, of course, refers to the hirsute five-piece’s trademark
by Ed Biggs Currently sitting atop the UK Singles chart for a fifth non-consecutive week, Mark Ronson’s ‘Uptown Funk’ is absolutely everywhere. It’s a ubiquity to which he’s accustomed: 2007’s Version was the coffee table album of the year, yielding six singles and shifting close to a million copies. But by the same token, Ronson is also accustomed to his divisive status. For every person who loved Version’s playful approach
by Ed Biggs Of all of the well-documented reunions in music over the last five years, few make as much sense as Portland’s Sleater-Kinney. Formed in 1994 and as contemporaries of Bikini Kill and the riot-grrl movement, there was always something more cerebral, more lasting about them. Their de facto leader Carrie Brownstein, who has since found fame in the TV world having co-written ‘Portlandia’, said in 2008 that she’d only consider
by Ed Biggs Following the demise of Canadian group Women after the death of guitarist Chris Reimer, two of its ex-members Matt Flegel and Mike Wallace hired local musicians Scott Munro and Daniel Christiansen and decided to soldier on in the form of Viet Cong. The new group dabbles in a more cinematic variant of the dark, grimy post-punk that Women played, and their self-titled debut follows twelve months after
by Ed Biggs Almost two decades after forming the group as a school project they all assumed that they would disband after two years, Glasgow’s Belle & Sebastian are still going. Nineteen years of wistful, literate, shy but melodically bold indie-pop have shown them to be a band of paradoxical qualities. Allmusic sums them up perfectly: “private but not insular, pretty but not wimpy”. A reissue campaign of their back
by Ed Biggs Taking time off from recording a purported new Animal Collective album due later this year, Noah Lennox a.k.a. Panda Bear has delivered his fifth solo album, which bears the cartoonish title Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper. It sees him reunite with Pete ‘Sonic Boom’ Kember on production, and just like 2011’s Tomboy, it unsurprisingly owes a lot to Spacemen 3. The grooves are head-nodding, the atmosphere
Although I was exposed to a vast galaxy of music at university, two bands dominated the soundtrack to my three years as an undergrad: Wakefield’s The Cribs and New York’s LCD Soundsystem. Musically speaking, they’re two very different groups, but both seemed to epitomise the spirit of invention that characterises all truly great alternative music and, crucially, both released at least two records while I was there. This meant I
by Ed Biggs For anybody looking for an entry point into Bob Dylan’s vast and varied back catalogue, there’s an awful lot to recommend Blood On The Tracks, yet in some ways it’s unsuitable. While it’s arguably his most famous album, and certainly his biggest seller, it’s something of an anomaly in Dylan’s story. While his imperial phase is generally held to be the mid-‘60s, a sequence of six records
