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
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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
