by Ed Biggs About to release their eighth studio album Born In The Echoes next month, The Chemical Brothers’ stellar career has begun its third decade: funny to think it all began because the Beastie Boys’ production team wanted their name back. Known at the very beginning of their career as The Dust Brothers, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons were DJs who began to make their own music using basic samplers
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by Ed Biggs Those of you with very sharp musical memories might recall the early ‘90s heyday of The Orb, a cult favourite for those ravers whose favourite part of the night was the 5am chillout room. A dub-influenced ambient duo now currently in its sixth incarnation – German electronic composer Thomas Fehlmann has been working with the ever-present Orb founder Alex Paterson since the late ‘00s – they enjoyed a
by Ed Biggs We’ve been waiting nearly two and a half years for this moment, an absolute eternity in our rapidly churning social media age of hype and backlash. Wolf Alice appeared on radar back in February 2013 with their first single ‘Fluffy’, but their origins go way back to 2010 and their embryonic self-titled EP. Releasing only a couple of singles and EPs since then, the London quartet have been
by Ed Biggs Ever since they first bamboozled the indie scene with their absolutely-anything-goes approach, the perennial problem with Everything Everything is that they’ve always sounded better in theory than in practice. In many ways, their meta approach to influences and culture is perfectly suited to the information age, characterised by social media, news overload and the conflation of the personal and the political. What could be more contemporary than a
by Ed Biggs While The Verve may be more famous for their hugely successful third album Urban Hymns (1997), its 1995 predecessor A Northern Soul deserves to be mentioned in the same breath. The sound that would bring them mainstream success two years later, a powerful brand of alternative rock with strong elements of prog and distortion – think Oasis and Spiritualized in equal parts – really began to take shape
by Ed Biggs Active Child is the recording name of New Jersey electronic music artist Pat Grossi, who won plenty of plaudits for his first album You Are All I See in 2011. A porous mixture of electronica, post-dubstep and minimalist pop accentuated by Grossi’s harp-playing skills and his striking falsetto that was developed through a childhood spent in choirs, it was cited by many as an example of the future
by Ed Biggs Since he released his debut album Butter in 2009, Glaswegian electronic wiz kid Hudson Mohawke (real name Ross Birchard) has become something of a producer-by-appointment to the hip-hop royalty of America. In the last five years, he’s accumulated credits on albums by Drake, Pusha T, Azealia Banks and Lil Wayne, and was named as Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. label’s in-house producer, all for his talent at infusing rap music
by Ed Biggs Franz Ferdinand & Sparks may have recently sung about how collaborations don’t work – oh yes, they do! Surf, a weird and wonderful record surprise-released at the end of May as a free download, sees a very unlikely (and probably one-off) combination of hip-hop upstart Chance The Rapper, young jazz musician Donnie Trumpet (the stage name of 21 year old Nico Segal), his backing band and a stellar
by Ed Biggs When we talk about classic albums and great artists on this site, we often talk about their ‘imperial phase’: that period during their career where everything they touch turns to gold, the critics and fans are united in adoration, and the material remembered and revered years down the line. Often, that period only seems golden with the benefit of hindsight, when the artist in question isn’t producing work
by Ed Biggs Manchester’s all-female quartet PINS made one of the better British guitar debuts of 2013 with Girls Like Us, a solid if unspectacular study in post-punk revivalism in which they demonstrated a thorough understanding of the dynamics of the genre. While it didn’t really add anything to the canon, it indicated great promise for the future. More impressive was their prodigious work ethic, relentless touring and the curation of
