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 –
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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 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 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 Ed Biggs I must admit, I find it slightly surprising that Hot Chip have remained together long enough to make a sixth studio album. Groups with this many creative individuals within them – singer Alexis Taylor with his solo album Await Barbarians; Joe Goddard’s side project The 2 Bears; Al Doyle and Felix Martin with their project New Build, which released a record just six months ago – tend to
by Ed Biggs To listen to the glorious, classic pop stylings of Mini Mansions, you’d never guess that it was a Queens Of The Stone Age side-project. But it’s hardly surprising, given the highly eclectic nature of that group’s last album …Like Clockwork, that their members should be indulging in such varied musical disciplines. QOTSA bassist Michael Shuman set up the group in 2009 with guitarist and co-vocalist Tyler Parkford and
by Ed Biggs One of the most promising new American indie acts of the decade, all-female four piece Chastity Belt have moved up in the world with their second album, and their first for a national independent label. Formed in the small university city of Walla Walla, WA, they fit neatly into a lineage of intelligent indie from Northwestern America dating back to Sleater-Kinney and Beat Happening. Rather than stick with
by Ed Biggs Even at a time when folk is as prominent in the wider pop scene as it’s been at any point since its heyday, Kristian Matsson (a.k.a. The Tallest Man On Earth) still manages to seem like a man out of time, of a different era altogether. It’s not only that he never resorts to the cynical stomps, handclaps and “whoa-ohs” of his contemporaries who cynically use folk as
