Lauren James and Ed Biggs review some of the biggest and best albums released over the last month, including: Peace – Happy People Idlewild – Everything Ever Written Imagine Dragons – Smoke + Mirrors Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear The biggest news items are also discussed, such as the new Blur album The Magic Whip, Live At Leeds line-up, Glastonbury’s possible headliners, and the BRIT and Grammy
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by Ed Biggs Last Thursday’s announcement of a new Blur album triggered an avalanche of excited social media reaction. Not only are they the most fondly-remembered band from the Britpop era alongside their great rivals Oasis, but they left behind a body of work that, by and large, has stood up to the test of time. Their summer reunion tours of 2009 and 2012 are the stuff of legend, but
by Ed Biggs Having cast a huge shadow over the charts worldwide with ‘Radioactive’, which sold over nine million copies in the States alone and spent more than a year on the Billboard charts, Vegas-based quartet Imagine Dragons return with a second record. Normally, having such an enormous success under your belt makes it difficult to emulate that success in the future, as it becomes an albatross of expectation that
by Ed Biggs Six years out of the game isn’t that long when you compare it to the huge swathes of time groups like My Bloody Valentine and Suede have left between records, but it’s proved to be too much for Idlewild fans, who successfully launched an online petition for their heroes to make more music early last year. But why? Though they frequently landed Top 40 singles, Top 10
by Ed Biggs Released thirty years ago this November, The Jesus & Mary Chain’s first album Psychocandy is one of the most important developmental milestones in rock music as we know it today, not to mention one of the most aesthetically pleasing records of the 1980s. With their brand of simple, heartfelt ‘60s pop melodies buried under an avalanche of squalling feedback, Jim and William Reid redefined the boundaries within
by Ed Biggs Boy, has Chris Martin got a lot to answer for. Irish ‘alternative rock’ quartet Kodaline, having found chart success with their brand of polished, radio-friendly pop-guitar ballads with their first full-length In A Perfect World, give us a follow-up less than two years later. But as with that, their second album Coming Up For Air must rank as one of the most egregious instances of musical mis-labelling
by Ed Biggs People tend to think of the mid noughties as a great time for British guitar music. At a cursory glance, this is correct. The breakthrough of The Libertines and Arctic Monkeys grabbed national headlines as their music crossed over to mainstream audiences and, at the time, it felt like we were living through some kind of golden age, with debut records from new and exciting bands coming
by Ed Biggs British guitar acts making second albums don’t have a particularly great record of late, but surely a band as joyously, air-punchingly upbeat as Peace might be able to dispel such fears through their sheer optimism, right? Sort of. In Love took a carefree approach, the equivalent of throwing paint at a blank canvas and creating a masterpiece in the process. It wasn’t terribly original, but its joie
by Ed Biggs If Rough Trade had got their act together sooner, The Smiths’ chart positions might have reflected the true extent of their popularity. If you didn’t know anything about them and looked at the commercial performances of their singles and albums, you’d never guess that it was the body of work by the most significant British guitar act arguably since The Beatles. Just two of their 18 singles
by Ed Biggs Philadelphia’s The Districts set the heart of many an indie fan a-flutter this time last year at SXSW, with their smart, sophisticated take on rock. Though all of the members are still in their teens, their first couple of singles felt like a quick journey through the annals of rock and indie history, with a magpie approach to sound and style that suggested that they had very
