Album

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Korn drop that whole downtuned guitar shtick and gather round a cheap piano to belt out a dozen of their favourite cockney anthems.

Maybe.

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So, we all know that pretty posh boy, Charlie from Busted went on to form Fightstar which he believed to be a far better reflection of his music and capabilities than the powder puff boy band that he became a teenage girls dream in. He is also a fan of the might Ipswich Town Football Club and ploughed some of his boy band amassed fortune into the football club when it needed it most, so I am reluctant to be too harsh about Mr Simpson. I admit, I haven’t actually heard much of Fightstar as I find myself turning over when they come on Kerrang! Maybe that is my narrow minded attitude, but it just seems so wrong that the boy who lived across the road from a colleague of mine and who sang of girls from the future who he met when he jumped time is screaming into a microphone and trying to be a hard rock musician now. Charlie’s inspiration for Deathcar followed watching a news report on the human organ market in China where organs are taken from prisoners on death row who are...

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Madding Crowd produce simple music and don’t try to hide behind any complicated promotional nonsense. This is a London based band of 4 members born in 4 decades. OK, so that sounds like a real novelty band and you probably can’t get away from the fact that the very fact the members were born in different decades makes them possibly interesting for the wrong reasons but pushing that fact aside do the band have anything to offer. Well, certainly they sound like they are heavily influenced by The Kinks. They are a band who detest over dubbing and over mixing of their tracks in a studio so will take their amps and record on rooftops. Simple music is certainly something that is to be applauded. Too many bands rely on heavily mixed music that produces a sound nothing like the music played in the studio and to disguise their weaknesses, but going the other way can also produce a sound that is, well, pretty horrible. The second track on this single, Up For Air, is so under-produced...

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When the publicity that accompanies a promo announces that the artist’s music is, “hard to categorise as it crosses over all of the gennre’s, folk, blues, country, Americana, rock” you know that this is not going to be a great artist to review. Such promotional company descriptions are, frankly, generally far from the truth. iTunes tells me that this single falls into the rock genre. Personally I don’t think it is anything other than Country and I am sure that he will be hugely popular in southern US states. Surprisingly though, this is not a US artist from the deep south but an Australian singer/songwriter which was certainly surprising to me. It sounds like Nauendorf (pronounced no-en-dorf) has attended some amazing evening course on Country For Dummies and come out of it as the Number One Student. This is Country-by-numbers and does nothing for me at all. Country music can be both powerful and heartfelt. However, it is a genre that is incredibly easy to mock for a...

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Album Review

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I'm struggling to find anything remotely interesting to say about Mothership, not because the songs are bad—it's the Zeppelin after all—but because, as is pointed out elsewhere, it's yet another compilation album and the track listing remains largely the same. I could go on about how baffled I am that Misty Mountain Hop isn't included on it, but as it turns out that only provides a sentence's worth of rambling. In comedy fashion I intended to get my dad to review this but my plans were scuppered when I approached him and he said "Led who?". Clearly my dad fails at dad rock (which also rather scuppered my nefarious cheap christmas present schemes and I had to spend seventy-odd quid on getting him the bloody Morse boxset, which at least might stop him watching ITV3 ALL. THE. FUCKING. TIME.) Anyway, compilation albums are a strange breed—surely fans of the band will have a fair chunk of their back catalogue anyway? And folks who've heard one or two songs, thanks to the wonder...

Sugary pop from the US.

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Glam rock loving band from the US release their first single.

Rubbish Aussie rock

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Powderfinger are Australian retro rockers who have been around for ages. Dream Days At The Hotel Existence is a pretty dull album, like Led Zeppelin stripped of any balls or like the Black Crowes without any groove or like the Stones but not Rolling anywhere. Did you see what I did there? Anyways, I had this on while I was sorting my Sandman Mystery Theatre collection into numerical order, a task requiring a pleasant aural experience. Instead I got bland blues licks, radio friendly melodies and insufferable pop rock that I have heard a million times before. People might call this stuff “sold, traditional, rock ‘n roll”. I call it fucking boring.

Compoer attempts to "bring classical to the masses"

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I was rather looking forward to hearing this album, unfortunately i shouldn't have bothered. 2 phrases from the blurb on this album keep sticking in my head, if I was doing this review in an audio format then they'd stick in my throat as well. These phrases are "Neo-Classic is a special musical composition that deserves recognition" and "Motion has produced an album that brings classical music to the masses, in a friendly, twentieth century approach". The first one is untrue. The second one is untrue, condescending and points out that this album sounds as out of date as the calendar in the blurb writer's office must have been on that day.

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I will listen to anything Mark Lanegan sings on. His voice opens up a world of whiskey and sin that I want to live in. So it’s lucky for me that in addition to his classic albums with grunge nearly-men Screaming Trees and his wonderful solo albums he sees fit to collaborate with plenty of other fantastic musicians. If anything, his cameos with Queens of the Stone Age, Isobel Campbell, Twilight Singers et al probably garner more praise and attention than his own career, a situation this record will most likely perpetuate. The Soulsavers are a London-based production and remix duo who first came to my attention via some very bloody good indeed DJ sets which made their way out of London clubs, onto white labels and then onto the internet where people like me who love soul and hip-hop but can’t dance to save themselves got to hear them. I love the funk but I don’t got Da Funk. It's Not How Far You Fall, It's The Way You Land is a surprisingly successful collaboration between these...