I was going to write a post about the Conservatives’ Breakthrough Britain policy suggestions this evening, but I then realised that the report is 861 pages long. So, tonight I shall take the easy way out, and just comment upon the delightful fifteen page report commissioned upon only problems in Birmingham (entitled Breakthrough Birmingham); which [...]
People just have to try to bend the barriers of genres of music, don’t they? It makes the job of any would-be music critic infinitely more difficult: you immediately can’t pigeonhole bands to be a complete snob or to express your indie cred anymore. Here, with All the Pictures, a new monster is born: a [...]
Even Flowers Kill’s MySpace You have to love a band who can reference pop (or otherwise) culture, and do it well: Graf Orlock made their entire fame on it. Coventry’s Even Flowers Kill begin, on paper, in very good books with me: with an EP titled in reference to the enigmatic Schrödinger’s Cat and a [...]
http://www.myspace.com/crashrepeat ‘Synthesiser with a predilection for arpeggiated leads seeks like-minded vocalist and overdriven guitar for good company, good fun and maybe more.’ The ungodly combination that this Lonely Hearts ad promises is the conceptual embodiment of Crash Repeat. Trebles meet bass with no room for a middle ground: this breed of electronic experimentation has no [...]
The Winter League MySpace Instrumental and minimalist music are two genres which are somewhat of a taboo in certain circles: it’s seen by far too many to be the case that music has to be immediate; music has to be loud; music has to be fast. The Winter League pretty much serve to define the [...]
From their very inception, most bands walk that most treacherous tightrope: balancing, on the one hand, their ideas and preconceptions of what they want to sound like, and on the other, the vocabulary of how to define that sound. So it is, once again, with a heavy heart that I have to whine about the [...]
I hate how the more prevalent local scenes develop. You have one band which does something semi-original, and then you get the emulating hoards who will follow objectivelessly: they just want the benefit of the peer validation of being part of this sprawling ‘community’ of the bands of said scene. Innovation dies off and you [...]