Album Review
Jeniferever
Spring Tides
Swedish playwright August Strindberg said, “People are constantly clamouring for the joy of life. As for me, I find the joy of life in the hard and cruel battle of life.” Fellow countrymen, Jeniferever, understand this and their pursuit of joy is not a clamour, but a hard, cruel battle of vast orchestrations [...]

Album review
Doves
Kingdom of Rust
An album title is important. It is our first introduction to the music to come, to the emotion that follows, to the philosophy in which we will get lost. It reveals a great deal about the band’s thought processes, the album’s theme and even, to an extent, the musical style.
Strangeways Here [...]

Album review
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
It’s Blitz!
The synthetic disco of the garish and gauche world of seventies’ and eighties’ dance halls into which bands periodically and awkwardly jig is usually a misguided homage to an era we are still trying to justify.
Sure, the disco revival has been ongoing since the days that rock tripped it up, hip-hop [...]

“Imagine a world with no possessions”. Had John Lennon been thinking of possessing music, it may be an imagining that has just become reality.
Thirty-eight years since Imagine, the possibility of there being no musical ownership is very real indeed thanks to a small, free computer application called Spotify.
Spotify (an awful name, made from combining spot [...]

Album Review
The Decemberists
The Hazards of Love
Storytelling is seldom so piquant. Music is seldom filled with such ambrosial emotion. So deliciously descriptive. So utterly immersing. The Hazards of Love is the Decemberists at their ineffable best.
Since their full-length debut, 2002’s Castaway and Cutouts, the band has been creating battlegrounds for narrative and melody. With The Hazards [...]