MarcBurrows has written the following articles:
This isn’t a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, it doesn’t have the depth of this year's great pop touchstones, Tegan and Sara’s Hearthrobb or Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City, and like when Christopher Ecclestone regenerated into David Tennant some of the edge, the darkness and the grit has been left behind.»
Three eras. Three Suedes. Ten years apart. Three different bands. “There’s definitely an ‘every ten years something happens’ isn’t there?”, says Brett Anderson, Suede's singer - still handsome, snake hipped and tiny bit waspish, but very definitely not the bum-slapping brat that kicked off British indie-rock’s golden era.»
This is a collection of elegantly assembled, fat-free pop songs, made from light and air and heart, and great choruses. It's the soul and centre of indie pop and deserves your immediate attention.»
It’s rare songs this well imagined can create an album that is less than the sum of its parts.»
"As I’ve got older. it’s interesting to me that punk rock is as significant to me on a personal level as it was when I was 16. It does mean slightly different things to me now, when I was 16 I thought punk was going to change the world and if only everyone would listen to Minor Threat there’d be eternal international peace or whatever, but to me these days it’s about a tribe, it’s about community, it’s also about the ability to create a space in which you can organise the world in a way that makes sense to you. " - Frank Turner»
The new record by Vampire Weekend is the best alternative pop album you will hear this year.»
Sometimes it’s very good and sometimes it misses the mark quite spectacularly, but crucially Everybody Loves Sausages always has fun doing so. »
Still bitter. Still brilliant. Still here.»
A band that still have plenty to offer when they stop playing to the middle ground.»
There’s nothing wrong with a bit of Nineties revivalism, but there’s a point during Peace’s debut album where it starts to get ridiculous.»
There’s a new Stereophonics album out - a really good one. Time was when that sentence would be barely conceivable.»
It’s basically Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman set to the Clueless soundtrack.»
This is by turns a wonderful and deeply irritating record, charming and frustrating in equal measure.»
Palma Violets get a pass this time, their lack of focus and their naivety balanced by their charm.»
Grouping these songs together is a happy reminder of how consistently great The Cribs have been, and if you’re a newcomer this is the best possible introduction to a band that have been keeping indie-rock very much alive and kicking for a decade and counting.»
Johnny Marr is quite clear that what he does is pop music. And pop, emphatically, is no dirty word.»
Last night, I saw the first UK screening of Dave Grohl's directorial debut, Sound City. The documentary tells the story of the legendary Sound City studio in LA where Nirvana's Nevermind, Fleetwood Mac's classic Fleetwood Mac, Rage Against The Machine's debut and several thousand other albums from Barry Manilow to Arctic Monkeys' Suck It And See were recorded across decades of scuzzy mayhem. It's essentially a love story, in which the main character is a 40 year old mixing desk with a great sound, and where all the sex scenes are 50-something rock stars having a bit of a jam together, a view given credibility by many of the faces they make mid-solo. »
Heartthrob is more than just a brilliant pop album, it’s unarguably a brilliant Tegan & Sara album and it’s very, very close to being perfect.»
Once a year the European music industry decamps to the pretty Dutch town of Groningen to load their expense accounts with beer and fancy dinners, attend increasingly panicky conference panels about illegal downloads, have endless meetings and, eventually, go and see which ever band has the most effective PR and claim they're checking out the 'buzz'. Although in this case 'see' actually means stand at the back of the room talking to someone else.»
Few groups in the last decade have had the bollocks to go for the popularist jugular quite so effectively and so credibly.»
What we needed was an album half as long, or twice as interesting.»
Secret Sounds Vol 2 is mostly an accomplished delight and in The Pictish Trail we may have the glimmerings of a genuinely exceptional talent from which we will hopefully see great things.»
A couple of years back I found myself jobless and took a part time gig in the Bromley branch of HMV to cover the Christmas period. It was mental; hugely busy every day, but everyone there was lovely and I genuinely enjoyed myself, particularly as working in a record shop had been one of those things I always felt you had to do at some point. The problem is, I wasn’t working in a record shop. Not really. This wasn’t High Fidelity; it wasn’t even Empire Records.»
There’s a Finnish focus to this years Eurosonic Noorderslag event, which kicks off today in a far flung corner of the Netherlands. The festival, which is a bit like SXSW if you substitute the Texas sunshine for Holland in January, acts as a superb annual showcase and cross pollination of some of Europes best and most hyped new acts, attracting industry bods from across the continent. John Peel was a regular attendee, and that’s as glowing an endorsement for a focus on new music as you could find.»
It’s 2013, there’s a new Yo La Tengo album, and everything’s going to be okay.»
Charlotte Hatherley likes her science fiction. “Look at Blade Runner,” she says, sat in a deserted Islington bar. “I mean, what’s the story in Blade Runner? It’s so fucking simple. 1984? it’s just a love story really. That’s the thing with »
A failed experiment then, all the more painful for the potential it showed.»
It’s fair to say that Andy Burrows never expected to be promoting a solo album. The self confessed “kid from Winchester whose never travelled and never lived anywhere else” was content to sit behind the drum kit, whether it be for a teenage garage bands, or mega selling chart-botherers Razorlight. In the eight years since he joined Johnny Borrell’s crew, he’s experienced a gradual flowering of confidence that’s taken him from the drum stool to front of stage, and culminates in the recent release of Company, his first full-length solo album, and a beautifully accomplished half hour of minor key, melodic pop which Burrows wrote in its entirety, played nearly all of the instruments on and co-produced.»
Distance. Separation. Sadness. Pain. A spark of wit, a soaring voice and a lonely piano. Ladies and gentlemen, the great lost masterpiece of 2012.»
This is a collection of songs you’re only going to listen to once a year, and nothing here is going to enter the mass-consciousness of the Christmas canon. It’s very odd, varies wildly in tone and has its fair share of clunky bits, but it’s all done in the spirit of fun and is always endearingly sincere.»
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