alhorner has written the following articles:
Few bands have consistently tinkered with the darker recesses of DiS' collective heart as LOW have. With their tenth album out this week, we were lucky enough to catch the band on the campaign trail for a chat, and a special live session. Thankfully the guys from Beatcast were there to capture the intimate performance and Al Horner's chat with Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker. And here's what the camera saw... »
Iceland, land of snow-capped glaciers, lustrous beauty and for the next five days, one of Europe's best loved music.»
DiS casts a glance over the last month’s music news…»
The electronic frontiersman's new album is a cosmos-straddling epic. But beyond its sci-fi scale lies a more human tale of depression and growing up, discovers Al Horner.»
James Murphy is many things to many people: frontman to now defunct electro icons LCD Soundsystem, label boss to the influential DFA Records, producer, DJ, coffee entrepreneur, watch manufacturer, comedian, budding novelist and now with the release of Shut Up and Play The Hits, a two hour document of his band's final show at Madison Square Garden, a film star. With so many strings already to his bow, is there anything he can't do, asks Al Horner.»
August came and went so quickly that we at DiS can’t be entirely sure it wasn’t some weird, lucid dream. After all, we're pretty sure Romanian discus throwers aren’t supposed to congregate outside our bus stop, fairly certain that our television doesn’t usually flicker with images of Actual Talented People, and resolutely convinced we shouldn’t have spent the week or two since the Olympics mourning what was essentially an elongated school sports day presided over by the who’s who of bastard conglomerates. But such was the sheer cynicism-crumbling excellence of London 2012 that, well, if you saw DiS stumbling around Stratford at 5am following the Closing Ceremony, a clutch of Mandeville plush toys pressed to our chest, the blue and white of our Team GB face paint smudged from tears, strumming a morose version of Kelly Clarkson's Since You've Been Gone on a battered acoustic guitar to a billboard of Jessica Ennis, uh, thanks for not stealing our wallets.»
Al Horner talks nostalgia culture, new album I Bet On Sky and never saying never with the Dinosaur Jr. frontman.»
Music news these days can be kind of impossible to keep up with. It seems to be this constant scream of information, unintelligible by the sheer speed that it shoots by at, often borderline unintelligible in the first place – “what was that thumping past like an Olympic air defence missile about the one out of The Vaccines' twitpics from his holiday in Marbella again?” - and that being the case, DiS recently took the move to step away from news lest we're all sucked into some gaping cyber abyss of rumours, get-there-first reporting and regurgitated press releases. So instead, we'll be bringing you a digest of the important goings-on each month in neat mixtape form. This month - Frank Ocean issues a statement on his sexuality, Death Cab For Cutie's Ben Gibbard goes it alone, Animal Collective take to the radio, Lykke Li leads a Fleetwood Mac love-in and more...»
Confess is an album about love and lust behind the bleachers, in the dark of a multiplex, on the back of a motorcycle, in bathroom cubicles, under the neon glare of America’s bright lights - and it’s wholly, wholly brilliant.»
Ahead of his headline performance at London’s Barbican Hall on Friday (18 May), DiS caught up with the German prepared piano experimentalist to discover his new collaboration with a choir of 70-year-old African women and delve into his long-haired, baggy-jeaned rap-rock past.»
Sparking elements of Nineties emo, art-rock and grunge, Attack On Memory is an exhilarating listen.»
With a résumé as decorated as this, you’d be forgiven for expecting a lot from this debut album. But Raleigh Moncrief doesn’t disappoint – he confounds. »
This third solo effort, his most assured and intuitive to date, is a revelation: elegiac, tender and often achingly beautiful.»
Like stepping into someone else’s delirious, sweat-soaked dream.»
... a decade on it is more vital and relevant than ever, not only in the murky undertow of “credible” music circles but in the cold harsh light of mainstream pop culture too: mined for samples by Kanye West, used on the much cherished American institution that is Saturday Night Live, the album’s twitchy mechanical clutter audible in blockbuster films and BBC2 primetime TV programming.»
A cryptic weave of indelible sounds and silences; an emotional juggernaut.»
Roots Manuva just keeps on delivering - here’s to another decade.»
Recorded in a cabin on the coast of Oregon last winter, with Prince the only musical touchstone Nurses would allow themselves, Dracula is a compelling listen.»
Nothing Is Wrong would have been a better record had Dawes eked emotion out of their own lives, rather than their record collections. »
