Articles
Mark_P has written the following articles:
Royal Trux - Accelerator (Reissue)
Accelerator’s savage vitality hasn’t diminished one iota in the intervening decade-and-a-half: quite what point it’s ultimately trying to make remains typically elusive, but you get the sense that it’s somehow been proved right in the long-run.»
The Dandy Warhols - The Best Of The Capitol Years: 1995- 2007
The Dandy Warhols emerge looking like the Brompton Bicycle of US indie bands: retro-styled, repeatedly flirting with hipster status, but oddly clunky and with precious few speed settings. »
Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster - Blood & Fire
It’s been a dusty old hiatus since 2004’s The Royal Society. We’re happy to report that, in the downtime, TEMBLD’s piss has indeed turned to vinegar - and that as a result, they’ve never sounded more caustically thrilling. »
Hole - Nobody's Daughter
Of course people change, and so they should - but the severity of the switch from crapped-out Converse to blagged Blahniks has been a mightily confusing one, especially for those of us left staring down at our own rainbow laces wondering whether any of it really meant anything in the first place... There are positive signs of rebirth to be found here, chief amongst them the fact that Love appears equally well-placed to tackle both rock anthems and more acoustic, stripped-down songwriting as she clatters towards middle age.»
Jónsi - Go
Go is, at its strongest, an album of almost lung-collapsing loveliness. »
Pavement - Quarantine the Past
It’s exactly what a Pavement retrospective should be - a heavily slanted, palpably enchanted slab of richly flawed anarcho-pop. Whether or not you agree entirely with the final selection, every track here is skewered on the band’s jagged refusal to bore; the same rickety backbone that makes each of their full studio albums to date such a valued companion for fans of angular, slippery, fiercely organic racket-making everywhere. »
Lightspeed Champion - Life is Sweet! Nice to Meet You
Onwards and ever upwards, Sir Dev. »
Anna Kashfi - Survival
Ultimately, the fact that Survival flat refuses to linger in any single camp for more than one song at a time is both a curse and a blessing.»
Gay For Johnny Depp - Manthology
A bizarre-o dichotomy lurks in the amyl-nitrate-soaked undercrackers of New York spazzcore hand-wringers Gay For Johnny Depp. As a»
Polly Scattergood - Bunny Club EP
Being something of a placeholder release was always going to be an accusation you could level at the Bunny Club EP: it's a reasonably lightweight package by any standards, but in Scattergood’s defence, it doesn’t really feel as though it’s intended to be much more than that. »
Nirvana - Bleach (Deluxe Edition)
Ironically, this package was always going to be one for the completists, but those who’ll actually get the most from Bleach are still the Nevermind fans left feeling alienated by the gnarled triumph that was In Utero. »
Lightning Bolt - Earthly Delights
Whether you’ve actively sought out one of Lightning Bolt’s semi-impromptu 10am patio gigs at ATP, or you just happened to be within a 400-mile radius of the festival site at the time, you’ll be aware that Chippendale live comes across something like Seb Roachford with his knackers wired to a car battery. Happily, both Chippendale and bassist Brian Gibson achieve pretty much the same Herculean level of deranged intensity on record, a fact that Earthly Delights takes great pains (quite possibly literal ones, by the sounds of it) to establish within two seconds of starting up, and then goes on to underline repeatedly with a blackened stump of crumbly, paper-shredding charcoal for the remainder of its 50-minute runtime. »
Japanese Voyeurs - Sicking and Creaming
Ploughing through Sicking and Creaming alongside mates of a certain age rapidly descends into a ludicrously nerdy game of early-Nineties musical Guess Who?»
The Spinto Band - Slim & Slender
All in all, Slim And Slender is an intriguing little gap-filler that, despite the subtle hints at a slightly more mature Spintos album to come, is pretty hard to quantify on its own. »
Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions - Through the Devil Softly
Through The Devil Softly is an album whose drowsy currents you’ll want to bob far away on, with no immediate concern over getting back. »
Blitzen Trapper - Black River Killer
It may only weigh in at seven tracks - one of which has already been released elsewhere, the remainder previously offered only as »
Richmond Fontaine - We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River
Full disclosure: in mid-2005, I spent a reasonably significant period believing that Richmond Fontaine’s sixth studio album, The F»
Finally Punk - Casual Goths
If the early Noughties (Christ, anyone care to join me in a clog-dancing bash atop the grave of that particular epithet this comin»
Spinnerette - Spinnerette
Throw enough shit at the wall, and some of it will stick. MGMT spring immediately to mind: Oracular Spectacular lurched from rubbe»
Clues - Clues
Since the windmilling demise of The Unicorns in late 2004 and main fringe-flicker-asider Nick Thorburn’s subsequent re-emergence w»
Condo F**ks - F*ckbook
The promo copy of Fuckbook comes slapped with a sticker bearing the smirkingly faux-earnest declaration that ‘This is not the new Yo La Tengo album’. To be fair, the sticker tells it like it is: despite having identical personnel at the tiller, Fuckbook is to most YLT records as bathtub gin is to a delicate blend of exotic herbal teas.»