“This was your 15 minutes,” sings Mark Gardener on 15 Minutes, “Hope you had fun now/ Have a nice life, yeah/ You’re basically done”. A few years ago, these words…
Review: Friendly Fires – Inflorescent
Just how long will Friendly Fires take to update their Wikipedia page following this third album? A full eight years after 2011’s Pala, the band are still referred to as…
Review: Shura – Forevher
Alexandra Denton’s second album, Forevher, centres around her relationship with someone she began dating after the release of her 2016 debut, Nothing’s Real. Her intent’s perfectly captured by its opener,…
Review: The Lightning Seeds – Jollification
A rare classic pop album from Britpop shows why, 25 years on, we need Ian Broudie more than ever… Considering its name, there weren’t exactly that many great pop acts…
Review: Bonnie Tyler – The RCA Years
Compiling Tyler’s first four albums from 1977-81, Lost In France and It’s A Heartache are the big tunes on a thoroughly-researched 4CD-set. Tyler had been singing in clubs for seven…
Review: Thom Yorke – Anima
“Goddamned machinery,” Thom Yorke fulminates on The Axe, after nearly two minutes of synths so dizzying they’re almost nauseating, “Why don’t you speak to me? One day I’m gonna take…
Review: Andrew Poppy – Hoarse Songs
It’s perhaps unfair after all these years to continue to associate composer Andrew Poppy with ZTT, a label with whom he only worked in the mid-80s. Somehow, however, that air…
Review: Gary Daly – Gone From Here
The China Crisis singer’s solo debut is an unexpected, understated gem that also serves to remind us how neglected his band’s been in some quarters… It’s the quiet ones you’ve…
Review: UNKLE – The Road Part II: Lost Highway
Mo’Wax founder James Lavelle’s back again with a cameo-laden sequel to 2017’s similarly cameo-laden fifth studio album, except this time it’s double the length, leading one to wonder, since it’s…
Reissue Review: Various Artists – Birth Of A Nation – Inevitable Records: An Independent Liverpool 1979-1986
It never attracted the acclaim or profile of a Factory or Postcard, but Inevitable Records was a valuable conduit for Liverpool indie music in the late 1970s and early 1980s.…