A God-awful Small Affair

There needn't be too much imagination required to observe how fickle the UK indie press can be with a band: Hard-Fi have gone from the hot up-and-coming "thoroughly innovative, post-Millennial urban horrorscape" to... somewhere off the radar entirely. But anyone around in 2005 and 2007 will have been aware of some rather decent singles in the way of "Ready for the Weekend", "Cash Machine" and "Hard to Beat", so it's not like they were an entirely random phase (see: Art Brut). With Killer Sounds , though, the band are in a hard-to-come-by experimental phase and the record has electropop (probably thanks to producer Stuart Price), disco funk and even a dollop of Primal Scream. So we'll start off with the scream. Single 'Good for Nothing' was a pleasant surprise to just about everybody - snowballing airplay from Zane Lowe and Soccer AM (perhaps predictably) - with its almost Beastie Boys instrumental dominated by percussion...

The invention of the concept of a 'guilty pleasure' is often confusing - it can be given to the most sugary of bubblegum pop because of feelings of nostalgia or unbeatable hooks (Steps, S Club 7) but some have taken it down an entirely misleading route of cynicism and snobbery that leaves you wondering just how someone can feel guilty for liking Coldplay or Elbow other than out of fear of judgment from others (and to put the record straight: I'm a fan of both). Only recently I was considering my appreciation for Will Young's music and found myself using the words guilty pleasure - but why? Maybe it's the platform through which he found fame, since no self-respecting music fan would enjoy an X Factor winner much, but then I look back over some of his records and just think "fuck it." Because when such records include All Time Love, Who Am I? or last year's excellent History with Groove Armada it's hard to feel guilty. Sure there have been so...

Haven't posted anything in 10 days and have been quite busy with real life stuff (I got into university! I have a social life again! Yay!) but now, have something that all music journos would squirm over, a top ten list of Radiohead songs. Just my favourites, not what I think are the greatest. 1. Just 2. No Surprises 3. Fake Plastic Trees 4. Pyramid Song 5. Street Spirit (Fade Out) 6. Everything In Its Right Place 7. Idioteque 8. The Tourist 9. Paranoid Android 10. Creep

Jon Fratelli would've been quite a long way down my list of potential multi-platform musicians from the 2000s lasting into the 2010s. But the former Fratelli has so far enjoyed a bit of success with the quite-alright-but-forgettable Codeine Velvet Club and has now decided to ditch them all and go entirely solo. It's no great secret that for pretty much the entirety of his career he'll have been fighting off Pitchforkers and their anger over the rise of pub-rock (and even for the most enduring listener, Chelsea Dagger got a little bit annoying) but perhaps the opportunity is now there for Fratelli, real name John Lawler, to make a creative stamp on the music world. Certainly his second band showed potential but seemed more pastiche than pastime, and never really inspired me. The outlook just peering over the tracklisting is bleak. The false, doe-eyed nature of some of Fratelli's songwriting is transparent enough to give itself away with titles like 'Oh Shangri...

It's been less than a year since the release of the phenomenal My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy but the anticipation and wait behind this has felt already like a lifetime. For Watch the Throne , West teams up with fellow mega-star Jay-Z and a host of equally massive guests and samples. With guest credits featuring Otis Redding, Nina Simone, James Brown and Beyoncé, as well as up-and-coming Frank Ocean, this is very much an extravagant affair. Gone are the melodramatic self-flagellations seen on MBDTF but one shouldn't be fooled into believing this is a who-you-know piece of slap-dash indulgence: money and egos are discussed at short-hand whilst race, politics and depression take centre stage. There have been some too who believe this to be a return to classic Kanye/Jay. The single 'Otis' seemed irreverent in its heavy sampling and thriving off of nostalgic throwbacks with its looped horns and organs, and bouncing almost nonsensical tongue-twisters around such as...

Short review: ROFL. 1/10 It has LMFAO. It has Natalia Kills. It has will.i.am. This is not my cup of tea. But I have tried, in the year or two I've been writing reviews now, to listen to everything (at least) twice before I make a judgment on its worth. The problem of course is that, in listening to this album twice, I have now put more effort into Sorry For Party Rocking than LMFAO themselves. To further this marvellous achievement I shall now dissect my review into 10 lessons - one for each track. [I] When people say "LMFAO" they're probably not really laughing. - Rock the Beat II Comedy has no place in dance music. Especially for unfunny people. So to commence this album with the spoken introduction is just opening yourself up for a world of embarrassment and cheese. "A short time ago in a galaxy close-closely near- is it closely?" this cartoon voice breaks character in some bizarre attempt to shatter their own fourth wall. They cite the...

Devonshire talents are rare to come by. We've done pretty well for ourselves with Muse, Chris Martin and Seth Lakeman all coming from the largest and greenest county, but almost ten years ago we were all proud of a teenage soul sensation who'd taken the country by storm. Joss Stone wasn't actually born here but it's far too late for me to change my angle now, and after a burst of success with teenage talent shows and a cross-Atlantic hit debut The Soul Sessions she seems to have crashed back down to Earth thanks to a couple of faux pas at the 2007 BRIT Awards. No Brit likes one of their own to go off and make it big in the USA. Ask Radiohead, whose release of Kid A initially met a world of "oh, is that it?"s and claims that (what Australians call) the Tall Poppy Syndrome had come into effect. There is some truth in a certain possessive nature amongst the British - and much of the backlash aimed at Stone following her new image and American drawl in 2007...

The press haven't been too kind on Viva Brother. Luck hasn't either. After creating a little ripple of noise the band, formerly Brother, were forced to change name or face a lawsuit from an Australian outfit of the same name - all of this before an embarassing U-Turn from the NME, who've gone from "The return of the great British guitar band" to a lukewarm review that'd probably please Razorlight. You needn't look too far, if you Google their name, for something in the way of an attention-grabbing statement from the band taken in a negative stance, but in a world of "I'm a Gallagher brother, here's what I think, watch as this thought somehow becomes news" you can't really fault a new band for trying to stand out. Especially in that economic climate. And other such boring observations. The problem is I'm not a very sympathetic person. Acts such as Yuck, Little Comets, The Joy Formidable and The Vaccines have all managed to garner s...