Ladyhawke - Anxiety
Ever since forking out the extravagant amount of £2 for her debut album in HMV I've been able to call myself a loyal Ladyhawke fan. The finest popstar to hail from New Zealand since...well, this is embarrassing. Philippa Brown broke through in 2008 with a whole range of excellently-crafted pop songs ( Magic, My Delirium, Paris is Burning ), but sadly none of them by her. She'd enjoyed relative success already as part of the Australian band Teenager but the idea of Ladyhawke as a popstar seemed to trigger more. Thus it was a nice day-after-birthday surprise to discover her return single, Black, White & Blue . The initial fear though was that Brown had decided to veer away from the pop tinges of her debut in favour of a kind of Garbage sound - indeed, Anxiety has been billed as a "straight-up guitar record": It's lot more rocky. The tone of it is definitely darker. It's still poppy and fun, but I listened to a lot of guitar rock when I was writing i...