Luvcat 'Vicious Delicious' (ALBUM REVIEW)

Luvcat’s new LP is a Bond–girl–meets–haunted–cabaret spectacle, shot through with the motif of a recurring circus refrain...

Where this melody stands out most is in the fourth track, ‘Dinner @ Brasserie Zédel’, a vaudeville-esque ballad that’s chock-full of manic, jazzy, waltzing orchestration. The track before it, ‘Matador’, introduces the theme on a pared-back acoustic guitar, starting as a playful, jangly tune that hints at the eeriness to come, almost as if the song were playing from a haunted music box. ‘Matador’, as well as the title track ‘Vicious Delicious’, are reminiscent of Panic! At The Disco’s debut album, with their twisted takes on dark romance, performance, and mystique making the listening experience feel more like stumbling onto a shadowy conspiracy.

Will Paquin 'HaHaHa' (ALBUM REVIEW)

Listening to Will Paquin’s debut album, ‘Hahaha’, feels like both a reflection and a rebirth, an energetic, genre-bending journey through memory, heartbreak, and the messy joy of moving forward. Across eleven tracks, Paquin balances raw emotion with jangly riffs, buoyant melodies, and a new, grungey garage-rock sound.

Big Special 'National Average' (ALBUM REVIEW)

They say it takes a lifetime to write your first album, then six months to write your second. Presumably, the latter only happens if the former generates enough of a splash, certainly the case for ‘Post Industrial Hometown Blues’, last year’s fine ode to not-so-quiet desperation, the debut release from West Midlands troubadours Big Special. 

Orbital - Brown Album (Reissue review)

 

I am fairly sure you cannot improve on perfection. In Orbital’s case, reissuing their spellbinding ‘Brown’ album (London Records) was always going to be warmly greeted, but what else did the brothers Hartnoll have in their locker? In stark contrast to Kraftwerk’s recent unmolested 50th anniversary reissue of ‘Autobahn’, the duo managed to curate a thirty-twotrack 4 CD boxed techno odyssey.

The Darkness 'Dreams On Toast' (ALBUM REVIEW)

It’s a brace of decades since ‘Permission To Land’ catapulted then cult NWOBHM throwback quartet ‘The Darkness’ into the stratosphere, infectious power pop underpinned by tongue-in-cheek 80s metal sonic pyrotechnics, leaving the listener wondering if the East Anglians were the real deal or simply the greatest piss take since Bad News.    

Marie Davidson 'City Of Clowns' (ALBUM REVIEW)

 

Combining the playfulness of Confidence Man, the detachment of Grace Jones as well as the sado-masochistic tendencies of Goldfrapp, the darkly alluring 6th long player from French Canadian producer Marie Davidson provides the somewhat startled listener with a 1990s tinged hedonistic dystopian rave odyssey. 

Zzzahara 'Spiral Your Way Out' (ALBUM REVIEW)

Zzzahara is American singer-songwriter Zahara Jaime; part Filipino, part Mexican, all California; or more specifically, Los Angeles. Waves of sun and grit spill out of this, their third album; a sound so uniquely Angeleno you can almost hear the traffic. Defiantly formed in the ashes of an ill-fated relationship, the emotion is thick and palpable. It’s a cliché to talk about sun-drenched guitar melodies, but the dreamy, beachy sound is undeniable. There are hints of Girls in there, of early Grimes, of Sky Ferreira's better produced moments.

Orbital: A Beginner’s Guide (ALBUM REVIEW)

I can still recall the moment Orbital first entered my life. Coming to after kipping on a friend’s floor after a night on the tiles, the room suddenly filled with the delightfully ethereal sampled vocal of Kirsty Hawkshaw, expertly fucked about with on Orbital’s slowest of slow burner introduction to ‘Halcyon + on + on’. A somewhat lengthier and bouncier mix of its original, arguably the track’s definitive version and of course, the delicious denouement of Orbital’s magnificent second album commonly known as ‘Brown’, my gateway to Phil and Paul’s unique variety of Hartnoll techno heaven.

Lazy Day 'Open the Door' (ALBUM REVIEW)

Lazy Day’s first full lengther Open the Door is the culmination of a ten year journey by Tilly Scantlebury, formerly of Brighton band Hella Better Dancer. An art historian by day, they have built on previous lo(wer)-fi releases, to curate a tightly bound and far slicker collection this time.

 

Crows 'Reason Enough' (ALBUM REVIEW and TOUR PREVIEW)

Jon Hopkins 'RITUAL' (ALBUM REVIEW)

Very much a comedown album, each of the eight pieces fuse soothing ambient and abrasive industrial, creating a droning hypnotic otherworldly soundscape, eerily redolent of contemporary science fiction cinema.

Enumclaw 'Home in Another Life' (ALBUM REVIEW)

They couldn’t have known, could they? Enumclaw have long called themselves the “best band since Oasis”, and in the run up to the release of their second album the Gallagher brothers announced their big reunion out of the blue. A matter of hours before Home in Another Life hit the shelves, tickets for the Manchester legends’ UK tour went on sale. We’ll leave it to the conspiracy theorists from here. 

HAMISH HAWK 'A Firmer Hand ' (Album Review)

Anyone naming a song ‘The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion 1973’ who then manages to make the end product an unforgettable 4-minute pop-art mini epic probably needs to be taken seriously. 

WHY? The Well I Fell Into (Album Review)

Experimental Cleveland quartet’s eighth album release, their first in half a decade, takes its title from a line within third track ‘Brand New’, a shimmering summery pop song comprising a splendidly cathartic yet mature take on the impact of emotional turmoil, a recurring theme throughout this 14-song offering.

Lip Critic ' Hex Dealer' (ALBUM REVIEW)

"...there is life beyond guitars when it comes to muscular riot-starting punk".

This review has two different readerships – those who have witnessed a Lip Critic gig and those who have not. Because the bombastic New Yorkers’ deranged, bludgeoning live performances rearrange the atoms in your auditory cortex, and you might just as well try to bottle sunlight as capture their monumental sound and presence on record.

Big Special 'Postindustrial Hometown Blues' (ALBUM REVIEW)

The debut album from Birmingham duo BIG SPECIAL is ferociously ambitious, to the point that their identity is about as fixed as the British weather. This all starts to make sense when vocalist Joe Hicklin waxes lyrical about his influences, which stretch from Jimi Hendrix to bluesman Robert Johnson to country maverick William Elliott Whitmore – not to mention the novels of Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski – but bringing them all together coherently is a trick he and Callum Moloney are still in the process of mastering. Not least because somewhere in there they’ve stuck a stick of dynamite up a synthesiser and given Moloney free rein to work through some stuff on the drums.

Gossip 'Real Power' (ALBUM REVIEW)

It’s great to see Gossip back where they belong, stage front, fanatical audience wrapped around vocalist Beth Ditto’s little finger. Wowing a clearly delighted throng at the recent 6 music festival it’s as if they’d never been away, not forgetting a barnstorming groove-laden new single ‘Real Power’ and now a brand new long player boasting the same moniker. The trio’s sixth album, released on Columbia records, their first new record in a dozen years serves as a fitting marker to the American trio’s twenty-five years together. 

Coco ‘2’ (ALBUM REVIEW)

Continuing the near recent trend of bands releasing new music anonymously or without fanfare, experimental stateside combo Coco unveiled their titular debut long player following a bunch of early  singles appearing as if by magic. Each record comprised languid, deeply infectious slices of soft rock, winning hearts and minds from many an unsuspecting listener.  

Solar Eyes (self-titled) (ALBUM REVIEW)

 

“There’s no escape, like Alcatraz,” goes the mesmeric middle section of the opening song on the debut album from Birmingham psych pop duo Solar Eyes. And it’s certainly easy to get sucked in – before you know it you’ve passed the psych-getti Western stylings of ‘Dreaming of the Moon’ and greasy Oasis-isms of album highlight ‘She Kissed the Gun’, dayglo colours streaming past you as you go. 

IDLES ‘Tangk’ ALBUM REVIEW

Whether they’ve wanted it or not, antagonism has dogged IDLES for most of their career. The Bristol band started off as the instigators, going after everything from the Tories to toxic masculinity, before being pushed towards the back foot at the hands of a rabid media, a strangely militant haterbase and, let’s face it, an underwhelming third album (the now all-but-disowned Ultra Mono).