Crocodiles - Endless Flowers

As someone who, from time to time, has been known to defend the record geeks behind indie rock and the whole ‘new music through archaeology’ formula, I find it frustrating every time I hear another album milked from the same old recipe – Phil Spector, Velvet Underground, Beach Boys, Doors – which brings little in terms of personality to the table.

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Collisions – Believe In This EP

“Fuck this place up!” screams Olly Simmons, and for a second I almost feel the flinging limbs of the sweaty, testosterone-charged melee he’s trying to transport me to. But something’s wrong, and immediately I’m uncomfortably aware of the midday breeze coming through my bedroom window, and my fantasy wafts away like a fart in the wind. What’s snapped me out of it is not only the realization that this isn’t a gig: this isn’t even a rock band.

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Gossip – A joyful noise

Looking through the comments on youtube videos of old Gossip songs is an uncomfortable exposé on how they hit the big-time in 2006. In amongst all the “you go girl”‘s and tiffs over the sex appeal of larger-than-life women, it doesn’t seem like anyone has anything to say about theirmusic. Back then Beth Ditto may indeed have been a conversation starter, rivalling Adele as the epitome of the anti-model, defiantly baring her gargantuan buttocks in the direction of the twig-thin catwalkers of the glossy magazine rack, but once you stripped them of alternative fashion icon status, Gossip always seemed to be a little short of things to say...


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Nada Surf - ‘The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy’

Prior to the release of their sixth original album, ‘The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy’, Nada Surf announced their intent for a return to a more visceral, practice room aesthetic. For a band whose retreat from skate-punk tinged alternative rock testosterone (and with it commercial growth) came almost immediately after the buzz of their one and only college radio hit back in ‘95...


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Portico Quartet - Portico Quartet

If you’d have surrendered your spare change to Portico Quartet’s hat on a drizzly London day sometime before their rise to the throne of youth-friendly post-jazz jamming, it may not have been obvious that a few years later they’d be competing for a place as the next Four Tet. However, after the electronic hinting of 2009’s Isla, it shouldn’t be too shocking that the follow-up has found an infatuation with synthetic production– an infatuation that all but buries the sax and hang drum rambling of their tube station busking days.

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Anomie Belle - Slither

Anomie Belle’s new single, ‘Slither’, follows November’s ‘Machine’, a single widely cited as an important part of the soundtrack to Occupy Wall Street. ‘Slither’, a collaboration with Sneaker Pimps’ Ian Pickering, suggests she's since got her hands on some chill pills - this one's much less urgent, a new age, floating down the river kind of track. Frictionless and sleek in its dynamics, it’s both unchallenging and subtly sophisticated.

Belle chews her words in a strange sort of way, with tones, pronunciations, and articulations the conventional singer wouldn’t go near. In a way it’s very similar to what Joanna Newsom does, but in place of Joanna’s folky innocence Anomie has a cool similar to Bajka (known for her work on Bonobo’s ‘Days To Come’).

‘Slither’ might not have the punch of protest that ‘Machines’ brandished, but its understated presence has a tender, almost surreal beauty. With its gentle gongs and House Of Flying Daggers strings towards the end, this is the sort of track Buddhist monks would be swaying to if they’d entered the iPod age.

Stressechoes - Bitter Acoustic Noise EP

In last month’s MAG review I teased Rufio Summers for naming his EP ‘Over It’ – an ironic choice, I suggested, for an EP that’s arguably a bit of a blubfest. It seems my sardonicisms can extend to February – the first chorus of Stressechoes’ ‘Bitter Acoustic Noise EP’, this month’s choice, appropriates a questionably relevant Dr Johnson quote most will recognize from Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘Fear and Loathing and Las Vegas’: “he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man”. Artistic license and abstract interpretations considered, it’s still hard to understand why these guys would pick said quote to introduce an EP that’s only a few jaunty riffs and a twinkle-in-the-eye away from being Cheltenham’s resident authority on ‘the pain of being a man’. Someone call a shrink: Gloucestershire is in denial!

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