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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The Twilight Sad - Another Bed

Nowadays, if you haven’t re-created yourself by album number three, you might as well be signing up to stack shelves at Morrisons. That’s why The Twilight Sad’s new single, ‘Another Bed’ – which displaces the diesel-thick noise folk they have been known for in the past for chilling, industrial gothica - is a smart move. It rolls along like a corrugated conveyor belt, the bass throbbing mechanically in straight 16’s, saturated with morose vintage synths and hopelessly bleak ambience. It’s like what New Order would be jamming today if Ian Curtis came back from the grave. They’re so adept at doom-peddling it’s actually hard to imagine that they recorded in a studio, not outside in a fucking thunderstorm. They’ve got some convincing emotional baggage, and know how to create atmosphere (sounds like they have as much fun with their bounty of effects boxes as any shoegaze pedal-boffin), but for fuck’s sake, someone give them a hug or something.

Underclass - Beat Your Fist

Their Facebook page may big them up as the next genre-smashing big thing, but in their latest release, ‘Beat Your Fist’, I can’t hear the faintest hint of most of the genres Underclass claim to have welded together. To me this is symptomatic of a patronising trend I have noticed a lot of recently – a band sing a pentatonic scale and suddenly they play ‘blues’; they use a wacky sounding synth and suddenly they’re ‘psychedelic’. Ok, rant over.

Contrary to what I may have insinuated, I don’t actually dislike this record. The middle 8 may sound a little like an alt rock nursery rhyme but the throaty brute force of that riff isn’t fucking around – it’s like something Black Rebel Motorcycle Club would play if someone hosed them out of bed at six in the morning. There’s an anthemic quality to the chorus, but it lacks the memorability needed to be a true rock anthem – next week I’ll have probably forgotten it.

The Dustaphonics - Party Girl

It’s like something from Kerouac’s On The Road - the dank smell of whiskey and stale cigarette smoke curls through the bar, thick and cancerous. It hangs in the witching hour gloom. A woman in stockings and a feather boa moans a tune from across the top of a battered grand piano. She’s sexy and dangerous and mostly every man sober enough to lift his head off the bar is swaying to her hypnotic spell. There are silhouettes of old negroes, sleazy looking men in shabby hats, sunken-eyed junkies - all clanking their bottles and stumbling around in the smog to the ramshackle clatter of the band.

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Fresh Reviews - Iarla O'Lionaird, Bankrupt, Rufio Summers

Aloha one and all. Got a few new reviews up, pre-release from Lights Go Out, Mudkiss and MAG fanzines.


The three artists involved really couldn't contrast any more - Iarla O'Lionard, the smooth-voiced celtic folk-sop of Afro Celt Sound System; Bankrupt, a snotty punk/ surf band from Budapest; and Rufio Summers, Gloucester's own bright-futured soul troubadour. Next up I'll probably be slapping death metal next to X Factor winners.

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