Tag: alternative
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Pale glimmerings of ambiguity
Singer-songwriter albums often foreground the songs, to the extent that there is more or less nothing to distinguish the way they are performed or recorded from any other singer-songwriter album. Some appropriate, accomplished guitar work, some appropriate, accomplished vocals, some lyrics, and some melodies. When the writing itself reproduces established…
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Dropout Patrol – Sunny Hill (art-pop)
‘Literate’ is a term that some might use to characterise Dropout Patrol, and ‘erudite’ is another: neither is really up to the task. Sunny Hill is not a literate record in the sense of being wordy, or more concerned with meaning than feeling, and neither is its erudition of the…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
If you describe Tamara Parsons-Baker’s practice as a formula, it doesn’t inspire much excitement: simple, mainly diatonic guitar strums; emotive vocals; songs about unsuccessful love affairs; we have heard these elements before. However, the five songs on Lover proceed from a somewhat more warped perspective than this formula might suggest,…
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Sargasso Trio – Get To Grips (alternative dance)
Some songwriters tell it how it is, laying their raw emotion directly on the line with simple language and an impassioned delivery; others burnish their lyrics with so much metaphor and wordplay that we feel an ironic distance from their subjects, irrespective of the ostensible pathos they may describe; some…
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datapuddle – MonkeySkyMonkey (indie/ folktronica)
This is an entertaining and individualistic album, that makes you laugh one minute, with its absurdist, science-fiction tinged humour, and then, while your mouth is still open, slaps you with something altogether less superficial. This is music with something to say, and it says it without going to either extreme,…
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lextrical – Deletia (electronica/ indie/ folktronica)
Deletia opens with ‘Lunchbox D’, which begins with an obviously electronic backbeat; this is joined a bar later by a saturated, analogue sounding synth melody, and simultaneously by a guitar. This sets the pattern for the album: it is a predominantly electronic construction, but it is a highly organic one,…
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Cutleri – Let Me Show You My Sweater (folk/ Americana)
Production standards for self released music have become so generically polished and exact, that it has almost ceased to be meaningful or valuable to release a well recorded album. I’m being facetious, obviously, and of course I like to hear music I like sounding good, but sometimes the slickness of…
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The Little Unsaid – Into The Faceless Night (folk/ alternative rock)
Original songs in the style of folksong aren’t ‘folk’ in the sense of ‘traditional music’, and nor in fact do they actually sound like any traditional music ever did… this is a collection of finely crafted songs in a style that draws heavily on that tradition, with some rock elements,…
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She Makes War – Disarm (gloom-pop/ singer-songwriter)
War isn’t the first thing that springs to mind: there’s a lot of female performers out there with a far more aggressive image, but there’s certainly a strength and a sense of resistance in the persona that Laura Kidd articulates through her music as She Makes War. This is dark…
Oliver Arditi 