Tag: raphael hall

Sunlight reflecting off the waves; skate punks with nothing to do; Californian melodies abrisk asunder. Like a batch of raspberry muffins fresh from the stove, surf-punk, otherwise known as lazy stoner-bred hipsterdom, has always been a somewhat uninspiring and vague aesthetic that is coloured by occasional stabs of aggression and…

Having both defined and subsequently relinquished the flag-waving cultural ethos of his youth; otherwise known as the bygone era of Britpop, Liam Gallagher doesn’t really have anything to prove or to give to anyone who is still even remotely interested in the crux of his musical output – lesser those…

Christopher Owens is something else. He’s not exactly seduced by any single steadfast idea of ‘cool’, or for that matter any measure of classic pop or rock n roll paradigms of any kind. This is a guy who’s been known to rock up to live performances in his pyjamas, colour…

Some of the great musical works of our time are canonized for associations; cultural importance and gallant artistic ambition, but rarely are they primarily championed for the strength of their content alone. Truly classic albums are strident works of perfection that balance this strength of composition with an often Herculean…

Unlike other such bands of recent times who likewise found themselves riding an avalanche of wellspring adulation and popularity overnight, the NME-hype zeitgeist has yet to be fully wrested away from the grasp of The Vaccines, a band whose celebrated arrival onto the scene last year drew comparisons with…

Photo by Lucy Bridger Brontide work their trade in a tough and often unappreciated field. Purely an instrumental band, their music isn’t typical of the genre they hail from. Rather than being sparse, experimental or even generally progressive, their songs tend to take shape as an exhilarating stew of beat…

Somewhere, someplace among the rolling meadows of Somerset comes the sound of chaos. Pure and bitter chaos. Thrusting their guitars and vocal chords forth with a polarising conviction that deliciously reflects their name, it seems that young upstarts The Waves of Fury are wholly responsible for this. Five knuckleheads who…

Bursting through a fuzzy bubblegum cloud of popularity and adulation with their first full-length effort two years ago, Best Coast have finally set upon delivering their second album, a dangerous predicament for a band so infused and rooted into such a distinct style of warm psychedelic pop. Made up of…

Damon Albarn is the British version of Jack White. His endless indulgence in random musical enterprises seems to suggest that he is still – twenty years on from fronting Brtipop legends Blur – searching for the ultimate musical calling in life. Unlike the former White Stripes frontman however, Albarn is…

Whilst the likes of Adele and Lily Allen have spearheaded the evolution of a new kind of femme fatale; a convoy of women who fiercely resent the sexually manufactured agendas that have plagued record labels for years, Laura Marling, the most graceful and divine English singer-songwriter to emerge since…

It should only seem fitting that upon venturing within ear-shot of Melbourne’s Festival Hall – a venue famous for housing the Fab Four a half century ago – the mighty guitar racket of none-other than NME indie-rock flag-bearers The Vaccines could be heard blaring through the doors at full volume;…

The Big Pink are perhaps every guitar band’s worst nightmare. Belonging to a select group of electro-pop artists that have recently found success through pragmatic, business like methods of networking as opposed to the more traditional rock n roll rite of passage (starting at the very bottom, playing the most…

In The Guardian’s review of The Maccabees‘ third LP ‘Given to the Wild‘, Alex Petridis entertained a peculiar notion; that despite the simmering success that The Maccabees have had over the past five years, they remain somewhat anonymous and faceless amongst their more outspoken peers in the modern indie landscape.…

It’s been a full decade since the world’s most famous virtual band burst onto the scene at the dawn of the century, born from two like-minded experimentalists and a set of crafty oil pastels. But few could have predicted the heights to which Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s project would…

London… the cultural and economic bastion of the western world from which some of the globe’s most coveted artists have emerged and from which some of the most famous songs have been inspired. If the riveting sleeve notes of ‘London: Songs to Define the City’ are anything to go by,…

No-one in their right mind expects Snow Patrol to make a generation-defining album, but we oft-expect them to make a disappointing record either. The alternative Irish outfit have been suspended rather awkwardly in the sky since the one-two punch of 2004’s ‘Final Straw‘ and 2006’s multi-format smash ‘Eyes Open‘. For…