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Liam Allen

Album Review: Yesway's Self-Tited LP

Album Review: Yesway's Self-Tited LP

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The spectres of folk music's past haunt Yesway's self-titled début album. While such a description might serve to paint these newly emergent songwriters as gothic miserablists, these spirits are very much benevolent ones, content to waft with a gleeful fervour out in the open air, before dissolving into dewy embers with the morning's first light. Sounds floa[...]
The Good, The Bad, The Inauthentic: Music of The Midwest-Folk Broken Down

The Good, The Bad, The Inauthentic: Music of The Midwest-Folk Broken Down

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I'm British, and as such I'm interested in how, with the aid of the net, traditions from overseas have spread and converged with this small island I call home. Halloween is a good example – instead of dressing up as bed-sheet ghouls or plastic vampires, such as we were formerly accustomed to, we now dress up as Kim Kardashian, or Highway 61-era Dylan; such h[...]
EDM: Forging Derivative New Frontiers

EDM: Forging Derivative New Frontiers

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As electronica darling Richard D James, aka the Aphex Twin, returns to his kingly pedestal with much critical harrumph, something of a tribal clash has emerged on the World Wide Whinge, taking place between two different generations of music fans. In the red corner we have the likes of Aphex Twin and Autechre, the IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) crowd. In the [...]
Dinah Thorpe: Lullabies and Wake-up Calls

Dinah Thorpe: Lullabies and Wake-up Calls

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Due to certain musical prejudices I was hitherto unaware of hosting, the prospect of listening to a rap album by a white, assumedly middle-class Canadian songwriter initially struck me as somewhat unappealing, if not entirely uninteresting; an unsavoury mixture of musical bacon and ice cream. However, delving further always helps. On Lullabies and Wake-up Ca[...]
Album Review: Basement Jaxx

Album Review: Basement Jaxx "Junto"

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With the sudden re-emergence of electronic music's favorite son, the Aphex Twin, it seems that electronica/EDM/that car alarm sound (whatever you want to call it) is falling into a particularly ruminative period; a self-reflective time to allow genre-heads to recollect and examine the general state of the genre as a whole. Now, electronic music - repackaged [...]
Album Review: Cymbals Eat Guitars

Album Review: Cymbals Eat Guitars "LOSE"

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On their LP no.3 New York-based Cymbals Eat Guitars present nine unwieldy song-shapes, ranging from fast and breezy punk to dramatic, overlong experiments in sound. All the while such aural chaos serves to accommodate the unfurling narratives of songwriter and vocalist Joseph D'Agostino, as his commandeering vocal style more than frequently overspills the st[...]