While it's tempting to position Elbow next to the sardonic likes of Badly Drawn Boy--mainly because of their proximity to the city of Manchester and their way with an acoustic guitar--Asleep In The Back, their frighteningly competent debut album, bears not the joker's smile. Instead, it comes straight from Manchester's simmering, ugly dark side--eleven tracks of rain-sodden misery, blown up ...
Manufacturer: Commercial Marketing
Typecast them as rootin', tootin' cowboy rockers if you will, but Aha Shake Heartbreak shows the Kings Of Leon have more to offer than beardy rock classicism. Indeed, for all the talk of Neil Young or Creedence Clearwater Revival, the outfit this Nashville-based band of brothers (and one cousin) resembles most is New York new-wavers The Strokes: it's there in Nathan Followill's minimal, ...
Manufacturer: Handmedown/RCA
Reading-based songstress Laura Marling has been likened to veteran folksters Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez. Despite such hyperbolic accolades, her entry into the crowded world of young female singer-songwriters has been remarkably hushed and wonderfully organic. Having started writing songs at the age of 15, Marling's success has been achieved not by shouting, but by whispering her way through the ...
Manufacturer: EMI
Inspired by '90s b-side collections such as Oasis' "The Masterplan" and Nirvana's "Incesticide", trendy Las Vegas rockers The Killers have gone and cooked up their own rarities and b-sides collection: Sawdust. That the band have only released two albums to date should have been warning enough that they couldn't possibly have enough solid material to fill such an album, though evidently not. ...
Manufacturer: Universal
Manufacturer: Mercury
Manufacturer: The English Channel
Konk, the second album from indie pop starlets The Kooks, will appeal to those who enjoyed the catchier, hookier elements of their best-selling debut Inside In/Inside Out. For the band are more "pop" than "indie" this time around, and Konk is an overt attempt at winning even more chart-topping kudos: and it's not a bad attempt at that. Recorded over a six-week period at the end of ...
Manufacturer: Virgin
Manufacturer: Wmtv
Our obsession with the weather has long been entrenched in the national psyche, but rarely--if ever--has it had so very much influence over the fortunes of one music career. But in the same way that it supposedly informs our resolute British demeanour (and capacity for standing hail-lashed in queues), seldom have we seen a band quite as stoic in the face of diminishing interest. Travis' existence, ...
Manufacturer: Red Phone Box
