An astonishingly intense and ambitious album, Elbow's Cast of Thousands is relentlessly experimental. Having toiled for 10 years over their spellbinding Mercury-nominated debut Asleep in the Back, the maverick Bury five-piece--who were initially hailed as the new Radiohead--have produced a worthy sequel in a comparatively short two years. While mirroring their debut's melancholy ...
Manufacturer: Commercial Marketing
Final Straw, third album from Glasgow-based quintet Snow Patrol, is a darker, nastier and altogether bleaker beast than anything they've produced before. These are ostentatiously pop melodies that have been locked up in a basement, blindfolded over night and subjected to gleefully twisted torture and cruelty until they've squealed. The bruised, distorted (yet basically acoustic) "Wow" ...
Manufacturer: Polydor Group
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 ...
As Greatest Hits--and particularly the busking pavement jazz of "Lovecats"--reminds us, the best Cure singles were very often tangential exercises; halcyon playtime divergences offering a Goth-free contrast to some of the weightier studiousness of some of those early albums. Or, as smudged frontman Robert Smith says of this 18-track collection, "Songs that are sung with a smile." This ...
Music doesn't come more touching than Parachutes. With their debut single alone, the emotion-fortified "Shiver", Coldplay proved they could shift between elated and crushed in a breath as singer Chris Martin poured out music's oldest chestnut (unconditional yet unrequited love) with the shakiest of voices and a backdrop of epic guitars that rouse and tug at the heart strings. For 10 tracks ...
Manufacturer: Parlophone
On Coldplay's A Rush of Blood to the Head, the melodic excellence of Parachutes remains, as does the delicate soulfulness of Chris Martin's voice. But now different styles are approached, as the band develop even further beyond their debut album (and the numerous Radiohead comparisons that dogged them at first). "God Put a Smile upon Your Face", for instance, has a thumping voodoo ...
Coldplay were faced with a difficult choice as they set to work on X&Y. They could either follow Radiohead’s lead and use their enormous success and financial security as a springboard to a brave experimental future--or they could play it safe, repeat the tricks used on the 16 million-selling A Rush Of Blood To The Head, and consolidate their position as one of the ...
This is the value of working at cross-purposes: The Smiths were Morrissey's excuse to undulate his wry, disaffected lyrics and Johnny Marr's vehicle for his sharp, chiming, pop songs. Their favourite kind of compromise made them essentially a singles band, and The Queen Is Dead has a couple of their best (notably "The Boy With The Thorn In His Side", one of the greatest pop expressions of ...
Manufacturer: Warner
There are three themes to Performance And Cocktails: slow, a bit faster and "hey, let's make a noise for a bit". The former, as heard on "Hurry Up And Wait", start off by making you feel like curling up into a little ball and wallowing, but too much repetition could get wearing, which is why the mid-tempo tunes fill the gaps in the middle with the prettier tunes, like "Just Looking". Yet ...
Manufacturer: V2
Whilst one suspects some kind of pre-millennial hysteria prompted Q magazine's readers to vote OK Computer The Greatest Album Ever Made scarcely five months after its release, it certainly doesn't look stupid up there in the pantheon. Following the hot red rock attack of 1995's The Bends, OK Computer heads out into the cold deep space of prog-rock and comes back with ...
