James Blake - James Blake

A&M Released: February 7th 2011 James Blake is virtually peerless. This is not to say that his debut album is wholly original. On the contrary, it draws inspiration from a variety of sources. It is to mean that James Blake works solely on his own terms and isn’t afraid in the slightest to delight, surprise, or disappoint listeners....

Rolling with the blackout crew

Jon Bauckham meets The Go! Team’s Ian Parton to discuss the band’s adventurous third album, Rolling Blackouts It is six years since The Go! Team earned themselves a Mercury Prize nomination for their debut album, Thunder, Lightning, Strike. In a shortlist that included Hard-Fi and the Kaiser Chiefs, it was not particularly challenging...

Mystery Jets turn luminescent

Jon Bauckham gets an exclusive glimpse at the freshly recorded Mystery Jets LP, courtesy of lead singer Blaine Harrison. Mystery Jets have been keeping rather quiet lately. Only having recently emerged from the studio after nine months of recording their third long player, the band have spent time road testing new material in Berlin,...

Twee no more: Los Campesinos!

Gareth Campesinos! checks in with devoted fanboy Dylan Williams to chat about his new philosophy: Romance is Boring. With a mission statement centrally covering sex, death and football, if new release Romance Is Boring does nothing else for Los Campesinos!, it should finally put to rest the unwelcome ‘twee’ tag that’s dogged...

Night Slugs

Having run for just shy of two years, L-Vis 1990, Manara and Bok Bok's Night Slugs clubnight has charted the cutting edge of bass-heavy gutter music with admirable consistency. With an ethos that stays true to club music's function as floor filling party music as well as continually highlighting innovation and experimentation, Night Slugs...

Everything Everything in their right place

The multi-regional pop-bastardisers chat to Jon Bauckham of the great expectations placed upon them ahead of their debut. “Imagine an episode of Friends called ‘The One Where Joey Gets His Fucking Head Blown Off By A Drone Aircraft’,” explains Everything Everything frontman Jonathan Higgs, attempting to describe the thought...

Promised Works - Nick Drake's Pink Moon

By 1971, the English singer-songwriter Nick Drake was reaching the end of his metaphorical tether: depression, insomnia and the near-crippling shyness that marked his earlier career combined with an increasing dissatisfaction at the poor sales of his two previous records, (1969’s Five Leaves...

No need for alarm

Bombastic Danish dreamers Oh No Ono converse with Laura Snapes. It’d be all too convenient to be able to liken Oh No Ono’s hypnagogic sound to the fairytales of fellow Dane Hans Christian Andersen. In reality, they’re far more Grimm than that, creating terrible Freudian prog dreamlands of watery metaphors...