Albums - page 3

The Divine Comedy - Liberation

“An ordinary day, down old festive road” begins The Divine Comedy’s second album (or first if you discount outlier album Fanfare for the Comic Muse), with Neil Hannon’s now customary literary wit and appreciation. Inside...

Empathy Test - Losing Touch EP

Empathy Test are two lifelong friends - singer and songwriter Isaac Howlett, and digital composer Adam Relf. United by a love of Science Fiction, together they’ve created an EP of mesmerising and immaculate synth pop,...

The National - Trouble Will Find Me

The trouble with The National is that they are so well-defined, so clearly themselves, so consistent that you could point a newcomer to a couple of songs - a slow one, a fast one -...

The National - High Violet

There’s a smoothness to High Violet that never existed on Alligator, and which was hinted at on Boxer. After that last album, of course, The National were moved from Beggars Banquet to 4AD; not exactly...

The National - The Virginia EP

I hope I’m not getting the timeline wrong here, or even just being cynical, but an album made up of demos, unreleased tracks and live versions, released after a band’s last release on one label,...

The National - Boxer

Compared to previous albums by The National, there’s a calm flow to Boxer that was previously absent. The pace is largely more consistent, but control also comes from the gradual coming to the fore of...

The National - Alligator

Part of the joy of being a music fan / nerd / bore is that from time to time you get a kick out of introducing a new band to someone and seeing them fall...

The National - Cherry Tree

Waiting expectantly for a full and proper follow-up to Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers] we happen upon [albumtitle:Cherry Tree; a bit more than an EP in the old-fashioned sense, a bit less than an album...

The National - Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers

Just before the end of Slipping Husband, the second track of The National’s second album Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, Matt Berninger loses it in a very, well, a very Berninger sort of way. It...

The National - The National

From the perspective of 2014, in which The National are slick, big-selling, Sydney Opera House playing purveyors of gently tumbling emotional trauma clothed in studio velvet, the sound of the same band’s self-titled debut album...

Tindersticks - The Something Rain

I really think more albums should start with a gentle nine-minute spoken-word piece that takes in custard creams, a job nearly done, a job not done at all, cigars, the little-observed truth that On Her...

Tindersticks - Falling Down a Mountain

After the break-up, after the break, after the reformation, what next from Tindersticks Mk II?

Tindersticks - The Hungry Saw

This was always going to be a problem album. After 10 years and 6 albums, live offerings released as official bootlegs, and some soundtrack work to boot, a new Tindersticks album after an almost five...

Tindersticks - Waiting for the Moon

The more things change the more they stay the same. For their final album with their original six-piece line-up, Tindersticks dripped some of the strings of their earlier releases over the soul of newer material,...

Tindersticks - Can Our Love...

The first three Tindersticks albums comprised 21, 16 and 15 tracks respectively; the next two were made up of just nine songs and eight songs. What can we conclude from this? Well, for a start,...

Tindersticks - Simple Pleasure

After three albums of increasingly easy on the ear orchestral vignettes, Tindersticks decided to shake it up a bit for fourth album Simple Pleasure. The strings are still very much in place, but now they’re...

Tindersticks - Curtains

On Tindersticks’ third album Curtains the band stick largely to the familiar: lush orchestration, sweeping strings, tales of love, lust, and desperate dependency. And just as they refined and cleaned their sonic make-up for the...

Tindersticks - Tindersticks

On a number of levels, Tindersticks Second Album is a continuation of where the band left off at the end of their début eighteen months earlier. The orchestral grandeur is there, the lovelorn tales, the...

Tindersticks - Tindersticks

Tindersticks’ debut album is a smoky piano bar; a doomed love; a long dark soul. Arriving in the Autumn of 1993, just before Britpop stormed the barricades of a nation’s musical conscience, it stands in...

Tindersticks Day

Looking back, it's a little disappointing that one of my most treasured musical moments took place in a city center branch of a well-known high street music chain. I could have at least been in...