One Band One Day - page 2

What to do after the success of Casanova… not so much the success of the album itself, which didn’t quite make the Top 40, so much as the success of singles like Something for the...

It’s tempting to see Casanova as nothing more than Neil Hannon’s cheeky-chappy coming out album. The truth, as ever, feels not quite as simple as that.

Just in case Liberation was a bit too easily-digestible, not quite soaked enough in literary reference, art or artifice, for its follow-up Neil Hannon pulls out all the stops. On Promenade he casts aside, for...

“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...

Tuesday April 29th is Divine Comedy Day on Record Rewind Play - eighteen years to the day since the release of Casanova, and I've owed Setanta a review ever since...

Having spent the whole day listening to and reviewing albums by The National, it would seem like a horrible mistake if I couldn’t, just this once, bend the rules and include a non-album track in...

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 -...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I hadn’t really paid much attention to [artistname]The National[/artistname] before a friend gave me Alligator on CD. I was instantly hooked, and easily reeled in by the smoky seduction of Matt Berninger’s voice and lyrics,...

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...

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

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...

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,...

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,...