'More going on in The World Could Turn than meets the ear: an intriguing combination of old-timey piano and spacey sounds; the 12-tog string section and a lovely horn outro... beautiful.'

What is there to feel, listening to Elliott Smith now, other than sadness at the tragedy of a life cut short? From his early scratchy recordings, all the way through to XO and then Figure...

Recently Jack White’s companion in The Raconteurs, Brendan Benson has had a solo career that goes back to a few years before the start of that collaboration. His second album, Lapalco, is perhaps the peak...

It seems strange that such a distinctly beautiful vocalist was once too terrified to sing, using her violin almost as a surrogate voice. But that’s how Joan Wasser felt before she started singing, and started...

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...

Talk about kicking someone when they’re down: not only did Aimee Mann lose out on a Best Original Song Oscar to Phil Collins - her song Save Me from Magnolia losing out to his more...

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...

If I had a section called “accidental discovery of the day” then I could now add The Cold by Exitmusic to the file. Recording on Secretly Canadian, Exitmusic are husband and wife duo Aleksa Palladino...

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,...

When Sufjan Stevens told everyone he was going to write an album for every US state, it seemed like a tall order, but not necessarily an impossible quest for such a prolific artist. First came...

Not to be confused with anyone else with a vaguely similar name, Club 8 are just one of many casually brilliant Swedish pop groups (quite a few of whom are currently signed to Labrador Records)...

Wild Beasts have released a video for A Simple Beautiful Truth, the next single to be released from their subtly seductive fourth album Present Tense.

Of all the artists included in Select magazine’s November ‘93 Yanks go home piece, The Auteurs’ Luke Haines was always the least likely to fly the Britpop flag. The clues were there, in his response...