Tracks - page 29

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...

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...

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...

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...

I’m sure this stop motion video is referencing something, I just can’t figure out what. Directed by Andy Martin for Dress Up from the new album Old Fears by School of Language, it’s a brilliant...

Annoying / cool / annoying / cool / annoying / cool / annoying / cool

This is a tough one. As much as I love Eels / E / Mark Everett, there’s no single album that I would say sits above all the others as a must-have: Electro-Shock Blues is...

Finally, an album that would be a shoe-in if I actually sat down and attempted a truly definitive list. Released at the tail end of 1991, Bandwagonesque is technically Teenage Fanclub’s third album, but only...

Look! It’s that Mark Morriss from The Bluetones, whose début album back in 1996 got me as excited as a very excited young music fan with its brilliant hooks and singalongability. He has a newish...

After an initial burst of excitement and enormous piles of hype and all the pre-release publicity, Reflektor turned out to be a sporadically brilliant, wilfully indulgent offering whose peaks were not quite high enough to...

I don’t like to use the under-rated tag if I can help it, but when a début album as good as Natural History misses the top 100 altogether, it feels deserved. Mancunians I am Kloot...

I’ve been meaning to write about this track for days, but time has its own ways…

Time for this playlist to show its early 90s Indie roots. For a day, at least.

Harmless indie rock for the quiet kids. Occasionally they go big (“The New Year”, “Tiny Vessels”), but mostly keep a light touch, gently unfolding melodies in their own time.

Not a great name for a band; rubbish album title. Oh, and their label went bankrupt while they were working on a second album, leaving everything from unfinished demos to the band name itself in...

Judging by the two minutes and three seconds of controlled frenzy and anger that make up Hey Mr. Grey, Merge Records (his label) are not exaggerating in their description of his forthcoming album: