Tracks - page 38

Select Magazine’s second best album of 1993 (pipped to the post by the exceedingly marvelous Giant Steps) was One Dove’s only album. You can blame record label politics for that....

How Dubstar seem to have fallen so far outside our collective consciousness I cannot explain. Disgraceful might have seemed like an uneven album at the time of its release, but its highs were surely memorable:...

In the wake of Portishead and the Bristol sound came a new wave of post-trip hop artists, expanding the genre into newer areas, whether it wanted to go there or not. Among their number were...

1995 was the year trip-hop truly broke, when Portishead won the Mercury Prize for the debut album Dummy. The album spawned three singles, “Numb”, “Sour Times”, and the Ike Turner sampling “Glory Box”. Others would...

An unlikely track to find on a free CD from Q Magazine, but that’s exactly where you could get hold of a copy of this track in late...

Moody Monday.

Curse you, Vic Reeves, you and your singing in the club style. Not because you’ve affected my very deep Tindersticks love (it’s gone too far and for too long to be sideswiped by anything so...

In what now seems like a fit of over-exuberance, at the time of its release I awarded Expecting to Fly the unofficial mantle of best new album, album of the year, the decade, ever and...

…at the link it’s easy.

For at least a year I only thought of Grant Lee Buffalo as a curiosity: I knew a handful of tracks from their debut album Fuzzy, but I was yet to be convinced of their...

Bender, when I’m upset, I write a song about it. Like when I wrote Devil’s Haircut I was feeling really… really… what’s that song about?

Perhaps mistaking The Frank and Walters for a one album novelty act, the world paid only a little attention to Grand Parade on its release in 1996. Three years on from the more playful Trains,...

Are we really going to film the whole video in the water?

By happy coincidence, we’re watching Conan again. Here he takes the opportunity to thank most of the band for their performance, sneaking up on and alarming Hope Sandoval in the process. Sandoval, after a typically...

And so to the headliners…

The introspective, minor key side of big synth. There’s a dreamy, spectral quality to the music; sounds creep in and out throughout, and trickster seems to have stolen part of the chord progression from the...

If you’re going to wear your influences on your sleeve, you’d better choose wisely.

Hatfield was not a big name in the UK - perhaps as well known for her bass and backing vocals work with The Lemonheads on It's a Shame About Ray while she was living with...

Just listen to that intro! Feel its velvety charms. And the rest? A crunching verse, and a chorus they apparently stole from Dixon of Dock Green; an incongruous transposition.

In a year M People would win the Mercury Prize all bets were off, it doesn't get any easier to be the smart, sensitive guys with guitars. So it was that after plenty of pre-release...