Tracks - page 43

Loathe as I am to post video-less tracks, I can make exceptions for the perhaps lesser knowns, such as this track by the bespectacled half of Kings of Convenience. The Black Keys Work appears on...

I’d love to be the guy that develops concepts for music videos: it’s pretty much a free-for-all, anything goes kind of frontier world. Take this effort from all-the-rage French popsters Phoenix, for instance. While I’m...

Staring across at Efterklang from the other end of the Danish pop spectrum, Junior Senior would be an entertaining choice, but only if they can recreate the magic formula that led to Move Your Feet....

And so congratulations go to Denmark, for winning with a song that was a bafflingly strong favourite, but for which I can’t recall the tune for love nor money. Euphoria, on the other hand…

Not merely one of the best songs written with Eurovision in mind, but one of the best songs ever written, and the kind of song that requires only the thinnest of excuses to post. My...

Norway aren’t really as Eurovision-tragic as they’re made out to be. Yes, they have failed to score more times than any other nation, and yes they’ve finished last more times than anyone else, but against...

How is it that all I want to do is post a link to a song that’s in some way related to the Eurovision song contest, but about an hour after finding the right video,...

Before Labrador, there was Stockholm Records, a Swedish indie set up in 1992 and now a part of the Universal Music Group. And before Club 8, there were The Cardigans, stitching their twee mark on...

Club 8’s label-mates The Radio Dept. have, over the course of three albums, and assorted singles and EPs, mostly stuck to a fuzzy low-fi template; the distorted vocals of the perennial outsider accompanying simple strummed...

Not to be confused with S Club 8, S Club 7, S Club etc

Et maintenant, la musique pop francaise! Cette chanson s’appelle Mille Fois, comme le gateau. Presque. Je l’aime beaucoup: c’est belle, non?

This fresh-faced young thing was billed as the Norwegian Badly Drawn Boy. An entirely musical comparison, I would say; hard to see Lerche in amiable beanie-topped shambling. While reviewing his fourth album Phantom Punch, The...

Speaking of dramatic scenery and atmosphere, here’s Sigur Rós, who you may know as the band responsible for Hoppípolla - the soundtrack to every sweeping landscape segment of every documentary and tv series circa 2006/7/8/9…...

Pantha Du Prince (aka German DJ and producer Hendrik Weber) takes found sounds, field recordings, sprinkles over minimal techno, investigating the hinterlands of silence and noise, reality and artificiality. In so doing,

If Scandi/Nordic noir didn’t grab you, chances are Broadchurch introduced you to a new kind of minimal musical backdrop. Here they Used to Build Ships is taken from an album soundtracking a film (Copenhagen Dreams)...

The story: Belgium rock band releases blinding second album “Much against Everyone’s Advice”, shows playful side by covering Nik Kershaw, puts down guitars, and plays a significant part in the development of mash-ups, in their...

I was thinking of celebrating all things musically European at some point, and what better time than the dizzying aftershock of local council elections that saw literally tens of people turn out to vote for...

It’s almost as if they heard the news that they’d been ousted at the top of my most played list by The House of Love, but The National are back three years after High Violet...

Loving the new album from The Leisure Society - since their first album, Sleeper, they’ve really expanded on the sound and the arrangements, without losing any of that keen melodic sense.

Last but not necessarily least, and first on my list of bands seen live, here’s Catherine Wheel, with Rob Dickinson (cousin of Iron Maiden’s Bruce) leading it out in front of a Finsbury Park horde....