CD Review The Smoke Fairies Through Low Light and Trees (Shock Records) I love this album. It’s like I dreamt it, a beautiful dream in which so much of the music I love magically combined somewhere deep in my unconscious and came out just the way I wanted it. And then it was sitting there [...]

CD Review Gareth Liddiard Strange Tourist (Shock Music) I’ve been listening to this album for a couple of weeks but I don’t think I really appreciated it till I happened to be listening to it in the recovery room after a recent operation on my knee. The surgery itself was pretty minor — repairing some [...]

CD Review Ben Folds and Nick Hornby Lonely Avenue (Warner Music) This is an album of great highlights and utter crap, an oddly self-conscious outing by two artists who in some ways were made for each other and who in some ways bring out the worst in each other. Ben Folds, in case you don’t [...]

CD Review Robert Plant and the Band of Joy Band of Joy (Rounder) I like the musical trajectory Robert Plant has taken since the heady daze of Led Zeppelin, not least because my own tastes have described a similar arc.  Not that I’m comparing myself to the rock icon, you understand; just that I find [...]

CD Review Fisherking Circles (Independent) Fisherking is a four-piece Sydney band that came to some prominence after winning JJJ’s Unearthed FUSE Festival Competition in 2009. They have previously released an EP and this is their first album. It’s great. Their own blurb describes their music thusly: “Bringing a fresh new approach to blues ‘n’ roots, FisherKing’s captivating [...]

CD Review The Verses Seasons (thru Warner Music) The Verses is the new band by former Killing Heidi siblings Ella and Jesse Hooper. And oh, what a disappointment this debut is. I love Ella’s voice, and the previous Verses’ EP showed some promise, but this album just falls flat.  I’m not going to spend a [...]

CD Review Cordrazine Always Coming Down (Rubber Records) IF Barry White is fuck-your-brains out music on a round bed with satin sheets and a mirror on the ceiling, then Cordrazine’s new album is more like a bit of a cuddle on the lounge on a cold afternoon after a nice bowl of soup. As lead [...]

CD Review Devo Something For Everybody (thru Warners Music) What is the point of Devo at this stage of world history? Once they were a nice, idiosyncratic band who made funny, catchy poppy rock songs that went down a treat and they used the-then relatively novel medium of film clips to add another dimension to [...]

CD Review Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Mojo (thru Warners Music) If you think of, say, Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan as superpowers of a certain type of music, the sort of artists who others pay a lot of attention to and who are capable, in and on their day, of upsetting the existing boundaries [...]

CD Review Liz Stringer Tides of Time Liz Stringer is a class act. That deep, smokey voice, backed up by a genuine songwriting ability, not to mention some decent musicianship, means that it is just about impossible for her to turn out a bad album, even a bad song. The other thing I like about [...]