Melt Yourself Down - Melt Yourself Down
2-5 Stars
Too uncoordinated, un-moderated and incoherent to do more than dazzle and confuse in equal proportions.
15th June 2013
2-5 Stars rated Albums & EPs
Jimmy Eat World - Damage
2-5 Stars
While this is by no means a bad record it definitely isn’t a good one either.
8th June 2013
Houndmouth – From The Hills Below The City
2-5 Stars
‘From The Hills Below The City’ is quite a sunny album. But quite sunny won’t set your hair on fire.
3rd June 2013
CocoRosie - Tales Of A Grasswidow
2-5 Stars
The album aims for vintage Kate Bush or Diamanda Galas but often comes across closer to vintage Enya.
25th May 2013
The Computers - Love Triangles, Hate Squares
2-5 Stars
For all of the frontman’s dynamism, he can’t save a frustratingly slow, out-of-date computer.
27th April 2013
Ice, Sea, Dead People - If It’s Broken, Break It More
2-5 Stars
Guitars sound like they’re having the last vestiges of life being wrung from their necks, and the vocals sound like they’re being throttled on their way out, too.
22nd April 2013
Frank Turner - Tape Deck Heart
2-5 Stars
Your ability to get on board with this record will depend more or less entirely on how you feel about its lyrical content.
22nd April 2013
Javelin - Hi Beams
2-5 Stars
It might benefit from some hooks to offset the at times cluttered sound.
15th April 2013
Cold War Kids - Dear Miss Lonelyhearts
2-5 Stars
The band’s fourth album is largely an up and down affair.
1st April 2013
James Yuill - These Spirits
2-5 Stars
Where other works were distinctive and refined, These Spirits feels confused and clunky.
24th March 2013
Retro Stefson - Retro Stefson
2-5 Stars
So irrevocably entrenched in the 1990s that it should’ve come with an issue of Loaded, a Fast Show DVD and a Crash Bandicoot game.
24th March 2013
And So I Watch You From Afar - All Hail Bright Futures
2-5 Stars
Too often the songs feel like first drafts that search for a melodic through-line and never quite find it.
18th March 2013
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Specter At The Feast
2-5 Stars
For all the odd moments where it clicks, the overriding impression this album gives is one of a band going through the motions.
17th March 2013
Thought Forms - Ghost Mountain
2-5 Stars
An intensely insular world of cavernous sounds, punctuated by forays into generic post-rock.
5th March 2013
Fiction - The Big Other
2-5 Stars
Even the finest slab of Hubba Bubba is liable to lose its sweet taste after a while, and ‘The Big Other’ soon descends into a lump of indigestible rubbery nothingness.
4th March 2013
Love Echo - I Promise You Always The Sky
2-5 Stars
By the end it all sounds quite tired and uninspired, and there just doesn’t seem to be enough ammunition to get them across the finish line.
28th January 2013
Ulrich Schnauss - A Long Way To Fall
2-5 Stars
The trick with ambient is that it’s got to sound like it’s about to put you to sleep, not actually knock you out.
21st January 2013
The Blackout - Start The Party
2-5 Stars
The tracks, although individually solid, blend into uniformity over the course of an album.
21st January 2013
Lord Huron - Lonesome Dreams
2-5 Stars
Incomplete, wearisome MOR taken straight from the Mumfords’ sick bucket.
21st January 2013
Zombie Nation - RGB
2-5 Stars
Many of the weaker tracks on this very long album are rendered blandly anaemic.
21st December 2012
Various - Christmas Rules
2-5 Stars
There is an unbearable feeling that it is all a little bit worthy.
16th December 2012
Mogwai - A Wrenched Virile Lore
2-5 Stars
The very nature of remix albums means they are rarely cohesive as a collective whole.
18th November 2012
Club Smith - Appetite For Chivalry
2-5 Stars
They do break out of their mould occasionally, but only towards the end of the album.
10th November 2012
James Iha - Look To The Sky
2-5 Stars
‘Look To The Sky’ is a markedly different album from his solo debut.
5th November 2012
Featuring Yard Act, Death Cab For Cutie, Graham Coxon, Maisie Peters and more.