Spotlight – 19: Las Kellies
“Horses are running everywhere/While I eat my cornflakes/I prepare to go to the beach/Which one I will choose?” This morning, a package arrived from Nottingham, from a former Plan B writer. I love shit like this. Makes life totally worthwhile, when friends you haven’t even ever met send you stuff just cos they think you […]
Spotlight – 18: Super Wild Horses
By Bangs, there’s so much great stuff out there waiting to be unearthed. A reader sent me the link through to this – primal garage rock, played just the way I like it. Vim, vigour, vitality, with viccisitude and a little bit of Bo Diddley, good and grungy (in the old-fashioned, 1988 Happy Mondays/1957 Johnny Burnette, […]
Spotlight – 16: Irmin Schmidt
This is what I listen to when I want to relax. Blank out the sound of the Roald Dahl audio-cassettes, the butcher birds circling and perching perilously close on our deck, the occasional rush of helicopter wind, Isaac complaining because he’s been sitting still too long. One of the applications on my iPod Touch that […]
Spotlight – 15: Kids Love Lies
The ‘Count In My Head’ EP is like everything thrown in together. Brash guitars, synchronised handclaps, “whoa-oh-oh’s” like Kate Nash sings them, chirpy and bouncy and racing along at way too fast a lick – indeed, this is what I like to imagine the State Of The Art sounds like in 2009, although let’s face […]
Spotlight – 13: The Deadnotes
I should declare a prior interest somewhere. But really, what first attracted me to this band – trained in the “school of error” as practised by Maher Shalal Hash Baz and all those other naive orchestral delights, accomplished keyboards man Leighton Craig of the firm belief that where drummers went wrong was when they first […]
Spotlight – 12: The Lost Girls
To be honest, they had me sold the instant I saw the blurb. All girl old school lo-fi punk band. Telling tales of crushes, stalkers, dead models and police sirens And fuck me, if that isn’t exactly what they sound like too! A bit of X, a bit of The Avengers, a bit of The Leopards, […]
Spotlight – 11: She Keeps Bees
Here’s what Brooklyn two-piece, female-male coupling, She Keeps Bees DON’T sound like. The White Stripes (What, did the number of people in the band fool you? Can’t think of many other groups with just two members?) Cat Power (What, did the sparseness of the music fool you? Did you feel that sparseness automatically confers a ‘confessional’ […]
