FOUND – Factorycraft - April 2011 April 3rd, 2011

Edinburgh’s art school guitar popsters FOUND insist on capital letters. Their sometime scratchiness will satiate those weaned on scuffed Scottish indie rock from way back, like Josef K or Fire Engines, but they’re clean and lean and melodic enough to clobber the casual consumer with chiming guitars and suckable hooks and falsetto vocal leaps, and…

Rome Pays Off – There’s No Simple Explanation - March 2011 March 27th, 2011

As part of the trio of electric bassists Rothko, Crawford Blair and Mark Beazley made abstract, throbbing, low-end noise with an edge of danger, sculpted for swooping shots of arctic landscapes in Discovery channel documentaries. Now playing as the duo Rome Pays Off they sound instead like a continuous edit of de-contextualised snatches of jazz…

Mary Waterson & Oliver Knight – The Days That Shaped Me - March 2011 March 27th, 2011

Last years Brits declared a pop-friendly facsimile of folk newly fashionable. But our venerable Waterson-Carthy clan continue plying the family business, unheralded by host James Corden. Siblings Marry Waterson and the guitarist Oliver Knight weave a hybrid of traditional textures and contemporary colours, cousin Eliza Carthy’s occasional fiddle their stark debut’s only adornment. Mary can…

Trembling Bells – The Constant Pageant - March 2011 March 20th, 2011

When folkies like Fairport Convention or Trees rocked out in the early Seventies, they assimilated then contemporary sounds. Attempts to ape them today, as in swathes of the Philadelphia psych-folk underground, can whiff of costumed re-enactment. Praise John Barleycorn, then, for Trembling Bells, whose third album is both stoically historic and heroically now. Confidently proclaiming…

Eleventh Dream Day – Riot Now! - March 2011 March 20th, 2011

Of all the brilliant bands that never broke, Chicago’s Eleventh Dream Day are perhaps the unluckiest. Playing Neil Young goes garage burnouts in the Eighties deadzone, pre-grunge and post-punk, their eponymous 1987 album is an all time great debut. Their first record in five years maintains altitude whilst rarely soaring. Former lieutenants departed, Rick Rizzo…

Arboretum – The Gathering - March 2011 March 20th, 2011

Crawling out of Baltimore like a psychedelic slug, Arboretum play the modal chord progressions you’d find on Seventies British folk rock albums, and douse them in cyclical strangulated lead guitar noise, a stoner metal band gone native at Cropredy. David Heumann’s yearning vocals lie back in the mix, like a man straining to see something…