The Puddle – Playboys In The Bush - January 2011 January 21st, 2011

The New Zealand lo-fi legends The Puddle’s engagingly sloppy indie-pop was epically unadorned. But what the band’s own press release tellingly describes as ‘florid saxophone embellishments’ on some songs here, suggest that for a quarter century these apparently inspired folk-art amateurs might actually have been frustrated exponents of emotionally explicit mainstream rock. There’s a sub-Velvets…

Sic Alps – Napa Asylum - January 2011 January 16th, 2011

Sic Alps, who once name-checked the Welsh mystic Arthur Machen in a song, suggest the infantile daubs of Syd Barrett spliced with 1980’s New York noise. Most of the twenty-two songs on their fourth album are less than two minutes long. The confident young trio lay down a loose riff or a fragile acoustic guitar…

My Autumn Empire – The Village Compass - January 2011 January 16th, 2011

Don’t consign ‘folktronica’ to the dustbin or dead genres yet. My Autumn Empire, the solo project of Benjamin Thomas of the Staffordshire outfit Epic45, is more song-writerly than its atmospherically Arcadian parent group, but on Block Colours And Straight Lines, for example, the tuneful vocals and deferential melodies are set back in a dense thicket…

The Jayhawks – Tomorrow The Green Grass : Legacy Edition - January 2011 January 16th, 2011

The Jayhawks’ Hollywood Town Hall, one of Alternative Country’s two or three key recordings, is also reissued this week, but 1995’s follow up, Tomorrow The Green Grass, is augmented by a disc of ‘The Mystery Demos’, fascinating lost 1992 recordings. The album proper builds on Hollywood Town Hall’s template, windblown Stonesey country rock with an…

The Sails – A Headful Of Stars - January 2011 January 9th, 2011

On the tabla-propelled Travel, The Sails play sitar-flanged psychedelia in the style of The Beatles’ post-enlightenment incarnation. Yesterday And Today draws a line from Honeybus’ 1968 single I Can’t Let Maggie Go to The La’s’ wondrous eighties one hit There She Goes. Dogs plunders the twelve-string folk-rock of The Hollies, in the interlude between ditching…

Wire – Red Barked Tree - January 2011 January 9th, 2011

Even when first pedalling short sharp Seventies shocks Wire were essentially conceptual artists, sculpting minimal cubist punk. Thirty-five years later, all pushing sixty, their third album this century seems to be a typically tidy modern rock record, albeit one that also unfolds within invisible inverted commas. The Artful Dodger dropped aitches of old are replaced…