Reviews for the 13th Floor 20/02/2012
    Reviews for The 13th Floor. Click on the link to read the full review. Julien Dyne Glmpse Rythmethod If you enjoy vocals, lyrics, hooks, riffs and melodies, Julien Dyne’s Glimpse isn’t for you. But if you like being challenged by music, if you’re partial to a spot of abstract jazz, and if you want to give your ears a workout, these nineteen beat-driven tracks will be right up your alley. Grant P Chilcott Sings Mitchell Parish Ode Records Grant P Chilcott, also known as Wentworth Brewster, has been keeping the torch of crooner-style singing aflame in New Zealand for twenty five years. He’s recorded with The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra Strings, performed with the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra, and sung in exotic countries around the world. In this album he turns his talents to re-imagining the songs of Mitchell Parish (1900 – 1993), the Lithuania-born immigrant turned Tin Pan Alley lyricist. Vintage Trouble The Bomb Shelter Sessions Shock With their mid-century recording techniques and influences, Hollywood-based Vintage Trouble are certainly retro, but they’re not up to much mischief. Sounding like The Detroit Cobras without Rachel Nagy’s cut-loose vocals or The Black Keys without the devil-may-care attitude, Vintage Trouble have a hot look but their brand of rock n’ soul lacks heat. Ana Tijoux La Bala France received many political refugees during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship of Chile during the 1970s and 80s. In 1977 Anamaria Merino was born in Paris to an exiled Chilean father and a French mother. In the 90s democracy was restored to Chile and the Merino family relocated there, where Anamaria changed her name to Ana Tijoux and immersed herself in the hip hop scene. Tijoux fronted rap group Makiza before striking it out on her own with impressive results (her second album, 1977, was nominated for a Grammy). Add Comment Reviews for The 13th Floor 14/12/2011
     Reviews for The 13th Floor. Click on the link to read the full review. The Black Keys El Camino Nonesuch With sleek, sexy and surprising cover art of people-movers both retro and modern, a gleaming silver sticker on the front instructing you to ‘play loud’, and eleven smouldering tracks within, the latest album from Ohio duo The Black Keys is this summer’s biggest fire hazard. The boys are back with their trademark dirty blues rock sound, but this time they’ve arrived in a cloud of rocket smoke and a blaze of glitter in the middle of a dusty road... David Lynch Crazy Clown Time Sunday Best You may not realise how much of David Lynch’s music you’ve already heard. He shares writing credits for the song In Heaven (Eraserhead, 1977), wrote lyrics for Julee Cruise, created music for Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive and more, and has worked on several musical collaborations... Fagan and the People Admiral of the Narrow Seas Big Ears Admiral Of The Narrow Seas has been a long time coming from 1985 RIANZ Top Male Vocalist of The Year winner Andrew Fagan. Spanning ten years, several recording studios and vast oceans, these twelve tracks are like the contestants at a Miss Kaitaia beauty pageant – some flawed, each different but all united by their homegrown beauty... Thrice Major/Minor Vagrant Though Thrice claim they’re not a Christian band, singer Dustin Kensrue’s lyrics are rife with Christian imagery, and the catchy Blinded could be read either as a curious kind of love song, or as the words of thanks from a sinner repenting before God... Bjork Biophilia Little Indian Despite the innovative platform used to share the album, the music itself feels much like the same old Bjork – still enchanting and original, but sparser and more abstract than before... Reviews for The 13th Floor 17/10/2011
   Reviews for The 13th Floor. Click on the link to read the full review. The Ettes Wicked Will Shock Entertainment The Black Belles, The Black Keys, The Detroit Cobras, Jace Everett, The Dead Weather. Deathproof, The Switchblade Sisters, Girl on a Motorcycle, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Leather, denim, gingham, bouffant hair, pussy bows. If any of the above appeal to you, hop in your Chevy and zoom down to your local record store to pick up Wicked Will, the fourth album from Nashville-based garage rock trio The Ettes... CSS La Liberación Sub Pop City Grrrl sounds like The Donnas with glo sticks, and Echo Of Love provides some pleasantly unexpected melodies before star track You Could Have It All bursts in with some pure pop power. With delicate piano trickling over squelchy bass, solid riffs and uncharacteristically emotionally honest lyrics, CSS display an evolution in their sound on this track for the first time... L/O/N/G American Primitive Glitterhouse The ten spacious tracks on their debut ‘American Primitive’ are a seamless fusion of alt country and laid-back electronica. Sounding as though they could have been penned by a modern-day Neil Young, these steamy, dreamy songs are both contemporary and inescapably rural. Eckman’s BA in Philosophy and Huber’s classical background contribute to songs that are long and atmospheric but always layered and stirring. Reviews for The 13th Floor 05/10/2011
   The Travelling Band Screaming is Something Shock On their second album Screaming Is Something the hirsute Adam Gorman and Jo Dudderidge share vocal duties. Rather unfortunately, they both have the kind of clear, pure voices that would have made them prime candidates for a boys’ Cathedral choir. Many of these darkly textured songs would instead have benefitted from a cool growl... Evaline Woven Material Shock The album features the cool urban desolation of Radiohead, the soaring highs and lows of Muse and the high drama of My Chemical Romance... Kasabian Velociraptor! Sony If Kasabian was an English schoolboy his blazer would be more highly-decorated than Hugh Grant’s bedpost... Reviews for The 13th Floor 24/09/2011
   Reviews for The 13th Floor. Click on the link to read the full review. Bonjah Go Go Chaos Shock Entertainment They may be New Zealand’s best kept secret, but rootsy rock band Bonjah are Rolling Stone’s 2011 ‘Artist to Watch’... Vetiver The Errant Charm Sup Pop Vetiver (named after a useful and non-psychoactive perennial grass) allude to the 70s from their softly-psychedelic cover through to their ten soft and sun-kissed tracks... Hellsongs Minor Misdemeanors Lovely Records Until young female singer Siri Bergnéhr had a stroke late last year, Hellsongs were a group of metal-loving Swedish musicians with a pop sensibility...  Reviews for The 13th Floor 11/09/2011
    Reviews for The 13th Floor. Click the link to read the full review. The Sami Sisters Happy Heartbreak! Like a time capsule with influences ranging from nana to Rihanna, this album is filled with exciting discoveries. In these three Onehunga-raised Irish/Indian sisters, we may just have found the real sound of New Zealand... Hollie Cook Hollie Cook Mr. Bongo London born singer Hollie Cook had her first taste of the limelight when family friend Ari Up encouraged her to sing backing vocals on the EP Revenge of the Killer Slits... Cairo Knife Fight II Liberation If you like your heavy rock served up with some sexy on the side, this is the band for you... The Howling Bells The Loudest Engine Shock Entertainment What’s really sexy about Stein is her intimate voice, which can glide from soft and husky to let-loose loud, all while retaining a quality makes her sound as though she’s whispering in your ear... Reviews for The 13th Floor 29/08/2011
   Reviews for The 13th Floor. Click the link to read the full review. WU LYF Go Tell Fire To The Mountain PIAS Roberts has a voice that could be described as a Homo Antecessor howling at the moon, a possum clinging to life after being run over by a car, or Tom Hanks in Castaway as Wilson bobs out of his grasp. These unintelligible, scratchy groans are apparently grunted along to at live shows. (A cheat’s guide to singing along: recurring words are ‘crown’, ‘baby’, ‘father’, ‘gold’, ‘money’, ‘blood’, ‘animals’ and ‘home’)... Beirut The Rip Tide Pompeii An intriguing blend of serious and sweet, this short album sounds like a dirge for the funeral of a smurf... The Nudge Big Nudge Pie Again the band mixes up the genres, beginning with a poppy sound that evolves into a Hendrix-style jam. Prebble is super snarly on It All Becomes Clear, where lines like “my fantasy is your catastrophe” sound as though they’re being spat and hissed by a pissed-off (but rather adorable) cat in a cage. The Excess: New Zealand's Forgotten Women 21/08/2011
 Miss Lonely Hearts gets ready for her imaginary date in Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rear Window' The weekend papers love to incite mass female anxiety by reporting on New Zealand’s man drought. This morning The Sunday Star Times ran yet another scare-mongering article on the issue: ‘She’s a hard road to find the perfect man’, by Nicola Russell. “Man Drought” is a pithy term for a huge social problem that has extremely negative implications for women and for society, but journalists have so far focused on sensationalism and failed to actually examine the issue. “Statistics New Zealand 2011 population estimates reveal there are more than 50,000 "excess" 25 to 49-year-old females living in New Zealand”, writes Ms. Russell. Excess? Statistics New Zealand might also like to check to see whether or not any excess female suicides resulted from this tactless reporting. In a society where having families is so valued that people are paid to procreate, the plight of the twenty five percent of women of childbearing age* who are single has been paradoxically ignored. On a personal level these women are missing out on both romantic love and on creating families of their own. These factors must surely contribute to New Zealand’s high rates of depression among women*, who have been socialized to desire and expect a partner and children from an early age. Burdened by the financial costs of living alone and with limited family networks many of these women also face lonely, impoverished working lives and retirements. On a social level the lack of men is also incredibly damaging. It’s a well-known fact that it’s the educated women, searching for equals, who are missing out on finding mates. As a society, we’ve lost out on all the children who could have been born to these intelligent, well-educated women – meaning we’ve lost out on the kids who would have been among our future movers and shakers, solving the leadership problems we’ve been hearing so much about lately. (The Ministry of Education's Competent Children, Competent Learners report reveals that "students whose mothers have high education levels are more likely to start school with high competency levels, and to maintain this high level of performance".) Anyone who’s seen the movie Idiocracy will see the writing on the wall for our economy and culture if we continue down this road. (Watch the opening sequence here to see why.) Theoretically there is one plus side to the man drought. With our demographic dominance and highly-educated minds women should shortly be ruling New Zealand’s business world (though in the country that made Alasdair Thompson the head of the Employers and Manufacturers Association, it’s certainly not a sure thing). It’s clutching at straws, and no consolation for the huge numbers of women who are searching for nothing more than an equal but are being told that they’re “setting their sights too high” (that’s another eloquent quote from Ms. Russell). Instead of writing unhelpful articles likely to drive Kiwi women to drink, how about offering some solutions? The man drought has been blamed on many things. Low male education, high male emigration, high female immigration, lower male birth rate and higher male mortality count amongst them. Here are some simple ideas that could surely have us raining men:
* One in five women, compared with one in eight men, will have depression over their lifetime. Reviews for The 13th Floor 19/08/2011
   Reviews for The 13th Floor. Click the link to read the full review. Thievery Corporation Culture of Fear Border Music All this wrapped up in a digipak so sexy you might want to take it to bed... Hollie Smith and Mara TK Band of Brothers, Vol 1 EMI Tattooed style chameleon Hollie Smith is as well-known for sporting urban street-wear as she is for rocking high fashion looks that make her look as though she’s a sexy alien from Planet Sphinx. Whatever she’s wearing, one thing’s guaranteed – you know the girl who’s been to Blue Note and back is going to look cooler than anyone else in the room... The Subways Money and Celebrity Shock Records With liberal use of cowbell, harmonies, hand-claps, classic rock riffs and pop punk melodies, this band may not win any points for originality but there’s something very endearing about them.. | AuthorMe & my cat. ArchivesOctober 2011 CategoriesAll |
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