Album reviews

The accent is on passionate: the chords and samples on Lazarus Phenomenon create a veritable Garden of Delights for Buck’s romantic whimsy to run riot in.

powerful, emotional and oh so bloody full of itself

pleasing enough

you’ll feel like you’ve eaten a big bag of E numbers before you even get half way through it

expect to hear it all over the place if the marketing machine gets behind them

it’s a pain in the arse to describe, but it’s a pleasure to listen to

Well meaning, beautifully played, intricately woven and boring as hell.

Benson back at his day job and he is a master at it

Kranky are masters at putting out LPs that are beautiful soundscapes, (Tim Hecker is another exponent of this stuff) so I shouldn’t be surprised at how good this LP is.

So there you go; it’s a sleek, powerful record, at times playing with big, rawk, sub U2 gestures albeit with a discernable panache.

Although the tracks are, in the main, built round acoustic guitar, there is enough going on sonically to make a case for this LP being much more of a psychedelic than a folk album.

Opener Who Fingered Rock and Roll has a heady early seventies stomp to it, a nod to Mott the Hoople here or even Elton at his most star-struck there.

...these tracks really reminded me of the smooth, deceptively calm emotional pressure the Blue Nile used to exert in records like A Walk Across the Rooftops.

The Longcut have been about for a while, their powerful, restless romanticism always seemingly capable of propelling them to something bigger. Maybe they’ve managed to find a door opener in tracks like Open Hearts, Repeated and Boom. They deserve more. 

For those who don’t know, Evangelista is the vehicle for Carla Bozulich’s muse and everything we’ve heard from her has been first rate.

A great, raucous rock and roll record, not a million miles away from stuff Dead Moon would bang out, blessed with two or three stand out tracks

I wonder whether these collisions of various musical ideas and traditions will ever transcend the sum of their parts. Or whether it’s better to give a sole focus on one of the two stools that music like this has to (often uncomfortably) straddle.

You can almost touch the leaves falling on the basket ball court...

Hayden Thorpe’s wrought vocal is likely to be the deciding factor in an appreciation of the band, his unearthly delivery occupying the middle-ground, somewhere between Noel Coward and Billy Mackenzie.

...this band are at their best when they allow their music to sound crystalline, akin, say, to seeing refracted light through a prism.