REVIEWS
Album reviews
Two Door Cinema Club are three young men from Bangor and Donaghadee in Northern Ireland. With a neat line in twitchy indie-pop, and at least one eye on the dancefloor, they share common ground...
At last year’s Electric Picnic this listener went to check out Marina And The Diamonds, following a tip-off from a fellow Ragged Words contributor (who shall remain nameless). So irritating...
Hype can be a terrible thing. Personally, the stir whipped up around Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion and Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest made them partially unlistenable in...
Despite their band-like moniker, Broadcast 2000 is largely one-man show. Rising from the ashes of the rather excellent Artisan, North London resident Joe Steer built-up Broadcast 2000 with his...
These New Puritans are not your average folk band. In fact despite the numerous bassoons, horn arrangements and melodious vocals they aren’t a folk band at all. Far from it. But listening to...
Imagine if the only films you ever saw consisted of romantic slush. Sure, it’s pleasant enough to watch the odd feel-good rom-com, and the latest slew of indie flicks that employ some...
Tony Simon is best known, at least in Hip Hop aficionado circles, as the producer of much of Aesop Rock’s revered back catalogue. To some, he is the East Coasts answer to DJ Shadow. However...
Like Roy Orbison, one can imagine Mark E Everett standing or sitting motionless, hardly moving his mouth whilst singing. It just spills great waves of emotion and love and death, spinning tales of...
Ever since the charming audacity of The Magnetic Fields’ 2000 release, 69 Love Songs, frontman Stephin Merritt has struggled to recapture his muse to quite the same effect. Live, they still...
What's most refreshing about Dublin's Sounds Of System Breakdown is that they're not out to impress anyone in particular. Their makeup - three lads whose guitars, percussion and electronic bleeps...
Caught live
First Aid Kit have come a long way since their last visit to Dublin. That was almost three years ago, when the Swedish sibling duo ope...
"There is a freedom in violence that I don't understand / And like I've never felt before..."
The last time Merrill Garbus' ...
Onstage stands a young man, Telecaster in hand. His early-nineties grunge hair sweeps across his face, a stark contrast to the shimmering golden jacket he is wearing. This is...
As the tagline of Guy Maddin's 2007 'docu-fantasia' masterpiece, My Winnepeg, proclaims: "The truth is relative". This is the...
Sunday brings me (in no particular order) bowling, a roast, an emo-ta-tha-bone beach, basketball,...
Saturday at ATP tells me this: Minehead does not possess a single mobile phone shop, or anywhere that might repair your car after midday at weekends. It does, however, have a lot of charity shops,...
Just over a year ago, Little Dragon performed at Dublin's Crawdaddy to an audience of not much more than a dozen punters. This evening, by contrast, havin...
_0.jpg "Caught Live: Wild Beasts + BRAIDS @ O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire, London")
Well-read Northerners – and recent Lady Gaga remixers – ...
There has always been a sense of fragility attached to The Antlers, as if at any moment the band's material (and perhaps even the band members t...