Timo Räisänen - About You Now

We live in a world where the words ‘geek’ and ‘chic’ put together have come to represent an acceptable fashion statement. Read more

Gallery 47 - [breakfast at the clinic]

I’m intrigued when a hand-sewn, initially rather anonymous-looking CD-shaped package arrives in the post. Closer inspection reveals it to be EP [breakfast at the clinic] by Gallery 47, the recording moniker of one Jack Peachey from Nottingham: “I really hope it didn’t get lost because I’ve hand sewn these ones and they took me ages, especially because I don’t really know how to sew and I don’t own a thimble.” My curiosity duly aroused, I was keen to find out whether this admirable attention to detail was reflected in the music. Read more

The Melting Ice Caps - Selfish Bachelor

Another release from the God Is In The TV Single clubs, and the quality shows no sign of abating as former Luxembourg front man David Shah puts forward a warming combination of personable vocals and softly rising guitars that are steadily pushed and prodded forward by a scattering of electronic beeps and squiggles. Read more

Funeral For A Friend - Memory And Humanity

Funeral For a Friend are only 5 years old, and have already progressed to the mainstream and, as a consequence, have been hounded for ‘forgetting their roots’ - a comment heard all too much in today’s music business by fickle fans and over-critical journalists. Read more

Kings Of Leon - Only by the night

Kings of Leon have always been a band able to draw up great deals of hype and attention at the drop of a hat. Read more

Damien Rice - Live From Union Chapel

Damien Rice has always had a habit of dividing the masses when it comes to his music. On the one hand there are those who find his melodramatic yet ambiguous wailings about how awful a person he is over a backing of acousticy folk formulaic and tiresome, but then there are also those (those who I personally like to refer to as “winners”) who think his eerie timbres and melancholic lyrics are just a bit beautiful. Read more

Jack’s Mannequin - The Glass Passenger

Andrew McMahon has what is quite possibly the most irritatingly vulnerable voice in popular music. This is his second album under the Jack’s Mannequin moniker, 5 years after what would now appear to be an amicable setting aside of his previous project, Something Corporate. Read more

Blakfish - I’ll See You In Another City

Birmingham’s Big Scary Monsters signed Blakfish have been making loud noises together in some shape or form for almost 10 years now (and they’re still just in their twenties) but you’d never guess from this mini-album. Read more

Future of the Left, Fighting with Wire, 20/08/08, London Monto Water Rats

Monto Water Rats is nothing like the vermin-infested dive its name suggests; the 200 or so capacity venue is more akin to a miniature country-mansion theatre than a rickety old barge, with chandeliers strung low throughout the room and those big emulsion-white archaic pillars either side of the stage. Read more

The Voluntary Butler Scheme - Trading Things In EP

The Updated Cool Rule List 2008

Rule #1: Must be in a band. All the cool guys are in bands, man! Read more

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