The Snowflakes and Car Wrecks EP gathers together seven tracks that were left over from the recording sessions for Hauschka’s widely praised album Ferndorf, which was released last September. Tonally, the EP is identical to the smaller-scale piano and string duo works on Ferndorf, and emotionally, too, it is that album's atmosphere of nostalgic reflection that is uppermost. While none of the tr.
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Hauschka - Snowflakes and Car Wrecks EP
Favours For Sailors - Furious Sons
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Artist:Favours For Sailors
On first hearing Furious Sons , one could be forgiven for easily mistaking Favours For Sailors for the latest ensemble of US college rock post-graduates that their Weezer-influenced guitar pop implies. That you'd be wrong is perhaps more to their credit, as it would no doubt have been much easier for this South London four-piece to have followed the rest of their capital-based peers along the ...
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New Rhodes - Everybody Loves A Scene
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Native Bristolians but now firm London socialites New Rhodes aren't so much this decade's forgotten band, but more a case of the ones that should've been yet never were. Despite being hotly tipped for success throughout the initial stages of their career, even bothering the singles charts on one occasion prior to actually signing a proper recording contract, commercial success always evaded the...
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Julie Doiron - I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day
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“I’m living the life of dreams / I’m living the life of dreams / with good people all around / I’m living the life of dreams...”So begins the ninth album by Julie Doiron, ending on a similar note with an acoustic ditty about riding bikes and being glad to be alive. With its naïve-but-effective mix (a looped “dreams / dreams / dreams…” panning one way, as the guitar-part shifts the
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Laura Gibson - Beasts Of Seasons
Among the flights of psychedelic fancy and dizzying jams that made up The Dodos’ Visiter album last year, there lay a number of treats unhindered by their relative lack of bombast. Chief among these was the sparse ‘Winter’, which found Meric Long mulling over a season stretching interminably ahead of him in a mire of heartbreak and gloom. It’s that album’s vibrant opener that concerns us
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In Photos special: The Camden Crawl 2008
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DiS did the Camden Crawl 2008 the weekend just gone, chasing NW1’s cracked pavements in pursuit of hawt young t’ings. And the Fratellis. While DiS was primarily holed up at our own Bullet Bar venue, ensuring the likes of Johnny Foreigner, Lovvers, Wild Beasts and M83 were all present and correct for the pleasure of many a sweaty attendee, intrepid snappers Holly Erskine and Lucy Johnston hit t
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Bestival 2008: The DiS Review
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A lot muddy and a little the worse for wear, DiS' team of intrepid reviewers braved the weather at this year's Bestival to bring you their highlights and some survival tips...---Friday Review - by Richard MacFarlane:There were certainly a few reluctant grimaces in the queue to the Bestival gates on the opening afternoon. While these seemed to scream “WTF am I doing here in this weather?” all i
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This is Our Music: SXSW '06 With No Prospects
DiS went to Austin for South by Southwest Music festival come conference, again this year. We fully intended to tell you all about the upcoming hypes'n'trends for 2007 but when the wonderfully talented Adam Gnade offered to write a piece for us we happily went off and got drunk with Metric and Martha Wainwright and left him to it. Little did we know he'd get twice as drunk and find five times a...
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The Great Escape 2008: the DiS review
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Artist:Sky Larkin
Amazing scenes on the south coast as DiS once again descends upon the annual beachside band-fest that is The Great Escape. For the third year running we’ve set up shop in Digital, a rather snazzy club right on the beach; but it’s not just the bands playing our stage that we’re here to see. Some 200 acts are playing across three days – May 15-17 – and DiS is in town to catch the very crea
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Field Day 2008: DiS's highlights
The rain fell and there were considerable queues for the toilets, but these twin disappointments couldn’t mask the fact that the second Field Day festival, held in London’s Victoria Park on August 9, was a vast improvement on last year’s event in terms of organisation. Some may argue the bill this time around wasn’t quite as strong – last year saw Liars, Battles, Justice and Chromeo wow
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...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - The Century of Self
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It's difficult to know what to say about this, the sixth pouring forth of ideas from the best fuckin' band in Texas, and how to say it accurately and fairly. The first listen to The Century of Self brings nothing but acute disappointment. We are, let's recall, listening to the band who wrote the 'fuck you, world' that was Madonna , the almost universally lauded Source Tags & Codes and the hein...
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Oslo And Behold: New Music At ByLarm 2009 - The DiS Report
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Scandinavia's most important new music festival is a breathtaking affair at the best of the times: things will always be expensive here in Oslo and temperatures in February will always be teeth-janglingly chilly. But this year it's colder than ever - the Norwegian sky dumps snow over this beautiful little capital city all weekend, and it freezes, leaving revellers slipping around all over the...
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Slowcore Week: Other highlights of slowcore - a brief round-up
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As you have probably noticed, this week on DrownedinSound , there's been a slowcore love-in, a celebration of acts such as Low , Galaxie 500 and Codeine , bands who somehow manage to make a slow and sparse sound, feel utterly life-affirming. To cap off the week of in-depth articles, DiS writers and readers have summed up their favourite 'other' slowcore bands, offering personal opinions, inter...
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Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique
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Retrospect is a fucking beautiful phenomenon. Capitol Records would have sure loved a stack of stock in that particular power when the Beastie Boys arrived on their roster at the fag end of the 1980s, fresh from their brat-rap rise to notoriety with Rick Rubin's Def Jam . Back then an extra dimension was what The Beasties were crying out for, after stoking such cultural tumbles as Volkswagen b...
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Slowcore Week: 15 Years of Chairkickers Music with Low (part 2)
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Things We Lost in the Fire (2000) The opening bars signalled the change immediately. The guitar part of 'Sunflower' chugs along, and Mimi's upbeat snare is only slightly on the slow side of regular pop or folk. Even the fact that the album opens with Mimi harmonizing from the first bar - a first - tacitly foreshadows an album less often about loneliness, "feel[ing] small" or "the times you wer...
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Slowcore Week: Cat Power – the Early Years
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Dear Sir (1995) & Myra Lee (1996) It's amazing to think that an artist who was making this kind of tuneless stripped-down post-hardcore music, fifteen years ago, would end up on Jools Holland. It also sounds a little implausible that Chan Marshall was spotted by Tim Foljahn and Steve Shelley (of Sonic Youth) having been coerced by friends to play her first ever solo-set, when she "couldn't pla...
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Brighton's Great Escape 2009 to include Kasabian, BSP, Passion Pit, B.Kweller, JoFo
The first list of notable names for The Great Escape 2009 have been announced. DiS can also confirm that we will once again be hosting a stage. Scribble down May 14th through 16th 2009 in your diary as that's when The Great Escape returns to Brighton. Even with this first list of names, the line-up for the fourth outing for the festival looks to be one of their best yet, with a mixture of buzz...
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Career Opportunities? How the 'Albums Artist' is being strangled.
The music industry has problems. It isn't digital downloads, it isn't necessarily piracy. It is far more fundamental than that. It has forgotten how to maintain careers. That isn't to say the world has been wiped of 'career artists' but the truth is they are a rapidly diminishing breed. By career artists I don't mean Girls Aloud. I mean bands like The Cure, Pink Floyd, Genesis (much as I perso...
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Sonic Youth reveal details about new album The Eternal
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Sonic Youth's sixteenth album The Eternal is due for release on June 9th via Matador . Here are all the details. Steve Shelley, Lee Ranaldo, Mark Ibold, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore have emerged from Echo Canyon West studio in Hoboken, New Jersey (where they have been trickling out details via their Twitter ) where they've been working with John Agnello, on their 16th album.It's called The E...
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Jeremy Warmsley's Valentine's Mixtape
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Ahead of his two Valentine's Day shows and his special Valentine's day download, we asked Jeremy Warmsley to make a mixtape to woo his beloved... --- A Valentine's Day mixtape: 11 songs with which to woo your beloved (NB: not responsible for likely disastrous results of said wooing)Final Fantasy 'The Arctic Circle'This is about a brief affair between a cold, cold woman (-"possible ideas for a...
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