Album Review: Planningtorock - W (BBC Music)

It's time for something brooding: the latest Planningtorock album for the rather splendid DFA label. "Rostron imagines a darkly melodramatic world of shadows and sleek metallic edges, her electronic setting industrial and semi-gothic in a similar fashion to current critical faves EMA and Zola Jesus." Read all about it here.

Album Review: Planningtorock - W (BBC Music)

Feature: How The Music Industry Is Killing Music And Blaming The Fans (The Quietus)

Years spent working with musicians, labels, publishers and other sundry music industry types have allowed me to see how changing listening habits have affected not only the business' bottom lines but also made it harder and harder for new musicians to be heard, even though we live in a time when music has never been more accessible. The resulting feature became The Quietus' biggest article to date, shared on Facebook thousands of times and inspiring passionate arguments across the board.

Not everyone agreed with the scenario I presented - "Though democracy won't allow for musicians to be gagged, it can still price them out of the market" - but at the very least it got people talking about issues which I consider very important. You can join in the debate here.

Feature: How The Music Industry Is Killing Music And Blaming The Fans (The Quietus)

Feature: Pure Magic - Julianna Barwick Interviewed (The Quietus)

Sometimes it's necessary to slow things down and enter a world of quiet contemplation. Thank Lousiana for giving us Julianna Barwick, then, who introduces us, perhaps accidentally, to the middle ground between Enya and and Eno. "When something is sad and beautiful at the same time," she says, "it just kills me. It always has. I love that sound." And so do I.

Lie back and let Julianna Hardwick tell you about The Magic Place here.

Feature: Pure Magic - Julianna Barwick Interviewed (The Quietus)

Album Review: Toby Burke - Mexico City (Uncut)

4/5
Horse Stories main man strikes Aztec gold

Now resident in LA after a spell in London, restless Australian Burke’s latest was recorded in one week in a Mexico City apartment. With little more than piano and guitar, its nine songs echo the sparsest acoustics of Springsteen’s Nebraska, Burke’s voice delicate and world-weary, his mood subdued but never defeated. ‘Cantina Crawl’ is an elegiac lament for characters “who smoked like a borrowed car”, and the album is populated by itinerants for whom “home is no place to go”. ‘I’ve Been Waiting For You’, its forlorn piano superseded by decaying, distorted guitar, is the exquisite highlight.

Album Review: Toby Burke - Mexico City (Uncut)

Album Review: Gus Gus - Arabian Horse (Uncut)

3/5
Immaculately produced techno soul from Icelandic veterans

Fourteen years on from their 4AD debut, GusGus have completed the transition from arthouse electronica to suave techno soulsters, their streamlining from unwieldy 12 piece to trio paying dividends in increasingly explicit club friendly gestures. They remain unafraid of the occasional sleight of hand, however, as the unexpected Balkan polka conclusion to Selfoss proves, and, elsewhere, Eastern themes underlined by the title bleed through an hour of largely euphoric, lushly textured but sometimes interchangeable grooves. ‘Within You’, featuring Hjaltalin’s Hogni Elisson, is more contemplative, but it’s the nostalgic, reverb-heavy house of ‘Over’ that’s most appealing.

Album Review: Gus Gus - Arabian Horse (Uncut)