Feature: "A Long Tradition Of Pessimists": Roll The Dice Play Ball (The Quietus)

Sweden's Roll The Dice make dark, dark music. That should be reason enough to chat with them. So I did. Find out what happened here.

"For all its bleak augury, In Dust convinces us that, although its creators have allowed it to be created mechanically, they're constantly pulling at the levers trying to ensure that it maintains some sense of humanity..."

Feature: "A Long Tradition Of Pessimists": Roll The Dice Play Ball (The Quietus)

Feature: A Scenic Highway To Hell: Ppartying At The Pstereo Festival (The Quietus)

And so it's time to return to Norway for the Pstereo Festival in Trondheim. If you want a breakdown of who was hot and who was not, try other journalists. But if you want to know what happened when I was let loose on the streets of that Norwegian city for a couple of nights, then this should do the trick.

"My heart's bruising my ribs, I'm losing the feeling in my left leg and my blood's pumping so ferociously that I'm expecting my hands to fly from my wrists like fireworks..."

Feature: A Scenic Highway To Hell: Ppartying At The Pstereo Festival (The Quietus)

Feature: Pursuing The Obel Arts - An Interview With Agnes Obel (The Quietus)

"The music journalist has an hour in which to unlock the secrets of the musician's work and make it interesting to readers, and the musician in turn needs to communicate enough to intrigue the journalist or else the promotional opportunity will have been wasted. Another day in the life…"

Agnes Obel - almost a neighbour of mine, it turns out - is neither shy or especially reserved, but she's about as far from the tired cliché of both a depressed singer songwriter and a mouthy wannabe indie rock star as one could hope. You can find an unusually down-to-earth discussion of what it's like to watch your music go from 0-250,000 in the space of just a few weeks here...

Feature: Pursuing The Obel Arts - An Interview With Agnes Obel (The Quietus)

Album Review: Archers Of Loaf - Icky Mettle (Uncut)

4/5
Chapel Hill’s cult college rockers revisited

Despite the preposterous name, Eric Bachmann’s quartet were, for a short time, close to mainstream acceptance as US indie rock looked set to take over the world. Their 1993 debut, remastered by Bob Weston, treads similar ground to Crooked Rain-era Pavement - if less self-consciously clever - with dissonant, spiky guitars piercing surprisingly melodic college radio favourites like ‘Web In Front’ and ‘Wrong’. Bachmann’s Jagger-esque drawl perfectly matches the slacker-punk vibe of absurd, crowd-participation favourite ‘Toast’ - “There’s something wrong with my toast!” – and bonus tracks include the atonal fury of ‘Audiowhore’ (from the Greatest Of All Time EP).

Album Review: Archers Of Loaf - Icky Mettle (Uncut)

Album Review: Googoosh - Googoosh (Uncut)

3/5
Rare Persian pop from ‘Iran’s Daughter’

Actress and singer Faegheh Atashin aka Googoosh was an Iranian heroine silenced by the 1979 revolution until her emigration to the US in 2000. This enlightening collection of lesser-known songs recorded in the 1970s reveals a pre-Khomeini world of Persian traditions and western influences – in 1971 she even recorded in French. The passionate, string-laden lament of ‘Digeh Geryeh Delo Va Nemikoneh’, the sultry, disco-inflected charms of ‘Talagh’ and the Middle Eastern chanson of ‘Mano Gonjishkaye Khooneh’ may be an acquired taste for indie-trained ears, but no one can deny the potent romance of Googoosh’s voice.

Album Review: Googoosh - Googoosh (Uncut)

Album Review: Various Artists - True Soul Volumes 1&2 (Uncut)

3/5
Crate-digging heaven for soul funk fans

While its most famous son Bill Clinton was busy not inhaling, Arkansas’ True Soul label – run by record store owner Lee Anthony – was documenting the thriving local soul and funk scene. Though its output rarely troubled the charts, these 32 tracks, compiled by Stones Throw label manager Eothen Alapatt, are packed with an abundance of righteous grooves and crazily titled gems, especially the pysch-funk of York Wilson’s ‘Psychedelic Hot Pants’. Memphis may have hogged the spotlight, but John Craig’s effortless ‘Doing My Own Thing’ and the laidback shuffle of Thomas East’s ‘Funky Music’ prove Little Rock had a big heart.

Album Review: Various Artists - True Soul Volumes 1&2 (Uncut)