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Maddy Costa

The Fall: Re-Mit - review

Re-Mit begins with a minute of blithe, bubblegum indie-bop so generic you have to double-check you're listening to the Fall.

Gabriel Bruce: Love in Arms - review

(Luv Luv Luv/Mercury) What a terrible album Love in Arms is. The beats are tinny, the synth sounds tacky; when the brass blasts in, the debt to Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band is glaring - though the punch-the-air chorus of Cars Not Leaving is just

Gabriel Bruce: Love in Arms - review

(Luv Luv Luv/Mercury) What a terrible album Love in Arms is. The beats are tinny, the synth sounds tacky; when the brass blasts in, the debt to Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band is glaring - though the punch-the-air chorus of Cars Not Leaving is just

Neon Neon: Praxis Makes Perfect - review

(Lex) Praxis doesn't quite make perfect on the second album from Neon Neon, AKA Super Furries frontman Gruff Rhys and LA producer Boom Bip - but there are times when it comes close. Their modus operandi is to choose a remarkable individualthen meld lyr

Music Weekly podcast: Austra and Sam Amidon

Katie Stelmanis is the vocalist with Toronto electronic sextet Austra . After spending the last couple of years touring with the XX, Grimes and the Gossip, they're back with their sophomore album, Olympia. Katie joins us in the studio. We also meet Sam

British Sea Power: Machineries of Joy - review

(Rough Trade) The word "eccentric" has dogged British Sea Power since their debut a decade ago; five albums in, that quixotic oddity is more pronounced than ever. Machineries of Joy skitters all over the place: from the uplifting chorus, cheerful rhythm

House of Love: She Paints Words in Red - review

(Cherry Red) Even on their debut album , now 25 years old, the House of Love were steeped in nostalgia. Since reuniting a decade ago, frontmen Terry Bickers and Guy Chadwick have spent most of their time looking back; the songs on She Paints Words in

Daughter: If You Leave - review

(4AD) London trio Daughter make music for troubled souls and broken hearts - but there's no consolation in their debut album, only an echo of misery. The opening song, Winter, has frontwoman Elena Tonra singing of lovers "drifting apart like two sheets o

Mies Julie - review

South African playwright-director Yael Farber has taken the bones of August Strindberg's 1888 play, in which an aristocratic woman has sex with a manservant, and stitched on new muscle, a new nervous system, new skin. Then, just as carefully, she slices t

Steve Mason: Monkey Minds in the Devil's Time - review

(Double Six) Steve Mason's 2010 album Boys Outside was relatively straightforward; it was as if, in discarding his various monikers to record under his own name, he also shed a little of his personality. Monkey Minds couldn't be more different: its 20