What do you get if you cross The Kaiser Chiefs, Kasabian and The Killers? Apart from an excited album reviewer with a weird fascination for the letter “K”, you get Sunshine Underground. At times sounding eerily similar to The Killers (especially the vocals) but also evoking the beat driven rock of the other K-bands mentioned. The Sunshine Underground were formed 2005 and Nobody’s Coming To Save You is their second album, following 2006’s Raise The Alarm. The album was released Feb 1st 2010 in the UK. I could not find a US release date at this point. The last trivia point before I get going is that the band is named after a Chemical Brothers song. [read the whole post]
Ellie Goulding is the hottest new artist in the UK. Championed by Florence and The Machine, she won the BBC Sound of 2010 award along with the 2010 Brits Critic Choice Award which is given to the artist expected to breakthrough in 2010. She was born in Hereford England, about 10 miles from where I was born, though admittedly it was almost 20 years later. So should we believe the hype on her debut album Lights, which is out in the UK now and will be released in the US on March 16th? [read the whole post]
I’m kind of a sucker for female singers with a British accent. Ok wait, I’m kind of a sucker for British accents in general, but let’s ignore that for now. Lucky for me there seems to have been some point in the last few years when the music industry decided that the new “it” thing was female British singers. I won’t name them, but you know who I’m talking about: they are always grouped together even though their musical styles are different just because they are of the same gender and geographical area. First Love, the debut album by Emmy the Great (aka Emma-Lee Moss), might fit the quirky-folk contingent. [read the whole post]
Reverend and the Makers come from Sheffield, which gives them a huge head start in my book with that being the home of my all time favorite, Jarvis Cocker, and many others such as The Human League and Arctic Monkeys. This is a British band I had heard of but never really listened to. A French Kiss In The Chaos is the band’s second full length album following on from 2007’s The State Of Things which reached #5 in the UK charts. The album was released July 29th in the UK but currently shows no signs of a US release.
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How We Became is the album everyone forgot to notice when it came out last fall. Then again, the only people that could have noticed it live in England. America, I present to you the Jeremy Warmsley.
I stumbled upon Jeremy Warmsley on my quest to go through as many Blogotheque take-away shows as possible. There Jeremy Warmsley was hidden, gangly and unassuming in front of a church, armed only with his acoustic guitar and his warbley voice. I was smitten. And so I found my way to How We Became. [read the whole post]
