Ben Cardew

Jan 27, 2025 | pitchfork.com | Ben Cardew

Wile E. Coyote stops and looks at the camera, a resigned expression on his face. For an agonising second his feet scramble to gain purchase on solid air, the cliff edge now meters behind him. Then he plunges to his (temporary) doom.

Jan 21, 2025 | pitchfork.com | Ben Cardew

The radio session might as well have been invented with idiosyncratic but influential post-punk shamblers Television Personalities in mind; the format gave prolific bandleader Dan Treacy an opportunity to record his latest songs quickly, efficiently, and without any of the industry conventions—like rehearsing—he apparently despised. In turn, radio loved them back.

Jan 16, 2025 | pitchfork.com | Ben Cardew

In a world where insatiable economic forces favor the inevitable push toward bigger, louder, and more, Good Sad Happy Bad reclaim the power of intimacy and simplicity on All Kinds of Days. The four-piece, a mutation of Mica Levi’s group Micachu and the Shapes, offers a powerfully inward take on indie guitar on the second album under its new name, released with appropriately minimal fanfare in late 2024.

Jan 13, 2025 | pitchfork.com | Ben Cardew

Ringo Starr was the Beatles’ cowboy: the grizzled, silent type, from the wrong side of the tracks, with a roughly emotive voice redolent of heartbroken days rounding up cattle. So of course the songs he sang for the Beatles were those where the Liverpool band embraced its country music influences—notably on “Act Naturally,” a Johnny Russell/Buck Owens number that Starr performed like a man with a crippling hangover on a horse ride to Misery.

Nov 21, 2024 | djmag.com | Ben Cardew

Humour in music is a difficult thing to pull off, longevity even more so. But for the English ambient house act The Orb, the secret to the latter has often been in the former. With an anything-goes attitude to sampling that has frequently branched into the bizarre, the group led by Dr Alex Paterson has amassed a ridiculously prodigious catalogue over the past three decades.