-
3 weeks ago | 
thequietus.com | Bobby Barry |Jonathan Wright
Reflecting roots in Athens, Georgia, there’s always been a strong element of Southern Gothic in Bambara’s music. This is something the now Brooklyn-based trio have embraced with fifth album Birthmarks, a collection of speak-sing story-songs that has both a commercial sheen and an underlying eeriness. The uncanny quotient is especially high on ‘Face Of Love’, which features guest co-lead vocals from Madeline Johnston (Midwife).
-
1 month ago | 
thequietus.com | Bobby Barry |Jonathan Wright
For a few bars it seems like things might be straightforward, even pleasant. ‘Inni’, the opening track on Icelandic theremin virtuoso Hekla Magnúsdóttir’s third album, initially conveys the idea of a door slowly opening. But just when you’re expecting to walk through into a magical garden, deep bass notes build and it’s clear that anyplace lying beyond this particular portal is likely to be at best challenging, at worst downright terrifying.
-
1 month ago | 
thequietus.com | Nina Garcia |Bobby Barry |Jonathan Wright
Perhaps every rock star who makes it big reaches a point in their career when they feel emboldened to do what the hell they like. This would certainly help explain the run of solo and collaborative projects from Ride and Oasis veteran Andy Bell over recent years, all of which have yielded music that is eclectic, playful and, more often than not, adventurous.
-
2 months ago | 
thequietus.com | Bobby Barry |Jonathan Wright
There are albums that, because of their seeming fragility, don’t make a great first impression. The debut offering from White Magic For Lovers is a case in point. Come to The Book Of Lies half-attentive in the midst of a busy day and don’t be surprised if it seems to spiral away and get lost in the ether, all too easily overwhelmed by distractions as prosaic as the pinging of an email arriving or the whistling of a boiling kettle. But persevere because the wispiness here is deceptive.
-
Jan 20, 2025 | 
thequietus.com | John Doran |Jonathan Wright
Of all the locations where you can identify the origins of British DIY indie music, the King’s Road is as good a place as any to start. Not just because it was here that Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren ran their SEX boutique – where John Lydon auditioned for the Pistols and the Bromley Contingent found an ad hoc youth club – but because it was also where Dan Treacy, frontman of Television Personalities, lived. The band’s debut EP, Where’s Bill Grundy Now?
-
Jan 17, 2025 | 
thequietus.com | Bobby Barry |Jonathan Wright
Sometimes, maybe even oftentimes, the best way to deal with the problems life throws at us is to remember to stay in the moment. It’s an approach captured by Weather Station mainstay Tamara Lindeman on the title track to her seventh album, Humanhood, a song that details diving into Lake Ontario off Toronto and being shocked into a sense of the present. Lindeman has, she realises, been too long “carrying a body that’s tired from carrying a mind”.
-
Nov 6, 2024 | 
thequietus.com | Patrick Clarke |Jonathan Wright
Baker's Dozen Artists discuss the 13 records that shaped their lives A Quietus Interview Baker's Dozen The Archivist: Mark Webber of Pulp’s Baker’s Dozen By his own estimation, Mark Webber is a “hoarder”. To put that more politely, the guitarist is by nature an archivist who, crucially when it came to compiling his new book I’m With Pulp, Are You?, a “visual history” of a band he first loved as a fan when few other people were interested and then joined on a full-time basis in the 1990s, had...
-
Oct 8, 2024 | 
thequietus.com | Patrick Clarke |Jonathan Wright
Though they’ve been making records together as Field Music for more than two decades, there was nothing inevitable about brothers David and Peter Brewis becoming each other’s closest collaborator. In the early 2000s both were fronting their own projects, David’s New Tellers and Peter’s Electronic Eye Machine, though with limited success. “I always refer to it as our period of flailing,” says David as he looks back to the duo’s early musical career and the formation of Field Music.
-
Aug 30, 2024 | 
thequietus.com | John Doran |Jonathan Wright
When Michael Chapman died, aged 80, in September 2021, he was an esteemed elder. It’s therefore no surprise that Andrew Tuttle should have been asked to oversee Another Tide, Another Fish, a release that beautifully reworks some of Chapman’s final recordings. But the respect accorded to Chapman today is in sharp contrast to the 1980s, a decade when this veteran of the 1960s British folk scene was in danger of becoming a forgotten figure. Partly, this was down to bad luck.
-
Apr 12, 2024 | 
thequietus.com | Jonathan Wright
In this month’s antidote to the algorithm, Jonathan Wright takes us on a trip to the fertile underground of 1980s Bristol. Photo of The Wild Bunch by @beezerphotos One version of the history of trip hop, told surprisingly often, is of laid-back Bristolians stumbling upon a downbeat form of dance music almost by accident.
