Author: Sean Keenan

Sean Keenan used to write. Now he edits, and gets very annoyed about the word ‘ethereal’. Likely to bite anyone using the form ‘I’m loving….’. Don’t start him on the misuse of three-dot ellipses. Divides his time between mid-Spain and South-West France, like one of those bucktoothed, fur-clad minor-aristocracy ogresses you see in Hello magazine, only without the naff chandeliers. Twitter: @seaninspain

Sarin Smoke: Vent

Recreating the gurgling dry-retches of Dawn French’s back passage during a virulent bout of random-onset dysentery using the medium of guitar feedback may seem a concept album conceit too far...

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Yann Novak/Robert Crouch: Fata Morgana

Yann Novak’s last artwork, the album Presence, was an impressive tableau of ambient noise, deeply evocative and intriguing, yet desperately missing a visual element. A multimedia artist working...

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Kitsune Soleil Mix

Much in the same vein as the earnest would-be intellectual stilting the atmosphere at an after hours house party, Intelligent Dance Music (for all its worthy pseudo philosophic concept and eagerness...

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Syd Arthur : On and On

Syd Arthur wear their Pink Floyd influences openly. There’s the Syd Barret reference in their name, as well as a typographical similarity between the A for Arthur on their album cover and the...

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Piano Magic: Life Has Not Finished With Me Yet

Eleven albums into a music career which can lay a fair claim to the title 'cult band', Piano Magic resist categorisation by virtue of developing and altering their musical style with each...

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DV8: Can We Talk About This? [Theatre/Dance]

'I'm an artist who's interested in real issues, not just pretty shapes' ...

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Dinowalrus: Best Behavior

Warrington's Parr Hall saw the Stone Roses' comeback gig just last Wednesday, playing a free concert for fans who could produce some physical merchandise-based evidence of their devotion. Rock and...

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Maz Totterdell: Sweep

Puppyskinner, nonce. What more? Elitist pseud, naysaying neverwas, pen-envious killjoy bubble-burster. Or, as Samuel Beckett worded his most venomous insult – 'CRITIC!'. For what or who...

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Vengeance and the Panther Queen: EP Review

Cramming in the pyrotechnic axe-wizardry of metal, the chundering drums of dance, and the infantile personal politics of punk. Vengeance and the Panther Queen sometimes get it right. Without even...

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Small Faces: Deluxe Editions

A seminal collection of songs, in the word's true sense. Unfortunately, so abused is the adjective that we tend to read on, having taken it to mean some glib variation of 'good'. In...

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Mo Fox: Poems

A Thousand Pockets Ah well, I remember you kissed weirdly because you used hold your big cat eyes open, watching me as we did it. I used close mine but opened them to watch you as we did it....

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Hannah Cohen: Child Bride

Hannah Cohen’s debut album Child Bride seems a fitting April/May release for those of us that are struggling through transition of the awkward weather and mishaps of general life, but should you...

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George Harrison: Early Takes Volume One

'a light hand on production, a closeness and immediacy, and a simplicity that is utterly seductive', George Harrison's Early Takes reviewed. An accompaniment to the DVD release of Martin...

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Trioscapes: Separate Realities

If there is a musical equivalent of preservation instinct, it would kick in for most people when jazz and metal meet that most portentious word: fusion. When the proposition involves just drums, bass...

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Yppah: 81

An attempt to recreate or capture the melodic theme to his own childhood, Yppah (Joe Corrales Jr) named this album 81 to reflect the year of his birth. Childhood musical influences usually tend...

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Two Wings: Love’s Spring

Such a challenging album is Love's Spring by Two Wings, and yet how very rewarding. It's enough to prompt the staunchest pragmatist to Confucius/Yoda pronouncements. Drivel on the nature of...

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Bang On!: [Sic]

And, like many gobby kids with a sharp wit and an audience, he gets carried away at times. 'Picking fatties with big racks/ to lick their piss flaps/ like Johnny Vegas in drag' flies past, sexist and...

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Anomie Belle: Interview

Scheduled for release on April 2nd, Yppah's Eighty One is an album of glossy synth texture and crunching gravel percussion. Reflecting Yppah's move to southern California to be closer to the...

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Decibels: The Lesser [single]

There's a touch of the schoolboy band about Decibels, mainly from the promotional onesheet in which they  describe  themselves as '5 misfits, finding each other in the woods around...

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Emma Sywyj, Photographer: Interview

Photographer Emma Sywyj has a wry approach to her craft. Sean Keenan interviews Emma Sywyj about her photography and travelling in the UK. ...

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The British Expeditionary Force: Interview

With scant weeks to go before the March release of their album Chapter Two: Konstellation Neu, The British Expeditionary force are at that tricky pre-publicity point in their album campaign. A spring...

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Speech Debelle: Freedom of Speech

Calling upon Kwes to produce, Big Dada apply a sonic approach to Speech Debelle's return album that, even this early in the producer's career, tends towards formulaic. It's there right at...

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The sound of us not dismissing anyone’s ideas (Islet)

Islet's stunning debut album, on which 'Guitar figures drone in and drown out vocal lines, cymbal-heavy rhythms pile in and utterly demolish all that is in the rest of the sound-picture, discordant...

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Straylings: Interview

Vulpine and ragged, dropping effortlessly from the plaintive minors of her upper range down to throaty growlings all earthy and powerful, Straylings' Dana Zeera throws her voice around in ways...

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Crystal Bright & the Silver Hands: Muses and Bones

“Where's your will to be weird?” ― Jim Morrison Crystal it seems, holds a better hand than most when it comes to music, playing a bewildering amount of instruments; accordion,...

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Colours: Drip Haze EP

Amongst the many overstretched suspensions of disbelief that Trainspotting foisted upon the world at large, one of them was the wild-eyed, car-leaping, elegantly loquacious Scottish heroin addict. As...

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Ringo Starr 2012: Album Review

Whilst in no way meaning to damn with faint praise (it's Ringo Starr, who would wish him ill?), there is little on Ringo 2012 that is deserving of great praise either. Nor does there really have...

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Raffertie: Mass Appeal

Continuing to pick and choose from dance music's ever-expanding past for seams of inspiration, Raffertie's single most endearing talent as a musician is that he references without trapping...

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Interesting Times: SOPA

Politics has rarely concerned itself with the intelligent. The art of persuasion is neutered by the intelligent person's demands for data. Where will the money for schools, libraries, hospitals...

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Trailer Trash Tracys: Ester

Painful though it may be to recall, it was summer once. Cool drinks were sipped at pavement cafes, flesh was bared and balding scalps reddened and peeled in the light of the now-forgotten sun....

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