Petal Falls – April Cope
Wednesday, November 30th, 2011Sweet country music from North Carolina singer-songwriter April Cope
Sweet country music from North Carolina singer-songwriter April Cope
’50s inspired record of the moment from the female ‘Pete Doherty’.
Bloc Party’s second album, veering close to being a concept album, but in this case, that’s not such a bad thing.
Third solo album from sheffield’s Richard Hawley, one time guitarist with both the Longpigs and Pulp.
Sufjan Stevens’ second album as part of his 50 great states project. Illinoise is, dare we say it, a ‘concept’ album.
The 11th studio album from U2, How to Dismantle and Atomic Bomb has already debuted at #1 in charts around the world, but is it any good?
There’s a moment, about 80 pages into Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, when what appears to be a reasonably conventional novel takes a disorientating twist (an anecdote about a visit to a Swiss mental asylum), before returning on track. Thereafter, throughout that lengthy novel gaps continously appear where it seems that if you but scratch the realism […]
The American Academic Cass R. Sunstein has an interesting argument in his book Republic.com.2.0 Revenge of the Blogs, that the abundance of information, choice, and social networking available on the internet ultimately leads to a more restricted closed culture. For a well functioning system of free expression, Sunstein argues, there are certain requirements that go […]
I discovered Samuel Beckett’s Murphy after a Friday-night friend boozily extolled its dark and comic virtues (‘he wants his ashes to be flushed down the jacks of the Abbey theatre, but instead they get spilled in a barfight!’). In similar circumstances I’ve had the good luck to stumble upon great books by writers as varied […]
The more I think back on Louise Welsh’s latest novel, Naming the Bones, which I finished just over two weeks ago, the more quietly impressed I am by it. And if that seems like damning with faint praise, nothing could be further from the truth. While the novel has a narrative arc that brings its […]