January 2012
10 posts
6 tags
2012 In Preview: Owen Pallett
Over the next few days we’ll be looking at what’s to come in the year ahead, and picking out some of the releases we’re most looking forward to hearing over the coming months.
Two years ago Owen Pallett released “Heartland”, a record of near unparalleled beauty and ambition which AGCS named our favourite album of 2010. Since then he’s gone on to score 14 Actors Acting for the...
6 tags
2012 In Preview - Bloc Party
Over the next few days we’ll be looking at what’s to come in the year ahead, and picking out some of the releases we’re most looking forward to hearing over the coming months.
Oh Bloc Party, as much as I may find your run ins with the music press amusing, you don’t do yourself any favours. Still, if it takes the “news” that Kele is being replaced as lead singer to bring you...
9 tags
2012 In Preview: Marina And The Diamonds
Over the next few days we’ll be looking at what’s to come in the year ahead, and picking out some of the releases we’re most looking forward to hearing over the coming months.
I’ll admit it. The first time I came across Marina Diamandis I was not impressed. Catching her live on the autumn 2009 NME Radar tour, I found her performance underwhelming, and I came out of the gig with no idea of...
9 tags
2012 In Preview: Franz Ferdinand
Over the next few days we’ll be looking at what’s to come in the year ahead, and picking out some of the releases we’re most looking forward to hearing over the coming months.
This may just be my perception of events, but Franz Ferdinand’s last album “Tonight” pretty much sank without a trace. Which is a shame really, as it really didn’t deserve to be met with such...
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2012 In Preview: Xiu Xiu
Over the next few days we’ll be looking at what’s to come in the year ahead, and picking out some of the releases we’re most looking forward to hearing over the coming months.
Whatever you think of Xiu Xiu, you could never call them boring. Seeing Jamie Stewart’s carnival of self-loathing at The Harley in 2010 remains the most intense live experience I’ve ever witnessed, and I can...
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2012 In Preview: The Avalanches
Over the next few days we’ll be looking at what’s to come in the year ahead, and picking out some of the releases we’re most looking forward to hearing over the coming months.
When “Since I Left You” came out, I was 11 years old. And I realised with a start the other day that this means I have spent more that half my life waiting for a second record from The...
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2012 In Preview: Everything Everything
Over the next few days we’ll be looking at what’s to come in the year ahead, and picking out some of the releases we’re most looking forward to hearing over the coming months.
Despite touring for most of 2010 and 2011 it seems like Everything Everything aren’t prepared to rest on their laurels in 2012. But although a new song, Kimosabe, started appearing in their...
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AGCS Interviews Screaming Maldini
Secret Sounds by screamingmaldini
It is AGCS’s humble opinion that Screaming Maldini are one of the most exciting bands around at the moment. The EPs they’ve released so far have been ridiculously over the top prog-pop affairs which have showcased more imaginative ideas than most bands can muster in a lifetime, and with a new album on it’s way 2012 could well be their...
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An Interview with Dad Rocks
Back in August I went to the online shop of record label Big Scary Monsters, with the intention of buying the Tall Ships EP, and somehow ended up spending £45. This record buying binge introduced me to a few good artists, but none as great as Danish death-indie band Mimas, whose record “Lifejackets” was on constant repeat for the next month. If that album wasn’t released in...
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Honheehonhee Guide Us Through "Shouts"
Honheehonhee are great, and although their debut album “Shouts” has only been out a matter of weeks its already one of my favourite records released this year. With this in mind, we asked the band if they’s like to write something about it for the site and they’ve done just that. If you fancy listening while you read you can stream and buy the album through the widget...
December 2011
20 posts
7 tags
"Nine Types Of Light" is an AGCS Album of the Year
OK, so initially we wanted to pick just five records for our AGCS albums of the year but I just couldn’t let this one go unnoticed. Because “Nine Types Of Light” recieved a lukewarm reception this year; people claimed it wasn’t as good as Dear Science (in fact it’s better) and in general it’s been overlooked, barely getting a look-in on album of the year...
7 tags
AGCS Reviews EVERY Sufjan Stevens Christmas EP -...
Since the release of the Songs For Christmas box set in 2006, Sufjan has recorded four more Christmas EPs (and who knows, the fifth could already be in the hands of this year’s lucky few). Of these only Vol. VI and Vol. VIII have found their way into the wider world; as for other two, we can only speculate as to what they may contain. I have it on very good authority that Vol. VII...
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AGCS Reviews EVERY Sufjan Stevens Christmas EP -...
Yesterday I reviewed Vol. I, Vol. II, and Vol. III of Sufjan Stevens’ Christmas EP’s, and today in part two of our Suf-stravaganza I’ll be looking at Vol. IV and Vol. V. As I mentioned yesterday, these releases are a fascinating way to track Sufjan’s progress across the years, and these two EPs are no exception. Indeed, despite being separated by only a year they’re...
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AGCS Reviews EVERY Sufjan Stevens Christmas EP -...
We couldn’t go through an entire Christmas Calendar without mentioning the S-word could we? And nowadays it seems Sufjan is as much a part of Christmas as mulled wine and bitter family arguments. You see, long before the indie world and his alternative dog were releasing a Christmas record, Sufjan Stevens decided to make a Christmas EP for his friends. That was 2001, and since then...
19 tags
A Guide To Christmas Drinking From Alcopop Records...
Alcopop Records are great for a number of reasons: they’re home to a legion of great acts (Stagecoach, My First Tooth, Screaming Maldini, Johnny Foreigner, Katie Malco, Jumping Ships, and many more), they have lots of great ideas (Frisbee EPs, Scarves, Photo Albums), and they know how to throw a party (see here and here). This year I’ve managed to see all the acts mentioned above...
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"Suck It And See" is an AGCS Album of the Year
The most exciting musical moment of my year happened in the most horrid of venues that would only be referred to as The Millennium Dome by the band on stage that night. As the frontman stood centre stage and sang the opening lines of the first song solo over clean guitar, we all knew what was coming. Break a mirror, roll the dice; run with scissors through a chip pan firefight; go into business...
8 tags
Smith & Burrows - Funny Looking Angels
I guess I should hate this. Smith & Burrows is the imaginative moniker of Tom Smith (from Editors) and Andy Burrows (formerly of Razorlight). I don’t like Editors and I don’t like Razorlight. The lead single from this record, When The Thames Froze, is incredibly annoying, featuring clunky politics and a nauseating video which sees the duo battle it out for the prize of...
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"I'm With The Band" - In Praise of Bandcamp
In the first of these “review of the year” things I got angry at the music press’s obsession with nostalgia. In the second I got angry with Spotify’s complete failure to give bands a fair deal and develop a viable business model. In this third one I’ll be getting angry about … nothing. You see, it’s not all doom and gloom, and this piece is a love letter to potentially the best thing to happen to...
9 tags
Gruff Rhys - Atheist Xmas EP
I really wanted to like this; Super Furry Animals hold a special place in my affections as the first band I saw live and one of the first bands I became properly obsessed by. In his capacity as a solo artist Gruff Rhys has penned some brilliant songs and, in 2007’s “Candylion”, crafted one truly great album. But this year’s “Hotel Shampoo”, despite garnering...
30 tags
Tramlines Is The AGCS Festival Of The Year
This year I was able to go to some truly great gigs, with particular highlights including Sufjan Stevens, Los Campesinos!, Johnny Foreigner, Peter, Bjorn & John, The Kabeedies, Metronomy and loads more I’m sure I’ve forgotten. But while I saw lots of great shows in 2011, on the whole I was disappointed by the festivals I went to this year. In fact Reading’s line-up was so...
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"Hello Sadness" is an AGCS Album of the Year
“Oh, another post about Los Campesinos!, doesn’t Jed like ANY other bands” is what I imagine you’re thinking right now, to which I will reply SHUT UP, BEST BAND EVA, LC! 4 LIFE! I mean, maybe my obsession with Los Campesinos! isn’t quite that bad, but there’s no denying I’m pretty enamored with them and could quite easily write (and have already written)...
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Tellison - Good Luck It's Christmas
Tellison are great, but as much as I loved this years “The Wages of Fear” I couldn’t help but wish the band had recorded an entire album of gorgeous ballads like “Freud Links The Teeth And The Heart”. Sure, I know they’re first and foremost a rock band, and a mightily good one as well, but personally I find it’s in these more tender moments (see also:...
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"The Future Of Music" - AGCS Vs Spotify
Remember a few years ago, when Spotify first started to creep into the public consciousness, and you downloaded it and your first thought was “wow, this is pretty cool”. Sure, the adverts were annoying, and there were huge gaps in the collection, and you really couldn’t see how it was going to be financially viable for the company itself, let alone for the bands whose music you...
7 tags
"Smother" is an AGCS Album of the Year
This year we decided that instead of arbitrarily assigning numbers to our favourite albums and putting them into a league table, we’d just pick some of the records we enjoyed the most and write about them. And while I could claim this was a noble move to examine music on it’s own merit and not make everything a competition, the real reason for abandoning the list format is simply...
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Christmas TV 2011 - An AGCS Guide
“And I’d like it if you made it to mine by Christmas Eve, So you can hold me, and we’ll watch Christmas TV”
So sang Slow Club on their festive hit “Christmas TV”, and while the sentiment is all well and good, the harsh reality is that Christmas TV is almost exclusively shit. I mean, just look at the BBC’s big, expensive promo for the festive season and as...
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Emmy The Great & Tim Wheeler - This Is Christmas
Saccharine (adj.)
Excessively sweet or sentimental
Relating to or containing sugar; sugary
To save me constantly referencing a thesaurus, looking for ten different ways to say the exact same thing, I’ve put that definition at the top of this review. I can call the songs cloying, sickly, overly sentimental but it all comes back to that one word: saccharine. If you were expecting this to...
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"Every Holiday Is A Disaster" with Bordeauxxx
Bordeauxxx are ace! If you checked out our awesome compilation of this year’s best unsigned music (if you missed it here’s a link), you’ll already be familiar with the gang-chants-and-glockenspiel glory of Every Holiday Is A Disaster, but if not, here it is again in video form:
Great, right? You can get this track and the similarly excellent “Mother’s Ruin”...
5 tags
"Let England Shake" is an AGCS Album of the Year
This year we decided that instead of arbitrarily assigning numbers to our favourite albums and putting them into a league table, we’d just pick some of the records we enjoyed the most and write about them. And while I could claim this was a noble move to examine music on it’s own merit and not make everything a competition, the real reason for abandoning the list format is simply...
16 tags
"The Pain From An Old Wound" - AGCS Vs Nostalgia
The first of a series of essays on the state of music in 2011.
“May You Live In Interesting Times” goes the old Chinese curse, and it’s fair to say this year has been an interesting one. The front pages of newspapers have been adorned with scandal, disaster, and revolution at a seemingly unprecedented scale. But what if, in a hundred years time, an historian was looking not at...
7 tags
A Christmas Gift For You From TeamABC
TeamABC are great. I think I may have mentioned this before, and indeed just yesterday I was extolling the virtues of their new Complaints EP. So I was very excited when the band’s creative powerhouse Stef Purenins agreed to write a Christmas song (his first one) for our calendar. The resulting track is called “Winter Nights” and in keeping with the rest of the TeamABC...
November 2011
6 posts
17 tags
The Best Unsigned Bands Of 2011
Here at AGCS we love new music, and so it’s only fitting that we should start off our calendar with a compilation of the great music made by new, unsigned acts this year. But it’s more than that; this is a taste of what’s to come in the run up to Christmas. We’ve got features and exclusives from several of the acts on this compilation going up over the course of the...
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The AGCS Christmas Calendar Is Coming...
Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat, and AGCS has been hard at work putting together a brilliant advent calendar. In previous years the calendar has taken the format of posting a Christmas song every day, but this time round we’re trying something more ambitious (also, we were running out of Christmas songs). This years calendar is set to feature interviews and exclusive...
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TRACK BY TRACK: Los Campesinos! - Hello Sadness
“Before we went to Spain we sat down to discuss what direction we wished the album to take and without restricting ourselves too much with particular rules or dos and don’ts, we all conceded we wanted it to be a more direct and poppier affair then the last one.” - Gareth Campesinos
So, what happened? In short: Shit happened. Gareth broke up with his girlfriend before recording...
7 tags
Review: Los Campesinos! at KCLSU
Photo by Treesiepopsicles.
Considering they’re just written their most miserable set of songs yet, Los Campesinos! seem pretty happy tonight, but then they’ve got every right to be. Every old song they play inspires mass singalongs, while even the new tracks, sent to those who preordered Hello Sadness just three days ago, are received like old favourites. As a visibly choked Gareth...
6 tags
Review: Johnny Foreigner Vs Everything
“We’ve made the record that sounds like we do in our heads … there’s nothing we’d change or tweak, nothing we’d rewrite or remove. It’s exactly as perfect/imperfect as we are, and if it fails IRL, then it does so as proof we just aren’t good enough.
Heavy.”
Alexei Berrow, Johnny Foreigner
Heavy stuff indeed. And while there’s nothing...
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REVIEW: Katie Malco And The Slow Parade EP
I don’t like folk, and I can say that to people (and indeed have said it to people) with some strength of conviction. But then if I pause to think about it, about the Jeffrey Lewis and Slow Club records I own, or the fact that my favourite album of the year so far is the decidedly folk-y “Let England Shake”, I realise that’s not entirely true. I mean, I definitely like at...
October 2011
1 post
4 tags
Screaming Maldini Set To Start Work On Debut Album
I love Screaming Maldini, the pink and white attired, quirk-core hitmaking machine, so the news that they’re due to start recording their first full length record next week has got me pretty damn excited.
I first became aware of the Sheffield sextet whilst i was compiling last years AGCS Christmas Calendar, and stumbled across their festive smash As Dew In Aprille. Since then I’ve...
September 2011
4 posts
3 tags
teamABC - Complaints Dept.
teamABC are a band I stumbled across some time last year through some nice words on Johnny Foreigner’s Formspring account, and as usual Lex didn’t let me down. I downloaded their free “20 Songs By teamABC” compilation (still available here) and from the first track, the unashamedly exuberant Another Fight, Another Defeat, I was hooked. I ended up downloading all the EPs and...
5 tags
REAL-TIME REVIEW: "Paradise" by Slow Club
My copy of Slow Club’s new album “Paradise” arrived in the post this morning, and I’m just about to listen to it for the first time. Below I will be writing my first impressions of the record, in another of AGCS’ ever popular real-time reviews.
Is reviewing a record on the impulsive reactions provoked by the first listen a worthwhile pursuit? Perhaps not: the list...
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PJ Harvey's "Let England Shake" Wins The Mercury...
It’s fair to say the Mercury Prize isn’t always the most reliable judge of what constitutes an interesting, innovative or even remotely listenable record (see: Klaxons), but on this occasion they only went and got it right! OK, so it would have been nice to see either Metronomy or Everything Everything get a sales boost for their very good albums, but Let England Shake was just so far...
1 tag
Johnny Foreigner Announce New Album
Released November 7th on Alcopop Records
Just two days ago I wrote that Los Campesinos’ new album title “Hello Sadness”, would work pretty well as a band motto. Well Johnny Foreigner only had to one-up that, didn’t they? Because anyone who has read frontman Alexei’s writings on the band’s blog will know that “Vs Everything” could be not just...
August 2011
4 posts
3 tags
Los Campesinos! Announce New Album
“Hello Sadness”. It could very well be the band’s motto; instead it’s the title of the new record from Los Campesinos!, due out on November 14th, and it’s got me very excited. Any regular visitors to this site should by now know that my obsession with LC! knows no bounds, and I’m so excited right now I can barely type. But I will try.
So, a ten track album...
Anonymous asked: Could I have an email address to contact you directly?
The first Ben Folds Five track in over ten years;...
July 2011
8 posts
10 tags
TRAMLINES FESTIVAL: Saturday
Having shouted myself hoarse during Hot Club De Paris the night before, I wake up on Saturday morning feeling decidedly worse for wear. Despite this I’m still off to a relatively early start (alright, 1 O’clock) at the Nando’s New Music Stage, for NME-endorsed next big thing Hey Sholay. I’ll admit, given the NME’s recent, unwavering support for such illustrious...
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TRAMLINES FESTIVAL: Friday
After Thursday’s “Tramlines Eve”, on Friday the festival proper kicks off and I get to see some pretty awesome bands, as well as one band so bad they genuinely made me angry. Oh well. I’ll try and focus on the positive.
We start off at The Cremorne with acoustic singer-songwriter guy Dan Williamson. He’s hardly reinventing the wheel with what he does but his...
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TRAMLINES FESTIVAL: Thursday
I didn’t really see much music last night, choosing instead to get horrifically drunk, so this is gonna be short and focused on just one band: Blood Sport.
I wasn’t planning to see Blood Sport. I went to The Great Gatsby at half ten to see Swimming Lessons, who were billed to play, purely because his BIO mentioned Talking Heads. For some reason though, I got Blood Sport instead, which...
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LATITUDE REVIEW: Sunday
Sunday get’s off to a gentle start with Marcus Brigstocke and Andre Vincent’s Early Edition in the Comedy Tent. Essentially a panel of comedians talking about the newspapers, the show is now something of a Latitude institution - but for some reason this year it just didn’t seem to click into gear and while there’s some mildly entertaining stuff about NOTW (obviously) and an...
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TWEETS FROM TRAMLINES FESTIVAL
Remember when I said I would tweet from Latitude Festival. And then my phone immediately died? Well this time I really, genuinely PROMISE to tweet from the Tramlines festival. You see, Tramlines is in a city centre, the beautiful city centre of Sheffield to be precise, and there’s plug sockets and internet and I will be sleeping in a ROOM with a BED and an EN-SUITE! It’s gonna be...