Gawd bless ‘em, the Manics. The Welsh heroes of modern music have returned, fresh from last year’s Journal For Plague Lovers, with a rollicking grandiose pop song from the forthcoming Postcards From A Young Man. Excuse the quality, there are only radio rips flying around at the moment. If anything you can use it as nostalgia for the olden days of mp3s, back when they were rubbish. This song’s not rubbish though, it’s very nice indeed.

Having downloaded the album before getting the call to review it, I feel that there’s a lot to say about HEALTH’s second effort. Read More

What’s happening in the current trend of sunshine and surf indie-pop? Girls nailed it nicely a while back, The Drums went left of the mark with their skinny commercial sound and now Wavves are tearing right through the middle with
buzzsaw guitars and a nasal punk sneer. Read More

Alarm bells ring when an artist’s comeback is punctuated by the hype of a ‘shocking video’ rather than the music. Read More

The reports are out – Hong Kong’s teens are officially apathetic. Brouhaha looks beyond the knee-jerk teen blame game to the bigger picture and finds the problem in the fabric of society.

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8 bit musicians are dedicated geeks, with their retro bleeps and bloops. But that doesn’t stop them knocking out killer tracks, like this one for the upcoming Scott Pilgrim vs The World game, created with a hacked NES and some guitars. Download the demo and enjoy this exhilarating piece in-game. (You’ll have to make a UK account because like everything else worth having, it’s not on the useless Hong Kong PSN Store.)

Weezer are back (again!). The tireless workhorses release the followup to Raditude in September. Hurley, named after the chubby Lost chap, is made up of 10 tracks of their power-pop rock that they can these days churn out on a dime. This is the first single and contains the same magic that makes something that at first sounds throwaway become gold.

Oh look! It’s the best band in Britain slipping out a cheeky single in between albums. The more ‘mature’ sound hints at the direction of the reportedly keyboard-laden new album. First time round it’s not got the immediate punch of their previous efforts but it soon enough creeps under your skin.

That’s right. You heard us.

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Handheld computing, once limited to the realm of fiction or failure, is finally catching up with the times. Read More