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• There’s a cleverness to this literate, delicate, gently melancholic mini-album that smacks of a self-conscious postgrad showing off on open mic night. ‘All Our Tomorrows’ opens inoffensively enough, a bit Badly Drawn Boy but with added girl-vocals and sweetly pealing guitar. Violin-swathed ‘I See Numbers’ has more fire in its belly, ardent like Damien Rice, with a great symphonic finish. Though hazy stand-out ‘Little Silver’ is a treat – the brisk hiss-snap of hi-hat and snare driving whispery vocals, guitar coiling in silvery loops above – ‘The Decline of Magic’ is a precious plaint on religious mis-instruction, and the album concludes in similar vein. Perfectly pleasant, but variously cloying (syrupy anti-lovesong ‘Somebody Unlike You’) or straining in vain for profundity. (Mike White)
Copyright Mike White 2011
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THE BIG GIG
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Gary Numan
Mike White muses on the missing link between Kraftwerk and NIN. The same year as ‘Alien’, three years before ‘Blade Runner’, awkward, acne-ridden 21-year-old Gary Webb wrote a song called ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’. It sounded…23.04.2012 READ MORE -
Philharmonia/Ashkenazy
You have to feel sorry for any young pianist braving a Chopin concerto under the baton of Vladimir Ashkenazy. Poacher turned gamekeeper, Ashkenazy’s glittering career as a pianist was kick-started by success at the Warsaw Chopin…23.05.2012 READ MORE


‘October, Looking South’ (LP, Self-released)



















































































































































































































