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King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard: Flight b741 review – a cheerfully rocking album about global collapse
The Guardian

The rollicking feel of Flight b741 masks some of the band’s most plainly dark lyrics to date, exploring dissociation, suicidal ideation and global collapse in a casual, conversational style – it’s one of the most cheerful doomer records in recent memory. The title of eight-minute closer Daily Blues is a pun, referring to its frenzied blues workout as well as its chorus of “gettin’ fucked up daily”. On Le Risque, the band – vocals are shared across the album, and on many songs they all take a shot at singing – crave “something to thin the blood,” imagining daredevil stunts as a way to get shaken out of a stupor. “I’m feeling like a horse on ket,” on Field of Vision, is a silly image, but in this context it refers to moving through the world in a depressive haze.

Le Tigre review – fun meets fury in an unmissable feminist pop reunion
The Guardian

On the face of it, rage and joy are not an easy aesthetic fit. Rage is engaged, rope-veined; joy is free and light – frivolous, even. And yet the collected works of musical activist Kathleen Hanna – across three bands: 1990s punk outfit Bikini Kill, her electronic bedroom pop project the Julie Ruin, and Le Tigre, a multimedia collaboration alongside Johanna Fateman (mostly guitar) and JD Samson (mostly synths) – dance along the tightrope between fury and fun.

Kathleen Hanna’s Feminist Party Band Le Tigre reunite: ‘It’s depressing our lyrics are still relevant 20 years later’
The Guardian

Most bands wring their hands over whether to reunite or not, but for Le Tigre it was easy. The impetus was a festival in Pasadena, Los Angeles, in 2022. “It was three miles from my house,” says frontwoman Kathleen Hanna, laughing. “I was like: ‘I want to do this because I can cruise down the hill and go to the festival and all my friends can come.’” Then they concluded that the rehearsals for the festival – done over video call, and in LA and New York where bandmates Johanna Fateman and JD Samson live – shouldn’t be wasted. They announced a full tour, their first since 2005, which hits the UK in June.

Perfectionism and poverty: why musicians struggle with mental health
The Guardian

When Jess Cornelius named her 2016 album Give Up on Your Health, she did so as a warning to herself not to get sick – physically, or mentally. As an artist, she couldn’t afford it. The musician, who performs as Teeth & Tongue, has just swapped Melbourne for LA. Sounds great, except she found that sorting out visas, tax, social security numbers and bank accounts leaves little time for creativity. Being a musician is dispiriting, she says.

The Guardian covers Ezra Furman’s London Show
The Guardian

““This is weird, huh?” says Ezra Furman, genuinely mystified. “What happened here? Two thousand people at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. What the hell happened here?”

We’re just two songs into an hour-and-50 minute set from Furman and his band, the Boy-Friends. As they move breathlessly from the itchy, life-affirming pop of Anything Can Happen to the searing, Bo Diddley-indebted At the Bottom of the Ocean, it’s impossible not to love and admire them in equal measure.”

The Guardian Interviews Mac DeMarco
The Guardian

“DeMarco is one of the most distinctive songwriters in modern guitar music, his songs recalling the hazy romance of a more innocent era, a sound that rouses an incongruously seething mosh pit from the DeMarco-clones at his raucous gigs…”

The Guardian reviews Mikal Cronin’s MCIII
The Guardian

Mikal Cronin might not be the best-known of California’s latterday garage-rock pack, but he is perhaps the keenest to experiment. On his third album, MCIII, you can practically hear him rubbing his hands with glee as he stuffs his songs with joyous strings and horns, which couch his most emphatic and vulnerable moments.

The Guardian profiles Mac DeMarco
The Guardian

DeMarco’s lovable jackassery has helped make him a kind of brohemian hero, but it’s his talents as a songwriter that have sustained the love. Sometimes sleazy, always sincere, his songs have a kind of slacker-stealth to them…

Ty Segall’s Twins reviewed on The Guardian
The Guardian

“Ultimately, the appeal of Twins – and Segall – rests not so much on the individual tunes, tuneful as they may be. You put one of these sneery, sweet, hyperactive, electric records on as a force field to ward off the dead, grey creep of the everyday, to remind you what a good time sounds like.”