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Artist:
Beck
"Acid casualty with a repossessed car," croaks Beck Hansen. "Vietnam vet playin' air guitar..." Odelay would later herald Beck as pre-Millennial jester without compare, but 1993's Mellow Gold finds Beck slumming in The City of Angels, working in a video store for four dollars an hour. Quite rightly, he's got the blues, but there's plenty more besides. Mellow Gold is a grimy Polaroid of fried white-trash invention. Reconciling the painfully fashionable grunge aesthetic with the drunken verbiage of the Beat Generation, Mellow Gold founded the slacker generation, and "Loser"--the opening track--became its unofficial anthem. A concept album of sort...
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List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £2.95
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Artist:
Magnetic Fields
"Grandiose" is the word that Stephin Merritt uses to describe this album, and he doesn't seem to be the type who's prone to overstatement. After all, his three-CD collection of 69 love songs has the rather under-elaborate title 69 Love Songs. Still, where he lacks creativity in titling an album, he more than makes up for it as a lyricist. Whereas most of his contemporaries would be lucky to write this many songs in their entire career, Merritt--as the creative force behind the Magnetic Fields--effortlessly proves himself as one of the pre-eminent songwriters of his generation. He is also an incurable romantic; his love songs are interspersed with melancholy, bitter...
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List Price: £8.99
Our Price: £6.17
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Artist:
The Antlers
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List Price: £9.99
Our Price: £4.79
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Artist:
Feist
FEIST Let It Die (2004 UK edition 13-track CD album from the Canadian singer/songwriter. Includes the singles Mushaboom and a brilliant cover version of the Bee Gees classic Inside And Out. Complete with picture sleeve booklet)
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List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £2.71
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Artist:
IRON AND WINE
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List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £3.64
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Artist:
Beck
That's the great thing about being a written off as a one-hit wonder--it really focuses your mind on making a stunning, no-holds-barred eat-that-you-smug-critics album the year after. It happened with Radiohead, from "Creep" to The Bends; Supergrass, from "Alright" to In It For The Money, and, most notably, with Beck, from "Loser" to Odelay. As thrilling today as on its release, Odelay is the sound of new musical frontiers being opened up: no-one before had thought to arrange a shot-gun marriage between hip-hop and Bob Dylan before and, as the subsequent slew of poor imitators proved, that was because only Beck could pull it off (with the help ...
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List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £2.27
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Artist:
THE SHINS
Oh, Inverted World, the sun-baked debut album from Albuquerque indie quartet The Shins, signposts a fascinating change of direction for Sub Pop Records. Back in the early 90s, bands like Nirvana and Mudhoney made the name synonymous with the dark, angst-ridden grunge sound. Now, it would seem, Sub Pop wears a flower in its hair. The florid harmonies and bucolic acoustics of "Caring Is Creepy" and "Know Your Onion" bring to mind a vision of the verdant hills and gleaming bays of California that's remained largely dormant since The Beach Boys hung up their surfboards: a sound that's undeniably nostalgic, but so vividly realised and perfectly recorded it seems almost ...
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List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £4.19
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Artist:
Modest Mouse
It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment Modest Mouse started sounding like a real band. But on Good News For People Who Love Bad News, front man Isaac Brock sounds like he's finally touching the earth, and the band--minus founding member and drummer Jeremiah Green--follows suit. For the longest time, singer-songwriter Brock seemed to exist solely to defy the established rules, forging forward on sheer momentum and ingenuity. Even Pavement looked relatively ordinary in comparison to the band's early releases like 1996's This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About and 1997's The Lonesome Crowded West. A relaxed mood prevails, not so much...
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List Price: £5.99
Our Price: £2.98
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Artist:
Neutral Milk Hotel
Led by Jeff Magnum, In the Aeroplane over the Sea finds the Neutral Milk Hotel assemblage loosely performing a series of narratives backed by folksy acoustic guitar. But from that springboard, a quiver of instruments (horns, organs, accordions, saws, banjo, zanzithophone, etc.) are layered into a sometimes rootsy, sometimes lo-fi, and often psychedelic mix. Contrary to most pop experimentalists, NMH songs stretch way past the two-minute mark: "Two Headed Boy" transforms from a Guided by Voices-ish romp into a New Orleans big band funeral march, "The Fool" is as catchy as anything Poi Dog Pondering ever produced, and "Holland" builds up to a crescendo of saw, Uillea...
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List Price: £8.99
Our Price: £4.55
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Artist:
Beck
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List Price: £13.99
Our Price: £5.50
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