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Final Straw Snow Patrol Final Straw, third album from Glasgow-based quintet Snow Patrol, is a darker, nastier and altogether bleaker beast than anything they've produced before. These are ostentatiously pop melodies that have been locked up in a basement, blindfolded over night and subjected to gleefully twisted torture and cruelty until they've squealed. The bruised, distorted (yet basically acoustic) "Wow" highlights...    Read More >>

Cast Of Thousands Elbow An astonishingly intense and ambitious album, Elbow's Cast of Thousands is relentlessly experimental. Having toiled for 10 years over their spellbinding Mercury-nominated debut Asleep in the Back, the maverick Bury five-piece--who were initially hailed as the new Radiohead--have produced a worthy sequel in a comparatively short two years. While mirroring their debut's melancholy tone,...    Read More >>

Parachutes Coldplay Music doesn't come more touching than Parachutes. With their debut single alone, the emotion-fortified "Shiver", Coldplay proved they could shift between elated and crushed in a breath as singer Chris Martin poured out music's oldest chestnut (unconditional yet unrequited love) with the shakiest of voices and a backdrop of epic guitars that rouse and tug at the heart strings. For 10 tracks on...    Read More >>

Asleep in the Back Elbow While it's tempting to position Elbow next to the sardonic likes of Badly Drawn Boy--mainly because of their proximity to the city of Manchester and their way with an acoustic guitar--Asleep In The Back, their frighteningly competent debut album, bears not the joker's smile. Instead, it comes straight from Manchester's simmering, ugly dark side--eleven tracks of rain-sodden misery, blown up...    Read More >>

A Rush of Blood to the Head Coldplay On Coldplay's A Rush of Blood to the Head, the melodic excellence of Parachutes remains, as does the delicate soulfulness of Chris Martin's voice. But now different styles are approached, as the band develop even further beyond their debut album (and the numerous Radiohead comparisons that dogged them at first). "God Put a Smile upon Your Face", for instance, has a thumping voodoo quality,...    Read More >>

X&Y Coldplay Coldplay were faced with a difficult choice as they set to work on X&Y. They could either follow Radiohead’s lead and use their enormous success and financial security as a springboard to a brave experimental future--or they could play it safe, repeat the tricks used on the 16 million-selling A Rush Of Blood To The Head, and consolidate their position as one of the biggest...    Read More >>

Greatest Hits The Cure As Greatest Hits--and particularly the busking pavement jazz of "Lovecats"--reminds us, the best Cure singles were very often tangential exercises; halcyon playtime divergences offering a Goth-free contrast to some of the weightier studiousness of some of those early albums. Or, as smudged frontman Robert Smith says of this 18-track collection, "Songs that are sung with a smile." This wasn't...    Read More >>

The Bends Radiohead After the massive success of Pablo Honey--or, more specifically, the single "Creep"--had made them a household name, most had written Radiohead off as one-hit wonders. That they could return with an album as awesome and monumental as The Bends, therefore, must have been particularly unexpected. Not that Pablo Honey is a bad album, but rather, when compared to the epic grandeur...    Read More >>

Different Class Pulp It became increasingly apparent during 1995 that the answer to the question "Blur or Oasis?" was, in fact, "Pulp". Different Class was the sound of a band so on "it" that they defined "it". Thirty years of fury, frustration, sexual longing, class angst and observations about girls' skirts was rammed into the grand Brechtian/Brel-like drama of "Live Bed Show", "I Spy" and, of course, "Common...    Read More >>

The Holy Bible 10th Anniversary Edition [2CD + DVD] Manic Street Preachers The Holy Bible,originally released in 1994,was the Manic's third album,and remains their one genuine claim to greatness.In fact it now stands as one of the very best albums of the 90s,standing with the likes of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless or Spiritualized's Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space.This tenth anniversary reissue contains demos,radio sessions and a US mix of the album along with...    Read More >>