"For some reason I was expecting some bedraggled hipsters and angry twenty somethings with beards who didn’t really know why they were there, but it was wall to wall hair, and that hair was flailing around in a proper, albeit slower than usual, way." - Dara Higgins on Sleep's Button Factory gig last week.
Joined14th November 2011
Articles106
"Dopesmoker is the entire history of the metal riff, slowed down, and deconstructed. It is, in fact, the entire history of the planet, of humanity." - Dara Higgins finds enlightenment in the reissue of Sleep's Dopesmoker.
"It’s an idiot savant record, lovely, well balanced pop bristling under the surface of what seems to be something that was put together in a shed over the weekend and recorded onto a Dictaphone wielded by a sugared-up toddler." - Dara Higgins on Skelocrats' Whip Crack Away.
"Intensity isn’t brought on by repletion of a chorus, or a swirling harmony, or some kind of angsty exhortations, but by layer upon layer of sound." - Last Days Of 1984's Wake Up To The Waves.
"It bears no airs, nor even graces, and this is what saves it from mundanity." - Dara Higgins on Best Coast's The Only Place.
"...like a love song sung by two lovers savouring the delicious regret of a recently embarked upon murder spree across the dusty highways of three states." - Dara Higgins on Hidden Highways' self titled debut EP.
"All along, it’s punctuated by the thunderous blows of Lomabaro’s drumming, using a stripped down, 4 piece kit. It’s barely able to contain his energy, or the extra couple of arms he appears to be sporting." - Dara Higgins on Philm's Harmonic.
"In vocalist Hanna Tuulikk they have a voice that puts them somewhat apart. It’s an odd, high pitched enigma, early Kate Bush, maybe a slightly be-heliumed Beth Gibbons." - Dara Higgins on Two Wings' debut LP Love's Spring.
"We need to undo the untold damage of the nineties, and it’s anoraks and lad rock, standing still, spitting out infantile rhymes and stealing only the obvious riffs from the obvious bands, and get back to posturing" - Dara Higgins on Kantor Tzar Collectif's Absent EP.
"When it works, it's terrific, but otherwise I'm left with an overwhelming sense of ambivalence." - Dara Higgins thinks the internet might be wrong about Grimes.