British bands the Arctic Monkeys, the Prodigy and the Ting Tings (yawn!) will join iconic rocker Neil Young to perform at next year’s Big Day Out music festival in Auckland. Also confirmed for the annual festival, to be held at Auckland’s Mt Smart Stadium on January 16, 2009, are indie-rock act TV on the Radio, [...]

I was pretty underwhelmed by the line up this year for Homegrown, which was generally full of bands you could see anytime during the year at smaller venues. Obviously, the people at Vodafone Homegrown feel the same (though they should have been happy with the crowds alone), because they’ve gone and confirmed Head Like A [...]

Unlike my pubescent self, I have become increasingly fussy about the hip-hop I listen to. Long gone are the days I would swing off my roof to adjust my makeshift FM aerial to ensure I could tape Radio Active’s Wednesday Night Jam. Those teenage ears would soak up any hip-hop thrown it’s way, often choosing [...]

‘Does it Offend You, Yeah?’ is the latest in a long string of NME endorsed ‘next big thing’ bands, a title that in the past few years has been met with a degree of cynicism due to the non-stop numbers of bands that get the said endorsement. Ignoring that fact, it’s possible that most people [...]

I’ll admit, I am a sucker for new technology; I love the latest ‘thing’.  If it lights up, connects to something and makes things easier (even if it was something I didn’t know I need to ‘make easier’ until the new technology came along), then I’m all over it. The other side of this argument [...]

P-Money hasn’t paid my iTunes library a visit in an age. I wasn’t too convinced with ‘Magic City’, and ‘Big Things’ seems like it was something from another era (er, like high school or something), but I’m fully warming, no, hot for, his latest single ‘Everything’. The production is unbelievable, and Vince Harder has the [...]

The use of sequencing and electro/retro-electro tools is something that is starting to be overdone in indie music, but M83 are almost pioneers of that sound. Their current release (like ‘Before the Dawn Heals Us’) ‘Saturdays=Youth’ is an album that I find so hard to pigeonhole – it’s obviously electronic music, but it covers so [...]

Bloc Party’s debut left people empty of superlatives to describe it. Tracks like ‘Helicopter’ completely attacked the senses, and left you with the same feeling you get when you ride a bike really fast. Even now, hearing that riff (and I must have heard it a couple of hundred times) still makes my heart quicken. [...]