Back catalogue: All genres

Review: X-Ray Pop play live at Rockomotives Festival in 2020. The cult band was first formed back in 1984 by Didier Doc Pilot and Zouka Dzaza and are said to be inspirations for the likes of Beastie Boys and Stereolab. Their set at Rockomotives marked a triumphant return to the stage for the group with Charlotte Barfuss and Zouka Dzaza providing vocals, Doc Pilot on space guitar and Olivier Gicquel on drums amongst others. The setlist takes in tunes from four albums - Surrealistic Pilot, Fuzzy Soundtracks, All that Jazz and The Dream Machine - with psychedelic jazz mixed with novo beatnik overtones.

Review: Re-pressed on vinyl for the first time in 15 years, La Foret hears a full reissue via 5 Rue Christine. As conceptual as Xiu Xiu's fusion of post-punk, gamelan, synth pop, folk, and noise might seem, the group's music never feels overly cerebral or detached. On the contrary, it's usually brimming over with often contradictory emotions: love, hate, sex, violence, fear, and humor cling together so tightly in Jamie Stewart's songs that they can't be separated. Harsh and beautiful words and sounds remain intertwined on La Foret, which ranks among Xiu Xiu's subtlest - and scariest - albums.

Review: Talk about being ahead of their time. Not only did XTC get the jump on everyone else (inadvertently) by predicting the letters XTC would change the course of Western European youth culture from the mid-1980s onwards, they also offered a very early stylistic premonition of the sounds that would, temporarily, usurp rave and associated genres as the pre-eminent adolescence, teen hood, and early adulthood music.
Formed in 1972, XTC are one of those examples of why we shouldn't really listen to what the hype men and women are saying. Struggling to break ground during their formative years - arguably their most fertile creatively - nevertheless the cult followers could see what was there. Most of the rest of us waited for another decade or so, at least, before realising this combination of elaborate pop, punk and art rock was actually prepping us for post punk, power pop and Britpop. Go 2 makes that very clear indeed.