With the echoes of his swashbuckling badboy project Grinderman still ringing in our ears, Nick Cave shaved off his noise-making moustache, reassembled his old troupe The Bad Seeds and released a bouquet of nine new songs under the title Push the Sky Away. Although stylistically miles away from its predecessor, it would be much too simplistic to write it off as a Grinderman aftershock, especially since the The Bad Seeds include all the members of the former, and there are too many signs that the radical change was a conscious step back to the murky realms of atmospheric elucidation that owes...

February 17th 1995. The police found an abandoned silver Vauxhall Cavalier at the parking lot of the bridge across the Severn river, a notorious suicide site. Its owner Richey James Edwards, member of the Welsh quartet Manic Street Preachers that hijacked the British music scene a few years earlier with a mixture of social counter-activism and archaic rock’n'roll glamor, pushing aside the dancefloor psychedelics and painfully apolitical sounds of Madchester, was missing since February 1st. As the author of the Manics’ manifesto, lead lyricist and chief public relations officer, Richey...

With music artists as diverse as the Manic Street Preachers, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Future of the Left, and throwing John Cale in the mix for good measure, Wales became known as the primary breeding ground for alternative sounds and stances that levitate a bit off from the central indie machinery. The Joy Formidable, one of the few new bands that is fully armed with the ability to hit you like a heavily amplified swarm of bumblebees, hails from the same surroundings. After their debut EP A Balloon Called Moaning harvested nothing but praise and the full-fledged release The Big Roar...