Album review: Caveman – Caveman

CAVEMAN Caveman (Shock) There are moments of melodic and cleverly arranged promise in this New York indie five-piece’s follow-up to 2011’s CoCo Beware (which this reviewer quite liked as a slow-burner but which mostly smouldered beneath the radar) but the band’s tendency to sand the edges off their tracks with synth-washed soundscapes prevents most tracks from blossoming, let alone bear any fruit. The repetition of building each track to a crescendo using that layered synth becomes tedious, detracting from layered mid-album highlights Over My Head and Pricey whose great reverbed guitar lines and thoughtful change-ups are drowned by that familiar cadence

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Album review: Change Becomes Us – Wire

CHANGE BECOMES US Wire (Southbound) Three and a half decades of arthouse punk is tough to sustain so the Londoners dipped into their past for the basis of their 13th studio offering. But the small nuggets mined from their late 70s seam of peculiarity get the type of reworking that reminds you that Wire are both the band of Heartbeat and Eardrum Buzz – and aren’t afraid to warp a track with poppy enthusiasm or Eno melancholy

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Q&A: Giles Martin on Beatles ‘Rock Band’ and remasters

The video game “The Beatles: Rock Band” is set to be released by Harmonix on Wednesday. Modeled on the already popular “Rock Band” game, and closely supervised by The Beatles and their estates, the game lets players sing and strum along to a huge list of Beatles classics over scenes ranging from Liverpool’s Cavern Club to their final performance on a London rooftop

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Woodstock: How Does It Sound 40 Years Later?

Lots of people never made it to Woodstock, in part because the 400,000 who did caused the most famous traffic jam in New York history. But for those of us who missed it because of the inconvenience of having not yet been born, the concert’s 40th anniversary is instinctively less a cause for celebration than an excuse to plug our ears. We know the basics — or think we do.

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The Man Who Organized Woodstock

For three days in August 1969, 400,000 people gathered on a dairy farm in upstate New York to listen to rock ‘n’ roll. The Woodstock Music and Art Fair boasted performances by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Who and Jefferson Airplane. But the festival is most famous for exuding a harmonious, we-are-all-one attitude that rain, traffic jams and overcrowding could not dispel.

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Ryanair slashes UK flight schedule

Budget airline Ryanair announced plans Tuesday to slash its winter flights schedule from its main UK hub, blaming a collapse in the British tourism industry, rising airport costs and "insane" aviation taxes. The Irish carrier currently operates 40 aircraft out of Stansted Airport, near London, but it plans to cut capacity by 40 percent to 24 aircraft by October 2009. That will mean a 30 percent drop in the number of weekly flights and a loss of 2.5 million passengers between October and March 2010, Ryanair said in a statement

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