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Nick Southall

Nick Southall

Nick Southall gained a degree in Media & Popular Culture with Philosophy in 2001, and became a senior writer at Stylus, the online music and film review magazine which launched in 2002. He is now a marketing manager for the University of Exeter in the UK, in which city he lives.

61 articles

List of articles in the library

By date | By artist | Most recently added

Ash: Free All Angels

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

AH, TEENAGE KICKS. Tim Wheeler may be 25 now, but he still knows that first love, while maybe not the deepest or longest-lasting, is always ...

Asian Dub Foundation: Community Music

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION formed in the mid-nineties, the product of a government-sponsored scheme designed to teach young Asian men music technology, two teachers, their pupil ...

(British) Sea Power: British Sea Power: The Decline Of British Sea Power

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

WHAT IS THE POWER of the British sea? An odd thing, for sure. A five-piece from Brighton, guitars and keys and drums and voices and ...

Clue To Kalo: Come Here When You Sleepwalk

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

IS THE LEGACY OF PUNK all those perky Californian skaters proffering spiky three-minute teen-baiting paeans to onanism and bad hair? Or is it something entirely ...

Common: Electric Circus

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

IN WHICH COMMON GOES MAD. Not sure exactly what happened in the time since 2000's excellent Like Water For Chocolate, but it appears to have had ...

Cornelius: Point

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

WHEN I WAS 8 OR 9 YEARS OLD our school had a guest speaker come and talk to us about the years he had spent ...

David Sylvian: Blemish

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

DURING THE RECORDING of What's Going On Marvin Gaye would apparently lock himself alone in a room for an hour or more each day to ...

DJ Shadow: The Private Press

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

IN 1996 JOSH DAVIS RELEASED ...Endtroducing, an expansive, intricate and morose tapestry of samples that wove brass, pianos, filtersweeps and hip hop beats together, creating ...

Gillian Welch: Soul Journey (Acony)

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

GILLIAN COULD HAVE COME DOWN from the mountains after Oh Brother and made the step into the wind that would have carried her to prosperity. ...

Ms Dynamite: A Little Deeper

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

SHE KNOWS WHAT SHE'S TALKING ABOUT because she's come from there. She started off with So Solid Crew but as soon as they started breaking ...

Nirvana: Nirvana

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

HAVE WARHOL'S predictions (desires) come true? Is art now pop and is pop now art? Can either be considered real or worthy or authentic? It ...

Shack: Here's Tom With The Weather

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

IT'S FITTING that Shack's new album (their third? fourth? — the Head brothers have lost so many master tapes and had so many pseudonyms over ...

Super Furry Animals: Phantom Power

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

I SLIPPED OFF Rings Around The World like an ant off frictionless glass, its expensive and slick production screaming "maturity!" and "longevity!" at me until ...

Bees, The (Isle of Wight): The Bees: Sunshine Hit Me

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

SUNSHINE ON WAX. This record is delicious. For the last 25 years or so the most important influence on British music has not been American pop ...

The Coral: The Coral

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

AN ARTICLE IN UK STYLE BIBLE The Face recently revealed that teenage girls in Liverpool have taken to walking round the city centre dressed in ...

The Vines: Highly Evolved

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

WELCOME to the twenty-first century alt. rock review. The Vines, as you know, are from Australia, and, as you also know, are the greatest band the ...

Witness: Under A Sun

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

I LOVED WITNESS' FIRST ALBUM. It caught me by surprise — their first singles were released at about the same time as Doves and Coldplay ...

OutKast: Speakerboxxx / The Love Below

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 23 September 2003

DRE, A.K.A. ANDRE 3000, a.k.a. Andre Lauren Benjamin, says he's run out of ways to express himself via hip hop. Big Boi, a.k.a. Antwan Andre ...

Siobhan Donaghy: Revolution In Me

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 30 September 2003

I'M IN LOVE. It's all projection of course. I've never met her, never seen her in the flesh. Know next to nothing about her. But… It's ...

The Rapture: Echoes

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 20 October 2003

THERE SEEMS TO BE VERY LITTLE POINT in reviewing Echoes now that it's finally hit the stores; the UK's been able to purchase it for ...

Basement Jaxx: Kish Kash

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 21 October 2003

DANCE IS DEAD!, proclaim the British broadsheet press. No it isn't!, they say again, three months later, It's just gone underground again!. Whatever, Basement Jaxx ...

Plaid: Spokes

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 31 October 2003

ED HANDLEY AND ANDY TURNER have been making exquisitely structured and melodious post-techno Warptronica for more than a decade now, first as part of the ...

Missy Elliott: This Is Not a Test!

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 December 2003

Miss E… So Addictive, spearheaded by the epochal 'Get Ur Freak On', marked a zenith for Missy Elliott and her long-term conspirator Tim Mosley, as ...

The Necks: Drive By

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 12 January 2004

TALK ABOUT ROCKIST; Drive By consists of one hour-long track, meaning you have to listen to the latest album by this intriguing Australian three-piece all ...

Busted: A Present For Everyone

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 15 January 2004

IT IS, OF COURSE, the awkward-looking blonde one who is the genius behind Busted. And rest assured that I don't use the word "genius" lightly. ...

Patrick Wolf: Lycanthropy

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 2 March 2004

Ly·can·thro·py n. 1. In folklore, the magical ability to assume the form and characteristics of a wolf. 2. A kind of erratic melancholy, in which one ...

The Vines: Winning Days

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 23 March 2004

THE COVER SCREAMS "PSYCHEDELIC", Craig Nichols' illustrated face warped by a thousand lysergic suns. As you'd expect. The hamburger-scoffing Australian son of grunge and Britpop ...

Nick Drake: Made To Love Magic

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 3 June 2004

PRECIOUS. TRAGIC. BEAUTIFUL. SENSITIVE. DELICATE. DOOMED. These are some of the words that people use about Nick Drake, born in Rangoon, died in Tamworth-In-Arden. Drake ...

Orbital: Blue Album

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 24 June 2004

THE END IS NIGH. This summer, after 15 years, Orbital will cease to be, at least in the form that we have known and loved ...

Bees, The (Isle of Wight): The Bees: Free The Bees

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 16 July 2004

FREE THE BEES FROM WHAT, exactly? The present? Debut album Sunshine Hit Me was an eccentric, eclectic affair, touched with jazz, funk, Portuguese folk, reggae ...

Bark Psychosis: ///Codename: Dustsucker

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 26 July 2004

VAPOUR TRAILS of distant airplanes turning orange in the sunset, a smear of royal umber bruise. Universes appear within your iris, tremulous rumbles consume miniscule ...

The Blue Nile: High

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 17 August 2004

SOME TWENTY YEARS AGO Scottish electronics and hi-fi specialists Linn commissioned a local folk band to record a song for them, in order to demonstrate ...

Dirty Vegas: One

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 21 October 2004

SOMEHOW DIRTY VEGAS managed to shift 700,000 copies of their eponymous debut's dance-lite and ended up playing live at Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson's wedding, ...

The Verve: This Is Music – The Singles 92-98

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 4 November 2004

IN 1995, as a naïve and passionate and occasionally very stoned 16-year-old, I bought a copy of A Northern Soul on spec, because I'd read ...

U2: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 23 November 2004

AH, U2, ONCE AGAIN PERCHED at the apex of world rock cool as they prepare to release (or is that unleash?) their umpteenth album. Mullets, ...

The Chemical Brothers: Push The Button

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 28 January 2005

IN THE MID-90S it looked as if dance music was on the verge of total crossover into the rock-oriented mainstream, and for a while I ...

Bloc Party: Silent Alarm

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 14 February 2005

FORGET EVERYTHING you think you know and start all over again. Bloc Party's website declares that they're "an autonomous unit of un-extraordinary kids reared on ...

Rufus Wainwright: Want Two

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 11 March 2005

EXCESS, THY NAME is Rufus. How else do you explain starting the most important album of your career with a 6-minute pseudo-classical drone of a ...

Stereophonics: Language. Sex. Violence. Other?

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 17 March 2005

KELLY JONES HOLDS A GRUDGE — cross him in any which way and he'll take revenge in the best manner he knows; through the power ...

Maximo Park: A Certain Trigger

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 11 May 2005

MAXIMO PARK are kinda cool, but also kinda weird. They're a punk band in the modern style but they're on Warp records, which sends you ...

Tom Vek: We Have Sound

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 11 May 2005

TO BE HONEST, I've been considering giving up writing about music. Someone told me it was as useful as dancing about architecture — I told ...

Oasis: Don't Believe The Truth

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 31 May 2005

IT SEEMS TO BE that the ever-cyclical, ever-fickle music press is at that point in its orbit where Oasis are deemed cool again. People are ...

Supergrass: Road To Rouen

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 17 August 2005

GAZ COOMBES HAS HAD AN INFERIORITY COMPLEX ever since 'Alright' was an enormous pop hit ten years ago; he's spent the intervening decade trying to ...

The Boo Radleys: Find The Way Out

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 8 September 2005

OH THE BOO RADLEYS. Sadly it appears that they have now been dealt a shite hand by history and will be forever known by most ...

Boards Of Canada: The Campfire Headphase

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 19 October 2005

ROLAND BARTHES would tell you that myth is a powerful thing, that it perpetuates itself, that it doesn't need to be created, just allowed room ...

Sugababes: Taller In More Ways

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 20 October 2005

POP ACTS AREN'T SUPPOSED to release four albums, aren't supposed to have careers; they're meant to emerge quickly, define a brief era, and be seen ...

Kate Bush: Aerial

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 8 November 2005

KATE BUSH HAS BEEN CHANGING the world since before I was born. I am now 26 and Kate is comfortably in her 40s; logic, sense ...

Will Young: Keep On

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 30 November 2005

FIRST UP, 'Switch It On' is a fabulous schizophrenia, single of the year, 'Footloose' by way of Bo Diddley, Basement Jaxx, 'Living In Another World' ...

Embrace: This New Day

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 27 March 2006

YEAH, I KNOW I'M BIASED. But any "critic" who claims to have some kind of objectivity when reviewing a record is lying anyway — the ...

Witness: Before the Calm

Retrospective by Nick Southall, Stylus, 12 September 2006

For better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old ...

Bloc Party: A Weekend in the City

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 5 February 2007

BLOC PARTY HAVE TROTTED OUT the usual "taller, wider, deeper" clichés that follow a critically salivated-upon debut, but what do those words actually mean? The ...

Patrick Wolf: The Magic Position

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 26 February 2007

THE ESSENCE OF PATRICK WOLF is captured for a fleeting moment during 'Accident & Emergency'. Amidst the lolloping electronic beats, dancefloor anthemics, stereoscoping brass, and ...

The Boo Radleys: The Best Of The Boo Radleys

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 13 June 2007

THERE'S A SERIOUS SENSE of déjà vu accompanying this fifteen-track, hour-long Best of the Boo Radleys compilation, coming as it does less than two years ...

Siobhan Donaghy: Ghosts

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 2 July 2007

EX-SUGABABES are in danger of becoming as plentiful as ex-members of the Fall, but Siobhan Donaghy, the waif-like, flame-haired original member of the sassy trio, ...

Two Lone Swordsmen: Wrong Meeting II

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 5 July 2007

MUSICIANS TAKE FAR TOO MUCH TIME between releases. Sure, prolonged touring / promotional schedules and the relentless search for perfection would be valid reasons for ...

New Young Pony Club: Fantastic Playroom

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 19 July 2007

DESPITE ALL the massed proclamations of New Young Pony Club's verve, charisma, and cool, on record they sound bored, listless, and uninterested. It's a studied ...

Wilderness Survival: We Were 21 In '03

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 16 August 2007

WE WERE 21 IN '03 is San Diego-based indie band Wilderness Survival's third album in as many years, and at 50 minutes is also their ...

Kate Nash: Made of Bricks

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 21 August 2007

TAKEN AT FACE VALUE, 20-year-old popstrel du jour Kate Nash is the Lily Allen it's OK to like — if you need a shot of ...

Super Furry Animals: Hey Venus!

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 24 August 2007

WITH A FEW EXCEPTIONS I've always liked the idea of Super Furry Animals more than the reality; some of the early, drug-happy eclecticism seemed perhaps ...

Beirut: The Flying Club Cup

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 19 September 2007

SOME PEOPLE MAY MOURN the passing of Zach Condon's cottage-industry approach and makeshift binary orkestra, the occasionally cacophonous delivery and earnestly clamoring, lo-fi arrangements that ...

Underworld: Oblivion With Bells

Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 12 October 2007

HOW THE HELL do Underworld still exist? Just past a decade from their cultural peak of the twin bombshells of Second Toughest in the Infants ...

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