LATEST ADDITIONS

This month we review: Anthony Gomes, Steely Dan, Fat Mattress, Louisa Amend Quartet

Consumer Electronics products are traditionally marketed on the basis of progress and technological improvement, and the hi-fi scene is no exception. Amplifiers were already a mature technology in the early 1980s, following big advances in low noise circuitry, robust complementary power transistors, DC coupling and high-speed operation. With these fundamentals in place the larger manufacturers turned their attention to exotic power supplies, remote controls and system integration, equalisers and frequency spectrum displays, special inputs for CD players and, of course, ever more output power to entice customers to upgrade.

This month we review and test releases from: Joseph Fort/King’s College Choir; Pilc Moutin Hoenig; Trygve Seim & Frode Haltli; Alice Zawadzki, Fred Thomas, Misha Mullov-Abbado; Ruth Wilhelmine Meyer.

One part musical genre, one part media-fuelled cultural phenomenon, Britpop was the UK’s vibrant answer to America’s grunge. Johnny Sharp spotlights 20 of its best albums

Who, or what, was Britpop? Good question, partly because it wasn’t a genre as much as a movement, or a ‘scene’. It’s shorthand for a period in the mid-1990s when a slew of alternatively inclined British vocal groups (solo artists barely got a look in – this was all about community endeavour) grew too big for their spiritual home of the weekly music press and the ‘indie’ charts, and entered the mainstream...