ALBUM REVIEW: TY SEGALL – HELLO HI

Just when you think you know Ty Segall as the modern king of psych rock, he blasts any preconceptions you have of him into outer space, as the ‘Whirlybird’ soundtrack released earlier this year demonstrated. Hot on the heels of that epic, comes his latest studio album ‘Hello, Hi’. There’s always been a touch of […]
During ‘Vietnam Tabloid’, the closing track on ‘The Sound of Musick’, Stan Batcow launches into a spoken description of what it takes for a piece of music to become popular, arguing that it merely has to become familiar. In safe, formulaic music, the listener can easily predict the chord changes, where the chorus and instrumental […]

ALBUM REVIEW: HOWL IN THE TYPEWRITER – THE SOUND OF MUSICK and THE RED ALBUM

ALBUM REVIEW: THE BURNING HELL – GARBAGE ISLAND

Anyone who writes a song about a gannet called Nigel, which starts with the opening lines “They’ve all been making plans for Nigel, and by them I mean the ornithologists”, is already on to a winner. ‘Nigel The Gannet’ is a catchy tale of the natural world complete with The Burning Hell’s brilliant take on […]
Snappy song titles are a sure way of grabbing attention. Since unleashing ‘Alternative Facts’ as a Too Pure Singles Club release in 2017, Mush have specialised in the sort of titles that suggest a pithy, barbed, obtuse take on the modern world (‘Gig Economy’ with its perfect irony for a band, ‘Hey Gammonhead!’ and ‘Poverty […]

ALBUM REVIEW – MUSH: DOWN TOOLS

ALBUM REVIEW – THE WOLFHOUNDS: BRIGHT AND GUILTY

The Wolfhounds’ timing was always askew. Coming to attention at the tail-end of the C86 movement, their debut album ‘Unseen Ripples From A Pebble’ did not fully reflect their garage rock and post-punk racket. By the time they released the far-superior ‘Bright and Guilty’ in 1989, now reissued by Optic Nerve, music press attention had […]
– Deaf Institute, Manchester – Sunday nights were made for watching Laura Veirs. But this is not the same Laura Veirs who has played this stage before. On her first UK tour since navigating a divorce from her husband and long-time producer, this is a new, quietly confident and tentatively upbeat Veirs reaching to pick […]
Laura Veirs

LIVE: LAURA VEIRS – 19/06/2022

Tirzah

LIVE: TIRZAH – 22/06/2022

– Stoller Hall, Manchester – In an interview in the excellent ‘Loud & Quiet’ magazine, Tirzah took her interviewer to an exhibition. Afterwards, when asked what she thought of it, Tirzah replies: “Maybe I’m a bit too traditional, but I found all the extras a bit too distracting. I’d rather see something stripped back so […]
Although we are officially at the “living with Covid” stage of the pandemic, otherwise known as pretending it no longer exists, the backlog of vinyl releases means that streams of lockdown records are emerging bleary-eyed into daylight. Even if lockdown might not be the overwhelming subject matter of Harkin’s ‘Honeymoon Suite’, the recording process was […]

ALBUM REVIEW – HARKIN: HONEYMOON SUITE

Peaches

LIVE: PEACHES – 14/06/2022

– Ritz, Manchester – In 2022, there’s something tiring about describing any kind of art as ‘feminist’. Yes, the word and the movement carried us to places we needed to be. And the battle to demolish damaging barriers, language and stereotypes is far from over. But the term ‘feminist’ has been hijacked, repurposed and distorted. […]
The post-punk era was a time where the original punk wave had opened the floodgates for DIY bands that were happy to shine brilliantly but briefly before disappearing back into civilian life. Girls At Our Best! were a prime example, releasing three singles and an album in the early 1980s, surely never envisaging that 40 […]

ALBUM REVIEW – GIRLS AT OUR BEST!: PLEASURE (DELUXE EDITION)