Album Review: The Twilight Sad – Nobody Wants To Be Here And Nobody Wants To Leave

Seven years and four studio albums have been punctured by shape-shifting releases in between. …Killed my Parents and Hit the Road was a stripped back b-side to the critically acclaimed Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, as was often the case with companion E.P. Here, It Never Snowed, Afterwards It Did. No One Can Ever Know […]
Prog, eh? Apparently it’s not a dirty word any more, but it’s still an ugly one isn’t it? That horrible image of men in capes making bloated pseudo-classical music that my dad listens to still comes to mind. Fortunately, Manchester heroes Trojan Horse have been challenging that preconception for the past few years now with […]

Album Review: Trojan Horse – World Turned Upside Down

Album Review: Thurston Moore – The Best Day

Thurston Moore’s new album The Best Day sees the US singer back on more familiar territory after 2011’s acoustic album Demolished Thoughts.  Performed by a newly formed Thurston Moore Band and running at 8 tracks across 51 minutes (double LP on Vinyl) this is on first listening very much an “album” in the classic sense, […]
In my review of Mark Lanegan’s recent No Bells On Sunday EP I predicted that the subsequent album, Phantom Radio, Lanegan’s third as the Mark Lanegan Band, would be a good one. Assuming he hadn’t used up all his best songs on the EP that is. Well, it does seem he used up quite a […]

Album Review: Mark Lanegan Band – Phantom Radio

LIVE: MARK MORRISS – 12/10/2014

– THE DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – It was Christmas day of 1996 when I first heard the distinctive vocals of Mark Morriss. I had just received my first CD player and the only CD I had to play on it was Now 35. One of that compilation’s highlights was The Bluetones’s ‘Marblehead Johnson’. Some 18 […]
I had the pleasure of watching Kindness perform at the Berlin Festival last month and was impressed by his mixture of modern day soul and outright smoothness. The combination of decent tunes, a fantastic wardrobe and one of the tightest backup bands going around, made him my favourite musical discovery of the festival. This lasting […]

Album Review: Kindness – Otherness

Album Review: Wild Cub – Youth

Wild Cub present their début album in a flourish of melody-heavy and anthem driven tracks with the aptly named ‘Youth’. The Nashville based outfit, assembled around frontman/guitarist Keegan Dewitt and multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Bullock, have quickly erupted across the United States and are now set on emulating such success in the United Kingdom. After recently releasing […]
The supergroup: a lazy term for a generally dirty concept in rock music. It brings to mind egotistical, indulgent, short-term projects comprising disparate musicians operating on different wavelengths. But after 15 years and six full length albums, The New Pornographers have found a way to circumvent these problems, chiefly by only convening every few years. […]

Album Review: The New Pornographers – Brill Bruisers

Album Review: Sex Hands – Pleh

When you talk about slackers, the glamorous, Americanised image is of beautiful surfer dudes smoking lots of weed and making lovely, reverb-heavy music about being sad. Best Coast, basically. The British equivalent isn’t nearly as cool. With a climate like ours, it’s nicer to sit in and watch telly all day and eat biscuits and […]
A hypnotic bass line introduces you to the slightly surreal adventure that is ‘To Be Kind’; Swans’ newest addition to their large collection of music. In what will feel like a two hour long hallucinogenic trip to the unseasoned Swans listener, this album may pass many people by as nothing more than a noisy din. […]

ALBUM REVIEW: SWANS – TO BE KIND