LIVE: DEMOB HAPPY – 30/03/2015

– THE RUBY LOUNGE, MANCHESTER – It’s a stormy Monday night, but shelter and warmth from the high winds and incessant rain has kindly been provided tonight by Manchester’s renowned basement rock venue. Intrepid, die hard music fans huddle around the stage, eager to hear the next big thing, while trying to shake off their weekend hangovers. […]
With only a couple of brushes with the charts over the course of a 35-year career, Stephen Duffy is no stranger to commercial failure. Yet so disheartened was he with the non-impact of his last album, 2007’s Runout Groove, and the state of the music industry that he decided not to release any more records. […]

Album Review: The Lilac Time – No Sad Songs

Album Review: Fawn Spots – From Safer Place

From Safer Place, the début album from York-based punk trio Fawn Spots, rests on a tipping point: written, recorded and self-produced at the bands own rehearsal space, it captures them in ferocious form, a band at the threshold of the familiar and about to slash and burn their way into unknown territory. Having built a fearsome […]
Public Service Broadcasting is a band that ought not to be able to release more than one album. The formula of putting music to samples of archive footage is something at first arresting; it’s the sort of simple-but-effective idea you can’t believe nobody has exploited properly before. However, having heard the band’s fascinating debut record […]

Album Review: Public Service Broadcasting – The Race for Space

Album Review: Panda Bear – Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper

Noah’s voice is somewhere up in the ether. Opener ‘Sequential Circuits’ christens the album with a languorous sweep of the arm, the choral vocal so drenched in reverb that the edges blur. Noah Lennox (Panda Bear) harmonises with himself as sustained, echoing synth plays the same trick. The beat is a damp pulse, a squidgy […]
With the 2014 albums of the year lists still fresh in the memory, early releases for the new year have the responsibility of filling us with optimism for the next 12 months. Step up – Dan Mangan + Blacksmith. The multi-instrumentalist Canadian folk popster, Dan, grew up on a diet of Nick Drake and The […]

ALBUM REVIEW: DAN MANGAN + BLACKSMITH – CLUB MEDS

ALBUM REVIEW: KLOZAPIN – KLOZAPIN

The self-titled debut album from New York based band Klozapin is an exciting and vibrant mixture of genre, sound and influence. With so much going on identifying a category in terms of genre has proven difficult, and indeed the band pride themselves in this lack of restraint in the music (with elements of psychedelia, rock, […]
There’s an innate appeal in hearing bands who push boundaries and plough their own furrow. The interest for the listener in being at the edge of the musical map is there are fewer points of reference, no landmarks to keep us on track and provide comfortable orientation. For the bands performing in this space, there […]

Album Review: Trash Kit – Confidence

Album Review: Cool Ghouls – A Swirling Fire Burning Through the Rye

San Francisco’s Cool Ghouls’ second album A Swirling Fire Burning Through The Rye recorded live to tape by Sonny Smith (Sonny and the Sunsets) and mixed and mastered by Mikey Young (Total Control, Eddy Current Suppression Ring) captures a band enthralled to the heady sound of late sixties ‘Nuggets’ era garage and the loud guitars […]
2:54’s ‘Scarlet’ EP instantly caught my attention a couple of years ago, prompting me to sign up for their 2012 Deaf Institute gig. The London based alternative rock band’s self titled debut long player shortly followed, and didn’t disappoint – their broody, understated, infectious melodies hit all the right spots. Sisters Colette and Hannah Thurlow front the four-piece, […]

ALBUM REVIEW: 2:54 – The Other I