Album Review: Jenny Hval – Apocalypse, girl

What is immediately striking about Jenny Hval’s third studio album Apocalypse, girl is the Norwegian’s fearlessness in exploiting speech and melody to convey her highly individual worldview. As a credited lyricist, writer and singer all rolled into one, her work demonstrates an artistic, experimental quality that incorporates familiar influences yet stretches out far beyond them. […]
– THE EAGLE INN, SALFORD – Being a city fattened on a diet of indie rock, Manchester isn’t famous for its incubation of electro-inclined sonic innovators. The scene that exists has been forced to become self-sufficient in order to survive. In some respects our nightlife is illustrious and unparalleled, but in terms of variety of […]

LIVE: FROM THE KITES OF SAN QUENTIN – 19/06/2015

LIVE: DAN DEACON – 17/06/2015

– FAT OUT’S BURROW, SALFORD – This is not your average Wednesday night. A grown man stands above us, wearing khaki shorts, a schoolboy-like shirt and red socks pulled up to his knees. Soon, this man would hold a level of control over us. He would direct us, manipulate us and frankly embarrass us. His […]
Gengahr have trapped a little nugget of sunshine. A Dream Outside is music perfectly paired with a healthy dose of vitamin D. It percolates your inner ear and clouds your vision and poof: you’re at a sunny festival, on a grassy knoll overlooking satellite stage. It gives you that midway-through-my-fourth-warm-can buzz. Although there are plenty […]

Album Review: Gengahr – A Dream Outside

LIVE: ELVIS COSTELLO – 10/06/2015

– THE BRIDGEWATER HALL, MANCHESTER – Accidentally spoiling things for myself before I can enjoy them naturally has become my bread and butter these days. A recent search for articles on the brilliant HBO series ‘Oz’ and revealing the deaths of certain characters was a real gut punch. Today it’s a Twitter mishap – On […]
Pacific, an unsigned Cheshire band, have recently released the video to their hotly anticipated single, ‘Those Nights’. The video, directed and filmed by LAB Exposure, would not look out of place if an established indie band had used it, the visuals successfully conveying Anthony’s (singer-songwriter) struggle to acknowledge what is going on around him as […]

Single Review: Pacific – Those Nights (Official Video)

LIVE: MANCHESTER PSYCH FEST III – 13/06/2015

– NIGHT & DAY CAFE, MANCHESTER – On the back of two successful events last year, Manchester Psych Fest brings about their third installment with an eclectic line up which does have one questioning what exactly is ‘psych’ these days. First on the bill we have one of the newest members of the Manchester psych […]
The new album from Kathryn Williams owes its origin to a commission from New Writing North for the Durham Book Festival, when she was asked to write songs inspired by Sylvia Plath’s book The Bell Jar. It was a daunting prospect for the Liverpool-born singer-songwriter and after returning to the source text, the initial five […]

Album Review: Kathryn Williams – Hypoxia

LIVE: ANDREW JACKSON JIHAD – 11/06/2015

–  THE DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – In case any of us had forgotten, Andrew Jackson Jihad (AJJ) reminds us that guitars can actually sweat. And bleed. Clean and raucous, friendly furious, the punk-folk band from Arizona turs up as an effective catalyst for teenagers’ rage, as most of the audience tonight is pretty young and […]
– GULLIVERS, MANCHESTER – This is, hands down, the oddest gig I’ve been to. And I saw the first iteration of The Knife’s Shake The Habitual tour. Jenny Hval, the Norwegian art-pop-composer-sometime—metal-vocalist has brought her show to Manchester’s intimate Gullivers, and it’s full on mental. Hval has just released her best album, Apocalypse, girl, and […]

LIVE: JENNY HVAL – 11/06/2015