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

LIVE: GRANT-LEE PHILLIPS & HOWE GELB – 10/10/2014

– THE DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER- Going from gig to gig around Britain with a guitar and a suitcase, a young Paul Simon once sat on a Cheshire railway station platform and wrote a lonely song about missing a home far, far away. Tonight, almost 50 years later, two other great American troubadours are in north-west […]
– GORILLA, MANCHESTER – In another world, Tom Vek probably deserves to be massive.  His recorded output is always unique and interesting: Plumbing the archives of electronic pop, he can achieve melodic dissonance, looped grunge and electro-wobble in the space of a single album, and this is enough to tempt me to Gorilla to see […]

LIVE: TOM VEK – 08/10/2014

LIVE: BILL RYDER-JONES WITH MANCHESTER CAMERATA – 09/10/2014

– MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL , MANCHESTER –  Manchester Cathedral plays host to the debut performance of Bill Ryder-Jones’s excellent debut album If…, recorded in 2011 as a hypothetical film score to the novel ‘If on a Winters Night a Traveler’, by Italo Calvino. The book itself is an experimental work, featuring ten chapters each of two […]
– SOUP KITCHEN, MANCHESTER – A few years back, I had the pleasure of seeing Tall Ships play to a packed out crowd at Soup Kitchen, as part of the annual Carefully Planned Festival. I’ve been a big fan of Tall Ships for a while now, so I was delighted to hear they were coming […]

LIVE: TALL SHIPS – 08/10/2014

LIVE: FUTURE OF THE LEFT – 05/10/2014

– THE ROADHOUSE, MANCHESTER – Andrew ‘Falco’ Falkous is an angry man. The Future of the Left singer is not only responsible for some of the best straight up rock music this country has produced in the last decade, but also a misanthropic outpouring that could make Charlie Brooker blush. Tonight the welsh band hit […]
– SOUP KITCHEN, MANCHESTER – I’ve spent the past few days downing lemsip, using all the toilet roll and refusing to take off my coat. Winter is here folks. Despite my immune system being at its weakest, there is something about this time of year that I love. There seem to be a few bands […]

LIVE: THE TWILIGHT SAD – 05/10/2014