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 […]
– ACADEMY 1, MANCHESTER – Following an undoubtedly successful summer, Clean Bandit’s marathon of dates subliminally catalyse their position at the front of public consciousness. Notably reflected in the quartet’s newfound take on electronic music, and symbolised by the dramatic soar in venue capacity, Clean Bandit scream modernity breaking the archaic stereotype of not only […]

LIVE: CLEAN BANDIT – 17/10/2014

LIVE: BABY GODZILLA – 20/10/2014

– SOUND CONTROL, MANCHESTER – If you’ve been any rock festival or gig in the past 12 months, chances are you’ve seen Baby Godzilla. The Nottingham-based foursome have been working super hard on the live front this year, playing absolutely anywhere they’re asked to and with an army of fans growing at each gig and […]
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

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