SINGLE: Manic Street Preachers – (It’s Not War) Just the End of Love

It’s hard to imagine now, but at the turn of the millennium The Manics were firmly out of favour. I remember seeing a picture in the NME of an overweight, dishevelled looking James Dean Bradfield with a caption saying something like, “Who ate all the pies”? Trust the NME to not see beyond the image. […]
– THE DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – The ABC Club come on stage in a haze of pyrotechnics, clad in leopard skin leotards and beckon to the crowd ‘Are you ready to motherfucking rock Manchester?’ Well, actually they don’t at all, but its Monday night in cold, wet and windy Manchester and I need a wakeup […]

LIVE: Wild Nothing / Milk Maid / The ABC Club – 08/10/2010

LIVE: DIETER MOBIUS/QA’AA/GNOD – 07/11/2010

– ISLINGTON MILL, SALFORD – Krautrock: has there ever been a more casually racist moniker for a music genre? In this day and age, with the musical landscape awash with weird and wonderful sub-genres -Math Rock, Aquacrunk, Witch House etc- the term “Krautrock”, coined by the British press in the 1970s as an umbrella term […]
Irish rock trio The Minutes will have lovers of all things down and dirty paying close attention. There’s nothing radically original about new single ‘Fleetwood’, built on a fusion of early Fleetwood Mac and, as the three Dubliners will no doubt be tired of hearing, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s grunge. Where this pulsing, upbeat song […]

SINGLES: The Minutes – Fleetwood

LIVE: YOUNGBLOOD BRASS BAND – 04/11/2010

– BAND ON THE WALL, MANCHESTER – Hullah Bazoo! If these guys were feline they’d wear flat caps and blue suede shoes! The crowd are full o’ beans, beans and the ravenous sexual thirst for the Young Blood Brass Band; a 9 piece group whose last album, ‘is that a riot?’ was released on their […]
Ray Davies is without doubt one of the UK’s very best rock & rollers – a saint amongst songwriters.  The Kinks were to north London, what The Beatles were to Liverpool and their output was equally varied – from the distorted rock & roll of “You Really Got Me” to the gorgeous mellowness of “Waterloo Sunset”. Kinky Ray […]

ALBUM: Ray Davies – See My Friends

ALBUM: Seal Cub Clubbing Club – Royal Variety

Seal Cub Clubbing Club’s ‘Royal Variety’ sounds like a mix of Radiohead, Terrorvision, Hot Chip, Arctic Monkeys, Oceansize, blah, blah, blah, blah… If you want to read a review about who this album sounds like, then go elsewhere – because although it’s easy to compare SCCC to Radiohead, especially when listening to songs like ‘The Borough’, the comparison […]
– THE RITZ BALLROOM, MANCHESTER – From the first song of hers I heard, ‘I Am Not a Robot’ I think, Marina seemed stratosphere-bound. Noting on her growing success she says: “This is my first proper tour. A lot of people say I didn’t expect to be here, but I did, because I wanted it”. […]

LIVE: MARINA AND THE DIAMONDS – 31/10/2010

SINGLE: Goldfrapp – Believer

London duo Goldfrapp’s latest single ‘Believer’ is an honest effort as far as bright and buzzy electropop goes. But new album ‘Head First’ was clearly produced with ‘sales first’ in mind. No one would argue that it’s a problem unique to the decade. Yet established artists face a challenge in the current climate to retain […]
Eccentric Icelandic songstress Björk has recorded a song for the upcoming Moomins film. Though The Moomins is a distinctly Scandinavian film, with the scattered percussion and flickering panpipes, ‘Comet Song’ sounds like it would go better with a Studio Ghibli animated, native South American scene set in dense rainforest as opposed to the barren wastelands […]

SINGLE: Björk – Comet Song