LIVE: CHRIS CUNNINGHAM – 22/04/2010

– OPERA HOUSE, MANCHESTER – Tonight, the Opera House is filled with casually dressed 20-40 year olds who have a passion for the audio and visually disturbing. The ornate and plush venue will be alien to many present here tonight, which adds to the air of uncertainty for what is to come. After the late, […]
– THE DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – Brooklyn is currently well established as a creative hotspot, particularly for US indie and experimental music. The members of tonight’s headlining act, Bear In Heaven hail from Georgia and Alabama but relocated to Brooklyn, where they have developed an exhilarating sound which combines psych, minimalist pop and krautrock and […]

LIVE:BEAR IN HEAVEN – 22/04/2010

LIVE: I CONCUR – 22/04/2010

– THE NIGHT & DAY CAFE, MANCHESTER – Taking to the stage with a minimum of fuss (in fact, starting to play with no discernable break between tune-up and opening song), I Concur immediately, if innocently established themselves as the shoegazer’s shoegazers. But what the quartet may lack in magnetism, they account for with their […]
– MOHO LIVE, MANCHESTER – Moho Live is one of Manchester’s newer underground venues with uber cool design, right in the heart of the Northern Quarter. It’s a decent size and is typical of many former mill basements, in that you’ll have to put up with obscured views from the iron pillars holding the rest […]

LIVE: THE PRIMITIVES – 20/04/2010

LIVE: ANGUS AND JULIA STONE – 20/04/2010

– THE RUBY LOUNGE, MANCHESTER – The last time I saw Angus and Julia Stone play Manchester, it was in the basement of the Bay Horse. The candlelit room was scattered with old chairs and chaise longes and the brother-sister duo wooed their small, but happy, audience with free milk and cookies. Their performance was […]
If this is your first taste of Kitsuné, you’d be forgiven for being a tad confused. They currently boast a successful fashion company, Parisian clothes store and a record label. Amidst this indie frenzy  they supply the world with the quirkiest, most exciting new music on regular compilations. Now releasing compilation number nine, “petit bateau […]

ALBUM: Kitsuné Maison 9 – Various Artists

LIVE: IDLEWILD – 18/04/2010

– MOHO LIVE, MANCHESTER – Four young lads, aged around ten or eleven, are having a game of football in a Levenshulme street, when one of them unleashes a volley that even the saintly Carlos Tevez would be proud of. It smashes into the corner of the goal and into the right wing mirror of […]
Although ‘Welcome to the Pleasuredome’ is commonly thought of as an album very much of the 1980s, in many ways it is not at all typical of other big hit pop albums of that decade. In fact it’s a strange mix that, in the end, cannot decide what it wants to be, either musically or […]

ALBUM: Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Welcome To The Pleasuredome (Deluxe Edition)

ALBUM: Monkey Poet – Welcome to the UK

Comedian Dough Stanhope once said “Babies are like poems – they’re beautiful… to their creators.” I’m not sure whether the ‘Monkey Poet’ [Matt Panesh] would call what he does on stage ‘beautiful’ – after all, it’s noisy, angry, challenging and unconventional. In all fairness, I think he’d be the first to admit that it’s positively ugly […]
– THE DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – First off I would like to say that The Deaf Institute is a truly fantastic venue to go and see live music. I’m sure that many of you reading this will already know that of course, but I’m getting it off my chest regardless. The stage is the perfect […]

LIVE: THE STRANGE BOYS – 17/04/2010