SINGLE REVIEW: The Jolly Boys – Perfect Day

Does anyone who covers ‘Perfect Day’ actually know it’s about heroin? I sometimes wonder. Getting the BBC to adopt this seminal song could be seen as a bizarrely subversive moment. But considering it was used to express the diversity of BBC coverage, and the song’s complex exploration of romantic expression, drug abuse, suppressed homosexuality and […]
Taken from this year’s Outlaster album, ‘You Can Take Your Time’ sounds so much like a variant on ‘Keep Me Warm’ by Ida Maria that it’s unreal. Essentially the tunes are identical, but it’s the little details that make or break a song. The devil is, as always, in the details. ‘Keep Me Warm’ is essentially […]

SINGLE REVIEW – Nina Nastasia – You Can Take Your Time

SINGLE REVIEW: The Chanteuse & The Crippled Claw – Are You One

Throughout each month I will regularly trawl through the listings on each of the Manchester venues websites to find the great and the good that will be playing so we can pass on this info in our handpicked gig guide. Now believe it or not, we will only include something in the guide if we […]
Montreal-based Olivier Alary, the man behind Ensemble, is a self-destructive songwriter a la Thom Yorke. It’s not that Ensemble really sound anything like Radiohead, Alary sings in French for a start, it’s just that both he and Yorke pen accessible, beautiful songs and do everything they can to fuck them up, primarily through somewhat schizophrenic […]

SINGLE REVIEW: Ensemble – Envie D’Avalanches

SINGLE REVIEW: The National – Terrible Love

To coincide with the expanded edition of High Violet, The National release the album’s best track, ‘Terrible Love’. Though well-respected, The National have always courted boringness like an enemy they keep too close. But with ‘Terrible Love’ that enemy is thrown into a pit and buried alive, because wow, this track is extraordinary. Cleverly, the guitars […]
King Midas Sound makes a welcome return to Hyperdub since ‘Waiting For You’ landed in November last year, making a large dub shaped dent in our world. With the album still ringing in our ears and the live show burning into our minds (if you were lucky enough to catch it), this stands as the […]

SINGLE: King Midas Sound – Lost (with video)

SINGLE: The Wombats – Tokyo (Vampires & Wolves)

The Wombats came to represent everything that was wrong with the scratchy, post-Libertines indie scene. Their lyrics were not just dull, they were obviously stupid. Will moving to New York, a city that famously never sleeps, help you defeat insomnia? And is dancing to Joy Division ironic? No it will not, and no it fucking […]
Last year, Darkstar laid out some concrete foundations with the ludicrously catchy “Aidy’s Girl is a Computer”. Their debut release on Hyperdub, the track managed to make its way around clubs, televisions and home stereo’s alike, and is still firmly lodged somewhere in my brain for the foresee able future (I still love it!) Since […]

SINGLE REVIEW: Darkstar – Gold

SINGLE REVIEW: The Decemberists – Down By The Water

The swash-buckling, sea-shanty-ing troubadours are back with an excellent, rousing single. The band that brought you an 11 minute tale of revenge culminating in a torture scene inside a whale’s stomach, have teamed up with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck (and his magical twelve string guitar) and Gillian Welch. ‘Down by the Water’ actually sounds a lot […]
Though it might be hard to believe, ‘Fits & Starts’ is one of the more upbeat moments from Hold This Ghost – an album of nostalgic, folk mastery. In ‘Fits & Starts’ it feels like Musée Mécanique are holding a warm, living person (though possibly dying), as opposed to a cold, clammy ghost. This is […]

SINGLE: Musée Mécanique – Fits & Starts