LIVE: TOUCHE AMORE – 18/02/2017

– SOUND CONTROL, MANCHESTER – The distressed voice of Daniel Johnston suffocates the room in thoughts of an eternal, inescapable funeral. Calls to forever close, and the silence invites a dangerous animal to the stage of Manchester’s Sound Control. Restless and feverish, the platform is paced to the soundtrack of melodic incline, before cathartic contraction […]
– SOUP KITCHEN, MANCHESTER – Championed by BBC 6 Music and just this week announced on the bill to support Belle and Sebastian in Glasgow as part of the 6 Music Festival next month, Julia Jacklin is an artist going places. Tonight, she plays a sell-out gig at Manchester’s Soup Kitchen, touring her debut album […]

LIVE: JULIA JACKLIN / KETO – 23/02/2017

LIVE: PINEGROVE – 23/02/2017

– DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – Pinegrove make genuinely warm music that exposes all our fallibilities and good intentions. Their music is wracked with nostalgia, recalling late nights, old friends and drunken mistakes. The six-piece alt country band were one of the breakthrough acts of last year, with their album Cardinal featuring on numerous end-of-year lists […]
– FRED’S ALE HOUSE, MANCHESTER – “You wanna keep your change down your socks on this road. And your notes up your…” Mark Morriss seems to have Stockport Road all worked out during his two-night residency at Levenshulme’s Fred’s Ale House. He should know the score by now, this being his third two-night stint at […]

LIVE: MARK MORRISS – 17/02/2017

LIVE: MODERN BASEBALL – 17/02/2017

– ACADEMY 2, MANCHESTER – Modern Baseball (MoBo from herein, shamelessly stolen from a Pitchfork review), are a band at the forefront of that oft misunderstood genre ‘emo’. I say misunderstood, because it conjures up images of sad teenagers dressed in various shades of black being sad about how sad their lives are, taking all […]
– DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – Back in 2010, Young Legionnaire were quite a promising prospect. They had big support slots booked, a huge sounding debut album in the bag and an ever-growing following that were transfixed by their heartfelt brand of alt rock. Sadly, things didn’t really take off the way in which many initially […]

LIVE: YOUNG LEGIONNAIRE – 14/02/2017

LIVE: TUSKS / ALPINES – 17/02/2017

– SOUP KITCHEN, MANCHESTER – Tusks is the solo project of Emily Underhill. The Hastings-born singer-songwriter shifts from genre to genre, at one moment making a tense electronic song and at others channeling her inner King Krule as she aggressively strums her guitar whilst delivering a faultless vocal. Tusks is signed to the same label […]
– DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – Since 2001, German ambient techno master Ulrich Schnauss has been making the kind of music that sounds incredible through headphones; particularly when you’re on a long train journey, when you’re just staring out of the window watching the beautiful/bleak (delete as appropriate) landscapes of England’s sometimes green and pleasant land […]

LIVE: ULRICH SCHNAUSS – 15/02/2017

LIVE: DUKE GARWOOD – 12/02/2017

– DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – It’s been a while since the Deaf Institute, with its adapted original features and perfect gig ambience, committed cultural harakiri and was eclipsed by the apparently more original-feature-featuring, more perfectly ambient and notably larger Albert Hall. Once the hottest alt gig venue in town, the good old Deafy could no […]
– DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – When you decide you like a band, you listen to their music and decide, “I like that”. You don’t need their influences listed and what they’ve done previously to decide if you like them. However if that was all I had to go on without listening to Boxed In, I […]

LIVE: BOXED IN – 09/02/2017