ALBUM REVIEW – DOT ALLISON: CONSCIOUSOLOGY

Concept albums were scorned and derided for a long time. Recently, the pendulum has flipped and significant numbers of long players, if not advertising themselves as concept albums, have an underlying theme that links the songs. This could be a response to streaming and the need to make long-playing records relevant as entities rather than […]
Blur are back with their ninth album, a whole 20 years since 2003’s ‘Think Tank’ and eight years since 2015’s ‘The Magic Whip’. At this point, you’re probably questioning what is happening. Is there finally a resurrection of our classic, beloved Britpop? Or have we just harped on enough to get another album? Either way, […]

ALBUM REVIEW – BLUR: THE BALLAD OF DARREN

PREVIEW: BELLE AND SEBASTIAN – MANCHESTER ACADEMY 21/07/2023

The effervescent Scots band return to our city following the release of their recent couple of astounding albums, 2022’s ‘A Bit Of Previous’ and this year’s ‘Late Developers’. This hugely anticipated re-scheduled gig will undoubtedly see the band drawing on not only the recent songs but utilising their brilliant back catalogue of work from 1996’s […]
A busy week of releases with plenty to grab the attention. Here is our weekly roundup. Wren Hinds        Don’t Die in the Bundu  A gleaming set of gently dappled and poetic songs about fatherhood and fortitude from Cape Town based singer-songwriter. Mull Historical Society   In My Mind There’s A Room        A concept album in which […]

ALBUM ROUNDUP WEEK ENDING 21 JULY 2023

ALBUM REVIEW – DEXYS: THE FEMININE DIVINE

Few bands can compete with the legacy Dexys Midnight Runners created in the early 1980s. Both the donkey jacketed, amphetamine surge soul gang of ‘Searching For The Young Soul Rebels’ and the dungaree clad Celtic soul barrage of ‘Too Rye Aye’ burst with incomparable euphoric energy and intensity. Unlike the records of many of their […]
The first sign of the summer lull with a comparatively quiet week but still a few releases to contemplate. Current Affairs                  Off The Tongue Current Affairs’ music straddles new-wave pop and gothic post-punk in the way that you should expect a Glasgow-Berlin band to do so: with grit and panache. Peace Flag Ensemble     Astral […]

ALBUM ROUNDUP WEEK ENDING 14 JULY 2023

LIVE REVIEW: JOHN GRANT SINGS THE SONGS OF PATSY CLINE WITH RICHARD HAWLEY AND BAND 11/07/2023

John Grant is blessed with a glorious, honeyed voice. Early in his solo career, he lived up to the cliché about being able to make anything sound good by turning a list of the items for sale in his childhood sweet shop into the most wonderful confection full of wonder and longing (‘Marz’). At Manchester […]
Until now, Habibi Funk Records has specialised in releasing music that was originally recorded decades ago. With their latest release, Charif Megarbane’s ‘Marzipan’, they have unleashed a collection of tracks recorded in Beirut and Lisbon in the second half of 2022. Megarbane is a multi-instrumentalist making what he calls ‘Lebrary’ music, a mix of Lebanese […]

ALBUM REVIEW – CHARIF MEGARBANE: MARZIPAN

THE MIGHTY BARD – BEYOND THE GATE

I never used to be pleased to see an album with only seven songs; it just didn’t seem like good value –but nowadays seven songs clocking in at over an hour seems like a promise of some good development and most likely some serious musicianship, so I’m all aboard! The Mighty Bard are a British […]
With pre-released singles, ‘Lovers Come and Lovers Go’, ‘Falling To Pieces’, and ‘Summer Girl’ already drilled into the brain of every indie-lover, The Pigeon Detectives are raising the tension in the scene with the wait for their sixth studio album, ‘TV Show’. The band’s celebratory rerelease of ‘Emergency’  for its 15th anniversary from earlier this […]

ALBUM REVIEW: THE PIGEON DETECTIVES – TV SHOW