LIVE: VESSELS – 05/10/2017

-SOUP KITCHEN, MANCHESTER- I remember really getting into math and post rock in 2008 which was when Leeds outfit Vessels released their debut album. It was a perfect marriage of the two sub-genres and naturally I thought it was ace. Fast forward a few years and I went to see the quintet at a festival, […]
-THE EAGLE INN, SALFORD- Tonight is the first time I’ll be seeing Jen Cloher, the first time Jen Cloher will play in Manchester and the first time I’ll be attending a gig at the Eagle Inn in Salford. It’s good to try new things, especially when it comes to music. However, Jen is anything but […]

LIVE: JEN CLOHER / CABLE TIES – 29/09/2017

LIVE – LIVERPOOL INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF PSYCHEDELIA 2017

There’s still time to fit in another festival this year, isn’t there? This ‘summer’ has been like an extended autumn anyhow, so it doesn’t really make a difference. Spending the weekend in an industrial estate not far from Liverpool city centre and the docks has become an annual ritual for me, and a must – […]
-MANCHESTER ARENA- There’s a part near the beginning of the recent Nick Cave documentary, which charts the making of Skeleton Tree, his latest album with the Bad Seeds, in which he says: “Isn’t it the invisible things, the lost things, that have so much mass? And are as big as the universe?” Cave has recently suffered […]

LIVE: NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS – 25/09/2017

LIVE: THE NATIONAL – 22/09/2017

-APOLLO, MANCHESTER- I first listened to The National’s music at my brother’s place in Leeds not long after the band’s third album Alligator had come out. Heading out afterwards into that Saturday afternoon’s bright sunlight I couldn’t stop singing the “sunglasses” line from the record’s opening track ‘Secret Meeting’. And that’s how it is with […]
-DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER- For a harmonica-playing psych-enthusiast, Melbourne band The Murlocs were essentially a dream come true.  I immediately fell for Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s snarling vocals and classic bluesman swagger, and the garage guitars. They were also my introduction to the wonderful Flightless record label – an introduction that led me to King Gizzard and the […]

LIVE: THE MURLOCS – 20/09/2017

ALBUM REVIEW: ZOLA JESUS – OKOVI

Nika Roza Danilova, better known as Zola Jesus, returned to her native woods of Wisconsin, built a house mere steps away from her semi-dilapidated childhood tree-fort and watched it slowly give itself back to the earth while raising her sixth offering in ‘Okovi’. Over the course of what she describes as “a profound meditation on […]
“I always remember things better than they were and miss people more than I should,” explains Austin Getz, frontman of  amber-drunk sun-seekers Turnover, when speaking of the mournful thinking behind the band’s fractured, Will Yip-produced breakthrough ‘Peripheral Vision’. Hyper-confessional meditations on sex, obsession, and loss ran through the self-crucifying offering, but where Turnover sourced ‘Peripheral […]

ALBUM REVIEW: TURNOVER – GOOD NATURE

LIVE: CHARLY BLISS – 19/09/2017

-THE EAGLE INN, SALFORD- The only people in Salford’s hidden pearl The Eagle Inn tonight who are shocked by the high turnout are the band themselves. Several times throughout their brisk, whistle-stop set, the Brooklyn quartet appear charmingly elated by the fact that a hundred or so strangers from such a faraway place know about […]
-STORE STREET WAREHOUSE, MANCHESTER- Now and again I can be prone to hyperbole when talking about music, such is my enthusiasm for certain bands. But, dear reader, hear me out here: LCD Soundsystem have just won music with their first night (of two) opening this year’s Warehouse Project season. Everyone else should just pack up […]

LIVE: LCD SOUNDSYSTEM – 16/09/2017