Album Review: Gengahr – A Dream Outside

Gengahr have trapped a little nugget of sunshine. A Dream Outside is music perfectly paired with a healthy dose of vitamin D. It percolates your inner ear and clouds your vision and poof: you’re at a sunny festival, on a grassy knoll overlooking satellite stage. It gives you that midway-through-my-fourth-warm-can buzz. Although there are plenty […]
– THE BRIDGEWATER HALL, MANCHESTER – Accidentally spoiling things for myself before I can enjoy them naturally has become my bread and butter these days. A recent search for articles on the brilliant HBO series ‘Oz’ and revealing the deaths of certain characters was a real gut punch. Today it’s a Twitter mishap – On […]

LIVE: ELVIS COSTELLO – 10/06/2015

Single Review: Pacific – Those Nights (Official Video)

Pacific, an unsigned Cheshire band, have recently released the video to their hotly anticipated single, ‘Those Nights’. The video, directed and filmed by LAB Exposure, would not look out of place if an established indie band had used it, the visuals successfully conveying Anthony’s (singer-songwriter) struggle to acknowledge what is going on around him as […]
– NIGHT & DAY CAFE, MANCHESTER – On the back of two successful events last year, Manchester Psych Fest brings about their third installment with an eclectic line up which does have one questioning what exactly is ‘psych’ these days. First on the bill we have one of the newest members of the Manchester psych […]

LIVE: MANCHESTER PSYCH FEST III – 13/06/2015

Album Review: Kathryn Williams – Hypoxia

The new album from Kathryn Williams owes its origin to a commission from New Writing North for the Durham Book Festival, when she was asked to write songs inspired by Sylvia Plath’s book The Bell Jar. It was a daunting prospect for the Liverpool-born singer-songwriter and after returning to the source text, the initial five […]
–  THE DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – In case any of us had forgotten, Andrew Jackson Jihad (AJJ) reminds us that guitars can actually sweat. And bleed. Clean and raucous, friendly furious, the punk-folk band from Arizona turs up as an effective catalyst for teenagers’ rage, as most of the audience tonight is pretty young and […]

LIVE: ANDREW JACKSON JIHAD – 11/06/2015

LIVE: JENNY HVAL – 11/06/2015

– GULLIVERS, MANCHESTER – This is, hands down, the oddest gig I’ve been to. And I saw the first iteration of The Knife’s Shake The Habitual tour. Jenny Hval, the Norwegian art-pop-composer-sometime—metal-vocalist has brought her show to Manchester’s intimate Gullivers, and it’s full on mental. Hval has just released her best album, Apocalypse, girl, and […]
– THE RITZ, MANCHESTER – British Sea Power are somewhat of a cult these days, a reputation for doing a lot for their fans, most of which are quite mad. Their online merchandise shop is, without doubt, one of the best in the world. They harbour the biggest range of band t-shirts known to man […]

LIVE: BRITISH SEA POWER – 12/06/2015

LIVE: DIIV – 10/06/2015

– NIGHT & DAY CAFE, MANCHESTER – Tonight’s entertainment comes in the form of New York’s finest surf rockers gracing this historic venue with their presence. Signed to Captured Tracks, DIIV started as a solo project for lead singer Zachary Smith Cole, which interestingly was originally called Dive after the Nirvana track. Cole put together a […]
There is as much to treasure about Nozinja Lodge as a statement of where the music industry finds itself in 2015 as there is with the addictive music itself. Nozinja – aka Richard Mthethwa – hails from the poverty-stricken South African province of Limpopo, and has become the talisman for the burgeoning genre hybrid known […]

Album Review: Nozinja – Nozinja Lodge