LIVE REVIEW: Elbow – 20/03/2011

– THE ECHO ARENA, LIVERPOOL – Band as territory. Discuss.  I’m gonna be honest with you. Declare a vested interest, if you like. I’ve got a long standing love affair with Elbow. Wholly unrequited, but never mind. Each time their tours come round, I watch on with increasing incredulity thinking “It can’t get any bigger […]
In April 1995, I spent two weeks in Seville. I’d never watched MTV before, and I was glued. It was Grunge Weekend and ‘Black Hole Sun’ was on every five minutes. Out shopping, I spotted a Nirvana bootleg and bought it, despite already owning all of Nirvana’s official albums. My Spanish friend asked me “Why?”, […]

ALBUM REVIEW: Soundgarden – Live on I-5

LIVE: HANNAH PEEL/LOVED ONES/RACHAEL & THE RED SOCKS – 19/03/2011

– CROSS STREET CHAPEL, MANCHESTER – Here’s the great thing about getting to a gig in time to see the support bands. Nine times out of ten, it’s some bunch of spotty ne’er-do-wells churning out their take on whatever the vogue is this week. No matter, you’ve only lost thirty minutes of your life to […]
– ACADEMY 2, MANCHESTER – Iron & Wine are now coming to the end of their UK tour. They have been promoting their new album ‘Kiss Each Other Clean’ from which their new single ‘Walking Far From Home’ is taken. Lyrically, this single is slightly weaker than other songs on the album, but the music […]

LIVE: IRON & WINE – 15/03/2011

ALBUM REVIEW: J Mascis – Several Shades Of Why

I was quite excited to hear J Mascis is finally releasing a solo album – although I’d always thought of his other post Dinosaur Jr. albums as mainly solo efforts. Still, the thought of a solo album is an interesting prospect, and I thought it might be not unlike his previous work with Dinosaur and […]
The title of The Vaccines’ debut album is, perhaps, a response to the masses of hype they’ve been the subject to since releasing their début single ‘Wreckin’ Bar (Ra Ra Ra)’ last November.  Most of this is due, perhaps, to the online buzz that they’ve created, and their tendency to keep their cards very close to their […]

ALBUM REVIEW: The Vaccines – What Did You Expect From The Vaccines?

LIVE: DEBT RECORDS SHOWCASE IN AID OF NORDOFF ROBBINS – 13/03/2011

– BAND ON THE WALL, MANCHESTER – Debt Records is a creative co-operative that ‘swaps favours, trades skills and shares round the good fortune of our individual members.’  By birthright, the in-effect music label is the love child of three members of ‘Louis Barabas & the Bedlam Six ’ (Who were also one of the […]
– ACADEMY 3, MANCHESTER – Academy 3 Manchester is in alcohol slicked high spirits, though the sort that could end in a drunken sing-song with a ephemeral best friend or spirited scrap outside the men’s toilets, depending entirely on whether somebody steps on your shoes or not. And they’re not sure what to make of […]

LIVE: CAITLIN ROSE – 12/03/2011

LIVE: THE DECEMBERISTS – 11/03/2011

  – THE ACADEMY, LEEDS – Few bands are quite so deeply unfashionable and misconstrued as The Decemberists. Though the NME grudgingly (and correctly) conceded that their charm permeated out as: “They transposed wordy Victorian melodrama onto folky sea shanties. But at least once they had a snappy poetic sensibility and an admirable interest in […]
New York Dolls are back on fantastic creative form with their wonderful new album, ‘Walking Backward In High Heels’, which was recorded and mixed in sunny Newcastle – miles from their home in New York City. Just shows you what you can achieve when you are taken from the clean streets of NY to the […]

ALBUM: New York Dolls – Dancing Backward In High Heels