LIVE: DIVINE COMEDY – 09/11/2010

– ACADEMY 2, MANCHESTER – Divine Comedy is Neil Hannon is Divine Comedy. It’s a Badly Drawn Boy /Damon Gough dynamic which means there will never be different line-ups… unless Neil plans on major schizophrenic schisms. Hannon does sometimes play with a band but tonight it’s only Neil, armed only with a grand piano, acoustic […]
Gregory and The Hawk, it sounds like a children’s book does it not? Indeed, singer songwriter, Meredith Godreau, took the name from her brother, Gregory, and his imaginary childhood hawk in a George Eliot-esque move – wearing the mask of someone/something else to gain credibility and avoid being pigeonholed. In Godreau’s case it was to […]

ALBUM: Gregory and The Hawk – Leche

ALBUM: MIDDLE CLASS RUT – NO NAME NO COLOR

“I came into this world as nothing, I ain’t gonna leave that way,” sings Zack Lopez on ‘I guess You Could Say’, the track which, on 10 March 2009, Zane Lowe damningly named his Hottest Record in the World. In a world of 6 billion people, Zane Lowe is a waste of human matter, and a […]
It’s hard to imagine now, but at the turn of the millennium The Manics were firmly out of favour. I remember seeing a picture in the NME of an overweight, dishevelled looking James Dean Bradfield with a caption saying something like, “Who ate all the pies”? Trust the NME to not see beyond the image. […]

SINGLE: Manic Street Preachers – (It’s Not War) Just the End of Love

LIVE: Wild Nothing / Milk Maid / The ABC Club – 08/10/2010

– THE DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – The ABC Club come on stage in a haze of pyrotechnics, clad in leopard skin leotards and beckon to the crowd ‘Are you ready to motherfucking rock Manchester?’ Well, actually they don’t at all, but its Monday night in cold, wet and windy Manchester and I need a wakeup […]
– ISLINGTON MILL, SALFORD – Krautrock: has there ever been a more casually racist moniker for a music genre? In this day and age, with the musical landscape awash with weird and wonderful sub-genres -Math Rock, Aquacrunk, Witch House etc- the term “Krautrock”, coined by the British press in the 1970s as an umbrella term […]

LIVE: DIETER MOBIUS/QA’AA/GNOD – 07/11/2010

SINGLES: The Minutes – Fleetwood

Irish rock trio The Minutes will have lovers of all things down and dirty paying close attention. There’s nothing radically original about new single ‘Fleetwood’, built on a fusion of early Fleetwood Mac and, as the three Dubliners will no doubt be tired of hearing, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s grunge. Where this pulsing, upbeat song […]
– BAND ON THE WALL, MANCHESTER – Hullah Bazoo! If these guys were feline they’d wear flat caps and blue suede shoes! The crowd are full o’ beans, beans and the ravenous sexual thirst for the Young Blood Brass Band; a 9 piece group whose last album, ‘is that a riot?’ was released on their […]

LIVE: YOUNGBLOOD BRASS BAND – 04/11/2010

ALBUM: Ray Davies – See My Friends

Ray Davies is without doubt one of the UK’s very best rock & rollers – a saint amongst songwriters.  The Kinks were to north London, what The Beatles were to Liverpool and their output was equally varied – from the distorted rock & roll of “You Really Got Me” to the gorgeous mellowness of “Waterloo Sunset”. Kinky Ray […]
Seal Cub Clubbing Club’s ‘Royal Variety’ sounds like a mix of Radiohead, Terrorvision, Hot Chip, Arctic Monkeys, Oceansize, blah, blah, blah, blah… If you want to read a review about who this album sounds like, then go elsewhere – because although it’s easy to compare SCCC to Radiohead, especially when listening to songs like ‘The Borough’, the comparison […]

ALBUM: Seal Cub Clubbing Club – Royal Variety