LIVE: HENGE – 19/10/2019

-ACADEMY 2, MANCHESTER- It’s cold. Save for one brief run and the odd cursory hands over my eyes glance at the news, I’ve spent almost all day reading under a blanket. It gets to early evening and my housemates are making bread from scratch. Our home is just one pumpkin spiced beverage away from wholesome […]

-ACADEMY 2, MANCHESTER- The songs that have escaped New Jersey trio Yo La Tengo’s three-decades of eclectic experimentation spin in slow-motion in the form of little silver discs above the stage of Manchester’s Academy 2, and the evening aims to honour the dichotomy between unclouded atmosphere and razor-wire feedback that hangs above them as they […]

LIVE: YO LA TENGO – 30/04/2018

LIVE: ALVVAYS – 19/02/2018

-ACADEMY 2, MANCHESTER- Alvvays (actually pronounced ‘always’), are a 5 piece band fronted by singer Molly Rankin, formed back in 2011 in Toronto. Since then they have released two studio albums: their debut Alvvays, released in 2014, saw them compared musically to the likes of The Cranberries and catapulted them into a world of live […]

-ACADEMY 2, MANCHESTER- “Welcome to the house of love”. We are treated to a few Bob Marley singalongs with the whole crowd pitching in before Tash Sultana enters the stage. The crowd are in great spirits and there’s a chilled vibe in the air. This is mirrored in the first few seconds of Tash Sultana’s […]

LIVE: TASH SULTANA – 28/10/2017

GHOSTPOET RETURNS WITH NEW SINGLE ‘IMMIGRANT BOOGIE’ PLUS UK TOUR DATES THIS OCTOBER/NOVEMBER

‘Immigrant Boogie’ marks the first new material from Ghostpoet since the release of his Mercury-nominated Shedding Skin third album back in 2015. The track also heralds news of a full UK tour in the Autumn – see below for tour dates. Ghostpoet aka Obaro Ejimiwe explains: “It’s a first person account of a difficult journey across […]

– ACADEMY 2, MANCHESTER – Modern Baseball (MoBo from herein, shamelessly stolen from a Pitchfork review), are a band at the forefront of that oft misunderstood genre ‘emo’. I say misunderstood, because it conjures up images of sad teenagers dressed in various shades of black being sad about how sad their lives are, taking all […]

LIVE: MODERN BASEBALL – 17/02/2017

LIVE: HINDS – 26/11/2016

– ACADEMY 2, MANCHESTER – Hinds are coming to the end of the beginning. Tonight marks the first night of a final jaunt around the UK in support of their debut album Leave Me Alone, and they appear for the first time to be taking in what has happened to them. The Madrid quartet, who […]

– ACADEMY 2, MANCHESTER – Remember when things seemed a little more optimistic? When everything hadn’t seemingly gone to shit? When Prince was still funky and Bowie was still confounding expectations? When actual politicians were in charge of major countries? When hate wasn’t the ruling emotion? When the baby boomers weren’t making terrible decisions in […]

LIVE: LOCAL NATIVES – 08/11/2016

LIVE: SPRING KING / GET INUIT – 14/10/2016

– ACADEMY 2, MANCHESTER – My back is up against the wall, adjacent to the bouncer, at a Friday night showcase of Spring King. I’d guess the modal age here is a good five years younger than myself as I cast my eyes towards opener Get Inuit. The crowd is tightly bunched towards the front, […]

– ACADEMY 2, MANCHESTER – 285 Kent-by-way-of-Texas pseudo-slackers Parquet Courts have been consuming culture at an unnatural rate and spitting it back out just as fast since 2011 in an endless effort to move beyond prescriptive expectation and reflect the great distances between humanity and the claustrophobia of the concrete world, but according to bassist […]