2015 END OF YEAR – ANDY VINE

ALBUMS Blanck Mass: Dumb Flesh Alternately transcendental and crushing, Blanck Mass’ second album takes the abrasive ambience of his debut and marries them to stuttering glitch and punishing beats. Powerful, throbbing sound disorientates, blurring into high contrast synths and ravey stabs, walls of droning noise, exotic rhythms and twitchy samples. It’s aggressive, it’s blissed out, […]
You know that feeling that only arises as a result of watching Eurovision? That nauseous glee that accompanies a man from Belarus singing like he’s got a pineapple in his colon; or the haughty guffaw at a trio of leather-clad Moldovans babbling over some mimed sub-Rihanna dance-pop. This, combined with the schadenfreude developed as a […]

Album Review: Little Boots – Nocturnes

LIVE: ELLIE GOULDING – 10/12/2009

– ACADEMY 2, MANCHESTER – Being named in the BBC Sounds of 2010 Longlist (actually it’s not that long, as it only contains a grand total of 15 acts) is most certainly an accolade that anyone trying to make their name in the music world would love to have bestowed upon them. Last year’s list […]
– ACADEMY 2, MANCHESTER – Silhouetted shapes with hoodies move across the stage like a scene from a poorly lit budget horror film. It’s anything but horrifying though, it’s Little Boots and her gang. The first number is deliberately slow and is set mostly in darkness. It’s intriguing and slightly unsettling. Then, bang! The stage […]

LIVE: LITTLE BOOTS – 10/12/2009

LIVE: LITTLE BOOTS – 13/05/2009

– CLUB ACADEMY, MANCHESTER – At the tail end of last year, 130 of the UK’s leading music critics and broadcasters came together to compile the BBC’s Sound of 2009. The final list included many acts that you will have heard day after day over the airwaves, such as La Roux, White Lies and Lady […]