Global Gathering
WIN! We’ve a pair of weekend tickets to this year’s Global Gathering to give away. To enter, simply ‘like’ us on Facebook, and answer the question in the comments below today’s post over there.
Winner will be chosen at random on Friday 6th July, and informed via Facebook. Entrants must be over 18 and will need to provide ID. More information about this year’s event after the jump. … Continue Reading
Laura Marling
By Sam Cleeve
March 2, 2012
Laura Marling’s current UK tour is something of a victory-lap for the Reading-born folkie. Her latest album, A Creature I Don’t Know, was followed by last year’s When The Bell Tolls tour, a jaunt that took in the finest of this country’s cathedrals (and I would guess filled the lot of them to the rafters). … Continue Reading
Josh T Pearson
By Sam Cleeve
September 28, 2011
“I’m a little surprised”, explains the inimitably bearded cult hero Josh T Pearson, “[that] we’ve been touring pretty much since the album came out, and people keep coming to see these ten-minute long suicide songs. Do y’all not have anything better to do?” Tonight – somewhat ironically – Pearson performs these so-called “suicide songs” at Birmingham’s Glee Club, a venue that primarily plays host to comedy nights. Even more sardonic is the fact that these painfully honest, bare-bones heartbreak memoirs are being played by their world-weary composer in front of six-foot high signage that simply reads ‘glee’. … Continue Reading
King Creosote and Jon Hopkins
September 9, 2011
King Creosote (moniker of beloved Scottish folkie Kenny Anderson) stands in stark contrast to the palatial surroundings he finds himself in tonight. Queen Elizabeth Hall, smaller sibling of its neighbour and equally regally named Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank is not – I’m sure – akin to the spaces he’s spent the better part of his heroic forty-album career performing in. The seats are cushioned, the lobby vast, and the softly lit hall is teeming with ushers. Anderson, meanwhile, shuffles about dressed in faded jeans and tattered shirt (and as the ageing folk bastion sings on Diamond Mine’s ‘Bats In The Attic’: “I’m growing silver in my sideburns” – his ruffled greying hair funnily enough adding to his boyish insouciance). … Continue Reading
30 May, 2011
While this year’s bevy of bands featured a few unpolished gems supporting the bigger names, you can’t help but feel that Dot to Dot 2011 was devoid of the inspired sparks that defined the event’s previous outings. The lineup was maybe more ‘accessible’ than ever before, but then with tickets still available on the door for each of the three legs, this didn’t necessarily mean ‘commercial success’. It’s not that it was completely desolate in Manchester’s venues, it’s just that I was perhaps expecting more enthusiasm and uptake for a festival that while this year didn’t offer the most innovative of lineups, still manages to offer fantastic value for money (and on a bank holiday).
Seems that spring is a good time for those sprawling multi-venue potpourri festivals that celebrate the oft-overlooked fresh faces as much as they do the more established acts. Since March, we’ve already seen the Texan behemoth SXSW roll out another endless line-up of live music, and here on our own turf both Brighton’s Great Escape and Liverpool Sound City have applied the same formula in their promotion of new music in the past month. Over the course of the bank holiday weekend though, this concept gets expanded as the annual Dot to Dot hosts it’s hectic venue-hopping one-day party in no less than three separate cities.
… Continue Reading
10 March, 2011
Despite being the ‘second city’, there’s as an odd lack of decent, credible bands stopping in Birmingham. So it comes as welcome news to learn that Iron and Wine, in its latest incarnation, aren’t only playing in our city, they are doing so in Town Hall, a beautiful and overlooked venue in what is, let’s face it, not otherwise the prettiest of cities. … Continue Reading
Josh T Pearson - Last Of The Country Gentlemen
Woe is Josh T. Pearson. I feel for the woman that has to deal with the undoubtedly catastrophic guilt of turning Pearson into this, the very definition of heartbreak. … Continue Reading
Apparently, the ‘magic place’ referred to by Julianna Barwick on her debut for Asthmatic Kitty is, in fact, a tree. “Oh, how very arcane” I hear you grumble. Well, maybe. Barwick’s vocal-based music is indeed entirely lyric-less, which effectively renders the songs a series of impressionistic vignettes, where the listener’s only aid in interpretation is each vague title. But where you’d expect there to be something very alienating about that, there’s actually a real sense of community about The Magic Place. … Continue Reading
Tamaryn - The Waves
Scanning over the PR blurb for Tamaryn’s first release, the words ‘sun-stricken’, ‘dream-pop’ and ‘San Francisco’ hit me round the face with a bluntly unimaginative thud. Here’s what I thought: Best Coast release their California recorded, reverb injected, Pitchfork Best New Music’d summer debut, and labels x, y and z follow swiftly behind with their en vogue doppelgangers. How very cynical of me. Luckily, there’s more to it than all that.
Where the debut mentioned bottles that sunlight-through-palm-trees summer vacation feeling, The Waves is a desert heat haze – heavy, thick and translucent in detail and content (hell, it’s even being released via Mexican Summer). It’s also worth noting that this same factor makes The Waves difficult to asses lyrically – with only the odd word filtering through as comprehensible, there’s much more of an impressionistic suggestion rather than a definitive message. … Continue Reading
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