Josh T Pearson, Birmingham, Glee Club

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, London, Queen Elizabeth Hall

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

Dot to Dot 2011 – Manchester

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).

… Continue Reading

Dot to Dot Preview

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

Iron and Wine, Daniel Martin Moore – Town Hall, Birmingham

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

Julianna Barwick – The Magic Place

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

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

Max Richter – Infra

Max Richter - Infra

“Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain” – two lines taken from the opening of T.S. Eliot’s hugely significant modernist poem, ‘The Waste Land’. In the context of Max Richter’s newest release Infra, the poem acts as the inspirational forefather behind the work, first informing the dance of choreographer Wayne McGregor, who personally asked Richter to create a twenty-five minute score to his ballet (and collaboration with artist Julian Opie) for The Royal Opera House. There’s a conceptual truth behind these words that can be heard throughout Infra. It’s certainly a dual-faceted record, oscillating in choice of instrumentation between more traditional classical genres such as the string quintet or works for solo piano, to the strict parameters of Richter’s finely measured static hum – perpetually contrasting the “dull roots” with the “spring rain”, flickering between “memory” and “desire”. … Continue Reading

Whale Watching, Reading Concert Hall

Whale Watching

April 25, 2010

Following a brief state of limbo after the extremely inconsiderate eruption of one of Iceland’s largest natural phenomena, the eight musicians that comprise Bedroom Community’s Whale Watching Tour make their third stop at Reading’s Concert Hall. Centered around Icelandic producer Valgeir Sigurðsson, composer Nico Muhly, electronic wizard Ben Frost and folk singer Sam Amidon, the set samples from each of the four’s catalogues. While the artist’s different genres and sounds gladly sit alongside one another on their label’s roster, you still might question the pragmatism of an evening spent flicking arbitrarily between them. Such accusations are soon stunted however, upon the realisation that Muhly’s treatment of the additional quartet of musicians (namely a violinist, violist, trombonist and double bassist) is to act as tonight’s most obvious cohesive element. … Continue Reading