Kicking off like a primary school orchestra warming up for a show, ‘A Midsummer Evening’ is a heart-filling summer song with a sting of fire in its tail. The choral chanting, discordant electronic instrumentation and strange imagining of a land…
Liz Green creates awesome, disturbing, strange worlds in her own particular, timeless way. She twists and flips her way through eccentrically created vistas, breathing life into strange individuals and creating music that is both fascinating and astonishingly good. Her second…
If Jack and the Beanstalk had featured a crazed-eyed angry woman and the threat of being locked away to dance for eternity in a picture frame, I suspect we’d all have been significantly more terrified as wee children. Heg and…
As we watch her prepare to attend her son’s birthday party, flashes of a transgender mother’s dingy home and dingier lifestyle are interspersed with the technicolor gathering she hopes to attend. Director James Cathcart imbues the father-to-son message of Micahel…
In Hard Rain Barb Jungr pays homage to some of the most violently political songs of a pair of legendary storytellers and songwriters. Mingling the angry, searingly clear-sighted songs of Bob Dylan with the indignant, rage-imbued writing of Leonard Cohen, Jungr brings…
Liz Green makes ‘tragicomic pop’ that imagines a dark, horribly grown-up fairytale realm of terrifying creatures and sinister folk. She’s into goblins and writes about blood rather a lot, and we love it all. ‘Rybka’ is a bluesy story of…
Two albums in with a third on the way, the Moulettes have firmly set out their stall of awesomeness as the enormous, complex, witty and unpredictable title track off forthcoming LP Constellations demonstrates all too well. With layers of big, stompy…
Seabear – I’ll Build You A Fire from seabear on Vimeo. Seabear are an intoxicatingly cool Icelandic collective whose starry brand of folk-pop celebrates all that is simple and beautiful in life. ‘I’ll Build You a Fire’ is a glorious…
In Undress, adoptive Mancunian Jesca Hoop’s acoustic reworking of 2009 release Hunting my Dress strips five-year-old songs down to the bare, scintillating bones with magnificent results. Welcoming Elbow’s Guy Garvey, Willy Mason, Erika Wennerstrom (of Heartless Bastards) and Samuel Beam…
