If ever a genre was in need of a spark of new blood, it’s country music. Sometimes it can feel a little like a museum piece: all nods and winks to the past and rigid adherence to a pre-defined structure.…
Category: Records
EP | Soap&Skin – Sugarbread
You know when you put a Soap&Skin record on that things are about to get unsettling it and so it is that ‘Sugarbread’, the title track of her new EP, opens up with the muffled sounds of screaming layered over…
Premiere | Songs For Walter – Family Hold Back
Manchester’s family man Laurie Hulme, aka Songs For Walter, is off to a fine start in 2013. Already longlisted for Glastonbury’s Emerging Talent competition, he’s now releasing a single every month until the summer, when he plans to compile them…
EP | Joe Banfi – Nomads
Where Joe Banfi’s last EP Iron felt like a conscious effort to show off the Northwich man’s full range in four short songs, there is no such pressure affecting the follow-up Nomads. Instead, Communion’s next big thing seems to be…
Album | John Grant – Pale Green Ghosts
Last year, in front of an audience of people on the south bank of the river Thames, John Grant came out for the second time in his life. The first time he came out it had been as homosexual –…
Album | Stornoway – Tales From Terra Firma
Stornoway have a bit of a history with FFS. Around the time of their first album we became a little frustrated with their insistence that they were not a folk band. We wrote our review of the record as an…
Album | Klak Tik – The Servants
The Servants, Klak Tik’s second full-length release, is an album of tensions. Begun during a trip the band took to a remote part of Wales – including sessions in a chapel and underneath Parys Mountain – and finished back in…
Album | Olafur Arnalds – For Now I Am Winter
The third album of Icelandic musician and producer Olafur Arnalds, For Now I am Winter, is intricately woven from repeating piano rhythms, delicate strings and loops to create a haunting and unsettling effect. From the opening track ‘Sudden Throw’ it…
EP | Little Green Cars – Harper Lee
The keys are in the ignition and the engine is revving: Little Green Cars are on their way. They are a five-piece band from Dublin who made it onto the BBC Sound of 2013 shortlist – as well as the…
EP | Worry Dolls – Worry Dolls
Like fish without chips or Wallace without Gromit, when listening to Worry Dolls its hard to imagine what Rosie or Zoe might have sounded like as the two solo artists who met at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts and…