Having had only limited exposure to the Be Good Tanyas and always been interested in hearing more, I fall squarely within the target audience for a retrospective, and this set forms a fine education. The older songs tend to be…
Category: Records
Album | Adrian Crowley – I See Three Birds Flying
It’s hard to tell whether being called the “best songwriter no-one’s ever heard of” is a compliment or a barb. Adrian Crowley knows just how it feels to wrestle with that conundrum but, when the description is delivered by none…
Album | Hurray For The Riff Raff – Look Out Mama
The story of Alynda Lee Segarra’s drift into the music business is one of those that seems a little too good to be true. The notion that, by the age of 17, she had already escaped The Bronx to drift…
Album | Jackamo Brown – Oh No, The Drift of the World
It would be fair to say Scroobius Pip is not a name I ever expected to write on this website. However, from the wondrously bearded rapper-poet’s new Speech Development label comes man of mystery Jackamo Brown with his curiously titled…
Album | The Mountain Goats – Transcendental Youth
Transcendental Youth is an album about being young and reckless, about Frankie Lymon, about the Diaz Brothers, about running and jumping and leaving everything behind. An album about the fleetingness of youth that could, perhaps ironically, only have been written…
EP | Cara Mitchell – Have You Ever Wondered
There is certainly a very large buzz circulating around the 16 year old Aberdeen songstress Cara Mitchell. Notching up support slots with Gemma Hayes and Pearl and the Puppets, as well as being compared to the likes of Ellie Goulding…
Album | Me & My Friends – Beneath A Level Head
You might not have heard of Me and My Friends before. In fact, if you’re not a regular around the Leeds music scene or a devotee of FFS’s New Bands Panel, you probably won’t have. After one listen to their…
Album | Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs – Sunday Run Me Over
After the best part of twenty years, it’s clear that Holly Golightly will forever languish as the musician’s musician. Despite numerous name-checks and guest appearances on dozens of records by artists as far afield as Mudhoney and the White Stripes,…
Album | Dark Dark Dark – Who Needs Who
It would be difficult to listen to Dark Dark Dark’s third, full-length album, Who Needs Who, without drawing comparisons with Regina Spektor and Anna Plaschg. The first track, of the same name, has all the dramatic, ponderous piano of the…
EP | Joe Banfi – Iron
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Communion are releasing a new EP by a singer-songwriter whose distinctive voice is, all by itself, enough to lift him above the crowd. And so Joe Banfi follows in the footsteps of…