Category: Reviews

Album | The Wave Pictures – City Forgiveness

City Forgiveness, the fifth studio album from the Wave Pictures, is a rare thing: an album full of substance and ideas, but bound in by style. It’s a road trip album, forged from notes that lead singer David Tattersall took…

Album | Los Campesinos! – NO BLUES

I’ve been looking forward to Los Campesinos!’s fifth album NO BLUES for absolutely ages. The same will be true for a lot of 20-somethings, for whom LC! have been a bit of a soundtrack band since they first emerged as…

Live | Pocktoberfest @ Pocklington Arts Centre

Earlier this year Richard Hawley caused something of a kerfuffle when he revealed he had turned down a slot at Glastonbury because the famous festival had become “meaningless”. For devotees of the Worthy Farm experience this was tantamount to heresy,…

Album | Andrea Tomasi – Hurricane Dream

Andrea Tomasi’s debut album, Hurricane Dream, is incredibly beautiful, and instantly comforting on dark autumn days. Beginning with a campfire guitar, the instrumental opening feels self-assured. It was recorded outside, in the woods: crickets chirping away create a natural space…

Live | Serafina Steer @ House of St Barnabas, London

For Folk's Sake | Serafina Steer

An evening curated by Jarvis Cocker was never going to be dull. Hosted in their tiny chapel by the House of St Barnabas, a private members’ club that uses its profits to operate as a charity for the homeless, this…

Album | Gill Sandell – Light the Boats

Light the Boats, released September of this year, is Gill Sandell’s second album since her well received 2010 debut Tarry Awhile. If Sandell hadn’t already established herself as one hell of a singer/songwriter, Light the Boats certainly sets it in…

EP | School of Night – School of Night

School of Night is the solo project of The Antlers’ Darby Cicci, who describes this EP as ‘futuristic church music, mixed with sugary pop’. That seems about right, although it also sounds a bit like a daydreaming alien, or a…

Album | Anna Calvi – One Breath

There may only be two of them to date, but it is already clear that when you drop the needle on an Anna Calvi record, you enter a world quite unlike any other. Her world is one of cinematic flair,…

Album | Israel Nash Gripka – Israel Nash’s Rain Plains

I might be the wrong guy to review this record. If you were figuring out the target audience for Israel Nash Gripka’s third record, you’d probably find me sitting on the bullseye, waiting to be picked off with ludicrous ease.…

Album | Okkervil River | The Silver Gymnasium

The Silver Gymnasium is a misty look back in time to singer Will Sheff’s childhood growing up in the small New Hampshire town of Meriden, circa 1986. The album cover is rather wonderful in its own right, coming complete with…