Category: Reviews

Album | The Lunchtime Sardine Club – Icecapades

Icecapades, the debut album from The Lunchtime Sardine Club, pseudonym of Brighton musician Oliver Newton, comprises an intriguing array of songs and moods. The album was home-recorded over a year and a half, and right from the first, Newton reveals…

Album | Tess of the Circle – Thorns

After debut album Magpie Tess Jones returns with a new band of musicians, The Circle, in tow. Together they create a bigger, heavier rock sound that still has one eye on folk music. From the opening seconds of first track…

Live | Greenman Review 2013

Hidden in the depths of a valley in the Brecon Beacons lies one of the world’s best-kept secrets. Greenman Festival celebrated its tenth year anniversary, and served to be, yet again, one of the best festivals I have undoubtedly ever been to.

Album | The Civil Wars – The Civil Wars

Break-ups are hard. Emotions are raw. Sometimes it takes a little while for the smoke to clear enough to see what, if anything, is still left standing. And The Civil Wars, in case you didn’t already know, is very much…

EP | Daniel Pattison – The Southern Cross

As soon as the first line has been sung on Daniel Pattison’s debut EP The Southern Cross you’ll be aware that Pattison’s is one of the most noteworthy male voices of the last twenty years. It’s a gorgeous voice –…

Live | Johnny Flynn @ the Tabernacle, Notting Hill

Johnny Flynn, playing the guitar in a studio

Watching Johnny Flynn live is a lot like spending the afternoon with your grandma. Take, for example, his confusion when playing a brand new song to ‘more than three people’ for the first time. Upon beginning, a man at the…

Album | Landshapes – Rambutan

Landshapes (formerly Lulu and the Lampshades) are a foursome most well-known for playing on cups in their kitchen. They are raucously fun to see live, playing a dizzying array of instruments (especially percussive ones), and Rambutan is rhythmically and musically…

Album | Darren Hayman – Bugbears

Whilst writing The Violence, last year’s dazzling musical chronicle of the Essex witch-hunts, Darren Hayman researched and adapted a repertoire of folk songs from the civil war period. On Bugbears he has kitted them out and sent them to march,…