The other day I ended up at a restaurant watching American folk bands again – this time a Thai kitchen-cocktail bar with a stage on the front deck. Dim mood lighting and wooden floorboards complemented the music, which was billed…
Category: Reviews
Album: Treecreeper – Juniper
Treecreepers are incredibly active birds native to the Northern Hemisphere and Sub-Saharan Africa. Treecreeper are not an incredibly active band. The slacker folk-rockers from Wendover have just issued their second album, a mere three years after the first, and it’s…
Album: Various Artists – Sing Me To Sleep: Indie Lullabies
Sing Me To Sleep is the latest example of the recent trend for kid-friendly compilations, in the vein of 2006’s Colours Are Brighter. It brings together various indie folk to rejig lullabies for toddlers with good taste – and their…
Communion take over the Flowerpot: days 1 and 2
The record label and clubnight Communion is hosting a series of exciting (and free) gigs at the Kentish Town venue the Flowerpot this week. And as well as the evenings’ entertainments, the upstairs venue has become a temporary studio for…
EP: Junip – Rope and Summit
After the release of EP Black Refuge in 2005 Junip took a five year hiatus, but now they’re back and promising both an EP and an album launch by the end of the year. Fronting the band is the familiar…
Album: Bombay Bicycle Club – Flaws
It is a brave or stupid musician that names their album Flaws. There is an unwritten rule in the art world that when naming your piece – whether it be an album, film, collection of squiggly lines on canvas, new book or whatever – you do not give it a title that in any way could be quoted by a critic against you.
Singles round-up: Melodica Melody & Me, The Pipettes, Pagan Wanderer Lu
Melodica, Melody & Me – ‘Piece Me Back Together‘ Melodica, Melody & Me are a 6-piece folk band hailing from South London. Their debut single, ‘Piece Me Back Together’ is exactly what bands hope their debut to be: full of…
Album: The Acorn – No Ghost
Bella Union, who release the band’s newest album, No Ghost, tell us that free from ‘the emotional weightiness’ of their last record, The Acorn are able to show off the real them, a lighter, more versatile sound than we might previously have known. There is certainly some truth in this – the album demonstrates a great deal more variety than previous records have, and is certainly less dark, thematically, than their last.
Album: Teenage Fanclub – Shadows
In some ways reviewing this album feels a bit superfluous; fraudulent, even. If the point of a review is to convey what an album sounds like, I can sum it up in a five-word sentence: it sounds like Teenage Fanclub.…
Live: Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit: Manchester Academy 3, 29th June
I first saw Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit in Liverpool on their club tour just before ‘Been Listening’ was released. They played a tiny club, Zanzibar, I was stool on a chair about 15 feet from the band. I’d…