It's not music specifically, it's local bloggerati fun and games, but The Manchizzle is now taking nominations for the 2007 Manchester Blog awards , to be held at the same time The Decemberists are playing in Liverpool. Boo! Hiss! Seriously though, it's great to see local bloggers supporting each other and if you're in the area and not otherwise engaged watching a really great band over in Liverpool, you should first nominate your favourite music blog and then make plans to attend the ceremony and watch and cheer as a more [...]
Before I begin, apologies for the delay in this post. Sometimes we run out of blogging steam a bit. This has been a hard one because as a result of too many gigs in too many far-off places, too much time on trains and in cars and not enough sleep, I managed to acquire a vile cold followed by a rather unpleasant ear infection and a new job which requires about 3 hours travel time a day and I have barely had the energy to get out of bed in the morning, much less keep up with blogging, but come [...]
Things seem to have ground to a halt around here. It's not that we've run out of gigs to review - we've got a huge backlog - it's just that both of us have been suffering from a serious lack of motivation. JustHipper has a decent excuse: she started a new job last month and it's longer hours and a much longer drive so she's exhausted most of the time. I, on the other hand, had the dubious distinction of turning forty a couple of weeks ago and I can't say I enjoyed it very much. Turning thirty [...]
The Besnard Lakes have released one of my favourite albums of 2007 thus far in Are The Dark Horse , an album chock full of epic shoegaze anthems with nods towards The Beach Boys, Neil Young and Spiritualized, among others. With its huge guitar sounds and multi-layered vocal harmonies I wasn't really expecting their live show to live up to it, especially in such a small venue as the Night & Day and with only around 40 people in attendance thanks, presumably, to the Champions League final (watched the first half, went to gig, managed not to find [...]
I'll never get round to writing full reviews for these gigs so here's a big review of all three. The Bill Callahan gig was the day we got back from ATP and I hadn't bought a ticket in advance not knowing what state of exhaustion I'd be in. JustHipper had somehow won tickets for the "secret" James gig in the Club Academy the same night and had gone down early. When I arrived I was told I had to join the huge queue of James fans queueing at the box office to pick up their free tickets in [...]
Thanks to Pitchfork for running a story about the possible demise of net radio . As it stands right now, royalties for internet radio stations in the U.S. are set to rise in mid-July to such an exorbitant rate that only the big companies will be able to afford to pay, putting the little indies, the stations that introduce us all to the great and the unusual and the new, out of business. This is yet another example of the corporate music industry not understanding that it is slowly killing itself. If small radio stations prosper then [...]
Sunday began with a short walk into Minehead for breakfast and to get the Sunday paper, though finding a copy of The Observer or The Guardian within a five mile radius of an ATP event would require getting up before the sun. On our way back we saw the impeccably dressed Nick Cave ahead of us, seemingly heading towards Splash Waterworld, and we fantasised briefly of seeing the great man thundering down the huge water slides with a big dumb grin on his face. Sadly, he turned right before he got there and disappeared into a row of relatively decadent [...]
Saturday started with more bluesy Aussie rock in the form of Joel Silbersher & The Spot Of Bother , The Spot Of Bother presumably being the two members of The Drones that Joel shared a stage with. Apparently Joel is some kind of post-punk legend in Oz and his set was refreshingly varied and a good way to start the day. Disappointingly Magnolia Electric Co. played pretty much the same set on the main stage that they had played on the Centre Stage the day before. The closed atmosphere [...]
It has to be said that the new venue for All Tomorrow's Parties at Butlins in Minehead, Somerset is a massive improvement on the Pontins in Camber Sands where the event had taken place since its inception in 2000. Ok, so it's still a crappy holiday camp but the rooms are better, there are more places to eat and drink, there's an extra stage and the size of the stages has increased to accommodate the extra capacity, which has doubled to 6,000. Plus, it's much easier to get to (for us at least), my run down to Taunton to pick [...]
Apologies for reviewing out of order, but this one is half-written in my head and the three James gigs will take longer to describe. Plus, we're enjoying being controvertial at the moment and I suspect that anything I say about Brett is going to spark a bit of lively debate. In any case, I had the feeling, heading down to the Uni, that this gig was going to be a bit of a let-down. After all, I'd spent the week watching James perform songs that I'd never expected to hear live, watching the inaugural Grinderman [...]
We went to this gig on the strength of At Swim Two Birds ' performance at The Circle Club supporting Final Fantasy last year. That night Roger Quigley played to a hushed audience his slow, lonely songs and it was all rather wonderful. Unfortunately the crowd at Kro Bar were not so courteous and despite the fact that the first thing Quigley did was to ask people not to talk during the set his pleas fell on deaf ears, or perhaps people couldn't hear him through the din, and his set was effectively ruined by a constant chatter that [...]
We both enjoyed Herman Dune at ATP last year. I think it might have been the beer and the sea air. So we bought their new album a couple of weeks ago. I finally managed to listen to most of it today in the car. We'd have been better off buying a copy of the original, otherwise known as Graceland by Paul Simon. Tonight's gig? Well. Opening band, no idea what he was called. Beardy Hippy Who Sounds Like Bob Dylan, I think. Herman Dune? Well. Beardy hippies that sound like, you guessed [...]
Apologies for the sporadic updates. We're not what you'd call natural bloggers. We're lazy. We leave it almost three weeks to do a gig review. Well I do, at least. So, almost three weeks ago we ventured into the industrial wilds of Salford to Islington Mill for some kind of XFM showcase gig. T'Mill had been spruced up a little since we were last there to see the same band, among others, last July . There were comfy sofas, coffee tables and a new, bigger bar where dope-addled bartenders would forget your drinks order as soon as [...]
Now I realised that this Shins gig was going to be different from previous occasions. The album, Wincing the Night Away , has received a lot of mainstream press and the landscape has changed a great deal since Chutes Too Narrow in 2004. I was not expecting to be stood amidst a lot of adolescent boys after The Ledge encouraged me to get to the venue early and get to the front so he could also have a good vantage point when he got finished playing football and finally joined me. I could hear the lads to [...]
It's been a while since we posted, bad old habits have returned. Yes, there was a bit of a gap between gigs for me, almost two weeks, having had not the slightest inclination to follow JustHipper down to London to see a band I'd given up on as far back as 1990. Then the Thursday before last my PC refused to boot up, kept logging off before it had properly logged on, and I approached the Malcolm Middleton gig at the Life Café that evening in a positively foul mood after a monumental and inconsequential bout of PC [...]
Regular readers of this blog, if there are any, will know that we are big, big fans of The Decemberists but might not know that we are also avid collectors of gig posters and have been since we stumbled across the brilliant Gig Posters website about three years ago having spent a good year trying to find some original and appropriate artwork to adorn the walls of the conjugal home. As luck would have it one of Europe's only gig poster art galleries, The Richard Goodall Gallery , was on our doorstep and soon works [...]
On Halloween in 1992, at the tender age of 19, I saw the most remarkable thing I had witnessed up to that point. It was James' first U.S. tour and they were performing at the re-opening of a club called The Channel with the Tom Tom Club and the Soupdragons. I can't remember much about what the other bands did that night but that James performance possibly changed my life. Seriously. In 1997, when James returned after a 3 year hiatus with their Whiplash album, I let a friend in England talk me into flying over for a [...]
This slight variation in our occasional Great Band, Shit Song feature has been inspired by this post on the excellent Song, by Toad blog, which, in turn, was inspired by a comment I made on this post on the same blog. It's pretty much a given that REM's two most recent albums, Reveal and Around The Sun , are their worst, but New Adventures In Hi-Fi , seems to have split the critical vote with well-respected bloggers like Toad's Matthew and James from Yer Mam! coming down heavily [...]
What a difference a night makes!. After the show in Manchester, I felt there was something missing. Don't get me wrong, visually it was good and the sound was electric, but I expected more. Leaving for the long drive down to Birmingham just before 3pm, I still was not sure of what to expect and after several pit stops we arrived at The Maze, aka the NEC car park. It was here the evening began, when we collected our tickets we then went and found something to eat in the NEC canteen. We exchanged our tickets for wristbands on the [...]
As good as the Arcade Fire were on their first night at the Apollo they were certainly below their best, putting in a relatively subdued performance by their standards and failing to really ignite until right at the end when they played some old favourites from Funeral . They only really scratched the surface of the Arcade Fire live experience but tonight, thankfully, they were back on blistering form while we were back upstairs, seated again almost directly in front of where we were sat last night. Last night it was a scintillating version of [...]
The Indie Credential
Monday Music – 28 May 2012
Bison - Quill
