Blog: Muso's Guide

By Rob Crozier  (words) & Laura Mukabba (photographs) May 24, 2013 Day 2 arrives and we head off, bleary eyed but ready for the fray, to see Dan Croll and his upbeat acoustic set. We know he is playing again tonight but we fear we will miss him.  We plump for Congo Natty ’s soothing acoustic reggae hoping he will soothe us as last night’s excesses are still very much with us. Unfortunately, Natty’s appearance has stopped us from entering upstairs at the Komedia with their Dutch bands theme [...]

By Rob Crozier May 22, 2013 Tricky is back with a brand new fifteen track album and the admission by the artist that he felt “lost for ages", because he was “trying to prove something to people, and trying to please others.” He openly admits that his last two albums were not his best work and this new album represents a return to form after finding himself again. In that respect it draws on his hugely influential early '90s work which saw him produce the [...]

By Mitchell Stirling May 24, 2013. With Laura Marling, there’s something in the water, it flows through her fourth album Once I Was An Eagle as it has done her previous work. The bodies of water keep getting wider; on her debut she couldn’t cross a river for a boy because “alas, I cannot swim” Here, she’s travelling over oceans. The album itself is broken into three acts, the first clearly marked by four unbroken songs. Opener ‘Take The Night Off’ is a mellow [...]

By Stef Siepel May 24, 2013 The Weekly Froth! A weekly take on six tracks, most of which have recently popped up somewhere in the blogosphere. Bit of a mixed bag with a slight leaning towards house, disco, and remixes, but generally just anything that for some reason tickled the writer’s fancy. Track of the week : ‘Dumb Disco Ideas’ by Holy Ghost! Seriously though, this is epic. Has been stuck on repeat here, with that crazy clip by  Ben Fries [...]

By Rob Crozier May 23, 2013 Welcome to Brighton and The Great Escape . 3 days, 30 venues, 350 artists. Living locally we knew the venues pretty well but still managed to find new ones to explore and others we would not normally venture into that had been transformed by the festival's presence. Thursday lunchtime saw the festival kick off in bright sunshine, so what better place to start than a dark almost cellar-like venue known as The Haunt? We popped in to the see [...]

By Joe Watson May 23, 2013 Haiku Salut may not be the name on everyone’s lips but one thing is for sure, if this album somehow manages to get your time of day, it’s not likely something you will forget in a hurry. Rather than try to pin a style of six or seven hyphenated genre abbreviations to the Derbyshire trio, we will do our best to break down the intricacies of what their instrumental debut album Tricolore is all about - [...]

By Danielle Gibson May 23, 2013 After a four year wait, 30 Seconds To Mars are back with Love, Lust, Faith + Dreams . After the massive success that was This Is War , does this new album stand a chance at doing an even better job? It is a great album, but it feels like you’ve listened to it before. Maybe because it’s full of power and contemporary rock songs that you can chant [...]

By Kenny McMurtrie May 22, 2013 The Wicker Man & Stonehenge - two things you can bet are in most peoples' top tens of 'things you associate with folk music'. Cliches though have to begin somewhere but, just because this very enjoyable album starts off with a song that brings the aforementioned film to mind and its release was marked by band leader Stephen Cracknell taking a three day walk to the latter stone feature, that doesn't mean this has all ben done before. [...]

By Rob Aldam May 22, 2013 There has always been a touch of the theatrical about Glasgow’s Sparrow and the Workshop . Their previous outings Crystals Fall and Spitting Daggers mixed playful folk with a sleazier rock side. The Irish/American, Welsh and Scottish trio seem to have grown into their sound since they began back in 2008. Murderopolis sees any tentativeness or uncertainty dissipate to be replaced by a strong sense of direction and focus. They seem to have finally shaken-off the shackles of nostalgic pining and [...]

By Tom Fake May 22, 2013 The Hot Five – My views on five tracks that have attracted my interest in any given week, usually with an older track thrown in the mix for something a bit different. Tracks usually concentrate on pop/rock releases, but really focusing on anything and everything that comes my way. Track of the week :  Everything Everything  – ‘Duet’ Once again this track was released a few months back, but in honesty it’s taken me a while to get into Everything [...]

By Nicko Ruddock May 21, 2013 After 10 years of hiding away under what we can only assume was a rock, Indie folk ensemble The Baptist Generals are back with a new album; Jackleg Devotional to the Heart is a beautiful collection of acoustic numbers which step outside the boundaries of contemporary pop music. By lacking the usual fear that they might 'do something wrong' The Baptist Generals have allowed their music to move up to a higher plateau above the norm. The entire album boasts an organic, [...]

By Kenny McMurtrie May 21, 2013 Bob Mould ’s Silver Age album, by rights, should have been in my Top 20 of 2012. Having unfortunately not managed to hear it until February 2013 it missed out. As returns to form go though you’d be hard pressed to find a better example within the last 18 months. Tonight therefore promised to be somewhat special. The capacity crowd were as reverent as expected when Bob and the band took to [...]

By Tom Bolton May 21, 2013. A new album from The Fall is an event anticipated, expected even, by many. When Mark E. Smith finally stops making records, entirely against his will of course, we will feel his absence much more keenly than that of Margaret Thatcher or Alex Ferguson.  He may have outlasted both, but its evolution that has kept him going for so long.  The Fall’s sound is always unmistakable but never predictable. Having ridden out a legendary amount of [...]

By Russell Watson May 20, 2013 ‘Minimalist’ is a word which you can frequently apply to Suuns ’ recorded output. Live, on the other hand the adjective makes no sense whatsoever. Any attempts to call this music minimalist get blasted away by the force of the band’s arrangements, turning elongated jams of eerie repetition into increasingly powerful sound. The elements of their style which give rise to this description remain fully intact, but empowered by the muscle, noise, and sheer volume of their live set up, it still feels [...]

By Richard Wink May 20, 2013 An unlikely early contender for album of 2013, this review will be more a plea attempting to convince you to give it a listen then anything else. When Toronto’s Hooded Fang released Tosta Mista it was weighed down slightly by some unnecessary filler, but it did carry some pointed clues to the future, a whiff of psychobilly, sixties surf and dumb psychedelia. The chuntering wall of bass, and garage rock simplicity of ‘Graves’ gets us off the ground, [...]

By Kenny McMurtrie May 20, 2013 The Isle Of Wight Festival these days hardly needs any extra advance promotion, given its association in the public consciousness with the original three events of the same name and the pedigree established over the 11 years since its revival by the Solo Music Agency . This year's festival takes place from 13 to 16 June and at time of writing major acts such as The Stone Roses, Bon Jovi, The Killers and The [...]

By Alistair Seaton May 20, 2013. These days a backstory seems to be obligatory for any debut album expecting to receive attention, and in this sense Field Report doesn't disappoint.  It is a vehicle for Christopher Porterfield (of which Field Report is an anagram of his surname), a former member of DeYarmond Edison , the band that also used to provide a home for Justin Vernon ( Bon Iver ) and future members of Megafaun , Phil and Brad Cook. Given this pedigree, his self-titled debut sounds much as you might expect: folky, [...]

By Kenny McMurtrie May 17, 2013 Anyone in need of a Superchunk fix should wrap their ears around this gem from Winnipeg quartet Boats (& yeah, we know you don't have too long to wait for the real thing now but still ...). Vocally there are a lot of similarities between the two bands but musically Boats carve out their own niche with some spacier, more pop leaning sounds in their repertoire (for example on A Fairway Full Of Miners ' tracks such [...]

By Russell Warfield May 17, 2013 If you too felt that Mumps. Etc. didn’t set the critical hype machine ablaze to the same degree as Why? 's 2008 opus Alopecia , tonight’s feverish show in London wouldn’t betray it. People here tonight adore the material, and inhabit every cloying syllable – throwing themselves behind each song with full commitment; even the wintery, songwriter turns from the awkwardly placed Eskimo Snow receive the full-blooded sing-along treatment. Yoni’s performance – wherever he happens [...]

By Stef Siepel May 17, 2013 The Weekly Froth! A weekly take on six tracks, most of which have recently popped up somewhere in the blogosphere. Bit of a mixed bag with a slight leaning towards house, disco, and remixes, but generally just anything that for some reason tickled the writer’s fancy. Track of the week: ‘I Didn’t Believe’ by Flight Facilities feat. Elizabeth Rose I love Flight Facilities. Their tracks are always such a [...]