Some Songs from Last Year: Slow Reader gets There in The End – Part 1
I seem to have been tongue-tied for the last half of last year; I couldn’t find the words. So I’ve only just got round to writing about these beauties from 2013, some of the fifty or so tracks I’d collected and had intended to prune into a Best Of… I’m not going to write about […]
John Grant @ St George’s Church, Kemptown, Brighton, 16.05.13
Isn’t that the way a love song – and indeed love, and indeed religion – works? Takes the internal intangible and makes it audible, physical, present, be it a 7” single or a cathedral.
The Bastards Of Fate @ The Green Door Store, Brighton, 27.04.13
Wake up you lucky bastards! This is transformative, inspiring, innovative stuff, all of which are dull-as-ditchwater words for music which is really, really anything but.
A review of ‘Arc’ by Everything Everything that absolutely takes issue with everything the NME and the Tories stand for
The words come tumbling out of Jonathan Higgs’ mouth like so many bright bees, clouds and clouds of them buzzing about, so numerous and sharp such that their ingenuity, volume and ambition remind me of Joanna Newsom’s meticulous verses. He conjures up drone strikes, billionaires, footballers’ wives, broken war-heroes, landmines, volcanoes, rioters, pterodactyls, post-apocalyptic landscapes, revelatory visions. Not a waistcoat in sight.
Dear Bobby Gillespie | Re: ‘It’s Alright, It’s OK’: it’s actually really not
It’s leather trousers worn by men in pubs. It’s an OAP still piling the remainder of his hair into his Teddy Boy quiff, which has over decades thinned to the point where it’s just a flimsy hint, a ghost of a style.
Beck – Song Reader (Faber/McSweeney’s)
I want to hear Beck songs played by elephants and by wind sculptures and London taxi cabs. Make it so!
Another letter to the poor sods at Uncool magazine…
“Mumford & Sons’ singular importance in rock’s current moment cannot be underestimated,” is not a sentence I ever imagined I’d read.
22 Songs I Loved in 2012 by Lucy Cage
Sparky, desperate, rough-edged, delirium-fuelled, defiant, shouty boy pop. There’s a place for it, you know.
Spiritualized – Sweet Heart, Sweet Light (Fat Possum)
Fuck it, Art: your licence is revoked. And Pierce: you’re a cunt.
Live Review | Boredoms, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Minehead, UK, 11.03.12
Seriously, the best thing I have ever seen.
