Album Review: Big Thief – ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’
Crikey, but Big Thief have had a busy COVID. 4AD’s Brooklynite indie darlings issued their fourth album, ‘Two Hands’ (billed as the “earth twin” to their hugely successful ‘U.F.O.F.’) in October 2019, and they’re already back with a twenty-track, 84-minute, monster of an album, ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’. When you add …
Album review: Nubiyan Twist – ‘Freedom Fables’: the sound of the summer we deserve
WHEN all of this (gestures expansively at the pandemic) is over we’re going to want live music. We’re going to need live music. Hell, we’re going to deserve live music. Freedom Fables, Nubiyan Twist’s follow up to their acclaimed Jungle Run from spring 2019, on Strut Records, feels like the gig we need; the gig …
TRACK – Permafrost release the dark post-punk of ‘Femme Fatale’
“What has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1.9) There really is nothing new about Permafrost or the sound of ‘Femme Fatale’, but there can be no less joy at that. For here is a band history of cinematic quality, spanning nigh forty years in a testament …
EP: Clara Mann – ‘Consolations’ – Bristol newcomer’s exquisite debut EP
‘Soft, I will say it softly’, Clara Mann opens on ‘Thoughtless’. The lyric encapsulates this, her debut EP via Sad Club Records. Plaintive, classic “almost folk”, quiet, private and intimate, ‘Consolations’ has an almost pictorial quality. You see yourself in the world Mann creates. It’s almost as if you stand sadly with her as she …
EP Review: Crossfire Eagles – ‘Major Arcana’: New seven-track release from Sheffield indie rockers
There’s a moment in BBC 4’s ‘Smashing Hits! The 80s Pop Map of Britain and Ireland’ when some old boy talks about how you could walk down any street in Sheffield and hear the Human League rehearsing at one corner, ABC at another and Def Leppard at a third. That tradition of South Yorkshire rock …
ALBUM REVIEW: Cheap Meat – People Are the Worst’
Cheap Meat are, the promotional material asserts, back with their debut album, ‘People Are The Worst’, released 29 January 2021 via Jerk Store Records. Their return follows a four-year hiatus between a 2016 EP, ‘The Parts That Show’ and December 2020’s ‘Marigold Moon’ single (included here), in which Ross Drummond (vocals and guitar), Matt Rebeiro …
Album Review: Anna B Savage – ‘A Common Turn’
If, for Anna B Savage fans, it has felt like a long wait for this, her debut album, that’s because it has been. The question is, has it been worth that wait? It’s nearly six years since the release of ‘EP’, with its tracks, ‘I’, ‘II’, ‘III’ and IV’. On the undoubted, shining strength of …