Album Review: Roo Panes – Little Giant
Debut album from West Country folkie that can’t quite break its slow, soft shackles to reach the heights. Roo Panes has been building up to this moment for a couple of years and that might be part of the problem with “Little Giant”. Essentially this is a majority re-packaging of his three earlier EPs …
Just Lions – Great. OK
I’m worried about Chandler, and not for the first time. Before it was The Bing Man: increasingly strung out, sweaty, scrawny and unable to convince us that there was any light left with which to leaven his self-disparaging quips. Right now, however, it’s yer man Strutz who is our Chandler of Concern There’s clearly trouble …
Muttley – Demo (Part 4 of Backseat Mafia On Tour: York)
Gosh, York seems such a long time ago. I picked up a clutch of music in May last year (!) while sojourning in that delightful locale and one of the pieces that I bought (in Attic Records) was Muttley’s ‘Demo’. You can now find some of these tracks on his most recent release ‘Contrarians’, but I’m …
Live: The Provincial Archive at The Islington
The final stop on The Prov’s European tour finds them just off Upper Street in London on a wet and windy May evening. They’re fresh from time on the continent (Germany in particular, where their new album, “It’s All Shaken Wonder”, has already been released) and, more recently, in Cardiff, Bristol and Folkestone (a thumbs …
New Music: Young Braves – Black Country (free download)
Cruising out of the titular ‘Black Country’, Shropshire’s teenage indie rockers are back with a new single. This is a song of youthful desire to escape limitations and oppressions, to run to the border, the ocean. The radio edit is propelled, at least to begin with, by a pretty standard Kings of Leon-esque foundation …
Meet: An interview with Saint Etienne
“Sorry if i kept you waiting, I was mucking around with a Vocoder and lost track of time” To be honest, my conversation with Pete Wiggs doesn’t get any less scattershot as it goes on. If he were given the task of telling his life story on the pages of a novel, he’d probably count as …
Live: Broken Twin at St John on Bethnal Green
Broken Twin’s music demands this church setting; somewhere deeply sonorous and solemn, redolent with the deliciously evocative smell of candle wax. On this windswept Wednesday evening, Majke Voss Romme and band are intense and focused, with barely a word spoken outside of song. They arrive on stage without fanfare, settle into position and off they set, beginning …
Live: The Fruitful Earth – “Rising Sun” album launch at Servant Jazz Quarters
Dalston Kingsland, half-eight on a dreary Thursday night, the capital greasily covered with filthy spring rain. This is not at all in keeping with the spirit of the record we’re here to receive, not at all. Fortunately The Fruitful Earth couldn’t give a flying fuck what it’s like outside. The Servant Jazz Quarters stage is …
Howie B: Interview
Text message: “Can we wait until half time ? I’ll call u in 20 mins”. It’s a finely balanced 0-0 at the Vicente Calderón stadium, so you can understand Howie B wanting to see out the first 45, hoping that Chelsea can keep Atlético at bay. With the break safely reached, he’s straight on the phone. …
Tom Brosseau: Profile
Outside it’s a beautifully bright Sunday lunchtime, but chill in the shade. Indoors, in the snug of Paper and Cup, it’s cosy warm. Tom Brosseau, his friend Eva, his manager Mary Jones, and I are happily ensconced in Calvert Street, E2, about to reap the rewards of the coffee machine currently threatening to drown out …