Indie
Track: Laura Marling – False Hope
Knowing very little, in fact nothing at all about Laura Marling, I did what any normal muso with OCD would do and checked my collection. The closest I could get was the miseducation of Lauryn Hill before the alphabetisation leapt to Led Zep, Leftfield, The LemonHeads and the Levellers so I lowered the cherry-picker, washed …
Premiere: Spectral Chorus – Old House
Gritty St. Helens trio Spectral Chorus, aka Fran Baxter (Vocals Guitar), Martin Baxter (Vocals, Bass) & Ewan Johnson (Vocals, Guitar) have announced their debut EP, out on Monday June 1st via James Skelly’s (The Coral) Skeleton Key Records. Baxter and Johnson met after being sacked from their jobs, and the band ended up living together, …
Track: Wire – Split Your Ends, plus tour dates
Hot on the heels of announcing their new album, the self-titled ‘Wire’, out via their own pinkflag label on April 13th, the legendary post punk group, now approaching their fortieth year, have shared a new track ‘Split your Ends’. It’s indicative of the lyrical content on the new record that it passes through love, crypic …
Track: Soft Cat release the bewitching ‘Diana’
The way it usually works is that people send me stuff, you know PR’s and the like. Hundreds and hundreds of emails per day, that I trawl though and have the unenviable task of picking what to write about, or to ask other people to write about. What’s not usual is that I accidentally hear …
Track: Jenny Hval releases That Battle Is Over, ahead of her new album Apocalypse, Girl
Already the veteran of albums under her own name and her guise of Rockettothesky, as well as being the singer of gothic metal band Shellyz Raven in her younger days, Norwegian singer songwriter is preparing to release her third studio album ‘Apocalypse, Girl’ on June 8th via Sacred Bones. Ahead of it, she’s released a …
See: Billy Lockett – Never Let You Go
Billy Lockett has won hearts and minds with his EP Old Man; the collection of songs entered the top 40 iTunes album chart last year, making Billy the only self-released artist to reach the top 100 that week. ‘Never Let You Go’ is the second single to be released from the grand EP, giving it the …
Track: Crocodiles – Crybaby Demon
“Who needs the future when the past tastes so good?” is something you might hear Brandon Welchez shout over to his band mate, Charles Rowell, as they hurtle down a pot-holed freeway in a rusty Cadillac, its beige mammalian body adorned with mysterious stains. Every inch the speed-addled aquatic reptiles that their hallucinatory music suggests, …
Live: Placebo – Leeds O2 Academy – 09.03.15
At first glance the setlist appears to have a few glaring omissions; ‘Nancy Boy’ and ‘Taste in Men’ doesn’t feature anywhere, and ‘Pure Morning’ is only aired as intro track prior to the band taking the stage. But this is a celebration of one of the most influential bands of the past 20 years, a …
Track: The Dead Ships – Big Quiet
Here at Backseat Mafia, we can never get enough of the kind if Garage Rock that made something of the Strokes, and continues today in the shape of The Black Keys, Alabama Shakes and the like. So step forward LA-based trio The Dead Ships, who’s new EP, EP1 contains, certainly on the evidence of ‘Big …
Meet: We meet the legendary Anton Newcombe
Barely a year has gone by since the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s fourteenth (!) long player hit the stores like cloud of dense mauve smoke. Revelation was the first BJM record to have been recorded entirely in Anton Newcombe’s Berlin studio, yet it displayed sonic characteristics already familiar to many long-serving fans: elongated, repetitive structures; layered …