Indie
Album Review: Medicine – To The Happy Few
When you hear a song like “Long As The Sun” -the opener on Medicine’s excellent new album To The Happy Few– you don’t think that this is a band that has essentially been stored in moth balls for 18 years. You think you’re hearing The Beach Boys ran through the Jesus and Mary Chain warpulator. …
Track: Years & Years – Traps
I reckon pretty much everyone tries a diet at sometime in their life. Whether that’s because they want to get smaller, or more muscle-bound, or fit into a particular dress or something, we all try it. I had a friend, this huge Tuba player we called Tiny, who went on a diet. Cut out all …
See: Walla release new Video for ‘Nature’
So I’m accident prone, what of it? The whole reason I started this….whatever its grown into, is (and you’ll know this story backwards by now if you read Backseat Mafia at all regularly) I fell over, and broke a whole range of things in my left hand. Several months, and several loads of inserted metal …
Album Review: Whirr-Around
Whirr are lumped into that genre we Generation X oldsters affectionately call “shoegaze”. And while some of my favorite music is lumped into this category, I have to say it’s getting used way too much. It’s become this generic term used to describe anyone that looks at the floor more than ten seconds in order …
New Music: The Very Most – Just A Pup EP
Readers, meet The Very Most. The band are from Boise, Idaho, on which a couple of fucking humungous FACTS. First, the bad fact: Boise is responsible for foisting Curtis Stigers on the world. Fortunately for Boise, ten years before it did that, it did something else, something good. Second fact: Boise is the birthplace of …
Album Review: Speedy Ortiz – Major Arcana
You know, I try to be “with it”, and “in the know”. I want to be “up to date” on all the relevant music of today. Even as a kid in short pants growing up in rural Hoosierville I was always buying cassettes at my local record store. If there was some new band everyone …
Comic: Monsters of Rock by Sally-Anne Hickman
Some time ago I proudly announced to Jim that I was also going to write a bit about comics and graphic novels. Since then I have done absolutely nothing on either. With the approaching promise of a family holiday, however, I took a trip to London’s two greatest comics stores to see what was on …
New Music: CatBearTree – Let’s Share Hearts
CatBearTree are a south-London threepiece made up of Zoe Konez (guitar), Claudia Mansaray (bass) and Sarah Smith (drums) who released their debut EP on Friday 2nd August, launching it through a multi-act bill at the Finsbury in Manor House, North London, up near my neck of the woods. They’ve been together since 2011, practising and perfecting …
From an old record box: Ox – dust bowl revival
What seems a very long time ago I went along to an acoustic spot in Cambridge to catch up with a friend (apologies to both Mark Day and Jon Wright, given that I can’t remember which of the two it was. Perhaps I can recoup some credit by saying I wish they had both been …
ALBUM REVIEW: VUVUVULTURES – PUSH / PULL
In the next few weeks I’ll be transitioning from my ‘early 30s’ to my ‘late 30s’. It’s not the end of the world, and 35 isn’t traditionally seen as being a landmark birthday, however I find myself oddly preoccupied with a wistful nostalgia for my youth, lamenting the long-missed opportunities that just passed me by. …