Interview: Errors

Anyone who has trawled MySpace in search of good music and been met by band after mundane indie band will know that it is acts that offer something a bit different (like Errors) that make it all at least semi-worthwhile. A year ago, maybe more, it was the track Mr Milk that made me sit [...]

The Futureheads - This Is Not The World

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It may seem exaggerated to call this a comeback, given that The Futureheads only crashed on to the scene with their self-titled debut some four years ago, but when the Sunderland punk-popsters were dumped by their label after a second album that certainly was ‘difficult’, their musical stock price took a nose-dive worthy of Northern [...]

Triptych, R.I.P.

There are perhaps more serious things to lament than the death of a mere music festival, but then Triptych is/was no mere music festival. This weekend it bows out with a typically diverse barrage of gigs across Scotland, and I at least plan to attend the Clinic show, with Errors and RememberRemember in support, at Cabaret Voltaire [...]

Interview: Frightened Rabbit

OK, so The Midnight Organ Fight has been out for a few days now, and if you’ve managed to buy, steal or borrow a copy you’ll know what a fucking superb album Frightened Rabbit have made: undoubtedly an early contender for album of the year. I wrote a review of it a few weeks ago, [...]

Paul Haig – Go Out Tonight

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To coincide with his first live shows in 19 years, former Josef K singer Paul Haig releases his tenth – yes, tenth – solo album. And whereas his Josef K persona was all giddy angst and jitterbug freak, Go Out Tonight - while it skirts with paranoia - is the product of a [...]

April in singles: beatniks, soulsters, the usual fluff

Pitched somewhere between O Brother Where Art Thou? and The Pogues, The Ballad of Bess Houdini (***, 7 Apr) by Paul Vickers and The Leg is nothing if not intriguing. Which means it is, by the way. So we’ve established that SL Records have an ear for quirky, beatnik troubadours. Thomas Truax is further proof: [...]

Coldplay are so dull they cause sleep, officially

Newspaper and website editors were finally able to publish a headline today that until now has been just a cynical complaint of the tasteful minority: ‘Coldplay sends you to sleep‘.
Yes, Chris Martin and his fellow bland members have been voted number one in a poll of 2,248 Britons who were asked what music sends them to sleep, [...]

The Accidental – There Were Wolves

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Listening to There Were Wolves - the first album from a collective of musicians and songwriters including The Memory Band’s Stephen Cracknell, Tunng’s Sam Genders, The Bicycle Thieves’ Hannah Caughlin and singer/songwriter Liam Bailey - it’s easy to form a mental picture of the participants huddled in Cracknell’s darkened lounge, spinning their [...]

Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight

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In medieval times it was widely held that your state of mind was inseparably tied to your state of body. Hence all the talk of apothecaries in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson’s Humour Plays. The theory may have been rightly trashed by modern medicine, but that hasn’t stopped it persisting - metaphorically, at least - in [...]