Crystal Antlers, Times New Viking, Dupec @ Sneaky Pete’s, 18 May

Live review for The Skinny

The unifying theme of this gig was always going to be volume – as in, lots of it. But Edinburgh band Dupec (****) refuse to be blown off the stage by their raucous American successors tonight. The trio pour their all into this their most high profile show to date, crashing [...]

Interview: Bat For Lashes

Feature for The Skinny
In a music business where female artists are so often forced into pigeonholes – Duffy the doe-eyed kitten, Lily Allen the feisty brat, Kate Nash the kooky every-girl – it’s only the true individuals who stand out over time. The talent of non-conformists like Kate Bush, Bjork and PJ Harvey burns far [...]

Sparrow and the Workshop – Sleight of Hand

EP review for The Skinny

The current Scottish music scene is healthily diverse, and now Sparrow and the Workshop bring another genre to the mix: country and western. Having only formed last year, the Scottish-Welsh-American trio’s debut EP opens with a brooding vocal harmony between singer Jill O’Sullivan (formerly known as Dead Sparrow) and drummer Gregor [...]

The Horrors – Primary Colours

Album review for The Skinny

Evidently tiring of the black-fringed cartoon band they had become in the wake of the B-movie pastiche of Strange House, The Horrors shift focus to the music with album number two – even if the title Primary Colours is irony of the highest order. And they don’t hang about: the 90-second [...]

Interview: Yahweh

Feature for The Skinny

Lewis Cook has a level-headedness that belies his youth. When most teenagers fly the family nest for the boundless freedom of university life, their first year away from home is spent drinking, watching daytime TV, attending the occasional lecture, boiling pasta, and more drinking. But the 18-year-old Cook – whose own nest-exit [...]

Bat For Lashes – Two Suns

Album review for The Skinny

Anyone acquainted with Bat For Lashes’ highly regarded debut Fur and Gold will know that the Brighton singer-songwriter (real name Natasha Khan) is something of a New Age siren. On this highly anticipated follow-up, she ups the mystic ante, harnessing the tribal energy of kindred spirits Yeasayer (most noticeably on thrilling [...]

Live review: David Byrne, Glasgow Concert Hall, 31 March

[A very poor photograph from my balcony seat]
When David Byrne sings “This ain’t no Mudd Clubb, or CBGB” in Life During Wartime tonight, the lyric has never seemed so true. The formal, seated auditorium of Glasgow Concert Hall is the antithesis of the dirty Lower East Side punk clubs in which Byrne began his musical [...]

Crystal Antlers – Tentacles

Album review for The Skinny

In the endlessly cyclical history of popular music, psychedelic rock has mostly been left to gather dust in record shops. There have been isolated attempts to revive the genre from bands like Comets on Fire and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, but nothing like a concerted revival. Crystal Antlers could well be [...]

Interview: RBRBR

Feature for The Skinny’s Mill supplement

XTC, REM, MGMT… and now RBRBR. The world’s latest musical acronym is an Edinburgh electro outfit who refuse to take themselves too seriously, as drummer Paul reveals when I ask what it stands for: “This week, it stands for Robbing Banks Regularly Boosts Revenue, last week it stood for Raging [...]

Interview: The Little Kicks

Feature for The Mill magazine:

If Ladbrokes were to offer odds on the next unsigned Scottish band to ‘make it’, one of the favourites would surely be the Little Kicks. The Aberdeen quartet have steadily built their reputation over the past few years, playing to packed tents at the T in the Park and Connect festivals [...]