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 [...]
[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 [...]
Gig review for The Skinny
Crystal Stilts are all about intensity. And in a space as small as Sneaky Pete’s (imagine your living room, minus furniture, plus 100 indie misfits), the intensity of their music – a murky blend of ’60s psych and ’80s shoegaze – is turned up to eleven. Whereas their acclaimed debut album [...]
Last year – if my memory serves me – the Gimme Shelter night at the Bongo Club consisted of three bands: Foxface, Broken Records and Frightened Rabbit. Not a bad wee showcase of Scottish music, but last night’s mini-festival at The Caves was a huge step forward.
The cream of emerging alternative music north of the [...]
I went to a cracking gig on Sunday night. TV on the Radio have been producing some of the most forward-thinking, ballsy indie rock of the past five years. True, their new album is decidedly ‘poppy’ (by their standards) but this was still a superb performance – and not even the fool near me shouting [...]
Rating: ****
With their self-titled debut album already jostling for position at the peak of many an end-of-year poll, Fleet Foxes are here to confirm what everyone in the ABC suspects: they are not merely blogosphere darlings but one of the greatest American bands to emerge in a long, long time. Appropriately, singer Robin Pecknold looks [...]
On top of the ‘live’ blogging I was doing for The Skinny while in the muddy environs of Inverary last weekend, I’ve also cooked up another series of rehashed mini gig reviews for the magazine. This covers pretty much everything I saw, with the exception of The Roots, who were so disappointing in the acoustically [...]
Rating: 4/5
9pm is really too early for an act like Digitalism to take the stage. The German duo are like the Chemical Brothers without the indie pretensions, or Daft Punk without the space-age sheen, and their high-octane electro-clash is tailored more to post-midnight revelry than the evening gig protocol. But this complaint is evidently lost [...]
Before they play a note, you just know what Glasgow’s Fangs (***) will sound like. Look-at-me hair + New Romantic fashion + luminous make-up + studied nonchalance = filthy, arty electro-punk, with lashings of synth. It would be easy to label them 21st-century-Blondie wannabes, or singer ‘The Queen’ a Karen O sound-a-like, but Fangs have [...]
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