Review // Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
After three long, interminable years, Fleet Foxes are finally back with the follow up to debut self titled album, Fleet Foxes, with the darker and seemingly more troubled Helplessness Blues. Described by front man and songwriter Robin Pecknold as a ‘synthesis of folk rock, traditional folk and psychedelic pop’, Helplessness Blues does...
News // Kunsthaus Tacheles Art House in Berlin to be Demolished
‘Tacheles’ – Yiddish for “straight talking” has been an art house and a nightclub since the Berlin wall came down in Spring 1990. Originally built as a department store in the Jewish part of former East Berlin in Mitte, then subsequently used as a Nazi prison, the future of this cultural paradise is under...
Review // Easter All Dayer at The Old Queen’s Head
Normally I would be at home with my family eating a Sunday roast on Easter Sunday, but this year, I headed to one of my favourite pubs in London, The Old Queen’s Head, for their ‘all dayer.’ First up, at 7pm (making it hardly an ‘all dayer’), was the wonderful Dimbleby and Capper...
Review // Record Store Day 2011
Manchester Piccadilly Records Record Store is a day to celebrate the existence of independent record shops and the physical release of music. I like these things very much so whilst up north, I decided to head to Manchester’s Piccadilly records to check out what it’s all about as I’ve never been able to attend...
New // Emmy the Great – A Woman, A Woman, A Century of Sleep
Emmy the Great is back! Hurrah! Her second album, Virtue, is going to be released soon. This is the first single from it, entitled ’A Woman, A Woman, A Century of Sleep.’ It seems a little more fictional and poetic than most of her older stuff. I like it; it’s a big development from her...
Interview // Bear Driver
I asked Bear Driver some questions…. How did you come together as a band? The band started out with Ol and Harry writing songs together in a bedroom in Leeds. We’d played together in other bands so we figured we’d try something new. We didn’t really have a plan of what...
Video // Bright Spark Destroyer-’The Shortest Distance’
Bright Spark Destroyer; they’re a bit of an ambiguous bunch aren’t they? Genre-wise they’re hard to place; location-wise even more so. Existing in a state of flux up and down the various motorways of this once great nation, they lovingly constructed their Holy Yell EP and released it last year unto a warm blanket of favorable...
Review // Lykke Li at Shepherd’s Bush Empire (14th April)
After first seeing Lykke Li performing her debut album Youth Novels more than 3 years ago in a tiny Liverpool venue, I have been following the career of the dreamy Swedish singer-songwriter. Since releasing her second album, Wounded Rhymes, she has gained more media coverage and an increasingly bigger fanbase – expanding it wider...
News // Those Dancing Days are to play XOYO
Sweeping in from Sweden, Those Dancing Days are a five piece girl band who started playing clubs in Stockholm in 2007. They are now signed with indie London label Wichita Recordings, who boast other amazing acts such as the Cribs, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Bloc Party – as well as new bands like...
Preview // Artwank at The Horse Hospital, Bloomsbury (20th April)
As this event is described as “Vintage porn, sex lectures and erotic performance”, I am strangely intrigued to find out what Artwank is all about. This event was curated and will be hosted by the never ending talent that is Ophelia Bitz who holds a cabaret residency at Soho’s Madame Jojo’s every week. Artwank...
