London 13 July 2013 It’s the middle of summer and London burns in plus 30 degree heat, and whilst some spent a sweltering day in parks at bars or on beaches some of us spent the time preparing for a whole weekend of psychedelic, doom-laden stoner rock. As it was so hot outside The Garage in all its wisdom decided to keep the air con on minimum (raising […]
live reviews
97 posts
London 11 July 2013 So the first problem is always going to be that, writing after the fact, things get a bit distorted. Nazoranai were utterly amazing. To the extent that what, on any other night, would’ve been a totally formidable set from the Flower/Corsano Duo ended up falling flat in my retroactive estimations. That sounds a bit “damning with convoluted praise,” but it’s not meant as such. […]
The South Bank Centre, London 2 July 2013 “Bonjour messieurs.” “Bonjour David.” “Est-ce un rêve ?” “Non, vous êtes vraiment voir cela. Et aussi l’entendre.” “Oh, c’est bon. Pendant un moment j’ai pensé que j’étais d’imagerie un groupe de fou Quebecoise, jouer de la musique de Tom Waits. Je suis heureux qu’il n’est pas une illusion.” “Oui, il peut être un peu désorientant. On l’aime […]
Corsica Studios, London 24 June 2013 The last time I saw Black Dice was in 2009 at the Tufnell Park Dome when they were joined by fellow uplifting souls Experimental Dental School amongst others. The evening had been a reasonably enjoyable listen of eclectic sounds and rhythms up until the point that the three members of Black Dice took to the stage. From then on in it was […]
London 29 May 2013 Recently refurbished and nicely polished, the venue presents a fairly comfortable setting for seeing The Handsome Family. The audience is calm and collected, fairly covered in beards and almost certainly here straight from work. One gets into an involuntary beard comparison routine right away and my own observation is that they’ve definitely outdone Brett Sparks, who seems to have had a pretty neat and […]
London 29 May 2013 It’s a Wednesday night in London’s hideously wanky Shoreditch, and we’re in an art gallery, and nobody’s really sure what to expect. Current music media darlings Savages and the achingly hip Bo Ningen have united to give us what they describe as a “sonic simultaneous poem”, and “a unique EXPERIMENTATION inspired by the early DADA concept of SIMULTANEOUS POETRY”. Seems like the only thing- […]
Aix-en-Provence 19 May 2013 A night of metal and more in one of the heartlands of Provence; not an area generally well-known for its enthusiasm for all things dark and loud. Luynes is a placid near-suburb of Aix-en-Provence, and close enough to Marseille to bring a decent audience from the current European Capital of Culture and beyond, but Le Korigan (a mischievous Breton elf-like creature – none more metal […]
Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire 17-19 May 2013 Bearded Theory is, pretty much by definition, a party that got out of hand. It started out as a birthday bash, and is now in its sixth year as a music festival. Somewhere in among this tangled web of history is an obsession with beards, and on the Sunday they have an attempt at the world record for the most fake beards […]
London 19 May 2013 Stuck in traffic, time was slipping away from us like a buttery thing, a total nightmare as impatient idiots decided to forge an extra lane in front, and I’m behind this person in a huge sports car that was probably twice the price of my house! He’s busy checking the mirrors – for gazes of envy, no doubt – I feel like making silly […]
London 15 May 2013 It had been a while since I was last at The Underworld in Camden. At one point I almost seemed to live there, seeing some great doom bands week after week, so it’s always good to come back here. And what a night to do it on, a night of diabolus in musica with three of the hottest bands around. As I enter the […]
Bexhill on Sea 11 May 2013 Personal history, you can skip this bit if you like: Back in the late 1990s I discovered what was London’s finest, most idiosyncratic record shop, These Records, following a tortuously convoluted traipse through the back-streets of Elephant and Castle guided by an A-Z and an address label stuck on the back of a second-hand Nurse With Wound CD. Behind the shuttered windows […]
27 April 2013 Out here on the periphery, the phrase ‘sole UK appearance’ instinctively elicits grumpy mutterings about ‘privileged Londoners’… after all, nobody ever does ‘sole UK appearances’ in north Wales!’ But what’s this?… Michael Rother presents the music of Neu! and Harmonia at Helsinki… Tilburg… Krems… St. Petersburg… Wrexham… Wrexham!?!… surely not THAT Wrexham? It turns out to be true – the recently established Focus Wales festival […]
Corsica Studios, London 25 April 2013 To Corsica Studios, for an intriguing evening of films and performances to launch Guapo’s new album History of the Visitation, a tremendous release that maintains the consistently superb standards set by this London-based instrumental rock outfit since their inception in the mid-90s. Proceedings began with a screening of Chris Marker’s 1962 short film La Jetée. It seems a little superfluous to review […]
London 27 April 2013 It’s raining. It’s cold. And it’s the West bloody End. But it’s also The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing‘s biggest headline gig yet, so let’s check it the fuck out anyway. As we walk in, Reprisal are onstage, and making quite a splendid racket. Three longhairs, heads down, studiously cranking out some loud as fuck death metal riffs, while a massive […]
London 13 April 2013 Slipping quietly into the performance area, arch-noisemonger Russell Haswell opens his set with a slow build of spluttering sharp attacks, crawling eventually into chaos wrapped in shards of broken glass spat bloody and still sizzling into the ears of the willing victims in the crowd. Haswell is hunched intently over his boxes of dubious FX, never looking up and playing his devices the noisnik […]
Lyon 27 March 2013 The advantage of seeing Swans play at a relatively small venue like l’Epicerie Moderne over, say, one of the larger auditoriums in a bigger city (or one with a more active fanbase) like Paris or New York is that the experience is a little more intimate than when the gig is held in a very big room with not as much chance of seeing […]
An arena, London 2 March 2013 HERE IS A RUBBISH PICTURE THAT LOOKS LIKE GIRLS ALOUD HAVE AN ACTUAL TANK THAT HAS DISCO LIGHTS RATHER THAN WEAPONS AND IS THEREFORE ALL QUEER-FRIENDLY AND SUCH: The arena is a complete bastard. I’m no Belgianologist, but it could fit Belgium in it, twice. The beer cost me roughly four million pounds and was watered down foamy rubbish. The staff were […]
The Lamb, Devizes 8 February 2013 Gentleman’s Relish are a wicked combo, a spiky pop duo of tight guitar evolves, countered by neat percussive candy. Those quirky poetics of lyric, comically charged and made further so by the drummer’s Bill Bailey mannerisms. A lot of sweet action indeed: that switch-a-roo guitar slashing in an angelic upstart-esque insistence as the syllables broke across your head in a bank of […]