There is no use in pretending that certain cities are inherently great for live music, least of all Glasgow. Yet the city’s ‘reputation’ is still paddled out in frustratingly shallow terms by any number of freshers guides printed in previous years. In the worst examples, it’s a reputation that seems to rest simply on the [...]
Showing up at the Arches, I realized how much trouble I was having comprehending the fact that it’s been FOUR YEARS since New-York City innovators BATTLES released the celebrated Mirrored. With the possible exception of single Atlas (which has cropped up all over the place, from LittleBigPlanet to Top Gear – I’m getting tired of [...]
Watching the Baltimore math-pop noise-lite four-piece, I had a lot of fun dissecting their influences. After the thirty minute set I came away with an impressive range, starting with the kind of ecstatic, guitar-riff work you’d expect from Fucked Up, and finishing somewhere close to the kind of relentless drumming you’d expect from The Mars [...]
Jean-Xavier Boucherat on the most cleverly named festival since Rockness, Doune the Rabbit Hole Jamie Murray is one of the names behind a somewhat curious event that took place near the sleepy burgh of Doune last summer. I wasn’t there, but apparently, in what was an all-together phenomenal coincidence, a sizeable number of campers (including [...]
Jean-Xavier Boucherat talks with long-standing Glasgow institution RM Hubbert about Flamenco and Open Source. Glasgow’s ‘DIY Ethos’ has existed in various shapes and forms for at least twenty years now. RM Hubbert has seen an awful lot of this since his days in the endlessly creative math-rock outift El Hombre Trajeado, who in their time [...]
There are moments when you have to question your validity as a music journalist. Reviewing Radiohead is one of them. Radiohead isn’t a band; it’s an institution, and one with a fanatical membership at that. Those who care most about this release will (as they should) make their own minds up about it. So the [...]
Japanther Captains Rest 10/02/11 Japanther use cassette tape players in their live shows. They like to perform their art-punk-dance-party-silliness over recordings of their own songs. You hear it and you ask yourself all kinds of pointless questions about artistic ownership and the nature of performance. That, or you spend the next week boring your friends [...]
Speaking to NME earlier this February, there was an air of apology about Freddy-and-Justin-from-the-Vaccines. As they stared hazily into space, the pair struggled over how to best describe their debut album: “I think the sound is quite immediate…” “…Yeah… yeah I don’t think it’s very… err… testing… I think you’ll know straight away whether you [...]
Trolling through endless review material to ascertain a flavour of what the furry sextet had to offer, the same buzzwords appear time again so much so that if we were to get our Staedtler highlighter out for the occasion there would be a florescent rainbow of ‘twee’ and ‘high fructose’ scrawled across our jotters. Nevertheless, [...]
NME Tour 2011 O2 Academy 3/02/11 This year’s NME Tour line-up consists of The Vaccines, Everything Everything, Magnetic Man and Crystal Castles. Disappointing list? Well in comparison to last year’s Maccabees and Bombay Bicycle Club, and 2009’s Glasvegas and Friendly Fires, I would have to say ‘YES’. As far as I was concerned, The Vaccines [...]
