Perhaps being the most discrete and well-behaved festival we have ever attended, Bushstock nestles in cosily amongst London’s bustling Shepherds Bush Green and surrounding chicken shops, pubs and Greek falafell take-aways. In fact it is the reality of the loveliness of the get-together that makes it so unique. St Stephen’s Church is very much...
Ralfe Band’s Son be Wise is a contradictory thing. A brooding, occult record driven through with pop hooks and fantastical shimmers. It’s somehow irresistibly danceable and irrepressibly dark. It’s one of those records that’s totally engrossing until it’s finished, when you feel you’ve only half-heard it, like somebody’s told you a secret at a...
Folk? Well, no, not really. But folksy and bluesy and rootsy and thoroughly good fun. From The Hills Below The City is the debut album by Houndmouth, a band from New Albany, Indiana, just across the river from Louisville, Kentucky, where the Midwest meets the South. It has the full complement of cops &...
The folk-phenomenon that is Alessi’s Ark has more good news for her fans this week. After the successful release of her third album, The Still Life and a sold-out UK tour under her belt, Alessi Laurent-Marke and her Ark have premiered a new stop motion video for single ‘Tin Smithing’ on Vevo. With over...
Georgia Ruth has had a busy few months, working with Guillemots on new material as well as appearing with Pen Pastwn, the new band from Richard James of Gorky’s Zygotic Monkey. Now she’s releasing her own solo album, Week Of Pines. Recorded in Snowdonia’s Bryn Derwen with help from fellow Welsh country-folk band Cowbois...
It’s Monday evening and we find ourselves shoulder-to-shoulder with an invite-only crowd, in a gorgeous, Georgian townhouse, hot under the collar and eagerly awaiting three carefully handpicked musicians to show us what they’re made of…It can only be another Society of the Golden Slippers. First up we have the sweetly soulful Raevennan Husbandes, who...
Christopher Porterfield might be a name familiar to those who have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bon Iver timeline – he used to be in a band with Justin Vernon, DeYarmond Edison, before going their separate ways. Whilst Vernon found international success, Porterfield very much stayed put. He gave himself five years to practise...
With past albums from Sparrow and the Workshop in mind, 2010’s Crystal Falls and particularly 2011’s Spitting Daggers, it wouldn’t be off-key to expect another thematically dark album from the Glasgow-based trio. One also may not be surprised to learn their recent offering’s title immediately screams of menace within. So you’re expecting dark, and...
Not enough people know this, but the Bandana Splits’ eponymous debut is the most exuberant record of the last five years and the best slice of upbeat comic-book girl-band retro-pop this side of 1962. Alabama-born Lauren Balthrop, one third of the Splits, adopts the alias Dear Georgiana and a more contemporary sound for her...
We parachute into Brighton on Thursday evening, landing in the middle of the Komedia Studio bar for our favourite avant-garde Norwegian, Jenny Hval. She wows us with her utterly unique brand of experimental, part-spoken-word, musical musings on bodies, cities and sex, drawing on sounds as diverse as rock, electro and folk. A heady, beguiling,...
#108 Nick Drake - Northern Sky Jun 19th, 2013
#107 Lowland Hum - War is Over Jun 18th, 2013
#106 Nick Mulvey - Fever To The Form Jun 17th, 2013
