Heg Doughty leads her lupine chorus with lyrics as clean and clear as crystal, producing multifarious, melodramatic folk songs. Strings and keys make for a lustrous, complex musical lanscape, home to a red-winged boy with avian aspirations and a dark heart.…
JJ Stone and the Campfire were one of the score of excellent artists we judged but couldn’t put through to the next round of the 2013 Glastonbury Emerging Talent Contest, but they deserve so much attention so we’re giving them…
We recently caught John Smith electrify a building so old and precious that it was delicately blasphemous of him to do so, really. He played a stonking set to in the endlessly beautiful (and sold-out) St Pancras Old Church, flanked…
Mark Oliver Everett is, without doubt, the most consistently bipolar songwriter of our times. Shuttling between the rhapsodies of Daisies of the Galaxy and the chill misery of Electro Shock Blues, the scuzzy rage of Souljacker and the dejected tones of…
Last weekend I went out in London’s trendy Dalston with our Live Editor, Helen. She takes me out every year or two to remind me that I don’t like it much in fancy pubs with copies of Wired magazine for…
Bookended by a pair of songs about phoning people who don’t want to talk, Caitlin Rose’s The Stand-In is a wide-ranging adventure in heartbreak, disagreement, and loving in the wrong direction on a regular basis.
Stomping onto the stage at Shepherd’s Bush Empire with a jumper wrapped turban-wise around her head and a Norwegian fox dangling from her throat, Martha Wainwright bursts straight into a rendition of ‘Factory’. Choosing to begin the evening with a…
For serious Willy Mason devotees, a number of the tracks on Carry On will be thoroughly familiar; he’s been gigging them all around the place for upwards of a year. Recording the album in the depths of south London with…
Do you sing about yanking on the ankles of the hanging and half dead in the shower much? No, nor do we. Or at least we didn’t until really quite recently; listening to The Violence a few times will have…
Have you ever been unfortunate enough to break the elastic on your party hat, mid-party? If you have, you’ll remember that the sensation is both physically and emotionally mortifying: you can no longer wear the same hat as everyone else,…