Category: Reviews

Album | Mat Gibson – Long Goner

Mat Gibson has impressed many with his beautiful sombre melodies and there has been much anticipation for new material since the much acclaimed Forest Fire. Well now the wait is over in the form of the enchanting Long Goner. Mat…

Album | The Be Good Tanyas – A Collection

Having had only limited exposure to the Be Good Tanyas and always been interested in hearing more, I fall squarely within the target audience for a retrospective, and this set forms a fine education. The older songs tend to be…

Album | Adrian Crowley – I See Three Birds Flying

It’s hard to tell whether being called the “best songwriter no-one’s ever heard of” is a compliment or a barb. Adrian Crowley knows just how it feels to wrestle with that conundrum but, when the description is delivered by none…

Album | Hurray For The Riff Raff – Look Out Mama

The story of Alynda Lee Segarra’s drift into the music business is one of those that seems a little too good to be true. The notion that, by the age of 17, she had already escaped The Bronx to drift…

Album | Jackamo Brown – Oh No, The Drift of the World

It would be fair to say Scroobius Pip is not a name I ever expected to write on this website. However, from the wondrously bearded rapper-poet’s new Speech Development label comes man of mystery Jackamo Brown with his curiously titled…

Album | The Mountain Goats – Transcendental Youth

Transcendental Youth is an album about being young and reckless, about Frankie Lymon, about the Diaz Brothers, about running and jumping and leaving everything behind. An album about the fleetingness of youth that could, perhaps ironically, only have been written…

EP | Cara Mitchell – Have You Ever Wondered

There is certainly a very large buzz circulating around the 16 year old Aberdeen songstress Cara Mitchell. Notching up support slots with Gemma Hayes and Pearl and the Puppets, as well as being compared to the likes of Ellie Goulding…

Album | Me & My Friends – Beneath A Level Head

You might not have heard of Me and My Friends before. In fact, if you’re not a regular around the Leeds music scene or a devotee of FFS’s New Bands Panel, you probably won’t have. After one listen to their…

Album | Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs – Sunday Run Me Over

After the best part of twenty years, it’s clear that Holly Golightly will forever languish as the musician’s musician. Despite numerous name-checks and guest appearances on dozens of records by artists as far afield as Mudhoney and the White Stripes,…

Live | Frightened Rabbit @ 93 Feet East, 21st September

Frightened Rabbit manage, somehow, to strike a fine balance between combative resistance and crowd-pleasing jollity in their live shows.  Preferring those at the front of the room to those at the back (who’re probably in the music industry, and therefore…