indie
caspar.gomez
TUESDAY 27TH JUNE 2023I wake up around 11.00, get outta bed around 12.00.My carcass has been ridden over by Immortan Joe’s entire fleet of vehicles from Mad Max: Fury Road. My inner head has been scooped out like a cantaloupe. Where my brain once resided a blistered, reddened, atavist lizard id sits curled in upon itself, pulling levers. I need to write. I can barely recall how to use a spoon. Maybe I have Long Glastonbury? No time for mewling. Back in…THURSDAY 22ND JUNE 2023Shepton Mallet’s behind us. So’s the A361. We’re into the leafy lanes, bustin’ the pastoral with GN’R. Don Carlton and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Pete Fij and Terry Bickers are bathed in muted red light. They are sat side-by-side, Fij with an acoustic guitar, Bickers with a vintage 1970s CMI hollow-bodied electric. Behind them, oil wheel lighting gloops and bubbles gently, bespattered with glowing green circles cast by the stationary disco ball hanging high above them. “It’s surprising to see how much life you can fit into the back of a van,” sings Fij, dolefully, then adds, “It only took two trips.”The line, from the song “Broken Heart Surgery”, sums up part of the duo’s appeal, combining, as it does, a world-weary mournfulness with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brit alt-indie outfit Django Django refuse easy categorisation and, as a result, during a decade-plus career, have never quite found their place with the wider public. Critical acclaim has come their way, and those who’ve kept an ear open know their catalogue contains gems (“First Light”, “Hail Bop” and “In Your Beat” spring to mind) as well as great remixes.Their fifth album is a 21-track monster, with multiple guests. An explicitly stated attempt to blast off in all directions, away from any usual working practices and templates, it’s mostly a success.Let’s get the classic music-journo- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tony Kushner’s early 1990s play Angels in America is an epochal, mystical, political, state-of-the-nation address, revolving around the AIDs epidemic. By no means straightforward, its narrative runs the gamut from New York’s gay scene to God’s own sexual proclivities, via the ghost of executed Cold War spy Ethel Rosenberg, the fall of the Soviet Bloc and much else. At over three-and-a-half-hours long, it’s not for the fainthearted. Neither is the new concept album from Christine and the Queens, which is inspired by it.Described by its creator as “the second part of an operatic gesture that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It takes a real effort to sound this small, this timid; to resist the effort to rock out and kick pedal. Singer ‘Amelia’ (oh yeah, I bet that’s her name) has spent her entire adult life pretending she doesn't menstruate. The rest of her band, too, look like the sort of fanzine autistics who still wear dungarees at 30”.In his Melody Maker review of Heavenly’s June 1992 second album Le Jardin de Heavenly (its predecessor was a mini LP), Simon Price went on to say it “recreates only the most stylised clichés of childhood. The lyrics are emotionally retarded in the extreme, and the music veers Read more ...
Cheri Amour
Five years ago, breaking dry January a few days early, I joined a throng of folks amongst the merch boxes and strip lights of Rough Trade East to see Dream Wife. The London-based trio has come a long way since those small-scale shows in the backroom of a Brick Lane record shop.Their last release, So When You Gonna… was the only indie album recorded and produced by all women at the time to break into the Official UK Top 20 album charts. And they’ve shared the stage with the bands who likely informed them to pick up their instruments, opening for Garbage and The Kills across North America.Half Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHRahill Flowers at Your Feet (Big Dada)Rahill Jamalifard’s debut solo album somehow transmutes autobiography into gorgeous slow-pop. Of Iranian-American origin and best-known as singer of the band Habibi, she and FKA Twigs producer Alex Epton use home recordings and pensive, sometimes nostalgic lyrics to create something unique, lolling and amiable. Beck appears on one song, “Fables”, and the magpie spirit of his best work is a good reference point. It’s a lovely album that seems at once familiar, yet strange and new, a collation that includes elements of jazz, trip hop, hip Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Council Skies was created in Noel Gallagher’s new studio, partly during lockdown, an attempt to reconnect with where he came from, Manchester, as per its cover art. It’s not an exercise in nostalgia (except insofar as everything either Gallagher sibling has ever done is), but more about mining his origins for inspiration, authenticity and emotional meaning. There’s an audible earnestness, then, a ferventness, but, unfortunately, the ratio of catchy anthems is low.Let’s face it, neither Gallagher sibling actually needs to reform Oasis. Both their solo careers have proved strong, chart-topping Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A standing ovation part-way through a concert is unusual. Conductor Jules Buckley gestures to the members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Chorus that they should rise. Beside Buckley, Father John Misty stands looking from the conductor to everyone else on the stage, to the audience. Seemingly, in the midst of this, he’s thrown.That this is an overwhelming experience is summed up a little later by Buckley when he interrupts the magic to speak from his podium. “This is pretty crazy”, he declares before getting into acknowledgements and an explanation of how this evening’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Estonia’s Mart Avi styles himself as “the twilight samurai of alternative pop”. He creates “nowhere-somewhere music, mapping uncharted territories between avant-pop and timeless grandeur”. The characterisations are issued via AVICORP, his internet presence.The in-person Mart Avi has an arresting charisma; a star quality making it impossible not to be drawn in by his 40-minute performance at Tallinn Music Week. The look could be enough – cutting a David Bowie and Brett Anderson dash. Despite what he says about its nebulousness, his music is a moody electropop with shades of The Associates, Read more ...
caspar.gomez
“stay with the beer. beer is continuous blood. a continuous lover.” So said Charles Bukowski in his poem “how to be a great writer”. Who am I to argue. It’s a bright day and 11.50 AM. The sun isn’t past the yard-arm but the beer is cold and good. IPA. Finetime and I stand with Vanessa, her 18-year-old son Cody and her mate Jodie. Vanessa has a short blond crop which glows.We’re to the west of Brighton, by the sea, the outdoor enclave of The Great Escape. As in other years, the three stages are dominated on Saturday by Australian acts. We’re here to catch the first of the day in the Amazon New Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In July 2007, an article in The Guardian expressed surprise that shoegazing was influencing a series of current musicians, Blonde Redhead, Deerhunter, Maps and Ulrich Schnauss amongst them.“You could hear the heady, woozy influence of a style of music that had been a byword for naffness and overindulgence for the past 15 years,” said the article’s opening paragraph. “A type of music that Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers had said he ‘hated more than Hitler’".Five years on, in the same newspaper, a May 2012 live review of America’s Beach House said much the same thing: “The early Read more ...