In Guildford, Monday night is student night – and normally, it’s not pretty. Last night, though, the streets were almost deserted, the freezing air probably prompting the town’s partygoers to settle for a night in front of the fire instead. Those in the know, however, headed Star-ward to check out one of the local scene’s favourite live acts, and give a chance to whoever might be supporting them. Read more…
If you love diversity, Brighton (aka Camden-on-Sea) is damn near perfect. Its top alternative music venue, the Concorde 2 – situated next door to the beach – hosted batshit crazy prog-metal mentalists SikTh on a school night last week. Now, just a few days later, a mixed-bag crowd of dub lovers are filing in to spend Saturday night the right way – enjoying music that moves the hips as much as the head. Read more…
The Borderline – a cramped basement located around the corner from London’s infamous Crobar – is the perfect venue for a night of unrelenting rock. This time out, it’s safe to say that every band on the bill delivered exactly that. Read more…
Outside Brighton’s favourite seafront venue, the wind is whipping up white waves that crash heavily into the shoreline. Inside, the air is moving even more violently as Idiom tear through a barnstorming set, followed in short order by Heart Of A Coward‘s crushing djent-fuelled brutality. Both bands deserve their dues for effortlessly eliciting manic reactions from a crowd set on saving their energy for the headliners. Read more…
2014 has been a good year for awesome album launches at the Boileroom. This time around, opening act Rival Empires lived up to expectations by delivering a strong set backed up with energetic stage presence and buckets of passion. Current TMMP favourite If I Was A Whale (prefaced by a short grammatical debate as kicked off here) sounds epic live, overshadowing the inevitable Paramore comparisons with nostalgic reminders of how good Lostprophets were before Ian Watkins started touching kids. It’s all about the clean sections in that tune, while elsewhere we got unexpectedly brutal riffs and shades of the Foo Fighters and Incubus. Add to that some solid musicianship and a guitarist capable of throwing up the devil horns mid-riff without missing a subdivision, and you have a brilliant up and coming British band. Read more…
To say that I was looking forward to this show would be an understatement. Long-time TMMP followers will have already seen me wax lyrical about this Southampton-based math-pop quartet – but until this night, I’d not ticked off the final – and most important – box on the ‘Band To Watch’ checklist: The Live Show. No matter how good a band sounds on record, if they suck live it’s going to be tough to justify really getting behind them. Read more…
As a born and bred Rock Guy, I’ll admit to feeling a tad dubious about this show. After all, mod culture is historically defined in opposition to more or less everything I stand for – but still, this evening proved to be worth the trip. Woking-based gravy bass purveyors Birdsworth got things off to a fitting start with gritty tunes that wouldn’t be out of place in a British gangster flick; The Tapestry‘s quirky rock’n’roll took things up a level with offbeat melodicism and sharp-edged riffs; and New Street Adventure blew me away with expensive-sounding chords, powerful soul songs, and a virtuosic showing from lead guitarist Billy Farr. Read more…
For many of us, our comfort zones lie outside the physical world. Face-to-face conversations are bring replaced by IMs, text messages, tweets, and comments on Facebook statuses that drop off your news feed after you’ve scanned over them once. From this social evolution, a profound sense of disconnect is gradually emerging.
Vivien Goldman’s Punky Reggae Party Show explores the meeting of two groups for whom deep connection and active communities were paramount: Reggae musicians and punk bands. As a talk named after a Bob Marley single penned in appreciation of the Clash’s cover of reggae artist Junior Murvin’s tune Police and Thieves and hosted by a respected NYU professor, writer, and music journalist, Goldman’s Punky Reggae Party Show might sound to some like a stuffy, overintellectualised snoozefest entirely out of sync with the attitudes and ethos behind the actual musical movements being discussed – but the reality is very different. Goldman speaks from first-hand experience of the front lines of reggae and punk at the time of their very first meeting, and her enthusiasm for music with deep meaning and intent is both boundless and infectious – making the Punky Reggae Party Show an exciting and engaging experience. Read more…
Although Guildford’s alternative music venue is called the Boileroom for a reason, few bands heat it up as quickly as Bare Jams do. For band and crowd alike, this show was very sweaty. Read more…
Although I was gutted at missing most of Cardboard Carousel‘s earlier-than-planned set, what I did catch was as wonderful as I’d anticipated. Cardboard Carousel are an incredibly talented husband-and-wife team whose precisely attuned vocals give their carefully-worded tunes the depth they deserve.
I was probably the only audience member who was completely new to Ezio (whose name my spellchecker wants to change to ‘Wazoo’), and it was cool to see a pair of artists receive so much enthusiastic appreciation. Whether bouncing between acoustic-based genres – taking in rock, folk, blues, country, flamenco, and gypsy jazz – or prefacing an encore with an in-depth discussion of the walk of shame, Ezio were consummate showmen and instrumentalists. Along the way were laughs, melancholic moments, and more than enough lilting serenity to ease my post-Marmozets bangover. Read more…