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Hard To Find Records is a worldwide mail order dance music vinyl & DJ equipment superstore specializing in new & rare / deleted vinyl. They offer the facility to backorder any track listed on their website which will then automatically notify you via email the next time a copy arrives into stock.
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ARCHIVED REVIEWS June 2005 Thursday June 2 Mark Mulcahy
It’s been four years since the former Miracle Legion frontman’s last solo album, Smile Sunset, during which time he’s written and appeared in two operas and been stockpiling material for In Pursuit Of your Happiness (Loose) though, one would hope, not had such a miserable time as the downcast material would suggest. It should be made clear from the get go that (with the exception of Propstar where Big Star meets La Bamba) this isn’t anywhere as instant as some of his past work. There are no radio friendly infectious toe-tapping singalong choruses, no purpose build singles designed to propel him into mainstream chart consciousness. You have to make an effort to tease out its riches, but while you’re working at it you do get to savour the mellow purity of his voice as it blossoms like a bruise across the skin of the pump organ droning title track, sighs wearily on dusty Cookie Jar, or slips into jazz grooves with A Smack on the Lips. "The things I love don't bring me joy, the things I want, I want to destroy" he sings on the Velvets-like train rhythm of I Have Patience, lest you be in any doubt as to the mood while the lazy country soul Nothing But A Silver Medal Will Do sums up the self-defeatistism. Not, of course, that you should assume that the man with "the greatest voice I have ever heard" (copyright Thom Yorke) really has such a misanthropic down on himself and the world , they are, after all, just songs and, the longer you allow them to seep in, the more you’ll agree that Everything’s Come Undone, 4:04 and the tremulous spoken Lou Reed meets Elvis He Vanished are splendid songs indeed. Opening the night is Duke Special aka dreadlocked Belfast singer-songwriter Peter Wilson whose debut album, Adventures In Gramophone (Hag) compiles his two EPs into one convenient package to offer an impressive portrait of his pop influences and romantic melancholy songs.
On Last Night I Nearly Died he marries his warm Neil Hannon burr of a voice to a Motown beat, Brian Wilson harmonies and a dreamy West Coast pop vibe while Don’t Breathe sounds spookily like Daydream Believer and Some Things Make Your Soul Feel Clean at times melodically harks to Wild Mountain Thyme were it to have been written by Stuart Adamson and arranged by Wilson. An obvious aficionado of the Brill Building era, he favours the dreamily spare piano ballad - viz Kill Me Quickly Please, As Good As It Gets, Love Is A Series Of Scars - but as a clangy guitar stalking I Let You Down (Like a Tonne Weight) shows he can scuff up the carpet if need be. Whatever adventures he chooses to spin through the wind-up wax cylinders tonight yo can be pretty much assured that he’ll more than live up to his name. 7.30pm, £7, Glee Club. Mike Davies Thursday June 2 Further Seems Forever Once home to Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba, now fronted by ex Sensefield man Jon Bunch, the Florida spawned Christian emo outfit’s third album, Hide Nothing (Tooth & Nail) pulls out the stops for amped up big music, Light Up Ahead, Like Someone You Know, Call on The Life and Bleed taking the guitars to the mountain top and Bunch’s vocals soaring past the heavens. Problem is they all tend to sound pretty much the same with the quiet start and then erupting tumult while quieter numbers like For All We Know really have no musical substance at all. The believers will no doubt be religiously lining up down the front and who knows, fans of musically like-minded outfits may wind up concerts too. I’m just amused at the irony of them playing a gig in Manchester at a venue called Satan’s Hollow. 8pm, £8 Carling Academy 2. Mike Davies Thursday June 2 Tori Amos
It's hard to understand quite why or how Amos fell out of commercial favour so suddenly and so dramatically. One minute she’s enjoying Top 10 albums, the next she can barely get them into the Top 30. Case in point current release The Beekeeper which struggled to No 24 and then vanished from sight. Comprising 19 songs segmented into six thematic 'gardens' tended by the title character it's a conceptual work of sorts, part confessional, part testifying journey through life shaping events and the emotional subconscious with subjects that embrace Cornwall, Bush's war on terrorism and American civil liberties, Biblical references, nature, life, death, sex, the usual. Despite some heavy topics and emotional weight (Toast is a simple, moving number she wrote in the wake of her brother's death), with melodies fluttering in the breeze and warmed in the sun, it's the lightest, airiest album she's made. But don't confuse the music with the content, even the delightfully playful The Power of Orange Knickers is an unsettling look at sexual terrorism, desire and betrayal, a thematic thread that also weaves its way through the likes of Orginal Sinsuality, Goodbye Pisces, the voodoo funky sway of Hoochie Woman and Sweet The Sting where she slinkily re-imagines You're So Vain as played in a seductive bossa groove. There's a strong hint of folk music curling through too, strikingly so on the almost trad Parasol but also evident on the gentle piano tinkling hymn to her daughter, Ribbons Undone and Jamaica Inn, a song which, as you might guess, takes its emotional metaphors from Daphne Du Maurier's novel. As ever, many of Amos's lyrics require you to unlock the imagery, references and symbols to get at the core concerns, and Mother Revolution, Marys of the Sea and the title track's death musings are no exceptions, deep, rich and intriguing with codes that Dan Brown himself would appreciate. And yet, buoyed up with the soulful groove of numbers such as the dreamily romantic Sleeps With Butterlies, the wistful reverie of Martha's Foolish Gingers or the staccato funkiness of Witness, there's nothing here to sets barriers to complete surrender to its honeyed charms. With a generous helping of the current album served up with past nuggets alongside a special section of covers as requested by fans via her website (go on, ask for Wuthering heights), maybe it’s time for those backsliding former fans to see what they’ve been missing. Setting the mood for the evening is Tom McRae, currently out spreading the word on his third album, All Maps Welcome (Bubblegun), his LA recorded follow up to Just Like Blood and first for Sony/BMG once again surrounding his moody guitar and softly feathered voice with strings, piano, organ, brass and pedal steel. Opening with the narcoleptic strung out late night desert moods of For The Restless, it’s a bluesier setting for his songs of loss and loneliness that distil melancholy and hurt into slow burning melodies cracked along the fault lines of emotion.
Reviews have generally not been as impressed as with the previous two albums, but the longer you listen and allow it to soak inside the skin, the more it reveals itself as his best yet. Open yourself up to the wistful fragile woozy Humming Bird Song or the resigned despair of Packing For The Crash, pay attention to the imagery and darkness that slips along the pathways of the atmospheric Strangest Land and surrender to the plaintive wounds of Silent Boulevard, the self admonishing cello waltzing My Vampire Heart, the tumbling Celtic folk beauty of The Girl Who Falls Downstairs and the dying fall of the soaring closing track, 9, and you’ll find yourself wanting to stop strangers on the street and share the epiphanies within. 7.30pm, £27.50. W’hampton Civic Hall. Mike Davies Thursday June 2 Iain Archer
Formerly guitarist with Snow Patrol and co-writer of Run, and more recently a member of The Reindeer Section, the Belfast singer-songwriter’s now making his solo way again with third album Flood The Tanks (Bright Star). As you might expect, echoes of his former outfits hang on the line while you’ll also detect such influences as My Bloody Valentine and Yo La Tengo, but while there’s times when the rumble builds to a storm (I Wasn’t Drinking But You Got me Drunk, Running In Dreams), in keeping with its melancholic themes of disillusion and disenfranchisement the album generally strips things back to the bare minimum displayed on Not Yourself, A Few Conclusions, Presure Drop and the watery folk of Does This Have A Name and Not Yourself. Boy Boy Boy and the chiming chugging Summer Jets display his indie pop sensibilities, but there’ll be no ciggie lighters and anthems filling the hall tonight. 7.30pm, £6, Little Civic. Mike Davies Saturday June 4 Kathryn Williams
Her last album, Relations, a collection of covers designed to recharge her own creative batteries, Williams returns to her self-penned material - and her self-funded Caw label - for Over Fly Over , a collection of songs written either side of the covers project that deal with her familiar concerns of everyday bruises, scars and epiphanies. Shorn of pressures to become a unit shifting household name, it’s a gentle, unfussy but complex album that wraps her breathy vocals around the textured and layered arrangements that twine folk, indie and indeed classical and world music influences together into deceptively muscular melodies and rhythms. Shop Window’s handclappy riffing is unexpectedly popsy in a disarming 60s way, Just Like A Birthday hints at The Breeders (complete with her first use of heavy drums) and Three catches you offguard with its feedback and petulant guitar clouds, but otherwise this sits firmly in a simmering cauldron of acoustic Nick Drake witchery, nakedly confessional on Baby Blues with its 3am trumpet and chamber cello, teasing out a suicide allegory on the beguiling Beachy Head and, her voice a thing of infinite hushed beauty, touching the realms of the inexpressibly lovely with City Streets. "People like you and me could leave this world and go unnoticed.." she sings on the closing Full Colour. Well, certainly not in her case. A perfect fit for a balmy open air summer’s evening, so no talking there in the back rows! 7.30pm, £13.50. mac Arena. Mike Davies Saturday June 4 Mark Knopfler
Inevitably lauded for his guitar work, it’s sometimes forgotten that Knopfler’s a fine storyteller too. He’s currently on tour promoting current album Shangri-La (Mercury), an easy listening mellow Geordie collection that offers several fine examples of his ability to unfurl a narrative. The opening 5.15am spins a Tyneside crime drama tale of the (one-arm) bandit man from Cockney land, the bluesy Boom, Like That tells the story of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, Back To Tupelo is about Elvis, Postcards From Paraguay a jaunty tale of a bank robber on the run while the downbeat Song For Sonny Liston and current single The Trawlerman’s Song (which comes with five live versions of tracks from the album) are fairly self-evident. And when he’s not spinning yarns, he’s still referencing real life, raising a celebratory glass to the king of skiffle on Donegan’s Gone while Don’t Crash The Ambulance is wittily sung in the character of George Bush to George Jr. Like JJ Cale whom he increasingly echoes, he’s never in any hurry to get to the end of a song when there are details to be explored, and while some may regard that as boring most will recognise it as craftsmanship. If the set remains much the same, he’s not dipping too deeply into the new album (though hopefully he’ll have the sense to chuck out the disposable Donegan song in favour of the excellent roots country Stand Up Guy) but he is looking over his shoulder at the past with versions of both earlier solo nuggets like Sailing to Philadelphia and Done with Bonaparte and a clutch of Dire Straits classics that include Romeo and Juliet, Sultans of Swing, the epic Telegraph Road, Walk of Life (well, not all classics), Brothers in Arms and, inevitably, Money for Nothing. He may not be anywhere as near as fashionable as he was in the 70s, but he’s still every bit as good. 7.30pm, £30. NEC. Mike Davies Sunday June 5 Destiny’s Child With Beyonce’s solo career going stratospheric and Kelly and Michelle not doing too badly either, bets were on that they’d never get back together again as a unit. The bookies surely cleaned up then because here they are, ‘reunited’ album Destiny Fulfilled (Columbia) notching up multi-million sales and sweeping away wannabes with the likes of Love My Breath, Soldier and current single Girl. Pity about the cod Barry White sensual come on of T-Shirt, but nobody’s perfect They’ve sweetened their R&B somewhat (Bad Habit, Through With Love, the gospel hued Free), but they remain the most bootylicious girl trio on the planet and, sass duly burnished, you can expect them to strut some serious full on stuff here tonight. 7.30pm, £40-£27.50. NIA. Mike Davies Sunday June 5 Smother
Formed back in 2001, the Southend rock trio have been determinedly putting together the building blocks for their long in coming debut album, Great White Hoax (Global Warming). While unlikely to suddenly catapult them to international arena packing status as saviour of tough as leather rock, there’s enough solid riffing and old school swaggery poses here to ensure a healthy life on the gigging circuit for the next couple of years at least. Although the band also apparently cite Jeff Buckley and Joy Division, the obvious points of reference would be Queens of the Stone Age and a happy cross between the poppier side of Guns n Roses and the likes of Dogs D’Amour. People Stay The Same throws in an unexpected nod to late 60s West Coast psychedelic rock but the cut and thrust generally falls into either the energetic charging pop hued likes of Find A Happy Place, Toy and a Oasisy You Don’t Have To Say A Thing and the more back to booze chugging rock n roll riffs of Last Go Round and This Generation Cannot Say No. Either way, there’s not going to be room on the floor for the body slamming they’ll generate.8.30pm, £5, Jug of Ale. Mike Davies Sunday June 5 A Hawk and a Hacksaw
Sometime collaborator with Birmingham based Broadcast, nomadic multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Barnes is something of a musical magpie, and his instrumental album Darkness At Noon is an eclectic not to say esoteric feathering of the nest that gaily romps through Eastern European folk, mariachi, klezmer, traditional American folk and contemporary experimentalism. Recorded in a Leicester church and a Mexican dance studio, it opens on a trumpet flourish with Laughter In The Dark based on a Transylvanian folk melody and ends with a cover of Portlandown, an old protest song Woody Guthrie used to sing but with the banjo part rescored for nerve fraying piano. It's fair to say Guthrie devotees might be hard pressed to recognise it. Between times it deconstructs trad folk forms and reassembles them out of shape and at skewed angles, marrying mazurka and mariachi in a gathering frenzy for The Moon Under The Water and lurching like a drunk at a funeral through The Water Under The Moon Water. Goodbye Great Britain is a sonic cut up,Wicky Pocky a kletzmer tune with ADD and A Black and White Rainbow gathers Bulgarian bandits for a campfire knees up drinking rotgut plum brandy. An acquired sensibility, but certainly one worth risking a hangover for. 8pm, £5. The Cross, Moseley. Mike Davies Sunday June 5 Audioslave
Building on their past history and that of current frontman Chris Cornell’s old outfit, Soundgarden, the band formerly known as Rage Against The Machine return with their sophomore album, Out of Exile (Interscope). It’s not perhaps quite what you might have expected. Sure there’s that crunchy riff heavy metal in there with the opening track Your Time Has Come, the scouring pyrotechnics of Worm or #1 Zero and the Ian Gillan-like Man Or Animal and Out of Exile. But from chiming country bluesy third cut Be Yourself onwards there’s also a weathered mellowness to things. Save for a Tom Morello guitar squall towards the close, Doesn’t Remind Me is even a folksy acoustic number while Heaven’s Dead is the sort of slow countrified blues Cornell explored on his solo album.Hardcore Rage devotees thirsting for that band’s aggressive rock are likely to feel let down, but as a blueprint for future expansion, between Morello’s eyeball popping fretwork, Cornell’s increasingly seasoned vocals and their increasing reliance on melody over sonic assault, this Exile should keep them comfortably on main street for a while yet. 7.30pm, £25, W’hampton Civic. Mike Davies Tuesday June 7 Leaves
With second album, The Angela Test, imminent, the Icelandic five piece slide into town clutching advance single The Spell (Island), all swirling Coldplay anthemics and ice floe melodies with clattering drumbeat and flowing strings as the vocals soar heavenwards. Given the accompanying tracks variously evoke Pink Floyd (Do I Sink) and the Beach Boys (well, ‘Til I Die was written by Brian Wilson), it’ll be interesting to see where the rest of the new material settles or whether they remain firmly ensconced in the Christ Martin regions of Breathe. 7.30pm, £5, Little Civic. Mike Davies Wednesday June 8 The Explosion
The Boston punk-pop crew return in headline mode to further the cause of major label debut Black Tape (Virgin), a flurry of alienation, angst and anger channelled into three minute bursts of flying guitars and whipped up chorus friendly melodies. There’s nothing new about their man the barricades fists in the air stormers - they occasionally recall The Alarm - other than a hint of al-country impregnating several of the melodies (Grace and Hollywood Sign) while Heavyweight leans on pure 60s pop. They parade social slogans and issues a little too much like commercial flags but you can’t deny they do it with ridiculously infectious verve.8pm, £7.50. Carling Academy 2. Mike Davies Thursday June 9 Turin Brakes
I never warmed to the last two albums, The Optimist and Ether Song, and the third, Jack in A Box (Source), isn’t about to change matters much. The vocals remain whiny, many of the songs still feeling thin and half-finished and even the band seem to have acknowledged that their time has past without ever really arriving as the talk about how fame and fortune never last on the opening country pop They Can’t Buy The Sunshine, itself one of the album’s better, sunnier tunes. On the plus side Forever’s a rather lovely rustic ballad with hymnal harmonies and Buildings Wrap Around makes a convincing stab at acoustic back porch sleepy Americana, but most everything else seems to have been over-arranged, over produced and over cluttered in an attempt to cover of the paucity of the songs themselves, reaching something of a low with the clunky country soul of Asleep With The Fireflies and the clumsy jugband Over And Over. They never really seemed to aspire to be more than a poor man’s Starsailor, but even such modest ambitions as those now seem further away than ever.7.30pm, £15, Carling Academy. Mike Davies Saturday June 11 Vetiver
Named for the tall narrow grass that produces a woody, earthy, herbaceous essential oil, this is the wistful acoustic vehicle for singer-songwriter Andy Cabic and his dusty fragile campfire folk Americana. Joined on tour by chums that include Devendra Banhart and Kevin Barker on guitar and Alissa Anderson on cello, he’ll be spotlighting his new EP, Between (DiCristina) as part of the Twisted Folk tour package. I’ve not heard the album, but the tracks on offer here are beguilingly enticing, Been So Long a lovely, ocean lapping, scent of jasmine number that hushes together Brian Wilson, Jimmy Buffett and Cat Stevens while both their cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Save Me A Place and Busted summon affectionate thoughts of the Everlys. 7.30pm, £10, Carling Academy 2. Mike Davies Sunday June 12 Joy Zipper
You will of course be aware that Long Island duo Tabitha and Vinny deal in tripped out lo fi fuzzy psychedelia, strings and sweet harmonies. Ok, forget that. For new album The Heartlight Set (Vertigo) they’ve largley kicked the languid into touch and whipped it up a bit. Although opener Go Tell The World does lay its psychobilly cards on the table, they’ve not exactly gone garage as such and there’s several occasions when you can hear that this all actually started out as a country album. But there’s a tighter, snappier sonic zing to things that puts an itch into the blood, niggling along with the sunkissed My Bloody Valentine influences of 1, coming over all Canned Heat with Anything You Sent and chugging it up on the Velvet Mary Chain tracks for You’re So Good and Window. As usual, there’s darkness lurking in the lyrical undergrowth, but even here they can’t stop themselves spreading a coating of lazy sunshine over things. The opiate fog of their past albums may have cleared but they still invoke their spiritual 60s West Coast home and the Wilson brothers coastal pathways on the likes of Thoughts A Waste of Time, For Lenny’s Own Pleasure (a tribute to Lenny Bruce’s sexual appetite!), the melancholically narcotic World Doesn’t Care and the chiming bittersweetness as Tabitha talksings her way through 2 Dreams I Had. It’ll be interesting to see if they apply this newfound vitality to the old material in the set. Support comes from new crew Kubb, a vehicle for Liverpool born, Tobago raised and Cornwall nurtured singer-songwriter Harry Collier who’s forthcoming debut album Mother (Mercury) seems to answer the question ‘what would Coldplay sound like with Jeff Buckley on vocals?’ Their debut single, Somebody Else, shared a love of old soul with Joss Stone (indeed, it calls to mind I Don’t Want To Go On Without You in places) while the passionate musical surges of Wicked Soul suggests they could wipe the floor with Simply Red if the urge took them and Remain, Glow and Keane on steroids piano ballad Sun are all purpose built for swelling to lighters aloft stadium heights.
Fuelled by the afterburn of a relationship implosion and the eventual emotional recovery, these have the instant hallmark of timeless classics while the man himself was clearly dipped in a bath of charismatic presence. This is a small intimate starter showcase outing, come next year the NEC may be just not be big enough. 7.30pm, £8.50. Bar Academy. Mike Davies Monday June 13 Weezer
Having taken time out to continue his studies at Harvard, Rivers Cuomo returns to the day job with his self-critical loser persona for more nerd rock with new album Make Believe (Geffen). Although the opening Beverly Hills suggests he may have spent time in the dorm with a pile of Steve Miller albums (listen to The Joker!) and This Is Such A Pity manages to sound like Europe if they played synth pop, it’s mostly familiar stuff with the buzzing guitars, handclappy melodies and heavy does of irony and acerbic sarcasm. We Are All On Drugs judders along taking swipes at cool narcotic poseurs while the likes of Freak Me Out, the anthemic guitars of Perfect Situation, a George Harrisonish My Best Friend, the soaring Hold Me and surgingly effervescent The Other Way all show Cuomo’s lost none of his trademark fizz while pursuing academic excellence. He has though taken up meditation and seems to have come over with a need to be a nicer person, even using songs to apologise for those he’s hurt and upset. Worry not, as long as he keeps that paranoia and cynicism simmering on the back burner, he’ll not be relinquishing the geek rock crown for a while yet. 7.30pm, £23.50. Carling Academy. Mike Davies Tuesday June 14 Ambulance Ltd
Latest New York outfit making waves, their self-titled album romps merrily through a rush of classic pop that draws as much on the shoe-gazing dreaminess of Galaxie 500 and the gentler moments of My Bloody Valentine as it does the Beatles and - in Marcus Congleton’s talk-sing delivery - Velvets. Opening instrumental Yoga Means Union is a bit of a false start since it suggests you’re in for a collection of narcotic space rock, but then come the likes of Anecdote’s countrified pop bounce, Heavy Lifting’s surging arpeggios and closing floatiness, the sunny Stay Where You Are and the slow lapping narcotic croon of the quite splendid Michigan, and you’re surfing clouds rather than cosmic waves. It might not quite score, as the closing number has it, Straight A’s, but with thoughtfully articulate lyrics to go with the melodies it’s well worth becoming an ambulance chaser. Support comes from new Glasgow fourpiece The Cinematics who, judging by their impressively dark and moody MP3 sampler Be In The World manifest a cross between The Smiths and U2. This is a fairly intimate showcase, but come next year the NEC may just not be big enough. 7.30pm, £7, Bar Academy. Mike Davies Tuesday June 14 Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Having been let go by Virgin after the less than wonderful second album, BRMC have regrouped, bringing errant drummer Nick Jago back into the ranks and locking themselves away to record Howl, due in August, an album they’ll be hoping restores their dented reputation. Recently featured in Michael Winterbottom’s porn movie 9 Songs, they’ll no doubt be roadtesting much of the new material here but you can also expect a healthy stockpile of old glories to reassure the faithful they’re still in it for the long haul. Support, by way of irony, comes from guitarist Peter Hayes’s old mob, the Brian Jonestown Massacre. It’s the latest line up permutation of self-destructive frontman Anton Newcombe’s ongoing revival of the sound of San Francisco’s 60s underground though, given his equating success with sell-out it’s not surprising if you’ve not heard of them despite having released some five albums. Next month Newcombe’s featured in Dig!, a documentary that charts his volatile career path and prickly relationship with former buddies the Dandy Warhols, so this affords a useful chance to get a taster of the real thing in the flesh and see if they can manage to get to the end of a set without him trashing members of either the band or audience. 7.30pm, £14, Carling Academy 2. Mike Davies Tuesday June 14 Minotaur Shock
The nom de music of David Edwards whose marriage of electronica and acoustic once hung from the shortlived folkatronica label, this somewhat rare outing coincides with the release of Mritime (4AD), an album he says reflects his romantic notions of the sea and love of Daphne DuMaurier novels. Where the recent EP had a smattering of vocals, this is a wholly - and often idiosyncratic - instrumental affair designed to evoke assorted images and emotions of a marine nature. Citing such diverse influences as The Wedding present, Can, Cocteau Twins, Steely Dan and, er, The Eagles, you can expect him to be twiddling the knobs for a selection of seaside shells that could well include reedy hornpipe Muesli, the reflective (She’s In) Drydock Now that charts the last voyage of an ocean liner, the bobbing electronic Krautrock meets folk of Vigo Bay, a very cinematic Someone One Told Me It Existed, But They Never Found It, the bleepy Hilly, jazz infected Luck Shield or the witty ship’s lounge dancer that is Mistaken Tourist. Grab a sou’wester or a towel, either way the water’s fine. 8pm, £3. Flapper and Firkin.. Mike Davies Thursday June 16 Dead 60s
Out of Liverpool with a melding of ska and combat rock Clash, the Mersey boys hit the trail to plug their eponymous debut album. Can’t say much about that since promo copies weren’t forthcoming but new single Loaded Gun (Deltasonic) is a suitably swampy, moody affair with fluttering psychobilly guitar while reviews suggest a spectral Nowhere could prove something of a live highlight. 7.30pm, £7, Bar Academy. Mike Davies Thursday June 16 Jeff Klein
Two years ago the Austin based New Yorker toured here with Everybody Loves A Winner, a lugubrious rainy day soul of an album that wore its American Music Club, Nick Drake, and Leonard Cohen influences on its sleeve. Good then to welcome him back for The Hustler (One Little Indian), a less stripped down affair but still steeped in his careworn woodsmoked hushed vocals as he documents recent life experiences, mistakes made, lessons learned, friends burned. Recorded in New Orleans. it features collaborations with Ani Di Franco (who sings on three tracks, including the spare countrified pedal steel enhanced title track and the pulsingly minimalist darkly shadowed Pity), Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner and Afghan Whig Greg Dulli who co-produced and adds ghostly backing to the closing slow funereal marching Nobody’s Favourite Girl. It’s an intimate affair for all the expanded arrangements, Cobalt Hue starting life as a simple piano tune before the distorted percussion and string quartet set in, The 19th Hole a haunting bluesy swayer, Ironside a pulsing dark lullaby with a mid section break out of what sounds like backwards guitar, All I Want a pure slice of bedsit Cohen. Not that there aren’t fuller blooded moments, the loping The Red Lantern, the jangly Put You To Sleep or the fuzzy pop of Suzanne with its Lovin’ Spoonful echoes and jaunty horn section, but it’s the starker, quieter moments that really catch your heart offguard. The album’s not out until next month so this is a useful taster opportunity, suitably blessed, of course, by past nuggets that will hopefully include Everything Is Alright’s song about a suicide arsonist and his self-destructive romantic I'm Sorry Sweet Emily. 8pm, £5. Glee Club. Mike Davies
Friday June 17 Motley Crue
Heavy metal leviathan dudes never retire, they just issue best of compilations and intermittently put together reunion tours to top up the bank accounts. Hence this bunch of 80s poodle hair rockers have put aside their famous disagreements and lifestyle excesses to squeeze themselves back into the leather trousers and torn t-shirts to flog their way through Red, White and Crue (Mercury), a gathering together of their frankly now rather dated sexist juvenile glam-rock strutters with a smattering of new numbers they somehow managed to drag themselves into the studio to record. Unless you were severely brain damaged banging the head to the likes of Girls Girls Girls, Primal Scream, Too Young To Fall In Love and Dr Feelgood the first time round it’s hard not to notice how weedy they now actually sound with Vince Neill’s vocals verging on the castrati while new material, like lumbering stadium power ballad If I Die Tomorrow are frankly turgid. Rather Poison than this! 7.30pm, £17, NEC. Mike Davies Friday June 17 Ben Folds
Rearranged from last November, this sold out one man and a piano date now conveniently ties in with the recent arrival of new solo album Songs For Silverman (Epic). Presumably no connection with the Saving Silverman film, it continues Folds’ track to be recognised as the new Billy Joel (though Sentimental Guy also has Randy Newman aspirations), but with more of a quirky sense of lyric. Variously wistful, melancholic and sweet, songs in honour of his tragic friend Elliott Smith (the poignantly bittersweet Late) and his daughter (Gracie) sit alongside the likes of the witty Bastard which twins a resignation of growing old with acerbic commentary about those who think they know it all or the gently biting American Dream satire Jesusland. It’s not his most immediate album, but with his piano playing more assured rather than brash, his world vision more seasoned, it’s surely his most mature and considered, dressed in themes of mortality, regret and self-examination. Musically it’s not going to cause any palpitations among those who expect to hear a certain Folds sound and style, but when it comes to well observed, finely crafted and emotionally acute grown up pop you’d be hard pushed to find many who do it better. 7.30pm, £17.50/£15. Warwick Arts Centre Saturday June 18 Nelly & The St Lunatics With his simultaneously released albums Suit and Sweat respectively debuting at No 1 and No 2 in the US charts, Nelly’s arguably hip hop’s biggest star, his previous two releases, Country Grammar and Nellyville having racked up some 20 million worldwide sales. More recently he pulled the two new albums together, cutting out the dead wood to make one single compilation too. Personally I can take or leave his rap cum r&b groove with its thug and thugette inclinations, but you’d have to be deaf and stupid not to acknowledge the musical class and elbow he can put behind something like his Snoop Dog collaboration She Don’t Know My Name, the unlikely teaming with country star Tim McGraw on Over and Over, the infectious calypso rhythms of an introspective In My Life, absent father lament Die For You or the bombastic power of Heart of a Champion and the bitter American Dream. There’ll be none of the albums’ star guests around to bulk up things live, but somehow I don’t think the audience are going to be that bothered. 7.30pm, £25. NIA. Mike Davies Sunday June 19 Maria McKee
Probably still best remembered for her No 1 power ballad hit Show Me Heaven, in recent years McKee has increasingly leaned towards the folkier side of the Americana spectrum. Out on the road pushing new album Peddlin’ Dreams (Cooking Vinyl) with its as live recordings, this marries the acoustic with punchier electric material but it’s all veined with a melancholic introspection that should more than please those who’ve longed for a return to the mood of her first solo album. Indeed the opening acoustic strummer Season Of The Fair turns out to be an outtake from that, written some twenty years ago and sounding like it could have come from an even earlier Joan Baez while the superb title track is a slouched soulful folk blues that evokes a bone weary Emmylou Harris and is stained with the time spent in Ireland. If thoughts Neil Young come to mind during the guitar blisters of Everyone’s Got A Story they’re made flesh as she covers his Barstool Blues, its dusty backwoods mood mirrored in the plaintive Appalachian Boy, Turn Away and the disarmingly beautiful, achingly autobiographical People In The Way. The kiddyish The Horse Life doesn’t quite come off, sounding just a little too vocally twee for the muscle of the lyric, but otherwise this is already proving one of the albums of the Americana year, topped off with a nod back to her own 60s influences with a fine torchy cover of (You Don’t Know) How Glad I Am. Though often at the mercy of the sound system, the venue’s acoustics and intimacy should well favour McKee’s delivery, so do her a favour and don’t call out for Show Me Heaven until she’s at least had the chance to dazzle you with what she’s doing now. Warming the evening up will be Deadman, a Texas duo comprising the nasal twang voiced Steve Collins and organist and co-vocalist Sherilyn Collins.
While the press blurb offers it up as a sonic and thematic descendent of U2’s Joshua Tree, it’s harder to avoid making the Gram/Emmylou comparisons the moment When The Music’s Not Forgotten opens their Our Eternal Ghosts (One Little Indian) album while you’ll also detect the strong influence of both Dylan and the Band here too. Laced with keening pedal steel, the album dwells on a theme of eternity and the determination to live in the face of the awareness of mortality, focusing on what matters rather than the distractions. The result’s an often bluesy affair, such as the twilight burnished intimacy of Won’t Be Long, a beat jazz lounged Werewolves and the scouring Crazy Horse workout of Sad Ole’ Geronimo but it’s probably the more desert hued slow swaying colours that paint The Monsters of Goya, the wearied Brother and the fuzzed slow burn country gospel Love Will Guide You Home that’s going to send you back out into the night with the shivers still playing down the spine. 7.30pm, £14, Glee Club. Mike Davies Sunday June 19 The Brakes
Forged from assorted members of British Sea Power, Electric Soft Parade and The Tenderfoot, this Brighton bunch have been lined up as a new Velvet Revolver though Ring A Ding Ding, the opening track of debut album Give Blood (Rough Trade) does tend to suggest they’d not be averse to be tagged as Roxy Music either, what with sounding not a million miles away from Virginia Plain and all. There’s many other strings to their bow though, second track in with NY Pie and they’re playing lollopping bluegrassed country jogalongs while The Most Fun heads off snorting drugs with They Might Be Giants while the scratchy chugging What’s In It For Me? sounds like a manic Wedding Present with too much speed and All Night Disco Party juggles a Krautrock drone rhythm, Donna Summer and Gang of Four art punk funk. Yep, it’s art rock all right, several tracks over before you can read the title, Pick Up The Phone getting the Ramones down to 30 seconds while Comma Comma Full Stop manages to knock a further 24 off that! Indeed, there’s barely anything hat breaks the two minute mark with the jittery three minute plus I Can’t Stand To Stand Beside You (very Talking Heads) practically an epic. Never exactly easy to tie down to a benchmark influence they come over all 60s chiming girlie pop with the Jesus & Mary Chain’s Sometimes Always and even turn in a hoedowning Lee & Nancy staple Jackson (featuring Liela Moss from Duke Spirit) with tongue placed firmly in yeehaw cheek. There’s not too much substance (as opposed to substances) here, but you have to agree they put the foot down hard on the fun accelerator. 7.30pm, £7.50, Bar Academy. Mike Davies Sunday June 19 Sons and Daughters
More Scottish hopefuls, headed up by the dark sprite voice of Adele Bethel this fourpiece give a fair idea of what the Velvets might have sounded like had they been a psychobilly band with P J Harvey’s black sheep sister on vocals. Following last year’s Love The Cup, they head out with their first album proper, The Repulsion Box (Domino), a murder ballads love match that puts a veritable tribal stomp riff to Dance Me In and Choked while whirling dervish fashion for the urgent pounding Medicine, cutting back into 60s r&b infused garage pop with Taste The Last Girl, coming over all Patti Smith on Gone and ripping it all back to the bare basics with the rumblingly ominous devils blues Rama Lama with its haunted Leone whistle. They don’t flex too far from their staple formula so they’re not going to spin across too wide an audience gathering yet, but if they can add some extra flesh to their well honed musculature then they could well prove potently poky children of the revolution. 7.30pm, £7.50. Carling Academy 2. Mike Davies Tuesday June 21 Friday July 29/Saturday July 30 Rod Stewart
Well, after three albums murdering The Great American Songbook, you can’t say that you don’t know what you’re in for with these rescheduled dates. Having hit an unexpected goldmine among the taste impaired when he decided to wring the life out of The Way You Look Tonight, These Foolish Things and It Had To Be You, Rod quickly sussed he’d found himself a lucrative gravy train and, to mix metaphors, duly set about milking it. In the past three years with the As Time Goes By and Stardust albums he’s duly turned such classic standards as Time After Time, Someone To Watch Over Me, As Time Goes By, Baby It’s Cold Outside, Blue Moon, Manhattan and, oh excuse me, ‘Rod’s special UK classic’, A Nightingale Sang In Berkely Square and, subjecting them to his cigarette smoke tones, turned them into coffee table musak for ears that wouldn’t recognise a quality Gershwin, Cahn or Porter cover if they fell over it. Not content with that he also lured such other ill-suited names as Queen Latifah and Cher into serving as duetting accomplices. Easy listening at its blandest, devoid of anything resembling the heart or wit Stewart used to conjure for the likes of his own contributions to pop’s hall of fame, it’s frighteningly going to be packed with punters who clearly have more money than musical sense. The chances of him doing Hot Legs are slim. 7.30pm, £50/£40. NEC. Mike Davies Wednesday June 22 Crosby, Stills & Nash
With Crosby and Nash barely having unpacked the bags after their last visit here a s a duo, they’re now back in the original trio format with Stephen Stills on the back of the recent CS&N Greatest Hits (Rhino) collection. Of course, you might want to niggle that a fuller picture of their rock history should really include some of the classic material they released when Neil Young was also in the ranks, but you can’t really complain about the compilation assembled here which covers all the major pit stops of their West Coast rock, the sweet close harmony pop of Marrakesh Express, the Byrdsian Teach Your Children and Suite:Judy Blue Eyes on the one hand, the throatier rumbles of Long Time Gone and Wooden Ships on the other. The quality tail off in the 70s and 80s is evident, with even the Wasted On The Way and Daylight Again pale imitations of the likes of Guinnevere, Our House and Helplessly Hoping but it’s unlikely any of the unreconstructed hippies and coffee table nostalgists that’ll be waving their bandannas catching this rare reunion tour tonight are going to be bothered. Of course, they might be less impressed if Stills decides to grab some spotlight time to plug his own new album, Man Alive (Talking Elephant). It may be his first in 14 years but it’s still a routine collection of stodgy dated southern blues rock (he even sings about Vietnam on Round the Bend while Neil Young dashes off some tired trademark licks) leavened with hints of African calypso (the lumbering anti-poverty Feed The People), reggae (I Don’t Get It), cajun (Acadienne) and even an interminable moody Spanish concept epic called, er, Spanish Suite, that sounds like a Hispanic Chris De Burgh before Herbie Hancock hijacks it for the jazz piano workout. 7.30pm, £42.50/£38.50. NIA. Mike Davies Wednesday June 22 Basement Jaxx Currently enjoying something of an unexpected massive revival in the wake of their singles collection flying out of the stores, the Brixton dance crew are wisely making the most of things. With some 15 dance floor fillers to choose from, and the likelihood of stretching things out live, there’s bound to be a few that slip through the cracks but you can pretty much guarantee twisting the limbs to Red Alert, Romeo, Where Your Head’s At, Do Your Thing with the likes of the bossanova beat Bingo Bango, ragga house Jump N, Shout and new bump n grind single U Don't Know Me high on the checklist too. With dance music having a bit of a slump at present, the Jaxx could be just the thing it needs to get the blood circulating again. 7.30pm, £17.50. Carling Academy. Mike Davies Wednesday June 22 Suzanne Vega
Something of a regular visitor here and even if there’s yet again no overdue new material she’s always welcome back. This time round, it’s being billed as an acoustic evening, so there’ll be more intimate woman and a guitar versions of such nuggets as Luka, Last Year’s Troubles, Marlene On The Wall, Tom’s Diner and, recently featured on the soundtrack for Closer, Caramel.
Support’s French-Indian singer-songwriter Nerina Pallott continuing her re-emergence with sophisticated new album, Fires, where songs such as the political swiping powerpop Everybody’s Gone To War, Heart Attack (a grown up Avril), prickly love song Geek Love and the soaringly defiant Learning To Breathe are all ample incentives to arrive early. 8pm, £17.50. Warwick Arts Centre. Mike Davies Thursday June 23/Friday June 24 Kings of Leon
The fact they can sell out two nights here is ample evidence that the Tennessee boys are more loved in the UK than back home in America. It’s a second go round promotional flurry for second album Aha Shake Heartbreak, taking their Southern soaked garage, swampy stoner rock and lazy bluesy funk to the next level as Caleb Followill growlingly chews his way through sordidly sleazy numbers and songs about girls with hourglass bodies always willing to lend a toothbrush. As intoxicating as sniffing Jack Daniel casks, they’ll choogling their way through a rollicking King of the Rodeo, the Stones go Joy Division swaggering Taper Jean Girl, bad ass punky Confederate hoedown Velvet Snow alongside first album gems Holy Roller Novocaine, California Waiting and the throbbing gutsy Molly’s Chamber. They’re still basically a low dive bar band, but you’ll certainly want a few quarts of whatever it is they’re drinking. 7pm. £18.50. Carling Academy. Mike Davies Thursday June 23 Farrah
Busted are dead, long live the new Busted. Back with second album Me Too (Lo-Jinx), the lads make no bones about serving up fizzy guitar powerpop in three minute bursts about teenage relationship angst. That Bob Harris rates the handclappy ballad First and Last says much about their credibility beyond the usual tweenie girl audience, and if you still need convincing Daytime TV nods to Richard and Judy with references to talking about haemorrhoids, Tongue Tied injects a ska lollop into its Blink 182 bounce, The Last Word and domestic drama He Gives An Inch both evoke the vintage days of Squeeze while This Is My Life, the Brian Wilson inclined The One That Got Away and break up ballad Hopelessly Devoted all underline their love of classic pop. Respect too for a fine cover of Joe Jackson’s Different For Girls, a song released before most of the people who’ll be buying the album and going to the gig were born. They deserve your attention. 8pm, £4, Actress & Bishop. Mike Davies Sunday June 26 Antony & The Johnsons
Latest eccentric to capture the media’s superlatives, Antony’s an androgynous camp UK born New Yorker who shares Eddie Izzard’s transvestite penchant for clothes and make-up and Nina Simone’s voice, steeped in a love of torch song cabaret blues and the sort of ambient late night smoky ramblings you might expect from Lambchop or Tindersticks. His second album, I Am A Bird Now (Rough Trade) is crammed with operatic laments about love, death, and identity crises, opening with the remarkable, crushingly desperate cracked beauty of Hope There’s Someone before proceedings its intoxicating way through the affecting piano blues gender confusions of My Lady Story (Cat Stevens meets Billie Holiday) and Today I’m A Boy, the gospel soul liberation of Bird Guhl and, on perhaps the album’s stand out cut, the stark confessional You Are My Sister. On that he duets with Boy George, just one of an array of guest stars that also include Devendra Banhart on the lush Spiralling, Rufus Wainwright taking lead on the late night cellar blues What Can I Do? and Lou Reed who provides the spoken intro and guitar for the rainy day sax drenched soulfulness of Fistfull of Love. Not that he needs any famous friends to deliver a spellbinding performance which, if the live shows are anything like the album, will leave you utterly mesmerised. For once the hype doesn’t even come close to the real thing. 8pm, £12. Glee Club. Mike Davies Tuesday June 28 Ryan Adams & The Cardinals
There’s been some sniffy reviews of latest double album set Cold Roses (Lost Highway), the first of three new releases apparently planned for this year. Hard to understand why really because, while over 19 tracks, there’s a few that could have been judiciously pruned back, this is really the return to the Whiskeytown country rock roots many critics have been demanding over the course of recent patchy offerings Rock N Roll and Love Is Hell. He still cuts up a rock rug from time to time, notably on the rowdy Beautiful Sorta and the Neil Youngish Tonight and title cut (you’ll also hear that Young influence all over Magnolia Mountain), but for the most part the mood is downtempo and reflective rootsy country, finding classic _expression on the twangy When Will You Come Back Home, Rosebud and Easy Plateau which all nod to the seminal days of the Grateful Dead while Dance All Night’s opening harmonica blast clearly nods the head to Dylan. Over here with his new band, which includes one Cindy Cashdollar on lap steel (keening away like an angel on first single Let It Ride and the early morning coming down of Friends), he’ll be playing two separate sets (though probably not reflecting the album’s divisions between songs of regret and songs of escape), so chances are he’ll have space to work through the entire collection and still find room for those back pages everyone’s wanting him to turn. 7.30pm, £18.50. Carling Academy. Mike Davies DO YOU HAVE NEWS ??? IF SO PLEASE CLICK HERE TO LET US KNOW BACK TO BIRMINGHAM101 HOME PAGE - BACK TO GIG GUIDE HOME
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