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ARCHIVED REVIEWS May 2008 Previews by Mike Davies Thursday May 1 Lightspeed Champion
Formerly guitarist with London art
punks Test Icicles, Houston born Dev Hynes continues to plough
his rather different solo furrow of country tinged, strings
laced, acoustic indie pop with debut album Falling Off The
Lavender Bridge (Domino).
It’s a bit unfortunate for Australian
quintet support Operator Please and
their nasally singer Amandah that the B52s have decided to
resurrect themselves since that’s exactly who they appear to be
emulating on their Yes Yes Vindictive (Brille) album. Cases in
point Zero, Zero, Get What You Want, Ghost and that annoying
single Just A Song About Ping Pong which are all jittery new
wave funky punk with angular rhythms, sometimes throwing a
twitch of Debbie Harry into the pot for good measure. Thursday May 1 Maccabees
Back on the road for the first time since last year’s acoustic ukulele calypso lilt single Toothpaste Kisses, there’s no news of any material yet to build on the Brighton art rock outfit’s debut album Colour (Fiction), so it’s just going to a case of rearranging the set running order for one more outing of things like the naggingly catchy rompers Tissue Shoulders, O.A.V.I.P., and Happy Faces and the slower shades of Good Old Bill. But any band who can come up with something as scurryingly wonderful as First Love are always going to be worth cherishing. 7.30pm. £11. Barfly Friday May 2 Matchbox Twenty
Slimmed to a quartet and back together after Rob Thomas’ successful solo sabbatical, this is something of both a reminder visit and a look at trying to crack the hitherto elusive UK market. As such it coincides with Exile On Mainstream (Atlantic), a collection of their US hits and half a dozen new songs. It’s as good a time as any to catch up on missed opportunities like Long Day, Push, 3AM, Bent, If You’re Gone and Real World, but it’s actually the new material that’s the biggest incentive. These come bursting out of the stable with the swaggering How Far We’ve Gone looking to grab any Bon Jovi fans in its path while I’ll Believe You When and If I Fall both take their cues from ringing 60s guitar pop, the latter a meeting between the Searchers and The Who. All Your Reasons is tumbling singalong friendly hood down driving urgency and These Hard Times is a slow shuffling, aching voice FM rock ballad. Ironic really that the tracks that have yet to be hits are the ones that sound most as if they deserve to be. 7.30pm. £25. NIA Friday May 2 Vampire Weekend
Making World Music for the 21st Century dance village, the geographical genre hopping New Yorker university grads are now the cool name to drop among the hipper hip-swayers with the release of their eponymous debut album (XL). Building upon the African percussion and soukous guitar style foundations that rejuvenated Paul Simon’s career, they throw in harpsichords, strings, and whatever to create a joyous noise that defies you not to start shaking a leg, Their academic roots poke through too with songs about punctuation (Oxford Comma), Ivy League lifestyles (Campus), Victorian Imperialism (Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa), and neo baroque architecture (the 50s doo wop lounge meets art-rock Mansard Roof) mixing it up with the more usual tales of student life and love. With M79 bringing together European classical chamber music and Zimbabwean pop, Walcott taking steel drums to the 50s prom, and Bryn and A-Punk relocating the Talking Heads to Soweto, they make afro-pop trendier than its been since Graceland. 7pm. £10. Carling Academy 2 Friday May 2 Eamon Hamilton
Brakes fans will recognise this as the singer, taking time out for some solo acoustic dates while putting together the band’s next album. As such, you can expect to hear try outs of new numbers alongside stripped down versions of songs from Give Blood and Beatific Visions, likely among them Heard About Your Band, All Night Disco Party, Porcupine Or Pineapple, honky tonker If I Should Die Tonight and autumnal pop No Return, Apparently he’s even been doing a version of their indie disco hoedown The Spring Chicken. 7.30pm. £7. Glee Club Saturday May 3 Dans le Sac vs Scroobius Pip
The Essex birthed duo lit up the dance floors last year with their singles, a clattery Thou Shalt Always Kill, the throbbing swaggery Beat That My Heart Skipped and Letter From God To Man, so now they’re preparing to keep the thrust going with their debut album, Angles (Sunday Best). Mixing together the hip hop beats of Rappers Battle and Development, the punk rants of Back From Hell and Fixed and the moodier street poetry of Magician’s Assistant, they’ll be previewing things tonight, along with new single Look For The Woman (Sunday Best), a Streets-style wry love song about trying to close the gap in a widening relationship.
Support’s provided by Manchester’s techno-pop crew The Whip plugging away at the Joy Division/New Order influenced debut album X Marks Destination (Southern Fried), Frustration sounding like a lost Ian Curtis track while Fire, Save My Soul and the fabulous Sirens all bear that New Order stamp. 7pm. £10. Carling Academy 2 Saturday May 3 Harvey Andrews
One of the folk circuit’s national treasures, Stetchford born Andrews recently turned 65 but still keeps up a gigging schedules the Stones would envy. He’s a welcome regular at the Red Lion and his set’s are always guaranteed to provide a strong mix of music and his very funny anecdotes drawn from a professional career now 42 years old. With some 14 albums’ worth of material on which to draw, second guessing the set list is impossible but there’s always fingers crossed it will include the likes of Margarita, Spring Again, Punch And Judy Man, If It Wasn't For The Song and You Knew We Were Coming. Those catching up on what they’ve missed might care to seek out the recently issued I’m Resigning From Today, a two disc anthology of his early Transatlantic recordings from the 60s and 70s that includes some find Harv classics, among them his Tony Hancock tribute Mr Homburg Hat, Song For Phil Ochs, his cover of Paul Simon’s A Most Peculiar Man, Buy Me A Rifle, Death Come Easy and the previously unreleased England My England and Davy. 8pm. £10. Red Lion, Kings Heath Sunday May 4 Adele
Tottenham 19 year old Adele Laurie Blue Adkins’ single Chasing Pavements was a classy example of torch r&b illuminating her love of Jill Scott, Dusty Springfield and Peggy Lee. You’ll hear much the same class on her debut album, 19 (XL), a jazz-soul journey through the highs and lows of teenage love that flows from the summery acoustic folk infused Daydreamer, the skittering beats of Cold Shoulder and My Same’s bluesy swing through a lovely piano ballad cover of Dylan’s Make You Feel My Love, to the funky Hammond soul pop Right As Rain and dramatic folk-soul strings laced debut single Hometown Glory. The Winehouse comparisons have been inevitable, tending to prompt some snide dismissals of her as label bandwagon jumping while Duffy has already taken her place in the flavour of the month lists. However, while it’s true to say she needs time to develop and find her authentic voice. as well as make a stand against some of the more MOR production imposed on the material, this is an impressive first step which should keep her from slipping quietly into the shadows of the next sassy soul girl hype. 7.30pm. £15. Alexandra Theatre Sunday May 4 Carina Round
Slow Motion Addict looking like it’s destined to remain unreleased in the UK now she’s out of her InterScope deal, she’s busy working on the follow up. So you can expect these full band dates to roadtest some of the new material alongside already proven live favourites like The Disconnection, Come To You and the pagan mood of January Heart. Listen up for the spooked but dreamy gospel blues of the delicate Backseat and a languid swamp groove Thief In The Sky where Kate Bush and Bjork swap saliva to a chorus of tremulous tribal yelps and handclaps. If you’re luck’s in she might also throw in her tremendous PJ Harvey blues style sleaze and sweat deconstruction of Donna Summer’s Hot Stuff. The woman’s a star, so when is the world finally going to accept the fact!
Support comes from Pennsylvania’s Ari Shine, whose upcoming A Force Of One (Bongo Beat) album struts like vintage Elvis Costello, spitting out those jerky new wave guitar riffs and sneer tipped vocals while also conjuring the power-pop of Rick Springfield, with a sheen of electro. Unlikely to find himself in the major leagues, but numbers such as the punchy Cooler Than Me, Flirtation Device, the chunky Keep You In Cabs and the catchy hooks of Most Popular Girl In The World should make for an energetic life set. 7.30pm. £8. Barfly (+ Wed 7, £8. Little Civic) Sunday May 4 White Rabbits
Over from Brooklyn, the two drummer six piece seem set to make an instant impression with Fort Nightly (Fierce Panda), a debut album that mines such diverse influences as The Specials, Cold War Kids, Bow Wow Wow, 10cc, Sparks, Kid Creole and Randy Newman (whose Beehive State they cover) to catchily melodic and densely textured effect. You’ll hear shades of ska (March Of The Camels), some Eastern rhythms (Kid On My Shoulders), Latin, (Navy Wives), and calypso (I Used To Complain Now I Don’t) stirred in with the retro pop, surf guitars and general leg shaking tunes. The crunchy martial beat Take A Walk Around The Table and the New Orleans party march Cotillion Blues (which sounds a lot like they’re revisiting Dylan’s Rainy Day Women), suggest they have a well developed sense of the theatrical too which promises to make their instruments swapping live set even more of a sparky affair. This is the last night of the tour so they should be well honed, and you can be sure they’ll be back before long in rather bigger surroundings. 7pm. £6. Bar Academy Sunday May 4 Ejectorseat
Signed to Taste Media, the recently resurrected original home of Muse and One Minute Silence, the Derby quartet are looking to follow the career trajectory of their forebears with new single Not My Girl. Fizzy electro-sheened not even three minute indie pop that wears its Suede and Manics influences boldly on its sleeve, accompanying tracks To Be More Animal and Hopeless And Emotionless are less convincing since they both seem to share roughly the same tune, but they’re worth checking out. 7.30pm. £5. Little Civic Monday May 5 Royworld Swiftly following up the Buggles sounding Man in The Machine and its Roxy influenced Elasticity b-side, Somerset brothers Rod and Crispin Futrille seem to have taken something of a major diversion into the record collection with Dust (Virgin) which, rather worryingly, seems to recast them as Asia. Rethinks in order. 7.30pm. £6. Bar Academy Monday May 5 Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Turned 50 and fourteen band albums in, Cave is like a good wine that only gets better with age. Following on from the sleaze blues Grinderman project (the Bad Seeds in all but name) and his soundtrack for The Assassination Of Jesse James (in which he also cameos), he’s back with the boys for their follow up to 2004's doubleAbattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus. Although the title track sounds oddly a lot like David Byrne, he’s in molten hellfire preacher mood with Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! (Mute), the guitars forged in white heat furnaces, Warren Ellis’ organ testifying from a lava pit. Fuelled by themes of resurrection, damnation, alienation, and, of course, sex, it’s music for the night, soundtracks for back alleys, railway yards and the devil’s own basement bars, industrial clanking, piston jabbing, gallows black but also at times (Moonland, Hold On Tou Yourself, Jesus Of The Moon) sorrowfully tender, this is Cave on classic (if at times self-mocking - assuming you can’t take We Call Upon the Author to Explain too seriously) form. There’s signs here that he may be looking to trawl in a wider listening base, Albert Goes West almost an Iggy meets Lou rocker while More News From Nowhere is a dusty folk blues with back up harmonies that might not sound out of place in a Springsteen set. Stalwart fans though will be happy to hear them in classing rutting mode with Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl), filtering the Doors with Midnight Man and shivering the hairs on the neck with a spooked Night Of The Lotus Eaters. Given the fun it sounds like they had recording it, they’ll doubtless be keen to include as much of the new stuff as the set list can contain, but there’ll surely be room for a decent dose of Cave classics and, if your’re good, maybe even No Pussy Blues from Grinderman’s sordid debauacheries. 7pm. £25. Carling Academy Monday May 5 Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
While folk music has always been a major part of Plant's musical repertoire, both as part of Led Zep and solo, he's never really been seen as a big country fan. So, on paper at least, a collaboration with the queen of bluegrass sounds an unlikely proposition. In practice, however, Raising Sand (Rounder) is a stunner.
Although they both had input, it was
producer T-Bone Burnett who
was largely instrumental in choosing the material, from blues to
country to rockabilly (a joyous cover of the Everlys' Gone,
Gone, Gone) and folk, pitching each songs more normally
associated with the other's traditions, Plant taking on Doc
Watson country with Your Long Journey, Krauss digging the Delta
for Little Milton's Let Your Loss Be Your Lesson. Tuesday May 6 Hadouken
Currently the top name on the nu rave grime pop, the Leeds outfit follow Not Here To Please collection of early bits bobs with the all new Music For An Accelerated Culture (Surface Noise) which, as the title might suggest, is a soundtrack banging it out on the dance floor and bingeing it up down the bar. There’ll be plenty of tut-tutting about their celebration of the modern hedonist’s lifestyle, succinctly pinned with the Prodgy-like Get Smashed Gate Crash and Liquid Lives, but limb-contorting, sweat gushing, rubber-legged party heads will be too busy doing the dervish to those and the likes of That Boy That Girl, Crank It Up and What She Did to bother about moralists. And, as is aware that such states are passing phases, Driving Nowhere and the glamslam Mister Misfortune show they’ve got an eye on stockpiling more mainstream inclined pop tunes too for when the winds of change blow their way.
Providing the bedrock for them to build on, special guests are German teenage trio MIT whose Coda (Half Machine) album offers ten tracks of minimalist electro punk Krautrock that, almost inevitably, references such pioneers as Kraftwerk, Neu and Daf on such Berlin club packers as Park, Beispiel, a stomping Gebaut and the catchily titled Tangerine Dream tickled Gibt es Denn Keine Anderen Grunde. 7.30pm. £11.50. Carling Academy Tuesday May 6 Late of the Pier
Heading up the Levi’s Ones To Watch tour, the Castle Donington outfit are an intriguing melange, their new single The Bears Are Coming (Zarcorp) a bizarre cocktail of vaudeville, Elvis, Afrobeat and burbling electronica. Given their previous Space And The Woods remodelled Gary Numan’s Cars and Bathroom Gurgle revelled in glam drums, they clearly have no truck with pigeonholes.
Sticking around the Midlands, The Displacements hail from Leicester and follow up the Eastern European mazurka rhythmed Lazy Bones with new single, Down And Out (Stiff), a more straighthead slice of retro sunny Britpop.
And then there’s Cazals, a London based guitar dance pop five piece that everyone seems to be falling over to call the next big thing. Signed to French label Kitsune, they’re previewing debut album What Of Our Future, an enjoyable if not entirely jaw-dropping set of catchy electro based power pop with lots of beats and burbles to go with the guitars and posturing vocals. You can see why the French like them, they’re a bit like Air if Air where punkier, but they also tend to recycle different variations on the same melodies so that numbers like New Boy In Town, Life Is Boring and A Big Mistake can sound a bit samey in places. Still, new single Somebody, Somewhere is good shouty chorus stuff and We’re Just The Same strikingly rings the changes with a mid-tempo jog reminiscent of the mellower moments of early Costello or Howard Jones. Worryingly though, quite a few of the numbers have faint echoes of Spandau Ballet, a suspicion confirmed by the fact they actually include a swaggering laddish cover of To Cut A Long Story Short. 7.30pm. £7. Barfly Wednesday May 7 Colin MacIntyre
Formerly operating as The Mull Historical Society, the Tobermoray songster’s ditched the pseudonym along with the optimism of past albums. But he’s stuck with those Beach Boys, Mercury Rev, Todd Rundgren, and XTC influences for his first solo album The Water (Pebble Beach), an album that turns its attention to celebrity culture (You’re A Star, Famous For Being Famous), politics/religion ((Future Gods And Past Kings, Faith No 2), self-examination (Stalker) and, of course relationships. Unfortunately, he seems to have lost the knack for a memorable melody somewhere along the way, without which his reedy voice becomes somewhat lost amid the rockier tracks or exposed as thin on the quieter tracks. There’s some pleasant touches as tuba, harmonium and cello weave around the mix, while the lengthy Pay Attention To The Human brings together his hometown high school girl’s choir and Tony Benn, who recites his humanist poem over the closing notes, but ultimately the charm’s no longer there. 7.30pm. £10. Barfly Thursday May 8 Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit
The first UK artist to land a US deal with American label, Lost Highway, home to Ryan Adams, Lucinda Williams, Shelby Lynn and the late Johnny Cash, things are clearly going well for the Johannesburg-born, Wales-raised new nu-folk contender and occasional Shakespearean actor. Following on from catchy strummed single The Box, they head out on a headline tour to plug debut Vertigo album Alarum. No promo copies were made available, but from the brief clips of Tickle Me Pink, Cold Bread and Brown Trout Blues on his MySpace page you can expect more of the cider swigging English folk and backporch southern American roots blues. He’s been likened to Nick Drake fronting the Pogues, which, while not entirely accurate, should be reasonable incentive to discover further. 7.30pm. £7. Glee Club Thursday May 8 Backstreet Boys
Down to a quartet after Kevin Anderson’s departure and hardly boys now two of them have turned 30, but otherwise things remain much the same for America’s stadium rock version of Take That. Re-emerging in 2005 after a three year absence, comeback album Never Gone saw them reaching out to a more FM rock audience and now follow up Unbreakable (Jive) travels further down the road with a relentless onslaught of piano driven lovelorn power ballads clearly aimed at the Bon Jovi/Eagles market. As such, the likes of Something That I Already Know, Helpless When She Smiles,, You Can Let Go and the soaring Inconsolable do the job with unbridled efficiency with Love Will Keep You Up All Night surely a close relative of Aerosmith’s Don’t Want To Miss A Thing. And, by way of relief from the heart-wringing anthemics, Any Other Way, One In A Million, Panic, the electro grooved Everything But Mine and Treat Me Right offer some light uptempo funky rock and beats. Ultimately, it’s going to be but like sitting through an hour or so of Back For Good on repeat play, but there’s plenty of folk out there willing to pay good money for that. 7.30pm. £30/£25. NIA Thursday May 8 Black Lips
A lo-fi retro-blues outfit from Atlanta whose live antics (vomiting, urinating, nudity, inter-band snogs, and a chicken) have seen them banned from numerous venues, they’re mates of Jack White and take influences from the garage rock of the Stooges, Troggs and early Stones. They’re in town plugging new countrified power pop single Bad Kids (Vice), lifted from the Good Bad, Not Evil album from which they’ll also likely to chucking in Jaggerish slow lurch, low slung blues Veni Vidi Vici (Vice), hurricane song Oh Katrina where Iggy meets Sam the Sham, the rockabilly twanged Cold Hands and How Do You Tell A Child That Someone Has Died, the song inspired by the death of original founder member Ben Eberbaugh. 7.30pm. £3. Club NME, Custard Factory Thursday May 8 Eastern Champions Conference
From Philadelphia with occasional Radiohead inclinations shadowing its garage rock and avant folk, the keyboard driven trio are busy establishing a foothold over here with current album Ameritown (Island). Single Sedative offers juddery garage swagger with hints of early Free, Noah hints at Thom Yorke fronting Smashing Pumpkins while To The Wind tosses in some gypsy folk punk, Some Sorta Light adopts a wasted country sway and Rabbit Hole feels oddly like the Hey Jude playout. On this showing, they’ll be staying here a while longer to cater to bigger venue demands. 7.30pm. £5. Little Civic (+ Sat 10 8pm. £5. Jug of Ale) Friday May 9 Jesse Malin
After his excellent if overlooked The Fine Art of Self-Destruction and Glitter In The Gutter, the nasally voiced punk frontman turned singer-songwriter takes a swerve from his self-penned Springsteen cum Young material for an album of covers. On Your Sleeve (One Little Indian). Alarm bells often go off in such circumstances, especially when the result’s something like Patti Smith’s recent embarrassment, but for the most Malin succeeds in coming up with one of those rare diamonds among the usual pile of nutty slack. It’s an interesting mix of the familiar and unknown, reinterpreted rather than regurgitated, he gives a bouncy Americana reading to Neil Young’s Looking For Love, gives Sam Cooke’s Wonderful World a soft acoustic reading, offers a weary laid back treatment to Everybody’s Talkin’, turns Jim Croce’s Operator into a more uptempo guitar tune and puts the Stones’ Sway through the electro mixer. Eleswhere he does Ramones (Rock n Roll Radio), Clash (Gates of the West), Elton (Harmony), Lou (Walk On The Wild Side), Simon (Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard), Tom Waits (a fine I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love with You) and, on a more contemporary note The Kills (Rodeo Town) and The Hold Steady (You Can Make Them Like You). Not everything works, not everything suits Malin’s high pitched voice, but generally speaking you’ll not get in a huff when he slips this in the set list between nuggets of his own like Black Haired Girl, Queen of the Underworld, Almost Grown and Downliner. 7pm. £10. Carling Academy 2 Friday May 9 Eliza Carthy Band
The launch tour for her new album, Dreams of Breathing Underwater finds Carthy working from trad forms but twisting them around, mingling English and American traditions as, for example, on Follow The Dollar which marries English folk singing with gutbucket blues riffing. Then there’s Two Tears with its West Country sounding wheezing squeeze box and scraping fiddle lurch and a melody that borrows from the traditional romantic love song, but has a lyric that namechecks Marianne Faithful. Elsewhere Rows of Angels has percussive beats and touches of dub, Mr Magnifico is a mariachi flavoured number with brass and spoken poetry between Carthy’s Deitrich styled cabaret chorus surges, Like I Care has zydeco feel squeeze box, Lavenders is all Spanish baroque, Little Bigman a cider swigger morris dance tune, Hug You Like A Mountain visits Eastern European wedding/funeral folk music and Oranges And Seasalt is a great vaudeville singalong with some shanty shaken over it. In short, quite possible the most adventurous and best album she’s yet made. The gig should be revelatory. 7.30pm. £14. W’hampton Civic Hall Bar. Saturday May 10 The Wombats
Following last year’s rowdy bounce pop Kill The Director and Let’s Dance To Joy Division and debut album A Guide To Love, Loss & Desperation (14th Floor), the Scousers continue their momentum with current single Backfire At The Disco. With their flurried guitars, snotty nasal vocals, indie pop carousel waltzers and witty teenage tales of love and sex, the likes of Little Miss Pipedream. Moving To New York, the stomping Help Me Rhonda meets Kaiser Chiefs Dr Suzanne Mattox PhD and Party In A Forest, are all proven live flor-fillers while their silly short doo wop handclapping Tales Of Girls, Boys And Marsupials has become something of a pub chant. 6pm. £13. Carling Academy Saturday May 10 The Castanets
Sounding like Neil young singing underwater, in an echo chamber, former surfer Raymond Raposa is the guiding light to this NewYork avant-folk outfit whose In The Vines (Asthmatic Kitty) album runs the gamut from icy electronic weird out (Rain Will Come) to keening backporch spiritual (This Is The Early Game) to strummed country (Westbound, Blue), from acoustic tribal rhythms (Strong Animal) to hymnal folk soulfulness (The Swimming). White noise and electronica would, on the face of it, seem incompatible with stripped down dark Americana but listening to the six minutes of Three Months Paid the background electric hum and synthesised wind noise works with the flutters of chimes, tapped echoey percussion and Raposa’s cracked voice to create something quite hauntingly magical. Devotees of Lamb Chop and Iron & Wine alike should swoon over the timeless slow waltzing The Night Is When You Can Not See while Sounded Like a Train, Wasn't a Train is a simple two string metronome guitar figure that gradually gathers around it tremulous synth horns and a desert hum to produce striking spooked gothic country. Sparse, fatalistic and melancholic (Raposa spend a year suffering depression after being mugged prior to recording the album) but tinged with redemption, it’s an unexpectedly beguiling work that suggests this is a gig well worth travelling to catch. 7.30pm. £8. Tin Angel, Taylor John's House, Canal Basin, Coventry Sunday May 11 Captain Phoenix
Fronted by Ben Burrows, younger brother of Razorlight drummer Andy, this lot make summery Southern tinted soul-pop mingled with British indie rock, driven by catchy infectious melodies with nagging chorus hooks. However, Life.Temper.Riot (Kind Canyon) rather undermines the chance of things like the sunshine jaunty Stand By and the jazzy heat haze pop of Same Old Story dominating the Radio 2 airwaves by including some unnecessary expletives. Still, they can always make up for that with Didn’t Know Sam, suburban strummer Blackheath, the Squeezy Living On The Guestlist or Where Did You Go providing the perfect soundtrack for some tanning on the beach while Baby’s Back takes on a Jean Genie glam stomp, Loneliness parades their Lennon influences, Find The Time dips its toes into lush ELO waters and Water/Sun takes a folksy shuffle through Andy’s contribution to the song set. If they realise swearing’s not only not big and not clever, but not a great career move when you have such commercial sensibilities, they could become a solid proposition for major success. 7pm. £5. Little Civic Monday May 12 MGMT
The latest American sun-kissed stoner college rock outfit to be invited into the next big thing paddock with their 70s filtered psychedelia squelchy synth-pop and its borrowings from Bowie, Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Bolan and the brothers Mael. The swirly pitched perfect Time To Pretend set the Brooklyn boys’ ball rolling with its fuzzily warm ode to hedonism, then the Oracular Spectacular (Columbia) album revved up the momentum with Weekend Wars conjuring memories of 60s Neil Young, Kids bouncing along on a belching synth line and a cocktail of glam and acid, Electric Feel coming over all Europhunk, 4th Dimensional Transition plunging headfirst into memories of Klaatu and Sparks with some added tribal drumming and tinkly carousel keyboards while Of Moons, Birds & Monsters, The Youth and The Handshake curl up under the blankets and snuggle close to the Lips and Lennon as clouds of flowers and sweet smoke billow around them. Enjoy while the incense stick still burns in their favour. 7.30pm. £10. Carling Academy 2 Monday May 12 Jonah Matranga
Back in town for another helping of debut solo album And (Xtra Mile) with its summery sounding songs of love and loss, dressed up with piano, strings and, on Not About A Girl Or A Place, jangling 12 string guitar. Aside from the power pop and folksy ballads mix supplied by the likes of I Want You To Be My Witness, Every Mistake and the fragile Fathers And Daughters, he’ll also be trawling his back catalogue for material from his more punk inclined days with such outfits as Gratitude, Far, and New End Original. 7.30pm. £7.50. Barfly Monday May 12 Willie Nelson
Providing the 75 year old country outlaw doesn’t get busted for cannabis possession again before he leaves or on arrival, this looks likely to be one of the remaining chances to catch the living legend before he decides he’s had enough of traipsing around the globe. Given he’s released dozens of albums, the set list could include pretty much anything from a recording career of over 50 years. However, it’s a reasonable bet that he may include such classics as Always On My Mind, Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain, Crazy and Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys and Till I Gain Control Again along with a smattering of tracks from his latest collection, Moment Of Forever (Lost Highway). Clearly demonstrating he’s still got an edge, it’s enveloped in a dark cloud of anger and protest with Nelson laid back but solidly felt interpretations of Dave Matthews' Gravedigger, Dylan’s Gotta Serve Somebody and Randy Newman's Louisiana balanced by the funky relationship themed Takin’ On Water and a world weary take on the evergreen Keep Me From Blowing Away. 7.30pm. £32.50/£30. W’hampton Civic Hall Tuesday May 13 Cancer Bats
After demolishing heads last year with the Birthing The Giants album, the Canadian quartet are back to sonically stove in a few more skulls with their latest gathering of high octane hardcore metal and piledriving Black Flag style punk on Hail Destroyer (Hassle).So more blistering bass and coruscating guitar riffs then as rage, disgust and defiance spill over in relentless mosh and metal assaults that are Harem of Scorpions, Deathsmarch, Sorceress, Let It Pour and Pray For Darkness. They do ease up on the party hammering for a moment, but given their idea of a ballad is a weltering blues swagger titled Lucifer’s Rocking Chair you shouldn’t expect to be slow dancing at anytime during the set. 7.30pm. £7. Barfly Wednesday May 14 The Bluetones
It’s 12 years now since debut album Expecting To Fly entered the charts at No 1, since when they’ve amassed 11 top 40 singles (13 in total with those prior to the album) and two further Top 10 albums plus a singles collection and, while it’s fair to say their success and profile has waned (the last two studio albums failed to set the world alight), they’ve never thrown in the towel. And they’re back again now with another compilation and tie-in tour. It’s the second retrospective in three years but The Bluetones Collection (Spectrum) is the first for which the band has selected the tracks and, other than obligatory inclusions like Slight Return, they’ve mostly avoided duplication, so you get things like The Last Of The Great Navigators, Tiger Lily, The Fountainhead and Sail On Sailor. However, given these aren’t exactly the most glittering diamonds in the band’s mine, you have to hope they’ll be a little more audience friendly with the live set list. 7.30pm. £12.50. Carling Academy Wednesday May 14 The Thirst
Featuring brothers Mensah and Kwame on vocals and bass with schoolmates Mark and Marcus on rhythm and drums, the Brixton boys blend old punk with Afro-Carribean flavours, hip hop and drum & bass influences to produce a sort of funky Arctic Monkeys filtered through inspirations taken from The Jam and Specials. Signed to Ronnie Wood’s label, current single Sail Away (Wooden) has an urgent hot summer jam vibe but upcoming debut album On The Brink needs to be more persuasive if they’re going to get quenched. 7.30pm. £5. Barfly Wednesday May 14 Marissa Nadler
Raised in Massachusetts in an artistic family, Nadler studied illustration and painting at university before adding music to interests that included woodcarving and encaustic art. Making her recording bow in 2004, she’s very much of the American Gothic tradition, her dreamy melancholic songs rooted in folk but coloured with electronics. Rock n roll she isn’t, her latest release, Songs III: Bird On The Water (Peacefrog) a fresh, ethereal and gossamer light collection that, backed by mandolin, cello and harp and taken at an almost narcoleptic pace, prompts comparisons to Vashti Bunyan. Nadler’s pure crystal mountain waters voice is a thing of beguiling wonder, drawing you into her leafy arbours and caverns as she weaves magic around Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat or mesmerises with self-penned tales of loss and love, life and death such as the haunted Diamond Heart, Dying Breed, the trad hued Thinking Of You, an almost hymnal Silvia and the sorrow slung story of Leather Made Shoes. Be prepared to be intoxicated. Especially if she does her cover of Neil Young’s Cortez The Killer.
Support comes from Jesse Sykes whose , the Seattle singer-songwriter androgynous whispery rasp of a voice jumbles shades of Melanie, Marianne Faithful, Grace Slick, and Janis Joplin into a melting pot of churning emotions. She’ll be showcasing current album Like, Love, Lost & The Open Halls of the Soul (Fargo), a set of dark country soul songs of isolation, loss, regret, fraying nerves and fragile hopes of love and connection. And if there's few tunes you’ll find yourself humming on the way home (the Beatles echoes of You Might Walk Away the closest), equally there’s few that don't seep inside you as you listen. Give an ear to the tremulous desperation of The Air Is Thin that suggests an alt-country Peter Gabriel, the ache of Eisenhower Moon with its Midnight Cowboy harmonica, or the emotional desolation of Aftermath where she sounds like Janis Ian after three nervous breakdowns, and discover new subtleties with each curl of her voice.7.30pm. £7. Glee Club Thursday May 15 Mystery Jets
Blaine Harrison’s dad may no longer be part of the touring line-up, but the lads don’t need any gimmicky angles to sell themselves or their music. Certainly not in the light of sophomore album Twenty One (Sixsevenine), a marvellously skewed collection of songs that tip the hat to 80s synth pop (Two Doors Down), Syd Barrett era Floyd (Umbrellahead), 70s summery pop soul (Young Love) and, on Flakes, the quivering big ballad emotions of Chris Martin. The Duran strokes to MJ might be a little overcooked and the slightly Haircut 100 meets The Smiths of Half In Love With Elizabeth could do without the vocal whoops, but the likes of the smartly observed Veiled In Grey and the high-voiced, high-strung suicide themed piano ballad 21 are more than enough to keep on the contenders list for another year. 7.30pm. £10. Barfly Friday May 16 Jack Savoretti
Having done a decent job of impressing ears with debut album Between The Minds (De Angelis) and its melding of Blunt, Ashcroft, Drake and Dylan, the husky voiced Anglo-Italian’s selling it a second time, now with an added unplugged CD, four new songs and the inclusion of bonus track Gypsy Love. Stripped down to acoustic basics Without exchanges the Verve soul influences for a more wearied naked confessional ballad that sits more obviously along the regret-hued folk inclinations of Dr Frankenstein. Of the new material, One Man Band is firmly in train-hopping Eric Andersen territory, Russian Roulette a spare strummed torch song with gypsy guitar notes and Lucy a lot like Van Morrison folk-soul without the Celtic gospel. And, for that fourth cut, he turns in a finely bruised heart live version of Johnny Cash’s Ring Of Fire that you’ll have to insist he includes tonight before he leaves. 7.30pm. £7.50. Glee Club Friday May 16 Caribou
The musical alter-ego of maths PhD Dan Snaith. this should take you back to the summer of love days of the mid 60s with choice cuts from his Andorra (CitySlang) album, the likes of Sandy conjuring the psychedelic harmony pop of Sagittarius while After Hours evokes early Floyd and She’s The One, Desiree and Eli are all day-glo LSD dreamy spaced bliss outs. Pack the beads and joss sticks and let the sunshine in.7pm. £8. Barfly Friday May 16 Pendulum
Now based over here, the Aussie drum & bass outfit would clearly seem to have set their sights on stadium seating if recent Top 10 single Propane Nightmare was any indication of things in store with the In Silico (Warner) album they’re launching here. However, dance beat addicts will be glad to hear that, while more rock oriented than Hold Your Colour, Showdown, Granite and Midnight Runner reveal they’ve far from ditched their Freestlers and Prodigy colours. 8pm. £20. Custard Factory Saturday May 17 All Time Low
Apparently one of the hottest new outfits currently spraying guitar licks across America, with the snotty vocals, buzzing guitars, circling melody lines and singalong hooks the Maryland four piece don’t sound a million miles removed from such acknowledged pop-punk influences as Blink-182 and New Found Glory. Having just played the Give It A Name Festival at Earls Court, they now headline their own dates in support of debut album So Wrong, It’s Right (Hopeless) and new single Dear Maria, Count Me In. Like that, numbers like Let It Roll, Six Feet Under The Stars, This Is How We Do It, Shameless, Vegas and Come One, Come All are infectiously catchy but resolutely generic and often melodically samey. Remembering Sunday is a token nod to the open heart ballad, but they’d be advised not to stake their future on such offerings. Still, they don’t pretend to be anything than what they are, they seem to have an awareness of irony and they clearly are dab hands at putting together radio friendly high school pop rock for budding punks and emos who have already become bored with Cute Is What We Aim For. 6pm. £9.50. Carling Academy 2 Saturday May 17 Little Man Tate
Having worn the songs from debut album About What You Know down to the bone, the Sheffield quartet are out laying the ground for the second wave with meet and greet introductions to material from the as yet untitled follow-up. Having already paved the way with the stadium arm-waving balladry of Boy In The Anorak, a second taster arrives with the far rowdier slashing guitar and Jam jerky riffing new single What Your Boyfriend Said (Yellow Van). 7pm. £10. Wulfrun Hall Sunday May 18 Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong
One of the year’s silliest names perhaps, but Lean and the lads make a sunnily catchy noise festooned with poppy hooks and bubbling melodies. Having impressed with the calypso flavoured Lucio Starts Fires and the jerky bright Jam pop of Lonely Buoy, they now pull out the stops for debut album Where Do You Go (Mercury). Judging by the choppy title track, the circling guitars that hover around a staccato beat Baby and the jubilantly euphoric Light And The Dark, it’s a harder edged affair than the singles suggested. But, as Brooklyn and Dear Rose demonstrate, they’ve not lost any of that effervescent pop sheen in the process. If the weather holds, they could be having a better summer than most. 7pm. £8. Carling Academy 2 Sunday May 18 Melanie
A rare appearance by the definitive 60s hippie flower child, now 61 Melanie Safka first found fame in France where her 1969 single Bobo’s Party was a No 1 while later that same year Beautiful People was a hit in the Netherlands. An appearance at Woodstock led to her signature song Lay Down (Candles In The Rain) and provided both her first Us Top 10 and became an international smash. Following up with Peace Will Come and her dramatic cover of Ruby Tuesday, she became the toast of both the 1971 Isle of Wight festival and Glastonbury. The following year saw her biggest UK and US hit with Brand New Key, the song she’s probably best known for here (if only because of the Wurzels parody Brand New Combine Harvester) while she set a record Stateside by becoming the first female performer to have three concurrent Top 40 hits with that, official follow up Ring The Living Bell and the reissued Nickel Song. However, stepping out of the spotlight in 1973 to become a mother, she’s never really recaptured that success. To be totally honest, her output over the years hasn’t exactly been consistent. Early albums such as Affectionately, Leftover Wine, The Good Book (which features a stunning version of Chords of Fame), Gather Me and Madrugada are outright classics as are 1983’s Seventh Wave and the recent ‘comeback’ Paled By Dimmer Light with such songs as I Tried To Die Young, Make It Work For Me and the anthemic guitar ringing (courtesy son Beau) And We Fall. But not everything measures up to those standards. In recent years there’s been too many lacklustre re-recordings (studio and live) of her old material and, while Paled... features a splendid version of U2's I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For and Madrugada a spine-tingling take on Jim Croce’s Lover’s Cross, her Moments Of My Live covers album features, to be honest, painful versions of, among others, Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?, I Will Survive and You Keep Me Hangin’ On. Be that as it may, the tremulously emotional voice is still in fine fettle and she still knows how to invest a performance with spirituality and drama, and with a treasure trove of material to draw on that also includes What Have They Done To My Song, Ma?, Tuning My Guitar, The Actress and Babe Rainbow, this has to be an essential night out for 60s nostalgists. 7pm. £22. Wulfrun Hall
Monday May 19 Give It A Name Tour
Another package of largely unknown hopefuls looking to crack the UK market, perhaps the ‘best’ known here will be Four Year Strong, a Massachusetts pop n mosh outfit featuring Dan O' Connor formerly of thrash metal crew Bury Your Dead. Which probably explains why the Rise Or Die Trying (Hassle) album mixes in a fair amount of spitting metal amid the Fall Out Boy thrashy punk on things like Prepare To Be Digitally Manipulated, Abandon Ship Or Abandon Hope, Heroes Get Remembered, Legends Never Die and Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Hell. Hard, aggressive riffs certainly, but really there’s nothing here that’s not been done better before. Sharing the dressings rooms with Meg & Dia and The Color Fred will be Tallahassee’s Mayday Parade. Signed to Fearless, the label that discovered Plain White T’s, they’re pretty much into the Fall Out Boy sound too, debut album A Lesson In Romantics a hefty spraying of riffs and hooks with urgent strained emo-ish vocals, battering drums and sneery guitar noise. Exposing the weaker side of the vocals, Miserable At Best and You Be The Anchor.....doesn’t suggest they have a huge future with ballads but when they hammer down for Jamie All Over, When I Get Home, You’re So Dead, Walk On Water or Drown and the circling punk fizz of Champagne’s For Celebrating (I’ll Have A Martini), they do a reasonable job of emulating their influences. But with titles like If You Wanted A Song Written About You All You Had To Do Is Ask and I’d Hate To Be You When people Find Out What This Song Is About, they’ll spend half the set just announcing them. 6.30pm. £5. Carling Academy 2 Monday May 19 Guillemots
After being feted to the skies for Through The Window Pane, Fyfe Dangerfield and co must be amazed at how quickly the wind can change in view of the slatings they’ve received for follow-up album, Red (Polydor). They’re probably bemused by the criticisms and sniffy public response. And rightly so. The truth is that this is every bit as good as their astonishing debut and, if anything, even more ambitious and musically diverse. Opening track Kriss Kross is a massive melody drenched orchestral pop song that makes Jeff Lynne sound lo fi, then the album’s electronic bias kicks in with Big Dog, a slice of sleazy Prince funk with an Eastern riff and a huge chart friendly clattering chorus grab. Then they take it down for the plaintive 80s with ethereal wash and brushed drums of Falling Out Of Reach, before pumping the energy back to a noisy Glitter Band glam stomping Get Over It with its shouty title line and wooo oooh backups. More electro then in the bleepy marchalong Clarion which swells into a sort of latter day Brill Building tower of pop with George Michael peaks and Oriental ripples. The dance floor takes prominence on Last Kiss, a concoction of throaty bass, Anita Ward disco and medieval cum oriental shades behind a strings laced Toxic beat and unstoppable barrage of drums. It’s exhaustingly good. Lush soaring Cockateels is a James Bond theme for a Bollywood 007, Words a restrained aching stadium folk ballad with harmonica and tinkling keyboards, Standing On The Last Star another pinch of Eastern spice sprinkled over falsetto soaring midtempo Johnny Marr big pop, and Don’t Look Down a padding percussion. starry sky number that lulls you with a gentle, folksy set up before suddenly Greig Stewart’s drumming fireworks explode all around you as it takes off into the universe. Which leaves Take Me Home to see things off with a glorious slow surf into the twilight heavens, firebugs twinkling in the sky, fading away to Fyfe’s baying at the moon. C’mon people, wake up, what’s not to love!
Support is Royworld who, in the wake of current single Dust, will be unveiling their debut album and trying to persaude you they aren’t just some Buggles/Asia fans who struck lucky.7.30pm. £14. Wulfrun Hall Tuesday May 20 Quireboys
Still fronted by Rod Stewart (when he was good) soundalike Jonathan Gray aka Spike with fellow founder member Nigel Mogg on bass, although the rest of the line-up’s been fluid and there’s been a couple of hiatuses, they’ve been active for the past 24 years, cranking out your basic barroom rock n roll from the old Faces/Stones/Frankie Miller blueprints. Surprisingly, in all that time they’ve only made five studio albums, the latest of which, Homewreckers and Heartbreakers (SPV) is being launched with this tour. Advance copies weren’t available but if the Maggie Mae-like Mona Lisa Smiled is any indication, then they’re on vintage form. It promises to be a beer swigging, hot sweating rocking night since they’ll be joined by former Georgia Satellites man Dan Baird and Homemade Sin. He’ll doubtless be including his old band’s biggest hit, Battleship Chains, and hopefully there’ll be room for a couple of showcases from Warner Hodges, the former Jason and the Scorchers guitarist who’s now part of the line-up. He’s just released his own solo debut, Centreline (Jerkin’ Crocus) on which Baird also figures on guitar as well as co-writing Whole Lotta Fun.
Pretty much in the Scorchers vein of guitar slinging rebel rock n roll country, it’s meat and potatoes stuff but promising a solid live workout as they rip it up on such tracks as the guitar boogieing I Love You Baby, a bluesy swaggering She’s Tuff, and Gimme, Gimme, throwing in old Scorchers flag waving nugget Harvest Moon and a swayalong cover of Merle Haggard’s Branded Man for good measure. 7.30pm. £12.50. JBs, Dudley Tuesday May 20 Delays
Parting company with Rough Trade after excellent but underachieving albums Faded Seaside Glamour and You See Colours, the Southampton outfit have linked arms with Fiction and return with their best work yet in the shape of Everything’s The Rush. Sure Pieces, One More Lie In and Silence finds them in power ballad mode, but pretty much everything else is vibrantly uptempo pop, suffused with a star-spangled euphoria and lashing of orchestral arrangements. With subjects matters like OCD, the lyrics might not always be the sunniest, but No Contest, with the guys whoo oooing in the background makes The Feeling sound like Leonard Cohen while the opening triple wide-eyed whammy of Girl’s On Fire, Hooray and the glorious tingling aural waterfall of Love Made Visible are three of the most heart-burstingly ecstatic pop songs you’ll hear all year. And the cascading synth pop Touch Down, the surf n sun Jet Lag and the falsetto tumbling ode to love The Earth Gave Me You run close behind too. If you had to place bets on the pop soundtrack to summer 2008, then this would surely be the one to put your money behind. 7,30pm. £12.50. Carling Academy 2 Tuesday May 20 Storys
Welsh-Italian singer Steve Balsamo must wonder if he's cursed to have things given to him with one hand and taken away with the other. First he lands the West End lead in the Jesus Christ Superstar revival and follows it up by being signed to Columbia only to have his first single stall outside the Top 30 and his debut album sink without trace. Parting company with the label, he forms The Storys with a bunch of fellow Welshman, including fellow vocalist Andy Collins. They record an album and release it on their own label. Then along comes Korova offering a deal. Reviews are good, they land a support slot on the Elton John tour and set about recording a follow-up. The future looks bright. Then Korova goes under, putting them back where they started. But as it turns out, things might actually have worked in their favour. Releasing through their own Hall label, they're able to keep control of what they want Town Beyond The Trees to sound like, adding strings for a final polish. But while it may be another new beginning, the band have stuck with what they've proven to do best. Namely, a close harmony soft rock counterpart to the West Coast sounds of The Eagles, CS&N, Jackson Browne et al. Indeed, on the opening Long Hard Road, Balsamo sounds uncannily like Don Henley while Nobody Loves You and the stunning Trouble Deep could easily have been outakes from Hotel California. Elsewhere you find yourself thinking of either a Bon Jovi stadium ballad on the lovely You Couldn't Make It Up while Evangelina (Seven Days) jangles down the highway with the hood down and harmonica wailing, Alone builds to anthemic status on sweeping strings and the title track takes it right down to a plaintive fingerpicked acoustic song about a guy on death row writing to his unborn child. Across the water they could easily take on the countrified soft rock market leaders at their own game while here, without a hint of cynicism intended, they may well make their name as the thinking music lover's Westlife. 7.30pm. £9.50. Glee Club Wednesday May 21 Jens Lekman
Currently living in Australia, the Swedish singer-songwriter has the same romantic grandeur as Stephen Merritt, Belle & Sebastian, Jonathan Richman and early Scott Walker, the latter clearly evident on And I Remember Every Kiss, the opening track to current album Night Falls Over Kortedala (Secretly Canadian). Singing songs of heartbreak that banish any whiff of cynicism about love’s splendour, there’s a touch of the Latin dance floor to the hip swirling jazzy Sipping On The Sweet Nectar, the Richman goes mariachi rumba of Into Eternity and the slower sway of A Postcard To Nina while a jaunty The Opposite of Hallelujah (think of a tap dancing Dexys), a handclappy spring in the step I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You and the wonky sax that peppers the goodtiming Friday Night at the Drive-In Bingo are all geared to get the feet moving. And, come on, you have to love a guy who writes a song about cutting your finger after being startled by a girlfriend’s hug (Arms Around Me) or, with Shirin, pens a soaring Four Seasons-ish celebration of his hairdresser. You might get a bit of a sugar rush from the show, but he’s worth the musical calories.
Support’s provided by Jay May, back for another reminder of her melancholically lovely debut album Autumn Fallin’ (Heavenly) and such delights as new single Ill Willed Person, the carnival whirligig of You’d Rather Run and the wistfulness of You Are The Only One I Love. 7.30pm. £11. Glee Club Thursday May 22 Westlife
Having played two sell out shows in March, they return for a third stadium packer for a set of their biggest hits (Flying Without Wings, Against All Odds, You Raise Me Up) and selections from the current Back Home album, most likely to include sentimental daddy song I’m Already There, Home, and recent underperforming single Us Against The World. 7.30pm. £32.50. NEC Wednesday May 22 Sarabeth Tucek
Exhibiting such diverse influences as Cat Stevens, Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Young, The Velvet Underground, Elliott Smith, Dylan and Joy Division, Miami born Tucek’s stepping out of the backup singer shadows with brittle but beguiling eponymous debut album (Echo). The Nico influences are evident on the bluesy slouch of Stillborn, Neil informs Hot Tears and the freak out erupting Holy Smoke, country pop flavours percolate through new single Nobody Cares and the likes of Ambulance, the lullaby-like Come Back, Balloon and a chiming Broken Kisses will go down well with admirers of early Beth Orton. You want warm brass and strings soaked fragile balladry? Check out Home. How about a cross of Coldplay’s Yellow, the Velvets and hushed psychfolk? Try the scintillating Something For You.. Suitably pensive and sarcastic in equal measure, Tucek’s whispery intimate voice luring you closer to hear her confessionals about busted relationships, you’ll be hooked in her narcotic web.
She’s paired tonight with labelmate Jacob Golden, returning for another serving from Revenge Songs (Echo) with the likes of the Paul Simon-esque Shine A Light, a melodically tumbling Out Come The Wolves, the full blooded Church Of New Song, and the spidery echoing Hold Your Hair Back. He’ll also be directing attention to new non-album single On A Saturday, a lovely Hawaiian tinged, crooning musical box number inspired by girlwatching London’s Soho Square that comes with a stripped down folksy cover of ‘Merican, a politically barbed protest song from US punk outfit the Descendants. 7.30pm. £7. Little Civic Friday May 23 Girls Aloud
Like Sugababes, the Girls have defied cynics by not being a passing fashion fad and vanishing into oblivion. On top of that they’ve continued to release solid albums and maintain a consistent chart presence with an unbroken run of 18 Top 10 singles. Not to mention cameoing in St Trinians and recording two songs for the soundtrack. After last year’s Greatest Hits tour, they’re back and all over the place like a rash over the next month or so, following up this gig with a second at the NEC (June 4) and a third at Warwick Castle (July 4), so you can take your pick or overdose depending on your fan and bank balance level. Although they ran through their chart catalogue last year, it’s a safe bet they’ll not be leaving out the likes of Sound of the Underground, Love Machine, See The Day or I’ll Stand By You but chances are the emphasis is more likely to be on tracks from current album Tangled Up. They’ll naturally be heating things up with the pop-dance friendly singles, Call The Shots, Sexy! No, No, No and Can’t Speak French, but likely also finding room for the infectious beats-friendly Girl Overboard, the lollopping Control Of The Knife,a Rhianna-like What You Crying For and the cinematic ballad Crocodile Tears, though hopefully not the ill-advised rapping of Fling. 7.30pm. £26. NIA Friday May 23 Does It Offend You, Yeah
The indie-electronica trio’s first
major tour in support of the You Have No Idea What You’re
Getting Yourself Into (Virgin) album, so expect the Daft Punk
party vibe to be pumped to the max with their lager-friendly
lowbrow steamrollering bleeps and beats as they loon around the
stage to things like the mosh happy Let’s Make Out, With A Heavy
Heart’s industrial electro meets Talking Heads strobe-disco, the
hissing nu-raveology of Battle Royale and a brief sci fi B52s
homage on Attack of the 60ft Lesbian Octopus. Friday May 23 The Holloways
The first of the 02 Weekender shows, brings the fiddle friendly, guitar jogging Cockerney ska pop crew to town where, between reviving cheers for rabble rousing good time tunes like Dancefloor, Malcontented One, Happiness and Penniless, and Generator off So This Is Great Britain, they’ll be roadtesting material for the upcoming sophomore albums.7.30pm. £12. The Place I Love, Custard Factory Friday May23 Vetiver
Having won more hearts with the summery nu folk of To Find Me Gone, soft, sinuously voice Andy Cabic and his band are back to town to plug the follow-up, Thing Of The Past (Fat Cat). This time though he’s packing a collection of covers rather than self-penned tunes. And a lovely affair it is too, a selection of gently wheezing country folk rock songs that range from the familiar to the totally obscure. Of the former, the most immediately recognisable will be a faithful banjo accompanied version of Loudon Wainwright’s The Swimming Song and while space rock aficionados might recognise Hurry on Sundown as an old Hawkind number, they’ll likely not have imagined it as a swampy moonshiners mountain music stomp. All praise for reminding audiences of the late lamented Ronnie Lane with his arrangement of Derroll Adams’ Roll On Babe, and equally so for making less obvious choices from other relatively well known names that include Townes Van Zandt (Standin’), Michael Hurley (Blue Driver), Garland Jeffreys (Lon Chaney), Iain Matthews (Road To Ronderlin) and even Norman Greebaum’s whistling folk gospel Hook And Ladder to remind that he wrote more than Spirit In The Sky. But, arguably, it’s the complete obscurities that afford the best moments. You may have never heard of banjo playing 60s comedian and singer-songwriter Biff Rose, but their cover of To Baby may well have you searching the vinyl treasure troves. Does the name Bobby Charles ring a bell. Probably not. But the Louisiana songwriter pioneered swamp pop and penned Bill Haley hit See You Later alligator and his hushed gospel I Must Be In A Good Place Now provides a beautiful closing grace note to the album. Even more obscure will be nigh forgotten Toronto folkie and friend of Neil Young Elyse Weinberg whose Houses (taken from her only album) provides the first track and Dia Joyce, who apparently lives in San Jose but about whom no info is available, whose fragile folk lullabying Sleep A Million Years is, duetted with Vashti Bunyan, easily the best track here. Doubtless he’ll find space for several of his own songs, the Grateful Dead-like I Know No Pardon and the early Simon & Garfunkel colours of Maureen included, but it’ll be great to sit through this record collector’s night out too, even more so if he can be prevailed on to offer some potted discography notes too. 7.30pm. £8. Tin Angel, Taylor John's House, Canal Basin, Coventry Saturday May 24 Shayne Ward
As virtually every pop talent show winner knows, their debut single and album are pretty much guaranteed the No 1 slot. It’s what comes next that’s the difficulty, many simply plummeting from sight once the next talent search comes along. So having had the big hits with That’s My Goal and No Promises, when Stand By Me stalled outside the Top 10, it was obvious steps needed to be taken to keep the flame alive. Judging by follow up album Breathless (BMG), the answer was apparently simple. Become Ronan Keating. Or Akon. Or Backstreet Boys. Or anything, since he clearly has no style of his own. It obviously worked since the vapid dance pop of No U Hang Up. If That’s Ok With You and the wimpy title track ballad shoved him back in the Top 10. Whether that can be sustained is another matter, given the next single is the watered down Prince of U Got Me So and the likes of electro pop album tracks Until You, Melt The Snow, Tangled Up and Tell Him (which borrows from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons) are as thin and soulless as they are slick. You might be able to pull off the same trick twice, but unless his next tour is going to be a slog round the clubs he’d better starting thinking of a new plan fairly soon. 7.30pm. £26.50. NEC Saturday May 24 Martha Wainwright
Calling your album I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too (Drowned In Sound) does rather set up a set of expectations as to what the songs might be about. And, as the opening track has it, Loudon’s little girl is certainly Bleeding All Over You. She may have recently married, but there’s no lovey dover cocooned in domestic harmony here. Maybe she’s just clearing out the stored up feelings and resentments of being hurt so they don’t intrude into the marital bliss. If so you’d hope things like the soaring pop of You Cheated Me, Bleeding All Over You’s letter to an ex lover who’s now a father, the disillusionment and unreliable lover of Jesus And Mary, the scuffed New Orleans lurching Hearts Club Band’s finger to someone who ‘wrote a song a day’ and was cruel in a different was than I was used to”, the self-loathing in Jimi and the insecurities of the nakedly confessional, musically plaintive I Wish I Were have got things out of the system. There’s a definite darkness here, if not involving emotional instability and former beaus, then a meditation on mortality and failure, the latter embodied in the nervy folk blues of The George Song (about another ex who committed suicide), the former underpinning the baroque chamber moods of So Many Friends (where her voice slides down the scales) and the stark, wailing gothic blues brooding In The Middle Of The Night which addresses her mother’s battle with cancer. Fortunately, this is balanced with notes of defiant hope (Tower Song) and certain playfulness. That’s certainly the case in the gloriously Fleetwood Mac like poppiness of Comin’ Tonight where she considers going to a gig by an old flame (maybe the one from Hearts Club Band) to rip off one of their melodies. And, while it may have been penned before she tied the knot with producer Brad Albetta, Niger River is a simple trad-hued folk song about making commitments, played out to cello and violin. Musically though, there’s little gloom here, the commercial radio friendly appeal of Comin’ Tonight echoed all over, especially so in You Cheated Me and her jogging cover of Pink Floyd’s See Emily Play, which should make a more robust evening than you might anticipate. It’ll certainly be interesting to hear what this more mature and, yes, rockier Martha does to her older, more fragile songs. 7.30pm. £17.50. Symphony Hall Saturday May 24 Sam Sparro
Another 02 Wireless Weekender evening, this is headlined by the LA dance groover who recently scored a No 2 hit with Black And Gold, an infectious dose of electro pop that sounded like a mix between Sam Cooke and Depeche Mode. Since no promo of his album materialised, it’s hard to say what else may be in store but snippets from 21st Century Life and Hot Mess would suggest he’s spent a lot of time in his bedroom with early Prince albums.
By musical contrast, he’s paired for the gig with Jack MacManus who sports a Leo Sayer hairdo and, to go by his Either Side Of Midnight (Polydor) album, has a big AOR soft spot for Billy Joel, Elton John (isn’t that the Honky Cat riff on Milky Way) and maybe even James Blunt. It’s all big, lush, easy listening piano man pop music with radio friendly tunes, singalong choruses, catchy hooks and songs determined to put a smile on your face and a spring in your step. The rocky strutting Kick off single Bang On The Piano seems more to be testing the water since there seems more directly chart targeted tracks here, most notably the bouncing tile track, a handclappy You Think I Don’t Care, Livin’ In A Suitcase and the inevitable closing big, strings drenched dramatic ballad Amy. OK, it’s a touch worrying that She’s Gone reminds you of Foreigner, Fine Time To Lose Your Mind sounds like he was asked to write an Eagles knock-off, and, at the end of the day, it’s all a bit insubstantial, but the man can write a melody and, despite an album cover that looks like it came from among the also rans of West Coast 60s songwriters, he’s going to be hard to escape when you turn the radio on this summer. 7.30pm. £.8.50. The Place I Love, Custard Factory Sunday May 25 Elliot Minor
The last of the 02 Weekender gigs brings the quintet out and about to plug their recently released eponymous debut album. 11 tracks long, four cuts (Still Figuring Out, The White One Is Evil, Jessica and Parallel Worlds) have already done service as singles and The Broken Minor and Last Call To New York City are Queen cum ELO high drama reworks of numbers from their previous incarnation. So, that leaves five to sway anyone not already in the fanclub. To be honest, it’s going to be an uphill struggle given that Time After Time, Liar Is You, Lucky Star and Silently are all seriously overproduced, drowning the band in orchestral bombast and flattening any emotional nuances the songs might contain. Even the poppy Running Away, which sounds like it wants to be single No 5, sounds so desperate to convince you that they’re a full blooded rock proposition that it forgets to let any personality through. Given the choirboys backgrounds, the lads have the voices. Maybe next time they’ll have the confidence to just let them show through. 7.30pm. £12.50. The Place I Love, Custard Factory Sunday May 25 The Zombies
Back in August 1964, led by the husky honey and smoke tones of Colin Blunstone and Rod Argent’s keyboards, the St Alban’s outfit had their one and only UK hit with jazz flavoured debut single She’s Not There. They were rather better received in the States, where it reached No 2 and follow ups Tell Her No and, after a hitless three years, Time Of The Season both cracked the Top 10. However, by the time they released their second album, Oracle and Odyssey, in 1968, they’d already called it a day, Blunstone going on to forge a successful solo career with songs like I Don’t Believe In Miracles and Say You Don't Mind and Argent’s self-named band scoring with Hold Your Head Up and God Gave Rock N Roll To You. In 1981 Blunstone was back in the charts teamed with Dave Stewart for a cover of What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted. Over the years, though, their first band has come to receive the critical kudos it never enjoyed at the time with that second album and songs like Care of Cell 44, A Rose For Emily and Hung Up On A Dream being now hailed as a masterpiece of the era. Not surprisingly then that, following its reissue, Argent and Blunstone have got back together for a new incarnation, playing material from both the band and their solo repertoires. They’ve already done the album in its entirety, so this tour, which coincides with The Zombies And Beyond (UMTV) compilation of their collective and individual best moments will doubtless be focusing on just those, though, it has to be said, the jamming jazz-rock of Argent’s hits and solos that lean to the worst excesses of ELP now sounds painfully dated. 7.30pm. £26.50-£21.50. Symphony Hall Sunday May 25 Beth Rowley
Another female singer-songwriter with a 60s hang up, born in Peru but now living in Bristol Rowley may have started out playing acid funk soul but her recent flop Oh My Life single sounds a lot like a slimline version of Mama Cass’s Dream A Little Dream Of Me with some added do wop sax swing. She’s paid her dues providing live backing for Ronan Keating and Enrique Iglesias as well as contributing to last Crowded House album, but, working with jazz saxophonist Ben (son of Roy) Castle, she’s also found time for three EPs and recently recorded Careless Talk for the upcoming Keira Knightley film Edge of Love. She’s also put together her first album, Little Dreamer (Blue Thumb) from which comes new single, the summery jazz pop jaunty So Sublime, and which showcases her soulful vocal range to good effect. No promos were available, but it does include her bluesy wailing Nobody’s Fault But Mine where she sounds like a female Eric Burdon, the gospel hewn Only One Cloud and a collaboration with Duke Special on Willie Nelson’s Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground. There’s also a reggaed up cover of Dylan’s I Shall Be Released, but the less said about that the better and any hint of it in the set should be a sign to start discussing the weather. 7.30pm. £10. Glee Club Sunday May 25 Scouting For Girls
A Narf Larndan rock n roll roll collision between Supergrass and Pulp influences, the piano led Acton trio’s eponymous debut album is a chipper affair with the bouncy It’s Not About You, a choppy She’s So Lovely and the breezy Britpop Elvis Ain’t Dead, with its Supertramp-like intro, all proving radio friendly singles. Throw in the likes of I’m Not Over You, Keep On Walking, I Need A Holiday and Mountains of Navaho and you’ve pretty much got a soundtrack to being young. Fun while it lasts, but aware that you have to grow up sometime.
Support comes from Go:Audio, a chugging indie pop outfit fronted by out of breath Walsall boy James Matthews whose new single Made Up Stories (Epic) sounds like they spent a lot of time poring through old Busted songs. Rescheduled Date. 7pm. £12.50. Carling Academy Sunday May 25 Hot Club de Paris
A Scouse perky pop punk trio with a
laddish wit who shake together bits of the Pogues, Dexys, XTC,
Billy Bragg and American punk outfit The Minutemen, whose The
Anchor they cover to rattling effect like The Streets doing a
sea shanty to a rapid fire drum beat. They’re out and about
previewing new album Live At Dead Lake (Moshi Moshi) from which
comes new single Hey Housebrick, a slightly silly but
ridiculously catchy little number with a chorus that’s going to
prove impossible to shake for the next few months. Monday May 26 Bob Mould
A veteran of the American punk explosion who fronted the seminal Hüsker Dü before going on to form Sugar and release a clutch of solo albums, Mould always sings as if he has a sore throat and plays like his life depends on it. He’s currently doing the business in support of new album District Line, his first since signing to Beggars Banquet but still sounding like his classic past. So that’ll be swathes of driving guitar riffs, solid basslines and a voice that soars up from some churning turmoil to take flight around the impassioned melodies. He can be vulnerable and tender, but most of the new material is clearly build to be heard loud, chiming out of the starting gate with Stupid Now and a rough-necked Who Needs to Dream? that conjures the halcyon Husker days while poppier instincts make themselves heard across The Silence Between Us, Very Temporary and Return To Dust, the best song REM didn’t manage to come up with for their new album. He doesn’t sound quite that comfortable on the voice phased electronic dance thrust of Shelter Me, but you can hear his folk roots coming through loud and clear in Again And Again and the six minute, mandolin backed Walls In Time. Given the mass of material to draw on, he’ll probably only find space for three or four of the new numbers, but they’ll fit seamlessly alongside already proven crowd favourites like Black Sheets of Rain, If I Can't Change Your Mind, Dog On Fire and, unless he can get away with leaving it out, Husker Du classic Diane.
Support’s provided by Oppenheimer, a Belfast synth-pop duo that came together between Shaun Robinson and Rocky O’Reilly’s shared love of krautrock, synths and soundscapes. Not that you’ll hear much of that on infectious tumbling two minute single Look Up (Fantastic Plastic) which sounds much more like a fizz and sunshine meeting place between Brian Wilson and Weezer. They’re a little tougher edged on the candy-acid The Never Never, but the intrinsic pop flavours remain. Their songs already recruited for use on Ugly Betty and Gossip Girl, they’ll be unveiling debut album Take The Whole Mid-Range And Boost It and titles like Major Television Events, Fireworks Are Illegal In The State of New Jersey, Stephen McCauley For President and Cate Blanchett. You’ll be wanting to hear more of this lot.7.30pm. £15. Carling Academy 2 Monday May 26 Santogold
Christened Santi White, the Philadelphia born producer turned songwriter nixed her punk band split for New York when her father died following a federal corruption sting. Here she reinvented herself under her new name and put together a self-titled album of dance friendly synth pop featuring the Bjork-endorsed You’ll Find A Way along with splashes of dub (Say A-Ha), rap (Creator), reggae (Unstoppable) and rock ((I’m A Lady). Promo copies weren’t forthcoming but current chart single L.E.S Artistes (Atlantic) seems a fair pointer with its mix of Stefani, early Madonna and Oriental rhythms. 7.30pm. £7.50. Bar Academy Monday May 26 Pull Tiger Tail
Purveyors of infectious indie pop, the Stratford upon Avon trio follow past singles Mr 100 Percent and the hook snagging Let’s Lightning with next week’s follow-up, the mid-tempo yearning pop Mary Jane (Young & Lost). It’s not the one that’s going to give them the next leg up, but it’s a catchy enough guitar pop clatter.7.30pm. £6.50. Barfly Tuesday May 27 Ida Maria
A Norwegian pixie pop fireball whose impulsive, untrammelled Iggy Pop influenced stage performances have led to cracked ribs and regular blood spraying cuts and abrasions, you may have caught Maria on Later With Jools Holland but you really need to experience her in the flesh. She explodes into town to preview debut album Fortress Round My Heart (RCA), a power packed collection of short sharp punky 70s garage pop songs that, like current hymn to partying single Queen Of The World, give you an idea what The Strokes might be like were they fronted by a cross betwixt Bjork, Chrissie Hynde and Janis Joplin. It bursts with life and the same’s true of everything on the album, whether she’s talking about drinking too much (the tremulously driving Oh My God which calls to mind Coventry new wave heroes The Primitives), depression (the feisty folk Drive Away My Heart), sexual politics (the Blondie goes mod I Love You So Much Better When You’re Naked), God (Stella) or love (the sherbet dab explosion Louie). She’s not all hyperactivity, both See Me Through and Keep Me Warm show she can handle an early hours slow dance ballad to good effect, but it’s the songs you can as she puts it, dance, drink and go crazy to that are going to make her a star. The album’s not released here until August, so this is an early opportunity to start salivating in anticipation. Maria has a condition called synaesthesia which means she sees music in terms of colour. No wonder she sings a Jackson Pollock rainbow. 7.30pm. £6. Glee Club Wednesday May 28 The Black Keys
Laced with The Band, Lennon, Led Zep, and John Lee Hooker, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney’s last album, Magic Potion, was a rough and ready affair designed to be played loud but not offering anything particularly original. They return now with their fifth, Attack & Release (V2), which again isn’t exactly marking out any new territory and the bluesy garage numbers won’t put an end to those White Stripes (I Got Mine) and Zep (Same Old Thing) comparisons, but, many of the songs originally written for an Ike Turner project, it’s a stronger and more focused work that expands its fuzzed guitar r&b and blues canvas to often white heat effect. Lies is a stand-out slow burn psychedelic blues that strikes to the 70s heart of Free and Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac while pumping it with Motown soul blood, while there’s hints of Cream to Strange Times, Psychotic Girl ploughs a down home folk-blues furrow while Remember When (Side A) lazes and whistles through a 50s reverb rippling hula ballad before Remember When (Side B) explodes in a Nuggets era echoey dirty garage rock freak out. The duo strike some real career highs here, not least the opening slow pulsing blues-folk ballad All You Ever Wanted, the Tom Waits shrug n lurch mood of So He Won’t Break with its Isley Bros guitar colours and the closing gospel hued, churchy organ backed resigned weariness of Things Ain't Like They Used To Be. This is their masterpiece and if they can pull it off live too, they could become unstoppable. 7.30pm. £15. Carling Academy Wednesday May 28 Essie Jain
The latest addition to the hushed alt-folk singer-songwriter list, Jain's an ex-pat Londonder now based in New York, debut album We Made This Ourselves (Leaf) likely to be on the shopping list of those who've previously bought Vashti Bunyan, Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom while the spare multi-tracked vocal and mournful violin of Sailor bears the stamp of Sandy Denny. It's all very minimalist and intimate, a melancholy piano here, meditative guitar there, muted brass putting in the occasional appearance (French horn lifting the aptly titled Haze above the clouds to take flight) and strings soothing the sometimes furrowed confessional brow as she addresses relationships wounded, splintered or healing. Her voice is husky and dark, bending the notes around the simple rustic melodies and stripped back arrangements to reveal more colours than might be immediately apparent. The nursery waltzing Disgrace with its bluebottle harmonica, the musing piano doodles of Loaded, the quite in/out breathing rhythms to the fragile romanticism of No Mistake and her quiet, cool edge of a breakdown slow build on the back of a stabbing piano note, accordion and brushed drum through the trad styled ballad Talking all offer scintillating highlights, but there's much here to send you giddy with shivers. 7.30pm. £10. Tin Angel, Taylor John's House, Canal Basin, Coventry Thursday May 29 Robots In Disguise
Lycra-favouring electro-punk duo Dee Plume and Sue Denim returns for more choice selections from the We’re In The Music Biz (President) debut album. Great self-mocking, tongue in cheek post-modern fun; if you’ve never heard of Shampoo. They’re not blessed with the greatest of voices, something all too apparent when they attempt to get serious on Animals or Tears, but the fizz and chav sketch show silliness bubbling along fizzily with The Sex Has Made Me Stupid, Can’t Stop Getting Wasted and the title track make for momentary enjoyable diversions. 7.30pm. £8. Carling Academy 2 Thursday May 29 James Yorkston
It’s two years now since the Scottish singer-singwriter was here promoting then current album Year Of The Leopard with its spare, gently rustic folk arrangements and meditations and reflections on love. He’ll be dipping back into that for things like the lilting I Awoke, and the sun dappled Us Late Travellers, but more to the point he’ll also be showcasing material from the just completed as yet untitled follow-up. Get an early treat. 7.30pm. £8. Glee Club Thursday May 29 Betty and the I.D.
A Birmingham quartet whose influences seem to mainly hang around The Stranglers (listen to that JJB bass) but also squeeze a few pinches of early space rock of Hawkwind, Floyd and, quite possibly, late 60s underground Britpsych outfits like The Smoke, into Cellophane Man and Neutron World. Both tracks feature on their limited edition (200 copies so get in quick) self-titled EP alongside the very Peaches-like Chant and the more experimental psychedelia of Last Night Dreaming which pulls together bits of Zappa, America’s stoner-desert rock, Soft Machine and Floyd. They don’t look the Springest of chickens, but they play with solid musicianship and energy and while the music may hark to times gone, it still sounds fresh minted. 8pm. £5. Hare & Hounds, Kings Heath Friday May 30 Avril Lavigne
It’s a while now since she was a tweenie’s poster girl singing Complicated and Sk8er Boi that place now filled by Hannah Montana, but as the foul-mouthy Girlfriend merrily demonstrated, she can still turn out that Toni Basil chewy pop in her sleep. That’s much the open vein bubbling out of her third album The Best Damn Thing (RCA), both I Can Do Better and the title track even having Hey Micky moments between the circling punky guitars. The adenoidal voice can get a bit strained after a while and the whiny notes aren’t best cut out for investing the emotional drama that arms swaying power ballads like When You’re Gone and Innocent need, but it would be churlish to deny that when she hits her bubblegum power pop princess stride on things like Everything Back But You, One Of Those Girls. I Don’t Have To Try and Runaway this is by far one of the best teenage rebellion and angst albums ever made by a married 22 year old woman. Go punch the air and tear down that Hannah poster at once. 7.30pm. £27.50. NEC Friday May 30 Tapes n Tapes
The Minneapolis quartet’s debut album, The Loon, saw them declared heirs apparent to the lo fi American indie likes of Pavement and the Pixies. Now the follow-up, Walk It Off (XL) looks to consolidate and confirm the accolades with ease, opening with the heady slacker pop rock rush of Le Ruse, switching moods into an echoey vocal, narcotic waltzing Time Of Songs and then hitting the funky Talking Heads basslines for Hang Them All and a distorted guitar three minutes of folksian Headshock and chant chorus. It doesn’t all gel; Blunt is a little too much in its Stooges blues rock punk homaging while Demon Apple is a meandering stoner blues that never gets anywhere. But balance those against the summery strumming Conquest (where Pavement get to hang out with the Beach Boys), the summery garage rockabilly pop Say Something Back, a spooked blues Lines and a jittery gradual intensity building dance-punk George Michael and there’s little cause to complain. And if the electro pulsing, guitar riffing, gospel glam stomping five minute closer The Dirty Dirty does the business live like it does on the album, this could well be their Spirit In The Sky. 7.30pm. £8.50. Barfly Friday May 30 Fightstar
Charlie Simpson’s post-Busted outfit have yet to really get a firm grip on the precarious ladder of rock success, but recent album One Day Son, This Will All Be Yours (Gut) certainly shows they’re climbing the rungs. Juggling the hammer through the skull hardcore yowling of Deathcar and Tannhauser with stadium ballad Floods, the gentle Unfamiliar Feelings and radio friendly emotionally urgent new single I Am The Message, they have far more of a future than they have a past.
Hard hitting rock support’s provided by Brigade, a London quartet (fronted by Simpson’s brother Will) whose Come Morning We Fight (Caned & Able) clearly has both My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy in its sights. It’s not a bad stab either, marrying melody and driving riffs to good effect on What Are You Waiting For, Shortcuts, Together Apart, recent poppy single Pilot and niftily titled power ballad Four Kids To A Glockenspiel. 7pm. £12.50. Carling Academy 2 Saturday May 31 Eric Bibb
It’s 11 years since the New York bluesman released Good Stuff, a debut album informed by growing up in a musical family where relatives and friends included Pete Seeger, Dylan, Modern Jazz Quartet pianist John Lewis and Paul Robeson. Today he’s still mining those acoustic blues, gospel and soul roots to good effect with current album Get On Board (Telarc) which finds working the groove on The Promised Land, shuffling New Orleans style down New Beale Street Blues, evoking a gospel Sam Cooke with Step By Step and gathering to testify down by the riverside for Deep In My Soul. He still has an impressive circle of friends too, Texas blueser Ruthie Foster duetting on Conversations and Bonnie Raitt playing slide on the slow churchy soul If Our Hearts Ain’t In It. Joined live by Danny Thompson and Trevor Hutchinson sharing stand up bass duties and daughter Yana on back ups, it promises to be a diamond night for blues enthusiasts.
Opening the show will be Emily Maguire, a London born singer-songwriter who now lives the eco friendly life in the Australian bush. She leaves that behind to promote her Keep Walking (Shaktu) album, its title inspired by her 10 year struggle to recover the use of her legs after a serious car crash when she was 17. If her story’s inspiring, so too is the album which begs the usual Joni Mitchell and Dido comparisons with its thoughtful lyrics and marriage of folk, blues and jazz. Headily arranged so that acoustic guitar, sultry percussion and a 23 piece string orchestra (she’s a classically trained cellist) perfectly complement her understated hushed voice, there’s a couple of moments that don’t quite come off (TV To Take It Away is overwritten and ingenuous) bu when you listen to the fresh breeze title track, the watery folk Back Home, and Lately, Someday and husky breathed slow waltzing single All That You Wanted, three songs that call to mind undervalued English songstress Lesley Duncan, you can understand why it may be a while before she sees her tin shack again. 7.30pm. £17.50. B’ham Town Hall Saturday May 31 Cute Is What We Aim For
Formed Buffalo quartet fly in to pave the way for Rotation (Fuelled By Ramen), their follow up to The Same Old Blood Rush With A New Touch, the label’s fastest selling release in its 10 year history. Promo copies weren’t available but lead off single Practice Makes Perfect doesn’t suggest any major deviations from the catchy modern emo power pop about girls and having a good time of the debut. They’ll be mixing up the new stuff with the likes of The Curse of Curves, There’s A Class For This and The Fourth Drink Instinct, your job is to spot the difference. 7pm. £10. Carling Academy 2 Saturday May 31 Soweto Kinch
The multi-award winning jazz musician has organised and heads up The Hockley Flyover Project, an all day community urban art street fest of hip hop, poetry, dance and theatre featuring artists like Bashy, TY, Eska Mtungwazi, Jonzi D and Zena Edwards as well as many local acts. Taking place, as the name suggests, under the flyover, it looks to put the spotlight on the area’s need for urban regeneration as well as indigenous black arts talent, with Kinch doubtless featuring material from his A Life In The Day Of B19 - Tales Of The Tower Block album and the still unissued Basement Fables follow-up. From 1pm. Free. Hockley Flyover
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