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ARCHIVED REVIEWS October 2004 Friday October 1
Power pop with cranked up guitars, blitzkrieg drumming, a love of The Who, The Ramones, The Undertones, and, rather surprisingly Buddy Holly and late 50s bobbysox ballads if Beautiful Dream is anything to go on, Aberdeen’s current claim to rock n roll fame come bursting out of the stalls with hooks flying everywhere, harmonies driving down the middle and a wiry Dave Dixon commanding the stage with his Brylcreemed quiff, thick-rimmed specs and explosive energy. With the likes of instant classics like Teenage Bomb, Panic on Easy Street and Dianne already under their belts, they’ve been touted in all the right places as power pop’s answer to The Darkness. Get the point. 8.30pm, £3, Jug of Ale.
Saturday October 2
It’s felt a long two years since Malin released scorching debut album,
The Fine Art of Self-Destruction but sophomore outing The Heat (One Little
Indian) has been worth the wait . Although a fuller sonic affair with more
layered electric guitars and lots more noise, there’s still that strangled
Springsteen edge to the voice although there’s several occasions (notably
the desolate Going Out West and the starkly haunting Basement Home) where
Neil Young’s mournful whine rings through.
7.30pm, £9, Carling Academy 2.
Saturday October 2
I caught this pair last time they were here playing support to Clive
Gregson and was much impressed by their musical energy, wit and charisma,
so this is a welcome return for Brisbane’s John Thompson on guitar, vocals
and whistle and Nicole Murray on voice and flutes. The duo, deal in trad
and self-penned folk, ably exemplified by their latest album The Fiddleship
(Roots), where the splendid title track, a rousing Thompson number inspired
by one of Murray’s scultpures and evocative of the work of Stan Rogers,
sits alongside the likes of the Scottish doomed love ballad Lady Maisry,
a capella duet Winds of Fortune, assorted jigs, Thompson’s unaccompanied
performance of Australian convict lament Plains of Emu, (Moreton Bay providing
a thematic companion piece) Murray’s setting of W.H. Auden’s ballad and
her jazzy-folk flute solo Wilna’s Dance.
8pm, £8, Red Lion, Kings Heath.
Sunday October 3/Monday October 4
Whether you regard the fact he’s now releasing material via his own
label rather than being signed to a major as a career downgrade (you may
be surprised to learn he’s only ever had three Top 30 singles), the fact
remains he still commands a loyal following that ensure packed tours even
if chart albums now look a thing of the past. Naturally he’ll be doing
the hoary Lady In Red, a song that’s now become something of a pop self-parody,
as well as the usual favourites like Don’t Pay The Ferryman, Broken Wings
and Tender Hands (though mercifully Patricia The Stripper seems long consigned
to oblivion), but doubtless one of the main purposes of the tour is to
spread word on recent album The Road To Freedom.
7.30pm, £32.50/£24.50, Symphony
Hall.
Sunday October 3
Having pollinated the airwaves with their lolloppingly sunny honeyed psychedelic shaker pop Wash In The Rain where those Stranglers influence join forces with straw sucking jug band goodtiming, the Isle of Wight boys flit back with their sophomore album Free The Bees (Virgin) positively buzzing with goodtime 60s noise, part Spencer Davis, part The Who, part part Hollies and on I Love You part Jim Webb. In fact, listening to the excellent This Is The Land you get a sense of what it might have been like had The Monkees and The Fortunes ever got together. A musical mix of r&b (No Atmosphere), whirlygig folk (The Start), psychedelic pop (Hourglass) and soul (the James Brown flavoured Chicken Payback), it makes no great claims for originality, but with the likes of These Are The Ghosts and One Glass of Water it does earn an instant place on the best summer albums of the year list. Best case of hives in town. 7.30pm, £8, Carling Academy 2.
Monday October 4
She may or may not be engaged to Sum 41’s Deryck
Whibley, but even given Don’t Tell Me advocating virginity (April
picking up the tarnished Britney baton?) there’s little doubt this is a
far more grown up Lavigne than the one who made Let Go a mere two years
ago. For starters, with the exception of the undistinguished He Wasn’t
and bonus chugger I Always Get What I Want (where she inexplicably seems
to adopt a Cockney accent), there’s none of the bratty guitar pop that
characterised breakthrough hits Sk8ter Boi and Complicated to follow up
album Under My Skin (Arista).
7.30pm, £21.50, NEC.
Monday October 4
Back giving a second push to current album Never Gonna Let You Go, one which sees Steve's kid sister stretching the country musical wings to add tastes of ringing roots rock (Our World), bluesy prowls (Stuart penned Lookin' For Fools Gold), Texicali (Cry Night After Night), Stevie Nicksish witchy woman rock (When She's Having Fun) and even old school chirpy Tin Pan Alley on Spread Your Wings and Maybe That's Just Me, the latter surely borrowing from Paper Moon, alongside more familiar singer-songwriter material like the shuffling strum Me And The Man In The Moon. The one to wait for live though has to be The Note, an aching piano ballad about a wife left behind and a song likely to leave the hairs on the back of your neck standing. 8pm, £11, Ceol Castle.
Monday October 4
Their brief glory days long past, founder members Biff Byford and guitarist Paul Quinn are still bumbling along playing their brand of derivative third division heavy metal like a low budget Iron Maiden with new album Lionheart (SPV) lumbering through tracks about 12th century kings, 17th century witchfinders (Witchfinder General), and English fighting ships (Man O’War) and their crew (cod acoustic Medieval ballad Jack Tars). What they do they do efficiently enough (though the sense of wit evident on the early albums is long gone) and the likes of Man and Machine and To Live By The Sword provide the requisite unreconstructed headbanging riffs but it’s a dispiriting throwback listen. 7.30pm, £14, Wulfrun Hall.
Tuesday October 5
With current single Vermillion a worrying slide into emo, with snakily purred lyrics you can actually hear and, heaven help us, a stadium rock guitar solo, fans might be worried that the boys are getting a bit soft. Worry, not. Clearly an aberrant blip on the Subliminal Verses album, the name of the game remains the standard guttural growls and skull crushing guitar riffage delivered in the familiar boiler suits and silly fright masks. And, as the recent live version of Disasterpiece shows, the stage show’s the same old ears bleeding sonic overkill. 7.30pm, £25. NEC.
Tuesday October 5
Formerly frontman for the ill-fated Sunhouse
whose rootsy blues work regularly graced the films of Shane Meadows but
rarely the public’s record collections, dust n gravel voiced singer Gavin
Clark now shares a band with Beth Orton collaborator Ted Barnes and Ali
Friend of Red Snapper, the music leaning more towards the rainy days end
of the soul-folk-rock spectrum once charted by Talk Talk.
7.30pm, £7, Glee Club.
Tuesday October 5
The Sunderland four piece cheerfully describe their music as rock n roll shambolique and judging by debut album Songs of Praise (XL) they’re on a curious mission to wed English folk music (Shadows of Your Love) with jerky Costello pop (I Am A Camera), indie garage rockabilly (I Want To Believe In You), 70s American punk pop (Renaissance Kid), Kinks style thrash (The Thought of Her) and after hours sway (I Don't Want No One But You). It's an uneven set of bed partners but one former English teacher John Renney somehow manages to make it all make sense as he spins out their songs of love's dark, nay, psychotic, heart. Even so, on the evidence of Never Had A Prayer he'd not be advised to go for that album of unaccompanied floor songs for a while yet. 7.30pm, £5, Little Civic.
Wednesday October 6
Two years on from the self-titled debut, the
Leeds four piece return with Welcome To The North (Virgin), asecond
dose of fuzzy rock and psychedelic blues that leans heavily on the legacy
of The Verve, Stone Roses and Led Zep. It’s epic stuff, full of bluster
and swagger along with the Eastern rhythmic textures that ripple through
the likes of Bleed From Within, Breakin, and the title track, but
after a while it all starts to become a bit overbearingly samey, making
chiming ballads Fight The Feeling and Into The Night a more welcome respite
than they actually warrant.
7.30pm,
£13.50, Carling Academy.
Thursday October 7
Another acoustic get together, this brings together
the seasoned veteran, the rising star and the newcomer for an evening of
folk, blues and country.
Despite being compared to Ry Cooder, Chapman
remains something of an underrated talent, so it’s useful that Castle have
just issued Dangerous When Sober, a self-styled potted history from 66-80
comprising early demos and live versions, showing off his blues
roots on a collection of songs and guitar instrumentals, both self-penned
nuggets such as Not So Much A Garden (More Like A Maze) and Time Enough
To Spare and covers that range from blues standards See See Rider and Parchman
Farm to Tom Rush instrumental Rockport Sunday and Tim Hardin’s Reason To
Believe. Masterclass stuff.
It's all hushed, intimate stuff showing off his gravelly husk of a voice to fine effect on soundtracks to a hundred broken hearts. Inevitably the sparser arrangements ring the changes on things like Here Come The Swells, now sounding more resigned and weary than in its biting, ringing guitar incarnation. The same's true of Jurassic Parking Lot's lament for a lost neighbourhood while Ends of the Earth, You Won't Find Me and I Want You sound even more melancholic and crushed than ever and the fabulous By the Time My Head Gets to Phoenix emerges in an autumnal folk setting. Should be a stunner.And, relatively wet behind the ears, the line-ups completed by Janis Haves one half of Kingston-upon-Thames husband and wife duo Haves & Haves whose self-titled debut album paints Americana soundscapes and reveals her as a fine songstress who picks through the bones and sinews of relationships and then gives them flesh with her soaring, slightly breathy voice.
The album's obvious golden nugget is Shameless, a plaintive plucked guitar ballad that captures the frailty and emotional desperation of the narrator, but it's run close by the closing quietly hymnal piano ballad Turn Your Love Around where the Emmylou reference points ring clear. It’ll be interesting to see how they translate to the solo setting, but, as with her fellow players, the set promises to be little short of magic. 7.30pm, £9, The Glee Club.
Thursday October 7
No, not a downsizing following a drop off in
fan following in the wake of the disappointing 12 Memories, but a return
to the smaller ‘club’ venues they played prior to the release of The Man
Who to tie in with the release of their Singles album (Independiente)
and dvd.
7.30pm, £19.50, Wulfrun Hall.
Friday October 8
After three years of Christmas gig reunions
playing the old hits to pay for the turkey and trimmings, the Stuffies
have decided to go the whole hog and make a new album, Escape From Rubbish
Island (IRL) to feature alongside the old favourites, too.
7.30pm, £12.50, Carling Academy.
Friday October 8
The biggest venue she’s played round these parts,
but that should prove no problem for the Barnsley lass if her Live
From Leeds DVD is any indication. Recorded at Leeds City Varieties Music
Hall with Ian Carr, Andy Cutting and John McCusker, Rusby’s not intimidated
by the bigger arena while, sporting her trademark look of lopsided grin,
white vest top and scraped back ringlets with a rose grip, she proves to
have affably witty between song repartee to go with her fragile,
haunting voice and a songwriting ability that's rapidly confirming her
as the best of the recent outcrop of young contemporary folk artists.
7.30pm, £16.50, Alexandra Theatre.
Friday October 8
Former lead singer of Sneaker Pimps back
when she was known as Kelli Dayton, this will be her first hometown
Birmingham gig since the late 90s and an opportunity to see what musical
directions she’s travelled (Bootsy Collins and Marc Almond collaboration
included) since the band gave her the elbow and plunged forward into almost
overnight trip hop obscurity.
8.30pm, £3, Flapper & Firkin.
Saturday October 9/Sunday October 10
First finding their way to the majority of UK
ears via Sweetest Goodbye on the Love Actually soundtrack and translating
awareness into the naggingly unforgettable jerking hit single Harder To
Breathe, the LA boys have actually been around since 1999, although back
then they were a four piece and traded as Kara’s Flowers playing pop-punk.
These days, with the addition of an extra guitar, they chug out a retro
white boy funk rock groove that’s a bit like Spindoctors but poppier or
Terence Trent D’Arby but more coherent. And with more wah wah. Whatever,
it seems to have captured UK audiences ears to the tune of sell-out tours
and a chart topping album.
7.30pm, £15, Carling Academy.
Sunday October 10
More familiarly known for his skewed psychedelia, Hitchcock returns to the Glee on the back of a somewhat unexpected new acoustic album that sees him collaborating with American Gothic country duo Gillian Welch and David Rawlings in something of a mutual admiration society. Suitably titled Spooked (Proper) in keeping with the music they make, it shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise since there’s always been a folk undercurrent to Hitchcock’s work, but this is the first time it’s really taken the lead. However, since with the exception of a cover of obscure Dylan number Trying To Get To Heaven Before They Close The Door, it’s all self-penned, the lyric content remains frequently off the wall in that English eccentric Syd Barrett sort of way with Demons and Fiends seeing him singing of hobgoblins and ghouls to a minimal revivalist gospel tune, Sometimes A Blonde talking of ghosts walking in the bodies of children, We’re Gonna Live In The Trees a bit of a slap guitar stomper about, well, living in the trees while Television is a gently infectious love song to the box that not only features a catchy chorus of binga bonga bing bong but also the line “you are the devil’s fishbowl”. The album also features English Girl, a song that finds an almond whirl serving as prelude to romance. With selections from past nuggets of engaging nuttiness likely to put in an appearance, this promises to be as barkingly magic as ever. 7.30pm, £9, The Glee Club.
Monday October 11
Northampton chaps whose stuttery pop and jerky whine vocals (think Gang of Four meets early Roxy albums with Morrisey phrasings and a touch of goth) have seen them added to the list of next big things. Surf twangy sophomore single Be My Enemy (Parlophone) confirms their fondness for angular noisy guitar lines and reinforce the Interpol comparisons, though, with this their first headline tour and less than a year to their existence, it may be prudent to wait for the album before getting too carried away with the hyperbole and predictions. 7pm, £6, Bar Academy.
Monday October 11
The four boys from the south coast seaside town of East Preston exploded into 2004 with hurricane pop single Maybe Someday. They arrive in town now with debut album Over The Counter Culture (B-Unique) having fully justified all the sudden buzz that erupted around them Drawing on The Jam, Morrissey and The Clash for inspiration with a love of Tamla and (on Little Bitch notably) ska mixed in, their character populated snapshots of Britain have a decided 60s retro thrust yet nevertheless retain a sharp freshness to match their often biting lyrics about today’s consumerist culture. Songs like Week In Week Out, Weekend Revolution, Maybe Someday, The List Goes On and the title track tumble over one another with spraying guitars and pumped up punk pop tunes while brassy new single Seaside and the Smithsy Just A Song show they’re equally capable of taking the beat down a few notches. They might need to expand their horizons beyond their conformity or individuality issues for the next album, but for now they’re up there in the top lists of must sees. Support comes from label-mates Leeds outfit Kaiser Chiefs who, along with such names as Blur, Supergrass and Dexys also cite the 60s as prime influences with The Kinks clearly way up front to judge by naggingly catchy new single I Predict A Riot. 7.30pm, £9, Carling Academy 2.
Monday October 11
Their first UK tour since last year when Steve and Stephanie Arlene packed their bags and the baby, bid farewell to Camden and made the move to her native California, they arrive with the first fruits of their relocation. As you might guess from the title Going To California (Loose) details the mixed emotions of the relocation with all the uprooting, goodbyes and turmoil it ensued. With accordion, lap and pedal steel, fiddle and trumpet serving the arrangements, the songs are both reflective and optimistic, treating on love, marriage, parenthood, showing nervous hesitation about unknown futures and settling some old scores. Though no great departure from excellent debut Stuck On You, their Americana sound seems to have been given an added fillip from being recorded under Western skies, opening in ringing 'mama I'm coming home' form with Smallville 336 and proceeding to make its diverse rootsy way through keening border country (What Am I Waiting For?), back porch bluegrass (Baby Brother, Travelling Song), Latin moodiness (What's My Name?), Eagles-like country rock (Love Her Like A Demon), plangent Byrdsian echoes (the title track), piano bar blues (Tempted) and chugging Johnny Cash blues (6 Junkie £'s). Amply justifying their reputation as one of the UK's finest Americana outfits, it'll be interesting to see what homesickness and their observations of living in contemporary America bring for the third album and between song banter. Support is Mary Lee’s Corvette aka Montana’s Mary Lee Kortes who made an impressive entree by releasing a live interpretation of Dylan’s entire Blood on the Tracks album. This time round though she’s doing her own songwriter thing with 700 Miles (Bar None), a roots based album fuelled by songs of distances between, yearning and, in the case of More Stupider, the problems of not dumbing down enough to get the guy.
It’s a collection that embraces the Beatlesesque go West Coast rockier shades of Out From Under It and the jangling acoustic Sheryl Crowe-like pop rock strut (Give It To) The Needy and Redemption Day as comfortably as it does the folksy whispery growing up narrative of Portland, Michigan, the pure voice desert moan The Nothing Song, Like Water’s hushed rippling balladry or the e-bow burnished title track slow shuffle. But whatever unleaded rootsy fuel she may pump it’s clear that her engine’s well tuned to rock. 8pm, £9, Ceol Castle.
Monday October 11
Almost 20 years and nine albums in, nobody's expecting the Junkies to throw out baby and bathwater these days. So it is that current album One Soul Now (Cooking Vinyl) is pretty much what you've come to expect; spooked and spare intimate arrangements, Margo Timmins' hushed smoky vocals and brother Michael's excursions into fuzzed blues guitar. Thematically too the issues remain fairly constant on songs that deal - in their familiarly obscure fashion - with the long term and the effects and confusions that birth, death, separation, age and weariness can bring. Meditating on the idea of connection and the unfathomable mysteries of love, the title track opens in spare, brooding bluesy mood before the chorus blossoms into a tumbling country hued melody, then it's claustrophobic blues again for Why This One?, its swelling ebbs and flows and rumbling percussion echoed again in My Wild Child, a song where the child proves the stabilising anchor for the parent. They loosen up somewhat with Stars Of Our Stars, a chugging start-over foottapper that's almost a rock n roll workout in their terms, and the meandering No Long Journey Home with its fuzz guitar doodles. But it's on the more pensive moments the album scores highest; the stripped down trad folk feel of Notes Falling Slow, its barely there melody and blurry guitar lines accentuating the frayed nerve endings of Timmins' vocals, He Will Call You Baby's 3am bluesy musings on love's twisted and tortured lies and betrayals, and the lost souls that haunt the ghostly desert landscape of Simon Keeper (an embezzler has his family turn against him and becomes a preacher) to a backdrop of skeletal percussion and organ. Appropriately enough given the religious references that run through the work they end on another questioning note with Slide, that sets the song’s spiritual desolation in a context where change may tough but is all part of life to be savoured. They’ll be showcasing the new material obviously, but as ever there’ll be the crowd pleasers from such earlier classics as Open and The Caution Horses providing more familiar smoky lustre and there’s always the chance they’ll slip in one of their regular covers (Thunder Road if you’re very lucky) as the cherry on the icing. Devotees of support act Vic Chestnutt will be beside themselves to discover that the wheelchair bound Athens, GA singer-songwriter much championed by the likes of REM, Tom Waits and Lucinda Williams (who’s actually the title of one of his songs) has just had his first four albums - Little, West of Rome, Drunk, Is The Actor Happy - reissued via New West with a staggering total of no less than 26 previously released bonus tracks.
Trading in ramshackle dusty throated rootsy folk and storytelling songs, this is a perfect opportunity to revisit or discover such overlooked nuggets as Soft Picasso, Gravity of the Situation, Lillian Gish, Guilty By Association and long time live fan favourite Bug as well as previously unavailable demos, rough sketches, outtakes and a magnificent live radio version of Dylan’s I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine. 7.30pm, £16.50, Wulfrun Hall.
Monday October 11
Standard bearers of the new acoustic movement with their debut album Quiet Is The New Loud, the Scandinavians return sounding incredibly like early Simon & Garfunkel on Homesick, the opening track of sophomore release Riot On An Empty Street (Source). S&G crop up again on Cayman Island and the jazzy Know How, while elsewhere Misread sounds like what Nick Drake might have recorded had he gone in for sambas and their affection for English folk territory is plain to hear on the gentle loping Stay Out of Trouble. It’s all rather lovely soft on the ear stuff, the boys branching out into rock n roll sensibilities by actually introducing drums on Sorry Or Please and even getting a bit Latin funky hipsway for Love Is No Big Truth and positively inviting audiences to shuffle in their seats with a swaying bossa nova-ish I’d Rather Dance With You and Live Long. Their audiences now more likely to be the cool, hip latetwenties who’ve recently discovered breathy Brazilian rhythms and copies of Bookends, this promises to be a gently hushed, chilled Chardonnay sort of evening. 7.30pm, £15, Warwick Arts Centre.
Tuesday October 12
It barely seems like yesterday since Drunk Enough To Dance was storming the airwaves with such bubblegum punk pop gems like Girl All The Bad Guys Want, but here they are back again with fourth album A Hangover You Don’t Deserve (Jive) and another sherbety rock smile on your face bunch of good time songs about beer and girls. Currently all over the radio with the brilliant 1985, a song that rates alongside such modern teenpop classics as Teenage Dirtbag and All The Small Things, they have an impressive arsenal of follow ups too with Trucker Hat, Ohio, Shut-Up And Smile, Next Ex-Girlfriend, Two Seater, Almost and Somebody Get My Mum all potential rampant guitar chugging singles. Heck, they could even be the first band to have a love song ballad hit called A-Hole. Sassy well sussed dumb slapstick rock and arguably the most fun album of the year and, if you can make your way past the umpteen jokey 15 second fooling around tracks you’ll also find them doing a tongue in cheek R&B version of their now staple hidden track Belgium. Even more fun at their rowdy live best, just pray guitarist Chris doesn’t decide to crowd surf! 7.30pm, £12.50, Carling Academy.
Tuesday October 12
A four piece from Leicester, this is another go round to milk further exposure for recent min-album The View Is Amazing (Sorepoint) which, if you’ve yet to discover its charms, comes loaded with six samples of their brand of melodic catchy guitar romping hook spraying punky pop, with Our Lives:The Sequel and Always both putting in a bid for anthemic stadium contenders while the piano led Butterflies seems to have been custom built for inclusion on some post Dawson’s Creek teen drama. As big on emotion as they are sound, it won’t be long before venues like this size simply won’t be able to contain them. 8pm, £4, Flapper & Firkin.
Wednesday October 13
Out plugging debut album Up All Night (Vertigo) and celebrating a step up in size of venues as word of mouth swells their reputation and following. Mouthy ex-Libertine Johnny Borrell leads things in a rampantly confident cocky swagger through 13 tales of London life that embrace new versions of Rock n Roll Lies and recent Jam meets Clash single Rip It Up alongside the likes of the soaring Golden Touch, live favourite In The City where they pay respect to Patti Smith’s Gloria, rowdy Springsteenesque new single Vice and the massive To The Sea while just to show they can do moody as well as mean there’s a time out breather for Hang By, Hang By and the closing Fall Fall Fall. And they walk it like they talk it too, so expect the place to be a heaving inferno of blistering rock and scalding sweat. 7.30pm, £10, Carling Academy.
Thursday October 14
Fronted by the tremulous girlie voiced Greg Gilbert, the newly emergent Southampton outfit are steeped in a starry eyed and laughing 60s nostalgia for jangling three minute pop songs that soar heavenwards on chorus wings and the sort of cascading melodies that make The Las seem like industrial white noise merchants. Bursting into the public consciousness like the first swallow of summer with debut album Faded Seaside Glamour (Rough Trade), a ltd edition of which comes with bonus DVD of promo vids and live performances, they swell with falsetto hope on Wanderlust as Gilbert assumes the mantle of Liz Fraser before he switches vocal affection to sound uncannily like Stevie Nicks on Bedroom Scene before getting his gonads temporarily into Spiritualized gear for You Wear The Sun and then doing a pretty fair impression of Roger McGuinn before his voice broke on Hey Girl. They don’t quite manage to sustain that first glorious rush throughout the album, Stay Where You Are is a particularly turgid sub Happy Mondays groove, There’s Water Here a noodling acoustic number that never quite sounds finished and Satellites Lost could have done with the direction counter being reset, but by the time they get to the chiming One Night Away and the Stone Roses-ish mantra sway of On all is forgiven. Listen carefully and you’ll find that with tales of lost innocence, death and wasted promise, the lyrics aren’t quite as joyful as the melodies might suggest but when you’re being swept away into angelic singalong bliss for Nearer Than Heaven I daresay you’ll be too euphoric to notice. 7.30pm, £9, Wulfrun Hall.
Saturday October 16
Down to a trio after the departure of Ray Thomas, the remaining members soldier on churning out their orchestral middle of the road rock. Not that they’ve actually released anything new so far this century, unless you count the frankly unlistenable collection of Christmas songs that came out last year as a bonus disc on yet another best of compilation, presumably given away free because no one in their right mind would buy it. Nights In White Satin can still send a shiver down the spine, but the sad fact is that as a live act the Moodies have now become so polishedly dull that the shiver is now more likely to be paralysis setting in with the boredom. 7.30pm, £27.50/£25.50, NEC.
Saturday October 16
Named after a slang term for lesbians, this New York five piece are currently the latest big thing in hip. Their self-titled debut album is brazenly open about its 70s influences with its camp glam burlesque screaming out Bowie, Billy Joel, Elton and Roxy while their version of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb given a Saturday Night Fever falsetto Bee Gees make-over is insanely inspired. Some of their synth pop (Lovers In The Backseat, Better Luck) rather dodgily invokes Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw, but you can overlook that when they swing into full Elton piano ballad mode for Mary or his more uptempo pounders with Take Your Mama Out and Music Is The Victim, give it serious Thin White Duke with Laura, recall the fab days of Hi-N-RG eurogay disco pop with Filthy/Gorgeous and get down for some party funk with The Skins It’s not all glossy froth, Return To Oz deals with a drugs death while the wonderfully named - and ever more wonderfully sounding - Tits On The Radio is a dig at Mayor Giuliani’s lockdown of the NY party scene, but while they’d obviously like you to think if you find the time the main object - sure to even more forthright live - is to get you to move your ass like a disco mutha. It’s a snip 6.30pm, £16.50. Carling Academy.
Sunday October 17
Novelty nutters the eight piece Welsh prankster rappers may be, a sort of Bonzo Dog version of the Wu Tang Clan, but with Guns Don’t Kill People, Rappers Do having cracked the Top 3, clearly there’s a sizeable audience who want to be in on the joke. It must be said that songs about cash spawning rock star suicides (Self Suicide), randy robots (Half Man Half Machine) and transvestite parents (Your Mother’s Got A Penis) do require a special brand of humour and the forced juvenile humour of major label debut Greatest Hits (Atlantic) rapidly becomes tiresome. But for now at least, the Goldies are laughing up their sleeves all the way to the bank. 7.30pm, £10. CarlingAcademy.
Sunday
October 17
Winners of the Mercury Music Prize for debut album (Domino), the lads from north of thre border present a basic but well shaken cocktail of influences that embraces The Doors (Darts of Pleasure), Mott the Hoople (Tell Her Tonight ), Blur (Cheating On You) and Bowie (Take Me Out) blended with aspects of Sparks, Pulp and such fellow Scottish underachievers as Josef K and Orange Juice while dropping references to things like chips, BBC2 and Terry Wogan into the lyrics just to underline their parochial cred. Fronted by the elegantly gangling Alex Kapranos, it’s kinetic funk punk pop with brain cells and some well crafted eccentricity, and while at under 40 minutes you may wonder what they’ve held in reserve their recent win should safely see them living on their laurels for at least the next 18 months. 7.30pm, £13.50, W’hampton
Civic Hall.
Monday October 18
Discovered and guided by Wombles supremo Mike Batt, the Russian born, Belfast raised and Surrey based 19 year old singer (and budding songwriter) has spent umpteen weeks in the upper reaches of the album chart with debut album Call Off The Search. And if first single The Closest Thing to Crazy suggested Melua as a huskier cross between Norah Jones and Edith Piaf, the title track points up her love of such jazz greats as Ella Fitzgerald while elsewhere on the album Crawling Up The Hill surely gives the nod to Peggy Lee, My Aphrodisiac Is You and Mockingbird Song hark to her blues influences and Faraway Voice is both tribute to and echo of Eva Cassidy. She’s not yet ready to take on something like Randy Newman’s I Think It’s Gonna Rain or Lilac Wine (given a definite Piaf treatment), both of which demand an emotional depth and maturity as yet beyond her and there are times she sounds dangerously close to West End musical territory, but she’s certainly getting there and, as this elevation to arena status shows, increasingly large audiences are going with her. 7.30pm, £20/£18.50,
NIA.
Monday
October 18
Having broken big with Wherever You Will Go, For You and the Camino Palmero album, guitarist Aaron Kamin and falsetto warbling singer Alex Band have wisely opted not to mess with a proven formula. Follow up album II serves much the same radio-friendly brand of sincerity and gruff emotional rock (themes include suicide, faith, domestic abuse and self-belief) that sounds like a meeting between U2, Neil Diamond and Pearl Jam. So, big soaring rock anthems then, perfectly embodied in the like of Things Will Go My Way, One By One, Chasing The Sun and Anything with recent single Our Lives showing their soaring pop colours and cello accompanied domestic abuse number Somebody Out There provides the sensitive side. They’ll hopefully not be tempted to include their bluesy cover of The Clash’s London Calling it in the set here, but otherwise those who want to raise stadium fists to the sky should be well served. 7.30pm, £14, W’hampton
Civic Hall.
Monday
October 18
Easily her most accomplished work to date, there are also deeply
felt moments here that register among the most profoundly moving songs
of love, loss and life's resilience she's ever recorded. Who We Are, a
song about bitter words spoken in anger, the simple hymnal Your Love Stays
(guessingly written in her husband's memory) and, sounding a close cousin
of Heart Like A Wheel, the piano backed Touch My Heart (another requiem
for those who have passed on) will quite simply shred you apart. "There
are songs I love that catch my breath", she sings. She knows how to write
them too.
Although much of the new material will undoubtedly figure prominently,
it’ll be interesting to see if she slips in anything from her latest release,
Hymns, which, as you might guess from the title is a collection of, er,
hymns. Mostly sung in Latin with minimal accompaniment and harmonies by
her son and father, it’s clearly a deeply personal spiritual project, but
you can’t deny that hearing her pure voice ringing out Veni Veni Emmanuel,
Panis Angelicus and, inevitably, Ave Maria is an incredibly soothing and
curiously warming experience.
Support’s provided by Scottish-American singer-songwriter and nimble
finger-picker David Ogilvy whose fine
Like It Is debut saw him compared to a cross between James Taylor, Nick
Drake and JJ Cale. He returns now, after eight separate throat operations,
with follow up Mockingbird, and while advance copies have yet to land on
the CD player, it’s a pretty fair guess that it’s going to be every bit
as wonderful as its predecessor. 7.30pm, £17.50, Wulfrun
Hall.
Saturday October 16
Down to a trio after the departure of Ray Thomas, the remaining members soldier on churning out their orchestral middle of the road rock. Not that they’ve actually released anything new so far this century, unless you count the frankly unlistenable collection of Christmas songs that came out last year as a bonus disc on yet another best of compilation, presumably given away free because no one in their right mind would buy it. Nights In White Satin can still send a shiver down the spine, but the sad fact is that as a live act the Moodies have now become so polishedly dull that the shiver is now more likely to be paralysis setting in with the boredom. 7.30pm, £27.50/£25.50, NEC.
Saturday October 16
Named after a slang term for lesbians, this New York five piece are currently the latest big thing in hip. Their self-titled debut album is brazenly open about its 70s influences with its camp glam burlesque screaming out Bowie, Billy Joel, Elton and Roxy while their version of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb given a Saturday Night Fever falsetto Bee Gees make-over is insanely inspired. Some of their synth pop (Lovers In The Backseat, Better Luck) rather dodgily invokes Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw, but you can overlook that when they swing into full Elton piano ballad mode for Mary or his more uptempo pounders with Take Your Mama Out and Music Is The Victim, give it serious Thin White Duke with Laura, recall the fab days of Hi-N-RG eurogay disco pop with Filthy/Gorgeous and get down for some party funk with The Skins It’s not all glossy froth, Return To Oz deals with a drugs death while the wonderfully named - and ever more wonderfully sounding - Tits On The Radio is a dig at Mayor Giuliani’s lockdown of the NY party scene, but while they’d obviously like you to think if you find the time the main object - sure to even more forthright live - is to get you to move your ass like a disco mutha. It’s a snip 6.30pm, £16.50. Carling Academy.
Sunday October 17
Novelty nutters the eight piece Welsh prankster rappers may be, a sort of Bonzo Dog version of the Wu Tang Clan, but with Guns Don’t Kill People, Rappers Do having cracked the Top 3, clearly there’s a sizeable audience who want to be in on the joke. It must be said that songs about cash spawning rock star suicides (Self Suicide), randy robots (Half Man Half Machine) and transvestite parents (Your Mother’s Got A Penis) do require a special brand of humour and the forced juvenile humour of major label debut Greatest Hits (Atlantic) rapidly becomes tiresome. But for now at least, the Goldies are laughing up their sleeves all the way to the bank. 7.30pm, £10. CarlingAcademy.
Sunday
October 17
Winners of the Mercury Music Prize for debut album (Domino), the lads from north of thre border present a basic but well shaken cocktail of influences that embraces The Doors (Darts of Pleasure), Mott the Hoople (Tell Her Tonight ), Blur (Cheating On You) and Bowie (Take Me Out) blended with aspects of Sparks, Pulp and such fellow Scottish underachievers as Josef K and Orange Juice while dropping references to things like chips, BBC2 and Terry Wogan into the lyrics just to underline their parochial cred. Fronted by the elegantly gangling Alex Kapranos, it’s kinetic funk punk pop with brain cells and some well crafted eccentricity, and while at under 40 minutes you may wonder what they’ve held in reserve their recent win should safely see them living on their laurels for at least the next 18 months. 7.30pm, £13.50, W’hampton
Civic Hall.
Monday October 18
Discovered and guided by Wombles supremo Mike Batt, the Russian born, Belfast raised and Surrey based 19 year old singer (and budding songwriter) has spent umpteen weeks in the upper reaches of the album chart with debut album Call Off The Search. And if first single The Closest Thing to Crazy suggested Melua as a huskier cross between Norah Jones and Edith Piaf, the title track points up her love of such jazz greats as Ella Fitzgerald while elsewhere on the album Crawling Up The Hill surely gives the nod to Peggy Lee, My Aphrodisiac Is You and Mockingbird Song hark to her blues influences and Faraway Voice is both tribute to and echo of Eva Cassidy. She’s not yet ready to take on something like Randy Newman’s I Think It’s Gonna Rain or Lilac Wine (given a definite Piaf treatment), both of which demand an emotional depth and maturity as yet beyond her and there are times she sounds dangerously close to West End musical territory, but she’s certainly getting there and, as this elevation to arena status shows, increasingly large audiences are going with her. 7.30pm, £20/£18.50,
NIA.
Monday
October 18
Having broken big with Wherever You Will Go, For You and the Camino Palmero album, guitarist Aaron Kamin and falsetto warbling singer Alex Band have wisely opted not to mess with a proven formula. Follow up album II serves much the same radio-friendly brand of sincerity and gruff emotional rock (themes include suicide, faith, domestic abuse and self-belief) that sounds like a meeting between U2, Neil Diamond and Pearl Jam. So, big soaring rock anthems then, perfectly embodied in the like of Things Will Go My Way, One By One, Chasing The Sun and Anything with recent single Our Lives showing their soaring pop colours and cello accompanied domestic abuse number Somebody Out There provides the sensitive side. They’ll hopefully not be tempted to include their bluesy cover of The Clash’s London Calling it in the set here, but otherwise those who want to raise stadium fists to the sky should be well served. 7.30pm, £14, W’hampton
Civic Hall.
Monday
October 18
Easily her most accomplished work to date, there are also deeply
felt moments here that register among the most profoundly moving songs
of love, loss and life's resilience she's ever recorded. Who We Are, a
song about bitter words spoken in anger, the simple hymnal Your Love Stays
(guessingly written in her husband's memory) and, sounding a close cousin
of Heart Like A Wheel, the piano backed Touch My Heart (another requiem
for those who have passed on) will quite simply shred you apart. "There
are songs I love that catch my breath", she sings. She knows how to write
them too.
Although much of the new material will undoubtedly figure prominently,
it’ll be interesting to see if she slips in anything from her latest release,
Hymns, which, as you might guess from the title is a collection of, er,
hymns. Mostly sung in Latin with minimal accompaniment and harmonies by
her son and father, it’s clearly a deeply personal spiritual project, but
you can’t deny that hearing her pure voice ringing out Veni Veni Emmanuel,
Panis Angelicus and, inevitably, Ave Maria is an incredibly soothing and
curiously warming experience.
Support’s provided by Scottish-American singer-songwriter and nimble
finger-picker David Ogilvy whose fine
Like It Is debut saw him compared to a cross between James Taylor, Nick
Drake and JJ Cale. He returns now, after eight separate throat operations,
with follow up Mockingbird, and while advance copies have yet to land on
the CD player, it’s a pretty fair guess that it’s going to be every bit
as wonderful as its predecessor. 7.30pm, £17.50, Wulfrun
Hall.
Monday October 18
Brighton rock boys who straddle emo, post grunge, prog (Disaster’s First Birthday surely borrows its intro from Genesis’s I Know What I Like) and old skool metal. Heading out with debut album The Torino Scale (Mighty Atom), the title taken from the rating of asteroid threats, they pile ragged guitar raging riffs, weltering drums, earnest strangled vocals and rolling hooks into epic melodies bearing titles like Battles Not Worth Waging, A Bad Situation Comedy and, just to show their sensitivity range, ‘ballad’ job, Aberro, Abolesco. Not immediately next big thing contenders, but if the Lostprophets comeback doesn’t maintain the impetus there’s obviously a place waiting. 7.30pm, £5, Bar Academy.
Tuesday October 19
Comprising a couple of Texans, a Mancunian and someone from Burnley, the four piece (expandable to 11 or so) have been recently declared the saviours of the musical universe with the release of debut album These Were The Earlies (679). Translate that into non-hyperbolic terms and what you have is the latest melding of Brian Wilson’s soft melancholic psychedelia into Flaming Lips blissed out cool, Mercury Rev cosmic zen and baggy Air floatiness. With harmonies and such instrumentation as sawtooths and euphonium. It’s a dreamy affair of an album; Wayward Song drifting on clouds of flutes, Song For #3 wafting across doodling piano and wisps of spacy electronica, One Of Us Is Dead a murmured drowning excursion into classic Beatles trippiness and Slow Man’s Dream a quietly building watery bubbling instrumental. It’s not all such narcotic sedation though, The Devil’s Country clanks along like some Hare Krishna party down the swamp with David Bowie guesting. Morning Wonder follows slurred beats on a funky adventure into Strawberry Fields backwards tape pastures, while Bring It Back Again wibbles along like chuffing pop. But, while there’s undeniably times when they meander too far off the path and others when over-indulgence (Dead Birds then) sets in, it’s impossible not to admire the ambition or the quiet early morning rooftops tranquil calm of Lows. Not quite the musical apotheosis reviews might have you believe, but perfect listening for closed eyes and wandering minds. 7.30pm, £7, Bar Academy.
Tuesday
October 19
Fronted by Ville Valo with his black woolly hat and fag constantly in hand, the Goth Finns love their metal but don’t take it too seriously. All of which, like the Darkness, makes their albums and live shows a rather more mainstream accessible proposition than most. Indeed, Buried Alive By Love from the recent Love Metal album is good old 80s stadium poodle riff rock metal while show style ballad The Funeral Of Hearts could easily be covered by Cliff. They’re back this time in the wake of And Love Said No (RCA), a gathering together of their best material from 97 to the present day, embracing the likes of Poison Girl, The Sacrament and In Joy And Sorrow. Not to shortchange old hands though, they’ve also thrown in a re-recording of When Love and Death Embrace and an exclusive version of It’s All Tears plus a couple of brand new numbers, the big stadium poprock title track and, following their cover of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game (also included here), a solid radio friendly version of Neil Diamond’s Solitary Man. If you like the idea of Evanescence only with a poppier coating or wonder what the Sisters of Mercy might have sounded like if Bon Jovi had fronted them then, you’ll be wanting to be singing from the same, er, Him book. 7.30pm, £16, W’hampton
Civic Hall.
Tuesday October 19
While everyone else is trying to be the new Brian Wilson or The Who, this youthful West London four piece have seemingly set their sights on being the UK’s new generation Aerosmith. Certainly that’s the impression given by swaggering, riff friendly, chorus belting debut single Come Get Some (BMG), though it’s also fair to say you can hear strong elements in there of such late 60s blues rockers as Free, Cream and Zeppelin. Already touted as the best thing to happen in rock since the last best thing the other week, they arrive on the back of what’s undoubtedly already a massive hit single and will be showing off their album colours too, samples of the rock n roll tumbler Platinum Blind and big ballad To Die For suggesting that, while they’re firmly entrenched in retro influences, they have a bright future ahead. 7.30pm, £5, Little
Civic.
Thursday October 21
Following the release of debut album Renewal earlier this year, the Birmingham based singer-songwriter’s put a band together for a fund raising tour on behalf of Kent based charity Seeds for Africa that will be profiling Fair Trade venues across the UK. This is the launch gig, so it’s an early opportunity to fully appreciate how the album’s blend of leafy English folk, jazz, Eastern European and South African music on such songs as Child of Gold and Needs And Wants works in a larger musical setting. 7.30pm, £4, Cafe One, Five Ways Shopping Centre, Broad Street. Mike Davies Thursday
October 21
Born in the Fife village of Kingsbarns and now based in Edinburgh, Yorkston’s heavily rooted in the folk idioms, even citing Anne Briggs as one of his influences. Not that he’s a traditionalist in the sense of revisiting or revising the old ballads for contemporary audiences, rather in that he relies on the simple warmth of his voice, his acoustic guitar and the gently rustic arrangements of hammered dulcimer, euphonium, banjo, and bouzouki to stir up the emotions within his organic songs of love bent, bruised, battered and beatific. Following on from the Someplace Simple EP earlier this year, he returns now with his second full length album, Just Beyond The River (Domino), which, while it may have been recorded to a listening background that included Can and Faust thankfully bears few Krautrock traces, its spare, uncluttered but finely detailed sound more in tune with homespun Appalachian country folk and the rural dusty backroads walked by the likes of Bonnie Prince Billy. Indeed, the pastoral life looms large on the opening Heron, a gently dappled love song about missing the country, while the banjo rippled shanty Shipwreckers recalls an evening spent amid the Cork hills and its ingrained folk lore. There’s a wistful reflectiveness abroad throughout, be it cast in the dark corners of the past that lurk within break up song Hermitage or the sunnier memories of skinny dipping and releasing shut up truths that bubble over the heathery flavours of Surf Song. Love brings warmth in words on the six minute Hotel, a literal tale of an evening in a Dublin hotel room and a lover’s voice on the phone, while the basic need for the comfort in others hums to accompanying fiddle on This Time Tomorrow where he sings “I clasp my hands around your waist, ignoring the usual associate commotion of the touch”. Being human and bruised, there’s bitterness and weary sadness too, the sour and musically angry Banjo #1 baring its teeth at three individuals who seem unlikely to be on his Christmas card list. Having said he doesn’t rummage through the folk archives, there’s actually two traditional numbers here. Scottish murder ballad Edward comes from the singing of Jean Ritchie but, featuring harpsichord and toy xylophones, is a lot more spare and foreboding, while The Snow It Melts The Soonest has been previously recorded by Briggs, Dick Gaughan and Eliza Carthy, though none of them did it as a pounding train rhythm drone and Celtic dance stomper in what Yorkston calls a meeting between Can and Planxty (though you might detect hints of a trad folk Crosby, Stills and Nash in there too) that, after lulling you into tranquil pastures, sees the album out in rattling form. Should make for a rousing live closer too. Support comes from Adembut you really are going to have to be on your most hushed behaviour if his live set is anything like debut album Homesongs.
Delicate and cracked like the rustle of autumn leaves, it’s the sort of gentle acoustic rural sound that makes Nick Drake seem like Metallica as his dusty vocals wrap around barely there leafily sad but cosily warm songs about home and the people and places close to him. He’s lifted the softly shuffling Ringing In My Ear (Domino) for the current single, adding three new tracks that include the auto harp and banjolene arranged Friends, Beware and, in slightly darker hues, the pagan sounding Let Me Give You A Reason. He’s also something of a maestro on the tapping pencil! 7.30pm, £7, Carling
Academy 2.
Thursday
October 21
Having released a covers album earlier this year, Casal paves the way for long awaited new material by cleaning out the cupboard with Leaving Traces, a compilation of tracks from his past nine solo albums. Latecomers will be pleased to discover two tracks, Free To Go and Maybe California, from his long deleted (brief) major label debut Fade Away Diamond Time (which also provides the compilation's title though not the accompanying song), though it's disappointing that he only finds room for one (the jauntily ironic All The Luck in The World) from its follow up, Rain Wind and Speed. There’s a brace of representatives from The Sun Rises Here, easily one of his best albums with the waltzing Today I'm Gonna Bleed among his best songs. Then there’s four from the odds and sods collection that was Basement Dreams, among them the Paul Simon-like Me and Queen Sylvia while Anytime Tomorrow, his last band album, represents the largest trawl of the net with five cuts that balance the lullabying Too Much To Ask and a late 60s West Coast sounding Oceanview on one hand with the tougher sounding and fuller rock arrangements of Lucky Stars and a cranked up electric Neil Young-like rumble through Eddy & Diamonds on the other. And, just to bring things up to date, he's even reprised his doomy piano cover of Johnny Thunder's It's Not Enough. A useful sampler for new admirers and old fans alike, but can we please now close up the back pages and have at least a taster tonight of what new chapters the last four years of silence have wrought. 7.30pm, £10, Glee
Club.
Friday October 22
Theatrical rock seems to be back in fashion. This Croydon nine piece bunch straddle the borderlands between glam, post punk, stoner blues and head on power rock, sporting tank tops, sporting face paint, bad suits, ties, and librarian chic and sounding, when you can pin anything down that specifically, like a cross between Queens of the Stone Age, Turbonegro and Britney Spears. There’s three main vocalists but, as you’ll hear on Tubesy pounding rock blast new single Time For Deliverance (Must Destroy Music) it’s Chantal Delusional who clearly holds the upper hand with her soaring gutsy r&b soulfulness like a demented Mary J Blige. They’re signed to the label who discovered The Darkness and while it’s unlikely they’ll follow the same stratospheric path, if they can outlive the novelty image (remember Deaf School) they’ve created for themselves and get audiences to listen beyond the look, they could be bad for a good while yet. 7.30pm, £4, Little
Civic.
Saturday October 23
Huge in America and her native Canada for well over a decade now, it’s taken a while for the UK to warm to her somewhat glacial clear tones and detachedly cool songwriting talents. However, perhaps having been seduced by the likes of Norah Jones and Dido, audiences now appear to have quite taken to her recent Afterglow album with its mellow, piano based country tinged songs of relationships (Fallen, Answer,) and the occasional observation on the state of the world (World On Fire). But despite being informed by both the death of her mother and giving birth herself, it never really burns with the sort emotional fire you’d expect from tales of regret, yearning and long suffering stoicism. There’s occasions (Time, Train Wreck) when the music threatens to break out of its laid back groove but then just sinks back exhausted by the effort into the familiar sedate, polished groove. No doubt her new fans will swoon away to these and the older favourites that’ll make up the set, but it remains difficult to see why millions of Americans, and especially feminists, have been so taken with her. 7.30pm, £25, Symphony
Hall.
Sunday October 24
An unlikely meeting point between Floyd, King Crimson, Can and Sabbath, this Manchester based three (and even sometimes four) guitar five piece certainly like to stretch out, their new Music For Nurses (Beggars Banquet) EP clocking in at over 20 minutes with just five tracks. It’s an even more intense outing into experimental, densely layered sonics, the metal elements taking greater prominence on the bass heavy trip moods of Paper Champion and the hammering piston riffs of One Out Of None. And then there’s the massive monolithic guitar riffs that punctuate the droning ebbs and flows of As The Smoke Clears. Their quieter side is displayed by the funeral keyboard pulse instrumental Drag The ‘nal and Dead Dogs An' All Sorts, though even that initial cosmic dreaminess gives way to a storm of guitar noise behind Mike Vennart's dark howls, producing something that Metallica haven’t managed in years. It won’t be long before they’re playing venues to match the size of their sound. 7.30pm, £6, Bar Academy.
Monday October 25
Crowded House brothers Tim and Neil haven’t worked together in over eight years, so their reunion for the Everyone Is Here (Parlophone) album was always going to be anxiously anticipated. It’s unlikely anyone was disappointed with its bringing back together their respective vocal strengths and the high quality of their melodic, pop inclined songwriting. The Beatles influences remain evident but equally the wonderful and affecting anthemic Nothing Wrong With You ( track to rate with Crowded House’s best) could easily see them pegged as the antipodean Everlys while Homesick surely has hints of Crosby, Still & Nash and childhood memoir Disembodied Voices harks to Simon & Garfunkel. Veined with bittersweet melancholy and cautious affirming optimism, it’s pretty much what you’d expect given their backgrounds, the acoustic bedrocks enhanced with orchestration and those perfect harmonies, melodies swaying between aching ballads like the pastoral Lennonish Edible Flowers and more uptempo numbers such as Part Of Me, Part Of You and Anything Can Happen. With these and the unlikehood of them being able to leave the building without doing at least Weather With You and Don’t Dream It’s Over, it promises to be a dream of a comeback and, hopefully, a warm up for a larger venue tour next year. Opening the show will be Minnie Driver, yes, the Good Will Hunting Oscar nominee and no it’s not another case of an actor reckoning they can sing. Driver was earning a crust making music before Hollywood called, it’s just taken a while to find the time and space to get back to it. She’ll be showcasing her debut album Everything I've Got In My Pocket (Liberty), with its recent Top 40 single, a rootsy affair with shades of Dido, Gillian Welsh and the Cowboy Junkies to her warm vocals and songs that generally relate to getting into, out of and over relationships. It’s good stuff too, particular highlights being the wistfully bittersweet So Well, the country shaded Home with its yearning pedal steel and the folksy early dawn ache behind Yellow Eyes. The ones to wait for though are undoubtedly forthcoming classy and catchy pop single Invisible Girl, and her stunning slow dance piano ballad recasting of Springsteen's Hungry Heart that deserves to become the definitive alternate arrangement. Swallow your preconceptions and prejudices, and give her a listen. You won’t be disappointed. 7.30pm, £26.50, W’hampton
Civic Hall.
Tuesday October 26
The press has never really forgiven him for spending half a year at No 1 with (Everything I Do) I Do It For You, each album now generally being dismissed as meat and potatoes stadium rock with a Springsteen infection. If we’re being honest then that’s a pretty accurate description, but it’s definitely prime cut roast rather than scrag end. And the good news for those who had lost a little faith over the past couple of releases, Room Service (Polydor) CLICK HERE for details and to buy @ £7.99 DELIVEREDmarks a return to the vintage days of Summer of 69 with rootsy swaggering mid-tempo guitar ringers like East Side Story, This Side of Paradise (the most obviously Bruce number here), She’s A Little Too Good For Me, Right Back Where I Started From and open road hood down rocker Room Service itself. Naturally you get ballads too - Why Do You Have To Be So Hard To Love firmly in the mode of Everything, the over orchestrated I Was Only Dreamin’ and the slow dance swayer Flying that sounds like it wandered in from an early Rod Stewart set - but mostly this is stuff to get the feet moving, Blessing In Disguise even offering burst of old fashioned boogie woogie rock n roll. It’s not going to make converts of the cynical, but it’ll certainly encourage a resurgence of interest among any lapsing fans and, surrounded by a healthy helping of past favourites, promises for a solid night of stadium rocking. 7.30pm, £30, NEC.
Tuesday
October 26
Easily the best of the British bands to have emerged in the wake of the garage revival, listening to things like Such A Fool and Baby Brings Bad News off the self-titled debut album (Heavenly) it’s clear the Lincon trio’s roots are very obviously anchored in homegrown 60s r&b legends The Animals (Martin Trimble showing strains of Eric Burdon) and Manfred Mann. But as Devil In Me and Why Don’t You Do It For Me? point out, they also have a love and feeling for the sort of Stateside swampy rock revived by the White Stripes and co, while the folksy blues and nasal delivery of Friends surely nods in the direction of Dylan and The Things That Lovers Do and I’m The Man are right out of the Nuggets book of 60s psychedelic r&b as written by such luminaries as The Seeds, Shadows of Knight and the less airy aspects of Love. And it’s not fanciful either to hear strong shades of The Doors filtering through Hold On. It may not be the most imaginative and groundbreaking album you’ll ever hear but it’s unquestionably one of the most ferociously exciting. And if it can drench you in sweat just blasting from the stereo, just imagine what a Turkish bath the live set must be. 7.30pm, £9, Carling
Academy 2.
Wednesday October 27
With the Be Good Tanyas on a continued sabbatical, singer-guitarist-banjo picker Trish Klein reunites with Montreal singer and clarinettist Allison Russell and fiddle player Diona Davies (the other two Tanyas and Ani DiFranco dropping in to guest) for a second side project helping in the shape of Vagabond Lullabies (Nettwerk). This time though the trad numbers have been shown the door in favour of originals mostly penned by Klein (though Russell’s touching song for her grandmother, Prairie Girl Gone is the album highlight) and lazing their laid back porch sippin' whisky way through street corner jazz (Part Time Poppa), gospel folk soul (the desperate yet hopeful Walk On And Sing) hobo blues (Tell Me A Story) and old tyme bluegrass mountain music (Movin’ On). However, as Klein’s lines on Poor Girl ( confusingly there’s two very different sounding numbers with the same title), about a ‘drug drenched daze’ and the inclusion of performance poet CR Avery on Driving indicate, they’re not actually living in the past. So effortlessly relaxed you can almost hear the road dust between their toes as the harmonies slip down like honey and mountain water and the songs deal with fractured relationships and troubled times, it bodes well for an equally beguiling live show, especially if they reach into the bag and pull out Cold Hungry Blues and What Sad Old Song from the last album too. Take your own grits, they’ll provide the mash. Support is relative newcomer Kirsty McGee, a Mancunian who started playing in bands when she was just 14 before switching allegiances to acoustic. She’ll ne showcasing her current album Frost, her eco sensibilities finding plenty of expression in images of the natural world with insects and the weather regular occurrences within her songs. Mostly these hang their arms around relationships, their impermanence signified in songs of leaving (Plane Vapours), the wandering life (Spit & Shine), nature’s ebb and flow (Kisses) and of life’s passing (Cloudwatching). The passage of time weighs upon her too, the changing seasons, day giving way to night, month surrendering to month; two possible lovers staring into the dawn sky at the end of a party in Coffee Coloured Strings and its what happened afterwards companion piece Put Back The Stars, sitting on a bench watching the tide of life pass by at St Mark’s Place as memories trickle into its stream. This all with a slightly dusty, pure careworn voice that occasionally conjures an English fusion of Janis Ian and Suzanne Vega. The sound of barley scented late summer, early autumn nights, caught between late balmy breezes and early chills to the air, it’s a gorgeous album and, with the likelihood of previous songs such as the wonderfully evocative Tuba Player's Wife or the melancholic The Wrong Girl putting in an appearance, this comes hugely recommended. 7.30pm, £12, Glee
Club.
Friday October 29
The 69 Love Songs box set established baritone Stephen Merritt among
the dreamiest of bruised romance singer-songwriters and he recently provided
the beguilingly wonderful soundtrack for Pieces of April. Now he returns
with i, 14 alphabetically ordered songs beginning with the letter 'i' and
which, for the first time, turn the lyrical focus back on himself and what
seems to be his fairly disastrous way with relationships.
It’s an unlikely high camp cocktail
but one that works extremely well, especially as applied to the album he’ll
be featuring, I Lucifer (Pias), a soundtrack to Glen Duncan's novel about
the Devil being given a chance to redeem himself on Earth, reincarnated
as a depressed writer in Clerkenwell.
7.30pm, £15, Warwick Arts Centre.
Friday October 29
Taking their name from a psychiatric paper attacking the state of
America’s mental asylum system and sporting military uniforms
as both image and comment, the Chichester quintet found early acclaim as
the salvation of UK rock on the back of rapturously received gigs. This
was tragically overshadowed however when guitarist Jimmi Lawrence committed
suicide at the studio during recordings for their debut album. It could
have crushed them but instead they emerged stronger and more determined,
and with The Lost Riots (Sony) a mightily impressive album to honour his
memory.
Steeped in lovelorn melancholia on the likes of Close My Eyes and the dreamy epic that is Lost , they have the emotional vistas to complement their widescreen sound. 7pm, £9, Carling Academy.
Saturday October 30
The LA quartet’s new album The Reason (Island) shares a
musical sensibility with Jimmy Eat World in its guitar drive, kicking along
through things like Same Direction, Just One or Out of Control while Lucky
and the title track new single pull back the curtain on their more emo
aspirations with singer Doug Robb coming over all emotive, hitting the
big epic swell on the closing Disappear. It’s the familiar world
of youthful alienation as far as the songs go, not fitting in, being prejudged,
not being understood and having relationships blow up, but while it’s
all well put together and stirring while it’s in the player,
there’s little here to make you keep going back.
7.30pm, £12.50, Carling Academy.
Sunday October 31
The country blues answer to Joss Stone, 19 year old Londoner Parr
may be barely of legal drinking age but she has a voice that speaks of
years soaking up Southern barroom whisky fumes, hunched over microphones
and wailing to beer soaked redneck truckers. Indeed, performing at smoky
West End dives, for the past five years, it was during a drinking session
with fellow UK country reprobates Alabama 3 that led to a publishing deal
when she was 17 and her providing lead vocals on Bulletproof for their
Power in the Blood album. A long standing collaboration with Grand Drive
(she sang on their recent The Lights In This Town Are Too Many To Count
album and they play on hers) and tours with Evan Dando merely serve to
underline her credentials.
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