Sunday October 1

Matt Costa

The California skateboarder turned singer-songwriter returns for another night of songs culled from debut album Songs We Sing, variously flirting with folk psychedelia (Sweet Thursday, Behind The Moon), country (Sweet Rose, Ballad of Miss Kate), Beatles ragtime pop (Oh Dear), surf noir, and classical pop, even calling to mind Paul Simon on Yellow Taxi.

An unfussy but beguiling affair, it evokes the halcyon days of 60s folk troubadours who could capture your ear with their warm, scuffed voices, your heart with their simple melodies and your mind with the things they had to say. Well worth a listen.

 8pm. £11. Barfly

Sunday October 1

Kate Doubleday

It’s a couple of years now since the Birmingham singer-songwriter released her debut album, Renewal, so there’s been a reasonable piling up of new material that will see the light of day later this year on Belonging. She’ll be showcasing a fair few of them here in what’s become something of a rare live appearance these days. There will, of course, also be nuggets from the first album’s collection of jazz and world tinted rootsy folk and songs of loss and renewal, hopefully including the loving Child of Gold, the South African influenced Footsteps and the summery musical colours of Rise and Fall.

7.30pm. £4.50. mac

Sunday October 1

Babyshambles

Assuming appointments with judges, solicitors or dealers don’t get in the way, celebrity junkie Pete Doherty and whatever shape the band’s in should be along to celebrate finding a label willing to risk giving them a new deal by rattling through a selection of ditties from the inconsistent Down In Albion with its wanderings between the cloakrooms of Morrissey, Ray Davies and Joe Strummer. Indeed, it seems decidedly ironic that the new single happens to be a pub rock cover of Janie Jones (B-Unique) which, you’ll recall was originally done by The Clash.

Sharing stage delights will be The Holloways, their fiddle friendly, guitar jogging Cockerney ska pop recently exhibiting its joie de vivre across the Two Left Feet that came complete with a cover of old swingtime standard Hallelujah I Love Her So. They arrive now with debut album So This Is Great Britain (TVT), a rabble rousing bunch of good time tunes stitched with a social and politcal concience on tracks like the Caribbean calyspo bouncing new single Generator, Dancefloor, Malconented One, Happiness and Penniless, Nothing For The Kids and, as you might expect, the title track.

Clearly you’ll spot the Madness, Sham 69 and Clash influences, but listen carefully and you might suspect they’re also fans of Chas n Dave.

 7pm. £17. Carling Academy

Monday October 2

James Hunter

A white boy from Colchester perhaps, but he sounds just like Sam Cooke on the title track of his aptly titled debut album, People Gonna Talk (Rounder) while the funkier r&b numbers call to mind such names as Lee Dorsey, James Brown and Wilson Pickett.

Guitars strutting, organ burping and horns parping, he leads a fine hip sliding groove through the likes of No Smoke Without Fire, a chicken scratching Kick it Around and a roustabout Talking ‘Bout My Love while his mellower side’s shown to equally glowing effect on the casual sways of All Through Cryin’, It’s Easy To Say and Mollena. Unlike many who dip into America’s musical past for inspiration, Hunter shows an authentic love of his influences that ripples through his music like the real thing, indeed, if they only had vinyl hiss these could sound like forgotten gems from the vaults of Atlantic and Stax. One not to miss.

7.30pm. £12.50. Bar Academy

Monday October 2

Electric Soft Parade

Having parted company with major label land following sophomore album The American Adventure, between also playing as part of The Brakes Brighton brothers Alex and Tom White have retrenched and gone back to the self-help ethos. Last year saw the release of The Human Body EP, tracks like the Beatles meet Brian Wilson jamming with The Strokes Cold World and the seven minute Everybody Wants proof that whatever may have seen them fall from favour it wasn’t the strength of the songwriting.

Since when they’ve been busy putting together as yet untitled album number three, due for release next year. A twelve track set sporting titles like If That’s The Case, Then I Don’t Know, Life In The Back-Seat, Have You Ever Felt Like It’s Too Late? and No Need To Be Down-Hearted it would seem to be a bit of knocked down got up again affair, and with Misunderstanding apparently something of a pop classic in waiting, it seems their time in the sun may yet be in store.

Opening up are Dundee outfit The Hazey Janes. Named after a Nick Drake song they comprise siblings Matthew and Alice Marra (dad being Scottish songwriting legend Michael Marra), Liam Brennan and Andrew Mitchell and, to judge by debut album Hotel Radio, are clearly deeply in love with the folk-rock sound of The Byrds.

Roger McGuinn's influence shines through from the jangling opening track, Always There and while Toulouse may take time out for a flurry of punky pop tinged with the Beatles, the countrified harmonies and shimmering guitars of Moanin' Face summon the ghost of Gram Parsons while Step Into The Country leans in the direction of Dave Crosby's CS&N years.

Gary Louris of the Jayhawks provides backing vocals to big swaying ballad Baby Tell Me and his band provides a suitable reference point for several of the tracks, though with Alice taking over vocal duties for the la la la-ing Don't Look Away you might suspect that the family's got some early Debbie Harry and 60s West Coast pop in the CD collection too. They’re lifting Fire In The Sky as a download single to coincide with the tour, and apparently promising a Fairport cover as a bonus to show they’re not just 60s West Coast obsessives.

If they’re half as good live as on disc, this should be a pretty rousing night, especially if the set includes powerpop gem Your Enemy, a blur of ringing guitar effervescence to rival the classic new wave flurries of Plastic Bertrand's Ca Plane Pour Moi or The Undertones and make you feel simply glad to be alive.

Tuesday October 3

Pink

"I don’t wanna be a stupid girl", she sings on the opening ‘be yourself don’t ape pop princesses’ track of current album I’m Not Dead (Zomba). Well clearly Philadelphia’s very own Alicia Moore is anything but. Her previous multi-million selling albums were pretty much stunners (well, ok, maybe not Try This), and, bursting with attitude, her fourth tops even those amping up the fusion of rock and dance that’s had her somewhat inaccurately tagged as the new Madonna. She’s much more of a grown up Avril rock chick than Madge, and while she may not still be co-writing with Linda Perry the album’s still packed with guitars erect, lungs filled stadium anthems like Long Way To Be Happy, Nobody Knows, U & Ur Hand, the sweary rolling pop rock Leave Me Alone (I’m Lonely) and the title track that will have those who remember the classic days of Pat Benatar weeping with joy.

It’s not all maxed out ballsy gusto though. Dear Mr President is a stripped back folksy open letter to Bush, Conversations With My 13 Year Old Self is teen angst ensconced in moody goth rock drama as she gets back in touch with her inner child, The One That Got Away is an acoustic bluesy folk number invested with the spirit of Janis Joplin while the melancholia haunted I Got Money Now suggests what might have happened had Janis Ian been born into the era of scuffed hip hop r&b beats.

Interestingly Cuz I Can is a don’t mess with me 80s stomper that owes a considerable debt to both Slade and Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, an electropop influence that also surfaces on her ode to self-pleasuring Fingers, while hidden bonus acoustic track, I Have Seen The Rain, a duet with her dad who wrote it (presumably in answer to the Creedence hit) while serving in Vietnam, suggests that if she ever fancies it there’s a career waiting out there in coffee bar folk land too.

Not tonight though, this is one to get the adrenaline pumped and your rock fists punching the air, for a powerhouse I’m not dead reckoning.

Support comes from Mudbone, known to his folks as Gary Cooper, once part of Bootsy Collins's funk conglomerations (he co-founded Rubber Band) and with a CV that includes work with Prince, Herbie Hancock and Mtume as well as a solo hit under the name of Sly Fox.

He’s spent the last 10 years living in France, experimenting with a mix of r&b, soul, dance and rock. Four years ago he met up with Dave Stewart and got turned on to the blues, the result being Stewart produced/co-written album Fresh Mud (Influx Music) which brings together Cooper's old and new found musical influences, and throws in a nip of gospel and hip hop for good measure.

Things head out in blistering form with Make The Devil Mad, a funky voodoo blues groove that calls to mind a swampy amalgam of Dr John, Marsha Hunt and War given a coat of distorted guitar noise, and from thereon he barely puts a foot or note wrong.

Listen in and you'll hear his love of old school soul bubbling up on several numbers. Boy From Baltimore harks to Marvin Gaye's Trouble Man days but with a dash of Barry White to the spoken female vocals, the organ driven gospel of Freedom's Coming (where he shares vocals with Stewart) conjures thoughts of Curtis Mayfield, Karma's a jazz n rap visit to Chambers Brothers days with Hendrix guitar, Come Together Now's tale of a hard life saved by God (featuring the London Community Choir and Jools Holland) evokes both Gaye and The Temptations while Where The Wind Lives nods in the direction of The Isleys. In fact the harmonica splayed slow boogie Stranded For Life is the only track that actually gets down and dirty with the delta blues.

Temptation and tough times inform the lyrics, but spirituality and hope generally win out, providing the poppiest track with Pray, a radio friendly number that sounds like a cross between prince and the Lighthouse Family, and, arguably the album's finest moment with the closing Home. A spare, rousingly anthemic and melodically infectious gospel number that finds Cooper in darkly sonorous voice, it also features a rather special and very rare guest appearance by a certain Mr Dylan, who also shares songwriting credits. It's a remarkable album, and likely to prove every bit as much so live.

7.30pm. £26.50. NIA

Tuesday October 3

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly

Otherwise known as Sam Duckworth, a 20 year old Southend multi-instrumentalist deconstructivist singer-songwriter who, in tandem with cornet player Mike Glenister, has just released debut album The Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager (Atlantic).

Slotting, for convenience’s sake, into the current folktronica movement, it takes a critical and at times jaundiced view of contemporary Britain through the eyes of a confused kid dealing with mixed feelings for a dead end home town, racism, getting drunk, dealing with relationships and looking for their place in the world.

Once More With Feeling and Lighthouse Keeper are the sort of classic rippling 60s acoustic picked folk also being rediscovered by the likes of Conor Oberst, but the bulk of the album is washed with electronics (live, his guitar and Glenister’s trumpet are the only instruments), skipping cheerily through Call Me Ishmael’s hymn to individuality, synthesised vibes driving along the jazzy An Oak Tree, bringing a clatter to the brass warmed glow of If I Had A Pound For Every Song Title I’d Be 30 Short Of Getting Out Of This Mess or throwing a fuzz of distortion into the middle of Whitewash Is Brainwash.

Lyrically astute and bristling with intelligent and insightful observations (‘don't let people make you think just because you're young, you're useless,’ he sings in Once More With Feeling), his social commentary calls to mind the early Billy Bragg, quieter but no less angry and passionate about the injustices around him. Up up and away, then.

Joining the tour is Iain Archer, the former Snow Patrol guitarist responsible for co-writing the Novello winning Run. Not one to sit around twiddling thumbs, last year he released third solo album Flood The Tanks and he’s back on the road now with follow-up Magnetic North (Pias).

Like its predecessor it’s a mix of simple introspective acoustic numbers like the softly sung ticking rhythmed stunner that is Canal Song (End of Sentence), the druggy Lifeboat and Everything I’ve Got’s slow chiming stargazing, complemented by the noisier My Bloody Valentine/Yo La Tengo side of things represented by a clattering guitar pop Minus Ten, the surging staccato When It Kick’s In and a frosty rimmed Long Jump.

Drenched in melancholy but (as per Collect Yourself) also far more uplifting than his past offerings, it’s not hard to imagine several of the songs, especially Soleil with its loose limbed bass and the haunting windswept piano ballad Arriero, fitting cosily into his former band’s current album.

As a solo performer, Archer may not ever find himself on quite the same arena filling level, but if he keeps producing quality material like this then the trophy cabinet will probably need some extra shelves.

7.30pm. £6. Carling Academy 2

Tuesday October 3

Johnny Panic

It’s frequently a sign of career desperation when, after a string of self-penned flops, an artist resorts to doing a cover version. Case in point here with the socially conscious London pop punk outfit who, having reassembled the line up and dusted down the record label, have had a stab at the old Turtles nugget, Happy Together. They don’t add anything new, they don’t improve it, they don’t even seem interested in singing it. Doubtless, the rest of the world will share their enthusiasm.

Local outfit support’s provided by Templeton Pek, a fairly run of the mill alt-rock/punk outfit far too in thrall to their better America role models to make much of an impression.

7.30pm. £6. Bar Academy

Tuesday October 3


Liam Frost & The Slowdown Family

Another sensitive acoustic folksy singer-songwriter with a band, Frost comes from Prestwich (and sings with accent intact) and has, not unreasonably, been compared to a shake up of Springsteen, The Waterboys, Shane McGowan and Badly Drawn Boy. Certainly, Show Me How The Spectres Dance (Lavolta) is an impressive debut veined with songs of loss and hope, a confessional self-examining journey through regret to find the light at the end of the tunnel. Indeed, poignant piano ballad The Mourners of St Paul (where the lyrics reference Louis Armstrong’s It’s A Wonderful World) takes a funeral as its subject but, unsentimentally coloured by children’s voices and rising to majestic climax invests it with a celebration of a life and survival rather than mourning.

While the fur-throated Frost may lean towards introspection and identify the world’s darker shades it doesn’t mean he dwells on the musically lugubrious. City At A Standstill bounds along with rising piano crescendos and rattling guitars (a touch of Lloyd Cole to go with the Springsteen perhaps) even She Painted Pictures (where he laments the vicious world) and the Brubeck influenced Paperboats skip along fleet of foot with an upbeat spring while even the bitter This Is Love finds the charity to ‘raise a glass to that bastard’.

If you want to curl up in the bedsit, he handles that too, going foetal for If Tonight We Could Only Sleep and Road Signs And Red Lights where his delivery leads you to thoughts of Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes.

With a keen ear for fleshing out the familiar colours of the genre (listen to the steel guitar adding a country flavour to Try, Try, Try), Frost is clearly not content to simply ride the rails when he’s so evidently capable of steering his own direction.

 7.30pm. £8. Glee Club

Tuesday October 3

Imogen Heap

Three years on from her collaboration as half of Frou Frou, breathy voiced Brit Heap returns to the fray for Speak For Yourself, an album of twinkling coffee table electropop that blends sunkissed sweetness easy listening with classy sophistication.

Things open with new single Headlock, a machine beat conjuring up images of robotic dancers but still pumping with heart. Likewise the pulsating beats of Goodnight and Go with its Jeff Beck guitar or Loose Ends, a number that evokes almost nostalgic thoughts of 80s Howard Jones. You’ll likely be familiar with Hide and Seek, a song featured on The OC , which, with its treated vocals sounds not a million miles away from Laurie Anderson, but much warmer.

It's not all soft and gentle. Comparatively speaking, Daylight Robbery is a virtual roar of noise while Walk and Just For Now ably demonstrate the sort of range and experimentation she's embraced. Heap's speaking clearly, you really should listen to what she has to say.

7.30pm. £15. Warwick Arts Centre (+ Thu Oct 12, 7.30pm. £12.50. Carling Academy)

Tuesday October 3


Papa Roach

Looking to find a new radio friendly pop edge to the old worn out nu-metal formula, the four piece have loaded up their The Paramour Sessions (Geffen) album with big hooks and choruses. The vocals are still raspy, the guitars and drums still heavy and I Devise My Own Devise does the old battering ram pistons at dawn bit, but songs like Crash, The World Around You, Time Is Running out (where they actually have a who oh oh chorus) and What Do You Do? are so desperate to take Bon Jovi’s audience by the hand it’s almost embarrassing. And, be warned, they’ve roped in a stray orchestra for the bombastic chest-swelling closer Roses On My Grave.

Not that these aren’t perfectly listenable stadium contenders or that they won’t provide a suitably hammering live show, but if you took the band’s name off the label you’d have a hard time making a positive i.d.

7.30pm. £15. Wulfrun Hall

Tuesday October 3


Sparks

It's almost 22 years since Ron and Russell Mael released their breakthrough album, Kimono My House and while it's been some time since they last enjoyed chart favour, their influence has become increasingly evident among bands such as Maximo Park.

Following a tentative comeback with 2003's Lil' Beethoven, the brothers now return in vintage form with Hello Young Lovers (Gut), their best album in two decades. It's distinctively Sparks, full of quasi-operatic camp bombast, complex time signatures, smart hooks, wittily sardonic and often barking lyrics and a wonderful sense of deadpan. The opening Bohemian Rhapsodic six epic minutes of the BBC banned single Dick Around announces the album's musical agenda in grand style with a chorus line of 'all I do now is dick around' before sliding into the fingersnapping feline prowl of Perfume, a love song that recounts a list of women and their designer scents and declares devotion to the one with just natural olfactory attractions.

Then its over to Weimar cabaret territory for the semi-spoken The Very Next Flight and the pizzicato stringed pop of the brilliantly lyrically double edged (Baby Baby) Can I Invade Your Country, a love song for our times.

Their way with a skewed image is in fine form with the pulsing military stepping beats of Metaphor as they how observe that 'chicks dig metaphors' and advise 'use them wisely and you'll never know the hell of loneliness'.

There's more lyrical genius on Waterproof, a jabbery slice of arpeggio break up song pop as Russell resists being moved by a lover's tears and declares that 'barometric pressure has no relevance to me'.

Elsewhere they waltz in twirly paranoia through There's No Such Thing As Aliens, a song almost totally comprised of the title line, revisit operatic baroque with Rock Rock Rock and go nervy doo wop on Here Kitty before wrapping up with When I Sit Down To Play The Organ Ar The Notre Dame Cathedral, a seven minute track that's mixes a celebration of the Divine with a secular more earthly devotion, partly musically evocative of This Town Ain't Big Enough, partly an expansive cinerama visitation of Bach and Handel complete with a Hallelujah chorus. Now isn't it nice to have some real romance back in the world.

They’ll be featuring the entire album in the first half of the show, which, as anyone who’s ever seen them live will now, promises to be a highly individual affair with back projections and cod theatrical dramatics, before giving over the second to such greatest hits as Something For The Girl With Everything, Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth and, naturally, This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us.

7.30pm. £25. W’hampton Civic Hall

Tuesday October 3


Hazel O’Connor

It’s a long time since Coventry born O’Connor and the music charts were briefly on speaking terms, but while she may not have had a highly visible profile she’s been consistently turning out solid, folk infused albums and slowly metamorphosing into the West Midlands answer to Marianne Faithful.

She’s touring here on the back of her most recent release, Hidden Heart (Invisible Hands), an album that finds her exploring earthy Celtic folk territory, a style well suited to her smoky rasp of a voice. But her feet aren’t just planted on Irish soil. The opening track, Acoustically Yours, is a marvellous slow marching air with Cumbrian pipes and didgeridoo that is underpinned with an Eastern atmosphere while I’ll See You Again maintains the musical cross-fertilisation with conga drums pattering behind the harp (courtesy of the famed Cormac de Barra), flute and recorder with their dawn mist on the hills textures and the burning urgency of Perfect Days adds rainstick and Morrocan flute to the cultural melting pot

She’s in soulful mood with Loveable’s organ and sax, a track that hints at a loamy version of Lighthouse Family while Time After Time brings Latin rhythms and the haunting End of My Days marries Gaelic bodhran with Indian colours. And, on the carpe diem learn to love yourself anthem, Fear of Flying, there’s even a children’s choir.

Produced (and orchestrated) by Martin Rushent and featuring such stalwart names as harpist Cormac De Barra, violinist Maire Breatnach and, on the eco-mystical slow carnival tempo Hidden, a spooked duet with Moya Brennan, as you’ll have guessed, it’s a heady musical brew. But lyrically too it has weight, addressing such themes as one’s place in the cosmos, death, loss, the commonality of mankind, passing time and, naturally, relationships. It strikes particularly lingering notes on Who Will Care?’s story of the death of a lonely addict at the end of her hope, and the refusal to succumb to despair that is If Only, a dramatic duet on with Tony Dangerfield from The Subterraneans (two of whom also provide the guitars) that sounds as if it were written as the defiant closing song in some theatre piece.

There’s little chance anything here will return her to the spotlight she once fleetingly enjoyed with things like Breaking Glass and Will You, but it’s a richly seasoned, organically crafted and emotionally resonant album of which she can be justly proud and which a lot more people should really make an effort to discover.

 8.30pm. £12.50. The Robin 2, Bilston

Wednesday October 4

Bugz in the Attic

One for the dedicated clubbers, this is something of an intimate excursion for the Bugz collective in the wake of their Back In The Dog House (V2) album. Sweet soul house is the order of the day as they spin through the old school funky Move Aside, get dirty in a Rick James stylee for I’m Gonna Letcha, sashay the handclap sway disco boogie on Consequences, work out the bass grooves to No More and head back to the 70s with its spangles, strobes and wannabe dance dogs for an electro jerked version of Yarbrough & Peoples hit Don’t Stop The Music.

Quite how many of the crew will be doing the live thang, and just quite how live that will actually be, you’ll only find out by queuing early to get a space near the knob twiddling decks and the crowded dance floor.

9pm. £10. Jam House, Jewellery Quarter

Thursday October 5

Maximo Park

Still flushed with the success of debut album A Certain Trigger with its cocktail of Sparks, Roxy, Buzzocks and The Who, the Newcastle lads don’t have anything new to flog around this set of dates. They are, however, gearing up to start recording the next album so along with current art pop staples such as Graffiti and The Coast Is Always Changing, chances are they might just slip in a couple of try outs to test the water.

7.30pm. £12.50. Carling Academy

Paul Rodgers

Thursday October 5

Having had a quick nap after fronting last year’s Queen link-up tour, the former Free/Bad Company frontman now steps back out to compile a set list of the other hits from his past life that he couldn’t wedge in alongside Bohemian Rhapsody.

Back in the day, Rodgers was one of the great British blues rock vocalists, electrifying such classics as All Right Now, Wishing Well, Fire and Water, Feel Like Makin’ Love, Can't Get Enough and Good Lovin' Gone Bad with his muscular, soulful gutsy wail. But, after Bad Co folded, things never really seemed to find the same spark, descending into the eminently forgettable stodge released with The Firm and The Law, neither of whom managed to trouble the UK album charts, despite the fact the former was a collaboration with Jimmy Page.

Then there are the solo albums, patchily decent but workmanlike at best with material that never matched the calibre of his voice, although Rodgers did find a return to form when he got back to his roots covering the music of Muddy Waters.

Doubtless there’ll be few in the audience screaming out to hear things like Radioactive or Find A Way, so prospects look good for a set packed with those earlier nuggets that made his name and, I daresay, a fair few blues standards into the bargain.

7.30pm. £25. Symphony Hall

Friday October 6

Disturbed

Born out of the nu-metal scene back in the late 90s, the Michigan crew are now in their third album, Ten Thousand Fists (Reprise) sticking pretty much to what they know with loud hard riffing guitars, crunching rhythms, melodic choruses, growling urgent vocals and songs about rising above oppression, being true to yourself, solidarity and the usual metal subjects.

Things like I’m Alive, Just Stop and the Iron Maiden-like title track all highlight their fondness for anthemics while the guttural Sons of Plunder, Decadence and Sacred Lie keep the flame alive for pummelling hard hat metal.

Although Overburdened takes the tempo down and comes with an acoustic guitar intro, they don’t do anything quite as sissy as slipping in a ballad to show their tender side, but they do own up to having at some stage listened to Phil Collins era Genesis with an unexpected hard but not entirely unfaithful cover of Land of Confusion. Metalheads will keep fingers crossed they don’t decide to throw in In The Air Tonight as a special treat encore.
 

Manchester feral hardcore punk metal rockers Zico Chain warm up proceedings, gargling through choice cuts from their self-titled mini album (Hassle) where Chris Glithero does his best to shred his throat and the rest of the band throw themselves into the pursuit of juggernaut thundering riffs in search of a stray Motorhead album. Their punk library gets a turning over with Rollover and the snarly, sweary The Lonely Ones and Social Suicide surely comes from spending too many hours locked up with Stooges albums, but in the end, while fast, raw and energetic, they really aren’t making anything more memorable than noise.

7.30pm. £15. Carling Academy

Saturday October 7

Seth Lakeman

Currently young Britfolk’s big hope to forge a crossover to the mainstream and a bit of a pin-up into the bargain, the fiddle and guitar playing Devonian found himself landing a major label deal with EMI offshoot Relentless (KT Tunstall’s label) in the wake of his cottage kitchen recorded album Freedom Fields. So taking advantage of having a few bob to spare, he went back and tweaked it with some re-recordings, polishing up the sound quality in general and giving a whole new coat of paint to the banjo dappled The White Hare’s sexual allegory that’s being lifted as the next single.

Melding a rock sensibility with the folk tradition, the album’s actually a collection of songs about war and conflict in relation to the West Country, turning up tales of the Civil War on King & Country and the title track and the oppression of tin and copper miners (The Colliers) alongside the more usual staples of love and sex. It’d be nice to think of office workers humming Lady of the Sea’s tale about local Naval traditions as they bustled off to their desks, but somehow, for all of Lakeman’s charms and musical talent, it’s hard to see that happening. Which, quite frankly, is their loss not his.

7.30pm. £10. Wulfrun Hall

Saturday October 7

The Deadstring Brothers

Had plans not gone awry with a fatal overdose, country rock pioneer Gram Parsons might well have joined the Rolling Stones back in the early 70s. Anyone wondering what combination might have sounded like should make an appointment with these Detroit boys. They’re back giving another hand to Starving Winter Report, an album with its feet firmly planted on Exile On Main Street’s cobble stones and singer Kurt Marschke wearing a Jagger drawl. They even have a song called All Over Now.

From the opening Stonesys country rolling strutter Sacred Heart through to the thumping Motown beat meets blues country Lonely Days, there’s not a duff moment. Given the influence of The Band to be heard on Lights Go Out and the gutsy Til The Bleeding Stops it’s no surprise they also turn in a cracking cover of their rootsy swaggering Get Up Jake while Talking’ Born Blues nods the hat to The Band’s old boss circa Highway 61 Revisited.

Fiddles akimbo, Moonlight Only Knows is more straight ahead mountain music country, picking up the earlier Wild Horses soulful ballad notes of Lights Go Out and giving them a bluegrass colouring with the assured unbridled confidence of a band that knows exactly where they’ve come from and where they’re going. They may not be carving out any new highways, but the old roads they travel have rarely been in such good repair.

7.30pm. £9. Little Civic

Sunday October 8

IV Thieves

And here’s a dash more lollopping pop, albeit this time travelling in from Texas with The Day Is A Downer (One Little Indian) EP, the quartet bemoaning the tedium of urban life, lonely nights and unfulfilled relationships on the chorus hooking title track, a loping Catastrophe and the slow soaring Chase Me Off/Out with its nods to Spector’s big pop sound.

Formerly Nic Armstrong and the Thieves, whose The Greatest White Liar album earned them support slots with Oasis and Paul Weller, they’ve moved on, shortening the name but expanding the musical prowess, refining the former raw retro into a more focused fist of emotional power. A new album’s on the cards for early next year, so this should be a useful taster of what’s in store.

7.30pm. £6. Jug of Ale, Moseley

Sunday October 8


Susanna and the Magical Orchestra

Promoted by Birmingham Jazz, this promises to be a bit of special and somewhat different musical evening out, one where dropped pins may as well be steel girders. Fronted by Norway’s Susanna Wallumred with keyboard player Morten Qvenild providing the Magical Orchestra part of the equation when not working with his own jazz piano trio, they’ll be showcasing new album Melody Mountain (Rune Grammofon). A hushed collection of minimalist cover versions that calls to mind the work of fellow Scandinavian Stina Nordenstam in its glacial fragility, the choices are nothing if not eclectic, the interpretations scintillating. Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was never exactly rock n roll, but their version is so hauntingly slow it makes a funeral dirge seem like a house party anthem, and then they bring much the same frozen pace to AC/DC’s It’s A Long Way To The Top, Kiss classic Crazy, Crazy Nights, Depeche Mode’s Enjoy The Silence and, apparently de rigeur for such projects now, a skeletal reading of Joy Division evergreen Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Elsewhere, you’ll find reinterprations of Prince (Condition of the Heart), Dylan (Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right, pretty much the album’s dance number) and Sandy Denny (a lovely drone reading of Fotheringay), but perhaps the number that’s most at home is Scott Walker’s It’s Raining Today, given a bare boned torch treatment that would fit right in with his own current musical inclinations.

Live there’s a very good chance, they’ll also drop in their cover of Jolene, an utterly distraught contrast to that of the White Stripes and, like everything else here, likely to send shivers as big as icebergs down your spine.

8pm. £10. Glee Club

Sunday October 8


The Ordinary Boys

Continuing their quest to be the new Madness, here’s another skank through current album Brassbound, blending the Jam flavours of Thanks To The Girl and Life Will Be The Death Of Me with the jerky ska beats of Boys Will Be Boys, On An Island, and the nightboat to Cairo that sails through Don’t Live Too Fast. Just in case you missed the point, they even throw in a cover of the old Locomotive hit Rudi’s In Love. It’s hardly bursting with original ideas, but it’s also an infectiously breezy jogalong that dares you to resist its sheer exuberance.

7.30pm. £15. W’hampton Civic Hall

Monday October 9

Orson

They've been called the missing link between the Stones and the Scissor Sisters while influences also include Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, Memphis soul, Led Zep and ELO. Having built a strong word of mouth via MySpace without even having a US deal, they made a strong first impression here with lurching pop No 1 No Tomorrow, but subsequent singles Bright Idea and Happiness have all peaked progressively lower down the charts. Certainly the Bright Idea (Mercury) album shows they played their strongest cards from the off, the rest of the material undeniably sunny, hooks laden melodic power pop but lacking the necessary magic touch.

That said the crooning do wop intro to Save The World is a delight while the Lennonesque piano ballad Look Around, the Billy Joel sounding double header Downtown and So Ahead of Me and the Stones meet George Michael dance swagger Last Night are all a few notches above filler material. They don’t, as The Okay Song demonstrates, sound too convincing when they pose as snotty punk pop boys, and you get the feeling they may well have exhausted all their ideas in one fell swoop, but for now at least their 15 minutes of fame is still ticking.

7.30pm. £15. Carling Academy

Monday October 9

Cerys Matthews

Catatonia having imploded not least in part to Matthews's well documented excessive love of the party life, she moved to Texas, dried out, got married and made a country album Cockahoop, indulging a love of Dolly Parton, cruising the honky tonk tunes, slipping in a Handsome Family cover to seal her credibility and a Welsh hymn to affirm her roots.

A couple of years and more tales of being rescued from tipping over the edge of the abyss later, she returns with Never Said Goodbye (Rough Trade), shedding almost all of the Nashville trappings in the process, the only remnant being the brief boozy barroom drunken sway of What Kind Of Man.

So, it’s back to indie pop then, laced with the sort of electronica embodied in the shuffling beats and drum rolls of Streets of New York, a song that talks of leaving Wales for the USA and which sets the scene for the subsequent search for home and self. Like the previous album, it yearns for the simpler life and, maybe because she’s Welsh, is also drenched in references to rain, actual and metaphorical. Indeed, there’s even a track called This Endless Rain.

It’s not as immediate an album as Cockahoop, and yet, perversely, you don’t have to work so hard resisting irritation at her warbling tones. The distinctive coy little vixen touches are still in evidence, but there’s also more muscle flexing, gutsily soaring on Oxygen where, pushed upwards by a lurching beat and brass, she sounds a bit like Melanie when she gets to the belting bits.

There’s a couple of stumbles, not least the clumsy Bird In The Hand and the messily clattering cacophony of electronica that is Ruby, but Open Roads and Morning Sunshine pleasingly show she’s still capable of recapturing Catatonia’s simple love of pop while Seeds finds her exploring 70s AOR with her own added witchy playfulness. And yet, as with Cockahoop, it’s the final track, the lullabying Elan, written by and duetted in Welsh with Gruff Rhys from the Super Furries that’s the real gem. You should definitely keep a welcome for her in your hillsides.

 8pm. £10. Glee Club

Tuesday October 10

Handsome Family

Over the years they’ve been musical partners Brett and Rennie Sparks have built a reputation as one of the world’s finest purveyors of melancholy Americana, their music conjuring images of dust hung desert nights and Appalachian mountains silhouetted against the evening sky as they sit round the camp fire singing songs of loss, death and damnation.

So, a surprise then that current album Last Days of Wonder is a relatively more upbeat affair, noting a world waltzing towards self-destruction but celebrating the infinite moments of wonder that nature provides to soothe the soul’s fears.

Using such instruments as mellotron and wine glasses and drawing on the sepia tinted worlds of hillbilly, tin pan alley, cowboy country, western slow waltzers and, on Beautiful William, even medieval tunes, Brett crafts the careworn honky tonk melodies upon which songs like Somewhere Else To Be, Bowling Alley Blues (very George Jones) and Your Great Journey are built.

Meanwhile, unfolding in airport lounges (the throaty Neil Young-like All The Time In Airports), bowling alleys (Bowling Alley Bar) and graveyards (White Lights), Rennie tells stories of hunters shooting prey that transform into their true love (Hunter Green), of shoes hung over telephone wires (These Golden Jewels) and post apocalypse life (After We Shot The Grizzly), striking emotional chords from such images as a black glove on the cliffs, broken cheap sunglasses, and ‘a small bag of onion rings’.

Existential, metaphysical, whatever, the Sparks dig beneath the dry clay and turn dulled stones into diamonds. A thing of wonder indeed, and if your luck’s in, they might even slip in their splendid cover of Famous Blue Raincoat featured on the soundtrack for Leonard Cohen documentary I’m Your Man.

Warming up proceedings will be Angie Palmer, the bluesy-roots singer-songwriter who’s been called a Brit Lucinda Williams. She’ll be spotlighting Tales of Light and Darkness (Akrasia) the more musically diverse follow up to the critically lauded Road, vignettes of love, loss and redemption sitting alongside more epic panoramas of life’s darker sides, co-penned with European philosophy lecturer Paul Mason.

Literature proves a touchstone, drawing on Steinbeck’s Depression stories (Rose of Sharon), Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic romance (Ravens) and the work of Mikhail Bulgakov (the train rhythm rolling Fool’s Gold), but so too do the closer to home experiences of a friend’s death on the poignant acoustic Columbus For A Day.

At present, she remains something of a largely undiscovered talent, but with albums like these it can only be a matter of time before the word starts getting around.

 8pm. £11. Glee Club

Tuesday October 10

Hot Chip

The casio popsters return to serve reminder of reminder of current album, The Warning, and flag up burbling glam stomp new single Over And Over. Rather over praised in some quarters and certainly unworthy of its Mercury Music Prize nomination, it’s pleasant summery stuff with all the frothy technopop bells and whistles and krautrock lite 80s electro you might expect. Tracks like the strobed Arrest Yourself, the Human League-like No Fit State, cool Isleys soul Look After Me and the beats clinking Just Like We are probably ideal for the less energetic dancefloors. But it’s all rather limply insipid. "Hot Chip will break your leg", they sing on The Warning. More like tread on your toe and apologise for hours afterwards.

8pm. £10. Irish Centre

Tuesday October 10

Nightingales

Fronted by Robert Lloyd, they were Birmingham’s answer to The Fall back in the 80s, second only to Mark E Smith’s band in the number of Peel sessions they recorded. They split towards the end of the decade, but after intermittent reunions Lloyd finally put together a new line-up a couple of years back.

Now fully active, they’ve come up with a new album, Out of True (Iron Man), a rather splendid beast that serves as reminder of Lloyd’s sharp, socially conscious songwriting skills and underline just how well his voice has matured over the years

As musically eclectic as ever, it cheerfully ranges from the Captain Beefheart meets Talking Heads of the steam train rhythmed spoken Born In Birmingham, shades of Bryan Ferry on The Chorus Is The Title, to the mutant rockabilly of Carry On Up The Ante and Bob Luman’s 50s hit Let’s Think About Living, and the feedback distortion noise of Workshy Wonderland.

Add to that the contrast between the Johnny Cash slow rumble of Black Country and a marvellous dark brown Leonard Cohen style version of Ray Davies’s There’s A New World Just Opening For Me, with the clattering Beefheart art punk blues of the delightfully titled UK Randy Mom Epidemic and Kevin Coyne’s Good Boy, and it’s hard to imagine this not cropping up on several year end best of lists.

As a live proposition, they’re likely to be a lot more ramshackle, but then what was always part of the ‘gales charm and unpredictability and just one more incentive to get hot and sweaty crushed at the front of the stage.

8pm. £5. Jug of Ale

Tuesday October 10

Bullets & Octane

Throaty, rasping guitars, throbbing bass and pounding drums provide the staple diet for this South California punk-influenced hard rock quartet, their name aptly summing up their aggressive, punching approach and the sound of frontman Gene Louis (named, trivia fans, for jazz drummers Gene Krupa and Louis Belson).

Intense, driving, urgent but melody based rock n roll, I Ain’t Your Savior may summon thoughts of Motorhead at full tilt but you’ll also hear elements of Nirvana and blues country in there too while several tracks may put older ears in mind of the Dead Kennedys.

Bathroom Floor briefly pulls the pace down to a marching military beat with a soaring stadium friendly chorus, but otherwise their In The Mouth Of The Young (RCA) album is a constant battering ram of concrete crushing riffs, cuts such as Cancer California, Queen Mirage, Signed In Alcohol, Going Blind and My Disease sprayed with references to booze drugs, rebellion and a general two fingers to the rest of the world. As yet they’re an unknown quantity over here, but anyone still moping over the cancellation of the Avenged Sevenfold tour should find their sorrows admirably drowned.

7.30pm. £8. Bar Academy

Tuesday October 10

Paramore

Signed to Fueled By Ramen, label home to Panic At The Disco and The Academy Is, the teenage Tennessee five piece fronted by Hayley Williams have been making a few waves with punky emo flavoured debut album All We Know Is Falling. After pulling out of Reading because of her voice problems, they finally make it over here for their debut UK tour with new single, the high octane pop charge of Emergency, but really it’s difficult to see what the fuss is about.

7.30pm. £8. Carling Academy 2

Tuesday October 10

The Klaxons

New invaders of the indie-acid dancefloor, the London trio mash up guitars and synths for a nu rave techno fusion, spacing out limbs with doomy slouching new single Magick where Bowie has it large with Krautpunk and PiL disco. Expect to go seriously bleep.

Wednesday October 11

The Kooks

One of the year’s finer and more welcome successes, the Brighton indie popsters head back on the road for a continued reminder of debut album Inside In/Inside Out with its sharply written songs of youthful frustration and screwed up relationships. A throwback to the 60s and 70s with comparisons to everyone from The Jam and The Kinks to Dexys and The Strokes, it’s not actually offering anything new but when they sharpen their pop razor on something like the simple acoustic Seaside, the rollocking goodtime summery strum She Moves In Her Own Way and You Don’t Love Me’s big beat 60s r&b pop staccato jitters they are very good indeed.

Tagged as part of the so-called Thamesbeat movement, Larrikin Love are a chirpy bunch with a fondness for bouncy gypsy rock, ska n soul that, on things like Edwould and Meet Me By The Getaway Car come across like a cross between Dexys and The Specials. Which may well explain the line ‘everything that I adore came well before 1984’ on the state of the nation disillusionment of Downing Street Kindling.

They’re out and about in the cause of The Freedom Spark (Transgressive), a loosely conceptual debut album that falls into three parts, Hate, Fairytale and Freedom, generally studded with less than sunny references to their hometown, country, recent single Happy As Annie being an ironically chirpy tale of rape and murder.

A little strapped for a stable musical identity as they leapfrog between different sounds and comparison points, but Ed Larrikin has an appealing vocal catch and with the likes of the fiddle fleshed Celtic village dance clumper At The Feet Of Rae, the poppy Well, Love Does Furnish A Life and the boundingly Bluebirds-like joyous Forever Untitled, they seem set to shift a fair few albums until, if he puts his passport where his mouth is, the band sell up and move to the outer Hebrides.

7.30pm. £13. Carling Academy

Wednesday October 11

James Dean Bradfield

With the Manics on an extended break, the individual members have taken the time to try out the solo experience. Nicky Wire’s just released his album but Bradfield was first out of the tracks with The Great Western (Columbia) and now becomes the first to rediscover what life’s like on the small venue circuit rather than stadiums.

The break from band pressures has clearly done him good, dusting off the cobwebs that clogged up the last two Manics album and emerging reinvigorated with a bunch of punchy guitar driven and summery sounding songs packed with an energy long missing. There’s even handclaps and a 50s sha la la on the opening That’s No Way To Tell A Lie, arguably the closest in sound to the earlier Manics material.

On the uptempo front, the chorus swooping pop and lazy verse melodies of Bad Boys And Painkillers is easily the stand out though both Run Romeo Run with its Supertramp keyboards and the vaguely ELO colours of Say Hello To The Pope are no slouches, while The Wrong Beginning is in a league of its own with the slow loping melody and an African tribal percussion beat and background choral croons.

But its arguably the more reflective numbers that really give the work its distinction, the tribute to their late manager Philip Hall on An English Gentleman, the slow building anthemic Still A Long Way To Go, acoustic folksy ballad To See A Friend in Tears and, introed with a touch of Laurie Anderson’s O Superman electronic pulses, the closing, Which Way To Kyffin.

If he’s as revitalised performing live as he was in the studio (and it’s not an unreasonable assumption that there might be a few born again Manics numbers in the set) then, like the train on the album sleeve, he can feel well chuffed.

The job of warming things up goes to labelmates Vega4, an Anglo-Irish-Canuck-Kiwi quartet who should be looking forward to breaking out the champagne and celebrating their debut Top 40 hit with the ridiculously catchy chest-beating single Traffic Jam.

It’s a taster of next month’s album, You And Others, an equally infectious collection of emotionally uplifting, variously soaringly melodic and affectingly fragile, ringing guitar songs that should bring a tear to the eye of any Snow Patrol devotee. Indeed Life Is Beautiful could be Chasing Car’s twin brother.

They’ll be showcasing tonight, and in the light of such heart-wringing songs as Tearing Me Apart, Let Go, Bullets and the slow swellingly anthemic Boomerang, you’d be advised to catch them now before you’re queuing outside arenas this time next year.

7.30pm. £12.50. Barfly

Wednesday October 11

Sparklehorse

It’s 11 years now since Mark Linkous formed his band and released their much admired debut album, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot. Since then two more have followed, sporting the more manageable titles of Good Morning Spider and It’s A Wonderful Life. However, five years and a battle with drug addiction on he’s resumed his linguistically expansive habits for the fourth, the snappily titled Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain (Capitol). Recorded in fits and starts, with Linkous playing everything, it’s good to report too that the band have maintained and improved upon his brand of melancholic art rock Americana and fuzzed guitar storms.

Those who favour the latter should be lending ears to Ghost in The Sky and It’s No So Hard, a pair of especially noisy distortion rockers, while devotees of their more fragile persona should be prepared to curl up in a corner, fetal-like, and let such numbers as the treated vocal slow pulse Getting It Ready, a ruminative See The Light , the quietly plangent Brian Wilson on acid Knives of Summertime or the dreamy waves of Shade And Honey wash over their bruised souls.

Given his experiences of addiction and depression, it’s not too surprising that the album should be pondering matters of life and death, loss and survival, or that there’s times when the spooked arrangements have the pallor of living ghosts.

It’s decidedly not his most accessible album, and the reworked version of Morning Hollow and the barely there ten minute ethereal and electronic instrumental title track that closes it take some work if you’re not already in an altered state, but for those prepared to free their minds and ears and embrace Linkous’s world, both on record and in the mesmerising live shows, the rewards are infinite.

8pm. £13.50. Glee Club

Wednesday October 11

Give Back Project

A new talent showcase for local bands and singer-songwriters to get their original music out to the public, this mixes up all manner of musical genres with a line up that features such Midlands hopefuls as the Lights, Silent Trigger, Karl Bailey, Mowglee and Bright Size Gypsies. The show will also feature dance routines choreographed by a team from Strictly Dance Fever. A second showcase will take place at the NIA on Nov 20 and music samples of the artists taking part in the project can be checked out at www.givebackproject.co.uk

7.30 pm. £15. Alexandra Theatre

Thursday October 12

James Yorkston & the Athletes

Joining forces with former TalkTalk member Paul Webb (aka Beth Orton collaborator Rustin Man), the Scottish singer-singwriter returns with his third album, The Year Of The Leopard (Domino), a more than worthy companion piece to Moving Up Country and Beyond The River but also a far more optimistic one.

As ever, it’s a spare, hushed early morning (there’s a spoken track actually called 5 a.m.) folksy affair with gently rustic arrangements embracing clarinets and concertinas, the vocals often first takes, the songs generally meditations and reflections on love in all its shades, from first delirium of desire to shattered heartbreak.

One of the song titles, Woozy With Cider (a spoken number where he talks of the dehumanising nature of the city and recalls trying to impress a barmaid with his modest chart success) ably captures the ambience of the album and the intoxicating charms of songs like the lilting I Awoke, the dolorous Don’t Let Me Down and, conjuring images of sun dappled streams, the lazily lovely Us Late Travellers with its image of a cat sleeping on his chest ‘like a seabird riding a wave’.

Warm, romantic and brushed with dew and cobwebs, it’s a beguiling unassuming affair from the man with the jumper and receding hairline, one you’ll want to lie back, close your eyes and soak up as it washes over you with its world-weary magic.

8pm. £8. Glee Club

******CANCELLED Thursday October 12 CANCELLED******

James Morrison

7.30pm. £9. Wulfrun Hall

Thursday October 12

Eleanor McEvoy

Back with an album even more stripped down that Early Hours, and on which she’s taken charge of the arrangements and plays pretty much everything you hear, Out There (Moscodisc) finds the South Wexford singer-songwriter variously mediating on ecology, economics and, in songs about relationships ended, lacking and desired, female strengths and vulnerabilities.

Opening in k.d.lang mood, the smokey lounge ambience, brushed percussion and vibes of Non Smoking Single Female offers a witty plea for romance written in small ads style but with a sub-text about consumerism. In more serious moods, the album moves on embrace the bitter hurt of To Sweep Away A Fool, masculine commitment phobia on Quote I Love You Unquote (co-penned with Dave Rothery of The Beautiful South), the wounded heart sarcasm of the mandolin and fiddled based Suffer So Well, the marimba tinged So Much Trouble’s tale of a woman discovering her husband’s infidelity and, by way of a mirror image, the temptation resisted in the Gaelic infused folk of Wrong So Wrong.

At least Little Luck looks on the brighter side of holding fast to a relationship in the face of everything.

Elsewhere, Vigeland’s Dream uses the Norwegian sculptor as a springboard for a meditation on the connections and emotions art can unlock within us while, embracing wider malaise Fields of Dublin 4 addresses the loss of the city’s soul that’s accompanied its tiger economy and eco concerns come to the fore on a haunting version of Marvin Gaye’s Mercy Mercy Me, slowed down and sung with just acoustic guitar backing.

It’s one of two covers on the album, the second being her equally bare boned reinterpretation of Little Feat’s Roll Um Easy.

It doesn’t always work, the use of programmed drums and synths at odds with the more organic nature elsewhere, but, again drawing on a musical cocktail of jazz, folk and blues, and never compromising her accent in the phrasing, for the most it’s another quiet triumph for one of Ireland’s most golden yet far to unappreciated talents.

7.30pm. £10. Little Civic

Friday October 13

AFI

Probably not a name that means much to the public at large, but the mascara laden San Francisco quartet have been around since the 90s, churning out a solid welter of no punches pulled metal, singer Davey Havok living up to his name with some throaty yowling, but filtered through an 80s rock sensibility that keeps pop hooks uppermost in the mind. They’re over here in support of new album Decemberunderground (Interscope), a breakout release that debuted at the top of Billboard charts and features Miss Murder, a swaggeringly catchy single that defies you not to let your limbs go swinging across it lollopping, semi-glam stomp. And while things like Kill Caustic may take a brillo pad to the back of the throat, it’s the more melodic, radio tempting valentines that dominate. Tracks such as the acoustic guitar trembling The Interview complete with church organ, punky pop surging The Killing Lights, big stadium friendly offerings Love Like Winter and The Missing Frame, riff monster Summer Shudder and the swellingly anthemic Kiss and Control.

With lyrics that tend to revolve around murder, suicide and death and pain in general, it’s clearly going to find favour with the devil’s fingers brigade, but there’s a real danger the band might find themselves being taken up by a fair few stray Green Day fans as well.

7.30pm. £13.50. Carling Academy

Friday October 13

Jet

You won’t have forgotten that the Australian four piece were responsible for the raw, garage rock urgent brilliance of Are You Gonna Be My Girl, the powerhouse dynamo around which the electrifying Get Born album was formed. So, anticipation for the follow up is understandably high. Sighs of relief then that, while they’ve polished up the image somewhat, Shine On (Atlantic) effortlessly lives up to hopes simply by not messing around with a good thing. Which, basically means, a balance of 70s heads down rock boogie along the lines of Rip It Up, Holiday, That’s All Lies and Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is, and tracks that ape Oasis in their fervent Beatles worship.

Indeed, Bring It Back, Come On Come On, piano ballad Shine On and the arms swaying All You Have To Do are haunted by the ghost of John Lennon while Shiny Magazine and even Everlys homage Eleanor, are veined with McCartneyisms.

It’s not all so single-minded in the influences, Skin And Bones sounds like early barroom brawling Faces, complete with burring Ronnie Lane guitar, while there’s times when Stones rock n roll swagger pokes its head through the curtains.

To be honest, nothing here has quite the same stature as their seminal hit, and you have to wonder at times quite why they want to sound like they come from Manchester, but with hooks, wit and sheer energy to spare they’re a good time that’s hard to say no to.

For this intimate prelude to a bigger bash at the Academy next month, they’re supported by Dundee scallywags The View, chasing up debut single Wasted Little DJs with another flurry of barricade storming guitars punky power pop in the shape of Superstar Tradesman (625), a rousing crowd bouncing stormer that calls to mind the days of Scot-punks The Skids.

The View

Also along for the ride are Dublin based mischief makers the 747s, their well received debut album Zampano (Ark) which reveals a fondness for 60s American teen-beat on things like Rain Kiss, Night & Day and Leave Your Job Today, and on Missed That Sun, Nature’s Alibi and the samba hints of Death Of A Star, an enduring love of that very English 60s rock emblemised by The Kinks.

Mixing it up even more, Miles Away is out and out music hall pop with a pub piano while Green & Blue puts on folsky smocks, Goodbye For A While is all Roy Orbison and Into The Shadow is Surfer Girl era Brian Wilson.

Buoyant and wistful in equal measure, as capable of being spiky as they are tender, they probably need to exercise a little more editorial control (at 14 tracks the album outstays its welcome), but if they put on the sort of varied life set the album promises, they can hopefully look forward to avoiding the new Zutons tag.

7.30pm. £10. Barfly

Saturday October 14

The Rifles

The Walthamstow boys continue to flog debut album No Love Lost, looking to show that, whatever early singles When I’m Alone and Local Boy may have suggested, there’s more to them than being Jam soundalikes. While still firmly in the Mod mood, they do throw in some curveballs such as the Clash colours to She’s Got Standards and thoughts of Madness with One Night Stand.

Mostly a flurry of stomping guitar riffs, racing rhythms and beats in the service of slice of life narratives that add talk of Arctic Monkeys to a comparison stew that also stirs in the Editors, Strokes and Franz Ferdinand, listen without prejudice and you’ll find a rather good collection of angsty suburban love songs that, on Narrow Minded Social Club and the jaunty Robin Hood, reveal as much a love for Ray Davies, Squeeze and Billy Bragg as they do Paul Weller.

Sunday October 15

Tina Dico

Formerly the voice of Zero 7, the Danish songbird’s rapidly making a name for herself with In The Red (Finest Gramophone). Written after she relocated to London and suffused with songs about love, loneliness and embracing what life throws at you, it’s a heat-infused torchy set that’s been compared to Joni Mitchell with shades of Elliott Smith, though opening track Losing sounds incredibly like Kiki’s Dee’s Amoreuse, a mood that sustains most of the album where you’re likely to find yourself also thinking Sophie B Hawkins, Judie Tzuke and Julia Fordham.

Lushly but never over orchestrated and making effective use of acoustic arrangements, despite never ranging too far from a basic melodic blueprint songs like Head Shop, Warm Sand, In The Red and new single Give In (which surely borrows from Morissette’s Ironic) slowly insinuate themselves in your head and blood stream until you wonder how you ever got through the day without listening to at least one of them.Support’s provided by Dico’s fellow former Zero 7 singer, Sophie Barker and Australian brother and sister Angus and Julia Stone. They’re over on these shores to promote their debut EP Chocolates & Cigarettes (Independiente), a rather fine collection of shuffling (Paper Aeroplane, Mangio Tree) or dreamy (All Of Me, the wistful piano backed title track) acoustic folk blues that sees them alternating vocal duties, she husky and prowling with Portishead colours (notably on the bluesy Private Lawns), he more akin to Paul Simon.

8pm. £7.50. Glee Club

Sunday October 15

Cord

I’m sure the Leeds quartet never planned it that way, but debut album Other People’s Lives Are Not As Perfect as They Seem (Island) just sounds like a poor man’s Coldplay; you know, yearning vocals with an occasional falsetto, introspective lyrics, tastefully soaring melodies, and radio friendly choruses. Just listen to Sea of Trouble, Winter or Best Days.

Of course, it’s not all Coldplay soundalikes. Sometimes they fancy themselves as a watered down Muse (Already Lost, The Greater Part), Echo & The Bunnymen (Stay With Me Now), and even Queens of the Stone Age (Go Either Way). Sometimes they’re a bit rocky and sometimes they’re a bit mopey, but while listenable enough in the background they’re never sufficiently interesting to make you want to turn up the volume to hear better.

7.30pm. £5. Little Civic

Monday October 16

Guillemots

Things have exploded for the Birmingham/Scottish/Brazilian/Canadian four piece named for a burrowing, crab-eating sea bird. Having released a handful of critically acclaimed singles and built a glowing live reputation, in short succession they scored their first hit with Made Up Love Song # 43 and saw debut album Through The Window Pane lodge itself in the Top 20 and earn a deserved Mercury Music Prize nomination.

One of the most eclectic and exciting acts to have emerged in the past year, the album's testament to their colourful tapestry of sound, one moment sounding like ELO with recent reissued hit single Trains To Brazil the next all lushly ambient with the synth washes of come down chill out folk ballad goes Brill Building Little Bear. Then they dive into the magnificent 11 minute epic Sao Paulo with its ambitious kaleidoscope of musical textures (Elton Johnisms included) sweeping away into a vast widescreen kitchen sink presentation before a Latin American fiesta section and an 1812 crescendo (and music box fade out) that bears testament to frontman/keyboard player/songsmith Fyfe Dangerfield's classical training.

And that's not just bombastic pretension. As a 20 year old he wrote a choral piece, O Emmanuel, that was included on a collection of Christmas music alongside work by Britten and Tavener.

The album is a wonderful musical panorama, at once organic and electronic as it pursues its running motif of travel through the carnivalesque Through The Window Pane's world music flavours, the swooping celebratory electropop Annie, Let's Not Wait with its Latin American beats and the gorgeous pastures of romance on Redwings.

Aside from a tenderly fragile yet joyous voice that sounds though he's been possessed by the soul of Jeff Buckley, Dangerfield (and to no lesser extent fellow members Greig Stewart, MC Lord Magrao and Aristazabel Hawkes) has an expansive musical vision that touches upon genius and madness, producing tracks like A Samba In The Snowy Rain and the six minutes of dreamy, ethereal melancholy that is If The World Ends which are etched with an impossible beauty rarely heard since the vintage days of Scott Walker, Bacharach, Brel and Jimmy Webb.

With the classic timeless orchestral pop notes to be found on We're Here and Through The Window Pane, they've created an album that casts a light of such exuberant optimism as to illuminate the darkest corners of the modern world. You owe it you yourself to surrender to their charms.

7.30pm. £10.50. Alexandra Theatre

Monday October 16

Vincent Vincent and the Villains

London pub rock with a hint of The Smiths and Dexys and a charismatic frontman, following two indie outings VV & the Vs have now signed to EMI, making their debut with the 50s feeling handclappy pop Johnny Two Bands and the equally autobiographical but more rockabilly Seven Inch Record. It’s hard to imagine anything like a lasting career, but they promise to be fun while it lasts.

 8.30pm. £6. Jug of Ale

Tuesday October 17

Jamie T

The lanky Wimbledon lad has taken an upbringing on The Clash, Specials, Rancid and drum n bass and filtered them into his songs about life in modern suburbia. Clearly channelling the spirit of both Billy Bragg and The Streets, he’s more fussed about the spit than the polish, so that he often sounds a bit, well, shambolic and amateur. Following the recent Betty And Her Selfish Sons EP, he returns now with new single If You Got The Money, so hopefully things will have picked up.

 7.30pm. £7.50. Carling Academy 2

Tuesday October 17

Ed Harcourt

Five albums in six years, you can’t say Harcourt’s not prolific. Fortunately, quantity and quality also go hand in hand. Following on from Strangers and its breezy pop hymns to loneliness and anguish, comes The Beautiful Lie (Heavenly), during which time the lad’s found love and got wed.

Thankfully it’s not mellowed his lyrical muse with dark veined songs that address friendship (You Only Call Me When You’re Drunk, Late Night Partner), the devastation of a small town and the lonely guy left behind (Whirlwind In D Minor), loss of childhood innocence and a world going down the sink (a Ben Folds like Visit From The Dead Dog), death (the spare, sad violin haunted The Last Cigarette), despair (the rainwashed autumn streets Shadowboxing), and plastic surgery (dusted folk blues The Pristine Claw).

Musically, there’s a fair few colours to the palette, Until Tomorrow Comes evoking thoughts of 40s dance bands and lonely waltzes, Revolution In The Heart all Thunder Road crashing anthemics, I Am The Drug calling to mind the clattering flamenco of Tom Waits.

All of it though resonates through your fibre, closing up with the minimal tender moods of Braille, where he duets on a love song with the missus, and the chapel hymn sounding anthem to hope and endurance that is Good Friends Are Hard To Find. You should certainly make Harcourt one of your musical best mates.

8pm. £13.50. Glee Club

Tuesday October 17

My Alamo

Formed in Moseley, the rising alt rock riff driving four piece take time out from laying down the debut album to pop corks and celebrate the release of debut single 1994 (7th Star). Foo Fighter thoughts bubble to the surface, even more so on the brief but nagging accompanying Doctor Doctor with its crowd friendly chorus. Expect to see them make major strides next year. Keeping things local, they share the bill with Stourbridge Verve meets U2 boys Midas.

7.30pm. £5. Barfly

Wednesday October 18

Embrace

Having exploded into the nation’s consciousness with No 1 album The Good Will Out, it looked as if they were going to fade away after the two follow ups had to struggle to get into the Top 10. Then came Out Of Nothing which put them back at the top and now they’re riding higher than ever with album number four, This New Day (Independiente).

Sporting anthemic shades of U2, its big music hits the spot with glowing upbeat optimism and soaring choruses invested in such numbers as No Use Crying, You Will Hit The Target Everytime and Celebrate. Even the emotional downers of I Can’t Come Down and end of relationship piano ballad Nature’s Law reach up to shake the heavens. Expect the earth to move too.

Support’s provided by Southampton outfit Delays who, fronted by tremulous voiced Greg Gilbert, will be digging into tracks from both debut album Faded Seaside Glamour and the You See Colours follow up.

With Gilbert sounding like a hybrid of Liz Fraser, Stevie Nicks and a pubescent Roger McGuinn, the band are still translating 60s nostalgia into swooning indie pop. Glistening chiming guitars and pop sensibilities remain to the fore, even incorporating a touch of T Rex on Lillian and electro dance with Out of Nowhere while other standout numbers include Calvary (You and Me), Given Time, an anthemic Hideaway and a nerve tingling Waste Of Space.

7.30pm. £20. Carling Academy.

Tuesday October 17

The Hedrons

Glasgow’s girl trio get back on the road to promote I Need You (Measured), follow up to debut single Be My Friend and another taster for upcoming album One More Won’t Kill Us. Like its predecessor its a riff pummelling slab of dirty rock n roll where PJ Harvey meets The Stooges. Nothing special but a sweaty, beer chugging noise all the same.

 8.30pm. £5. Jug of Ale

Thursday October 19

Fightstar

Having parted company with their record label, former Busted man Charlie’s been declaring that he’s not bothered whether the band have hits or not. Which is lucky since the Unification album’s workmanlike collection of emo-esque rock in thrall to the likes of Linkin Park was never likely to provide them. Still numbers like Lost Like Tears In The Rain and Sleep Well Tonight show he can actually sing while Alex Westaway clearly knows how to rip out a vicious guitar line. But at the end of the day, it’s more bluster than substance.

7.30pm. £12. Carling Academy

Thursday October 19


iLiKETRAiNS

The Leeds quintet pull back into the station for a second helping of current mini album Progress Reform. Featuring A Rook House For Bobby, a darkly melancholic song about the troubled life of grandmaster Bobby Fischer, it builds on their Sigur Ros like love of vast doomed symphonic landscapes with a further five tracks, among them No Military Parade, a sort of postscript to Terra Nova’s glacial account of Captain Scott’s doomed 1912 Antarctic expedition.

The band do like to get their teeth into a narrative. The Beeching Report is a scathing account of the 60s reforms that dismantled the country’s rural rail network sung by one of the axed rail workers while Stainless Steel is an eight minute murder ballad where the cuckolded narrator revenges themselves on their adulterous partner during a three minute sonic guitar and cornet storm.

With the swirling noise of Citizen evocative of the vintage days of Ride, they’re an intense bunch to be sure, and even when they pare things back, as on The Accident, their brand of minimalism still towers like icebergs floating over the heart.

Clad in old Victorian rail uniforms and with a stage set that deploys back projection films of trains, snow and the like, they’ve built a sterling reputation as quirky but far more than some eccentric fad. Worth getting a platform ticket.

Setting the atmosphere are new London three-piece The Early Years, unveiling their self-titled debut album (Beggars Banquet), a flurry of psychedelic guitar rock and fuzzed feedback that calls to mind such luminaries as the Velvets, Spiritualised and Spacemen 3 with, as evidenced on the opening All Ones And Zeros and the lengthy instrumental Musik Der Fruhen Jahre, an added vein of Krautrock.

They do wistful hymnal shoegazing (Things, Brown Hearts) as adeptly as they handle narcotic surging racealongs (The Simple Solution, the Monkees-like So Far Gone) while the lovely stoned clouds of Song For Elizabeth show they can do the nine minute opus without self-indulgence or sending audiences into a coma. If they can bring the same bliss and burning to the live set, then, climaxing with the guitar storm epic High Times & Low Lives, they promise to be very good indeed.

7.30pm. £6. Barfly

Thursday October 19

Boy Kill Boy

Having failed to struggle into the Top 40 with recent organ driven single Civil Sin, the Smiths copyists will be pinning hopes on Shoot Me Down, the latest track to be lifted from debut album Civilian. But even with a cover of Nelly Furtado’s Maneater, it’s hard to get too excited.

7.30pm. £112.50. Irish Centre

Thursday October 19


Eric Bibb

Now pushing his mid-50s, the New Yorker’s long since left behind those best newcomer days of his early 80s releases, but he’s lost none of the easy going acoustic blues brilliance that had the critics sitting up and paying attention. He’s over here promoting Diamond Days (Telearc), his third album in as many years, following on from Friends and A Ship Called Love, and very much a typical Bibb collection of 12 string guitar folk blues and reflective meditations on life’s highs and lows. Save for an excellent cover of Dylan’s Buckets Of Rain with Martin Simpson taking on finger-picking duties, it’s all self-penned material that sees Bibb at the top of his game with stand out numbers like the uplifting rambling blues of Tall Cotton, 30s flavoured doo wop Story Book Hero, harp blowing blues groove Destiny Blues, the spirit raising Shine On, a wistfully autobiographical Heading Home and Still Livin’ On’s closing tribute to such blues and gospel greats as Mississippi John Hurt, Gary Davis, Pops Staples and Son House.

A live recording of the soul blues In My Father’s House is a firm reminder of his power and prowess on stage, a strong enticement to get down and see the man in action.

8pm. £17.50. Warwick Arts Centre

Friday October 20

Martha Tilston & The Woods

West Country daughter of folk legends singer-songwriters father Steve and step-mother Maggie Boyle, Tilston’s last album Ropeswing, was only available via free download. However, she’s back to traditional release patterns for Of Milkmaids & Architects (Pond Life).

The title stems from her two grandfathers, one the son of a milkmaid (also named Martha Tilston), the other Eric Lyons the architect, both inspiring songs (the former dappled with lovely banjo) reflecting on her roots. Although no details were available, it’s very much in the same musical vein as Bimbling with its meld of trad English folk, world music and Appalachian influences, her breathily husky vocals sounding even more matured and loamy.

Along with musings on her roots, Tilston’s political conscience also remains active with Tulip Effect’s meditation on the current global climate, office song Artificle and, on a more optimistic note, the bluesy Good World.

Elsewhere she explores the minefields of relationships (the guessingly titled You Won’t Have Me, where her spellbinding voice evokes the McGarrigles, is an album highlight), both in her own material and a haunting version of trad nugget Silver Dagger.

Out on the road with a core of eight musicians, and instruments that include flute, bazuki and Brazilian percussion, the tour’s been conceived as a recreation of campfire music sessions and English woodland festivals and, in addition to numbers from the new album the set will be suitably seasoned with songs from Bimbling (hopefully Red and Over To Ireland included) and a clutch of trad nuggets.

 8pm. £7. Glee Club

Friday October 20

The Infadels

Featuring Bill Bruford’s son Alex on drums, this east London outfit’s debut album, We Are Not The Infadels (Wall of Sound), takes electro-rock and give it a touch of ska on Can’t Get Enough while also coming on like early INXS dance rock with Jagger ‘67. Elsewhere they’re casting minds back to Specials skank for Topboy, diving into bleeps and burbling beats with Stories From The Bar and sporting acid clubby fashions with Love Like Semtex and Murder That Sound.

However, nothing really holds your attention, a problem not eased by the often muddy production, and while admiring the sense of experimentation it’s hard to get too worked up over the prospects of them spreading in out for display live.

7pm. £6. Barfly

Friday October 20

Cooper Temple Clause

It’s been three years since Top 10 album Kick Up The Fire, And Let The Flames Break Loose, and unfortunately, while completed, the follow up, Make This Your Own, now won’t be out until next year. However, following on from the veritable pop flavoured Damage, they’ll be trailing it with new single Homo Sapiens (Sequel), a harder rock, piston pumping affair which, with its metal undercurrents is further evicdence that the album’s going to be a long way from more electronic feel of its predcessors.

Having made their Top 40 debut with Tendency earlier this year, post punk Londoners Battle return with seven track EP Back to Earth (Transgressive), ahead of next year’s debut album.

 If you’ve heard the work to date, it doesn’t hold too many surprises with Jason Bavanandan veining his vocals with an edgy paranoia while the band run through their Echo & The Bunnymen, Morrissey and New Order influences, finding time to indulge in a little Blur/Jarvis pop for One More Night. Although Easy To Listen To heads down the ballad path, things tend to get a little musically samey after a while on the rhythm section front, but Wicked Owl and Isabelle show they at least have the songs to hold your interest.

10.30pm. £11.50. Barfly

Friday October 20

The Icicle Works

To celebrate their 25th anniversary, Ian McNabb’s taken time out from his solo career to put the band back together, reuniting with bassist Chris Layhe and drummer Chris Sharrock for the first time since they split six years ago. And to mark the occasion, their old label, Beggars Banquet, has reissued an expanded version of the self-titled debut album that spawned their only Top 40 single, Love Is A Wonderful Colour.

Quite why they never succeeded in following it up remains a mystery, since all three albums were sizeable chart hits and songs like Bird’s Fly, Understanding Jane, Hollow Horse, Hope Springs Eternal, Evangeline and the Shakespeare referencing All The Daughters (Of Her Father’s House) remain undisputed classics of thundering Liverpudlian guitar rock, McNabb’s voice roaring out like Scott Walker on steroids.

Live they were volcanic, and loaded up with all their greatest moments, you really should not miss this chance to revisit past glories or to discover why older siblings talk about them in hushed awe.

6pm. £17.50. Carling Academy 2

Friday October 20

Pedro Luis Ferrer

If your perception of Cuban musicians is of an endless array of salsa tunes and songs about women, sun and earnest social protest, then the delightfully eccentric Ferrer will come as a breath of fresh air.

Drawing on country and rock as much as he does rural Cuban folk music, he sounds traditional but never formulaic and while not averse to making a few socio-political points, he tends to singing about cattle protesting against artificial insemination.

Sung in Spanish, his current album, Natural (Escondida), is laced with playful wit, featuring numbers about ladies letting their hair down for some femme on femme party fun, annoying moustache hairs, women with moles, a one armed romeo and his cheating mute girlfriend, plus, of course, tales of love, life, and the land. He even has a song that opens ‘they say tough guys don't eat soup’.

It’s joyous stuff, Ferrer’s warm, earthy voice and Cuban guitar joined by thumb piano, percussion and his daughter’s harmonies. You don’t need to speak the lingo to let your limbs fall under his spell.

8pm. £12.50. Warwick Arts Centre

Saturday October 21

Rooster

Having convincingly laid their cards on the table with their self-titled debut album, the chicken boys return with Circles and Satellites (Brightside), a second helping of pop and rock with its eye on the stadiums.

Yet somehow, even though all the pieces are in place with things like the hook friendly One Of Those Days, Get Up, Home and I Come Alive, it just doesn’t feel as exciting, the band giving the impression they were too concerned about getting the Bon Jovi/Bryan Adams market tucked away to allow themselves to relax.

Things are a little better on the slower numbers, Breathe and Clear Skies two of the album’s strongest offerings, but too often sounding like its a well oiled machine going through the motions, it’s really nothing to crow about.

7.30pm. £10. Carling Academy 2

Saturday October 21


Ray Davies

It's taken him over 40 years to get round to a solo album proper and he's spent a decade doing it, the release delayed by the minor hiccup of being robbed and shot in New Orleans. So, does Other People's Lives (V2) do justice to one of the most influential songwriters in the history of rock music?

Well, in parts. As you'd expect it's witty, sardonic, and, despite heading into Memphis soul and Dylan inflections territory with Run Away From Time, very English, tossing off lines like "Is there life after breakfast?" , "cheer up son, put the kettle on" and telling how Mr Brown "ran off with an Essex blonde" on the mid-tempo jaunty strumalong Next Door Neighbour.

As you might expect from his advancing years, there's a tendency to view contemporary culture through jaundiced eyes, most notably on the Ian Dury-like Stand Up Comic's contempt for dumbing down yobbism that passes for today's wit, while both the country-inflected The Getaway and the sultry moodiness of The Tourist's musings on travel find him seeking escape from the humdrum and disillusioned with the flash nature of his countrymen abroad.

However, as the live set will doubtless underline, there is nothing here of the same pedigree as Waterloo Sunset, Dead End Street or the underrated Don't Forget To Dance and you'd not imagine fishing this out in forty years time and finding it still fresh and pertinent. You also have to lament the fact that the man who wrote Dedicated Follower Of Fashion now pens lines like "now the clown does a fart and we all fart back . . . and that's that." But, when it shines, as it does on Creatures of Little Faith's tale of domestic strife or the 11 minute Over My Head with its wah wah guitar, organ soul, reggae hints, folk-rock and stadium baiting flourishes, then it stays with you all day, and all of the night. Hopefully, the gig will too.

8pm. £22.50. Warwick Arts Centre

Sunday October 22

Tunng

Having done the business at the recent Moseley Folk Festival, the folktronica collective fronted by Mike Lindsay and Sam Genders return for their own tour in aid of current album, Comments Of The Inner Chorus (Full TimeHobby).

Rippling with the trad spirits of Nick Drake, Dr Strangely Strange, Incredible String Band, and John Renbourn as well as taking influences from Aphex Twin and The Wicker Man soundtrack, it’s beguilingly lovely stuff but with enough of a dark side to avoid accusations of folk-twee.

Here be songs of women transformed into hares, wind-up birds and, on current single Jenny Again, murdered lovers imagining their killer’s future life, the music feeding electronic colours into the pagan and medieval vibes. Banjo, cello, typewriters, audio samples from children’s stories and clattering found percussion are all part and parcel of Tunng’s fantastical world, one it would be remiss not to explore more deeply.

Setting the hushed, cobwebby tone for the evening will be Alabama hippies Nathan D. "Nabob" Shineywater and Rachael "Rabob" Hughes aka Bright Black Morning Light, a guitar and Rhodes piano duo whose stoner chill out alt folk sounds like it was born to be piped over sound systems during over a Glastonbury twilight.
 

Narcotic jams, jazz tinged tribal beats, slow blues rhythms, lazy Hawaiian lilts, swampy lullabyes and lyrics that reference rain, crystals, and rivers all filter through the spare campfire songs of their eponymous Matador album where time stands still and tracks stretch out into infinity, bearing titles like We Share Our Blanket With The Owl, Midnight Mountain Reflections, Fry Bread and Star Blanket River Child. You get the idea.

8pm. £10. Glee Club

Sunday October 22

Keane

Anyone hoping the Sussex public schoolboys might be in a cheerier mood for their follow up to Hopes and Fears and its songs of sorrow, sadness and regret would have found little comfort in Under The Iron Sea (Island). If anything, it’s a gloomier, darker, more angst-ridden and intensely earnest affair, its big music, yearning vocals, and driving guitars put to the service of ever more downbeat songs set in a fairytale world overcome with dark confusions. That’ll be symbolic then, Mr Blair.

If you weren’t persuaded by their last collection, it’s unlikely that the likes of a stodgily clunky The Frog Prince, the prog-Coldplayisms of Leaving So Soon?, the empty anthemics of A Bad Dream and Nothing In My Way or the overblown operatic finales of Broken Toy will change your mind. Indeed, even devotees might find their loyalty faltering if they have to listen to the awful Crystal Ball on a regular basis. Just pray it’s not on the set list.

Support comes from boy girl 80s electro poppers Captain, still touring debut album, This Is Hazelville from whence comes dance friendly pop spirited new single Frontline (EMI), and The Long Winters, a Seattle guitar rock outfit fronted by Alaskan songwriter-guitarist John Roderick.

They’re here packing copies of third album Putting the Days To Bed ( ), a collection of jangling pumped up guitar pop likely to summon thoughts of The Jayhawks and Wilco with the occasional shade of REM. A collection of relationships based songs and musings on the capacity for self-destruction, sometimes offering cautionary advice (as in Honest when mom warns daughter, ‘don’t you love a singer’), sometimes peeling back his own skin to examine what lies beneath.

(It’s A ) Departure shows they’re as guilty of dumb swagger as anyone, but with numbers like Teaspoon, Ultimatum, Pushover, the gloriously soaring Hindsight and the vaguely Wall of Voodoo like Sky Is Open where a retired air force pilot goes in search of his soul this is clearly a band with a heart and a brain to go with their rock n roll.

7.30pm. £21.50. W’hampton Civic Hall

Sunday October 22

The Lemonheads

It’s getting on for ten years since, spiralling towards crack and drink fuelled self-destruction and overly enamoured with the Britpop explosion, Evan Dando called time on arguably the most exciting American pop-punk guitar band of the day.

Opening their UK chart batting with a cover of Mrs Robinson, they notched up a further three top 40 hits and a top 5 album (Come On Feel The Lemonheads), but their success and popularity was about more than chart placings, Dando the perfect embodiment of scruffy slacker charm.

So, it’s good that, clean for some years and happily married, he’s decided to resurrect the band, calling in former Descendents rhythm section Bill Stevenson and Karl Alvarez to record the self-titled comeback album (Vagrant).Boasting no greater ambitions than making a damn fine melodic country flavoured guitar pop album, it sounds as though it could have been made back in their heyday, romping through infectiously catchy nuggets like Black Gown, the mid-tempo single Become The Enemy, the rolling In Passing and the buoyantly upbeat summery sparks of Let’s Just laugh and Poughskeepie.

And, for fans of country murder songs, there’s the Tom Morgan penned tongue in cheek waltzer Baby’s Home where a guy ponders shooting his cheating wife and pounding her lover’s head with a stone.

He sounds older and more world weary, but Dando’s soft voice hasn’t lost its appealing laconic and while, clocking in at barely 35 minutes and with only half of the tracks written by Dando, it may not be in the same league as their acknowledged finest hour, It’s A Shame About Ray, it’s still got a lot more going for it than mere 90s nostalgia. Though with Dando apparently happy to chuck a lot of the old material into the live set, you’ll be happy to know you get that too.

7.30pm. £16. Wulfrun Hall

Sunday October 22


The Divine Comedy

Neil Hannon’s been off the scene for a while, but this tour with an 8 piece band marks a return with the long awaited follow up to Absent Friends. It has to be said that its kick off single Diva Lady, wasn’t especially exciting, a typically witty lyric about the J-Los and Mariah Careys of the world but set to a one note melody line that never really goes anywhere. However the album, Victory For The Comic Muse (Parlophone), doesn’t disappoint with its English languid ennui and orchestral pop.

A Madness/ Pulp hybrid, To Die A Virgin is a clumpingly sassy vaudeville pop songs about a young lad who might be on a promise, Mother Dear offers banjo plucking hoe-down while the cascading soft reveries of The Light of Day has him sounding like a choirboy Morrissey.

Much calls to mind early Scott Walker, most notably the Brel-like The Plough and A Lady of A Certain Age where he paints a poignant portrait of a lonely English widow, her celebrity days now faded.

He also drops in a flamenco-like gallop through old Associates hit Party Fears Two that seems likely to prove a highlight of what promises to be an expansive show. Given he sounds a bit like Hannon and favours a similar musical era, it’s ironic that the opening act is dreadlocked Belfast singer-songwriter Peter Wilson alias Duke Special, a man clearly with soft spot in heart for the glory days of Brill Building pop and its dreamily melodic piano ballads. Ironic, but most welcome.

Having compiled two EPs to form debut album Adventures In Gramophone, he’s back now, freshly signed to V2, with a clutch of new vagabond soul material (well, save for a re-recording of Last Night I Nearly Died) in the shape of Songs From The Deep Forest. As Brixton Leaves and Ballad Of A Broken Man show, can get a bit theatrical at times, indeed This Could Be My Last Day sounds like it’s auditioning for a West End musical.

But that’s compliment rather than criticism, and in the company of Salvation Tambourine (reminiscent of early Leo Sayer at times), the lushly orchestrated Celtic drama of Wake Up Scarlett, Portrait’s Vaudevillian bounce, the pop swing Billy Joel echoes of Everybody Wants A Little Something, you get the feeling that one day Broadway is going to putting out the welcome mat too.

8pm. £17.50. Warwick Arts Centre

Monday October 23

OPM

Special guests to headliners hip hop metal outfit (HED)p.e., the LA outfit had a minor hit some years back with Heaven Is A Halfpipe, returning now with their third album, California Poppy (Suburban Noize), another druggy (opium, geddit) loping fusion of reggae, hip hop and rock in the service of songs about love, politics and, well, drugs actually. Rather more laid back than you might have imagined (UB40 fans won’t run screaming), the mood enhanced by the soft vocal delivery and the poppy flavours of things like Rock Me Slow, For Tonight and the shantyown ska of That’s The Sound. Things edge up a bit with the rock blues infused Voodoo Hex and the tougher Lion’s Pride, but really this is all about getting down to a lazy skank than any pumping hip hop moves.
Formerly Weapons of Mass Belief, now pruned down to Weapons, the Welsh five piece join the support crew to unleash their self-titled new album (Wicked Old Lady), showing that while the name may have been curtailed their cocktail of hard rock, punk rap, pop and politics remains as full blooded as ever.

You want riffs then check out the roiling punky Love Is Thunder, you want brooding try Last Place She Went Was The Ocean, feel in need of Cypress Hill/Eminem styled rap-rock then here’s Each Man Kills What He Loves The Most or The Thieves, or there’s piston pumping hardcore punk with Panic and Evanescence operatics with Requiem. And, then bundle everything together for the album’s centrepiece blasting Black Line Ninja. Could be a hard act to follow.

7.30pm. £10. Carling Academy 2

Monday October 23

Level 42

Come on, be honest, does anyone really still harbour lingering affection for Level 42’s 80s jazz funk and things like Lessons in Love, The Sun Goes Down, Running In The Family or Hot Water? Okay, then, so you’ll be pleased to learn that thumb slapping bassist Mark King has got back together with keyboardist Mike Lindup for the first time in over a decade, not just for the tour but also a new album, Retroglide (Universal) that looks to recreate the chemistry that produced twenty Top 40 hits and cash in on the soft rock revival

Fans will be happy to learn that nothing’s much changed. Unfortunately, it’s not aged well either. There’s nothing desperately bad about the poppy easy funk likes of The Way Back Home, All Around or Dive Into The Sun, it’s just that they sound so uninspired, songs that would have been album fillers back in their chart bothering days.

King’s voice and playing haven’t diminished, and if they held appeal then there’s no reason you won’t find them attractive now, but with the new material sounding flat, over indulged and lumpen, it’ll probably be a better gig for all concerned if they concentrate on past glories.

7.30pm. £22.50. Symphony Hall

Tuesday October 24

King Creosote

Kenny Anderson can’t have seen his Fife home much in recent months, seemingly on a never ending set of tours promoting KC Rules OK with the bittersweet nu-folk pop of such little gems as the skittish Boot Prints, a playful Jump At The Cats and the beguiling melancholia of I’ll Fly By The Seat Of My Pants and Locked Together. He has though found a few minutes to contribute to Plague Songs (4AD), a collection of recordings commissioned as part of a public art event recreating the Biblical flight from Egypt. Anderson gets to croak his way through the plague of frogs on the deceptively gentle sounding Relate The Tale while elsewhere the other visitations are handled by an illustrious set of fellow collaborators that include Laurie Anderson (death of livestock), Imogen Heap (locusts), Robert Wyatt (flies), a suitably melancholic Rufus Wainwright (death of firstborn) and, in cheerfully spare, gloomy Kurt Weill mood, Scott Walker taking care of the darkness.

7.30pm. £7. Carling Academy 2

Tuesday October 24

The Raconteurs

The long awaited album that brings together chums Brendan Benson and Jack White, augmented by bassist Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler on drums, Broken Boy Soldiers leans firmly more towards Benson’s Beatlesesque pop sensibilities (listen to the George Harrison meets The Raspberries of Hands) than White’s scuzzy roots blues, the overall effect sounding like it came out of some 70s tough-pop time capsule.

Steady, As She Goes borrows Joe Jackson’s walking Is She Really Going Out With Him? riff, chirping along like a lighter hearted Costello number, the ace title track single a surging cocktail of Led Zeppelin folk-rock complete with the Eastern colourings before giving way to the skewed fuzz power pop Intimate Secretary with its backwards drone and Sgt Pepperisms.

Together sees them as a sort of gospel tinged Elton circa Rocket Man before Level brings up the feral blues prowl, Store Bought Bones jabbers like a mad organ driven voodoo child and, skipping past Yellow Sun which sounds like they were messing about and forgot to turn the tape off, that leaves the lazy drunken sway of Call It A Day and the closing Blue Veins with its reverse tape intro and Jagger meets Lennon narcotic soul swamp blues. Stronger than Benson’s recent collection and a far more durable than the Stripes’ current offering, it threatens to provide a thunderingly brilliant live set. Let’s hope they prove more than just Raconteurists.

7.30pm. £17.50. W’hampton Civic Hall

Wed October 25

Andy Abraham

The X-Factor runner up makes a belated debut tour on the back of his The Impossible Dream (BMG) album, but at least he’s beaten Shayne Ward by a good few months. His soul pop recalling the likes of The Christians and Lighthouse Family, he’s got a decent voice and handles the constraints of having to produce an album that’s heavy on the covers with dignity and aplomb. He’s no Percy Sledge, but his version of When a Man Loves A Woman does the memory of the original justice while the required piano lounge inclusions of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, Me & Mrs Jones, The Greatest Love Of All, Unforgettable, When I Fall In Love and The Impossible Dream, are classily assured.

However, memories of Nat King Cole do sit oddly with the likes of the poppy disco of All Around The World and the overwrought soul pop on Sticky Situation where he seems to be heading more in the direction of John Parr. Once he’s contractually free to follow whatever his own inclinations may be, he could yet prove to be the show’s real winner.

 7.30pm. £25.50. Symphony Hall

Wed October 25

Kathryn Williams

She may not be working under major record label pressures to deliver to a timetable, but the Liverpudlian singer-songwriter’s clearly not shirking. She’s turned out an album a year since Little Black Numbers back in 2001, keeping up the output now with Leave To Remain (Caw). While hardly overproduced, unlike last year’s Over Fly Over, it’s a fuller sounding set, building on the core piano, cello guitar trio framework with woodwinds and strings along with the occasional dab of electronics.

Otherwise, it’s business as usual with her folk flavours tinted with the golden days of 60s American songwriter pop on sophisticated, intelligent, insightful and compassionate songs that address love and sadness, unwanted or self-imposed loneliness, and the yearnings for at least one night of happiness.

On Sandy L she adopts the persona of a woman who keeps company with those watching her on webcams, Stevie is a melancholic hymn to tragic poet Stevie Smith, while she weaves haunted, unexpected poetic images of jaundiced babies (Blue Onto You), drawings of lions (Let It Happen), effects pedals (Sustain Pedal), and a glass bottomed boat (er, Glass Bottom Boat) into tales of love embraced or invited in.

Muted and at times meandering, but consistently full of depth and insight, both her albums and her performances demand that you stop the chatter and let the voice, the playing and the songs seep under the skin. Why on earth would you not.

8pm. £12.50. Glee Club

Wed October 25

The Answer

The Zep, Free and AC/DC loving Irish quartet are back for yet another go round in the cause of debut album Rise (Albert). There’s nothing original going down here, but they’ve undeniably mastered the art of old school riff swaggering, complete with blistering guitar solos (the Zep-heavy Never Too Late even starts with one), driving beer drinking, skirt chasing rock n rolling (Come Follow Me, Into The Gutter, Leavin’ Today) and wailing bluesy rock (Memphis Water, Be What You Want).

With Preachin’ showing they’re also no slouches on the slide guitar, this is no frills, no fuss good time sweaty, hanging with the boys, dirty rock music like it used to be played. And thank heaven for that.

7.30pm. £6. Carling Academy 2

Wed October 25

SixNationState

The latest signing to Jeepster, the label that first discovered Snow Patrol and Belle & Sebastian, this rowdy Southampton quintet conjure thoughts of a bunch of Eastern European gypsies relocating to the Texas border and forming a mariachi punk band. Mazurka meets rawhide on their galloping debut single Fire, they pound through the sea shanty Taking Me Over and fuse Motorhead with Dolly Parton on Country Song. With a reputation for an even more frenzied live show, you’ll be needing a few gallons of cactus juice to keep up.

7.30pm. £5. Little Civic

Thursday October 26

The Young Knives

Emerging from the hotbed of indie rock that is, erm, Ashby de la Zouch sporting charity store tweeds, NHS glasses and sensible haircuts, the trio play angular art rock in the manner of early XTC, Syd Barrett and later Pulp, write articulate lyrics with a sense of intelligent wit, craft infectious melodies that borrow from punk and pomp in equal measure, and have a bassist called House of Lords.

Debut album Voices Of Animals And Men (Transgressive) is a splendid affair with its English everylad songs about girlfriend’s parents (She Was Attracted To - ‘you were screaming at your mum, while I was punching your dad’), office boredom (Part Timer), small town depression (Loughborough Suicide), death (Mystic Energy), tailors (erm, Tailors) and how basically how life’s still a shoddy affair no matter where you go (Tremblings of Trails).

Although there’s falsetto warbling moments when he sounds disturbingly like Feargal Sharkey (notably so on Weekends and Bleak Days), singer Henry Dartnall more generally comes across as a provincial pop mix of Damon Albarn and Andy Gill. They can certainly cut it.

Doing warm up duties you’ll find the choppy handclap pop of The Grates, an Australian trio fronted by Patience Hodgson whose Science Is Golden (Dew Process) single should get a few legs jerking around the floor, and Bristolian five piece Fortune Drive. They’re taking time out from putting finishing touches to the debut album to plug the Recent Advances Vol II (Shy) single, a bass throbbing rock n soul tale of those nights when you just don’t when to stop.

7.30pm. £8. Carling Academy 2

Wed October 25

Kate Rusby

Maybe it’s the way she sings with an undisguised Yorkshire accent with its distinctive vowels, maybe it’s her sparkling sense of humour and down to earth nature, but whatever the reason Rusby’s easily the most engaging, everyday figure in the current folk revival crop of young performers. She’s also by far the best of the bunch with an earthy pure voice, heartfelt delivery and a faultless choice of material that spins the traditional with a modern sensibility without overbalancing either.

Two years on from the disarmingly wonderful Underneath The Stars, she’s currently touring The Girl Who Couldn’t Fly (Pure), another marvellous collection of self-penned and traditional numbers. Aided and abetted as always by hubbie and musical partner John McCusker, it’s uncut English folk music, spinning from her own break up waltzing lullaby No Names and the heart yearning The Lark through confident arrangements of such trad tunes as the gambling as metaphor for sex The Game of All Four, a rousing Mary Blaize and the gently beguiling Bonnie House of Airlie.

Were there ever any doubt in regard to how well tuned she is into the folk tradition, then her own faux epic Elfin Knight should settle matters, sounding as if plucked from some ancient rustic songbook and delivered in clatteringly joyful fine fettle.

Though it may still be a bit early to include Little Jack Frost in the set, the night should afford a goodly representation of the album alongside past material on the lines of Cruel, Who Will Sing Me Lullabies? and the superbly buttered Underneath The Stars itself. If you’re lucky she may even throw in her fine version of Richard Thompson’s Withered and Died. Close your eyes and whatever the weather’s been, you’ll be swept away to a sepia postcard landscape of village chapels and sunsets on the green on the wings of music as simple and as lovely as an English country summer's day.

8pm. £16.50. Warwick Arts Centre

Friday October 27

Lordi

In the most unpredictable Eurovision Song Contest since an Israeli transvestite won the day, a Finnish heavy metal band who dress up in leather and Slipknot style monster masks and make-up (even when not actually performing) snatched the prize away from the usual collection of emotive ballads, cheesy pop and dreary odes to traditional musical culture with their self-penned anthem Hard Rock Hallelujah.

Quite how seriously they take themselves it’s hard to say, but it’s hard to listen to their The Arockalypse (Sony) album without grinning at the earnest recycling of death metal guttural growls, Alice Cooper, AC/DC and Kiss that informs such amusingly titled numbers as The Kids Who Wanna Play With The Dead, Bringing Back The Balls To Rock, The Chainsaw Buffet, They Only Come Out At Night and, oh joy, The Night Of The Loving Dead.

There’s nothing remotely original here and it’s so bound to old school hard rock cliches that you can imagine them doing duelling guitar solos from atop of the speaker stacks. As you might expect from seeing them on Eurovision, the live show is suitably over the unsubtle top with horror movie theatrics, pyrotechnics and all the head banging poses you could wish for. Good cartoon metal fun, then home to bed for an Ovaltine then.

 7pm. £10. Carling Academy

Friday October 27

Kenny Rogers

Hard to image I know, but middle of the road easy listening country man Rogers once fronted a psychedelic rock band back in late 60s before finding mainstream countrified pop acceptance with Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town and Something’s Burning. Since then he’s steadfastly clung to that audience, churning out a big hot every few years or so with things like Lucille, Coward Of The County, We’ve Got Tonight and Islands In The Stream.

Making his first UK visit in seven years, he’s still going relatively strong, new album Water & Bridges (Capitol), a perfectly acceptable collection of middle of the road country pop and ballads, most with some sort of swelling chorus, that deal with growing old, drifting relationships, finding love and being a man.

What’s surprising is to find him slipping in a handful of the sort of social comment tracks that will raise an eyebrow among his Middle America audiences. Someone Is Me paints a fairly depressing picture or urban decay and a society too self-absorbed to care, The Last Ten Years (Superman) offers a wider picture of America flushing itself down the toilet amid Presidential scandals, tv reality shows, and corporate corruption. while, for all its sentimentality, My Petition sets a list of things wrong with society against American complacency that’d rather watch the ball game than gets drugs off the street. He’s clearly not ready to settle down to a life of Nashville pipe and slippers just yet.

Having only recently played his farewell tour, wouldn’t you know it but Don Williams is back again for another shot of his laid back greatest hits. As a sort of latter day Jim Reeves, he’s had a fair few too though it would be nice, just once, if he also threw in a reminder of his own days back in the folk rock 60s when he was part of the Pozo Seco Singers recording such great songs as Look What You Done and Excuse Me Dear Martha.

Rounding out the package in, it must be said, rather more attractive form, is Rita Coolidge. Formely Mrs Kris Kristofferson, she’s enjoyed her own spotlight with a string of warm soulful, r&b tinged country albums occupying a similar spot on the shelf to Bonnie Raitt, interpreting songs by the likes of Boz Scaggs, Van Morrison, Guy Clark, Leonard Cohen and, of course, Kristofferson.

Although she was probably at her finest back in the days of The Lady’s Not For Sale and Anytime Anywhere, covering songs like Donut Man, My Crew, I Don’t Want To Talk About It and A Woman Left lonely, and last had a hit 23 years ago with the bond theme All Time High, she’s continued to turn out quality albums, most currently the just released And So Is Love that finds her bluesing her way through Cry Me A River, Come Rain Or Come Shine and We're All Alone.

7.30pm. £37.50. NEC

Friday October 27

Rob Sharples

A new acoustic singer-songwriter guitarist from Bath, steeped in the influences of Nick Drake, John Martyn, Jeff Buckley and Bert Jansch, Sharples is starting to widen his gigging horizons now he’s signed to Marrakesh Records. Tonight’s gigs erves as a showcase preview for his upcoming debut EP, So The Story Goes.

As you might surmise from the influences, it’s bucolic folk, Sharples’ voice soft and leafy, his guitar augmented by cello and violin to conjure images of summery English glades and rippling streams. It’s not readily immediate, but the title track with its tumbling fingerpicking is something of a grower and while the uptempo Scratching Out The Absolute lets the side down, the haunting cello enhanced No Grand Gestures and The Detail Between Us, where he calls to mind the easy warmth of Ezio, should ensure his first visit to these parts won’t be his last.

8pm. £7. Glee Club

Saturday October 28

While & Matthews

The UK’s answer to the folk harmonies of the McGarrigles, Chris and Julie are a fixture on the folk circuit but really deserve to be playing much bigger halls than the pub rooms that currently provide their staple gigging diet. Next year sees the 10th anniversary of their work as a duo following the departure from the Albion Band and to mark the occasion they’ve put together The Best Of (Fat Cat), a 15 track collection culled from their five studio albums to date and, to delight newcomers and collectors alike, Thorn Upon The Rose from the now deleted Ballads EP.

It’s a wonderful introduction and career snapshot with songs that have become audience favourites over the years, ranging from uplifting tales of love (Walk The Line) and childhood (The Light In My Mother’s Eye) to broken relationships (Shadow Of My Former Self), from the playful Class Reunion and the optimistic vision of a better life in Westward to the heartachingly serious concerns of domestic violence (Generation Game), cancer (the dulcimer coloured Steady Breathing) and the decline of the steel industry (Seven Years of Rust).

It speaks volumes about the quality of their material, that this could easily have been a double disc and still not had room for everything you owe it to yourself to hear. Doubtless the tracks here will form the basis for the set list, but hopefully they’ll find the room for a lot more too.

 8pm. £9. Red Lion, Kings Heath

Saturday October 28


The Long Blondes

A Sheffield boy girl five piece indie outfit with a love of Blondie flavoured 70s rock pop and a touch of Chrissie Hynde to Kate Jackson’s vocals, they take time out from recording the debut album to lend a helping hand to Once And Never Again (Rough Trade), the fizzy tumbling joy of youth follow up to their Top 30 debut Weekend Without Makeup.

They share the bill with Scottish labelmates 1990s, an electric rock n soul trio who’s upcoming You’re Supposed To Be My Friend single should show whether those Stones, The Velvets, The Fall, The Modern Lovers comparisons are justified.

 7.30pm. £8. Carling Academy 2

Sun October 29

Sandi Thom

It will, of course, have been impossible to have avoided hearing I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (with Flowers In My Hair), a catchy musical era conflating single that went from the Scottish singer-songwriter’s Tooting basement webcast to the No 1 spot in the charts. Albeit after previously nibbling the lower end of the Top 50 prior to the stunt and a major label deal.

Now, though, comes the tougher job of persuading people there’s more to her than a good news story and a catchy country pop flavoured single that sounds suspiciously like Kevin Johnson’s Rock ‘n’ Roll (I Gave You The Best Years Of My Life).

Despite the album emulating the single’s success, the long term prospects look like being something of an uphill struggle given the fact Thom’s so desperately determined to create her own 70s folk-pop timewarp where record stores are full of people lining up to buy Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon albums. That and the fact that she tends to come on like a slightly more countrified but less interesting K.T. Tunstall.

Not that the album’s not a pleasant listen. When Horsepower Meant What It Said is another catchy, shuffling barnyard boogie lament for the good old days, Sunset Borderline a Nashville honky tonk ballad, What If I’m Right all handclappy girl power lite and Superman a dance floor waltz love song while the Carly-like Time shows her in dreamily twee frame of mind. For the moment she’s still a Radio 2 audience darling, whether a second album will sustain the romance remains to be seen.

7.30pm. £10. Carling Academy 2

Sun October 29

Enter Shikari
 

A hardcore/screamo trance metal outfit from St Albans dedicated to making a brutal, shouty, ripped throat noise but with dance electronics rippling behind the guitar assault, they’re not easy to ignore, a fact underlined by their sky crushing appearance at the Download Festival. Following their download only track Mothership of a couple of months back, they’re releasing OK, Time For Plan B as a physical single to tie in with the tour.

They’re supported by :(, a punctuation minded Aberdeen quartet whose First Blood mini-album (MustDestroy) charts a similar cross genre path with techno bleeps and throaty guitars, showing postrock inclinations on Pre-Emoticons and whipping up a playful romp with live favourite Heartache of Soccer Mums. Even so, a less than essential gig.

7pm. £6. Bar Academy

Sun October 29

Sohodolls

Following on from Stripper, Maya von Doll, Ana Bonbon, Toni Sailor and Gavin Jay return with new single No Regrets (Filthy Pretty), another slice of electro-glam pop riddled with sleaze and a spoken come hither promise that guarantees to leave you with your trousers round your ankles and your hands tied behind your back.

7.30pm. £6. Little Civic
 

Monday October 30

Bat For Lashes

Both the name of the all girl trio and the nom de music of Pakistan-born, Brighton based singer-songwriter Natasha Khan, her debut album Fur And Gold (Echo) has been critically hailed as one of the year’s best. Deservedly so too. Taking inspiration from fairy tales and nursery rhymes with gothic folk songs of dark desires and disturbing dreams veined with animal and natural imagery and coloured by strings, harpsichords and percussion, the spare mood is decidedly cobwebbed and pagan.

Both in Khan’s swooping vocals and in the context of the ethereal, cinematic music she’s understandably drawn comparisons to Kate Bush and Bjork, (both of whom she channels on Sarah) though obscurantists might want to add witchywood duo Pooka and Patrick Wolf to the reference map while the brief drum intro and spoken passages of What’s A Girl To Do betray a fondness for Spector and the Shangri-Las.

Organic, fragile, dramatic, mystical and stunningly atmospheric, it shows her naked and vulnerable caught in the open by angst on Sad Eyes, celebratory and cantering in the woodland moonlight on the military beat, mist enshrouded Horse and I and awestruck by the free spirit of the natural world in Bat’s Mouth. But there’s dread and danger in their wilderness too. Just listen to the deceptively uptempo Sarah

It’s an intoxicating musical feats, shimmering with New Age clouds on Tahiti, going folk-tribal with Prescilla’s handclaps beat and mediaeval textures and walking through the ice-encrusted piano tinkling, shaker shuffling musical landscape of The Wizard, before the album closes in sinister symphonic splendour with I Saw A light, a song that includes two dead people in the back of a car. What better way to spend the night before Halloween.

8pm. £7. Glee Club

Monday October 30

Grace

Tipped as a name to watch for next year, recently signed to EMI this London five piece cite such names as Bowie, Blur, The Cure, The Killers, Nirvana, U2, and Ben Folds among influences, at least some of which (along with a bit of Coldplay) you may detect on upcoming debut single Stand Still (Gracious). A bit of a fast/slow anthemic wannabe that builds to a soaring crescendo before a quiet fade it bodes well, especially in the company of tracks like the indie urgent rocking Wonderful (where JP Jones gets to show his yearning, short of breath vocals), moody big music Explode, their orchestral ballad Sleep All Day and, arguably the stand out, the stadium friendly chorus hook of Sleep Like A Stone. Worth catching them early.

 7.30pm. £5. Bar Academy

Monday October 30


Metric

Toronto electropop with Emily Haines’s feathery sweet female voice counterpointed by Sonic Youth style blasting guitars and chugging rhythms, Metric inevitably summon thoughts of PJ Harvey in places, but they also filter in rawkus CBGBs punk with Monster Hospital, shades of krautrock on Poster of a Girl and bubbling Gallic ambience to The Police and the Private.

Much of this is punching, sometimes squally rock, banging it out in fierce form with Patriarch on a Vespa, James Shaw ripping out a screaming guitar solo for Empty and prickling the nerve endings with Too Little Too Late but always keeping an eye on the melodic side of things, particularly so on the hardpop of Handshakes and the fragile piano and fuzz moodpiece of Ending Start.

Likely to build a bigger wall of noise live as riffs are cranked higher and cacophony’s given a free rein to match the often venomous undercurrent of the lyrics with Glass Ceiling the one you’ll be calling for as a repeat encore

Once upon a time Ginger Rogers had to re-do a tap dance scene so many times that the camera man asked whether she’d changed out of her white shoes into some red ones. She hadn’t. It turned out she’d danced so hard they were covered in blood. Such is the story behind Blood Red Shoes, the name under which Brighton guitarist Laura-Mary and drummer Steven operate.

 If the set up sounds a bit White Stripes in reverse, upcoming single You Bring Me Down (Drowned In Sound) doesn’t go too far out of its way to dispel the comparison, though it’s a little less garagey and her voice is a bit sweeter and snottier than Jack’s.

Lamacq championed Bournemouth boys Air Traffic didn’t overly impress with debut single Just Abuse Me, sounding not unlike early Supergrass with a barrelling piano and romping guitars. And matters don’t improve with the follow up Never Even Told Me Her Name (EMI), the Supergrass reference points now with a smidgen of added Jam smears on a song that simply doesn’t go anywhere and leaves nothing to mark its passing.

7.30pm. £6. Little Civic

Tuesday October 31

Simple Kid

Stressed out by all the New Dylan hype, Ciaran McFeely dropped out of sight, working in a video store and watching old movies to recharge the batteries. He’s back now though, tipping his hat to movie tradition by titling his new album Simple Kid 2 (Country Gentleman).

Opening with the ramshackle back porch whoops and bottle neck of lil’ King Kong, clearly not a lot’s changed in the interim, the sound still scuffed lo fi hip hop/folk-blues beats in the early Beck manner with banjo and acoustic guitar occasionally fleshed out with organ drones and, on Mommy n Daddy, a krautrock rhythm.

The bluesy A Song of Stone, a freaky psychedelic Serontonin and the sonically messy Love’s An Enigma (the latter pair both musing on the nature of attraction), add orchestral arrangements, but for the most this is your basic bedsit hick with a guitar stuff, even talking about staying holed up away from the buzz and glare on Old Domestic Cat, a track likely to set those Dylan references off again, only with a few Nick Drake nods thrown in.

It’s all very autumnal, but despite the charms of songs like the leafy acoustic You and the loose-limbed Lennon swampiness of The TwentySomething, you suspect McFeely won’t have to be overduly worried about being bombarded by tabloid slavering next big thing attentions this time around.

He’s supported by local lad Chris Tye, serving reminder of debut album Somewhere Down The Line (Headwrecker). Pegged to themes of home and change, it’s wears its influences like a badge of honour; Like Wild Fire charged with Van Morrison, the beautiful Come Undone is haunted by both Paul Simon and Nick Drake, Sidesteps nodding to early Dylan and Beautiful Morning coloured with tones of an ambient John Martyn. Blessed with a soft Buckleyesque voice and a guitar style than calls to mind the work of Davy Graham and Bert Jansch, the ‘new Ed Harcourt’ headlines start here.

7.30pm. £5. Barfly

Tuesday October 31

The Paddingtons

The Hull punk pop three chord thrashters have gone from strength to strength since the release of debut album First Comes First, even if quite a lot of it calls to mind the barricades storming pop of The Alarm on the likes of guitars ringing Panic Attack, 50 to a £, and Worse For Wear. Elsewhere Loser and All Right In The Morning show they listened to the Pistols and Clash along the way too, but it’s the full throttle teenage rushes of big shouty, bounce around fizzing rock n roll that’s currently helping them scale the heights.

Opening up will be emerging Coventry trio The Enemy. Variously likened to Oasis and Kasabian, they recently signed to the resurrected famed Stiff label for whom they debut with 40 Days & 40 Nights, a track that rattles along in 60s British garage rock style but also veins it with a nod to the city’s Two Tone heritage with an undercurrent hint of reggae rhythms.

7.30pm. £10. Wulfrun Hall