Birmingham live music and gig guide

Monday September 6
The Mooney Suzuki

They may be named in tribute to founder Can members Malcom Mooney and Holger Czukay, but you’ll find no krautrock influences buzzing around this nunmch if NYC retro garage rockers. Slogging around the circuit for the past few years, things are starting to pay off with the former art school students, with frontman Sammy James Junior recently co-writing the title track to School Of Rock which the band featured on the soundtrack. They arrive here in the wake of the Alive & Amplified (Columbia) album, wearing their Kinks, Stones, Yardbirds and Who influences emblazoned on their sleeves, melding old school Brit R&B with Staxy soul and the dumb garage rock of the MC5 on the likes of Primitive Condition, Legal High, the boogie woogie New York Ladies and the inevitably strutting Hot Sugar. Titles like Messin’ In The Dressin’ Room, Loose ‘n’ Juicy and Shake That Bush Again (nothing to do with GW) should give a rough idea where they’re coming from in terms of school singalongs, though Naked Lady will probably fill in the picture for those slow on the uptake. If the garage boom still has any fuel left in the tank, this lot should safely burn a few miles of tarmac.

7.30pm, £7, Carling Academy 2,
Mike Davies
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Wednesday September 8
The Dears

Blazing in from Canada for their debut UK tour, The Dears look set to ignite here too with their soulful orchestral pop, providing a soundtrack for a lost summer with new single We Can Have It (Bella Union), frontman Murray Lightman starting out in a curled up ball and slowly swelling to the sort of majesty you might concoct in a cross of Babybird, Pulp and Aztec Camera, while the epic Summer of Protest occupies similar swirly spooked psychedelia territory to The Church. Armed with a formidable reputation for their lives shows, they’ll be previewing the upcoming No Cities Left, an album that’s already had had critics back home talking in terms of album of the year.

8.30pm, £1, Jug of Ale.
Mike Davies
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Saturday September 11
Ella Guru

An eight piece Liverpool band rather than some female singer-songwriter, the name tips the hat to Beefheart and former Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black puts in an appearance on aptly titled debut The First Album (Banana) reading the closing track Base Is The Spine (which after a few seconds fades back in with caressing hidden lullaby On A Beach). Which might lead you to imagine something avant garde and difficult rather than the hushed, barely there druggy sighing acoustic miniaturism that actually lurks within. Fronted by the whispery toned John Yates on vocals and coloured with ukulele, pedal steel, cornet and double bass, it drifts through dreamy pastures of shimmering melodies and hushed harmonies like conversations held at the back of an old church. Titles such as I Got My Mojo Working and This Is My Rock n Roll don't actually sound remotely like they suggest, though My Favourite Punk Tune does, preferring instead to flow along the same skittering desert twilight path as Augustus Golden (imagine Belle & Sebastian singing Giant Sand) and the intimate cinematic moods of the lovely Park Lake Speakers and Oh God with its Spanish sounding guitar. Here's to the second.

8pm, £5, Jug of Ale.
Mike Davies
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Saturday September 11/Wednesday September 15
Rush

Unlikely as it may seem for charter members of pseudo intellectual progressive stadium pomp rock, veteran Canadian power trio Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee and Neil Peart have just released Feedback (Atlantic), a mini album of r&b covers! The first time they’ve recorded anyone else’s work, it’s not as odd as it may seem, their choices paying tribute to the artists that were formative influences back in the late 60s. And for ears who find their lengthy workouts, drum solos and interminable epics hard going, it’s rather good, featuring as it does succinct, stripped down and suitably raw versions of Summertime Blues (by way of Blue Cheer), The Who’s The Seeker, a brooding metal veined For What It’s Worth, a rage through Love’s Seven And Seven Is, Lifeson’s guitar ripping out on a blistering Crossroads (though Lee’s high pitched vocal sounds curiously at odds) and a brace of Yardbirds classics, Heart Full of Soul and Shapes of Things. Assuming they don’t fiddle too much with the 30th anniversary set they’ve been doing on the US leg, you can expect to find three or four of the covers making their way to the stage while, given it’s their first visit here in over a decade, it’s pretty much guaranteed to feature such lifetime favourites as Tom Sawyer, Bastille Day, The Spirit of Radio, YYZ, The Trees and a couple of representatives from the recentish Vapor Trails album. Plus, of course, the drum solo. With a stage set to match their sound and pretensions, no prog-head is going home disappointed.

7.30pm, £32.50/£29.50, NEC.
Mike Davies
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Saturday September 11
P J Harvey

It’s back to basics then, Polly J’s latest album, Uh Huh Her (Island), a considerably starker, more abrasive affair than the relatively accessible Stories From the City, Stories From The Sea' far more in tune with her earlier work. Shuddering staccato rhythms, prowling guitars, bluesy rhythms with Harvey’s vocal variously predatory and whisperingly bruised, making Patti Smith seem like Kylie. Playing everything but the drums herself, it’s an unsettling, sore wound of a record (generally fuelled by the break up of a relationship) that sets outs its stall from the get go with unconcealed disgust that pours from The Life And Death of Mr Badmouth, spitting venom on the ragged Who The F**k?, wailing blues on Cat On The Wall and fuzzing into distortion on recent soul baring desperate for love single The Letter.It’s not all musical laceration though by any means. Pocket Knife is the sort of spooked folk (indeed, much of lyrical output here has trad folk influences) Nick Cave might find unsettling, You Come Through shimmers with occidental glockenspiel, The Desperate Kingdom of Love is a barely there acoustic murmur and The Slow Drug gives a humid clammy sheen to its come down sickness. And if the introspective mood (the word ‘me’ crops up everywhere) is wreathed in emotional darkness, the closing The Darker Days Of Me And Him (introed by the sound of seagulls) offers a declaration of recovery from the wreckage as she sings "I'll pick up the pieces, I'll carry on somehow". Whether this hint of light will make its way into the live show is another matter, and if she remains in this stripped down, raw-edged frame of mind it’ll be interesting to see if she’s arranged the earlier material to suit, but either way you can pretty much be certain that neither you nor she are going to walk out feeling anything less than emotionally drained.

7.30pm, £17.50, Carling Academy.
Mike Davies
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Named for the Chinese uprising and fronted by Tennessee born vocalist Nathan Brown, the London boys have been variously aligned with the Verve, Cooper Temple Clause, JJ72 and the less heavier moments of Muse. They’re back on the road giving a hand to new single Code Red, their first to be released via Mercury, and previewing material from next year’s album. The seeds of rebellion are growing quite nicely.

New Jersey punk cut from the Green Day cloth and sewn with big patches of hook riddled melodies, raging riffs and liberal amount of teen angst, the boys stop off during their current swathe of gigs to rip the heart out of new album Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge (Reprise). A impressive clutch of three minute pop explosions that also trawl in emo and goth influences, recent single I’m Not Okay ramps through the roof with effervescent abandon while the likes of the moodier (and at times strangely Sparks-like) staccato You Know What They Do To Guys Like Us In Prison, an urgent soaring Helena, The Ghost of You’s slow fast quiet loud balladry, a metal riffing Thank You For The Venom and a vaguely early Queening The Jet Set Life’s Gonna Kill You all spread out the range bubbling through their self-declared 'violent, unsafe pop music.' They have black hair, black clothes and black humour. The gig though will definitely be bouncing into the red.

Having exploded on the country crossover scene at the age of 13 with Blue, Rimes has long since shaken off the novelty child star label, racking up a steady stream of hits (though less here than in the US), all of which were collected on the recent Best Of and then repackaged with dance mixes for the, er, Remixed, reissue but minus several less ‘upbeat’ tracks Blue, Crazy, You Light Up My Life and Elton John duet Written In The Stars among them.
If you’re lucky you’ll not be getting the club Latino version of Can’t Fight The Moonlight and the chances of Ronan Keating popping in to warble along with her for Last Thing on My Mind seem slim, but otherwise you can be fairly sure of exactly what you’re getting with her pre-packaged join the dots and forget the emotion pop country. Pray to God though that someone has the courage to tell her never to sing Over The Rainbow ever again.
Support comes from Brit popboy Mark Joseph who’ll be desperately trying to persuade audiences that debut album Scream is more than bog standard Oasis blues and ballads with some Elton-ish piano and a vague suggestion of Bon Jovi and/or The Who. It isn’t.

Latest Americana messiahs, while latest album Post To Wire (El Cortez) takes its title from the term for a horse that leads a race right up to the finishing line, it's the losers like the down and out from whom they took their name that occupy frontman Willy Vlautin's thoughts.
With a cracked yearning and dusty voice that fuses Lou Reed, Gram Parsons and Miracle Legion's Mark Mulcahy and musical sensibilities that embrace Uncle Tupelo, American Music Club and The Band with pedal steel, they inhabit a landscape of desert towns and backroads populated by ruined lives.
Indeed, it plays out like a mini narrative with three spoken postcards providing updates on the lead character, Walter, who's travelling across the mid west having pawned best friend Pete's tv and his folks' wedding rings, encountering an array of colourful characters, getting beaten up and trying to figure a way to pay the debts he left behind.
Between these are snapshots of Walt's experiences, spun out like Raymond Carver stories with their richness of place and character and set to songs that veer between the gunslinging Sprinsgteen-esque guitar rock n roll of Montgomery Park, the twang n burr country rocking title track duet with Deborah Kelly and the stripped down speak-sing acoustic ache of Broken Hearts where two shattered hearts may just make one whole.
And if there's desolation seeping from the pores of Hallway, The Longer You Wait and the broken lives documented on Always The Ride, there's also a sense of connection - however brief - filtering through the likes of Polaroid where the bartender pins a photo on the wall and time is frozen in a moment of happiness, Barely Losing where the couple walk the railway tracks at 5am in a moment of calm between the storm gathering around or Allison Johnson with its hopes of a family future.
Amid tales of loss and absence, of loneliness and disappointment, rising up from the squalls of electric guitars on Hallway or filtering through the cracks in the quiet of the closing instrumental Valediction, there is a chink of light seeping from the hearts of those who hang on to the hope, or as on the broodingly intense and oppressive seven minute Williamette, a missing brother's leather boots, horse shoe chain and unsent letters, that perhaps somehow you can sit on the banks of a polluted river and, just maybe, piece together lives in a better time, a better place. Pretty damn stunning really.
That alone would be incentive to form an orderly queue as soon as possible, but to coincide with their biggest UK tour yet, the label’s reissuing both the more abrasive punk sounding third album Lost Son, and Post to Wire’s immediate predecessor Winnemucca. Though a more stripped down affair, it shares its country feel and lyrical concerns as Vlautin wraps his dusty tones around the likes of the Gram Parsons-like pedal steel coloured Winner’s Casino, a wearily drawled out Santiam, the skeletal feedback drenched Patty’s Retreat and 5 Degrees Below Zero, a road/leaving/observation song that richly deserves to be rescued from cult obscurity and paraded before the masses.

Now based in Oslo, on the evidence of the scuzzy beat hop of recent single How About That?, Gisli could probably best be described as Iceland’s answer to Beck. However, the same titled album (EMI) displays more colours than that. Certainly listening to the guitar pop bounce of the self-deprecating Straight To Hell you can see why he cites Eels among his heroes, but then Go Get ‘em Tiger is beatnik hip hop about "a horrible day with Gareth Gates" while The Day It All Went Wrong suggests a folksier Dinosaur Jr, Can You Make Me Right is scratchy beats, I’m Trying all weary Americana and the witty Worries is simple acoustic guitar and rough throat strum. Veined with a deadpan sensibility about the mundane evident on the slow lollopping pop of The Day It All Went Wrong or the woozy binge drinking number Passing Out, it’s evident he has the humour to leaven and misery while wrapping it all up in naggingly catchy tunes. Quite possibly the best thing to come out of the land of the midnight sun since The Wannadies.

Liverpool’s being particularly prolific at the moment, churning out all manner of retro rock contenders. Snappily casual, these boys (and female sax player Abi Harding) cast a rather wider net than most for their trawl through the influences. Debut album Who Killed...The Zutons (Deltasonic) variously hints at David Byrne (Nightmare Part II), Zappa (Zuton Fever) and on Pressure Point and You Will Won’t You the psychedelic era of The Temptations while also throwing country (Confusion, Railroad), vaudeville (Remember Me), bluegrass (Moons and Horror Shows), and voodoo rockabilly (Havana Gang Brawl) into the mix for good measure. They didn’t win the Mercury Music Prize, but on the evidence of the album and growing live reputation reports of their death are likely to be exaggerated for some time to come.

The old school rock n roll revival continues, with this hairy Harrow four piece following in the steps of Young Heart Attack with their unabashed nod to the rifferama metal of AC/DC amply in evidence on new single High On Hate (Island) while Get ‘Em Off shows they’ve spent something of a misspent you closeted with Thin Lizzy albums too. Throw in a few Who reference points and Motorhead pile driving boogie, clog the place with nicotine and beer fumes and the smell of old sweat and off you go then.

Give us a break! Four spotty youths who’ve barely stumbled out of puberty trying to play Chuck Berry meets the Beach Boys rock n roll with new single That Girl is bad enough, but a cover of She Loves You that sounds like the 4th year school band playing the end of term dance! Named for Michael J Fox’s character in Back To The Future and spawned from the same stable as Busted (for whom Tom Fletcher co-wrote many of the hits), they’ve clearly been locked in a room and forced to listen to their grandparents collection of 60s pop vinyl and Bay City Rollers singles. The outfit’s debut album, Room On The Third Floor, is inoffensive clean cut but hormonal tweenpop with proper guitars, choruses and bounce along tunes for ears who’ve never encountered the like of Cliff, Herman’s Hermits, Monkees and their like. With a string of No 1s already under their belt and 10 year old girls going bonkers and plastering their walls with poster pin-ups, this relatively small gig feels like a warm up for the undoubted inevitable NEC shows and will surely be bursting at the seams with impressionable moppets who think they’ve discovered the future of pop music rather than its past.

While third album Tyrannosaurus Hives (Polydor) isn’t quite up to the same snuff as its predecessors, the Swedish retro garage rockers seem to have largely avoided the slump that’s overtaken many of their similarly minded contemporaries. If some touchstones remain evident, Walk Idiot Walk a blatant Who lift for example, they’ve also ordered in few more take away influences, so that A Little More For Little You is handclappy bubblegum pop with a razor guitar, Diabolic Scheme is jabbering fractured blues-punk, See Through Head a roiling blend of surf-punk and art rock that sounds like Devo after a few too many speed chasers while Too Timing Touch And Broken Bones slaps the Monkees’ Stepping Stone riff over a Stooges slab of dumb body crashing. Whether they’ll be stepping out in their sartorial white jackets and ties remains to be see, but with anything that breaks the 3 minute mark is pretty much the band equivalent of an epic, you can pretty much be sure that this is going to fast, loud and very noisy.

Still looking for the major break, the Birmingham singer-songwriter gears up for another knock on the doors with a follow up to last year’s Burned By The Wire single. Backed with twin acoustic guitars and building to embrace a full band, Dear Friend (Dust) is a wistful reflection on an ending relationship that, while it will inevitably still prompt those Simon Fowler comparisons with his catch in the throat dusty voice, more specifically conjures thoughts of vintage Paul McCartney. Which can’t be a bad thing.
Twinned with live favourite An Englishman Abroad, an amusing ironic take on the national pastime of xenophobia set to a vague marching beat, a trad folk melody line and a run down of the typical Brits abroad menu, there’s a definite hint of Robyn Hitchcock lurking around the fringes. Chances are that this decidedly intimate gig will also throw in some other new material being worked up for a second album some time next year.

He shares the night with equally underrated fellow local bard Chris Tye whose most recent demos show a lessening of the Dylan flavours and, on Chemical Cloud and the haunting come down bluesy sadness of Usually I’m Fine a deepening of the Jeff Buckley/Nick Drake side of things while the yearning No Sing? would add lustre to any David Gray admirer’s collection.

They may be a relatively big name in Canada but Nova Scotia’s answer to Brian Wilson mean precious little here. That should change though with their fourth album and first UK release, The Night And I Are Still So Young (Transistor) and Jason MacIsaac and Andrew Watt’s lushly orchestrated symphonic sunny pop.
Although patently modelled on Surf’s Up (In The Morning is classic Beach Boys), the five piece (aided and abetted here by 25 other musicians) are far from mere copyists, salting their three minute 60s flavoured dreamy melodies and harmonies with quiet melancholia, though even something called Unseasonably Sad manages to splash itself all over with the smell of warm oil on sandy bodies. There’s a tang of acid to He Heard His Song, a pure tab of 60s West Coast, while Mother Dear dances round the ballroom with a swirl of piano and lace that the Polyphonic Spree would kill to wear and both the liquid air title track and Try Telling That To My Baby soar from the very roof of the Brill building. Gorgeous stuff and while they couldn’t get the full orchestra into the gig even if they could afford it, chances are they’ll still manage to fill the place with clouds of pure pop joy.
Providing the group’s female voice is Ruth Minnikin who’ll also be taking a turn in the support spotlight in something of a reunion with brother Gabriel. Formerly the creative axis of Americana outfit The Guthries, the band split up around a year ago with Gabe relocating to Manchester while Ruth stayed back home in the States, and both pursuing solo careers. She released a self-titled own label live five track EP, evocative of the early McGarrigles or Iris DeMent with its combination of childlike innocence and emotional yearning but also hinting at the darker undercurrents of Gillian Welch, the lilting Dono Wertho Mexico and the catchily sad This Heavy Heart particular highlights. Again through his own label, her brother’s gone the full album hog with Hard Feelings (sis helping out on backing vocals), his stentorian baritone variously conjuring comparisons to Brad Roberts from Crash Test Dummies, Nick Cave, and Leonard Cohen, sounding like he's lived several lifetimes longer than his thirty years on his melancholic but melodic songs of loss, misery and finding you're out of tea.
This tour will be the first time they’ve shared a stage since going their separate ways, and promises to draw on songs from both their albums as well as picking through some Guthries favourites too.

Round these parts not too recently, the Gibraltar boys put in another appearance following the release of their epic emo single The River and the imminent arrival of the Cultura (Albert) album which sets out their stall to good effect as they marry the sort of punishing riffs you’d expect from the likes of Pantera and Alice in Chains with the rhythmic and melodic Moorish and Arabic colours of their heritage. With the album’s guitar flurry opener Individio setting the pace and La Ultima Hora laying out the chant undertones, there’s some inevitable axe grandstanding that’s likely to over extend come the live solos, but even when they’re doing the standard gravel gargle vocal routines or letting the air guitars off the hook on things like The Only Ones and World’s On Fire, it’s clear they’re a cut above the norm, with the acoustic ballad Numb suggesting there’s a platinum AOR stadium ballad single waiting in their future.

Walsall’s latest claim to pop cred (with a bit of Birkenhead thrown in), the five piece cheerily describe their music as “a big sound with someone in the middle of it screaming their heart out.” Others use lines like “the sound of the future”, “majestic” and “arguably the best new band in the country.”
The reality is that debut album The Silent Hours (Polydor) is a solid collection of classic English guitar rock packing all the big themes into three minute pop songs that embrace orchestral flurries and spare atmospherics alike. Within their vast soundscapes, you’ll hear The Who and Teardrop Explodes loud and clear on the rocking along Forgotten, Just Want To Live calls to mind a meeting of the minds between The Verve and Stone Roses while isn’t that a shadow of ELO peeping through Step Into The Light?
Steeped in lovelorn melancholia on the likes of Close My Eyes, Coming Down and the dreamy epic that is Lost (though it does sound a bit like a slower version of Del Amitri’s Nothing Ever Happens , favouring rainy suburban afternoons over sunny days on the beach, they have the emotional vistas to complement their widescreen sound, Jon Winter’s guitar chiming in perfect sympathy with Steven Bayley’s bruised vocals. With recent single Elevation cementing their elevation to the year’s rock firmament is assured, making tiny gigs like this guaranteed to rapidly become a thing of the past and golden memories to tell the children.

Similarly musically inclined support comes from West Country outfit Thirteen Senses whose debut album, The Invitation (Vertigo), traverses and equally celestial sonic sky with the likes of Do No Wrong and Automatic building from piano to anthemic proportions, The Salt Wound Routine soundtracking student bedsit breakups, and new single Into The Fire unleashing a new generation of next Coldplay/Radiohead comparisons. RSVP at once.

With the demise of Korn moving them another rung up the nu-metal ladder, Papa Roach scream into town on the back of new album Getting Away With Murder (Geffen), a fairly typical rage driven storm of noisy guitars, throbbing basslines and scarred throat vocals generally centred around songs about alcohol not being a good thing, depression and how singer Jacoby Shaddix’s recent past’s not been a bowl of cherries.
Scars does the angsty power ballad to reasonable effect and, featured on the Chronicles of Riddck soundtrack, title track single crunches along in suitably prowling mood, while Take Me offers itself up as a potential single for stray Dashboard Confessional and Limp Bizkit fans while both Blood and Blanket of Fear give it some solid nu-metal stick. But really, after a while it does all begin to sound much like everyone else plying the same routine, the live set even more likely to merge into one bone rattling onslaught.

A heady mixture of McCartney, Nilsson, David Gates, and Billy Joel put to the service of fluid floating tenor vocals and sunny pop melodies that could have wafted down from the roof of the Brill building, though American, constant touring and heavy Radio 2 airtime have made Mead far better known in the UK. Turned 30 and newly wed, Mead recently returned home to Nashville after a stint in New York which, judging by some of the songs on new album Indiana (Nettwerk America), wasn't exactly a time of wine and roses. The opening homage to his home town talks of having to cut and run. You Might See Him speaks of hanging on to life while the title track recalls bad times and 'a guy in Chicago' who 'said I sing like a girl.'
Disappointment seeps through the cracks, but so too does hope. The possibility of relationships offer lifelines in the breezy Oneplusone and brass accompanied waltzer Only A Girl, an 'angel on disguise' might save him from an Ordinary Life while the clip clopping cowboy crooning New Mexico offers the promise of clean air.
Certainly there's nothing downcast about the music, gorgeous melodies embrace even the most disillusioned of songs. Beauty soars on cello wings and a dreamy falsetto, Nashville flows with a liquid guitar and soft Paul Simonesque vocals, and he even takes Michael Jackson's Human Nature, graces it with strings, piano and acoustic guitar and transforms it into something that sounds as though it stepped off the Broadway stage. He saves the best for last though, back in New York's island of vagabonds for Queensboro Bridge, a beautiful, poignant song of leaving and waiting behind surely written to be sung by Art Garfunkel and played over the most romantic movie montage you could imagine. Well worth discovering.

That’ll be breathy voiced New Jersey singer-songwriter Erin Moran then, back after her well received support slot to Josh Ritter to give an extra boost to her self-titled debut album. A dreamy collection of smoky urban love songs designed as backdrops for looking out of loft windows over rain washed dusk streets, her husky tones, acoustic guitars and mournful string or piano arrangements accentuate the lazy torch moods of such reflective numbers as Kathleen, Girls Can Really Tear You Up Inside, Tears All Over Town and Did You See The Moon Tonight? But she’s not without musical claws, The Long Goodbye featuring noisy electric guitar while People Used To Dream About The Future catches you off guard with sudden sonic eruptions amid the easy groove. She’s more laid back live, so you close your eyes and soothe away.

Dead, buried and exhumed, the Black Country boys continue to show strong signs of life with not one but two new albums. Well, strictly speaking The River Sessions (River Records) isn't entirely new since it's actually a live Radio Clyde recording from 1985 at the Mayfair in Glasgow. The band had just released On A Storyteller's Night, arguably their best album, and the date was part of the tie-in tour. They're on excellent form too, old favourites like Two Hearts, Kingdom of Madness and Soldier of the Line in there alongside the then all new How Far Jerusalem, the poppy Just Like An Arrow, On A Storyteller's Night and, indisputably two of the best things Tony Clarkin has ever written, Les Morts Dansant and The Last Dance.
You'd have to be a real pomprock snob not to love this.
No doubt a few old favourites from that set will be making an appearance but the purpose of the tour is to plug Brand New Morning (SPV). A fairly typical Magnum album really with its surging art rock prog bombast, Clarkin's heaven swelling guitar, Bob Catley's chest bursting big hair vocals and those tumbling melodies driven by Mark Stanway's keyboards. It's all big powerhouse stuff with its hard rock riffery and swollen ballads and while there's nothing here likely to earn itself in the band's classic hall of fame, the nine minute epic Scarecrow (think Rolf's Sun Arise meets Neil Diamond's Soolamain) comes remarkably close.

Given their seemingly ceaseless gigging schedule, it’s a wonder the boys have found any time to spend in the studio, but here they are back out on the road again and this time with a new album to flog. If anything Infinity Land (Beggars Banquet) is harder and more abrasive than
The Vertigo of Bliss (Beggars Banquet) with more savage guitar and yowling vocals, but it’s also exploring other territories too with new single My Recovery Injection a sort of stuttering altrock dub that weds emo rock, hardcore and, er, The Police. Indeed, Simon Neil sounds equally worryingly like Mr Sting on Some Kind of Wizard too.
Those who fancied the folky acoustic With Aplomb from the last album will want to head in the direction of The Atrocity and anyone wanting more of their flirtation with Eastern colours on the last album should be directed to There’s No Such Thing As A Jaggy Snake, a curious hybrid of melodic poprock and ear bleeding hardcore. And with recent single Glitter and Trauma hitting a mutant disco groove with Neil putting a sugar sweet coating to the voice and The Weapons Are Concealed switching midway from a semi-spoken delivery to a single guitar pulse into a rampaging flurry of guitar pop noise, predictability certainly isn’t a term much bandied about here.
When they focus in on the staccato, laceration and riffola elements, they’re as brutal as it gets but, as they’ve constantly demonstrated and Only One Word Comes To Mind amply reinforces, beneath that iron glove lurks a deceptively velvet fist.
Support comes from Rotherham quartet ThisGirl who join the tour to give a hefty helping hand to current album Uno, a collection of post hardcore/emo that embraces the straightforward rock of recent single Hallelujah, the jazzier flavours of Coffee And Giro Cheques or new single Master Blaster, Inshallah’s Eastern rhythms and the simple folksy acoustics of Drake which, you don’t have to be a genius to assume is a reference to winsome folk legend Nick.

Unlikely though it might sound, but Oscilloscope Love and Der Der Der Der even vaguely call to mind the early non bombastic work of Queen while the closing St James Gate Marylebone could even find favour among old progheads.
Beeping At Pedestrians and Cartwheels shows they can still turn on the sonic funky hard rock thunder but for the most part this is the sound of a band pushing their boundaries. Besides anyone who has a track called You Are But A Draft, A Long Rehearsal For A Show That Will Never Play has to be worth a look

The latest breathily sweet voiced sensitively melancholic singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar and piano to get the new Jeff Buckley/Nick Drake/whatever treatment, the Suffolk boy’s debut album, Feather & Stone (Sony) touches all the right bases. It’s a regulation balance of minor key ballads and breezy upbeat melodies, veined with strings and set to the service of songs about bruised relationships, overcoming misfortune and, naturally the autobiographical laying it on the line of and the cumulative swell of My Declaration. There’s a hint of Michel Legrand to Girl From The Hills, a melding of Steve Forbert and Hothouse Flowers on All Comes True, some heady Celtic aromas on the overly earnest Don’t Let Go and a touch of bossa McCartney to This Boy while the finger-wagging Under The Thumb (mate spends too much time with new bird) goes for the big tumbling pop sound.
His folk background (mom and dad played the 60s circuit) is evident on Day In Verona, and to be honest it’s on the less cluttered numbers that he comes across best rather than, for example, the self-conscious moody and unnecessarily prolonged Scorpio Boy or the over the top, over-orchestrated histrionics of Almost There which sounds like it’s striving to become an All By Myself remake.
He may well prove himself a durable force, but once you get past the hype and studio polishing it’s clear these are early days yet.

Born in New Hampshire, raised in Maine and based in Nashville, though currently best known as Slaid Cleaves' co-writer Picott’s rapidly making a name for himself in his own right. Impressive debut Tiger Tom Dixon's Blues was quickly followed by Stray Dogs, and now he’s back on the road to promote his third release, Girl From Arkansas (Welding Rod). The template remains pretty much the same, dust stained gravelly vocals, Springsteen and John Prine influences, evocative blue collar imagery and songs that deal with lost dreams, troubled relationships, the working life and decaying towns.
But, with the exception of the swampy blues Wrecking Ball, the musical framework’s far more subdued, more in keeping with the downbeat, melancholic material. The wistfully sad hand me downs and no hopes title track sets the mood, No Love In This Town, the Guy Clarke-like back porcher Gun Shy Dog with its dobro figure and the bluesy Gone all deal with love lost while the coal-hammer rhythmed Big Mean Men addresses misguided masculinity and the circle of abuse and the closing The Last Goodbye simply seeps desperation.
It’s not all so wracked in misery, the quietly strummed Down To The Bone may talk of good times blown away, a life of rain washing away summer beauty and of mockingbirds flown, but at its heart is a touchingly plaintive declaration of enduring steadfast love while That’s Where My Baby Lives prizes “all the love a broken heart can give” over material wealth.
With the likelihood of past nuggets such as River Runs, trailer trash love song Circus Girl and Torn in Two putting in appearances, this has to be well up there on the gig priority list.