Arboretum – The Gathering - March 2011 March 20th, 2011

Crawling out of Baltimore like a psychedelic slug, Arboretum play the modal chord progressions you’d find on Seventies British folk rock albums, and douse them in cyclical strangulated lead guitar noise, a stoner metal band gone native at Cropredy. David Heumann’s yearning vocals lie back in the mix, like a man straining to see something…

Various Artists – Before The Fall - March 2011 March 13th, 2011

Before The Fall is a superbly sequenced selection of rock and roll, vanilla soul, reggae, garage, country, psychedelia, prog and novelty nostalgia, each track having once been covered by Manchester’s art rock survivors The Fall. Approach in ignorance and emerge thoroughly educated by The Fall’s front-man Mark E Smith, whose ears, though famously waxy, remain…

Van Der Graaf Generator – A Grounding In Numbers - March 2011 March 13th, 2011

A friend fled a Peter Hammill performance, horrified at “the least musical music” he’d ever heard, but Van Der Graaf Generator were progressive rock’s Tractarian renegades, lacing the movement’s musical orthodoxies with liturgical ceremonialism, rather than the usual elfin splatterings. On their new album, the pellucid and beautiful Your Time Starts Now rubs up against…

Comedy: Stewart Lee - March 2011 Varsity Magazine - By Fred Maynard - March 11th, 2011

Until recently, I was only aware of Stewart Lee as a comedian who is liked by other people, the kind who sneer at just about everything anyone’s ever heard of, condemning it as being too mainstream. I would secretly like to be one of these people, because I have a sneaking feeling that they actually…

Cambridge Corn Exchange, March 6 - March 2011 Cambridge News - By Lizzy Dening - March 7th, 2011

It’s 7.30 and Stewart Lee is grumpy. Late comers (perhaps a result of the show’s incorrect listing on the Corn Exchange website) are holding up his introduction, and his microphone isn’t working. The famously curmudgeonly comedian can barely contain his glee, telling us the show is already ruined, and he’ll never manage to win us…

Klaus Kinski – Skellington Horse - March 2011 March 6th, 2011

Citing their influences as Bauhaus, Satanism and Herzog, Klaus Kinski explode out of Llanfairfechan playing moronically furious music that’s also deceptively intelligent. “Ecce Homo”, a screaming, serrated song about indecent exposure that ends unpleasantly, takes its Latin title all too literally. Yes, Klaus Kinski might suggest any number of British imitators of the Birthday Party’s…