Talulah Gosh – Was It Just A Dream? - October 2013 October 20th, 2013

Formed in Oxford in 1986, Talulah Gosh were rock’s Brains Trust, vocalists Elizabeth Price and Amelia Fletcher going on to win the Turner Prize and helm the Office of Fair Trading respectively. The group reversed the mid-eighties malaise by retreating into a polka-dot sugar-punk Shangri-la, establishing the enduring global indie-pop template. Here’s everything they ever…

Richard Youngs – Summer Through My Mind - October 2013 October 20th, 2013

Since 1990, Glasgow’s Richard Youngs has been meshing the structures of folk music with the textures of avant-garde experimentation, sustaining unbearable and yet egoless levels of shamanic intensity that are profoundly transportative and quietly devastating. Summer Through My Mind, his 90th album, shares as much with the expansive acoustic retro-Americana of Gillian Welch’s Time (The…

Stewart Lee, Comedy Review. Liverpool Philharmonic Hall. ★★★★★ - October 2013 Liverpool Sound & Vision - By Toby Hall - October 15th, 2013

Stewart Lee’s latest show boasts value for money as he delivered two hours and twenty minutes of largely new material, where he takes seemingly familiar subject matter to abstract and hilarious new territory. Lee opened many of his segments at the Philharmonic Hall with an ostensibly simple and recognisable situation such as the affrontingly ignorant…

Lee Ranaldo & The Dust – Last Night On Earth - October 2013 October 13th, 2013

Though as adept at atonal art grunge improvisation as his Sonic Youth colleagues of three decades, Ranaldo uses the New York experimentalists’ hiatus to deliver his most conventional album, Last Night On Earth, stretching suede denim 70s pop rock shapes, that Sonic Youth would have shredded, into slow-burning psychedelic epics. The closing pairing of Ambulancer…

Body/Head – Coming Apart - October 2013 October 13th, 2013

New York experimentalists Sonic Youth’s three decades of atonal art grunge are over. Thurston Moore now channels their signature sounds with Chelsea Light Moving. A liberated Lee Ranaldo weaves once verboten psychedelia with The Dust. And Kim Gordon, now 60, essays uncompromising guitar drones with Bill Nace as Body/Head, her keening bellow swaying amidst the…

Stewart Lee: Mill Volvo Tyne Theatre – 10th October 2013 - October 2013 Gigglebeats - By Nic Wright - October 12th, 2013

Remember Stewart Lee’s last show, Carpet Remnant World? There were dazzling lights, recalls Lee, countless individually-illuminated rolls of luxurious pile, sound queues, and a cohesive underlying narrative. By Lee’s own admission – in fact he discusses it at length – this show isn’t anything like that. Much A-Stew About Nothing (or Much Ado About Stew,…