Alasdair Roberts & Mairir Morrison – Urstan - March 2012 March 25th, 2012

Roberts’ six solo albums seamlessly incorporated traditional elements into timeless songs. But today he’s a full-blown folklorist, compiling the rare Scottish field recordings collection Whaur The Pig Gaed On The Spree, and issuing these Gaelic tunes with the Hebridean singer Mairir Morrison. An initially serious tone suggests diaphanously gowned highland visionaries in dimly lit Seventies…

Chuck Prophet – Temple Beautiful - March 2012 March 25th, 2012

The Stetson-sporting Tucson punks Green On Red suddenly clicked into country rock classicism when an unknown Prophet brought his chiseled guitar-for-hire to 1985’s Gas Food Lodging. With songwriting assistance from the poet Kurt Lipschutz, Prophet’s eleventh solo album anatomises his hometown of San Francisco. The upbeat Stones party rock of the title track is this…

Comedy review: Stewart Lee: carpet remnant world - March 2012 The Scotsman - By Jay Richardson - March 24th, 2012

Despite his BBC show being re-commissioned for a further two series until 2015, a clutch of recent awards and tonight’s performance, his biggest audience in a quarter-century of solo gigs, Stewart Lee, stand-up’s éminence grise maintains a desire to retreat back into cult obscurity. Or at least to the humbler Citizens Theatre across the Clyde.…

Lee Ranaldo – Between The Times And Tides - March 2012 March 18th, 2012

The guitarist Lee Ranaldo’s songs were among the New York art rockers Sonic Youth’s most beautiful, his extended tonal workouts mixing Deadhead riffing with minimalist repetition, unencumbered by the ironic fascinations with kitsch pop culture that dates his colleagues’ work. Ranaldo’s extracurricular activities usually display solid downtown experimental sensibilities, but this solo album offers grown-up…

Napalm Death – Utilitarian - March 2012 March 18th, 2012

Thirty years ago, Birmingham’s Napalm Death invented ‘grindcore’, and initiated a dialogue between hardcore anarcho-punk, extreme metal, and the experimental jazz crew. Without them, almost nothing your surly weed-eyed nephew nods out to at weekends would exist. Today, behind an ersatz protest punk sleeve, a long serving line-up finds Barney Greenway bellowing fearsomely incomprehensible cut…

Belbury Poly – The Belbury Tales - March 2012 March 12th, 2012

Sleeve notes for Belbury Poly’s 5th album suggest the soundtrack to a travelling salesman’s adventures with an acid-spiked ploughman’s lunch, somewhere in early seventies rural England. Belbury Poly play like dispirited sixties psychedelic survivors, reluctantly meeting the demands of television or advertising commissions in the subsequent decade, redeeming their banal compositions with snatches of haunting…