Resofit Benefit, Bloomsbury – review - November 2011 The Evening Standard - By Bruce Dessau - November 2nd, 2011

Comedy comperes are meant to be unobtrusive, there to heat up the crowd and hype up the talent, not upstage it. The rule book flies away though when Daniel Kitson is MC, as was the case at last night’s fundraiser for radio station Resonance FM. Most guests were good but the award-winning Yorkshireman made the…

The Bevis Frond – The Leaving Of London - October 2011 October 30th, 2011

A quarter of a century ago, Nick Saloman’s home recordings as The Bevis Frond revivified then forgotten forms, three minute acid-pop nuggets bleeding into twenty minute guitar freak-outs. A Walthamstow Hendrix, wet with drizzle, Saloman brokered a nostalgic negotiation with the psychedelic sounds of his Sixties childhood. The Leaving Of London, his first album since…

C.Bailey & H.Burns – Stranger - October 2011 October 30th, 2011

In 1976, Chris Bailey’s Brisbane band The Saints became Top Of The Pops’ first punk guests. Bailey’s recent European sojourns have furnished a collaboration with H-Burns, from the moody French post-rock group Dont Look Back, that rehabillitates his tarnished legend. A fresh take on the sound of all those inscrutable early Eighties American revivalists the…

Charlotte Hug – Slipway To Galaxies, Solo Viola and Voice - October 2011 October 23rd, 2011

Here’s eight real-time improvisations by Charlotte Hug, bowing, plucking, and scraping the viola, with studiedly inchoate vocal accompaniment. A Romantic whiff surrounds the affair, suggested in part by sleeve shots of the black frock coated musician, poised to perform, against abstract arty scribbles. Like Caspar David Friedrich’s mountaintop wanderer, facing into a sea of fog,…

Roy Harper – Flat Baroque and Berserk - October 2011 October 23rd, 2011

Seeing Harper live in the Eighties, it seemed astonishing to us that the venerable sixties troubadour still breathed. This Mancunian Methuselah would, of course, have been all of forty-five years old. Now, Harper’s seventieth birthday sees digital re-releases for his twenty-three albums. 1970’s Flat Baroque and Berserk, a marinaded acoustic set, only partially spoiled by…

Richard Buckner – Our Blood - October 2011 October 23rd, 2011

Richard Buckner wallowed in the wake of Alternative Country’s first wave, arriving in the mid-nineties with looks, licks, and sparsely affecting lyrics that hit home harder than his competitors’. His ninth release, delayed by business wrangles and questions regarding a headless corpse found hear his home, arrives trumpeted by feted followers, Bon Iver and Richmond…