Neneh Cherry & The Thing – The Cherry Thing - June 2012 June 12th, 2012

Nineties pop-pickers remember Cherry’s adventurous hip-hop hits, but her apprenticeship with Bristol’s Roland Kirk inspired beatniks Rip Rig And Panic, and a childhood spent with her stepfather the trumpeter Don Cherry, make her the ideal collaborator for the Scandinavian free jazz trio The Thing, interpreting fifties and sixties New Thing, and seventies American sleaze punk,…

Codeine – When I See The Sun - June 2012 June 10th, 2012

Codeine are another early nineties American post-rock band recently rediscovered, like Bitch Magnet, by young people, ravenous for sacred sources, and caught in the time-collapsing vortex of the internet’s immediate availability of everything. Here’s Codeine’s slender oeuvre in one luxurious package, simple crunchy chords sliding into empty spaces over then radically restrained beats, their glacial…

Clever comedy at Warwick Arts Centre but too drawn out - June 2012 Leamington Courier - By Sundari Sankar - June 4th, 2012

Stewart Lee, Warwick Arts Centre, May 24. WHAT began as an evening of extremely clever and thoroughly thought-through comedy unfortunately did not continue that way. Stewart Lee will not allow anyone in the audience to ‘not get’ a single joke during the show, as he insists on going back over, ripping apart and piecing back…

Spain – The Soul Of Spain - June 2012 June 3rd, 2012

On previous Spain albums, smokily spiritual blues guitar drifts across the provocatively expansive spaces between vocalist Josh Haden’s bare bass parts. But The Soul Of Spain sees two uncharacteristically animated numbers, Because Your Love and Miracle Man, chug past in standard moody alt rock mode, and new drummer Matt Mayhall clings to metronomically regular rhythms…

The Trypes – Music For Neighbors - May 2012 May 27th, 2012

The availability of everything dissolves the presumed linear progression of popular culture. Thirty years ago, pop music scorched away its immediate past, and no legal reissues or illegal weblogs enabled the immediate reformatting of forgotten forms. The Trypes, New Jersey practitioners of the ‘Hoboken Sound’, alongside The Feelies and The Willies, were amongst the first…

Carpet Remnant World, Wolverhampton Civic Hall 25/5/12 - May 2012 Reviews & Rambling Blog - By Rita - May 27th, 2012

Carpet Remnant World was said to be about idealised notions of society. As the comic introduced the show, he mocked his own comedy style: “I say one thing for comedy effect. I make a factual bold statement then mean the opposite. I will do this five or six times then talk about something for too…