May saw the Echoes And Dust DJs released from their darkened room and out in to the world of gigdom. They mostly behaved themselves and the inaugral Sunkan Dymonds night was widely regarded to have been a rip-roaring success, £500 being raised for Macmillan Cancer Care in the process. The result of all such breathless excitiment has been that we've hardly had a chance to pen to paper this month, so here's a few things we missed but deserve an honourable mention Read More…

The Commune Of Rochefourchat
Daniel Higgs
Danny Laycock
Les Sages
Deadman

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So, it was with equal measures of excitement and trepidation I slipped the new album 'Fever' by Sleepy Sun into the CD player. Their debut 'Embrace' made it to my album of the year and so their new offering had a lot to live up to. Could it blow me away or would it result in a shrug of the shoulders and a 'meh'? Read More…

April, meant to be a month of spring sunshine, summery showers and cherry blossom. What have we had this year? Volcanoes, hail storms and general elections.

All feels a little end of days if you ask me and adding to that sensation comes this apocalyptic sounding record. ‘We Are A Unit’ (Brew Records, April 12) from Castrovalva is twenty seven minutes of absolute adrenaline charged insanity. In less than half an hour this Leeds three piece crash through twelve tracks of thumpingly heavy but tight as fuck funky craziness. Read More…

With a stated aim to emulate Lightning Bolt, the sound of "Here Come the Hurricane" falls somewhere between that and (at times) a kind of instrumental Big Black, with a healthy dose of shoegaze and space rock thrown in for good measure. It's more linear and progressive than the most 'sonic punk-jazz-spaz-out' aspects of Lightning Bolt but comparable in the use of squelchy, dirty bass and drums. And nothing else. Just solid repetition, delay and looping of those two instruments, producing a sound so huge it belies the one-man-and-his-8-track-in-a-bedroom setup that spawned it. Read More…

Team Horse

Matt Bentley is a singer songwriter hailing from Leeds (where else these days? It seems like every other CD we’ve reviewed recently has come from Leeds) and plying a quirky, upbeat type of melancholia, if that isn’t too much of a contradiction. Think Iron & Wine or Noah & The Whale. Read More….

Before an initial listen to ‘The Explorer’ by The Half Open Sky Gives Us Hope it is worth knowing that this is the product of one man and a whole bunch of technology. It’s worth knowing that because without that knowledge most listeners would assume it was the work of an at least four piece band with a pretty hefty string section in accompaniment; such is the scale and scope of these tunes. In fact, the more I listen to this album the more the notion that this is all the produce of just one mind becomes increasingly astounding. Read…

I never really got the point of using Roman numerals to denote years (being as we've been using…y'know…numbers, for the past 1,500 of them) but I eventually worked out that MCMLXXX translates to "1980". After the first minute or so of this album (during which you get the impression you might just have embarked on a dance/trance trip), you realise that Lazer Crystal are probably not too fussy about using subtle or obscure titles.  Read More…

Contrary to the protracted style to which we are accustomed, Red Sparowes’ third album, at just over forty three minutes, is unusually short. Despite this relative brevity, Bryant Clifford Meyer’s collective, with the help of sometime Melvins collaborator, Toshi Kasai, have produced a sublimely accomplished release, peppered with moments of both force and beauty. Read More…

Wow. What a back story we have here. John Petkovic of Cobra Verde loses his mother to a long and horrible illness, gets in his car, drives 400 miles across America, chain-smoking and generally swamped by his grief, and ends up in the neighbourhood of some of his old buddies – Dave Sweetapple from Witch and (sharp intake of breath) J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr/Witch/Fog/being a general godlike genius fame, who basically tell him they’re all going to start a band and send him home to write some stuff. Read More…

Sweet Apple