Matthew Ellis

Sheelanagig – Cirque Insomnia

Music Reviews 8 June 2012

Sheelanagig’s latest album, ‘Cirque Insomnia’, finds the band once again stirring their crowded melting pot of world musical influences. Balkan folk music is a constant throughout the record & offers them a basis for experimentation.

Sproatly Smith – The Minstrel’s Grave

Music Reviews 30 April 2012

Sproatly Smith’s latest release ‘The Minstrel’s Grave’ demonstrates a band that are willing to play at the fringes of folk music and incorporate musical ideas drawn from rock, psychedelia and even rap.

Live Review: Get The Blessing @ Ronnie Scott’s

Live Reviews 4 April 2012

Jazz-rock quartet Get The Blessing is a heterogenous beast at the best of times. Bassist and leader Jim Barr hails from Portishead while trumpeter Pete Judge and saxophonist Jake McMurchie are both National Youth Orchestra alumni. Tonight, with Goldfrapp’s Daisy Palmer replacing Clive Deamer on drums, they were more chimerical than ever. But the band [...]

Hannah Cohen – Child Bride

Music Reviews 2 April 2012

[rating=3] Two narratives will dominate discussion of Hannah Cohen’s Child Bride. The first situates her within a lineage of female singer-songwriters. The second recounts Cohen’s past life as a model before explaining the album’s emergence from a dizzyingly fashionable New York scene comprising artists like Ryan McGinley and Terry Richardson as well as a stable [...]

Live Review: Neil Cowley Trio – Queen Elizabeth Hall

Live Reviews 20 March 2012

The audience at Queen Elizabeth Hall that witnessed Neil Cowley Trio’s live performance seemed to recognise the watershed nature of the performance and rewarded it with a deserved standing ovation.

Ben Frost & Daníel Bjarnason – SÓLARIS

Music Reviews 9 March 2012

★★★★★
Sólaris, the recent collaboration between experimental musicians Ben Frost and Daniel Bjarnason, re-imagines the score to Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris.