Live Reviews

Live Review: CW Stoneking & Brownbird Rudy Relic

by Scott Edgar 4 February 2011 Live Reviews

CW Stoneking and band are looking a little more dapper than usual with immaculately Bryllcremed hair and striped boating blazers. In truth he’s more of a preacher than a performer but certainly entirely authentic in his recreation of the downtrodden hobo blues from almost a century ago.

Live Review: Justin Townes Earle & James Walbourne, Belfast

by Scott Edgar 25 January 2011 Live Reviews

At 6’5 Justin Townes Earle is physically as big as his talent and hype hint at. His attitude is brash Nashville no messing but delivered with a hint of New York City suave. It’s impossible not to listen and to find yourself forming little relationships with the protagonists of the pieces.

Live Review: Bella Union Christmas Service @ Union Chapel

by Melanie McGovern 10 January 2011 Live Reviews

What an end to a great year for Bella Union, their issue of John Grant’s Queen of Denmark debut successfully found itself in most magazine and national newspapers’ ‘Albums of 2010′ features, and he too headlined the last uniting of label artists at Union Chapel in the summer.

Live Review: Angus and Julia Stone @ Royal Festival Hall, London

by Melanie McGovern 18 December 2010 Live Reviews

The Midsummer Nights Dream stage set up at the Royal Festival Hall, complete with lamps, foliage, a tree strung with fairy lights and a starry backdrop marked the occasion as magical before Australian siblings Angus and Julia Stone, and their Transatlantic band, even set foot on stage.

Live Review: Dark Dark Dark @ The Lexington

by Melanie McGovern 2 December 2010 Live Reviews

With their second recording Wild Go receiving airplay on UK shores Dark Dark Dark’s pitch and note perfect re-creation of their Balkan inspired tracks tapped out a heartfelt oscillation between liveliness and loneliness, with the precision of it all framing their Eastern-folk and pitch dark jazz hybrid.

Live Review: Magic Lantern @ Cafe Oto

by Melanie McGovern 30 November 2010 Live Reviews

The candle-lit environs of Dalston’s Cafe Oto felt a particularly apt setting for chamber-folk five-piece The Magic Lantern to host their single launch party. Amongst the flickering tea-lights atop wooden tables, decorated with remnants of Organic beer and homemade cakes, a crowd of friends, family and listeners new and old gathered.

School of Seven Bells @ Heaven, London

by Melanie McGovern 19 November 2010 Live Reviews

Despite the departure of Claudia Deheza from the band a month ago, the remaining School of Seven Bells members (now duo) played an impressive show at London’s Heaven last week.

Live Review: Micah P Hinson

by Melanie 10 November 2010 Live Reviews

It’s strange to start at the end, but at the close of Micah P. Hinson’s string swathed set at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, he stated that “music speaks for you when you can’t”.

Josh Ritter & the Royal City Band @ The Barbican

by Melanie 27 September 2010 Live Reviews

Josh Ritter and his suit adorned Royal City Band played possibly their biggest show to date at London’s Barbican Theatre on Thursday evening - ’the only venue’, Ritter joked, ‘to have a tube stop named after it’.

Old Crow Medicine Show and Dave Rawlings Machine @ The Troxy

by Melanie 23 September 2010 Live Reviews

The closing night of the three-day Campfire Trails event at East London’s The Troxy was highly anticipated enough for hosting bluegrassers Old Crow Medicine Show and their frequent touring partners Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, and yet Friday, rounding off two prior evenings headlined by The Felice Brothers and Wild Beasts respectively; culminated in a ferocious display of musical talent and surprise special guests, making this one of the live [...]

Phosphorescent review and interview

by Melanie 20 September 2010 Interviews

Despite musical beginnings a decade ago in Athens, Georgia under the moniker Fillup Shack, Matthew Houck’s better known Phosphorescent guise only recently crept out of the woodwork with acclaimed 2007 LP Pride, the lo-fi, haunted tones of which earmarked him as an artist of a similar highly praised songwriting stature to Will Oldham and Iron & [...]

Iron and Wine Live at Union Chapel

by Melanie 18 September 2010 Live Reviews

On the back of a beautiful performance at End of the Road festival in Wiltshire, Iron and Wine, the moniker of Sam Beam returned to London’s Union Chapel to a silent, near motionless crowd hypnotised by his Southern, sombre folk songs.

Matt Bauer and Others at The Slaughtered Lamb

by Melanie 14 September 2010 Live Reviews

“Before, I was pretty lost. Really unhappy. For years. A lot of times I didn’t want to leave my apartment because I felt too self-conscious”, Matt Bauer once confessed. This may, in part, explain why this Brooklyn-based banjo player sings the way he does, in a gruff whisper that is, more often than not, softer [...]

Open House Festival pt.3 – The Low Anthem

by Alex 9 September 2010 Live Reviews

The Low Anthem put on a performance last night in Belfast that immediately won the crowd over. They are the type of band that will always give a consistently good performance. They get the balance right: they play the hits and they play them well. Their timing, delivery and stage presence is second to none.

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