Reviews on The Review

The combination of Alice Russell’s smokey tones and the South American inflected drive of Combo Barbaro proved irresistible to the packed house at Manchester’s Band on the Wall, on Friday.  Combo Barbaro put together by the Worcester-born but Colombian resident, Will ‘Quantic’ Holland, contained a Colombian percussionist, a Peruvian keyboard player, long-time Russell collaborator, Mike [...]

When Soweto Kinch moved into his ‘free-styling’ rap, he elicited words from the audience that came from the letters of ‘Marsden’.  The Marsden audience, part of the arc of Pennine post hippydom that runs from Hebden Bridge, through Todmorden, and Marsden to Mossley, initially gave him ‘melifluous’, ‘artisanal’, ’sheep’, ‘dung’,  ‘energy’ and, finally, ‘Northern’.  Kinch, [...]

Album Review: Thrice, Major/Minor, 2011 Vagrant Records
Major/Minor is the seventh full length from Irvine, California based quartet Thrice, produced by Dave Schiffman in LA who had previously worked with the band as an engineer and mixer on the albums Vheissu (2005) and Beggars (2009) respectively. In their thirteen years together Thrice [...]

If Metronomy are disappointed at having missed out on the Mercury Prize to P. J. Harvey, they fail to show it in this frenetic, joy-inducing set. From the chugging guitar and swelling keyboard of hypnotic opening track ‘We Broke Free’, it’s clear that this band that started as a one-man outfit recording in a bedroom [...]

Last year on this page, I reviewed guitarist Stuart McCullum’s last performance for the Manchester Jazz Festival.  That performance was in the festival tent, and he was first on the bill with Trio VD and The Golden Age of Steam.  Then he was performing solo with laptop and electronics. This year, launching his new album, [...]

A few moments before Fleet Foxes took the stage last night, just after 9pm, the lights darkened and ‘Nothing Special’, the opening track from Trees’ 1970 debut, The Garden of Jane Delawney, playing over the PA, was drowned out by applause. Perhaps it was coincidence that the band members lilted into position just after this [...]

Tenor sax giant, Pharoah Saunders came to Manchester on the first of May channelling the spirit and legacy of his great mentor, John Coltrane. The first half of the concert was all Coltrane favourites: Giant Steps, Naima and then, My Favourite Things. Sanders is obviously not as agile on his pins [...]

There’s a determinedly retro feel to much of Raphael Saadiq’s new album. The cover shows Saadiq in roll-neck sweater with drums and bass accompaniment playing at a party full of beehive hairdo’s, and preppies in bow ties. And much of the music harks back to the early Motown and Stax days. Tracks [...]

When I booked to see Faris Badwan’s Cat’s Eyes play the beautiful St. Phil’s in Salford I admit I was hoping for spectacle.  The Horrors’ frontman and his skinny jeans, playing with a classically-trained multi-instrumentalist, in one of the city’s oldest churches, with his big hair – it’d take someone much less gothically-inclined than me [...]

Had Purcell and his anonymous librettist been working in the twenty first century, they would have been had up by the Advertising Standards Authority.  There is little or no resemblance between Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream  and this semi-staged opera.  In the late sixties the Purcell Society published a comparison between the Shakespeare and the [...]