It is always fascinating recognising influences in a band or artists style, but noting how they have been adapted, morphed into something different and new. For the Brighton based three-piece rock band Tigercub, influences like Nirvana and Queens of The Stone Age are easy and obvious to grasp, but it is also apparent how the trio push through into their own style and making.For those not in the know, Tigercub consist of Jamie Stephen Hall (vocals and guitar), Jimi Wheelwright (bass) and James Allix (drums). For the last fifteen years they have honed and refined their alternative rock sound, Read more ...

It was something of a miracle how long They Might Be Giants managed to preserve their trademark madcap optimism intact. It lasted right through to their last album, Book (2021). In The World is to Dig, they are still holding on to it in some tracks, but in others it is clear that even they have finally succumbed to ubiquitous world-weariness.Maybe the surprise is that they stayed immune from it for so long. The band’s two Johns, Flansburgh and Linnell, are now in their mid-sixties, their band has been going for over four decades, this is their 24th album. But it is hard to ignore a new vibe Read more ...

For anyone to create a whole, new, recognisable – and kick-ass – musical style in this day and age is no small achievement. To do so as you enter your 70s is pretty mind boggling. Yet somehow, that’s what sometime Sonic Youth-er Kim Gordon did on her second solo album The Collective in 2024. She’d already made a huge splash with No Home Record in 2019, where she smashed all kinds of dance, electronic and hip hop elements into distorted alt-rock with uncommon panache, but The Collective tightened the focus, building a whole language around mutations of the modernist drum patterns and bass Read more ...

One of the smaller but more passionately enduring subcultures in the world today is that around slow dance music. The core of its audience is a Gen X crowd, a good number of whom have stuck with club culture since the mid Nineties or earlier, with others who’ve rekindled their love of electronic music in middle age: people whose knees might not be up to stomping to techno for hours, but are still deeply committed to the experience of deep and prolonged immersion in repetitive beats.Belfast’s Phil Kieran is a key mover and shaker in this scene. Though his career began 25 years ago as a Read more ...

Mandy, Indiana are a Mancunian four-piece with a French singer who's based in Berlin. They make a lot of noise. Their second album is a take-no-prisoners amalgamation of electronic squall, thrashy rap (a distant cousin of Dälek), and tints of deranged hyperpop. In an age when ever-increasing quantities of people seek soothing music, they are outliers. URGH is too cacophonic to be the making of them but those after a solid, catalytic bash around the brain may want to tune in.The album was flavoured by multiple operations undergone by frontwoman Valentine Caulfield and drummer Alex Macdougall Read more ...

Another interesting thing about the endless flux of the streaming era is that, for all that it’s supposed to homogenise and flatten things out, sometimes it ends up allowing more interesting things to belatedly get their due. Look at the way once-obscure musicians like Julius Eastman, Alice Coltrane or Arthur Russell have snuck into the vocabulary of alternative and even mainstream music. But also, acts who weren’t short of success or acclaim but were nonetheless perhaps considered a bit cultish, nerdy or niche have gradually achieved a sort of cross-generational depth and universality of Read more ...

A new look and new vibe for Grant-Lee Phillips at this pared-back performance, part of the Celtic Connections festival that takes over Glasgow for a couple of weeks every January and February. The fresh vibe was due to this being Phillips first tour entirely seated, as he put it, sitting down and armed only with an acoustic guitar, while the 62-year-old is now more hirsute, having grown a beard.There was little else beyond simple performance here, for Cottiers' converted church setting does not exactly lend itself to any onstage gimmicks. If the plastic chairs of the auditorium gave it all Read more ...

 According to legend, Glasgow can be a tough place for a support band a crowd do not warm to. Therefore brotherly duo Faux Real were perhaps taking a risk when they elected to bound into the audience during the first number in their Wet Leg support slot. It was greeted with mostly puzzlement from early attendees, but when they repeated the trick 30 minutes later - finding space and sprinting towards each other before jumping into the air with high kicks - the reaction was much more enthusiastic. The pair had mixed up synth-heavy pop of varying quality with relentless, hard working Read more ...

It’s weird, right? We’ve somehow stumbled into a world where, for all we’re told that algorithms homogenise music, actually more people than ever are exposed to very, very odd and abstract soundmaking.There’s new age gong baths at even the most normie health spas. There’s a kajillion hours of “relaxation music” flooding streaming services from who knows where, a lot of it just drones and/or modulating white noise. There’s the sound design of scores by the likes of Hildur Guðnadóttir, Daniel Lopatin, Cristobal Tapia De Veer that reach millions in surround sound via movies, games and prestige Read more ...

Witch Fever are a rising four-piece, originally formed in Manchester. Their debut album, 2022’s Congregation, was a raw, sludge-punk howl that represented singer Amy Walpole’s livid rejection of the stridently patriarchal Charismatic Church of her upbringing.Since then, they’ve toured with everyone from Biffy Clyro to IDLES, and gathered a righteous amount of attention (and, of course, they look great). Their second album is less laser-focused on religious subject matter. It’s a match for its predecessor but with greater use of atmospheric effects and electronic trimmings.Opener “Dead to Me Read more ...

Before we get into it, reader, can you accept that The Last Dinner Party are a band born of privilege and high academic study? Of poshness, classical composition, private education, master’s degrees in music? No? Might as well stop reading then. That’s where they’re from. Let's have a valid debate somewhere else about the arts shutting out those with less money. Right now, though, The Last Dinner Party are fab live, look great, and, in From the Pyre, deliver a worthy follow-up to their vibrant debut.They’re preposterous, of course, but wonderfully so, their music Chantilly-laced through with Read more ...

VINYL OF THE MONTHBlack Lips Season of the Peach (Fire)Some of the many releases by don’t-give-a-damn southern US rockers Black Lips are of variable quality. They’re actual rockers, not Modern Music BA university graduates, so it depends where their wild heads are at. Their latest is a good one. Their garage instincts are intact, but they also render loose-limbed, fibrous versions of country music, southern soul and indie guitar pop. There aren’t many bands who could write a song with a chorus that runs, “I just want a prick of my own”, and make it a catchy new wave singalong akin to the best Read more ...