Posts in category

Soundtrack of our Lives


Melbourne’s Eilish Gilligan is a one person tour de force who has bloomed during the harsh (but ultimately very successful) lockdowns in Victoria. She has been releasing some stunning singles over the past year, undertaking fascinating live shows during lockdown through Twitch and has now released an epic self-produced EP, ‘Hospital’. This EP is a …

TOM JOSHUA is a young singer-songwriter from Stockton-on-Tees, who’s set a course to seduce us with sweet and emotive, well-sculpted guitar and piano-led songs such as the autumnal fragility of “Meteor Showers”. He’s just released the Undergrowth EP (watch the video for the title track, here), and not content with just that, has made a …

MAGIK MARKERS came hurtling at us from a Connecticut basement in 2001, full of fire and noise and dirt and excellence. Back then there were four of them: singer-guitarist Elisa Ambrogio, bassist John Shaw, drummer Pete Nolan and Leah Quimby, but Leah fell by the wayside back around 2006. They began plying a line in …

The tracks on Lisa Caruso‘s new album ‘In Feelings’ provide a gloriously impassioned tableaux for emotion and pain: honestly expressed and rendered with a theatrical flourish and a hint of troubled glamour. Caruso recorded parts of the album back in 2018 in London with producer Ben Fletcher (Sarah Blasko and Marina and the Diamonds) before …

EDINBURGH’S Mt. Doubt is the musical vision of Leo Bargery. The band have been picking up regular airplay on BBC Scotland and 6Music; has shared a stage with names such as Idlewild and We Were Promised Jetpacks. They recently featured on, and were one of the undoubted highlights of, the Wakefield festival compilation Long Division: …

Last month I was highly impressed by the debut EP ‘Early Trauma’ from Sydney band Johnny Hunter – it’s a new new wave for our times. So impressed was I that I had to find out more from the band – about how they got together, their influences, their favourite songs and their striking image. …

YOU MAY not have taken a dive into an El Goodo album; that, I’m afraid, may be a flaw entirely laid at your own door. OK, they don’t work to a Tin Pan Alley rhythm – there’s only been three albums since their eponymous debut for Super Furries’ Placid Casual imprint in 2005, the most …

PAUL MOLLOY is something of a psychedelic pop gentleman around town. He wielded six strings in a later incarnation of The Zutons, who of course gave us that song for Amy Winehouse to conquer just about everything with. He’d come up through the Liverpudlian scene ranks, having previously being a member of both cult buzz …

BEGINNING back in 2005 with the fine English psych-swamp rock charge of The Duke Spirit, Liela Moss has grown into being one of the UK’s most forthright and potent voices, never afraid to stand up and sing life as she sees it. A quintet of albums with Toby Butler et al preluded a move to …

Aberdeenshire’s Kevin Allan releases his second LP of this most universally fraught year today, August 7th. Valentine’s Day brought us ‘Separate Lives’, which was necessarily championed by Stuart Maconie on his 6Music Freakzone. ‘In Monochrome’ is an absolute stunner, we find. Raw, chilled, unblinking in the face of life, Kevin makes promises no answers. But what he does do is communicate with you, proffer you emotional information; learn alongside him. ‘In Monochrome’ is unflinching and visionary; it’s one of the essential albums of 2020, sayeth us here at BSM.