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Album Review: Altadore – Golden Hills
Wow. I haven’t been this excited about a new artist for a very long time. Wow. I’m not claiming that this band is doing something that is going to break the world wide open. This isn’t the birth of rock and roll or hip-hop. And that’s not what they are trying to do. But it …
Track: Fat Freddys Drop – Blackbird & the album release show
We have this cleaner. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not one of those rich families that mention to everyone that they’ve got a cleaner because that means we must therefore be middle class. We actually need a cleaner. I seem to have bred (and I know they’ll be some argument about this) two of the …
Album Review: Vinyl Floor – Peninsula
A lot of what we listen to and write about on Backseat Mafia has one thing in common: potential. And that’s what I feel in this album from Denmark’s Vinyl Floor. “Peninsula” is a concept album broken into two sides – the first is utopia, the second dystopia, albeit finishing on a minor-key upturn …
Album Review: Blue Angel – Departures
Fate, it seems played its part with Blue Angel. The first piece of fate happened at rehearsal rooms, the now defunct Backstreet Studios on Holloway Road in London , when producer/Instrumentalist Jason Newton heard Bella Bennett in the next room, rehearsing for a wedding, and he knew he’d found the voice he’d been looking for. The other piece …
Album Review: British Sea Power – Machineries of Joy track by track
Have British Sea Power really been around a decade? It doesn’t seem that since, shortly after the release of their second album, Open Season I saw them in London, as support for the much missed (in my house anyway) Electric Soft Parade. They wore odd costumes, paraded around the stage on each-others shoulders, made a …
Meet: Paul Browse – Visions of Excess, Clock DVA, electronic music….and me.
Imagine this. Born in dour post war Sheffield, you join one of pop histories most experimental bands while still in your early 20s. After almost ten years of making records that are one hand appealing and the other wildly experimental, you leave not only the band but the country, and go on to be highly …
Meet: Life in Film – Interview plus May Tour Dates
Recently I got dumped. I’d not been seeing him very long so I certainly wasn’t heartbroken but nobody likes being rejected so I allowed myself a 48 hour wallowing period. This involved some tears, a couple of ill-advised abusive text messages, nurofen and a lot of wine. It also involved much skipping on my MP3 …
EP: Good Graeff release new EP of gorgeous indie folk – Better Half
You know what they say about dogs being like their owners, well that was the same for music students where I went to University, and I suspect it was (and is) the same everywhere. There was us, the brass players. Loud, brash, heavy drinking animals who arrived in college purely to find people to go …
Remembering The Lucksmiths
One thing I struggle to understand whenever I meet an Australian is how they never seem to have heard of The Lucksmiths. Lunacy. For a time, it was also incredibly frustrating. “But they’re yours !” I used to think, “How can you not know EVERYTHING about them ?”. I was just hoping I would meet …
NEW MUSIC: LOW AND NIGHT BEDS
When did listening to music become such a solitary habit for me ? Not since the days of a dreadfully miserable teenager wishing for all his heart to be deemed cool enough to like The Stone Roses and Ride, listening to CNFM103’s indie-heaven-in-a-local-radio-show “Jive Alive” on a black-and-electric-blue double-tape-deck and radio stereo in a darkened room lit only …