Indie

Meet: Indie pop darlings Making Marks, and listen to new track ‘Barcodes’.
Sometimes, you hear quite by accident a track that literally bowls you away. That happened to me a couple of weeks ago when I was trawling various social media sites to find something new and good to listen to. I can’t quite remember now how I came across ‘Barcodes’ by Oslo based Making Marks, but …

See: Emily and the Woods release new video for small song / announce Summer tour dates
My father used to take us to the woods, quite a lot of the time. They didn’t have much money (I’ll never live the embarrassment of my home-made elasticated school trousers, but needs must I suppose) and so at the weekend, when me and my brother (and latterly my sister) were tearing the house apart, …

Album Review: Saltland – I Thought It Was Us But It Was All Of Us
There are some record labels, and Seattle’s Sub Pop comes immediately to mind, where you know that whatever they release is going to be at the very least interesting. Others have the sort of design style where you only have to look at the artwork to know what label is behind it, such as Germany’s …

Track: Editors new single – A ton of love / The Sting
I went to live in Huddersfield when I was 17, away at this music place. I’d lived in the county pretty much all my life so when I first moved to this industrial heartland of years gone by it was a little bit daunting, with its mills and canals and expanses of terraced housing in …

Meet: Gerard Langley of The Blue Aeroplanes, plus new reissue / tour dates
I suppose I would have been about 18. I’d gone along to the Trent Polytechnic (in those days we had such things) to watch my then favourites, The Darling Buds. When I came away, I’d fallen for this band of Bristol artisans, who made this sort of jagged art-sunk indie, with this front man constantly …

New Music: Lost Ghosts – Tunnels
I remember my debut quite clearly. The first concert I ever played in I was (just) eight years old. Even by eight year old standards I was rather a runt of the litter, my young body ravaged by asthma and suffering from being incredibly skinny and fairly small. That first concert was in a local …

Not Forgotten: John Grant – Queen of Denmark
It took three years but I finally found the proper follow-up to Midlake’s The Trials of Van Occupanther in John Grant’s Queen of Denmark. Man, I can’t believe I’d never listened to this album. It’s filled with Midlake’s penchant for creating these wooded landscapes and D&D-lite atmosphere, but since it’s NOT their album the melancholy …

See: Vampire Weekend – Diane Young Video, Plus Tour News
How did it happen? You know that four regular guys, Ezra Koenig, Rostam Batmanglij, Chris Baio, and Chris Tomson firstly met, and then formed Vampire Weekend in 2006 while attending Columbia University. How did it happen that this sort of indie band, admittedly with killer songs, but mix in this African style guitar playing, and …

Track: I set the Sea on Fire release new single, W.A.K.E.
I set the sea on fire are a five piece outfit from the city of Sheffield. It consists of Billy Washington on vocals and guitar, Peter Jenkins, vocals and bass, drummer Josh Knight, Joss Allsopp , vocals and trumpet, and Megan Washington on vocals, percussion and keyboard. They formed in 2011, and after starting out …

Meet: Drenge
Drenge are made up of two brothers, Eoin and Rory Loveless who hail from the Peak District, not far from us (well, me) in Sheffield. They are a duo in the Black Keys / White Stripes way (as opposed to the Pet Shop Boys sort of way I suppose) with no bass, instead this raw, …