Manchester
NEWS: Doves tease track from ‘The Universal Want’ – as sheet music!
YOU have to admit, it’s pretty much a stroke of genius. Just weeks before the release of Doves’ fifth album, The Universal Want, the Manchester trio has shared the album’s closing track, “Forest House”, but have left it to fans to work out how it sounds – by leaking the sheet music and lyrics. You wanna hear it, they’re saying: …
NEWS: King of the Slums announce ‘Encrypted Contemporary Narratives’ for September 25th
A FEW weeks ago Backseat Mafia had the pleasure to catch up with Charley Keigher, wordsmith of the rejuvenated King of the Slums. He revealed in the interview – which you can read in full, here – that they were due to “start mixing the new album in a few weeks; got two more albums …
SEE: A Certain Ratio – ‘Yo Yo Gi’: fantastic funk futurism sees ACR in fine form; album and live stream
A CERTAIN RATIO have shared a new track, “Yo Yo Gi”, from their eagerly anticipated new album, ACR Loco – and it comes with a dazzling video; watch below. Culled and edited with visual distortion and colour casting from rapid transit systems, railway interchanges, road junctions, flickering at speed through timelapse, it’s a dizzyingly urban …
SEE: Cabbage – ‘Get Outta My Brain’: Pennine baggy-psychesters waylay us again; album news
MOSSLEY – pronounced Mozzley – high up where the Pennines lurch high and wild, right out on the north-eastern fringes of Greater Manchester, has spawned a looming, mist-blurred collective known in whispers, from Delph to Dobcross, to beset weary travellers with hard and chaotic, baggy funk, lyrics chomped and spat, guitars sprawling, the better to …
NEWS: Screamadelica star Denise Johnson has died
MORE sad news from the world of music: it has been reported that Mancunian soul voice extraordinaire Denise Johnson has died unexpectedly at the age of 56. She began her singing career in a gospel setting, with that effortless, soaring voice, and moved through a stint with Maze to become one of the defining voices …
Meet: Charley Keigher of King of the Slums
KING OF THE SLUMS came snarling out of inner-city Manchester in 1986, full of condensed vignettes of raw city living, distorted violins and a deep, dark vision. After a hiatus, they’re back, with current round-up of recent work, ‘Our Favourite Trainers’, available now – we caught up with creative kingpin Charley Keigher for a chat – he also gave us a couple of exclusive photographs. Do read on …
ALBUM REVIEW: The Blinders – ‘Fantasies of a Stay at Home Psychopath’
BOTH the title and motive behind The Blinders’ new album seems remarkably timely. The album explores numerous internal struggles across its eleven tracks, whether through the tortured sense of self in the vocal catharsis of “Forty Days & Forty Nights” or the cataclysmic depiction of an introvert’s breaking point on “Black Glass”, who refuses to …
SEE: Hurts’ ‘Suffer’ in monochrome; September album
MANCHESTER’S intelligent electronic pop duo Theo Hutchcraft and Adam Anderson, better known as Hurts, have released the sultry, monochrome brooder “Suffer” ahead of a fifth album, to be released on September 4th. “Suffer” benefits from a stunning black and white film clip, which you can watch below. The track is on-the-money polished and sultry, occupying …
ALBUM REVIEW: King of the Slums – Our Favourite Trainers
THEY emerged from Hulme in 1986, breathing sour fire and an eagle eye for unfashionable detail. Second cousins of The Fall in the way they filtered and spat language to reach deeper, following the grimy thread of it back through 21st-century estates and the Industrial Revolution to a lost, almost medieval rural folk tongue, as …
MNRØ – I’m not running to you
Out right now is the debut single by Manchester singer-songwriter MNRØ, I’m not running to you, and it marks her out as something to watch out for in the rest of 2020 and beyond. Over bubbling electro beats, MNRØ lays down her expletive laden rejection of continually being used, and taking charge of her own …