LTW newsletter 82

Welcome Warriors!

The nights are drawing in, crispy evenings and thousands of students glued to their mobiles walking straight in front of cars and buses and hints of Christmas everywhere, no matter how much you try and avoid its festive fakery!…with all this swirling around, we are very much back in gig season!

In the past few days, I’ve seen great shows from Jim Jones and also from The Humanist at Manchester’s Deaf Institute - a great venue - one of my faves. In these hectic autumns Manchester is crazy for the mount of gigs to go to. On any given night, there can be 20-plus things that you would quite like to be at, but the explosion in the number of events and bands means that there are constant calendar clashes. The problem with the current music scene is not that venues are all disappearing it’s perhaps that there are too many…we are cursed with…TOO MUCH CHOICE

Luckily, LTW has a team of writers who go out all the time, so we have much stuff covered in this tsunami of noise!

Not sure if anyone has the time to watch TV and wile away those hours in the middle of gig season but we saw this rubbish clip from Saturday Night Live in the USA - it’s one of those programmes that has been on for ever and occasionally bits of it filter over here just to underline how much more nuanced and multi layered UK comedy is compared to the ham fist of mainstream American TV comedy but this Oasis skit was particularly toe curlingly awful…

We are sorry to hear that the legendary Salford Lads Club may be about to close. The venue , that was made into pop culture iconography by the Smiths photo shoot there all those years ago, needs £250 000 by Christmas to survive and have launched an appeal. It would be sad to lose this place - not just because of The Smiths photo (lucky they chose that location for the venue - the other idea was the great map of the north at Victoria Station) but because of the continued pop culture history of the place - the Hollies used to rehearse there, and it has a continued presence for events and is still being a place where people can do stuff plus an amazing looking old building.

Goat have been long term LTW faves with their dramatic choral pop/noir. Their trippy soundscapes and thrilling soundscapes are very much to the fore on the new album from masked Swedes, who deal a trip that you can dance to with its infectious hypnotic rhythms and mysterious psychedelic/experimental/blues/folk/afrobeat on their sixth studio album, a shorter and sharper shock of funk-infused bliss to hibernate the Winter blues away. MK Bennett listens in.

Bearded Theory Festival has long been one of our favourite festivals and is going from strength to strength and gradually becoming a major festival event without losing any of its more DIY feel. Next year’s bill includes Iggy Pop and is a mighty looking line up and one to get into the diary as soon as.

One of the best tours running up the mileage in the UK right now is Jim Jones All Stars who are cruising up and down the country with an eight piece soul, rock n roll and sweatshod blues line up. Its a thrilling show with an added twin sax section that really powers the droog anthem songs along and the righteous delivery is cutting through the autumn murk.

Stick In The Wheel have been dealing their radical folk for more than a decade now and their mix of stomping folk and a nod to electronic music have hit paydirt yet again on their new album. Their perfect synthesis of the old and the new is captivating from their stomping cockney knees up techno folk to their deeply entrancing drone dark folk space with haunting landscapes and deep winter spookiness that somehow combines the deep mystery of the music from soil with captivating drones from the SUnn O) bank of foggy mystery and some modern tech in the vocal effects bringing the ancient up to the hi tech now. There are also stomping poetic songs that bring old cockney rhyming slang into a modern playground.   The album is quite brilliant and a big favourite here. LTW first covered them ten years ago, and it's great that they retain their creative edge.

The hot Manchester band of the moment, HUNGRY have a new single out that sees the band release a song that combines their poetic Smithsonian Moz when he was fun to a post hardcore almost Fugazi tightness.

Perennially brilliant Wedding Present played yet another great London show that underlined their lifetime of great song writing filtered through a post punk pop/noise. The Peel faves are now in their silver haired neo dotage and still sound as vibrant as ever.  The band are back with a vengeance at London’s O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire with new material, plus Miki Berenyi of Lush in support with her Trio.

LTW has featured Swansea Sound loads of times (Si apre in una nuova finestra), and rightly so, because as well as being ‘legends’ in the history of UK Independent music, they are still staunch outsiders who poke fun at the music business and criticise capitalism and the modern world in short sharp bursts of fizzy, fun agit/art-pop. But that’s not why Ged Babey likes this single…

After Wardruna there seems to be a whole scene of Scandinavian mysticism with Viking runes and poetic landscapes filtered through film score and dark wolf laden landscapes…often sounding great. Eivor brings her Nordic spirit to a sold-out Manchester Academy to deliver an otherworldly performance: Spiritual and darkly beautiful, combining haunting electronic soundscapes, shamanistic tribal beats and tradition, with her utterly mesmerising voice.