This Thursday (the 15th April) Names Not Numbers are hosting a night of excitement at the Green Room in Sheffield. With two exceptional musicians all the way from London town!!! – Roxanne Emery and Mariam Razak – and the resident singer-songwriter-poet-writer Phil Ugochukwu, this is going to be a night of fun, laughter and delightful →
Old-school hardcore from the Massachusetts crew and touring partners Down to Nothing aimed to decimate a less-than-timid London crowd. Gold Kids from Cagliari, Italy were to set the precedent for the evening’s entertainment. It was to be all about loud, aggressive hardcore. Theirs was a mix of the technical incisiveness of Converge and a looser →
Last weekend’s White Noise Festival at Leicester’s Firebug venue highlighted an overlooked music scene. In recent years the city has been known for Kasabian and little else. Perhaps only My Awesome Compilation and Maybeshewill have garnered a small buzz since something like 2003. Its other bands have generally stayed under the radar of the mainstream. →
British trio find hope in Anthemic Rock. The Xcerts might deal in melancholic tales of despair but they’re keen to stress they are not miserablists. From Aberdeen by way of Exeter, guitarist/vocalist Murray MacLeod, bassist Jordan Smith and drummer Tom Heron deal in big melodies and loud noises. Whilst the band admits the song-writing period →
I can’t think of any better way to get to know a person than by snooping through their record collection. The records I put forward here are not a list of my personal favourites but rather represent my musical lineage. These are the records that have shaped me and my musical tastes, they are ordered →
2008 left us in the midst of a credit crunch, on the dawn of a new America and has somehow still found the time to provide us with a bounty of fantastic records. Compiling a ‘top ten’ for the year was an excruciating task and has left many bands at least deserving of honourable mentions: Vampire Weekend, Iwasacubscout, Deerhunter, Fucked Up, TV on the Radio, Ryan Adams and the Cardinals, Frightened Rabbit, Lightspeed Champion, Glass and Ashes, This Will Destroy You, Of Montreal, Micah P. Hinson, Why?, The Gaslight Anthem, The Hold Steady, Mogwai, Fleet Foxes, Death Cab for Cutie, Paint it Black, Bloc Party. We can only hope that 2009 leaves us with such a haul.