Here’s our round of up this weekend’s gig picks. There’s some great gigs on, the weather’s going to be fantastic, it’s just past payday so there’s no excuse for not getting out there and seeing some live music.
On Thursday night, The Mojo Fins headline Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar. There’s some great support slots too – Curxes are supporting Chapel Club at The Haunt, and Negative Pegasus are supporting Holland at Green Door Store.
Friday night see’s Time for T playing at St Luke’s Church on Old Shoreham Road. This is one of the first gigs we’ve heard of taking place at St Lukes, so could be interesting. Ourother Friday Night gig pick is also in a church – Abi Wade is supporting Olof Arnalds in the Unitarian Church.
At the Brunswick on Saturday Night House of Hats host this month’s Harvest Sessions, with support from Emily Baker and Cordelia Gartside. If you fancy an all dayer on saturday then head over to the Green Door Store for Cupboard Music’s second annual Hey! Fever gig. There’s ten bands on over the course of the day, with Negative Pegasus and Black Black Hills topping the bill.
Here’s a few new singles which have hit our radar recently.
First up is Shrine, who headlined Friday night at the Nice Weather For Airstrikes festival on friday night last week. Their new single is called Kursk. Here’s the video, and the soundcloud which has a free download option:
Next up is The Wytches. Beehive Queen is out on Hate Hate Hate records next monday, limited to 300 7″s, and the launch is at The Hope this saturday.
Cartagena by Two Jackals is out on Seven Dials Records on 1st June and was produced by Joel Cadbury and Pablo Clements from UNKLE.
Finally, we’ve got a remix of Further Still by Curxes. When we first posted about the track back in March we mentioned that there was a remix due, so here it is, with Avec Sans on the knobs, complete with a link to a free download:
What a weekend – I saw over thirty bands over the weekend, many of which were local. Here’s a gallery of them all. We’ve got: Jennifer Left, Justin Saltmeris, Curxes, Kinnie The Explorer, Us Baby Bear Bones, Anushka, Fear of Men, Martin Rossiter, The Bobby McGees, IYES, Jacko Hooper, Kins and The Beautiful Word. As usual, click on the image to view large:
Brighton Music Blog favourites Curxes played twice at the Alternative Escape yesterday. We caught up with them just after they came off stage at The Mesmerist:
Brighton Music Blog : Hello Curxes! How was the gig?
Macaulay Hopwood : Amazing – sweaty, crazy – the usual festival fayre. Really Good. Roberta Fidora : All powered by cough syrup. MH : Cough syrup and beer RF : Isn’t that a Flaming Moe?
BMB : You’re playing twice over the weekend. You’ve just played on the Les Enfants Terribles stage at the Mesmerist. What’s the other one?
MH : We’re also playing at the Black Dove, across town. That’s for Southsea Fest stage. RF : It sounds slightly sinister, the name – “The BLACK Dove” MH : Sounds a bit dark, but hopefully it’ll suit our sound.
BMB : What other Brighton bands are you looking forward to seeing at the Great Escape?
MH : There’s a few bands that I really want to see – We managed to catch half of Us Baby Bear Bones who were on just before we were on a different stage. Hopefully we’ll catch them when they play again. RF: And Chvrches as well (BMB : who Curxes remixed earlier this year) MH : Hopefully we can get to hang out with them a bit BMB : Anyone else, or are you just going to drop in and see what you find? MH : Despite playing, I haven’t actually got a wristband! So it’s a bit limited as to what I can go and see! I’ll go and see as many as I can.
BMB : Your live set up now has three people
RF : That’s Raife from Strangers. Say hello Raife! Raife : Hello! MH : Raife is playing drums with us at the moment. I often moonlight playing bass with Strangers, so we’re doing a bit of band swapping. BMB : When did the decision to beef up the band come about? RF : When I couldn’t count in time! MH : We thought it was cool having a drummer onstage. Raife is a really good mate anyway, we have a good time jamming together, so we thought he would be a good addition to the setup. RF : It adds more to the spectacle… MH : He’s a good looking chap as well. We never had too many girls come and see us before, but now that Raife’s with us… RF : Now we have to clear loads of pants off stage after we play!
BMB : You’re starting to be described as “Blitz Pop” in various places. What does that mean for people who haven’t heard you? Where did the name come from?
MH : An obsession with the second world war, and we’re quite poppy, I suppose. It’s noisy, it sounds like the blitz. It seems to fit the music pretty well. RF : We leave a trail of destruction in our wake!
BMB : Your latest single Further Still was also out earlier this year. What’s coming up next?
MH : We’ve got another release coming out fairly soon, possibly with a single label, but nothing’s been finalised yet. It’s a song called Valkyrie which is what we close our set with at the moment. It seems to go down well – it’s noisy, it’s got a bad-ass trumpet in it. What more could you want!
Here’s a new regular feature that I’ve decided to start on the blog. We write a lot of posts about a lot of bands, and quite often a blog post about something we absolutely love can easily drop out of view. On top of that, some things we write about are slow burners, and while we’ll write things up as soon as we hear about them, some tracks can creep into your consciousness weeks later. So here’s my top ten for April, based on my plays according to last.fm (although it seems to miss half my plays, so I reserve the right to use a bit of licence sometimes).
10. Interlocutor – Saturday (demo)
Alex White of Electric Soft Parade and Brakes has played a couple of gigs with his new solo project Interlocutor, despite the new ESP album due any minute now. He’s also quietly put up a couple of demos onto Bandcamp which we rather like.
9. Bat For Lashes – Laura (Vogue session)
A couple of months ago Natasha Khan did an exclusive session for Vogue.com. Two of the tracks from this session were released on 7″ for Record Store Day which was a nice reminder of what a brilliant track Laura is.
8. Pete Fij & Terry Bickers / I don’t give a shit about you
This track originally came out back in October last year so isn’t Pete and Terry’s new single. This track has crept into our top ten after being put up on Soundcloud as a free download.
7. Shrag / Sleeprunning
Officially the last track to be released by Shrag now that they’ve split. Sleeprunning is the b-side to On The Spines of Old Cathedrals, their final single to be taken from Canines.
6. Curxes / Further Still
Curxes put out their fantastic new release Further Still at the end of March as a free download, and then put up the video a few weeks later. We can’t wait to see them playing the Alternative Escape in a few weeks time (Thursday 16th May – Les Enfants Terrible stage / The Mesmerist at 18:55 or Southsea fest stage / The Black Dove at 20:50).
5. IYES / Lighthouse (Capsun remix)
We absolutely adore Lighthouse. It was one of those tracks that appeared from nowhere that was some brilliant and so unexpected. It’s spawned dozens of fawning blog posts saying how great it is but the problem was the only way to listen to it was on Soundcloud. Earlier this month though the track was remixed Capsun, which beefed up the beats and the bass and put up on Soundcloud which meant you could listen wherever you happened to be. IYES play the Alternative Escape on Saturday at the Mesmerist at 15:20
4. Black Black Hills / Red Cabin
Red Cabin, with it’s retro reverb drenched rock and roll and backwards video, was an immediate hit when we heard it a couple of weeks ago. Go download it now! Black Black Hills play Brighton Noise’s stage at the Alternative Escape on Saturday at 15:50.
3. Us Baby Bear Bones / You
You is another track which had been floating around for a while but got put up as a free download this month. You is going to be on UBBB’s debut EP due for release in July
2. Crayola Lectern / Slow Down
Slow Down is one of my favourite tracks from the new Crayola Lectern album The Fall and Rise of… The whole album is fantastic, but this is the track that we’ve played the most.
1. Electric Soft Parade / Brother You Must Walk Alone
From the moment we heard the new Electric Soft Parade single at the end of last month, it was inevitable that it was going to end up as this months most listened to track. Breezy guitar pop at it’s finest, that sounds even better now that the sun’s out.
We haven’t stopped listening to the new Curxes single since we downloaded it nearly a fortnight. Now the duo have put up the accompanying video. I’ll let you watch the video to see the whole story, but the tag line put out with it reads “A lone taxidermist sets out to work on his most ambitious project yet”…
If you haven’t grabbed it yet, then you can head over to www.curxes.com for the latest download link.
Today Curxes release their new single Further Still, a free download currently available via soundcloud. Further Still is more delicate and complex than their previous releases, kicking off with an warped operatic vinyl sample which fades away to what initially appears to be a heartfelt ballad but reveals itself to be a thumping disco number by the end:
The announcement of the track was made on the 405 earlier today, and they promised some remixes. No sign of them yet, but we’ll update you when they surface. In the meantime, here’s the Curxes remix of Chvrches single Recover, which gets a digital release today. As mentioned a few posts ago, Recover is getting a vinyl release for Record Store Day on 20th April.
Records Store Day is less than a month away, and this week the list of exclusive records available was announced. There are six shops taking part in Record Store Day on April 20th – Resident, Borderline, Rarekind, Cult Hero, One Stop Records and RK Bass – each of whom will be getting a selection of this year’s releases in. The bigger shops will have more stock, but they’ll also have bigger queues.
We’ve spotted a few Brighton bands amongst the exclusives. So far we’ve seen from Bat For Lashes (a 7″ with different versions of Laura an Marilyn), British Sea Power (The Facts are Right on 7″), and Curxes (who remix Chvrches ‘Recover’), but the list isn’t final yet – There’ll be even more bands added over the next three weeks.
As you may have gathered from our posts, we’re big fans of live music here at Brighton Music Blog. In Brighton, we’re incredibly lucky that there are so many great gigs and so much choice. Last night was no exception, so much so that we decided to go to two gigs. We headed to the Green Door Store where Curxes were first on the bill at Danger De Mort’s monthly night, and then moved on to the Blind Tiger where Milk and Biscuits were headlining.
Curxes
Danger De Mort first came to our attention in October last year when they put on a show that Nordic Giants headlined. Since then they’ve been putting on a gig every month with a mix of local and national bands, all with great line ups. Last night Brighton Music Blog approved Curxes opened the show. Where their first few releases had been very much in an industrial electro vein (they opened with Souxsie Sioux fronts Depeche Mode style single Spectre) they showed a new side with their Christmas cover of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and it was this that we were hoping to get get a glimpse of last night. The first part of the set was filled with the early singles – big belting synth epics which only went slightly awry when a lead fell out of the back of the laptop providing the visuals. Because it was cold, because it was midweek, because it was early – for whatever reason – it was a bit quiet, so Roberta took to the middle of the room as her stage, losing herself in the space, giving us an impression of the what the Curxes live show might be like when they’re playing bigger venues. Their new more reflective side was shown at the end of the set, when they closed on quieter aggressive song, showing off Roberta’s voice and showing the band’s newfound versatility.
Milk & Biscuits
While I had heard good reports of the rest of the bands on the bill they weren’t from Brighton, and there was another band playing in town who I was also looking forward to. I had only seen Milk and Biscuits once before, playing a low-key support slow at the Green Door Store around the time of their Balcony Times mini-album back at the tail end of 2011. That it’s taken until now for me to see them again isn’t to say the eight-piece took 2012 off – half of them are also in Restlesslist, whose concept album Coral Island Girl was one of our highlights last year. By the time I arrived at the Blind Tiger, the place was getting busy and I spotted quite a few local musicians amongst the crowd – Mary Hampton, Jennifer Left, Nick Hudson, Adam from Fragile Creatures, and probably a whole load more that I didn’t recognise. The Milk and Biscuits onstage yesterday were far more performance based than the band I saw over a year ago – they’ve transformed from a bunch of great musicians playing amongst each other to a fully fledged band who looked out towards the audience in a formation which showed them off well. Musically things had changed too and their set didn’t feature any tracks from their first release. To these ears their new sound isn’t quite so introspective as before. Last year’s single White Noise still sounds quite pastoral, but Milk and Biscuits rock harder than they used to. Local poet Gary Goodman joined them onstage for a few tracks, which added a different dimension to things, his sometimes-cutting observations showing that they’re more than just a band. Overall though, the gig was hampered with poor sound – there was a lot of feedback from the microphones, and the drummer seemed unhappy throughout, no doubt one of the issues of having such a large band. Let’s hope that next time there aren’t the same issues. Next time they’ve even promised an encore too!
Normally our weekly post about which gigs we think you should go to to see some of our favourite local acts starts on a Thursday. Thursday has long replaced Friday as the start of the weekend in the Brighton Music Blog calendar. This week though, we’re starting things even earlier on Wednesday, because there’s two cracking gigs on tonight which we feel deserve a bit of a mention.
Tonight Milk & Biscuits play at the Blind Tiger. We loved last year’s epic White Noise single, and this is a great chance to see them playing their new material for their follow up to 2011’s Balcony Time’s mini-LP. Over at the Green Door Store, Danger De Mort are holding their third event. Their first night had Nordic Giants headlining, and we were gutted to miss last month’s event which had IYES and Us Baby Bear Bones supporting. This month’s local support are Curxes, who have promised to play the new tracks they they’ll be releasing later this year. I don’t know a great deal about the rest of the bill, headlined by a band called Cymbals, but we reckon it’ll be great just on the strength of their previous line ups.
Onto Thursday night, where we normally kick off our weekend. One Inch Badge are putting Doldrums at the Prince Albert. Doldrums are from Toronto, but the supports – Us Baby Bear Bones and Luo are two of our favourite local bands.
On Friday night we’ve spotted four gigs we like the look of. Written in Waters, IYES and Calico are playing at Brighton Electric, Speak Galactic and Cloud are supporting Antibang at the Prince Albert, Catherine Ireton is supporting Stu Larsen at Sticky Mike’s and Anneka is playing at live set at the Traumfrau night at the Haunt. We’re spoiled for choice!
Then on Saturday Professor Elemental is launching his new single at the Marlborough. The single’s called This is My Horse (Show Me Yours), and we’ll be writing a separate post about it sometime next week.
On Thursday night, The Mojo Fins headline Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar. There’s some great support slots too – Curxes are supporting Chapel Club at The Haunt, and Negative Pegasus are supporting Holland at Green Door Store.
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