Happy Birthday Green Door Store! Yesterday our favourite venue in town invited us along to their birthday gig. As we mentioned in our January gig preview post there were a couple of Brighton bands on the bill – Guru and Desire – so we pointed our lens at them and you can see the pics below. Click through to view large: Continue reading
We Are Millionaires by Pete Fij & Terry Bickers was released back in July, quietly understated but at the same time accomplished and powerful. The band describe their songs as being miserable, which you can’t deny, but there’s also a majesty to them too. Most of all though, they make it look effortlessly easy, which everyone knows is the really tricky bit. Continue reading
This year, AK/DK released their second full length long player Patterns / Harmonics, a further refinement of their anarchic analogue kraut-punk-techno sound and the follow up to 2014’s Synths + Drums + Noise + Space. As great as they are on record though, it’s live where the band shine and their album launch at the Green Door Store in October was our gig of the year.
We haven’t managed to make it along to many Bleeding Hearts Recordings related things this year, but we’re still fans of what they do with their regular monthly nights ploughing a different furrow to everyone else. They’ve only put out one record this year, which felt (to us at least) like it was a long time coming. Since the recording of the three tracks on grasshopper‘s Nothing Like Us single they’ve changed guitarists a number of times, but have now settled on a line up which has added some meat to the post-punk bones of their previous post-punk incarnation. Where so many guitar bands in Brighton opt for a grungey shoegaze sound it’s always refreshing hear grasshopper (which you can do on the 3rd January at the Green Door Store)
We’ve put a couple of bands in our top five who only had short form releases, whose music we love and we feel still deserve a place in our list despite not having released an album. The first of these is Anneka, who released her Life Force EP at the end of April on Anti-Ghost Moon Ray. The tracks managed to be both electronic and organic at the same time, layering synths over ethereal vocals and blurring the distinction between the two. When we met up to do her Brighton Rocks shoot in May she told us that there was a follow up planned at some point so hopefully we’ll see that soon in 2018. Continue reading
Making end of year lists is tough, especially for us. No, hear us out – this isn’t just some sob story. Most of the bands we write about are just starting out, so haven’t had albums out yet – should they be lower down the list or even omitted because they haven’t put out a long player? And conversely what about the bands who have released an album – surely they shouldn’t be higher in the list by default. And what about the more established bands – should we be including them at the expense of smaller bands? And how are we going to get around the fact that bands with more recent release or live dates are nearer the front of our mind than those who put records out at the start of the year? It’s a metaphorical minefield, so our list is rather arbitrary. It could easily have been twice as long, and as usual we’ve gone for bands rather than tracks or albums to get around it. Here’s numbers 25 through to 11: Continue reading
So, welcome to probably our last new music post of the year. As December hits we’ll be doing our end of year round ups, but it’s rare that anything gets put out in the run up to Christmas anyway. Continue reading
Our thirteen Brighton Rocks is with Kate Gerrard, songwriter and frontwoman for The Delta Bell:
For this month’s gig preview post we’re actually going to cover November and December. Generally there aren’t as many gigs in December, and we’re normally distracted with end of year stuff on the blog, so it’s seems appropriate to cover two months in one post now. Continue reading
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