"Close your eyes and you'd swear it was 1988 all over again."
"It’s time to throw punk rock out the door and embrace middle age. The balcony it is, vertiginously positioned above the seething, balding mass below, pogoing and crowd surfing and acting as if tomorrow wasn’t a work day." Dara Higgins reviews last Sunday's PiL gig at The Button Factory.
"It was gash. It was horrible. It was a grimpocalypse. The wind, which cut across the field, played havoc with the sound. At least, I think it was the wind. It may just have been the sound." - Dara Higgins gets his weekend ruined at Forbidden Fruit.
The first half of Siobhán Kane's epic roundup of this year's Primavera Sound festival - Walkmen, Wilco, Friends, Iceage, Grimes, Afghan Whigs, Mazzy Star, Thee Oh Sees, Danny Brown, A$AP Rocky & Refused.
"For some reason I was expecting some bedraggled hipsters and angry twenty somethings with beards who didn’t really know why they were there, but it was wall to wall hair, and that hair was flailing around in a proper, albeit slower than usual, way." - Dara Higgins on Sleep's Button Factory gig last week.
"He's neurotic and anxious, wandering around the stage as if he's lost his front door keys, shouting at us, shouting at himself, shouting at the complexities of everyday life." - Siobhán Kane's take on Jerry Seinfeld at The O2 on Sunday night.
"... it might have seemed ramshackle, but had assuredness at its core, something which Muhly references as disorganised and casual but instead seemed more like fluid poetry." - Siobhán Kane attended Nico Muhly & Owen Pallett's recent performance at the Barbican Centre in London.
"... with his shirt sleeves rolled up, it seemed as if he was going to work in the fields, which I suppose he was, somehow, but rather than fields of wheat, fields of imagination." - Siobhán Kane travelled to London earlier this month to see Jeff Mangum play at Union Chapel.
"I could watch them every night of my life, and it would not be enough." - Siobhán Kane on Future Islands' performance at Whelan's last Saturday.
"...a lightness of touch that makes complex compositions and ideas seem like misty clouds floating around your brain, before you wake up from the dream and realise you have just enjoyed a song about a fairytale monster" - Siobhán Kane on Agnes Obel.