Serafina Steer – St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch, London, January 24 2013
By Samuel Spencer
Last Thursday night, I did something I never thought I’d be doing again; I went to church. No, I haven’t had any sudden spiritual conversion. I did ‘see the light’, but the lights in question were the red, blue and green stage lights illuminating Serafina Steer, launching her album with a sold-out gig in St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch.
Serafina Steer – The Moths Are Real (Stolen Recordings/ January 14 2013)
By Samuel Spencer
Last week, Time Out London named Serafina Steer as one of their ‘ones to watch for 2013’ amongst five other bright young things in the music industry – a strange group to find Steer in, who has already released two albums, and has been performing for nearly six years as a solo artist, slowly picking up a cult of fans including Patrick Wolf (who she has been a support act for) and Jarvis Cocker. However, during this time she has often been sidelined by reviewers, who have put her in a number of rather odd boxes, with the main ones being the ‘British Joanna Newsom’ and ‘Laura Marling with a harp’.
Martha Wainwright – Come Home To Mama (V2 Records/ October 15 2012)
By Samuel Spencer
Surprisingly for an album that begins with a song titled ‘I Am Sorry’, this is an unapologetic set of songs from the youngest of the Wainwright/McGarrigle troupe. Although the opening beeps suggest the singer has ‘gone electronic’, before you cry Judas and cut through the power cables, rest assured that there is much to please both old and new fans ofMartha Wainwright.
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Following shows at The Great Escape festival and London’s Borderline club, and their being heralded as a ‘Band To Watch For 2012’ by NME, Wet Nuns, a death-blues duo from Yorkshire, have announced details of their new single and tour. The single, ‘Why You So Cold’, is due for release on September 10, and will be available digitally and on a limited edition 7”. Their previous singles have been described as ‘hedonistic riffology’ by The Fly and more colourfully by Thrash Hits as ‘music that makes us want to get in bar fights in the vain hope that it might impress hot girls with tattoos’. By all accounts ‘Why You So Cold’ is more of the same.
Liverpool band Stealing Sheep have just released a new video, as well as details of their debut album. The video, recorded in the garden of Liverpool’s The Kazimeer, is for their latest single, ‘Shut Eye’, which may be familiar to some as the theme to the new Hollyoaks ad, and features the band playing the song amongst a troupe of other musicians; imagine ‘60s love-in meets Shoreditch meets MGMT’s ‘Time To Pretend’ video. Watch it below.
Hey Sholay have just announced their September tour dates, as well as their album’s release date, topping off what has been a very busy year for them. The band, a group of musicians, artists and filmmakers hailing from Sheffield and Leeds, have certainly been burning the candle at both ends – when not releasing singles, they’re playing gigs in paddle boats in Hyde Park, winning awards like The Must See Band of Summer 2012 from BBC 6Music and sending demos to record labels wrapped in faux bear fur.
![grace-jones-hula-hoop-www.telemoustique.beimages-03-07-09[1]](http://musika.flexyserver.co.uk/wp-content/uploads//2012/06/grace-jones-hula-hoop-www.telemoustique.beimages-03-07-091.jpg "grace-jones-hula-hoop-www.telemoustique.beimages-03-07-09[1]")
Festival season is upon us (you can tell from the flooding), with one of my personal highlights, Lovebox, happening this weekend. However, this is not any old Lovebox. This is the tenth year since Groove Armada began the festival, and they’ve really thought outside of the (Love)box (my only pun, I promise) this year to produce what is possibly their finest line-up ever – so good a line-up, in fact, that naming the five essential acts to see is an almost impossible task, with many fantastic acts (Bobby Womack, Lana Del Rey, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, Little Dragon, Friendly Fires) not even making my shortlist. From the dubstep dystopia of Friday to the disco-centric Sunday (who would have thought we’d be seeing Chaka Khan and Chic on the same bill in 2012?), it’s sure to be a fantastic weekend all round. But here are my personal highlights…
As I’m sure you are now aware, Donna Summer died yesterday (May 17), creating a deluge of tributes on Twitter. And no wonder – without Donna Summer, modern music would have been completely different than it is today, and it’s all due to one song. In fact, you could say pop music has two parts; before ‘I Feel Love’ and after it.
But surely it’s just another disco record, and as everyone knows ‘disco sucks’, right? Wrong. The song – written by Summer and produced by Georgio Moroder, then an upcoming producer who has since gone on to win three Oscars – was the first UK number one single to feature solely electronic instruments. Basically, these eight minutes of synths, squeals and lust are where it all begins.
An interview with Mt. Wolf
By Samuel Spencer
Genres are often tricky to identify with some new music – and this is certainly the case for London-based four-piece Mt. Wolf. Writers have tried to define them as many things, but none of them have truly fitted. “I think labelling our entire catalogue of music as a genre is quite a hard thing to do,” said singer Kate when asked how she would define her own sound, “I think we quite liked the whole idea behind ‘dream folk’, because it fused the really large-scale expansiveness of dream pop, fused with that more intricate folk side, and we quite like the ideas that that threw up.” Just don’t call them ‘folktronica’; “I can’t ever think of ‘folktronica’ as a genre, I find it too boxy , and I don’t think you can really box our stuff in. If you just take a concept in its own right which is so vast thing as folk and just cut up the word electronic and stick them together, it doesn’t quite get to the heart of that middle ground that happens when you’re fusing music.”
Interview with The May Birds
By Samuel Spencer
For better or for worse, Folk is back in a big way. Teenagers who ten years ago would have bought an electric guitar and wanted to sound like the Strokes are now buying acoustics and discussing Laura Marling and Mumford & Sons in exalted tones.
I asked Camilla Rockley, pianist for The May Birds, her views on this revival. “I think what it comes down to is that it’s pleasant to listen to. I don’t think it offends everybody and it’s not the sort of thing that anyone would turn off, so from that point of view everyone will listen to it – whether they listen to it again is up to them,
