This weeks edition of After Hours comes courtesy of one of our favourite-est new bands: Sons Of Noel and Adrian. You’ve already read how much we love their debut self-titled album (out now on Shels Records) so we thought we’d catch up with the two main men responsible Tom Cowan and Jacob Richardson to find out what they’ve been listening, reading and watching over the past few months. Continue Reading

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

That quote itself could have been the perfect review for The Ascent Of Everest’s debut How Lonely Sits The City. Now, I admit to being a bit of a lazy person, but even I’m not that lazy… So here goes: Post-rock has never really been my “thing”. Perhaps it’s my short attention span doing battle with the often marathon-length tracks, or maybe it’s my partiality to things like, say, lyrics. Upon receiving HLSTC, I was admittedly daunted by the album’s scant five tracks, ranging in length from seven to fourteen minutes. Still I approached it with the same open mind I try to approach any new music, and I came away considerably moved by the album’s mixture of subtle beauty and crashing intensity. Continue Reading

While it might be better known for the likes of Fatboy Slim, The Kooks and 80’s Matchbox B-line Disaster, Brighton is quietly developing a new folk scene to rival any city in the UK. And we aren’t talking the coffee table smugness school of folk that the likes of Adem insist on peddling, nor the one man/woman with a guitar that gets plastered across our tv’s and sunday supplements then used to sell us butter. This is folk that scares or unsettles you, a way of passing on stories and legends. The figures of Birdengine and Mary Hampton both deliver dark brooding folk music with a passion and with lyrics to chill you to the bone. Add to that the instrumental magnificence of -A+M and the massed tribes of the Willkommen Collective (of which Sons of Noel and Adrian are a part) and you realise the city is really very lucky, even as it stands to be invaded by a couple of thousand drunken morons for the beach party in September. In most other cities, this would be considered a ‘scene’, but with so many various micro-scenes, there is no cohesive ‘Brighton sound’ as yet. Continue Reading

In case you didn’t know already - TLOBF are hosting a free mixtape called Building with Strings from the folks down at Something In Construction records. It’s actually frigging excellent and anybody who’s anybody has already downloaded it, so you might want to get your act together and get it yourself before someone brings it up at a party and you embarrass yourself by being the only person there not cool enough to know who’s on it. Anyway, the launch for it was at The Old Blue Last – an e-mail tipping me off about some free tequila and a free gig had me scurrying down there like the freeloading, music-loving boozehound before I could finish reading it, I can only assume that TLOBF intended for me to write something about the night also… Continue Reading