The simple, unassuming, almost ambiguous name of this group is rather fittingly an apt encapsulation of the sounds they create. Ten are an ambient, cinematic and experimental group from Leeds. On record it’s the project of Dominic Deane & Jonny Fryer but live it carries a full band performance complete with brass and strings. The songs are remarkably humble, plaintive and sweeping in scope. Read more…
Three-piece, Manchester based outfit Plank don’t have a single word to say between them. Instead, their recently released debut album Animalism does all the talking for them. Eight tracks of Germanic-tinged, instrumental noise are what they account for their inaugural offering to the world. Read more…
Sauna Youth’s debut album is available for pre-order now, ahead of its release on September 3rd (via the same label – Gringo Records/Faux Discx – that put out Peel Apart favourites Hookworms’ debut EP). The opening ‘Town Called Distraction’ is a ten-minute stomper, all The Fall guitars and thumping bass, but instead of hearing the battery-acid gurgle of a glorious drunk howling at a bus stop (Mark E. Smith) it’s a male/female split of spoken word eloquence with teasing nods to lifeless pretention that somehow work. Read more…
Toucans is the one man project of Adam John Humphrey, often armed largely with just an acoustic guitar, his music can be rusty and rudimentary but also grainy and wholesome, the plaintive and often instrumental tracks evoke a back-porch Americana of old, all glugs of bourbon and endless muggy nights out under the stars. Still in in its infancy, the project is not much more than a large bunch of homemade soundcloud tracks and a couple of gigs played, but from the songs offered thus far there is more than enough to get excited about. Read more…
Where some bands explode into life, others sizzle with the steady shush of a vinyl in perpetual wait for the click of completion. BEAK> are one such collective. From their eponymous 2009 debut to their latest offering ‘»’, they carry with them a perpetual air of contemplative consistency. Experimental is a word thrown around carelessly at times, but in this instance it seems less an adjective and more a hallmark of the band’s work. Read more…
Bands who can play badly, perform with no cohesion and be generally awful live, yet still provide a thoroughly entertaining and captivating spectacle, surely have half of the battle won. I have seen The Black Tambourines several times over the last year and on each occasion they have left the audience breathless. Read more…
