Magic Teapot + Andy Wright presents

Willy Mason + Nina Violet + Jinnwoo –  The Musician, Clyde Street, Leicester £8 adv £10 door

Willy Mason – Black Cab Sessions

www.willymason.net

With a sound that recalls Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash along with the cynicism of American hardcore and punk, nobody could believe wry singer/songwriter Willy Mason was only 19 when he appeared on the indie scene. Born and raised on Martha’s Vineyard, Mason grew up with his parents’ love of folk music. He loved it, too, but his teen years brought Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine into his life.  Mason found their political and social messages much easier to identify with and soon combined folk’s softer and loose delivery with the revolutionary attitude of his new heroes.

Magic Teapot presents

Three Blind Wolves + Silent Devices + Dark Dark Horse

The Musician, Clyde Street, Leicester £5 adv £6 door

Three Blind Wolves – Echo On The Night Train

Three Blind Wolves are the top of my list of music discoveries this year. Ross played in Leicester when he played as Ross Clark and the Scarfs when he supported Frightened Rabbit at Firebug.

 The Glasgow band is making a name for themselves in their native Scotland and their debut album, Sound On The Storm, is sure to be a head-turner in the States.

Their sound is a blend of Frightened Rabbit, Mumford and Sons, and Frontier Ruckus. The album in my possession lists songs out of order, but the first song I heard was the uptempo”Black Bowl Park.” It’s a song that chugs along with surf-inspired guitar over rapid percussion, ending in a guitar finale that sealed the deal for me. I was an immediate fan.  “Captain of a Ship” crept in next, with ethereal vocal harmonies breaking into a steady rhythm. But just as you start tapping your foot, the song breaks with a pause and opens up into a stormy chorus, “I’m the captain of a ship that’s going/ Going down, going down, going down/ Going far from here.” The song then turns itself into a country jam.

Those first two tracks grabbed my attention and it didn’t really matter that they were actually the 2nd and 5th tracks on the official album.  You can sort the songs alphabetically, reverse chronologically, or just shuffle through them. You won’t find a weak spot anywhere. Ross Clarke’s quavering vocals make the band’s sound distinctive, but I’m guessing this great album still won’t do them justice. Three Blind Wolves strike me as a quintessential live act and their buzz will build in the States as they take the stage before new fans.

Hear Ya

Andy Wright + Magic Teapot presents

Janice Graham Band +  This Motion Picture + Baby Teeth

Lock 42, 2-4 Frog Island, Leicester £6 adv

Janice Graham Band – Murder

After headlining “The Next Big Thing” gig at the HMV Ritz venue and releasing their debut album “It’s Not Me” in February, the Janice Graham Band have definitely been making waves across Manchester. Now supporting the Inspiral Carpets on their UK tour, the Janice Graham Band have been making meteoric impact, yet there is something really earnest and refreshing about this four piece from South Manchester. What’s great about the band is how their music celebrates a whole range of genres. From Acid-Jazz, Ska, Hip-hop, Garage, Reggae, Jazz, Soul, Punk and Surf, the Janice Graham- Band are like Terry Hall’s and Alex Turner’s love-child, bobbing about with their spontaneous brand of Kitchen-Sink-Jazz.

“Robbery” is a song which narrates like an angsty MC, whilst swinging with the jazzy old-timers. It’s a song whose baggy bass, intoxicating trumpet and galvanic guitars pulsate with a youthful zing. Despite its gritty motifs, “Robbery” is a song which exhilarates and drags you into a cavern of chilled-out indulgence. It’s also a song which makes you appreciate the versatility and Bona fide delivery of singer Joe Jones. In essence, “Robbery” conveys an understated craftsmanship, which builds to crescendo, before wanderlusting into a frenzied finale.

“No Money Honey” is a song whose trumpet bellows like a sleepy, hunter’s horn, reverberating against the chilled out undercarriage of rhythmic bass and drums. It’s a song whose urban-grit lyrics are delivered like street poetry through intense slightly inebriated sounding vocals. Although it’s the boisterous, relaying trumpets which swing in and out the spotlight, “No Money Honey’s” brilliance is also echoed through the all consuming 70’s wah guitar solo, which is an unexpected twist in this ska-reggae-laden song.

“Murder” is a song whose vocals wails with a menacing showmanship, likened to Buster Bloodvessel on a good day. It’s a song whose bold lyrics and tortured echo-plea’s take you on a mild macabre excursion. Despite the dark undertones, “Murder” is an infectious song, whose “in-ya-face” facade is mellowed by nimble-fingered guitars and jaunty trumpets. Interestingly “Murder” is probably Janice Grahams- Band’s most oblique song, whose out-tro showcases a “black improvised jazz” endorsing the band’s individualistic streak.

The Manc Review

http://www.myspace.com/janicegrahamband

Andy Wright + Magic Teapot presents

The Primitives + The School + Produkty@ Lock 42, 2-4 Frog Island, Leicester £8 adv £10 door

Good times and missing friends

The Primitives – Crash

Eighteen years is a long time, period, never mind when set against the fickle contexts of musical fads and trends. Having initially split up in 1992 after the commercial and critical failure of third album Galore, it seemed The Primitives brief bubble had burst almost as quickly as it had inflated, off the back of numerous endorsements and one unexpectedly out of kilter smash hit single. Brought together by the tragic sudden death of former bassist Steve Dullaghan, and no doubt inspired by the number of hot new artists namechecking them in interviews (The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Los Campesinos!, Vivian Girls et al et al), the remaining trio of Tracy “Tracy” Cattell, Paul Court and Tig Williams recruited a new bassist Raphael Moore and their reformation was (re)born.

On a personal level, tonight feels like being transported back to an adolescence that had long disappeared, The Primitives being one of the first gigs my younger self had the privilege of attending. Schoolboy crushes aside, and at the time, Ms Cattell along with the likes of Transvision Vamp’s Wendy James and Andrea Lewis of The Darling Buds were the subjects of every indie male’s fantasy, The Primitives also released a clutch of damn fine singles, not to mention one of the most overlooked and underrated albums of the 1980s in Lovely, making this about the most anticipated re-union this side of Kevin Shields and co. delivering tinnitus to a new generation in recent years.

Before the main event, London based six-piece Lucky Soul prove to be more than passable openers. Their sound, veering between sixties style soul, old school rhythm and blues and intelligent pop, could be deemed as somewhat out of place in the current climate where rehashing the familiar is classed as the new new, yet they’re a welcome diversion, drawing comparisons with the likes of Saint Etienne and Makin’ Time respectively. They have songs with titles like ‘Love 3′ and ‘Southern Melancholy’, which go someway towards explaining where their eclectic heads are at, while recent 45 ‘White Russian Doll’ could be mistaken for any number of acts from Wham! to The Jam and back again.

Looking around the venue it’s clear to see the influence The Primitives have had despite being out of the limelight all these years. Balding men with stout paunches rub shoulders with smartly attired girls less than half their age, while even lesser known album tracks such as ‘Dreamwalk Baby’ and ‘I’ll Stick With You’ are mouthed back word for word, partly because Tracy Tracy’s vocals are too low in the mix, but more as a benevolent show of appreciation that one of C86 and its ensuing years most focal groups are back together. ‘Stop Killing Me’ still sounds as fresh and exuberant as it did back in 1987, while even the material aired from their later period such as ‘Empathise’ and ‘Summer Rain’ has a more eminent feel about it than first time around.

Early b-side ‘(We’ve) Found A Way To The Sun’ – poignantly dedicated to the sadly departed Dullaghan – and breakthrough single ‘Thru The Flowers’, both sublime in their execution, bring a lump to the throat in awe while their jaunty cover of Lee Hazelwood’s ‘Need All The Help I Can Get’ offers a timely mid-set interlude to the memory jerkers that both precede and succeed it. Unsurprisingly, the biggest cheer of the night is reserved for the aforementioned top five hit ‘Crash’, while the encore of ‘Nothing Left’ and ‘Really Stupid’ also proves memorable, if only for the sight of several pounds of flesh starting a moshpit near the front of the stage.

Afterwards, in the bar downstairs, an orderly queue of punters form in order to obtain mementos from the band, while one girl can’t contain herself in telling Tracy Tracy she’s been waiting nineteen years since the age of seven to see them live! Let’s hope they don’t make us wait another two decades, because if this evening’s performance is anything to go by, The Primitives are as vital today as they ever were. Welcome back!

Dom, Gourlay, reviewed gig at The Bodega in 2010, Drowned In Sound

The School

The School are a pop band from Cardiff. Their debut album ‘Loveless Unbeliever’ was released in 2010 on legendary Spanish label Elefant Records, and was produced by Ian Catt (Saint Etienne, Trembling Blue Stars, The Field Mice, Shampoo).

The album appeared in over 70 ‘Best of 2010′ lists, it was 6Music’s Album of the Day, Rough Trade’s Album of the Week and Radio Nowhere’s Album of the Year. BBC… Radio Wales’s Adam Walton declared it his ‘favourite Welsh pop album of all time’. Oh and Molly Ringwald is also a fan.

Album two – ‘Reading Too Much Into Things Like Everything’ – will be released on 14th May 2012, recorded & produced by David Wrench (Euros Childs, Guillemots, James Yorkston, Everything Everything, Caribou, Fanfarlo, Alessi’s Ark, Bat For Lashes, Race Horses) at Bryn Derwen studios in North Wales. It has 12 tracks and is 29 minutes long.

“a swaying, winsome tune with some of the Phil Spector lushness of Lucky Soul, the Belle & Sebastian-style modesty of Camera Obscura, and the airy, girl-group vocals of both” – Pitchfork

http://www.soundcloud.com/theschoolband

Andy Wright + Magic Teapot presents

Said The Whale + Theo Miller + guests @ Lock 42, 2-4 Frog Island, Leicester Saturday 19 May 2012 £6 adv

Said The Whale – Camilo (The Magician)

Said The Whale formed in 2007 as a collaboration between songwriters Ben Worcester and Tyler Bancroft. The pair’s debut EP, Taking Abalonia, featured sunny west coast indie pop, with breezy harmonies, shimmering guitars, and lyrical tributes to their home city of Vancouver.  

The group is now poised to take the next step with the release of its latest single, “Camilo (The Magician).” With its gritty powerchords and sunny powerpop chorus, the single has already been dubbed the “song of the summer” by Grant Lawrence of CBC Radio 3. Produced by Howard Redekopp (Tegan and Sara, The New Pornographers, Mother Mother) and Tom Dobrzanski (Hey Ocean!, The Zolas), it will appear on the group’s sophomore album, Islands Disappear, due for release on October 13 via Upper Management/EMI.  

Unlike the west coast focus of previous releases, the new album draws on the experience of driving across Canada, from the van breaking down in Manitoba (“Dear Elkhorn”) to camping in Alberta (“Emerald Lake, AB”). With stylistic forays that include backwoods folk (“False Creek Change”) and danceable ukulele/glockenspiel rave-ups (“Goodnight Moon”), it’s the sound of a band coming into its own, delivering on the promise of its early recordings.

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Magic Teapot + Andy Wright presents

Lucy Rose + Nathan Holmes + Jinnwoo @ The Musician, Clyde Street, Leicester £7 adv £9 door Sunday 27 May 2012

Lucy Rose – Middle Of The Bed

This young singer-songwriter with the acoustic guitar who sang with Bombay Bicycle Club on ‘Flaws’ will inevitably draw comparisons with Laura Marling. There are similarities, but Lucy Rose is no- imitation, and a forthcoming (it’s being mixed as she plays tonight) debut album and this show should go a long way towards proving it for good.

Lucy Rose manages to combine the best of two worlds; the pop craft demonstrated by her band’s subtle flecks of guitar, synth and even cello on occasion, and a natural romance and swing that engage the hips and the heart. If her voice isn’t quite as adaptable and all encompassing as Marling’s, then it is a shade sweeter, a sort of moreish appetiser to Marling’s full-blown meal. It feels like the sound as a whole is most crucial to her, not the desire to write the perfect song, and it’s that sound at its fluid and fleshed out best that sets her apart.

“I suggested to my local HMV that they could prominently place the copies of The Fly with me on it”, she jokes, making reference to her place as one of January’s six different cover stars, before adding, in a perfect bored employee impression, “they said, ‘your mum’s already been in and we did it’”. It won’t be long until such family interventions and peer name-checks are a thing of the past for Lucy Rose.

Martin Cordiner The Fly

Magic Teapot + Andy Wright presents

Milagres  + guests @ The Musician, Clyde Street, Leicester £7 adv Tuesday 29 May 2012

Milagres – Halfway

To create music inspired by glacial mountaineering that doesn’t sound like Sigur Ros is an accomplishment. It’s even more of a triumph then, that the debut from Brooklyn quartet Milagres soothes like a sedated TV On The Radio or a more streamlined Doves. Fronted by the doe-eyed and dulcet-voiced Kyle Wilson (who became obsessed with extreme climbing before the album’s inception), Milagres’ debut at times teeters on the edge of inoffensive indie, but when their cinematic soundscapes do ignite, ‘Glowing Mouth’ is as emotionally jolting and cosily reassuring as a night in with a David Attenborough boxset.

Harriet Gibsone – The Fly

Andy Wright + Magic Teapot presents

The Fossil Collective + One Cure For Man + guests @ The Musician, Clyde Street, Leicester £6 adv £7 door

The Fossil Collective – Let It Go

Fossil Collective, a two-piece from Leeds, consists of multi instrumentalists David Fendick and Jonny Hooker. Their first recordings saw them taking inspiration from classic albums by Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac and Simon and Garfunkel and suggested comparisons with more contemporary artists such as Fleet Foxes, Midlake and Bon Iver. But in truth their exquisitely structured songs and glorious, rich harmonies owe as much, if not more, to a solid English song tradition, and their material holds that distinct English quality that many North American artists hanker after.

Andy Wright + Magic Teapot presents

Skinny Lister + The Skunk Boy Project + guests @ The Donkey, Welford Road, Leicester Tuesday 5 June £7 adv

Skinny Lister – Plough and Orion

Well, the fact that their next album is going to be entirely a cappella might provide some answers. And so might Slow Down, the far-from-accessible debut album from Hyde & Beast. The record is a self-produced collaboration between Neil Bassett, who North-East indie fans will remember from The Golden Virgins, and The Futureheads’ glum drummer Dave Hyde.

You might remember Dave best (if not for being able to play the drums by only moving his arms from the wrist down) for his brief turn as lead singer on ‘Danger Of The Water’ from The Futureheads. His muffled mumblings made that song all the more sinister, and undoubtedly the bands’ most unsettling track to date. So it’s no surprise that Slow Down, with Hyde on lead vocals, is darker than any album he’s worked on before.

Just take ‘You Could Buy Me Anything’ which is built around the low, tuneless strum of a guitar, collapsing into a chorus of Dave’s creepy falsetto. Its suicidally slow pace and twanging dissonance gives it the feel of a Field Music 7-inch being played at 33rpm instead of 45rpm. This bleakness is matched by the track that follows, ‘All Because Of You’, as vocals are slurred and chords are audibly wrenched into something approaching life. But as much as these songs might sound like a slog, they’re full of charm and beauty.

Opener ‘Never Come Back’ is the best example, as it does what all opening tracks should, by setting out the Hyde & Beast blueprint. The introductory piano plays droopy major chords that sound as though they’re being played at the end of a crumbling pier in a rainy northern seaside town. The sky outside is grey, but the pianist is muddling on and making the best of it anyway. The emotion of the song peaks with a chorus that brings in a jubilant brass band to gloss over the gloom. It’s both a clumsy and brilliant twist.

It’s also quite bizarre, which is another of this album’s themes. ‘Last Chance For A Slow Dance’ is stranger than most, with lyrics that plead for a leaving lover to stay. What’s odd is the way lines like “I would give the sky / For just one more night / Please just stay” are literally moaned, almost reluctantly, as though the sentiment is a chore. It’s a superbly surreal take on a love song, even if it’s not one that’s like to win any woman’s affections (unlike genuine tearjerker ‘Go To Sleep’). Stranger still is ‘Wolfman Blues’ which combines fuzzy sub-Libertines guitars, honky-tonk piano and a sludgy bass, all playing in different keys like a hazy Eno-era Roxy Music artrock jam.

Hyde & Beast turn off course again with ‘You Will Be Lonely’, which is an authentic and unusually jolly country-dance number – a wry, British take on bluegrass. It’s one of two tracks to feature Field Music’s David Brewis and another ex-Golden Virgin, Lucas Renney on bass and guitar. The pair also appear on ‘Lord, Send For Me’, which has subtle Eastern influences that make Hyde & Beast’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. What’s great about Hyde & Beast is that they’re able to explore such diverse varieties of music – snippets of British music hall and Sixties psychedelia, fragments of glam rock and folk, a slight White Album aesthetic – but always in a tasteful way. Their songs are never bland genre studies or tedious pastiches. The pair maintain a hushed reverence for their musical influences and treat them with their own subdued personalities. It all makes for a record that is undoubtedly their own and unlike any other. Make no mistake, Slow Down is not the feel-good album of the summer, but it’s an unusual and impressive insight into the weird and wonderful world of Hyde & Beast.

Drowned In Sound 8/10 Robert Cooke

Magic Teapot + Andy Wright presents

Liz Green + Angela Armstrong + Courtney Askey

Liz Green – Bad Medicine

Here is an Independent review of her recent Bush Hall, London perrformance written by Ben Walsh on Wednesday, 4 April 2012

“It’s going to be a whole lotta of fun tonight,” Liz Green sings, in her jazz-coated tones, on the perky ‘Midnight Blues’. That’s about as jaunty as the 28-year-old’s music gets. She even warns us, jokily (and Green’s very droll, like a blend of Victoria Wood, Linda Smith and Beautiful South’s Paul Heaton), that “I’m going to try and depress you now,” before the exquisite lament ‘Hey Joe’, adding “it’s a sad song about my imaginary friend’s less than impressive love life.” 

The self-deprecating, retro-folk singer is a rare, exotic talent, who routinely sings about death. Her vocals sound like a heady mix of Nina Simone, Portishead’s Beth Gibbons and Karen Dalton and the subjects of her dark materials include obsessive funeral-goers (‘Luis’), rag and bone men (‘Rag and Bone’) and old people’s homes (‘The Quiet’). In fact, two songs into her imaginative set she delivers a sumptuous rendition of Pulp’s “Help the Aged”, and Green’s chief sympathies appear to be with the vulnerable, the ignored and the forlorn. The pained singer’s distinctive fingerpicking guitar style is backed up tonight by an enthusiastic and sympathetic band on sax, trombone, drums and double bass.

Five years after triumphing in Glastonbury festival’s emerging talent competition and four years after releasing the sensational single ‘Bad Medicine’, the Wirral chanteuse finally released her debut album, O, Devotion!, late last year and it’s a sometimes eerie, but always humane gem. At points, this gritty record wouldn’t feel out of place sound-tracking Edward Woodward’s desperate, final screams in The Wicker Man, but then it also reeks of a decadent nightclub in 1920s Weimar Germany. Thankfully, Green punctures the grittier material with lots of humour tonight – “Yeah, this one’s about death, too – and no little cabaret, the greatest example being the moment when she adopts “a secret transformation”, sporting a grey woolly bird’s face on her head before an a cappella rendition of ‘Who Killed Poor Robin?’. It’s extremely funny, but a tad creepy, too.

There are plenty of highlights tonight, most notably ‘Bad Medicine’, where she innovatively adds her own mouth trumpet, ‘Displacement Song’ (a war track, inspired by Primo Levi) and the powerful, mordant ‘Gallows’. Nevertheless, Green still gently castigates herself throughout – for starting a song in the wrong key, for “just coming out with a big splurge” of words – and she expresses shock that Bush Hall is full. She shouldn’t be. If anything, this intimate venue, although suited to Green’s chatty, down-to-earth performance style, is way too small for a talent this big. Liz Green, you’re terrific.

Magic Teapot + Andy Wright presents

MOON DUO + The Roz Bruce Infusion + guests

Moon Duo – Mazes

Moon Duo – Killing Time

Moon Duo is the tandem of Eric “Ripley” Johnson (guitarist, vocalist for Wooden Shjips) and Sanae Yamada. Rather than representing a departure from the hazy, drug-addled psychedelia of Wooden Shjips, Moon Duo functions as a natural creative extension for Johnson. Whereas the Shjips are strongly rooted in a late-60s/early-70s, distinctly Californian aesthetic of Jefferson Airplane and The Doors, Moon Duo is a more geographically, if not temporally, adventurous project. Escape, the band’s first record for Woodsist, finds Johnson reveling in the murky pop stylings of Suicide, the motorik rhythm of Neu!, and the ecstatic clatter of The Velvet Underground.

Tiny Mix Tapes