Without really intending to, we seem to have low-key ‘done’ Sundance this last week, mainly via the ewaitlist, which is cool fun. Of the headline grabbing films, we saw The Tale, (with Laura Dern, Jason Ritter and an eleven year old Isabelle Nélisse) which has amazing parallel times and lines storytelling. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4015500/ I can’t tell …
Search Results for: Mike Hughes
I shouldn’t like Skating Polly, two Oklahoma kids playing thrashy post punk, but it turns out I love them utterly to bits. I got the album on a whim, and to check them out further, seeing as it turns out I’d seen them live supporting Babes In Toyland. I’d kinda filed that away in the …
School Of Seven Bells – SVIIB to their mates – have had a place in my heart from the start, but it’s not always been firmly fixed. It seemed so sweet when twin sisters Alejandra and Claudia Deheza met up with Benjamin Curtis while opening on tour for Ben’s band Secret Machines, and the three …
Loved this song for a long, long time. Only just realized it has Chloe Sevigny in it, apparently her first time on film in any guise. I was prompted to it by watching Chloe’s excellent UK mini-series Hit And Miss in which she stars as a paid assassin who just happens to be transgender female. …
I’m ….slightly …..disconcerted by her attire ………….. but this is top class pop music. Yowzah!!” – Mike Hughes
Hannah Lou Clark (TAPKA FOE) – new song, new video. Yup, different, but all still there for sure. – Mike Hughes
East Portland Blog is run by a man I’ve never met, but have become good friends with over the past few years. Let’s call him Davey. And just to prove that Davey takes notice of what he puts up on EPB, in one of our email conversations the other day, he asked “So what’s going …
MH: OMG, I almost managed a morning start! Not quite pre-noon, although I did manage to get back down to 6th Street in order to catch Feathers play a lunch-time slot. I was curious about these. Their PR image is of a very glossy 4-girl band, almost too glamorous to be real, and I’d been …
PD: Friday morning came like a dull thud. Fell out of bed and down to breakfast just before the kitchen shut. The morning was more challenging than any previous that week, and I hated missing perfectly good sets starting at noon, but there are only so many 03.00 roll-ins one can manage without deleterious effect …
Mike Hughes: Thursday was another hot one in Austin. I was playing with that ‘SXSW conundrum’ — do I go and see British bands, especially ones that are going to be playing down the road from me in a few weeks? The decision today was a resounding yes, so I said farewell for a few …
Mike: Wednesday was going to provide no respite on the sleep front. You gotta have a plan for SXSW and mine was to aim for one or two main ‘must-do’s per day, then fill in the rest. Today’s first imperative was to see Tegan And Sara, who I last saw in 2010 at the Roundhouse …
So, Mike speaking here. I’m sitting in Austin-Bergstrom Airport at the end of my second SXSW. I’ve got the cans on to drown out the sound. You can’t knock it, there’s 3 live bands playing in the airport departure lounge on the Monday after it’s all over, but I need to concentrate. On the way …
Deerhoof are a band I’ve been in the next street to but inexplicably never managed to see in the flesh. That’s likely to continue for a little while as, despite being over here for ATP, and furthermore playing a couple of gigs either side, I’m sadly going to be in fail mode yet again. I’ll …
LCMDF are more on the money than ever. We’ve been chasing their moves ever since seeing them in a dank dripping concrete cellar in Liverpool. That’s been a year or two, they’ve been through some slightly fallow and middling times with Kitsune, and have now totally found their bite with this new song “Paranoia.” It’s …
This must be a record, nearly a month to post a gig review. I have my reasons for the ‘slight delay’ and I will post this and be damned, given that the raison d’etre for this blog was always supposed to be as my own gig diary and compendium. Anyone who wants to glance over …
Then there’s this band from Japan called Taffy (I wonder if they know that it’s slang for Welsh?) who are famous for sounding like Britpop. I mean, some of their songs really do sound like they’ve snatched Louise Wener off the street and have her chained to a radiator. But I like them rather a …
Next up, news of the band that I really do think are the most exciting prospect to break it huge this year. Forget all that hype about about certain bands from London, because PINS really are the shizzle. They’ve got a new track out, “LuvU4Lyf,” that comes somewhere close to showing what a bollock grabbing …
Only just over a week ago, I came across the improbably named Woodpecker Wooliams. No, stop, don’t be put off, come back, they’re really, really good. Or rather she is, for the human name of this bird is Gemma Williams. God I love it when things get cut up, distorted and reduced to elements of …
Excellent, my suspicions are confirmed, Mr Revo Ziganda does in fact have a real name. But I’ll keep that to myself, he’s earned the right to a nom de guerre, and to congratulations for the solid impact he is having on live music in Liverpool. It is regularly tempting me away from that (not so) …
Total Victory is a band I know next to nothing about. I came across this track very randomly on the internet and was moved to share it here. The vocal starts off feeling Fall-esque but once it gets into its stride, the whole thing is quite a hypnotic sucker-inner. The lyrics are straaange …. sci-fi? …
A COLLECTION (2000-2012) from the Be Good Tanyas is a 16-song career retrospective. The collection features two brand new tracks, “LITTLE BLACK BEAR ” and “GOSPEL SONG,” and two new mixes of previously released tracks. The album is already available in North America and will be released around the rest of the world on the …
Continuing FOE‘s slight obsession with things deathly, occult and nightmarish, this track “Frankenstein” is the B side to new single “The Black Lodge.” I like B-sides, the way they give the chance to do something as a one-off with no pressure to make it fit a larger strategy. This is quite touching, and the lyrics, …
Garbage – wow, away for seven years. It’s a bit of a personal journey for me too in the 13 years since I last saw them. Back then I was a shrinking violet at gigs, sat up in the cheap seats. Tonight, I’m not ashamed to admit that we queued two hours before doors, and …
Jess Bryant is someone I first came across in London, playing on a boat 200 metres in a straight line from where I lived. I saw her twice in quick succession and then a few times after that, but that first time, she announced with all seriousness (and she can be serious) that this was …
In a week, a month, a year when I’m experiencing some great music, I didn’t realise just how much it would mean to me to realise that Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, had broken radio silence and is preparing to hit us with a new album ‘Sun’. I’m trying my best to be objective here, …
Yes, East Portland Blog’s friend and contributor, Mike Hughes, was lucky enough to interview rock legend Ian Anderson about his new album, Thick as a Brick Part Two. Mike tells you all about it and offers links on his site.
This is not a review. You will know that I tend to only bother with bands that I like anyway, not one to sit sniping on the sidelines. But even within those limits, I simply like Austra too, too much to be in any way objective. I fretted about whether to take a camera on …
Hmmmm, so far I have missed Poliça. That’s more the fool me. Check out this lot from those lovely lovely lovely people at NPR. In fact, once you’ve watched the video, you can go HERE and download the audio, all 30-odd minutes, as a freebie. It’s her voice that works for me. Doesn’t it always? …
“Check my make-up, check my watch again, I can hardly wait. Play the album, play it all again…………..this could be my life, this could save my life…… tonight the sound is breaking like a wave, wish I could always feel this way and life would never be the same…” the words of ‘Tonight’ by Saint …
It’s a great shame, she was very young indeed. I must have been 15 when ‘I Feel Love’ came out, it was like sex on a stick. Aural porn in the best possible taste. I listened to it again last night, with more musical sensibilities than I had back then, and it still holds up …