Originally published here: http://joup.co/gloomballooninterview/

My sneeze echoed off the funeral home, reminding me I was still alive on the night Lou Reed died. Recently I’ve been given to checking out the heavens. Kicking the tyres on the sky. Sometimes when I see that white-hot sun burning through fast moving cloud in a cold sky, I wonder what would happen if my life’s console was compromised, deleting all you NPCs and leaving just me.

Me and that accusative-looking cyclopic sun.

Supposedly meaningful scenes shot at dusk or dawn just don’t cut it anymore, and you get to thinking Hotel bibles are…

Thu 11 Jul – Amanda Palmer & The Grand Theft Orchestra, Amanda Palmer, Jherek Bischoff, The Simple Pleasure

You're lucky tonight, fortunately she's fine with stuff like this" says a doorman after the obligatory rifle through my bag in which I routinely point out the camera that I've used without let or hindrance at every venue I've patronised in this City.

I've risen from a sweat-soaked impression of myself on the sofa after a bout of food poisoning from a 48 hour-old takeaway that I should have known better than to tangle with, expelling out both ends like a dying…

Iceage
You're Nothing
Matador 2013

'New Brigade' came pounding out of darkness to your door, before
flailing around your house like an amphetamine-addled Warsaw during
one of Ian Curtis’ epileptic fits. I can’t remember a debut sounding
so menacing and energetic; Guitar like it’s being played with a cheese
grater, bass superficially compliant, but on closer examination,
psychotically off-kilter. Meanwhile, the drummer packs-in more hits
than a one-man-band hurtling down a a chalky Møn cliffside into the
indifferent (have you ever slapped damp) sand(?).

Whose (and how many) bones were you lending a hand in applauding the
crushing…

Wed 6 Feb – Maria Minerva

Recycling Night. Highlight of the wheelie bins' fortnight. I get a garbage guard of honour. The hot ticket tonight is unarguably Thurston Moore and Michael Chapman at Band On The Wall, but my interest was piqued by this hot shit, Pitchfork-adored, up-and-coming Estonian songstress whose alliterational name with its connotations of legendary greatness is never far from superlative descriptions like 'sensual', 'dreamy', 'narcotic', 'hazy' or even "libidinous swirl". This being the week in which Kevin Shields refrigerated Hades, she's going to have her work cut-out for her with this particular critic, whose two-day attempt…

Many of us are familiar with the story by now. Been there, done that. Others pretty much skipped it and just bought the 'Hi, How Are You?' T-Shirt.

My staunchly atheistic Dad always warned me as a kid, NOT to fool around with the occult.

"You don't believe in spirits Dad, you dick. Fuck it, let's commune with Lucifer via the medium of this deck of playing cards."

As I got older, I realised that he didn't have to believe in anything, he'd just seen enough to know how easily a fertile mind could quicksand up to its…

Fri 23 Nov – Iceage
www.manchesterscenewipe.co.uk/reviews/iceage-live-review/
‘When I was seven years old, my father bought me a bicycle…’

Not really.

At least, I don’t think so. Over pre-gig drinks in The Castle, my +1 tonight used this as an example of the sort of tenuous intro Pitchfork writers use to start-off reviews. Being as the ceasefire was declared earlier in the week, and it was yesterday that saw slate-shaking winds coincide with the anniversary of JFK’s assassination – I’ve been robbed of some sort of relevant and pretentious metaphor in which to cosset flailing and abrasive Danish whippersnappers ‘Iceage’. So…

Tue 7 Jul – Michael Joseph Jackson - Final Tribute

Mariah Carey tried in vain with her right hand to scratch the notes she wanted to reach in the air with her pointer-nail, as if by doing so, the noises lurching out of her throat would take a hint, and play-doh themselves through the clawed-out holes.

The Jackson brothers were cloaked in solidarity, wearing close approximations of the outfit Michael wore when he waved a sparkly glove ‘goodbye’ to them through the moondust, while doing that backwards-walk on the Grammy’s in ‘83.

Lionel Richie flounced around, harping-on about Jesus, in…

Fri 3 Aug – Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks

STEPHEN MALKMUS & THE JICKS || MILK MAID || DEAF INSTITUTE || 3/8/12…

…YOUNG BRITISH ARTISTS || FUEL, WITHINGTON

Q.1: *"Daddy Malkmus, I like to think of death as something as incomprehensible and annihilating to the individual as a sperm's metamorphosis into embryo. But then I remember all the sperm that die along the way, ending up nothing. Do you have an indefatigable favourite band - A band that has never let you down, from whom no album passed you by? Can you describe what exactly it is about them that…

Originally published here: http://www.treblezine.com/reviews/4114-Silver_Jews_Early_Times.html

In 2009, at the height of their acclaim and popularity, David Berman buried his Silver Jews 333 feet beneath Tennessee. Three years on, after little from the man himself, Drag City have excavated his Silver beginnings, sidling the contentious Dime Map of the Reef and The Arizona Record EPs up against one another for Early Times. These releases have been tricky to get one's hands on, and even harder to get-into since Berman erased certain indelible associations to a certain other band by relieving Bob Nastanovich and Stephen Malkmus of their musical duties during sessions…

Published Hyar: http://treblezine.com/reviews/4080-Best_Coast_The_Only_Place.html

Bethany Cosentino bounces back into our lives all irrepressibly upbeat, and full of wonder at the "mountains, birds, ocean, trees," and having "fun, fun, fun," but there's no T-Bird Time-Out from Daddy for this California Girl. You Californians are so damn cheery. You've "got the ocean, got the babes, got the sun, got the wav(v)es." "Why would you live anywhere else?" Bethany questions. I mentally flick through alliteration-heavy, bile-coated put downs I've had time to amass due to a life predominantly spent indoors in one of the UK's rainiest habitations that chance has planted me, my only…