James Blake - James Blake (Mancunion #7 Album of the Year)

Of all the things to have come out of the explosion of dubstep over the past few years, James Blake’s eponymous debut has to be the most unlikely. At the start of 2011, Blake was a 21-year-old popular music student from Enfield, releasing EPs of glitchy futuristic dubstep to a community of loyal fans. Despite alienating some dubstep purists, James Blake is an album of unexpected beauty and textural brilliance. His voice is fragile and soulful,...

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Marcus Foster @ Deaf Institute (25th November) - Mancunion

★★★★ “I guess I became a hunter quite young, I just for some reason became obsessed with it,” explains Marcus Foster of his love for discovering music. A lifelong fan of Tom Waits and John Martyn, Foster’s music belongs to a different time, and his on-stage presence borrows from an age of vocal theatricality and brutally honest performance. When I caught up with Foster before the show, he described how his sound came about. “A few years ago...

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Sonic Boom Six @ Moho Live (15th October)

★★Teenage ska-punk gets a bad rap. Unfortunately, through all their pseudo-political rallying, and 'give yourselves a massive cheer' hyping, Sonic Boom Six didn't do much to dispel its reputation. The night was kicked off with an unexpectedly anarchic and brilliant support set from local hardcore ska-punk hooligans Stand Out Riot, who made good Moho Live's reputation for intense and intimate local gigs. The contagious enthusiasm and brutal confidence...

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Clock Opera @ Sound Control (10th October)

★★★★ Playing an inexplicable second fiddle to Chapel Club’s flat-out uninteresting headline set, those who managed to arrive early enough were rewarded with a fierce and genuinely exciting half hour from experimental synth-rock titans Clock Opera. Apart from a quick introduction, the band didn’t seem to be too interested in crowd interaction, but the all-too-short set contained enough diversity and raw power to draw their admittedly sparse audience...

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Bert Jansch, 1943-2011

Up there with the most respected guitarists of his generation, Bert Jansch will be sorely missed. Influencing everyone from Jimmy Page to Johnny Marr to Devendra Banhart, his virtuosic style and intricate songwriting helped him lead the 60s folk revival, both as a solo artist and as part of folk-rock troubadours Pentagle. After fighting a two-year battle with cancer, Jansch died earlier this week at a hospice in north London, aged 67. In an interview...

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Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost

When Girls' debut Album was released in 2009, it was embraced for all its lo-fi tortured optimism and let's-get-fucked-up-and-love-each-other balladry. The story that led to its conception was pretty damn unbelievable (abandoned son of god-fearing cult members moves to San Francisco, is taken in by local millionaire, starts band with neighbourhood punks), and bandleader Christopher Owens' voice had apparently been tailor-made to break...

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Mixtape #6

Winter is comin...

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Mixtape #4&5

Yeah, it's been a while. Here's two from the vaults. More words soon enough.  ...

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Mixtape #3

It's summer for chrissake. Get happy...

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Arctic Monkeys - Suck It And See

Poor Alex Turner. It’s not often the curse of the difficult second album strikes so poetically. When he shuffled on to the scene in 2005, ever the unassuming frontman, Whatever You Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, his aching love letter to the practised art of going out and getting pissed, struck a chord with a generation of teenagers who did little else. The lyrics were disarmingly poetic, and above all else, the album sounded great....

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Live: Wolfmother

WOLFMOTHER ARE FUCKING AWESOM...

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Mixtape #2

This one's a chille...

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Mixtape #1

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Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

In a 2010 interview with MTV, Kanye West admitted in a rare moment of pseudo-modesty that “I do have a goal in this lifetime to be the greatest artist of all time, [but] that’s very difficult being that I can’t dance or sing”, and in his more vocally ambitious moments on MBDTF, the latter is made abundantly clear. How, then, do you go about proposing your place as the greatest indie-leaning rap megastar in the world? West’s own particular...

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