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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