NoNewWaveNoFun

    It's a little under a month since Israeli Post Punks SCREENS   released new single 'Lie Lie Lie' and Ryan Doyle Elward has been sharpening up his metaphors to their finest point before telling us about this excellent Single.                                               Tel-Aviv  trio SCREENS  rip into their latest single ' Lie Lie Lie'  with heat and wit, the full warmth of which is not felt until roughly 50 seconds are left in the track, as reverberant tones spread out over chilly aggregates of synth into a desolate space, but whose message hangs about in the air: a big breath into the cold, blooming then becoming vapor.  Lines I wasted my youth, now’s the time to tell the truth  is first an individualised treatise on time and opportunity, but as such it is a cultural coming-to-terms. It is a refusal to be any longer complicit in the great waiting hinged on the precipice of social change. It is a pulling back of the outstretched arm of patien

Irish Singer-Songwriter Patrick Saint James released his first E.P ' Moodswings and Roundabouts' last week.  Andrew Cook  looked deeper into this beguiling and brave debut. Andrew's fantastic debut novel  The Toucan Man  is available now. Patrick Saint James  is making 2021 his year, After an apperance on Manchester Pride's coveted Alan Turing   stage and a sold out headline show at Gullivers, The Manchester-based Irish singer-songwriter has wasted no time in getting his highly-anticipated debut E.P onto shelves and streaming platforms alike. Produced by Joe Cross, who has both The Courteeners and Hurts  on his resume, and released via Lovers Music, ' Moodswings and Roundabouts' highlights the singer's battles with Bipolar Disorder, love, self-acceptance and everything in between. With influences in the vein of Carole King, Adele, Years & Years and Lauv, the self-taught pianist has developed a style that sounds unique and refreshing - one that's been

  O riginally from Essex, but now residing in Liverpool,  Beija Flo   is not your average musical artist.  Ryan Doyle Elward  takes a listen to her current single ' Heads or Tails '  and tells us more.                                    With just a handful of releases from artist Beija Flo to gauge against, ‘ Heads or Tails ’ is by comparison a track-start sprint. At a little over a minute and a half, the single is anatomically simple, oscillating between two notes abreast with fuzz: a landscape which itself seems to say,this or that. Across her musical corpus (since, she has art prints and poems as well) ‘Heads or Tails’ so far makes for one of the first of her songs to be relatively level front-to-back, unlike ‘Why?' -  A beautiful and brilliant demo that intensifies throughout its duration, or ‘One of Those Things’,  which by song’s end becomes absolute theatre; a demonstration of how her  through controlled exasperation and how it can give velocity to whatever the co

                               Zuzu - Queensway Tunnel (Planet Z)   Some of us don't live in the People's Republic of Liverpool , yet we live so close that it's sheer force of personality and history drags us in with an irresistable potency  - basically, we're what proper Scousers would call Wools. I have an infinity with this magnetic attraction, even though my accent suggests otherwise. I've been travelling to Liverpool regularly since I was a kid, mostly to go and watch Everton play, but also later to shop and go to gigs and clubs. I don't think there's any other city that has had such an effect of me. No matter which way I got there, the journey always required a trip through The Queensway Tunnel.  Built in the 1920s to link The Wirral Peninsula to Liverpool, the tunnel was pioneering; once the longest road tunnel in the world. It allowed outsiders to connect back with the city that had inadvertantly pushed people out; the overspill of rapid

  TOKKY HORROR Sometimes, whatever the circumstances are pointing you towards, you just have to rip it up and start again - just ask Orange Juice.  When Queen Zee -  once seen by the NME as one of the most eye-catching and engaging live acts in the UK -  split in 2019, just months after the release of their debut album, it seemed likely that we would see vocalist Zee Davine again.  So it was perhaps no surprise then that TOKKY HORROR was formed shortly afterwards. Comprising of Davine, Ava Akira and Mollie Rush - the trio are based in three different cities - Liverpool, Manchester and London. Working from home has meant the band have already amassed a large selection of tracks over a short period of time.                                                 Home Recordings: 2020 - 2021 (Extended Edition) by Tokky Horror Debut E.P ' I Found The Answers and Now I Want More' was a thrilling introduction to the band that fused aggressive beats, punk guitars and a powerful sense of havin

     This piece was originally written in October for  Robinsons Records  - please visit that wonderful Manchester based blog at the link above. Let me get this clear from the off; we all had shit taste in music when we were 13. Even if your Dad was playing wall to wall Bowie , your Mum working her way through the Motown back catalogue or your hormonal older Sister was smashing her guitar to Bikini Kill in a show of disdain to the Patriarchy - you'd have still been listening to Take That / Spice Girls / Westlife / One Direction / Little Mix / BTS (Delete where age applicable..) It's not your fault though is it? I don't think so. Pop is aimed at you at that age as much as Kinder Buenos or the adverts on CITV in November are - primed as we are for a life of endless consumption and crippling debt as young as possible. BUY IT BUY IT BUY IT BUY IT YOU TWATS BUY IT BUY IT  BUY IT BUY IT. There's two men who are really to blame; Sigmund Freud and Edward Bernays . Freud y

                                 📷 Derek Bremner Let me tell you about a small city on the North Wales/North West of England border with a big ol' history. Chester is an ancient city; the Romans had Deva (as it was known back then) as their 'Capitol of the North'. It's location was key - the walls that overlook the city allowing visibility to help ward off the rebellious Welsh from attacking. The Amphitheatre can still be visited, despite the short-sightedness of the Council, allowing half of it to be built on in the early 20th Century.  That's where the history lesson ends.  The music scene in Chester is a small, yet passionate one. The city often gets overlooked for touring shows, lying as it does almost equidistant between Liverpool and Manchester; but things have certainly improved in recent years. Venues such as The Live Rooms, Telford's Warehouse and Alexander's have continued to bring great live music to the area; the addition of  St Mar

                                 Buckley Tivoli 1995 The popular psychological convention is that the first 8 are the formative years of a child's life. It's in these years that a child experiences rapid levels of learning; their cognitive, social and emotional landscape shifts dramatically. Often in this period our preferences and fears can crystalise and shape our character and personality - it's often where we develop a sense of belonging.  For me personally, it was only when I moved to Buckley in North Wales in the late 1980s (I'm not certain exactly when, but I was small, probably 6-7 years old) that belonging became a reality. I was a British Army brat, I'd travelled with my family to various different bases following my Dad's job; from Belgium to Germany (pre Berlin Wall coming down) to Surrey, before the eventual relocation to Buckley - My Mother's hometown. It was here where my life became more normalised and consistent, wher

  Returning with a new E.P ' The Dark Arts Will Break Our Hearts', Chicago's Black Magick Marching Band create a tantalising blend of Psych and 60s Jangle Pop. Chicago native Ryan Doyle Elward took a listen. With vocal timbre a bit like BRONCHO and an overall sound that is 60s folk-rock (yes, a capacious portmanteau) first pulled through the 90s, Black Magick Marching Band here falls somewhere closer to The Byrds grafted over Brian Jonestown Massacre . There is a dynamic between the consistent format-for-every-song chord playing and the soloed notes which is eerily sedating. A mesmerizing pull of attention to something out of place, like a too well-lit spot of sun in a graveyard. And while those arpeggiated guitar parts are a little fussy at times, it is that part of the music which does well in dressing up the lyrics with optimism. A pleasant trap to disguise the conversation which pervades each track with dark themes of futility and the inescapable aspects of life and

    Green Man Festival line up The thought of going to a festival barely seemed real at the start of the summer; certainly not with the more cautious Welsh government's approach to allowing large scale events. Two test events in Liverpool, a reduced capacity Download and then a full  Latitude  seemed to show a positive summer for festivals.  However, the lack of convincing and thorough insurance policies and the fact all three test events were run by Festival Republic, ensured many small independent events struggled to get off the ground.                      📷 Natalie Wright But as England removed social distancing measures and the legal requirement to wear masks in public places, Wales held off as the Delta variant began to take hold - things looked bleak for Green Man. But then came the news that fans of the festival were waited for - The Welsh government relaxed the rules and it was on! It had a full line up(see above) and all with a month to spare.    Earlier in

T he long-awaited new album from 60s Pop enthusiast Joe Kane a.k.a The Poppermost, came out on July 30th. Ryan Doyle Elward takes us through this playful new release.   With 'Hits to Spare', The Poppermost boost flashbacks of bright orange and all other casts of psychedelic colors (well, pre-psychedelic technically), returning to an era bygone, of  Rickenbackers and biting, bare reverb.  There is a surrealness by this design, an occurrent awe and almost bewilderment to the quality of replication as The Poppermost (don’t think they but actually he, just him, Joe Kane ) are able to suspend time and place,to be for a moment transmutable in all but skin as a result of such an authentic and total reconstruction of ‘60s sound.   But out of the early part of that decade it is The Beatles specifically who are here reanimated, where for each of the album’s songs or intra-song elements there are near- Beatles equals: observe the likeness between ‘Ticket to Ri