This Week's Live Picks: 28th November - 4th December
Posted on: 28 Nov 2016Another week of rich musical pickings for you lucky Bristol sorts with everything from ageing, punk scarecrows to world-beating progressive house music to sample within our city's walls across the next seven days. Feast your ears.
Stevie Parker - The Louisiana, 29.11
Stevie Parker is pertinently aware of her popular musical heritage. Her debut EP Blue (a nod to Joni Mitchell’s seminal album of the same name) features a cover of Joe Jackson’s exquisite track ‘It’s Different For Girls’ and her first single is named, simply, ‘The Cure’. Interestingly, though, Parker doesn’t sound like any of these famed forbears. Plying an ambient blend of electro-pop, she layers cushioned beats and shining synths beneath a vocal majestic enough to earn favourable comparisons to Hannah Reid of London Grammar. The effect is magic and best appreciated in the flesh; it’s a good job then she’s at The Louisiana tomorrow evening then isn’t it.
John Cooper Clarke and Hugh Cornwell - O2 Academy, 30.11
While 2016 has acted as a Night of the Long Knives for reams of music’s elder statesmen, the wily, wiry pair of Dr John Cooper Clarke and Hugh Cornwell (from the original line-up of the Stranglers) have been opening up a new vein of life. On this tour, the punk poet laureate is recalibrating his larynx, swapping the note-book for the hymn sheet and giving the singing lark a go. And get this: he’s actually quite good at it. Check out the doctor’s new-found manc croon as the pair descend on the O2 Academy on Wednesday.
Hinds - Trinity Centre, 01.12
Sometimes your first advent calendar chocolate isn’t quite enough to get you through a cold December Wednesday. Hinds, however, are four girls from Madrid who specialise in scuzzy, lo-fi pop music, with melodies and progressions that shine with the strength of the Spanish sun. Sandpaper-rough round the edges and readily glorying in their flaws, they perform with the ramshackle clatter of youth, a facet ample to charm critics and fans alike with the release of debut LP Leave Me Alone earlier this year. Allow them to dapple you with their infectious heat on Thursday when they storm through the Trinity Centre.
Cousin Kula - The Old Malthouse, 03.12
Bristol-native, Chiverin-signees Cousin Kula have been making waves locally of late, with the shimmering and eclectic psych-pop peddled by the sestet leading the way for the lighter side of the city’s music scene- for more on that, check out our Sound of Bristol interview with them. Sporting a curveball line-up that combines trombone and saxophone with the more standard guitar/bass/keys/drums combination, their shows operate with a sheen of brass and represent an intriguing live prospect. This gig at The Old Malthouse is their last show for a while and brings down the curtain on what has been a fabulous year for the band, with 2017 looking to likely be even brighter.
Knee Deep in Elrow - Motion, 03.12
Daley Padley’s Knee Deep in Sound label is just one of the outcomes of the stratospheric rise of Hot Since 82, the moniker under which he has produced some of the best progressive house of the last five years. It seems only fitting, then, that he will headline the event which is co-hosted by Elrow, the Barcelona-based beat-house, with the Catalonian connection rendering the booking of Matador as similarly apt. German mogul Butch and Futureboogie signee Christoph are also set to play on a bill that is amongst the finest of this In:Motion series.
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An ardent Geordie minus the accent, Sam seemingly strove to get as far away from the Toon as possible, as soon as university beckoned. Three undergraduate years at UoB were more than ample time for Bristol (as it inevitably does) to get under his skin, and so here he remains: reporting, as Assistant Editor, on the cultural happenings which so infatuated him with the city. Catch him at sam@365bristol.com.
