Bristol's Live Highlights: 6th - 12th March
Posted on: 06 Mar 2017Another week, another seven days of top-quality music drawn from eclectic pools of genre. Bristol's live highlights this week begin with powerful, home-grown post punk and concludes with some groovin', moveable house, with nu-folk and math rock taken in in between. Feast your ears.
Idles - The Fleece, 8th March
Idles are the quintet of punks who form the foaming mouthpiece of Bristol’s new glut of quality musicians, spitting furiously about the spurious elements visible within today’s society. No target is safe from the time-sharpened tongue of frontman Joe Talbot, no matter whether it’s a Conservative MP or a TV baker between his rhetorical crosshairs; as such, forthcoming debut LP Brutalism represents something of a night of the long knives for popular culture, with its perpetrators shot down indiscriminately. Coming in support of the record is their biggest tour to date, with a massive homecoming show at The Fleece landing on Wednesday.
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Laura Marling - Colston Hall, 9th March
Laura Marling’s natural storytelling ability has rendered her one of the purest song-writers that this country has ever produced. Having released five accomplished records over the last decade, it is easy to forget that she is only 27; especially when the breadth of emotion which she nimbly applies to each of them betrays a well of experience that is deep beyond it’s years. This tour heralds a forthcoming sixth album Semper Femina, which, according to her form, is likely to be another very special piece of music.
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Tall Ships - Louisiana, 9th March
Never mind the math rock: Tall Ships make the short voyage from Brighton to Bristol this week for a stop-over at the port of the Louisiana. The Falmouth-born trio announced themselves onto the sea-n in 2010 with the release of their eponymous debut EP and a subsequent flotilla of critical attention which carried into the 2012 release of debut album Everything Touching, a watertight 10-track of crunching guitars and soaring choruses. The minimal noise made since had garnered fears that the band were creatively all at sea, until a series of singles swam into focus last year, developing into this tour and second album Impressions.
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Hannah Wants - Motion, 10th March
Everybody wants to see Hannah Wants! I bet she has never heard that one before. Dead puns aside, Hannah Wants occupies an important role in a dance music scene which remains greatly imbalanced along gender lines. Making cool, unfriendly house has been her forte ever since she stormed the scene in 2014. She stops over in Bristol on Friday night as part of her Play tour, bringing the likes of Shadowchild and Low Steppa with her to Motion.
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Artwork - Love Inn, 11th March
He’s no oil painting is he? Nah, only joking; Artwork is beautiful in our eyes and, for that matter, in our ears. Under this moniker, Arthur Smith has made some of the most important dance music of the past two decades, operating both on his own and alongside Skream and Benga as Magnetic Man. He takes to the decks at The Love Inn on Saturday night as part of his Art’s House tour, which incorporates house, techno, disco and everything in between.
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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.
