Mozart Would Not Enjoy This

I was a bit late to the Hunger Games thing. I only watched the first one this last summer, and I haven't even read any of the books yet. I will though. Don't you worry. The much-anticipated second film of The Hunger Games trilogy, "Catching Fire", is due to appear in cinemas next month. The soundtrack seems to be slowly appearing on the internet and radio, with Coldplay epic "Atlas" being released online about a month ago. Christina Aguilera has also contributed something (which I'm not a huge fan of). Courtesy of:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/laubarnes/4180812856/

So I just completed a month long spate of work experience at  GLAMOUR.com , the sister website to the magazine (obv). Whilst there, I did quite a few interesting and fun things, including interviewing Mollie King of The Saturdays (who was just SO nice!!!). I also went to an album/film launch of V V Brown's...

This post will be dedicated to songs that I really wanted to write and post about over the summer, but didn't. Generally because I didn't have time, and by the time I DID have time, the moment had gone and it was too late. Sob. A nice scenic picture what I took

As you can probably guess, AlunaGeorge is made up of a girl named Aluna and a boy called George. Ms. Francis and Mr. Reid met over MySpace in roughly 2009 after he remixed Aluna's band My Toys Like Me's track "Sweetheart". This song is the first song they ever released together, and, oddly, the one I heard most recently of theirs. I was skimming through their Spotify profile and thought, hmm, haven't heard that one before. I must have missed it when I listened to  "Attracting Flies"  [their most recently released track] and  "You Know You Like It" , which have great remixes by Bauuer and Bondax respectively. I first heard of them after listening to  their collaboration with Rustie on "After Light" , and then obviously on the massive banger with Disclosure,  "White Noise" , which will go down in history as an absolutely phenomenal track. What I really like about AlunaGeorge is that their music can get me pumped up when I&

This was only the second music festival I've ever been to. I know, shocking. Parklife takes place in Manchester once a year, normally within the first fortnight of June and this year was situated at Heaton Park. After being thoroughly let down by Beach Break (they moved to Newquay and had a terrible line up), we started looking around for others we could go to. After seeing Chase & Status at the Victoria Warehouse in Manchester, it only seemed right that we should go to the Warehouse Project's own music festival. Taken at the end of Saturday Saturday's timings The weather was ridiculously good. Hardly any clouds whatsoever, and flippin boiling. Which was good in some cases, but we had expected rain and wind and dressed accordingly. Getting into the park was badly organised as they didn't have very many of the silver barriers, but never mind. The first thing I saw was the latter half of Delphic's set: I'm a big fan of these guys so was

So THEN I travelled back down to London for my NME work placement on the Sunday of getting back from Muse. I stayed with my lovely friend Anna in West Norwood, so it took roughly an hour to get there every day, which includes walking to and from stations so that's not bad at all! I always find it fascinating, working out how to get from one place to another in London. It's all just so clever! So every day I would get into the London Bridge overground station, next to The Shard: And I would walk to the Blue Fin Building in which NME is based. Here's a view from the top of the building: On Monday we were given a tour of all the important bits of the building that we'd need to know. Karen Walter is the Editor's PA, and was basically in charge of us whilst we were there. She gave us two tasks to complete by the end of the week; one was to go through last week's edition and analyse it by saying what we liked and didn't like about it. The other was

Saturday the 1st of June, I saw Muse at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester. They were INCREDIBLE. My write up of it for Stereoboard can be found here , but the unabridged, full fledged version is below. This band have been on my top-ten-bands-to-see-before-I-die list for rather a while. So when I opened up that envelope with the ticket confirmation email in from my parents at Christmas, I was suitably ecstatic. Regardless of whether you’re a Muse fan or not, you can’t watch a video of them at Glasto or similar doing their thang and not want to be there! It was a suitably lovely day in terms of weather as well, and that is kind of what makes or breaks a stadium gig in my opinion.  The support acts were Bastille and Dizzee Rascal. I’m not a massive fan of Bastille, but went in with an open mind. They were surprisingly good, so fair play to you guys! They played new single “Laura Palmer” really well, and “Flaws” sounded good too. I slightly questioned the judgement of whoever

If you regularly follow/look out for my blog (which I should hope you do!) then you may notice that I haven't posted in almost two months. My bad. To be fair, May was filled with exams and university work. But what a month June has been! Gosh. Let me tell you about it: Thurs 30th May: You Need To Hear This launch in London - writing for Stereofox Sat 1st June: Muse at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester Sun 2nd June - Fri 7th June: Down to London for my work placement at NME Sat 8th June - Sun 9th June: Parklife Festival in Manchester Thurs 20th June - You Need To Hear This party in London - writing for  Stereofox Let's just say The Trainline have done well out of me! So the launch. You Need To Hear This is an idea created by Phillips and Noisey, the music section of VICE magazine. It's a fantastic idea, music documentaries that are topical. Check it out! It was down in Haggerston in London, at a place called "The King's Head". Looks like an old pu

I first heard of this band about 4 years ago, when their first album "Acolyte" came out. There's a great track on there called "Doubt", click here  for the Spotify link. The whole album is pretty good to be honest, it's indie but is quite electronically focussed. When this album came out, there weren't that many bands doing that kind of thing, but obviously now there's quite a lot of bands doing this (just look at this blog!). They were supported by Everything Everything, who are also within this genre and also from Manchester, but are slightly more eclectic. Delphic are made up of Richard Boardman, Matt Cocksedge, James Cook and Dan Hadley.

Haters of Made In Chelsea look away now. No, I'm kidding. Please don't! I used to be a hater myself, but my housemates forced it upon me once and... well, you can probably guess the rest. However, I'm safe in the knowledge that I'm not obsessed with it, like so many are. I just find it fascinating to see how these people live. Craziness. Anyway, MIC (as it's affectionately known)'s redeeming quality for myself and many others is the music, chosen by a lady called Andrea Madden. Nice work Andrea! In one of the episodes was a song called "Nova" by this band.  Click here  for the Spotify link. It's a great song, so I looked for them on Spotify, and found this song, "All Eyes".

I normally like to start my posts off with a little bit of background about each artist. I feel like it helps us get to know them a bit better. Context always helps. But I can't actually find very much on this band at all. They're from London (obvs), their names are Hannah Reid, Dot Major and Dan Rothman, and they played a very well received gig at Electrowerkz a couple of weeks ago, but apart from that there's not that much. Nothing is really given away on their facebook page, twitter or even on their own website. Maybe that's what they're going for though, they want to be elusive and aloof... Maybe not. Anyway.

The thought of a band made up of family members used to fill me with a sickening sense of worry; visions of the Osmonds, the Von Trapps and the Cheeky Girls flooding my brain. But then I remember the coolness of Kings of Leon, the cutesie Jackson 5 and Irish group The Corrs (yeah I went there). So it was better for this band that I heard the song before I heard who it was by and that they were sisters. Obviously I wouldn't have been so silly as to reject it based on the fact that they're related, but at least I went into it with a clear mind. Haim (like the Corrs, Jackson 5 and Hanson) are named after themselves; Haim being their collective surname. (According to Wikipedia, the name Haim rhymes with rhyme. I know you've been wondering too.) These three sisters are from a musical, LA-based family and grew up listening to 70's and 80's music, which kind of explains the band's musical style.

I was in H&M yesterday when this song came on through the speakers. I've got a Shazam type thing built into the phone, so I went for it. Casually stood with my phone in the air. How does that even work anyway? How can it possibly recognise songs that way? Anyway, I got home and listened, and it struck me that the vocalist sounded very similar to someone I had heard already, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. A few hours later and I searched the band, only to find that the singer was only José bloody González! If you dunno who that is,  listen to this . I'm thinking you'll probably recognise it. So this Swedish band are returning from a 5 year hiatus with a new, self-titled album that is due to come out next month, with this song being track numero uno.

So this is the first of the HMV albums that I bought to go through. I've picked out the stand out tracks for me, but if you think that another song should was better, please comment at the bottom of the post. Bat For Lashes is the stage name of Natasha Khan. Her sound is very kind of mythical, and ethereal. This album, "Two Suns", came out in 2009 and is her second album. Courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/loveleeannette/508397794/

If you look back through old posts, you'll see that I love me a bit of Ben Howard (ok a LOT of), and I'm also a bit partial to Everything Everything (not to be confused with the Kevin Bacon phone network). This is a masterful combination of the two. Old Pine is track numero uno from the album "Every Kingdom". Great track, great introduction to the album, sets the scene nicely.  Click here  for the youtube link, and  click here  for the Spotify link. Ben Howard's is the type of music you might listen to were you up for a nice chilling out session, it's acoustic, almost folk music.  See here  for my thoughts on "Only Love", same album as "Old Pine". Courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thequeenshall/6899514215/in/photostream/ Which brings me to Everything Everything. They are completely NOT chilled out. They're incredibly eclectic. Check out  my thoughts on their song "Final Form" from album Man Alive. They're