Live Reviews

New Century Hall is a surprising venue for the American quartet from New York, and to be honest is a surprising venue for any musical venture - it’s a function room. Unlike most gigs this venue was fully furnished with a patterned carpet which made for interesting dance moves when 3 out of the 4 members of Animal Collective hit the stage. They played a host of classic tracks off their backlog of 7 albums but it was the tracks off their latest album “Strawberry Jam” which managed to get the crowd vibrating most. With no breaks the band played an amazingly danceable 1 and a half hour set. As a new fan to their music I found the gig adventurously entertaining and will definitely see them again.

Rating: 9/10
Author: Doug Shapley

Good Shoes stole the show on Tuesday night with their longest set to date (running in at just over an hour) to the biggest audience they've ever played to at Academy 2.  With a mixture of B-sides, new tracks and tracks off their debut album, ‘Think Before You Speak’.  With such a flat album it's a surprise that the band are so lively, and the crowd seemed suitably impressed with muchos crowd surfing and dancing.  Surprisingly, the band offered to finish the set with a request, to which half the crowd wanted to hear the hit single ‘Morden’ a second time.  If only the studio had captured the energy Good Shoes exude, maybe the debut album would have sold better.  A solid performance.

Rating: 7/10
Author: Paul Wright

I dislike Sunday evenings, they are monotonous, long and foreboding. In an attempt to break my cycle of Sunday’s being a day of Primark jogging bottoms (not for jogging) and endless cups of tea and digestive biscuits, I went and saw Jesse Malin. Let’s get this over with. Okay, an effort was made, the die hard fans with one hand in the air were there with their confused girlfriends, but something about Jesse was just a bit lacklustre and pre-meditated. There was nothing fresh about Malin’s performance, yes, he had the banter (on repeat) and he had the key ‘HELLO  MANCHESTER!’ sentence down to a T but musically it was rather like a mild earache. Jesse Malin  sounded like the Boss and Ryan Adams gone bad which all made sense when his latest album “Glitter in the Gutter” features them both heavily.

In a change from their normal venue, The Young Knives played the small Night and Day Café, and adjusted to the intimate setting well. Though the purpose of the gig was clearly to try out new material, they also pulled out their biggest hits such as ‘Weekends and Bleakdays’ and ‘Here Comes the Rumour Mill’. Though the crowd was liveliest during their well known tunes, their newer tracks also went down well, especially ‘Counters’ and ‘Dyed in the Wool’. As per usual there was some hilarious onstage banter between frontman Henry Dartnall brother and possibly best named bass player ever House Of Lords. On the whole their new material sounded very good although it wasn’t much of a departure from their first album.

Rating: 8/10
Author: Jordan Messer

It seems a rainbow appears every time Welsh power-pop favourites Los Campesinos! come to town. Seven band members, each with more colour than a rattling bag of skittles, lit up the Night & Day Café in the heart of Manchester on the night of Eid.

Selling out venues across the UK has not fazed this youthful crew who happily mingled amongst the crowd and even enticed many to purchase crazy animal fronted t-shirts as soon as they stepped through the doors of the venue. The band displays all elements of FUN through their songs, videos and artwork, and evidently have countless laughs each time they’re together. It was great to finally see the band transform this colourful energy onto a headline stage.