Author: Beth Kirkbride

Indie pop band The Crookes take to the stage to warm the crowd up for Van McCann and his merry men. As a fellow Sheffielder, familiar with their discography and with a penchant for their soothing indie pop concoctions, I enjoy their brief set. However, as their material is seemingly fairly unknown and unappreciated down […]

Louis Kevin Celestin, known better as Kaytranada, is one of those rare artists that transcends time, genre and place. His music is a colourful, sonically rich mixture of hip-hop, house and r’n’b, that pays tribute to the musical heroes of his past but fuses their elements into a totally original whole. It is a musical […]

Grime Whether it’s cravatted MCS preppies, sitting on Magdalen bridge with Skepta’s dulcet tones rending the nearby ether from an overzealous phone speaker, or fully-fledged Streetonians in convoy with other private school road-boys, Oxford has certainly taken to the sound of the Tottenham streets, even if admission figures for ethnic minorities and those on lower […]

James Blake has built his reputation on a combination of high-calibre electronic production and soulful crooning. His two previous albums, 2011’s James Blake and 2013’s Overgrown, showed an artist moving towards singer-songwriter territory, exemplified by his cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case Of You’, and emotive vocal-centric tracks such as ‘Retrograde’ on his second effort. […]

The London mayoral election ended up with the result most people expected. Zac Goldsmith always seemed an unlikely candidate for the role, being neither left-wing nor Boris Johnson, and an uninspiring campaign didn’t help his cause. With hindsight, though, we should turn to what is surely the most important aspect of the race – its […]

Something strange is going on at Oxford. Having spent years in a school culture with a clean divide between cool music and bad music, it took me a while to notice it. But look at the middle floor of Park End, or whatever they call it these days; go to a college bop; spend a […]

I’d like to start off this article by saying that I spend a lot of time studying, and that it’s important to make the things you spend a lot of time doing as comfortable and pleasing to do as possible (hence the advice to buy a good bed, because you spend more of your time […]

When you look at the album cover of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ newest release, the one thing that immediately grabs your eye is that the very name “Edward Sharpe”, also the alter ego of lead singer Alex Ebert, has been crossed sharply out by a red marker. It’s gone now. According to Ebert […]