Steve Spithray

5 days ago | narcmagazine.com | Steve Spithray

Newcastle’s Trev Gibb channels his best Antony And The Johnsons meets Flaming Lips inner being on King Of The Sea’s All Desire Is A Desire For Living. It’s an introspective and hopeful ambient pop track with a moving message of community built upon an oddly distorted organ (or heavily effected guitar?).

2 weeks ago | narcmagazine.com | Steve Spithray

When I was an art student I used to spend hours studying Cornish bays and beaches, cynically reinterpreting them as immature red, blue and green watercolours for marks. Despite this clinical quest for grades, I always found some kind of melancholic solace in the tranquillity of a place I hardly knew, of a place where romance was no longer dead but the sadness was as authentic as the fishing boats.

4 weeks ago | narcmagazine.com | Steve Spithray

Igg says he makes ‘meta boom rap’ which is apparently characterised by dense drums, layers and layers of vocals and samples, found sounds and abstract lyrical themes. The Blyth rapper sets out his, erm, hustle on the title track of his Hustle Culture EP, where the layered rhyming gives the aural illusion of a number of vocalists, set to a loosely dramatic bass-driven beat. Elsewhere, the alt.

1 month ago | narcmagazine.com | Steve Spithray

It would be unfair if James were to be remembered solely for that awful Sit Down song because anyone who has seen them in the last fifteen years will know there is nary a thing so joyous as the Manchester veterans live. Tonight’s show might be a warm-up for some bigger summer venues, so not quite the full take-me-to-church experience, but the cult indie nonet are right at home in the Town Hall’s grandiose setting and at fifty quid a pop for tickets punters would really hope they would be.

1 month ago | narcmagazine.com | Steve Spithray

Top tier funky slacker rock. Slick and bouncing with enough fizz and buzzy melodies that the melting smiley emoji would be enough on its own as a review, but this is a serious publication after all. Thinkin’ by Patrick Gosling is the South Shields singer-songwriter’s first new track of the year, soldering his trademark intricate lyricism and clever, catchy musicality onto a stupidly contagious riff.