Superfood | Mon 27 Mar | O2 Academy 2 | £11.25
Superfood’s exuberant garage-rock jams show that there’s still gold to be mined from the Britpop era, taking Graham Coxon’s pop-noise subterfuge and throwing in chain-gang slogans, jazzy muzak and deadpan dancing girls. New single ‘Double Dutch’ suggests they’ve picked up Blur’s knack for reinvention, too. See our full preview here.
Mist | Wed 29 Mar | O2 Institute | £18
Birmingham’s own rising star of grime, MIST’s patience and raw-throated delivery gives him a sense of gravitas often missing in hungry young upstarts. Come and see the YouTube sensation in a hometown show that’s bound to be buzzing. See our full preview here.
Binker & Moses | Thu 30 Mar | Hare & Hounds | £10
London jazz duo Binker and Moses make an astonishingly enveloping sound for a simple saxophone and drums setup. Hypnotic and exultant, it’s a smoke screen of sound, punched through by Moses Boyd’s deft drumming. Skiddle.com
NME Tour ft. Blossoms, Cabbage & Ross Wynne | Wed 29 Mar |
O2 Academy | £18
Looks like the Birmingham hype might be slightly off the intense boil for Manc most-likelys whose gigs here sold out in seemingly seconds last year. Tickets for this tour have sold out pretty fast elsewhere in the country, but a few still remain for Wednesday’s Birmingham show. Go show some love for Joe Donovan’s drum kit kids (someone has to). Full preview here
Jesus and Mary Chain | Fri 31 Mar | O2 Institute | £31.75
Nineteen years after their supposed swansong, the iconic stoner rock band the Jesus and Mary Chain are on the road in support of their new record, ‘Damage and Joy’. Psychedelic dream-punks whose sense of acrimonious comedy has only calcified with age, the Mary Chain’s legacy on British rock music is hard to overstate. See our full preview here.
Desperate Journalist | Sat 1 Apr | Sunflower Lounge | £5
Desperate Journalist make the kind of bleak, hazy post-punk that suckers in drooling Smiths fans; but then they raze the ground with apocalyptic guitar blasts and leave their audience shattered. Paranoia and alienation have a new soundtrack in the form of their arresting new album, ‘Grow Up’. Seetickets.com
Jorja Smith | Sat 1 Apr | O2 Academy 2 | SOLD OUT
A precocious local talent, 19-year-old Jorja Smith sits comfortably in the R&B lineage from Curtis Mayfield to Jamila Woods, making earnest and beautiful songs with a literate lyricism that belies her age. With some major tastemakers in her corner, Jorja is already climbing the ranks of the next big thing. See our full preview here.
Pulled Apart by Horses | Sun 2 Apr | Mama Roux’s | £12
Nothing about guitar-straddling alt-rock quartet Pulled Apart By Horses could be called ‘quiet’, but the group has been laying low in the Welsh countryside, working on the follow-up to 2014’s riff-onslaught, ‘Blood’. It’s a characteristically no-bullshit sound, with thundering toms, amps rigged to eleven, and fuzzy garage rock screams that pile up as high as, well, Dinosaur Pile-Up. See our full preview here.
Words: Chris Donald - Gigs Editor
Published on: Tue 28 Feb 2017