There’s something ephemeral about the rising tide of dream pop music. It hasn’t taken the world by storm, but it is casting a shadow that makes its presence felt in every- thing from independent airwaves to emotional scenes in TV dramas. Such sounds could be dismissed as mere melancholic background music, but this trio from Boston wash away all such accusations with the mesmerising multi- faceted melodies found in their new album In Roses. Gem Club’s latest offering comes in the wake of their well-received debut album, Breakers, for which critics lauded their intimate, minimalist yet emotionally charged sound.

This album marries the symphonic and the psychedelic, as the weightless instrumental first track, ‘No Noise’, demonstrates. The band’s characteristic rhythmic loops and riffs some- times risk descending from sonorous to soporific on instrumental tracks, but lead singer Christopher Barnes’s increased vocal range rescues the rest, culminating in the tracks ‘Idea for Strings’ and ‘Polly’, with tones of James Blake’s soul dub. Overall, In Roses manages to maintain Gem Club’s formula of haunting piano chords and melancholic vocals, whilst sounding more mature, developed and not compromising on their power to move.

We all know that feeling: when you have an essay crisis because you’ve attempted to write an entire 2000 word argument based on one strong idea (which you’ve already used), and you still have 1200 words to go. Panicking, you grab copious amounts of chocolate and a book or two, and waffle like a champion to fill up the space, rifling the critic’s pages in an attempt to find an incredibly tenuous link. Et voila! You will also have So Long, See You Tomorrow.

Few albums have been as highly anticipated for 2014 as Bombay Bicycle Club’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. Their mix of calm, acoustic in- die folk and irresistible pop tracks have made them forerunners of the indie scene, and with three hugely successful albums already under their belt, they have a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, despite some great scraps of ideas, they haven’t quite done it.

That’s not to say it’s a poor album. Because the scraps that are great, are really great. The singles ‘Carry Me’, ‘It’s Alright Now’ and ‘Luna’ lead the record with a convincing confidence. Rae Morris, who supported the band at their Alexandra Palace gig in 2012, provides haunting and all-encompassing vocals on the latter, to help build a track that is true to heart, anthemic, and shows off what they do best: get- ting to the blood of the listener.

Although the deep cuts are where most of the disappointment lies, it’s also here that we find the highlight. ‘Eyes Off You’ is an embodiment of simplicity and love, and the perfect song for those who wish to reminisce back to 2010’s Flaws. The honesty the band promised with So Long, See You Tomorrow is at its finest here, on echoing piano and duet vocals. In a similar vein, ‘Whenever, Wherever’ starts and ends beautifully, but the faster middle only seems messy and unnecessary.

So Long, See You Tomorrow contains the genius fragments of music that fill frontman Jack Steadman’s mind late at night. But as good ide- as that come to us before we fall asleep often do, they loop like crazy, and are filled in with dull intermediaries. There’s little sense of unity or completeness. What’s really lacking is the aura which has made Bombay Bicycle Club’s past albums so addictive and distinctive.

It’s January and everyone’s getting sick. There are about four hours of light each day, and even those are often impeded by rainclouds, lectures or a hangover that confines you to bed until 2pm when it starts getting dark. You’d love to go to the doctors but prescriptions cost £7.85 and you’ve just paid your battels. However, everyone on your floor is going to be ill too soon unless you sort it out. What better way to cure a winter ailment than by turning to the advice of our forefathers?

Bald’s Leechbook is an Old English medical text from around the ninth-century. Nobody knows who Bald was, but an inscription in the front proudly proclaims ‘Bald owns this book’. As in a modern medical book, there’s a handy index to help you identify the problem. There are remedies for sore throats, shivering fits, pain in the joints, bleeding of the nose, bleeding in general, spot eruptions and stomach ache. There are also remedies for other less common ailments: insanity, the atrocities of all fiends, and demonic possession. Hmm, maybe save those for later on in term.

The remedies are heavily based in common-sense, making them perfect for the busy student. For example, if you want your hair to grow faster, you can smear your scalp in a mixture of willow-leaves and dead bees (willows grow fast, and bees are hairy). To stop your hair growing, apply ant’s eggs (because eggs are hairless, obviously.) The name for an infection is ‘flying venom’, because contagious diseases are caused by elves or evil witches who roam the land shooting people with invisible darts. Another great thing is that most of the ingredients for its remedies can be found in Uni Parks or Tesco. Bald’s solution for ‘a woman’s madness’, for example, is to eat a radish every morning before breakfast. Honey is a cure for everything, including pox, obstructed birth and theft. A surprising amount of ailments can be cured by beer of various strengths (but we knew that).

The Leechbook is a must-have for all hypochondriacs, beauty queens, and those who have sold their soul to the devil (Topshop?). After all, possession by a fiend can be cured by a ‘pleasant drink’ of carrot, beetroot, radish and mint, which I’m pretty sure you can get in Prêt à Manger. 

Anyone who’s ever cringed at their own teenage attempts at oh-so-meaningful poetry will find themselves in uncomfortably familiar territory at an Anti-Slam. This event, which was conceived in Berlin, and as Dan Simpson, one of our hosts for the evening, proudly told us, now takes place in “over four countries”, turns the poetry slam format on its head as performers compete for the lowest scores with the worst possible poems they can come up with.

From horribly strained metaphors – snooker as an analogy for western colonialism – to sage advice – ‘Grope a grouper, but don’t jack off a jaguar’ – to environmental angst – ‘Every time you dry your hair / You kill another polar bear’, the poets had us squirming and convulsing with laughter in equal measure. Endless repetition and painfully extended rhyme schemes were rife, as were character acts who entertained with their utter disdain for the audience. One poet stormed onto the stage, knocked over the microphone and performed a rage-filled poem in seven parts, ranting his way through objectification, censorship and the coalition government with such cringeworthy earnestness that I genuinely wept tears of laughter. Another read a (weirdly sweet) poem comparing his girlfriend to the pokémon Bulbasaur off the screen of his phone, stopping halfway through to read a text. One of the highlights of the evening was a young woman’s reading of her own teenage poetry, taken from her thirteen-year-old self’s diary, which was all the funnier for being unintentionally awful.

After everyone had performed, the three lowest-scoring performers went through to a final round, before which they were given ten minutes to write a new poem involving a place, object and person, crowdsourced from the audience, who offered up the moon, socks and Gary Barlow as the three topics. The deserving (anti-)champion was Sophia Brookner, whose first poem had contained such gems as “I love you like snowmen love snow, / like a super tampon loves a heavy flow” and “Roses are black, violets are white / When you’re looking at them in ultraviolet light”, and who delivered a stormer of an ode to Gary Barlow in the final, rhyming ‘Gary’ with ‘Carrie’ in yet another menstruation reference. However, her finest moment was surely coining the neologism “lovesludge”, which disgusted audience members and judges alike.

Despite some slight confusion over heckling – an important aspect of traditional poetry slams, in which poets can be shouted off the stage one they pass the two-minute mark, but which didn’t really work here as the deliberately terrible poems divided the audience between hecklers cutting the poets off before they could finish and those who wanted the fun to continue – this was overall a brilliant evening and a great chance to experience something outside the student bubble. I left with a smile on my face and the immortal opening line “I’m an environ…ist. BECAUSE I’M NOT MENTAL” engraved on my memory forever.

Hauschka – stage name of avant-garde innovateur Volker Bertelmann – is talking to me about childhood memories. “They are very powerful. Whenever I play I relate back to my childhood. The musical research that I do on the piano is something I did as a kid in the field.” Such a comment can come across as mawkish, especially for a reputed enfant terrible of the Cageian prepared piano. Hauschka is well aware, and wary, of sentimental pitfalls: “When I was younger I would have said, ‘Oh that’s completely clichéd.’ I would have felt unable to mention it, because it sounds so Hollywood.”

This is an apt dualism for his music, consisting of mutable vignettes that shift over a wide variety of genres and disciplines, intimating an innovative electricity in the array of colours and textures he has at his disposal. Hauschka favours simpler melodies, infused with nostalgia that runs on the edge of preciousness, sometimes even twee- ness. It is a tricky balance, achieving at its best a haunting instability, as in Silfra, his most recent collaboration with violinist Hilary Hahn.

But Hauschka is speaking to me to promote his upcoming album, Abandoned City. Battling through an unpredictable phone connection and jetlag – he has just arrived back in Germany from touring the US – he attempts to explain his artistic vision. Like his music, the title is inspired by an internal and emotional background, not concrete ghost towns, but his own creative process. “It’s a weird state of mind. This kind of alienation is beautiful, but also incredibly lonely. Abandoned cities have a similar dichotomy. They are romantic, but also tragic, exuding a hint of human temporality.”

Everything in Hauschka’s world has a deeply personal link. Descriptions are built out of instinctive emotional terms, yielding rich visual metaphors. The process of composing is painting, “loading up with feelings and images.” Even the sonically dark strain that runs through Abandoned City is inseparable from Hauschka’s own history, “It is a link to my past. I used to work with darker electronic elements, and I needed a colour that brought back this darkness, not aggressiveness, but something that could transform quickly into anger. I wanted to create an undertone of fear.”

It is precisely from this emotional experimentation that Hauschka derives creative excitement. He often talks about the dangers of conforming to expectation, and dislikes being classified by any particular genre: he defines his various influences as a “collection bag, full of disparate things that somehow work together.” By transcending conventional boundaries, similarly varied responses from the audience are evoked, “Everyone who listens to me has a different imagination. During a live show, I can see something happening in their faces but I don’t know what – whether they hear the music of an abandoned city, or a dark zombie movie. I don’t want to take this away from them.”

Given his desire to innovate against the constrictions of any singular genre, how does Hauschka feel about being termed “indie-classical”? It has attracted a wide variety of responses, viewed alternately as an emblem of positive diversity, or of hipster exclusivity. He laughs, commenting wryly, “The problem is that people need to categorise and orientate. Once they link you to a genre you are all boxed and ready to go. But if someone calls me ‘indie-classical’, and someone else disputes that term, then at least there is a discussion being had.”