Sheffield-based band Reverend and the Makers are celebrating nine years of formation with their fourth studio album, Thirty-Two, due for release later this month.

The band are currently touring the country – not playing in larger venues, however, but visiting different cities each night in fan’s houses. The band simply ask people to tweet them if they’d like a gig, one person is chosen in that night’s location a day or so in advance – it’s that simple.

I caught up with Jon ‘The Reverend’ McClure to speak to him about this method of promotion, the band’s new album and their impending tour. At the time of writing, the band are almost at the end of their scheduled thirty-two houses, and McClure is loving it. “It’s been absolutely mental, we’ve had people falling through windows, police vans turning up, and even a marriage proposal – a successful marriage proposal from a fella to his lady, so we’ve been having a right laugh.”

In an industry where the enormity of some artists creates an ever widening gap between them and their fans, ‘The Reverend’ feels like these unusual gigs are more important than ever. “Unless you’re gonna make really awful music to get onto daytime radio, your options are limited to what you can do to get people to know about the band…fans love it.” McClure values the loyalty of his fans more so than he does about being a renowned name – “You can be loved by ten thousand people, or liked by a million, but if they love you, they’ll love you forever, and that’s what music’s about for me. I don’t want to force the mainstream in order to be liked.” Indeed, although the band’s Heavyweight Champion of the World is widely recognised, McClure does not aim to have his songs played nationally. “I don’t want to start to make rubbish music to play on the radio, I’d much rather stick to my guns – and I think it’s working.”

And the name of the album? Inspired by Jon’s age. “I’m not trying to pretend I’m 21…I’m 32, why pretend I’m not?” explained McClure, “I’m not trying to please anyone anymore – no radio players, no one else, just me…and besides, Adele’s f**ked when she gets to my age. She’s had 19 and 21, but she can’t have 32!” the frontman joked.

Thirty-two is already looking to outdo the surprise success of the band’s last album, which McClure referred to as a “resurgence for the band”. Indeed, the pride that McClure takes in his new record is warmingly genuine. “It’s almost like the first album in that we have nothing to prove to anyone. We’re making music for us and because we like it, and you can hear that we’re not shying away from anything, its that ballsy confidence”.

As always, the band’s songs stem from real experiences, and this album marks a new age of maturity for them. The song ‘Your Girl‘, is “about a mate who couldn’t go out ’cause he was always with his missis. There’s one called ‘The Only One’, about wanting to be treated like the only fella’,” explained McClure, before musing on his own circumstance – “I’ve got married to Laura, and there’s a bit of thinking like ‘this is where we are, this is where we were; what’s next?’ Its a crossroads age, 32 – you’re definitely not a kid anymore, real life’s kicked in.”

Thirty-two is due for release on February 24th, the day after the band begin their UK tour. 

Ryan Hunn (alter-ego Illum Sphere) has a lot to live up to with his debut release on Ninja Tune. The label has been a conduit for some of the most interesting electronic music to be released in recent years, with names like Bonobo and Actress on their roster. Ghosts of Then and Now shows us why Hunn deserves to be mentioned among this elite.

Apart from anything else, Ghosts is an impressive display of balance and a light touch. Hunn is rarely heavy handed with his production; he never let’s one element overpower the rest, and the songs never sound crowded or showy. Not only that, but the album works however you choose to listen to it. It’s equally rewarding dipping into individual tracks, or settling down to appreciate the project in its complete form. The songs are meticulously constructed, with layers fluidly dropping in and out, propelling the music along with a life of its own. On the best tracks, everything unfolds so perfectly that you barely notice it happening, but the enthralling collage of textures will repay attentive listening.

There’s a subtle impression of concept about Ghosts; the title evokes a faint nostalgia – vague shadows of the past with a slightly uneasy undertone – and it feels like Hunn has tried to render these ideas musically throughout the album. Having an idea like this to base the music around can often focus production and give an album a sense of continuity, stopping the tracks from jarring with one another. Everything is enveloped with a generous helping of vinyl crackle too, heightening the warmth and giving it a strange air of familiarity.

There are a few weak moments though, especially at the start of the album. The opener ‘Liquesce’ sounds like a half-arsed attempt to emulate the wonderful ‘Prelude’ that introduced Bonobo’s ‘Black Sands’, and ‘The Road’ somehow manages to seem much longer than three and a half minutes, and not in a good way. But for the most part, Ghosts is an impressive debut from Illum Sphere, and essential listening for any fans of Bonobo-esque electronica.

Everyone already loves Temples. Johnny Marr and Noel Gallagher have already waxed lyrical about their ability and potential, calling them the best new band in Britain. With all the hype and expectation surrounding them, you would have been forgiven for worrying that they’d do a Palma Violets and disappoint. This they have not done. Yes, their straight-out-of-the-60s brand of psychedelia is not exactly forward-thinking, but it’s as good as anything from the Summer of Love, drawing clear influences from the Kinks, and is part of the powerful movement of indie psychedelia burst open by Tame Impala, whose signature swagger is in clear evidence on Sun Structures.

Such modern psychedelia is all the rage at the moment, with artists like Morgan Delt and Foxygen perfectly exemplifying 2014’s taste for the trippy. ‘Shelter Song’, already a favourite up and down the country, opens the album in impressive fashion and the stunning ‘Mesmerise’ and ‘Colours of Life’ slot brilliantly into the work. And it’s not just the singles which impress: psychedelic epic ‘Sand Dance’ followed by the contrastingly brief and tender ‘Fragment’s Light’ end the album on a definite high. Hazy without being boring, reflecting without imitating, Sun Structures is a masterpiece.

Before listening to Dead, you might not expect Edinburgh to produce challenging, avant-garde hip-hop: however, this seems somehow fitting for a debut album which operates on casting off and undermining expectations. ‘War’ opens with a menacing a cappella from the dark hinterlands of hip-hop which MF Doom calls home, before moving into a chorus whose reverb-heavy vocals over a xylophone sample are dreamy, ethereal electropop. ‘Eclectic’ has become a cliched epithet to level at any artist slightly more ambitious than an X Factor winner, but it is difficult to avoid using it to describe Young Fathers’ distinctive sound, setting up classic rap flows over unapologetic sonic weirdness comprised of tribal drums, primal screams and infectious riffs which are always slightly distorted beyond becoming comfortably hum-a-long.

And yet, despite the disjointed, non-linear trajectory of each track, employing samples which sometimes sound like a polyphonic ringtone heard underwater, melody is the most fundamental principle of the album. Every song on the album, even those as off-kilter as ‘MMMH MMMH’, reaches its climax in a haunting, often euphoric chorus: the mash-up of styles and genres and the resistance to overly slick or ‘finished’ production is unified by Young Fathers’ pervasive eeriness into an organic, elusive but cohesive whole. 

Inside Llewyn Davis is a satisfying, wellstructured and subtle film. In two hours of understated cynicism, fairly mundane events are rendered deeply dramatic: if you’ve never taken a cat on the subway, now is the time to experience the frissons such an endeavour provokes. The film spans one week in the life of
Llewyn, a failing folk singer in Greenwich Village, whose life is a fairly bathetic blip on the orgy of emotion that was the sixties in New York.

The score was written by Dave Van Ronk, a folk singer who really existed and whose life inspired that of the fictional Llewyn. Van Ronk’s music is typical in its deteriorating quality: when Llewyn plays his ‘old stuff’, we feel inspired, but the songs he’s writing by the time we come across him are fairly lacklustre Llewyn’s lack of achievement is is underscored by a ten second shot near the end of the film. The characters are in a dive bar watching hopefuls like Llewyn perform; onstage is a curly-haired, thin-nosed singer, silhouetted sullenly over a guitar. It’s a young Dylan, and the 2014 audience smiles wrily at how inconsequential Llewyn’s life will end up being compared to Bob’s.

Dylan turned the down-and-out existence of a folk singer into a lucrative and prized career, setting the gold standard for future folk singer/songwriters. His sound graduated from the tried and tested folk song; his songs were political, topical and fresh, refuting Llewyn’s maxim, “if it’s not new and it doesn’t get old, it’s folk”. His rejection of society was verbalised in the form of songs like ‘A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall,’ a rally against nuclear warfare that has prompted album sleeves and YouTube blurbs to cheerfully deem it “the protest songs to end all protest songs” ever since. The lyrics are stirring and upsetting even to a fairly politically inactive 20 year old half a century later, making Dylan’s the kind of legacy that will probably endure.

Llewyn’s wanderings needed to be immortalised by the Coen brothers to create any kind of legacy for the score, and his musical career was trumped and roundly eclipsed by another 60s Greenwich Village folk singer. Dylan occupies a paltry 10 seconds in the film of Llewyn’s life, but these 10 seconds are pivotal:the Dylan song in question is the fairly unknown and nostalgically entitled ‘Farewell’. There is also something poignant in the choice of song: folk was getting political and everything was about to change. Someone else is about to realise Llewyn’s dream, and Dylan’s success will inspire and completely eclipse the next generation of Llewyns.

There was an era pre-Dylan, when folk was more about the song than the singer, before the self-important politicising that came out of 1960s and the naval-gazing that accompanied it. In Tom Lehrer’s “The Folk Song Army”, he
parodies the righteous right-on of Dylan’s lyrics, wailing puerilely, “We all hate
poverty,war and injustice/Unlike the rest of you squares”. It’s the petty humanity of this lyric that Inside Llewyn Davis perfectly reflects. It’s not trying to idolise its protagonist or bloat his achievements, and the script is gloriously
apolitical. It’s just one beautifully shot week in the life of one fairly unscrupulous man, with a guitar, some songs and a cat.

I’m back in Beijing for my second semester after a much needed seven week break in the UK. At home I got pretty sick of being asked “How’s China?” or “What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen?” The craziest thing I actually saw was a guy who had passed out on the street at midnight in freezing temperatures, and nobody went to help him. You can imagine a person’s typical reaction towards
this – he could quite easily have been dead.

But when I arrived at my mate’s flat and said “I think I saw a dead guy”, he just replied, “Well that makes two of us.” China hardens you up. But never mind the oppressive state, gutter oil, or terrorist attacks – I’ve had tonnes of fun. I’ve met guys like Cameron Blades who studies English. He’s never been abroad but
he’s almost perfected a cockney accent by watching Eastenders. There’s Da Xing, who latched onto us just because he liked my mate’s dulcet public school tones, and of course Legolas, our neighbour who speaks English and really, really likes Lord of The Rings.

It’s not easy being a foreigner – I felt like a babbling baby for about a month and some locals got more frustrated than I did. Making Chinese friends can be really hard unless you already have a friend in common, plus a lot of ex-pats are upsettingly bitter people and you get ‘seasonal depression’ for half the week if the pollution’s bad. But if you try hard enough, you realize that Legolas actually isn’t an elf. Legolas is a human being like the rest of us. He wants to have fun with us like a few other Chinese bros, and with a bit of respect, it can be the best cultural exchange ever seen.

I don’t like slam poetry. I like stand-up and I like poetry and I like hip-hop, but slam seems to exist in a curious nether-zone between the three.  Like brunch or a lukewarm Greggs pasty or the weird bit between your willy and your bumhole, it stands in an odd limbo between the extremes of rigidly formal written poetry and raucous live performance. Content often seems to follow form, as poets write with the Buzzfeed clickbait taglines already in mind: “This Jamaican Drug Lord Gave The Room Goosebumps With His Sonnet About Potatoes”, “Racism Is An Epic Fail- Just Ask This Brave Young Girl”, “I Can’t Believe How Eloquently This Sock Puppet Showed Us That Gender Is A Social Construct”.

 I therefore approached the Afro-Caribbean Society’s slam poetry night with trepidation. The last thing I wanted on a Tuesday night in the pissing rain was to be harangued by an over-confident substitute teacher with a jaunty beret and a depressingly bad goatee. The room was packed out, and the compere was greeted not with the whoops and hollers of a traditional slam but with a smattering of Oxonian applause.

My snobby fears were ill-founded. We were gently massaged in by a whimsical opening salvo of poems about delayed trains, aggressive vegetarians and a toddler’s passionate but regrettably short-lived marriage to a cat. This gentle patter lulled me into a false sense of security, chuckling wryly at the wry wordplay and wryly waggling my eyebrows to indicate my approval. It was all very wry.

 The wryness suddenly vanished as the big hitters took to the stage. A man named Nima came out swinging with a hip-hop influenced style, transplanting Arthurian legend onto the streets of London amongst the dealers and the drizzle.

Nima’s poetry had the audience reacting like the crowd at the world’s most genteel boxing match, and he took the final by just a couple of votes. I like stand-up and I like poetry and I like hip-hop: and so I like slam poetry. Like a delicious brunch, a nourishing pasty or a crucial part of my nether regions, it exists in a fluid and fascinating nether zone between poetical extremes.