Francis Lung has been a busy bee during lockdown, and clearly he’s dying to be among the first out of the blocks too after the vaccine rollout frees us all up to gig together once more. Having last year delivered up 7-track mini album Songs From A Living Room – a treat no one asked for but quickly discovered they couldn’t start the morning without – he’s back with summer shows and a full length LP, Miracles, that dives straight into the same pool of power pop that ignited the likes of Elliott Smith, Teenage Fanclub and Brendan Benson.
Oh, how we thrill at festival announcements! What’s a summer without days lost to living in a field taking in beautiful sounds and too many flat beers? It’s no summer we want to go through again, and so you should definitely add this latest announcement to your 2021 calendar. It’s a taster session of sorts for the main Moovin Festival on the August bank holiday weekend, with many of the best names to ever grace the festival’s stages brought together for a barn dance to end all barn dances: Congo Natty, Mr Scruff, Norman Jay, Stereo MCs and so many more are all lined up to entertain until dawn.
The second quality Francis on our list today, Francis Of Delirium are a celebration of the rowdy face of rock music, sucking in tons of 1990s grunge influences. To some extent, their particular grunge debt is owed as heavily to Avril Lavigne as to Alice In Chains or Pixies, and that’s probably because there’s a generation gap at the core of the band: teen Jana Bahrich and Chris Hewett – 30 years her senior – being the creative brains behind the group. They’re just two EPs in with their second one, Wading, fresh out this month, but they already sound like a duo who mean business (look up Quit Fucking Around – we dare you not to be instantly hooked) so get on board now.
Short for Land Yacht Regatta, LYR are definitely a vibe. Heady and heavenly, and not just because of Simon Armitage’s instantly recognisable voice, LYR are a perfect triplet of talents completed by Richard Walters (look his list of work up – you will be amazed!) and equally over-achieving mutli-instrumentalist Patrick James Pearson. Together, they’ve created Call In The Crash Team, an album they describe as “an easy-to-love midpoint between poetic spoken passages, soaring vocal melodies, and instrumentation which gleams like a rough-cut jewel”. In fairness, there’s nothing rough about the scale of the sound these three make together; the thought of being surrounded by it in the intimate setting of Gullivers is something to get very excited about indeed.
- Words:
- Sarah Walters
- Published on:
- Fri 9 Apr 2021
Celebrating 10 years of making celestial shoegaze sounds in 2021, Flyying Colours are heading over from Australia with their first new music in five years – album Fantasy Country – which definitely dives into the chirpier end of noisy psyche rock rather than seeks to drown you in drone. It’s fair to say tracks like Ok and Goodtimes even have something close to singalong choruses (“Throw it all away,” chant Brodie J Brümmer and Gemma O’Connor, as light and breezy as you like). And honestly, anyone handpicked by brilliant musical minds like Anton Newcombe (The Brian Jonestown Massacre) and Johnny Marr as tour support is ‘Ok’ by us.