Friday Means Six of the Best

Here are another six tunes to try and cheer you up a little bit on another dank and dreary Friday in England… First up is Hardly Art’s Unnatural Helpers and their raging first single, Hate Your Teachers, from upcoming album Land Grab. River City Tanlines keep the energy levels fizzing with their own garage-punk howl and shred of Stop My Heart taken from the forthcoming release … Continue reading Friday Means Six of the Best

Mad Mackerel Recommends…The Young Evils

We picked a whole bunch of tracks we’d been sent over the past few weeks from new bands (to us anyway) and stuck them on a playlist to see what would jump out at us. First to make a showing was the infectiously catchy, but dark-hearted indie rock of Seattle’s The Young Evils with a couple of tracks from their new EP Foreign Spells. There is a … Continue reading Mad Mackerel Recommends…The Young Evils

Mad Mackerel’s Best of the Month: June 2012

Image (c) Big Pic A cracking month for new releases. Here is the some of the best of our posts from June, together with a couple of newbies for the perfect June mixtape. Check out some of the other ‘Best ofs’ in the sidebar too. The Hunting Accident – Aubergine Angular, compulsive, propulsive thump. a Download Damon Moon & The Whispering Drifters – The Fool mp3 (from Lungs, … Continue reading Mad Mackerel’s Best of the Month: June 2012

New Single From The Boombox Hearts

Thoroughly enjoying this, the first taste from the Boombox Hearts debut album. It’s called 100 (The Latest Flame), and it’s very much pop the 60s way with some noisy indie-style guitars (and yes, the title’s a reference to Elvis!). According to the band, “basically, it’s about: pop, love, a girl perhaps named Marie, cigarettes and wine and the Isle of Wight“, a winning combination in anyone’s … Continue reading New Single From The Boombox Hearts

Q Magazine’s Free Amy Winehouse Tribute

It seems de rigueur at the moment to reinterpret classic albums wholesale, especially for the UK music monthlies as their free cover disk mounts. Following Mojo and Uncut both offering recent tribute discs to Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Beach Boys and George Harrison, Q magazine have joined the party with Back to Back to Black, an anniversary re-recording of Amy Winehouse’s album featuring amongst … Continue reading Q Magazine’s Free Amy Winehouse Tribute

Mad Mackerel’s Best of the Year (so far)

So then, half way through the year already. Time to take stock and see what the first six months have delivered up in terms of new tunes and bands. We asked some of the regular MM contributors to pick three songs that have particularly struck a chord (sorry) with them in the first part of 2012. Kyle Adem – Brother Follow  Unlike Brains by Lower Dens … Continue reading Mad Mackerel’s Best of the Year (so far)

Town Hall’s Free Covers EP

Must be a day for folky covers of other genres! Hot on the heels of our earlier post of the Smoke Fairies covering The Cult, we have Town Hall Plays The Classics Vol 1, a free EP of five covers by the NY folksters. Each member of the band  picked a favourite song and each was then given the Town Hall treatment. It comes hot on the heels … Continue reading Town Hall’s Free Covers EP

Mad Mackerel Recommends…Ormonde

Anna-Lynne Williams (aka Lotte Kestner) and Robert Gomez, nearly strangers, left Seattle and Denton and went to Marfa to make a record under the name Ormonde. They platonically arranged their instruments in a tiny adobe house in the most dreamlike town in Texas. They made ten songs. They called it Machine. When you hear the guitar strum, when you hear Gomez breathe in, when you … Continue reading Mad Mackerel Recommends…Ormonde