Darwin Deez

Having quickly established itself as the best metropolitan music festival in the UK, Live At Leeds returned over the warm bank holiday weekend to send a spark of excitement and energy fizzing through the city's streets. As ever with LAL - and most other festivals - line-up clashes were inevitable though it did little to dampen the atmosphere of what proved to be one of the best Live at Leeds offerings yet.

The thing to remember when wandering the streets with a crumpled programme trying to figure out if you can sprint from Brudenell Social Club to The Wardrobe in under 8 minutes is that you really don't need to. The whole point of Live at Leeds is that there's always someone playing, somewhere, and it makes for a far richer experience to circle a couple of your must-sees though pretty much go with the flow of the festival.

Incidentally - after a visit to the Holy Trinity Church to catch the end of the impressive Harry George Johns - the first real port of call was the horrendously busy Cockpit venue in the city centre, where queues snaked up and down the street with hundreds of fans desperate to gain access. Luckily, organisers had put together a pretty tasty schedule for the venue so waiting wristband holders were eventually treated to something worth queuing for.

Continue reading: Live at Leeds 2013 - Live Review

Darwin Deez, concoctor of Marmite-effect earworm pop, is back with second album Songs For Imaginative People. The title says it all: here comes Darwin Deez, one of life's outsiders. So outside, he's outside the outsiders that actually get noticed as outsiders. Trying to align himself with the arty-folk in a manner so calculated that his songs scream 'artifice' and 'charlatan.' And yes, we know that Darwin Deez is a band, but Darwin Deez the man, IS Darwin Deez the band.

It begins well enough, with (800 HUMAN), sounding a little like short-lived New Yorkers The Blow (who morphed into DFA-dwellers Yacht), in a forceful, playful analysis of "what it's like to be human," complete with impassioned, well-placed cursing and cascading melodies. Similarly, 'You Can't Be My Girl,' with its punchy hollering as percussion is one of the triumphs of the album. It's one of the occasions in which Deez decides to work with his own melodies, rather than battling ineffectually against it. With its core message of of "I think I love you, how horrible," and lines like "your sneering Gorbachev" and "I am sober as a marble," it's studiously anti-love, without bludgeoning the point home.

Completing a trio of quality, is 'Good To Lose,' with its chaotic guitar lines, a slacker's anthem, a frustrated soul trapped in oppression: "I'm free to be / asleep 'til three / I let my laundry / pile up on me." When Deez lets the melody drive him, rather than his own desire to colour outside the lines, he creates a whole bundle of perfectly pleasant alt-pop. Off the wall, buoyant and enticing. Outside of those moments, though, what follows is simply a tired variation of a theme, in which Deez has but one dimension and that dimension is "look mum, no hands!" Slowly, the album zones out on itself, descends into space noodles on 'All In The Wrists' and ends with a whimper, on the directionless 'Chelsea's Hotel.'

Continue reading: Darwin Deez - Songs For Imaginative People Album Review

Eccentric New Yorker Darwin Deez comes from that uber trendy Brooklyn lo-fi set that has been seeping into our unconscious for the last year or so. Look at the hippy curls, the trendy indie moustache and his love of quirky dance moves and you'll immediately get an idea of what to expect from his music.)

Continue reading: Darwin Deez, Darwin Deez Album Review