Weekly what’s new – Vigo Thieves

Doesn’t Valentines Day just make you feel good? Don’t you love paying a fiver for an overpriced piece of card and being grievously ripped off for flowers and chocolates? No? Then give thanks for the Vigo Thieves new single ‘Love Is Dead’. Long-term ELM faves, this is another taster of their forthcoming debut album.

Guitar music – dead again?

Guitar music is dead again, apparently. What do you mean you didn’t know? Well, it’s your fault for not noticing. Yes, as utterly ludicrous as it seems following the year when Kings of Leon sold 18 trillion albums and you couldn’t get a ticket to see Mumford and Sons without a hundred quid or the [...]

From the vault – Camper Van Beethoven

Some bands just don’t get the respect they are due. Camper Van Beethoven probably do, from about the fifteen of us who like them, and I can’t imagine they’d want it any other way. They are responsible for perhaps the greatest lyric of all time – ‘there isn’t a line here that goes with anything’ [...]

Friday From the Vault – Warren Zevon

Life, as they say, isn’t fair. If it was, we’d all be rich. There would be no EastEnders. Only people I don’t like would get ill. Mars Bars wouldn’t have gotten smaller. A whole host of things. But possibly the biggest difference would be that Warren Zevon would be revered by the masses as the [...]

ELM Presents – Fram

ELM Presents kicks off in May with a show at Glasgow’s 13th Note. Headlining will be Scots post-rockers Fram, whose debut This is How We Live Now was one of 2008′s best kept secrets. We talked to frontman Scot van den Akker about all things music: ELM Presents – we’re excited; how are you feeling [...]

Elbow and the idea of the album

It may be archaic and even somewhat quaint to younger readers, but musicians used to spend a long time deciding the make-up of an album. Deciding what songs were selected wasn’t simply about which ones were best; many acts often left storming tracks go out as b-sides because they didn’t fit the concept of the [...]

Gig-going and the Free Market

There’s a tradition in Scotland at big football matches that people will sell tickets outside the venue to supporters who haven’t managed to pick one up before matchday. The strange thing is that the seller makes no money on the deal. Tickets are sold for face value, and anyone attempting to sell them for more [...]

The Songs That Saved Your Life – The 80s; Where Is My Mind?

There was more to the 80s than Duran Duran and massive cocaine habits, you know. Scandalously disregarding the work of Sonia, Salamander takes us through the fashions and then goes for a song coming right out of left field. The 80s, then; the decade of big hair and enough hairspray to have caused the ozone [...]

Like a female Morrissey fronting the Bad Seeds – Phantom

We first caught up with Phantom about six months ago, when they were in town for the Hinterland Festival.  Today sees the release of their debut single ‘The Great Pretender.’ We caught up with the guys to to see what’s been happening in the corner marked ‘gorgeous pop-noir’; Elsie Martins

The Friday 5 – 5 reasons why we love rock’n’roll

Light and shade. That’s what we strive for round these parts. In ELM Towers, you’ll find rooms bathed in a light so shiny and white you’d swear you’d walked in on Simon Cowell, whereas the adjoining room would be dimmer than Manni Dinogue. For steady repetition is not good for the soul. But we’ve been [...]

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