Sound Of Scotland
March is jam-packed with new releases and unmissable performances
Your columnist Lisa-Marie Ferla finds that March is memorable for music
AS it heads into its fourth year, crowdfunded record label Last Night From Glasgow continues to look for new ways to support independent music. Last year, they launched instrumental imprint Komponist, and now Hive – a new label “by artists for artists” – joins the LNFG family, offering unsigned artists the chance to tap into their infrastructure and connections.
Hive launched in January with the debut EP from Nicol & Elliott, a Glasgow-based Americana duo whose melodic songs are built around male-female harmonies and gothic subject matter. Meanwhile, the main LNFG label recently released Post Neo Anti, the new album from reformed indie rockers Close Lobsters, a band whose popularity on US college rock radio stations in the late 80s and early 90s brought them critical success far from their native Paisley.
Glasgow indie pop band GUMS! self-released their debut album in January. TEMPS charts the highs and lows of a relationship over a 15-year period, and the wistful lyrics and deadpan delivery of songwriter Martin J. Smith tap into a particular nostalgia when combined with Nora Noonan’s poppy harmonies.
Eigg-based Lost Map Records has teamed up with
Chicago avant jazz label International Anthem and London’s Total Refreshment Centre to bring the new album by bandleader and composer Alabaster deplume into the world. Named for two men with whom deplume played while employed as an outreach worker for a Manchester-based disability charity, To Cy & Lee Instrumentals Vol. 1 features 11 instrumental tracks and is a celebration of connectedness and community.
Lost Map also welcomed Glasgow synth-poppers Happy Spendy to the roster – expect a compilation of
their three EPS of “feel-good sad songs” later in the year.
Erstwhile Glasgow four-piece Spinning Coin released their second album, Hyacinth, on The Pastels’ Geographic imprint in February. The album finds the band seeking beauty from chaos: personnel changes, the forced relocation of two of its members and the desire for compassion in a turbulent world have seeped into the songwriting. The band tour the UK and Europe this month, with dates including Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh (March 12); Beat Generator, Dundee (March 13); and CCA, Glasgow (March15).
Multi-instrumentalist and electro gloom-pop star MALKA is out on tour, whose third album I’m Not Your Soldier came out last month. Featuring honest, reflective songwriting set to warped synths and bass-heavy beats, it’s an album about mental health, motherhood and reassessing your place in the world. MALKA plays Stereo, Glasgow on March 6, and Macarts, Galashiels, on March 12.
The Scottish Alternative Music Awards (SAMAS) is once again running the Paisley Takeover music festival at Paisley Arts Centre on March 13 and 14. For the full line-up see officialsama.squarespace.com.
My live highlight of the month is From Scotland With Love – director Virginia Heath’s film of Scottish archive footage paired with a live score by King Creosote, last performed in 2015. I saw it at the Kelvingrove bandstand in Glasgow as the sun went down one August night. This unmissable show tours Scotland from March 7 to 12.
Finally, Simon Thacker brings his Indo-bengali project Svara-kanti to the UK this month, with a host of Scottish shows.
“The album finds the band chaos” seeking beauty from