January may be a blue time but there is plenty of live music in Cambridge this month to lift the spirits. Our first tip for 2015 comes in the form of an artist who was ranked by Rolling Stone magazine in their Top 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. Following the success of J Mascis’s fourth solo album, Tied to a Star, released on Sub Pop last summer, the Dinosaur Jr frontman will be heading back to the UK for a full tour, which makes a stop at the Cambridge Junction J2 on 15 January.
First Aid Kit (pictured) are touring the UK this January, including a date at the Corn Exchange on 17 January. Last summer the duo made a triumphant return with their critically acclaimed third album Stay Gold, which entered the UK chart at number 11. Soon after they sold out their UK tour and biggest headline show to date at London’s Royal Albert Hall. With Stay Gold, First Aid Kit – sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg – have honed their musical skills and blossomed as vivid storytellers in creating a ten-song collection. The record is their most mature and ambitious to date and is filled with aching beauty and wisdom beyond their years.
Ambient rock sensations These Ghosts take to the stage in Cambridge this month, with meditative, introspective guitar music and velvet delivery, reminiscent of Radiohead’s fusion of splintered guitars and electronics. These Ghosts will play St Paul’s Church on 30 January and it will be their first Cambridge show since the release of their sophomore album, Still The Waves. These Ghosts released their debut album, You Are Not Lost, You Are Here, in 2010, before university got in the way and the band put a hold on creating music.
Messers Duncan, Yager and Hall attended different universities, meaning that meant band activity was reduced, but after relocating and honing their craft and fledgling movements in music, the result of their second release is an album full of melancholic guitars and a patient intensity. Support comes from one of Cambridge’s finest new bands and ones to watch in 2015, Fast Infamy. Led by boy-girl vocals, Fast Infamy flux between soulful R&B grooves and sultry house beats.
January sees Hayseed Dixie bringing their unique take on AC/DC classics with their very own genre of ‘Rockgrass’ to Cambridge Junction on the 17th. The band have a sense of humour running through their core, but also have a great knack of producing complete 360° reworkings of classic tracks.
Known for his world-class guitar playing, and on-stage acrobatics, Nils Lofgren is a true rock legend and January sees him play the Corn Exchange on the 9th. He’s a superb frontman, both with Grin and under his own name. Recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the E Street Band, Nils released his new album Face the Music in 2014.
Wednesday 21st sees The Portland Arms play host to an incredible double bill of Grant-Lee Phillips and Howe Gelb, both towering figures in alt-county songwriting. Grant-Lee Phillips has been making memorable music since his days as the golden voice and poetic visionary front of the folk-rock trio Grant Lee Buffalo. Since recording four fine albums with GLB, he’s gone on to release seven solo albums, including his latest, Walking in the Green Corn, exploring his Native American roots.
Howe Gelb is the freewheeling luminary whose three decades of voluminous recording with Giant Sand have forged a legend of Southwestern American roots punk and international prominence. Gelb has described his solo music as erosion rock music that changes with the elements on a daily basis and described himself as ‘endlessly restlessly wanderlusted encrusted’…
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