Website fixed!

Yes indeed. Thank the lord.

Website problems 17.03.08

Yep, we know that the reaction sheets are playing up at the minute. No cover art, no press blurb, just a blank page with some response boxes. Rest assured we're on the case and have people looking at why it's gone skewiff and hope to get it fixed ASAP.

In the meantime, please do the best you can and leave your reactions as normal as they still come through to us and get logged. Also, once you've filled in the response all the press release and artwork magically appear for some reason but we don't know why.

Thanking you for your patience.

Delays @ The Barfly, 12.03.08

If you've ever been to the Barfly in London then you know how much of a sweatbox it can be. If you haven't been, I'm sure you can sympathize by thinking of your own local venue and all the times you've squeezed in there to see a band who really should be playing a larger venue. And so it was with Delays - myself, Ian and Gemma from the Wild office went down to see the show and it was exactly what you'd want from Delays. With three albums of songs to choose from it was almost a Greatest Hits set, kicking off with 'Long Time Coming', blasting through new songs like 'Hooray' and 'Love Made Visible' with a fervour you rarely see these days and climaxing with a massive run through of 'Valentine' which sent the crowd into overdrive.

There was definitely a section of the crowd in from Southampton as Greg was joking about the football team and local landmarks to whoops and cheers. But the bulk of the audience seemed to be a cross section of very cute girls and very trendy looking indie boys who knew every word to every song.

They've just announced a load of dates for May where they're playing proper sized venues. You should go.

In the meantime, remind yourself how good 'Long Time Coming' is.

DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist, 13.03.08

I'll admit that I was very worried when I went into this gig as I had, erm, "obtained" an mp3 of the Hard Sell set that these two were performing in the States and I wasn't overly impressed. I'm a big fan of Brainfreeze and Product Placement, the two preceding shows they have put together (I went to see Product Placement at the Scala in fact when they did it, and it was blinding) but the new direction away from the old funk records didn't gel with me when I listened to it. So despite having spent £25 on a ticket as soon as they went on sale I was dubious as we actually got to the venue. Ian from our office was similarly nervous but we crossed our fingers that we'd be proven completely wrong and guess what? We were.

It was brilliant, loads more old school hip hop than I was expecting, a fantastic bit in the middle of the first set when they recreated loads of old De La Soul tracks using only the original records from which the samples were taken and plenty more to make this boy very happy. It was definitely more eclectic that either of its predecessors mixing more electro, indie (Bloc Party, Foo Fighters and Blur at one point!) and nearly venturing into drum & bass at one point.

Obviously the technicality of both DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist was amazing but even they seemed to have a couple of slip ups where their respective tunes went out of synch with each other and needed to be kicked and shoved a bit to bring it back. But I actually enjoyed that to be honest and seeing Shadow give a bit of a wry smile and a shrug of the shoulders proved that they weren't just playing off some DAT but it was a real-time performance and those couple of small blips demonstrated just how difficult the whole thing was and the fact that the rest of it went flawlessly is testament to their skills. Eight turntables, four mixers, a selection of guitar pedals and a couple of samplers are hard to keep on top of I would imagine.

And then to top it all they encored with a scratch version of Metallica's 'One' which lifted the roof off an already ecstatic Roundhouse.

So, definitely one for the geekier among us but an absolute treat to watch and listen to. I'm very glad I was wrong.

If you haven't heard the Brainfreeze mix yet then you owe it to yourself to do so as soon as you can. You can download the first part here.