PLUS ONE MAGAZINE

Can it really be 20 years since the chaotic swamp fuzz of the Gomez debut album ‘Bring It On’ took the UK by storm, songs including ‘78 Stone Wobble’, ‘Whippin’ Piccadilly’ and ‘Get Myself Arrested’ helping garner its creators a Mercury Prize for their troubles? 

Wakefield’s leading arts fanzine Rhubarb Bomb, created Long Division back in 2011, the  city’s own take on the multi-venue city centre all-day music festival that’s become  increasingly popular in the last decade. 

Electronic garage Londoners Big & The Fat half swagger and half shuffle onto We Can Do It Records with the mesmerisingly tense new double A-side ‘Fruit’/’Crack Crack’. There is something bizarre, even gratifyingly uncomfortable, about both tracks, which stomp ever onwards with the steady regularity of a pendulum while ramping up a certain sense of uneasiness which never really resolves itself. The tracks are the musical equivalent of eating four grapefruits in one sitting with no sugar, bitter as anything but also delicious, nourishing and distinctly moreish.

The well-worn adage that a country’s political situation is inversely proportional to its musical output still appears to ring true, in this case, the bewitching release by veteran North American punk turned troubadour Laura Veirs .  

Emerging from the swirling mists and forbidding fogs in the DMZ between shoegaze and grunge, Chilean outfit Maff reach for their bricks and mortar to build another stunning wall of sound on new ep 'Melaniña'. Inspired by frontman Ricardo Gomez’s first child Augusta, the ep title combines the word ‘melanin’ with ‘niña’ – Spanish for little girl – to pay tribute to the fact that Augusta is slightly albino.