I just bought The Dresden Dolls - Live At The Roundhouse DVD and watched it for the first time yesterday. It's brilliant! I thought it would be pretty difficult to capture how good it was to be at the Roundhouse gig last November but it goes an awful long way to doing this. I haven't watched all of the features yet, so I'm looking forward to seeing how they put it all together and hoefully some more bits of the vast number of support artists that were there.

If you want to see what I thought of the original gig,…

So, last Thursday meant a trip to Bush Hall for Thu 12 Jul – Aqualung.

Aqualung were, as ever, great. This was a warm-up gig for them prior to the Latitude Festival, where they'll hopefully win some new fans (or reconnect with some old ones who might have forgotten about them). It was an excellent setlist, with a good mix of older songs and stuff from the new album (which, judging by people's reactions, everyone has a copy of, despite it not having been officially released in the UK yet).

Matt seemed a little bit quiet at first as…

So, a review on: Mon 18 Jun – The New Pornographers, Envelopes, which I attended with Ged_UK and was very excited about, having jst got into The New Pornographers recently and really enjoyed all 3 of their albums.

We arrived pretty early to stake out a good spot (very early as it turned out - the Bar Academy Islington was virtually empty when we got there at about 7.15 or so). After enjoying a couple of pints of surprisingly nice beer and watching the place gradully fill up, support appeared in the shape of Envelopes. They were pretty…

I have a new number one in my last.fm charts. For over a year Duke Special has been sitting pretty at the top. But as of my last chart update he has been overtaken by The Mountain Goats. So I thought it was worth a journal remarking on this.

I've seen this coming for a while. I think it's because there's only a small collection of Duke songs as he only released his first full studio album last year (and had some EPs before that), whereas The Mountain Goats have many albums, and so I've been able to discover…

On Thursday I went to see Thu 7 Jun – Andrew Bird, St Vincent at the Scala with Ged_UK.

Opening up was Dosh. He's a great musician (using keyboard, drums and other stuff to build up his songs) but not really a performer so while he was interesting to listen to, half an hour was plenty for me.

Prime support was from St. Vincent, formerly of The Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens' touring band. She's a multi-instrumentalist and en excellent guitarist. Her song-writing is a bit weird and off-the-wall in places but she really grew on…

Aqualung's new UK single, Cinderella is to be released on June 11 and there's an accompanying video, shot at the recent ULU gig (which I attended: Gig review)

I'm pretty sure I'm in this video, although I only fleetingly appear in the wide shots - I was standing to the left of the stage by the bass speakers. Good luck picking me out, however, as I only just about managed it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf-ostUl1GI

Incidentally the new album is rather good and well worth your hard earned pennies, at least in my opinion.

So a quick recap on Wed 11 Apr – Patrick Wolf, No Bra, bishi, probably more for my benefit than anyone else's.

Support: No Bra - really not impressed. Standing almost motionless in the middle of the stage reciting lines quite monotonously along to an overdone backing track on a laptop isn't enough to impress me.

Bishi was ok but I think it's pretty difficult to adapt the traditional Indian instruments (Sitar and Tabla mostly) to Western song styles and I don't think this always worked.

Patrick Wolf was great. Full of energy, he managed a couple of costume…

So, I went to Thu 12 Apr – Aqualung and I've just got round to writing a gig review for it. I blame illness followed by a trip home.

I think this is the closest I've ever stood to the stage at a gig. It's a bit surprising as we didn't turn up very early at all but there was still loads of space right by the stage. I was close enough to be deafened by the bass speaker and almost close enough to reach up and touch Ben Hales. A couple of the songs were being filmed (Cinderella…

Stolen from ChudleyCannons:

Go to your top artist, and have a look at their 8 "most similar" artists. Make a note of any artists in the list that you haven't heard of, or that you have heard of, but never bothered to listen to.

Then continue down your Top Artists list, checking their "most similar" as well. Every time an artist comes up that you haven't heard, give them a point. Do this for your top 25 artists, or until you get tired of it and see which artist has the most points. Check them out and see if…

So, last night was Fri 30 Mar – Barenaked Ladies, Boothby Graffoe. It was my third time seeing the guys and they were as good as ever.

Support was from stand-up comedian and musician Boothby Graffoe. Stand-up comedians aren't always a good choice as openers for bands but Boothby works well as his mix of comedy and humorous songs fit in well with the main Barenaked Ladies show. It helps that the band seem to enjoy his work and Kevin, Jim and Ed all came out to provide musical support for some of his songs, ensuring a good…