"Hallo. We are The Cosmic Dead from Glasgow and this is us at home, playing a set of music for you!", so bellows the normally very placid looking Lewis Cook after turning to face the audience following the initial 11 minutes of sonic battering the band have given us tonight. I know it's been 11 minutes because the guy to my left has been filming the entire first song and it's displayed on his screen. Get a life buddy. Ironically the set's being professionally filmed anyway.

At home the band certainly are though. For some acts that would mean bigging up their place of birth to the already converted and having baying fans agreeing that this truly is Eden. Not for The Cosmic Dead though. They pass the Buckfast amongst themselves and keep pounding away. Whether the booze is what in fact fuels them creatively, just something they happen to like or an ironic prop is unknown but it has the effect you'd expect either way. What songs do they play? No idea but that's of no matter - volume, mastery of what they do and taking great pleasure from it & just letting it all hang out on stage are what they're all about tonight (they were tight as fuck but more restrained last time I saw them) and they give the impression of being in for the duration.

On their final momentous number ("15 minutes? That's not even long enough for an intro") the guitar though becomes unusable, the keys almost tumble to the floor and a microphone is lost in the minor chaos of their rescue & things have to thunder to a halt. The crowd doesn't go wild but then it's hard enough to just clap after such a pummeling. Mind and senses numbed you wonder how any act can follow such a performance. Do these words do it justice? Not in the least.

White Hills get themselves set up (tonight has seen a lot of kit needing replaced on stage for each act) and launch off at the pleasingly high volume that's featured throughout the night. Having found them electrifying in larger surroundings at the Liverpool Psychfest a couple of years ago the prospect of seeing them in the compact basement space of Nice 'N' Sleazy's had been tantalising since seeing the date advertised, a fact shared by a great number of others too given the size of the crowd (which in a way seemed to have changed from that which was there previously). 

Something however just wasn't, for me, ticking all of the boxes. Whether it was the choice of songs ('No Will' from recent album Walks For Motorists has always seemed a bit of a plodder) or the band were just in the touring zone or something else, there was a sense of motions being gone through and I didn't feel engaged. Mine was most likely a minority of one but if you're not feeling it past the halfway point of a set then you're unlikely to be pulled back from the brink and just have to write it off.

Opening proceedings tonight was Leeds' one man noisefest Girl Sweat. Unintelligible, sonically punishing blasts of lap guitar and self-help levels of howling make up his short set as he pads about the place bare-footed, killing his own electronics in the process. A rambling, shambling, Hawaiian shirt clad mentalist.

The Cosmic Dead's new album Rainbowhead is released on March 25 and is available from amazon. 

Here's a stream of it:-

Having started off 2014 in a healthy state it’s safe to say that the malware infection which threw the Wordpress version of Muso’s Guide off track in the spring was a setback that we’ve been slow to get back up to speed from. Contributors disappearing into thin air over the past few months has also obviously been less than helpful in a year that, initially, was shaping up to be extremely good – we’d covered our first festival in the USA, reviews were being published at a rate seldom before witnessed and UK & European festival coverage was on the increase. Significant progress was also being made in the area of music-related books.

We’re still here though and as committed as ever to reviewing whatever we feel like, agenda-free and entirely honestly & whilst the past 12 months have thrown up challenges we’d definitely not anticipated it’s not been a bad year for music. I’ve personally thoroughly enjoyed my experiences at all of the festivals I’ve covered (Liverpool Psych Fest, Le Guess Who? & Long Division all for the second time and Beaches Brew & Bradford’s Threadfest for the first times). Practically everywhere you look now has a similar urban event going on at some point in the year so 2015 will see coverage from those already mentioned as well as the likes of Hipsville and a look at what Ghent & St. Malo have to offer.

On the recorded music front I’ve lost track of the enjoyable individual songs that have leapt out at me at various times across various platforms but we’ve tried to corral those we’ve particularly enjoyed on our soundcloud-hosted Underexposed playlists as well as collating the bigger named acts in a similar manner over on Rdio. As for albums keeping an ongoing list for the purposes of reference in this article has as ever been invaluable.

In no particular order then I can safely see myself still caring enough to be listening to the following in the year ahead:- Quilt’s Held In Splendor, Holy Wave’s Relax, Mark Morriss’s A Flash Of Darkness (which benefits greatly from his voice sounding a tad cheerier than with The Bluetones), The Faint’s Doom Abuse (possibly their best album yet), Chiaroscuro by I Break Horses, East India Youth’s Total Strife Forever, Bleeding Rainbow’s Interrupt, Pontiak’s Innocence, Skaters’ Manhattan, from way back in December 2013 The Frowning Clouds’ Whereabouts (the only act amongst this lot who’ve managed to have another album out in the same 12 month period), Todd Terje’s It’s Album Time, Cuello’s Modo Eterno, Luminous by The Horrors (who’ve managed to fully change their spots with a work that came close to being played to death), Clipping’s Clppng, White Fence’s For The Recently Found Innocent and, finally, the musical riot that is the self-titled debut from Meatbodies.

Gig-wise Augustines, Teenage Fanclub, Muck And The Mires & The Black Lips stand out for me but the bulk of performances taken in were during the previously mentioned festivals with Gnod, White Hills, Nissenmondai, Theo Verney, The Vaselines & Einstürzende Neubauten all delivering brilliantly (the latter being the best performance for this and many previous years combined). 2015 has a lot to live up to.