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Noah & The Whale may be the most obvious example of ‘morning music’ I could ever hope to find. Folk with the lyrical style of The Postal Service is a combination that seriously rivals corn flakes and ice cold milk in my opinion.

Tracks like ‘Rocks and Daggers’ and ‘Shape of My Heart’ are so damn catchy I reckon I could actually sing along to them in my sleep. I’ve been a fan of these tracks since the demos I heard them in their demo forms, site no rx but these new recordings seem to have a lot more life to them. With added vocals and different instruments used they take on a whole new, this more exciting, character.

The high point of the album has to be ‘5 Years Time’ though. It’s the recollection of a joyous daydream considering what a relationship could be like 5 years in the future. It springs along at the tempo of giddiness, with horns that are reminiscent of Beirut, making it sound like a declaration.

The album definitely isn’t all quite so memorable however, as many of the songs seem to merge into one. Towards the end of the album the pace slows and the songs seem to have less about them. They can pull off this style of songwriting as they show on tracks like ‘Give A Little Love’, but the last two tracks do come across being as being tucked away as if they were filler.

Written by Charles Drakeford on Tuesday July 15th, 2008 3:43 pm

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In case you missed it, healing visit web everyones favourite nostalgic treat – Cadbury’s Dairy Milk – is moving with the times and going Fairtrade. Last week, cost Cadbury’s announced that from the end of Summer 2009, nurse it will receive Fairtrade certification, a move which will triple the amount of Fairtrade cocoa sold in Ghana (where Cadbury sources its cacao beans). Cadbury’s believes that this will also open up new opportunities for farmers to benefit from the Fairtrade system. It is a worthy – and savvy- move for a food item which, at least in my mind, is so rooted in the past. In recent years the general public have moved away from the old-school confectionaries and embraced the more ethically produced chocolates; Green and Blacks, Fairtrade’s own Divine chocolate to name a few. While Dairy Milk always maintained a strong foothold in the market – with 300 million bars sold annually in Britain and Ireland – Cadbury’s clearly see that the current zeitgeist is ethical, ethical, ethical and wants a piece of this pie too.

Am I a dissenting voice here? Is it bad form to rise a cynical eyebrow over what appears to be a good deed? At the end of the day, whether this is a PR exercise or not becomes irrelevant because there are thousands of farmers who will be better off regardless of Cadbury’s motivations. Still, while the response has been generally warm, some issues have been raised. The publics general idea of a Fairtrade business is a co-operation or small business – which Cadbury certainly is not. And while we would be forgiven for thinking that when an food item is bestowed the coveted Fairtrade status, it must be 100% Fairtrade. Not quite. Especially when it comes to something with as many ingredients as a choccie bar.

The key components of a humble square of chocolate are cocoa beans, sugar and milk. So the cacao is covered, what about the other ingredients? Wanting to do a bit of journalistic digging, I went onto Cadbury’s blog and was reassured to see that the general public remain an inquisitive and suspicious bunch. There were enough people asking about the origins of the other ingredients to warrant a response from Cadbury’s PR in the form of a written explanation and a live web Q+A. So here’s facts. The sugar is also Fairtrade certified, but the milk is not. The milk comes from British farmers, who Cadbury’s are keen to continue a relationship with. So there is a little bit of a percentage issue arising here. Barbara Crowther from Fairtrade defended this slightly tricky situation, saying

“For ingredients like cocoa and sugar which primarily grow in developing countries, our rules say that anything that can be Fairtrade, should be – 100%. Also, if a product (like chocolate or cakes) has lots of different ingredients, there must be at least one that makes up 20% of the product. Ideally, the total combination should be 50% or more (this isn’t always possible if only one ingredient can be Fairtrade. Otherwise we agree, there’s not enough Fairtrade content there to justify the FAIRTRADE Mark.”

So there you have it; some might say that Cadbury have slipped through the net with this one. The concept of what constitutes a product being Fairtrade was always fixed in my mind; perhaps I need to adapt my pre-conceived notions a touch. Still, once it gets its certification, I look forward to picking up a Dairy Milk for old times sake.
If the thought of leaving zone one gives you a nose bleed, sick it’s time to get out of your comfort zone as I profile my favourite galleries that are just that bit out of the way.

South East.

Illustrations part of a project by Thomas Ronson

Living in New Cross since the closure of the East London line I know that South East London isn’t the most easily accessible place. The great thing is however, viagra sale once you’ve made the journey there’s so much to see. I’ve heard the term ‘the new Shoreditch’ a few times in relation to New Cross recently and while this isn’t a label I particularly care for, pills there is a definite buzz in the area at the moment.

Art collectives such as The Sunday Painter, LuckyPDF and Friendly Street Gallery all have artist-run spaces in the Camberwell/Deptford area. Off Modern also have a monthly installment of art and music at Corsica Studios. These are all really new projects so they’re worth going to in order to get an exciting first look into still developing gallery spaces. These venues fit in nicely with long running galleries such as APT in Deptford. The next Apt show takes place 19th March – 5th April and is a group show of six artists with works in ceramics, paper and in print.

Bargain hunters check out Deptford market, which is just by the station, on the way. It’s on pretty much everyday of the week and the stuff ranges from the fantastic, antique furniture for under a tenner, to the downright disgusting, an Amelia’s intern once spotted half a tube of foot cream for sale!

North East.

Ok so Hoxton is hardly out of the way, but to get to Limoncello you need to head away from the White Cube and the vintage shops and up Hoxton Sreet towards Greggs bakers and Peacocks. Although the space is only small Limoncello has 11 diverse artists that usually have a month long show each a year. The next artist to show is Jack Strange, if ever an artist was named for greatness it was him. The exhibition opens Friday 27th March and will no doubt have the same charm and wit as his previous offerings.

Once you’re done at Limoncello head over to 17 Kingsland Rd to the slightly less imaginatively named SEVENTEEN. As you enter the gallery you’re first faced with the standard white cube, but to get downstairs one has to pass not only the gallery ‘office’, but also the staff kitchen. Something really excites me about the transparency of the gallery allowing you to see all the bits they usually keep hidden. Downstairs they’ve completely dispensed with the usual modernist aesthetic of – ahhh keep out the rest of the real world lest it contaminate the art! It’s dark and dingy and it’s usually where they show the videos, which you can sit and watch on chairs that look like they’ve been picked up from the side of the road. The next show opens on 18th March; the artists Mike Harte and Jamie Shovlin will be occupying the basement of the gallery for seven evenings leading up to the exhibition. Every night they will drink a different branded bottle of Bourbon and, using the Bourbon as their medium, create a single painting of the word joy.

I once went to see a friend’s band in Leytonstone before I moved to London. Such was the fear induced in me from walking those streets in the early hours of the morning, that I made an unofficial pact with myself never to go further North on the Central line than Liverpool Street. Despite being between Liverpool Street and Leytonstone, Mile End is a surprisingly nice setting for Matt’s Gallery. Walking through the park to get there I could completely imagine taking a picnic and refuelling on peanut butter sandwiches before seeing some art. After arriving at the gallery the advantages to being further out of central London are immediately obvious. For an artist-run space it’s huge. Being that bit further out means that rent is much cheaper, because it’s not as high in demand and exhibition space can be much bigger.

Their current show is It has to be this way. by Lindsay Seers, who currently has one of the best pieces in the Altermodern exhibition on at Tate Modern at the moment. Seers uses as material for her art personal narratives that are so insane you’re never really sure whether it’s the truth. “These narratives are punctuated by incredible plot devices – stalkings, burglaries, shipwrecks – that mimic the rupture at the heart of image production, creating a dramatisation of selfhood in all its melancholy and failure.” This body of work centres on the artists stepsister Christine who had an accident that left her with severe memory loss in 2001 before then going missing in 2005.

South West.

Studio Voltaire boasts that it’s the first and only artist-led gallery and studio complex in South West London. This is a bit annoying because it means there are no other galleries to look at in the area, but they do get big enough artists showing there to make it worth the trip. The next artist to exhibit is the rather newly famous figure of Cathy Wilkes. For a chance to check out the work of a Turner Prize nominated artist in a more intimate setting make your way to Clapham between 11th April and 24th May.

She gives me the shivers. She hasn’t even got an album out yet, pills and already we know she’ll be huge. Florence Welch, drugs a.k.a Florence and the Machine has stormed onto the scene and is set for a fantastic year.

It was her cover of Cold War Kids “Hospital Beds” that first drew me in whilst surfing music blogs. I love the song anyway, dosage but hearing her distressed, soulful wail refreshes my appreciation anew.

Yet covers aren’t all she’s good at, she can write too. Her lyrics are a self-professed fairy tale, not wanting to be too realistic as she says the song-writing of Kate Nash and Lily Allen makes her feel too exposed. Her first single Kiss with a Fist was assumed by critics to be about domestic violence, all slapping and hitting and smashing. But Welch defends her choice of vocabulary by saying “if you’re a writer, you’re just expressing your perception of what’s going on.”

What else is great about Florence, is that it seems she has many different personas without ever leaving any of the behind. On The Girl with One Eye her sultry snarl is reminiscent of Cat Power, yet the high pitched shimmer on Postcards from Italy reflect a bit of Kate Bush. But to compare Welch to any of these should not attempt to take away from her own voice. The girl has a pair of lungs on her that could stir up a hurricane, but she never overdoes it. She can switch automatically from a soft whisper to a powerful bellow.

The songs we’ve heard so far remind you of the happiest but the saddest day of your life all in one go. A summers day with pour of rain, but in the end leaving a teary smile on your face. She’s one to watch this year for sure.

Written by Abigail Roe on Monday March 16th, 2009 4:19 pm

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