I'm shooting off to Brighton today for a bit of R&R. Gonna be sweet but won't be updating the blog for a while. I'm going to try to do some kind of coverage of The Great Escape on here and on twitter, but I haven't got one of those fancy i android phones so the frequency and quality of my coverage might be, as they say, naff.

My meticulously planned festival schedule is pretty much embedded in my head as I set off on my great adventure. With an ambitious plan to see more than 5 bands over 3 days I wonder if I've set my hopes and expectations way too high. With some overlappings and expected queing, some sacrifices have to be made. The biggest one being who to check out

Kyla La Grange



or

Ghostpoet

These are the tough decisions in life.

Esben and the Witch

So another Brighton band from me. Who'd have guessed?
Possibly anyone.

More ace haunting gloom for you. This time from Esben and the Witch.



Named after a Danish fairytale about Esben, a witch and some major family issues, Esben and the Witch perhaps sort of sound like a cross between Florence + the Machine and The XX. Not bad eh?

E&theW will be playing at The Great Escape and E&theW will be supporting Efterklang along their tour.

And I will probably just sit at home being pathetic.

Best Coast

So I was meant to do stuff today. But because I'm finally out of the dark abyss of "the lab" I decided to have one of those "entire-day-naps", leaving me with a whole lot of stuff that I meant to do today but didn't.

("The lab" is nay some hip-hop studio, nor is it the place where I make all my meth. It's just a plain old run-of-the-mill lab. How boring...)

What I have done today is check out the line-up to this years Great Escape festival in Brighton. (feels like Brighton's all I ever talk about these days)

The line-ups for past Great Escapes have always been a bit like having the love-child of Mozart and Brian Eno do super-cool glitter-graffiti over your already über-cool favourite cellar door whilst you yourself are bound and gagged in the boot of the local alcoholic's/drug addict's Toyota Corolla. This year however I feel the urge to escape that empty bottle/syringe riddled, shit-stained car boot and spread my wings towards the freedom and musical bliss that this year features the likes of:

Band of Skulls
Cold Cave
Delphic
Ellie Goulding
Ganglians
Hurts
Japandroids
Marina & the Diamonds
Real Estate
Surfer Blood
The Leisure Society
Wild Beasts

Of course that ain't even the half of it. You need to check out the website to fully grasp the entirety of the PRELIMINARY artist line-up.

Basically all the bands there are bands to look out for, but if I was on the lookout for something a bit good and a bit very awesome, I'd go with Californians Best Coast who have that supergood sundrenched fuzzed-out sound to them making them sound like a female-lead scuzzy Beach Boys or more like a female-lead Wavves (with audible lyrics)





So May, Brighton, anyone?

Lets go and have a grand old time, listening to Best Coast and pretending the pebbled sea-front is a primed-for-surfing Californian beach and the ruined west pier could be an epic sized Great White Shark set on destruction. But because we've all drank waaay to much Red Stripe we end up having some sort of larger-than-life drama about "Why your best friend's boyfriend is like so totally a total jerk because he like comes from this like poor part of the city where they don't even have money for like stuff like three cars and a swimming pool filled with like real water." But in the end it turns out that your boyfriend is "like so totally an even bigger jerk because he wants to go like all gay or whatever and sail across the sea/universe in his dumb-ass sailboat that he may or may not have named after you"