The Lancashire Hotpots - Mum’s For Tea

Without wanting to play the race card, how have I ended up getting a song by reputed comedy folk band the Lancashire Hotpots as my first contribution to #reviewanything? Is it the flat cap, the ferret down my trousers which always entertains the troops at morning conference, or my strict adherence to getting my five a day (that’s pie, peas, chips, gravy and a barm)? As it turns out, predictably enough I am familiar with their work, the likes of Chippy Tea and Wigan Church Of Pies being sure to raise a smile among anyone who thinks that saying “garlic bread?” in an inquisitive voice is the last word in humour. Mum’s For Tea sees the ‘Pots move into Ashcroft/Oasis anthemic territory. It gets full marks for rhyming “fettle” and “kettle” and “stuffed to the rafters” with “summat good for afters” but over-eggs the (steak) pudding with an unnecessary talkie bit at the end. Still, if you wanted to hear what Snow Patrol would sound like fronted by the bloke from Scrappers, Mum’s the word. Martin Horsfield

Coketown Potboilers - Metropolitan

Like Jim Carrey in Liar Liar I cannot lie. I want to, I really want to lie and like this as a fellow Evertonian and a lover of all things scouse, I want to cherish and suckle Coketown Potboilers as if they were my own kin. But this is hard to take. It sounds like a slowed-down Casio keyboard demo mode track peppered with cheesy electronic organ noises with video featuring shaky shots of the Liver building. Now if we were talking about their amazing 13 second love song I Love Goodison, Because The Blues Play Here, then it’d be a different story. That’s a bit of Frank Sidebottom-esque magic; this really, really isn’t. Arbitary rating system: more Andy van der Meyde than Ross Barkley. Lanre Bakare

Michele Martinelli - The Girl With The Doughnuts (short story)

I’m not quite sure what to make of Michele Martinelli’s short story about watching a girl eat some doughnuts on the tube. In one sense, it is slightly rueful in its depiction of a universe where a woman can’t consume a couple of pastries in a public place without being ritually humiliated on social media then frogmarched by society into a plastic surgeon’s office. But then, Martinelli’s quite happy to milk all the grotesque horror he can out of her in the name of a bit of ghoulish atmosphere: she’s eating with “her face struck between two armpits” while being “used by a commuter as a newspaper table” and grinning like a madwoman. But do you know what I think? I think it’s the protagonist who’s the real weirdo. First - he admits that “in my mind I was smiling”, which is the sort of sentence that could easily get you sectioned. Then, after spotting the girl, he tells us that he “couldn’t convince my neck to turn away” - which is either really bloody awful writing or an admission that his brain has no authority over his other body parts. I’m presuming it’s both. And I know who’d I’d rather share a tube carriage with. Rachel Aroesti

The Lucky Face - A Fine Line

‘For best results, watch with your eyes closed. All the images you need are in your head’, suggests the Youtube spiel for A Fine Line. Which is good news, as it means this review can entirely ignore the complex assemblage of unrelated images on show in the songs’ video - Algeria fans celebrating a World Cup victory, may day revellers, a dual carriageway, a bored-looking horse - and instead focus on the most banal series of rhyming couplets heard this side of an Enemy/Twang joint tour. “It’s a fine line between hope and fears/it’s a fine line between laughter and tears”. True, but it’s a reassuringly thick, double yellow line between actual good music and this witless, open-mic-night-ska strummery. Next! Gwilym Mumford

TONTTU - Anti-Gnomen Divisionen 4 (Mastering the fine art of gnome eradication)

I once kicked a garden gnome when I was pissed and stubbed my toe really badly - further proof that something drastic has to be done to counter the swelling gnomic menace. TONTTU’s six-track anti-gnome EP, ‘Mastering The Fine Art Of Gnome Eradication’, claims that simply by playing it you can scare off the behatted little tosscocks. The problem is that to do so is like listening to the inside of Rob Zombie’s id. There’s nightmarishly terse piano and guttural Finnish gurgling throughout - presumably some kind of ancient macabre incantation, or simply innumerable riffs on the phrase ‘piss off, gnomes’. Either way, play the EP at all times forever and nary a gnome will be seen; that much is guaranteed. Though neither will anyone else - family, friends, anyone unwilling to have sex with someone who fears gnomes. In fact, the only entity you’ll see for the rest of time is the first of your neighbours to finally snap, kick down a front door and punch you in the face, neck and torso until you’re dead, just because of that gnome music. Meaning, in terms of the very same home protection you were trying to establish in the first place, you’ve absolutely wasted your time. Luke Holland

Untitled Image Of Phil Collins Singing Next To A Train Station Departures Board

What is meaning? Where is truth? Who is justice? Why is you? In 2014 our greatest artists are forced to confront these big questions daily, be it at the Venice Biennale or on the 8.09 to Woking. A mode that articulates directly the uncertainty, the chaos of the age, collage is the preferred technique of many of our grandest artists - Cory Arcangel, Kurt Schwitters, Gerhard Richter and this bloke who’s sent in a jpg of Phil Collins. The process appears simple: an out of focus snap of a train station is painstaking cropped badly in Photoshop; a piece of paper is sellotaped on top, the dismal pun at its heart a symbol of man’s exploitation of earth’s ecosystem. Finally, the coup de grace, Phil Collins in a peach suit. The work is typically now; challenging the viewer, asking us to remember a time of greater certainty and confidence, when a pop star could be bald without everyone laughing. It begs us of the question: am I taking the piss here or what? Paul Macinnes