Melting Vinyl: Bringing the cream of live music to Brighton.

The vocalist and guitarist of the indie rock band Twothirtyeight plays an intimate solo show in Brighton, debuting songs from his latest release, Golden Age.

Chris Staples has built a career on writing songs in their most immediate form – a moment happens, and to process it he lets a thought or feeling guide the song into being. This mentality has carried him from his first solo record, Panama (2001) to American Soft (2014), and with each album, Staples’ core strengths have grown into a subtle brilliance – innate melody, intense allegory, and the deceptive sinew behind songs that could easily be dismissed as merely quiet.

Balancing his music with day jobs in construction and carpentry, and playing at times in other people’s bands, Staples has previously struggled to prioritise his creative life. But as the songs for Golden Age (the new record, set to be released in August 2016) started to materialise, he resolved to look forward and consider what he had been balancing. He quit his full time construction job and decided to stay in the Northwest to finish recording.

For the latest record he maintained his natural way of writing – keeping notebooks and letting an offhand line or thought point to a song’s direction. As the album took shape, he crafted it with the express purpose of reorienting his route and taking stock of his life. With a combination of practiced technique and newfound perspective, Golden Age is his most intimate, reflective, and exploratory record to date.

Support comes from:

Hayley Ross
Originally from Surrey & South East London, now drifted South to Brighton, Hayley writes songs that sound like Mazzy Star meets Beth Orton in a David Lynch movie.
The lead track from Hayley’s debut EP ‘Fierce Love’ is a beautifully bare emotional thing which was featured in Mays episode of MTVs ‘Awkward’. Hayley’s second EP is the sublime ‘Barracuda’, a 4-track EP b/w ‘Go Slow’ ‘Kids Again’ & avant-garde pop genius MERZ’s remix of the lead track ‘Barracuda’, which was recently the “Headphones Moment” on Lauren Laverne’s BBC 6 Music radio show.