**Let us begin with the venue, because the venue matters.** The Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone is not a room that flatters the mediocre. Renzo Piano's magnificent complex on the Viale Pietro de Coubertin holds up to 2,800 souls and carries with it the gravitational weight of Morricone's own name — a building that exists, architecturally and spiritually, as a monument to the very highest standards of live musical craft. Bands do not merely play the Auditorium; they audition before it. Which makes the sold-out triumph of Mardi Gras at the Teatro Studio Borgna all the more remarkable, and all the more worthy of serious consideration.

**By the time the opening chord lands, you already know exactly what kind of people made this record. And you want to be their friend immediately.** Luke Mortimore and James Mcrea — operating under the gloriously deadpan banner of PILL-BOX — have arrived with the sort of debut single that makes you wonder why anyone bothers writing anything other than post-punk kitchen-sink comedy. *Cost Of Living* is three minutes or so of Berkshire-brewed agitation, a lovingly sarcastic dispatch from the frontline of modern British mediocrity, and it is, frankly, a bit of a triumph.

Few artists dare to excavate the truly undefended territories of the self — not the performative wounds so fashionable in contemporary folk, but the kind of raw, pre-verbal terror that lodges itself in the body before language has a chance to explain it away. With *Tapestry*, Fish And Scale — the artist name under which German-born Roland Wälzlein has quietly built one of the more compelling independent folk catalogues of recent years — does precisely that, and the results are quietly, stubbornly extraordinary.

Rock criticism has always had a complicated relationship with the live recording. The studio album is a controlled argument; the live document is a confession. Microphones catch what the mixing desk cannot — the breath before a difficult line, the slight hesitation of a musician finding something unexpected in familiar material, the audience's silence, which is its own kind of instrument. The video for "With Who," filmed at THEARC in Washington DC on the 28th of February, understands all of this instinctively. It does not dress itself up. It does not need to.