There’s a very educated review of The Crimea’s gig at Birmingham Bar Academy up on the Fat Amp Music site, with the reviewer leaving quite impressed with the band.

The Sheffield version of This City has a preview of the Leadmill gig still up. It may be a little late with the gig having taken place four days ago, but this one isn’t: Evening News 24’s preview of the Norwich Arts Centre gig on the 14th is still valid and contains a little info on the support bands too.

Album stuff now, and Mark Stanley’s blog contains a recomendation and pointer towards the free album, while foreign blog (still not entirely sure where though) Muzak! contains a review of the whole thing. Unless they number things as differently as they write them, that 29% probably ain’t great.

Judge for yourself though, as the Indiestore wordpress blog points you towards the 7Digital Idiestore online shop, official Crimea online retailer, where you can download the whole album from instead of the official homepage. Strangely enough they also charge £1.50 for downloading the album as a whole. Possibly most interesting though is the last paragraph on the blog which mentions some very interesting stuff. Just don’t trust it any more than those Bombay Sapphire Coma rumours.

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Here’s some vids I took the other night. The band’s cover of Je T’aime, White Russian Galaxy mixed with The Raconteurs’s “Steady As She Goes”, and Weird which goes out to all the street team, support bands and, oh yes, myself .

Two album reviews today with both Manchester Evening News and This Is Fake DIY giving it 3 out of 5, the former prefering the the previous album and the later liking the subtletie of the lyrics.

A little more impressed us Unkle Rupert who recommends the album in his blog.

Portuguese blog Remixtures also mentions the album and quite a lot more, though I’ll have to have some babelfish fun before knowing exactly what’s there…

Finishing with some gig based stuff, Room Thirteen review the band’s show at the Fez in Reading, giving it an eventual rating of 11 out of 13.

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A new radio session from The Crimea should be broadcast on the BBC’s Radio West Midlands in, you guest it, the West Midlands, 95.6 FM later today on Paul Frank’s Drivetime show between 4pm and 7pm. Sorry for the short notice, I’ll try and get it recorded if I can. They’ve just said the session’ll be aired after 6pm.

I’ve just got hold of some more goodies to add to the CD competition prize fund. Wisking it’s way to the lucky winner will, along with the rest of the stuff, be a Lottery Winners On Acid US EP (big gold promo stamp on the front though, best I could do), the US version of Tragedy Rocks with 4 extra tracks (if you just wanna buy one, play.com user importcds will ship it for £4.89 inc p&p), some Tragedy Rocks flyers and postcard and a wee little The Crimea sticker. Stay tuned for more updates on the prize fund; still waiting for the Witching Hour CDs like the rest of you

So how many of you have entered so far then? Well, not many. In fact I could almost afford to send CDs to every one of you, and likely will until some more damn people enter . Check this post for all the competition details, or just hit the link at the top of the page.

Least he still skates better than I do . Davey takes a spill in Nottingham…

The Crimea - What goes up… will still keep going up. Take that, Isaac Newton!
The latest update on the Witching Hour tour straight from the band.

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There’s a few new album reviews turned up on the web, and they’re not too shabby either. Stylus Magazine give the album a B rating, saying “Macmanus’s unappeased ache is the splintered reflection of the love-fearing adolescent in all of us”. Subba Cultcha also like the album, comparing The Crimea to Grandaddy, Brighteyes and Mercury Rev. And Manchester Music give a shorter review ending in a 4 out of 5 rating.

Pointing you in the right direction is the Morning Paper site with, dare I say it, hopefully one of the last album release stories I’ll have to write about here.

So, on to the gigs, and the BBC Berkshire site has a preview up of a gig last month. A bit late, but what can you do. More recent is the review of the band’s Wrexham Station gig a few days ago from Glasswerk, and this one from Fat Amp Music of the band’s recent Modest Mouse support slot in Wolverhampton.

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Youtube user roadmutha is now officially my favourite Crimea fan. She’s just uploaded four live vids of the band playing at the Nottingham Social and Birmingham Bar Academy over the last two days. If all goes well, they should appear below. And if you have any Crimea vids that you wanna send to my goodself to upload somewhere, try files@inaudible.co.uk .

Old crocketts.net webmaster Holly has just send me a load of old Crocketts tour photos that her husband and former Crocketts guitar tech Will took while the band were supporting the Stereophonics in France. You can find em all along with amusing comments by Hol on the Webshots Crocketts album at community.webshots.com/user/the_crocketts. I would have used /thecrocketts but someone’s already taken that. If it was you… can I have it please? I’ll give you crox stickers and… stuff…