With festival season at it’s peak, we’re recapping on our favourite gigs over the course, so in case you missed it, here’s our round-up of live shows over the past week.

Psych Fest - 8th July | Trinity Centre

For the past three years, Bristol Psych Fest has engaged in a passionate and loud audience on smaller foundations – building themselves up whilst providing a fun and engaging experience. Now, for a variety of reasons, the festival has reached a new height. Whether due to the new location (Bristol’s enigmatic and vociferous Trinity centre), the dedication to ensuring high quality (the standard of sound on offer was incredible) and sheer plethora of artists playing the event, Bristol Psych Fest has joined Simple Things in being a template of Bristol’s ever progressive and encompassing evolution. Read more.

Darlingside - 2nd July | The Lantern

After the exhilaration of seeing Darlingside on a Sunday night, it’s frankly difficult to give a toss what happens for the rest of the week. There’ll still be moments by Friday when a work colleague tells me that really important thing, that vital thing which under no circumstances can be overlooked or forgotten, and I’ll be lost in a reverie of the soaring four-part harmony at the end of ‘Good for You’ or nodding manically to the mandolin line of their acoustic rave, ‘Harrison Ford’. If composing and playing songs is the joyous, communal celebration of a beautiful craft, then their performance to a sizeable crowd epitomised what live music is all about. On their third visit to Bristol, they were delighted to see the city from above ground for once, “We think of Bristol as subterranean; this is really shifting the paradigm”, having twice before played The Tunnels. Read more.

Gogol Bordello - 4th July | O2 Academy

A bordello (brothel in Italian) is referred to in English criminal law as a ‘disorderly house’. If you’ve ever witnessed Eugene Hütz and his gypsy punk, noisenik comrades, Gogol Bordello, you’ll understand quite how disorderly the O2 Academy became on Tuesday night. Bringing their intense, delirious back catalogue to Bristol and a taste of their forthcoming album, Seekers and Finders, due for release on 25th August, the Gogol Bordello experience was distinctly multi-sensory, with theatrically visual, visceral performances from the stage and sweaty bedlam down at floor level. Read more.

Birdskulls - 16th July | Exchange

Amidst the summery heat, the Exchange played host, within the intimacy of the bar, to a quality line-up of various DIY punks, culminating in a fittingly frenzied set from Birdskulls – proving why the DIY music community, and particularly the Bristol music scene, has such a genuine and great reputation. Read more.

A Blaze Of Feather - 4th July | Trinity Centre

After months of mysteriously appearing on gig adverts and festivals line-ups, A Blaze of Feather finally revealed what they’re all about at their Bristol show in the Trinity Centre.

Despite it being one of their first shows as a band, the room was packed with eager fans waiting to see how their recently released self titled album would translate in a live setting. Opening with the incredibly atmospheric ‘Winter’, it seemed almost a bit too melancholy for the vibrant hot day that we’d left behind outside. Read more.

Come back next week for more live reviews of the best shows in Bristol