... after a snaky Sebadoh-infused instrumental prologue to usher us in (“Theme”), we’re firmly thrust into a series of tune-stuffed songs, with Josie’s magnetic vocals pulling things into sharp yet warm focus for the majority of proceedings.
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Keith's voice is from that landscape, and his love of the outdoors comes through in the warm northern English tones; but the esoteric nature of the words, describing ancient geology, are secure in their place within this wilderness.
...they conjure up a momentous whirling sound that travels across borders seemingly at will, struggling up steep inhospitable inclines and streaming across open plains, as if something were in hot pursuit. But through it all they are reacting to one another's playing in a way that showers the portentous percussion with streams of fiery frustrated strings.
There’s a falling spaceman on screen and you feel the helplessness in the sonic tumble of those sharpened melodics rush on over you. A life-affirming experience that ends on an updated version of "The Hacker" that mauls supernova, stuttering in harshly beaten majesty, rough-cut keys and an urgent thrust of images that pile upon your retina in stark black'n'white.
Multi-instrumentalist Jan Todd's fourth album has Frostlake has her once again teaming up with Terry Todd to provide bass tones; but the addition of Andy Peake on piano has imbued the pieces here with a timeless air and a real sense of the soft hush of a dreamworld.
Having recalibrated themselves somewhat with 2021’s towering epic Burials, Cambridge’s Fuzzy Lights return belatedly with the logical extension that is Fen Creatures. With Rachel Watkins retaining sole lead vocal and lyric-writing duties, alongside her role on violin, Xavier Watkins (guitar), Chris Rogers (guitar), Daniel Carney (bass) and Mark Blay (drums) continue to turn up both the turbulence and atmospherics, the folk-psych-rock melding appears even weightier and wider in its reach.
Terrazoku: an Earth tribe of the future brought into being by the climate apocalypse of the late twenty-first century; a ragbag of survivors for whom life on Earth is a very different experience from those of their predecessors.
...my first time seeing these legends, and with their recent Touch LP figure-heading the proceedings those open-ended adventurers flew fiery from the start. Nevada(ry) soft focus they descend -- all desert twilights and snaky rhythms, the cold black backdrop behind rippling with an ochre glow as John Herndon’s drums held command over the flex.
With four red lights and plenty of dry ice, the group in their sharp suits and nonchalant swagger looked like a dissolute Rat Pack, each member moving in time with the music, already caught up in the atmosphere... Definitely a night to remember, like a snapshot in time reflected into the future.
Rather than shocking new life into a familiar legend, respectable horror nerd Guillermo del Toro pores over Mary Shelley’s seminal science fiction masterpiece with the studious attention of a literature professor. He follows Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 example (not to mention that of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula adaptation of a couple of years earlier) in prioritising fidelity to the source material, although he takes enough liberties to keep it interesting.
An immediate ignition; a series of fluttering electronic sound signals arrival. The where is hard to spot as the constant chirrup of unknown variables the static stutter of distant disturbances. A settled reflection sits atop a burr of metallic brogue that is alive with chatter, the ironic sound of rebellion.
There is undoubtedly no productivity crisis in the broad spheres of nouveau shoegaze and DIY electronica, with complementary manoeuvres and convergence playing out between them to boot. This is certainly apparent in sifting through another review pile on the verge of toppling over, replete with a lot of familiar suspects from some reliable sources.
Swedish composer Joel Danell has been trading under the name of Sven Wunder since 2019's Doğu Çiçekler (Eastern Flowers) and each release seems to refine his romantic take on widescreen instrumental music, touching as it does on soul, jazz, yacht rock and soundtracks.
"Do we need Fall reissues" seems like the wrong question. We're getting them and they're going to be somewhere between glut and porcelain. Though it being the Fall you take the rough with the less rough. It's a wheat from the chuff review.
This dark and contemplative work, inspired by the blazing spike of William Blake's Albion, is a haunting torchlit journey into some imagined underworld, something the opener "The Milk White Path" unloads in plentiful supply. That farm-gate creak, bathed in a slow dronic yearn, pitted in plunging bass.
Truly, Slightly, Overflowing, Whereabout Of Good Will is a darkly foreboding and quite a tough listen, but it's oddly charming throughout. There's a lot of careful weighting to contributions and a good amount of careful listening and pivoting -- so far as musicianship goes it's a grand exemplar of a certain trend in often-quiet texture-based improvisation. Haino is a terrifying vocalist so having a whole set where he can go off vocally is a treat.
This curious mix of circumstances gives the album a sense of sense of statelessness; a sense that things could go in any direction, Liv's playful and ever-elegant piano either shadowed or mobbed by the scattered percussion of August Glännestrand and the warm languid bass of Georgia Wartel Collins.
Songs mutate and evolve, improvised elements sticking and becoming part of the canon. In fact, Swans evolve to such a degree that I reckon given a long enough tour, one of their songs is infinitely more likely to develop sentience than any fucking LLM.