After conducting another targeted rummage through the BBC’s archival strongrooms, Precious Recordings takes us back through some of the life and times of Glasgow’s The Primevals -- in John Peel, Andy Kershaw and Janice Long-commissioned session configurations.
album review
2647 posts
Soul Song Jerusalem-based composer and bassist Yosef Gutman continues his inspired run of collaborative albums with Shir Yedidot, a collection of chabad nigunim, which are Hasidic melodies along with a selection of his own compositions, but all inspired by the idea of melodies adorned with prayer and tears. This approach tends towards the lower key, but along with the uplift and positivity and the assembled players: regular travellers […]
Allying Hardanger fiddle and jaws harp with the kind of beats found in electro-halling, disco-gangar and springar d'n'b is still a novel idea and one with which they are trying to show a natural progression from the sixties through to the modern day. Familiar dance staples like the Roland TB-303 and TR-909 flex their elegant muscles against instruments that have been around for hundreds of years and the outcome is a real ear -opener.
Whilst arguably having missed a few opportunities, Touch is nevertheless a roundly decent latter-day Tortoise record that reassures us that the internal alchemical artistry – even if not as effervescent as it once was – retains a distinctive potency. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait for another best part of a decade to find out if there is more left in the shared sonic tank.
The two albums work well but in different ways, and for any fan of intelligent and leftfield electronica are are rather essential. They stand up well over thirty years later and Warp's re-issues are very welcome.
Building on the dictaphone rawness of Matt Loveridge’s Atworth release as MXLX comes a devotional enrichment minus the tape hiss atmospherics, eight tracks that delve deep into the hammered soul of the piano.
Spread across ten tracks, Four Ways To The Sun highlights Georgia's warm, mysterious voice and paints her imagery in a balm of soft focus jazz and folky flecks. It is a dreamy, ethereal sound that opens the album with a voice that has a depth but sounds cool; languid.
It is always a pleasure and a journey of discovery to receive a new Bobby Conn album and even after nearly thirty years of releasing his personal yet immensely memorable missives, this latest, his second for relatively new home Tapete and first since 2020’s Recovery is a real game of two halves and quite the curveball.
Experimental pianist and composer Johnny Richards is probably best known for his part in Shatner’s Bassoon, but has done plenty of other genre pushing collaborations. For his latest, he teams up with Bad Plus drummer Dave King and by a series of transatlantic transactions, they have stitched together a suite of ten personal and complex pieces that required Johnny’s piano to be treated in various ways to provide an extraordinary array of sounds and textures.
Venturing once more into the overflowing world of wires, elemental sounds and wordlessly channelled conceptualism brings us to three more new things from electronic explorers from across the globe.
Another well-chosen but overlooked group reconvening with a release on Computer Students is Knoxville, Tennessee's New Brutalism who, as the name may suggest, purvey a sharp modern high-intensity take on punk rock that melds a kind of Chicago dynamism with LA ire
Cusping the halo of consciousness, Rosa Arruti AKA Nad Spiro conjures up a sonically charged space full of moth-like flutters and abstracted transits on Limbo Channel. An investigative inventory of sibilant vocals and murmuring otherness that flutter-flowers your skull in broken orbits and Coil-like elves.
...continuing to approach the sound horizontally was the breakthrough he needed to bring the album to its inevitably longitudinal conclusion. Instead of a singular piece lasting an LP’s length, we are given the pleasure of listening through four variations of the soma-induced trance brought about by the brave new world of Synestopia
At this point in the lifespan of Sloan, a new studio album is not really about reaching out to new audiences. It’s much more about sustaining creative consistency and keeping the Canadian power-pop institution’s adherents attached.
...conjures up ten windswept songs of yearning and love with a voice that is warm and worn but bright like the desert sun. Mostly on acoustic guitar or piano with some string embellishments, the songs echo through the desert canyons, moving languidly, shimmering guitar often sparing through the thin desert air.
With songs generally written by trumpeter Gabriel Alegria or sax player Laura Andrea Leguia, those instruments tend to be at the forefront, but they are only a part of a series of ever-evolving soundscapes which with the wonderfully sinuous Mario Cuba on bass and Hugo Alcazar on drums with Freddie Lobaton adding percussion really swing.
“Hey hey, my my, indie-pop can never die,” as Neil Young didn’t quite sing. From the boom years during the 1980s and into the 1990s, through a lower-profile but still fecund 2000s to 2010s and into the ongoing revival of the 2020s, the combination of independent-mindedness and a deep-seated love of melody, has sustained a cross-generational thread. The following three releases – one archival and two brand new – convincingly confirm this somewhat comforting sense of continuity and survivalism, whilst also capturing the internal diversity of it all.
Over the course of the next year, the band evolved a unique musical style: stripped-back and heavily focussed on rhythm, powered by new equipment including the crunchy Maestro Fuzz-Tone pedal, and embellished with unusual instrumentation such as the banjo, which more than one observer has seen as being as integral to their unique style as was the jug to that of The 13th Floor Elevators.