Freq has been online in various forms since 1 April 1998; this iteration has been around as of 2010, with an archive of older material available.
What is this? Big synths, oodles of vocal production, a distinct sense of being pop. Pop + nausea. Hints that '90s r'n'b and The Human League have been banged through a blender.
Electronic squiggles and bleeps lay the foundation for a rising drone before Lynch's pipes take centre stage with a traditional, and somewhat unexpectedly jaunty, melody. Nevertheless, the drone remains, at times emerging from the background like an air-raid siren...
...it's a bit like operatic music -- the motifs are simple but the drama is off the scale. Whispered, bone-quiet sections, effulgent black metal overkill, an entirely off-kilter lead guitar / saxophone section. A really fucking special band.. #livemusic #musicreview
In the long-awaited follow-up to his 2018 surreal satire Sorry To Bother You, Boots Riley turns his iconoclastic gaze upon the inequities of globalised late capitalism through the kaleidoscopic point of view of a group of shoplifters who find bizarre new ways to fight the power of an evil fashion designer.
The blossoming abstraction unwinds as La Lucha Es Un Poema Colectivo opens with crossed electric wires and percussive false starts, engaging and disjoining and emitting hollow echoes. A mystery voice intones as the instruments stretch and elaborate, dissolving into playground mayhem.
It's a jazz record and you know what jazz records should have? Proper sleevenotes. You know what this record has got? Proper sleevenotes... A magical date is what I'm saying and it's pretty much a slap on the face to tell me that I really should get more Cecil Taylor. You should too.
...when the quartet convened at the Southampton Arts Center in New York state they had never actually all played together. Although a bit of a baptism of fire, Martin felt a connection with the others that thankfully for us and for the sound crew was captured for posterity. Eight years later, clearing out an old computer, the files were rediscovered and the end result is here.
Whilst it’s not worth losing sleep over, the tags of shoegaze, dream-pop, indie-rock and indie-pop have somewhat lost consistent meaning over time and through differing geographical points of reference. At a more fundamental level though, the commonality across such elastically bordered genres is the eternal push and pull of melody and dissonance.
The thirteen tracks collected here contain diverse vocal stylings that are put through a whole raft of effects while surrounded by synth drones, strange waverings and head on-beats that are oddly manic and disorientating.
Poland’s doyen of beautifully understated efficiency completes a trilogy of historical dramas with this pocket biopic that focuses on a road trip taken by Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his bohemian daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), following the suicide of his son and her brother, through the proud ruins of post-war Germany.
The stately melancholic nature of the pieces is well captured by the duo; but where they bring their own stamp is in the way they draw what is essentially indoor music evoking gowned ladies and bewigged gents moving in graceful arcs out into the open, lending it an air of dust and yearning...
Martin McDonagh’s latest stroll around his favourite theme of hilariously toxic masculine friendships finds him treading on a few real-life thorns of twentieth-century political history. Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich team up as a pair of ageing CIA agents sent to Coventry (well, Easter Island), where they can rifle through the spilled guts of their careers while the real action carries on without them.
They could have taken the easy option and give us a facsimile of the recorded work but instead, forty-three years later, they rip it up and scatter the parts allowing them to thrill and confound in equal measure. Remarkable.
Olivia Colman lends her estimable talents, both comic and dramatic, to this endearing and hilarious fairytale for grown-ups. She plays a fisherwoman whose ripe profession ensures a certain amount of social ostracism in her tiny village community, and it’s only exacerbated when she asks the local basket weaver to build her a husband out of any bits and pieces he might have lying around.
Collecting…connecting... cultivating... the band’s antenna always seemed to be searching out ways to bend modernity back on itself, prey to an older consciousness. As such, Gold Is The Metal has got me re-playing, dot-joining its many components to so much of Coil’s discography, seeing where the contents have leaked into future use beyond the obvious connections of this track being the demo of that.
..transplants a familiar SF / horror trope on to the gym-toned body of the superhero movie, and although it musters a few insights into the ugliness of human vanity, it’s chomping at the bit to unleash its malleable anti-hero so he can wreak his revenge.
For me there is something in the melodic approach, the ringing guitars and personal lyrics that reminds me of the halcyon days of nineties guitar bands but with a modern twist, and with the addition of fiddle from Sophia Bartlett and banjo from Michael Rea pushing things in a slightly more countrified direction.
So when An Undying Love For A Burning World dropped, it was an incredible surprise, but one that gave rise to the usual uncertainty of a band returning from hiatus -- what it they’re shit now? Fortunately, they aren’t. As