Earache This takes me back. Sometimes innovations can be pinned down to very specific musical moments. In the same way that Eddie Van Halen‘s tapping on “Eruption” spawned a legion of followers, Mick Harris‘ death blasts on “Scum” set the pace and tone of metal drumming for decades to follow. Its hard to overstate the impact of “Scum” and late 80s UK hardcore. Suddenly everyone was listening to […]
Monthly archives: October 2009
8 posts
Earache This isn’t what I’d expect from Earache at all. Cauldron are a “traditional” metal outfit from Canada. Not a hint of Grind Madness here. Maybe Cauldron are a sound of things to come. Growling and evil has dominated metal for quite some time now. Yeah it can be great fun, but its a little one dimensional isn’t it? And hey making devil horns and growls is quite […]
Constellation When Toronto’s Do Make Say Think emerged over a decade ago, they came over as an enjoyable but slightly generic example of the Canadian post rock scene of the time, seemingly doomed to live in the shadow of Montreal’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor, before fading away when the post rock bubble burst. In the event, things have turned out very differently and as G!YBE themselves seem to […]
Ipecac Unlike a lot of remix albums where an artist gets a song to work with, the artists on Chicken Switch were given whole Melvins albums to work with. So each track is a remix of a whole album. The Melvins chose experimental electronic artists for Chicken Switch, with such names as Matmos, Lee Ranaldo, Merzbow, Kawabata Makoto and Speedranch getting involved. The result is a pretty extreme […]
Easy Action While a 4CD set of murky cassette recordings of the same set from four different Stooges shows during Spring 1971 is clearly only of any real interest to hardcore Stooges fans, why would anybody not be a hardcore Stooges fan? The three holy relics that have sustained the Stooges’ reputation for the past thirty five years are in themselves perfectly realised works of unparalleled slobbering rock […]
(Éditions Mego) I first became aware of Sister Iodine when my group Fflaps played alongside them in Lille way back in November 1992. I enjoyed them a lot – they played a thrilling high energy no wave inflected punk rock, full of dissonant guitar savagery, filtered through an inscrutable Gallic nonchalance. Maybe their sound at the time owed a little too much to Sonic Youth, whose Lee Ranaldo […]
Pop Montréal, Ukrainian Federation, Montréal 3 October 2009 The gathering krautrock-keen fans filled both levels of the seated, community-centre vibe auditorium known as the Ukrainian Federation which has hosted the likes of Patti Smith, Joanna Newsom, Loudon Wainwright III, and A Silver Mt. Zion. For Faust’s first ever show in Canada, heralding their entrance, Jean-Hervé Peron started by squawking and squealing on a trombone from the back of the […]
(Southern Lord) What We All Come to Need is Pelican‘s first full length release on Southern Lord and and continues their elusive path of powerful instrumental rock. Southern Lord have also announced a tour with stable mates Wolves in the Throne Room, which has the makings of some must see gigs. Two fantastic but very different bands. What We All Come to Need is a superb album. At […]