Stolen Recordings If you’re thinking of buying one Japanese cross-dressing psych rock freakout album this year, I would suggest you shed out your hard earned cash to get this one. The opening track “4 Seconds To Ascension” is a statement of intent. It’s fast and powerful and kicks you in […]
Yearly archives: 2010
105 posts
Barbelo Remix albums never seem to make a very cohesive whole; they also don’t serve very well as an introduction to an artist in general. Some are just a money-making activity rehashing band material whereas others are for die hard fans and completists only. Some artists even refuse to talk […]
Corsica Studios, London 31 October 2010 Its Samhain, the time to dress as ghosts and devils, a time to watch reruns of old Boris Karloff films and listen to wind howling over bleak moors. However, I am doing none of these things. I’m at Elephant and Castle (ok, not too […]
Demdike Stare This is a budget priced (around £7) mix of some of the earliest of Demdike Stare’s recordings. The one track is housed in a basic cardboard sleeve with no information on it except the name of the artist. The music itself though is magnificent and makes up for […]
Pica Disk I have had a small break from reviewing the Jazkamer monthly 2010, but this is not me quitting the promise of reviewing every monthly. No, I have been busy running a festival, and was planning on picking up where I left with submitting the August release. But what […]
13th Moon OK, a bit of a lesson in rock history. Well, by “lesson” I obviously mean “completely partial and somewhat half-baked theory put together by me for the purposes of reviewing an album,” but at least it’s not like double geography or something, on a sunny day, when you […]
Tompkins Square The ordinary soldier’s tale is a lamentable one full of dark humour born of hardship and kinship in barracks and battle. Here are 15 such laments ranging from the period 1924–1939 from the USA; in Europe a sometimes overlooked participant in the First World War, with its own […]
Easy Action “Bbbbrrrriiinnggg, bbbbbrrrrriiiinngggg. This is Uranus calling Pink Fairies, hurry up and reform and play some shows. We will pay 50,000 intergalactic credits.” Ok, let’s start from the beginning; you should buy this CD. Not just because the entire royalties go to Boss Goodman, roadie, DJ, producer and chef […]
Sony After having Steve Hillage play on their first (as well as several other) albums it does make one wonder why a collaboration between The Orb and David Gilmour didn’t happen a long time ago. The Orb had referenced Pink Floyd’s work enough including sampling Richard Wright’s keyboards at one […]
Beta-Lactam Ring Records It might be thought that with a title like Nostalgia Ever After that Sand Snowman would be revivifying old-school folkies with a penchant for replicating the sound of chiming bells and hippydom sat cross-legged around lava lamps while the bong slowly bubbles over paisley dreams worthy of […]
Mute Is it just me, or did it suddenly get kinda butch in here? I mean, the amount of testosterone coming out of the discerning listener’s speakers at the moment is really quite intimidating. What with Michael Gira‘s reactivated-and-all-male-again Swans trying to frighten you into an early grave, and Grinderman […]
The Vortex Jazz Bar, London 27 September 2010 My view of this evening is tainted in about 200 different ways and as I haven’t drafted this review I don’t know what you’ll make of it but hang on a minute. I have to explain that when I was younger and […]
Important The second album-length outing from Lesbian finds the self-professed prog-doomsters reaching further into the upper reaches of the psychosphere on a craft constructed from some seriously heavy sounds and equally convoluted musicianship. Lesbian like to rock, they like to soar, and it’s quite possible they’re rising high over the […]
Dirty Water Over the years a lot of the music from the 50s and the 60s has been treated badly by many bands and artists. Squeezing every nerve out of great songs to make them fit in big companies’ Christmas parties, or in extravaganza shows in Las Vegas or other […]
Young God Swans are back, and it’s an event so massive, so inconceivably vast and unimaginable, that the very fact of its occurrence drowns out even the loudest of their tracks. Michael Gira, of course, has never been away, continuously pumping out increasingly diverse and intimate music under the name […]
Kranky “My hammer feels the urge to nail you to the ground / to smash one through your cheek.” Welcome back Boduf Songs, straight off the starting blocks with another ingeniously constructed threat of violence to the listener, with both the compulsion and responsibility for the act located outside of […]
The Garage, London 11 September 2010 Reanimated musical corpses aren’t much of a news story these days – after The Velvet Underground and Throbbing Gristle reformations, nothing comes as a surprise. I was shocked then to realise just how stunned I felt to hear that The Pop Group had got […]
Versatile Given a penchant for vintage analogue synthesis, Goblin and motorik drumming, and having named themselves after a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer game, it is not only appropriate, but almost de rigueur, that Zombie Zombie should find themselves tackling the oeuvre of a key progenitor of electronic cinema soundtracks. John […]
Rooster When this album was released way back when, in 1996, it was at a moment when electronic music of all sorts was riding high in the charts and otherwise, and stoner rock riffage as produced by a hirsute quartet from Bristol somehow became buried in a slew of trip-hop […]
Ad Hoc Every now and then you come across a product born of such radically alternative starting assumptions that it gets treated with near indifference by its potential audience, as though to even entertain the possibility of its existence could cause the tapestries of multiple musicotheologies to unravel. Infinity by […]