Conspiracy Sunburned Hand Of The Man member Paul Labrecque turns his hand here as Head Of Wantastiquet to his own particular variation on American primitivism, taking the form down meanders which can be as strikingly wondrous as the packaging the record is released in. Both the music and visual imagery are redolent of shadow-dappled ruralism and forest-dweller rusticism, though rather than the US backwoods, Dead Seas was recorded […]
Yearly archives: 2010
105 posts
Conspiracy Two oddities from the pacific North-West USA’s favourite oddball ethnodelic forgers of all things conjured up from an alternate world music scene. Side one’s “Themes From The Motion Picture Man With The Green Gloves On” is a slice of solemn gamelan’n’drone in their usual temple of the weird mode, all chimes and rumbling percussion interspersed with feedback and other signs of electronic life. As the drift becomes […]
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 the gut like High Rise playing Black Sabbath on speed and falling into a factory that makes Stooges […]
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 about their remix albums as was the case with Blixa Bargeld when I interviewed him around the time […]
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 dissimilar to a bleak moor) about to see two Frenchmen [post=zombie-zombie-play-john-carpenter text=”play the back catalogue of 80s horror […]
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 the lack of information on the packaging design. It shifts between elements of 70s sounding free jazz, Arabic […]
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 happens? During the festival I was, as the first person in the world, given by Lasse Marhaug himself […]
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 have to squint at a map of Haverfordwest for an hour and a half until you feel like […]
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 continental conflicts and a civil war to draw subject matter from. A CD of songs taken from private […]
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 – and the man who kept The Fairies on the road – but because it has some of […]
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 point. Anyway, with a rather polite fanfare here are the fruits of their first labour together. And to […]
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 both Keats and Beardsley; and to an extent, they might be. Or more to the point, he might, […]
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 back to try to “charm” you into bed with a bottle of Jack and a handful of pills, […]
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 more energetic and had more brain power with which to be creative I did used to review music; […]
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 stratosphere right now. Ten parts doom to three parts pomp, Stratospheria Cubensis is a logical component to all […]
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 money filling shit-holes over the world. Some exceptions, though, but still too few to be counted, compared to […]
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 Angels of Light, occasionally dipping his toes back into that pool of intensity on which Swans used to […]
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 detached perpetrator and the implication of an animist, ritual significance. It’s a classic Mat Sweet strategy, delivered […]