Substantia Innominata The latest instalment in Cédric Peyronnet‘s series of cryptically titled releases as Toy.Bizarre manifests as part of Drone Records‘ lovingly assembled Substantia Innominata imprint, arriving wrapped in a delightfully warped 10″ sleeve which not only manages to make brown and sepia look stunning ( a rare trick), but would also make a great poster as a result. The vinyl inside is clear, however, and each side […]
Yearly archives: 2015
188 posts
Rocket It’s the shortest day of the year and Hills’ Frid album is bringing some summer warmth on a midwinter’s day — blasting, beautiful, fuzzed-out freak beat psychedelia from Gothenburg’s finest. “Kollektiv” is like a slab of 1969 all rolled up in a glorious joint of mellow psychedelic madness. From its fuzzed out opening to its sitar-laden exit, this is . It so perfectly captures a certain era […]
London 11 December 2015 “And you could be there…” Zoom in. You’re down the front at The Forum. New Model Army are playing up a storm, and Justin Sullivan has put you right in the head of a religious extremist. They started with the never-more-appropriate-than-right-now-when-we’ve-just-started-bombing-in-Syria “Bloodsports”, a song which in itself encapsulates
The Arkive/Beggars Banquet Gary Numan’s Top Of The Pops performance of “Are Friends Electric” was the Bowie “Starman” flashpoint for my generation (those creeping around the 50s age bracket). In school the next day we had many discussions about it, the weird music, the weird look, etc; it was like Kraftwerk but darker and, to be honest, just seemed alien to us. That performance changed lots of people’s […]
St John at Hackney, London 5 December 2015 It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas: illuminations strung across the lampposts of the capital, sparkling every night like twinkling stars; the inky darkness of the night already setting in by mid afternoon; overflowing trays of “luxury” mince pies everywhere you look. And – really – what says “Christmas” more than a Faust gig?
Young God (North America) / Mute (Rest of the world) Disc 1 — White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity After a disastrous flirtation with a major label on The Burning World, White Light From The Mouth of Infinity was a self-financed regaining of confidence for Michael Gira. The acoustic spirit of Burning World was still high on the agenda, but the lacklustre verve that cursed that LP was ditched […]
London 21 November 2015 A grim Saturday night in Olde London Towne, and The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing have their name up in lights. Well, kind of; even the acronym only just about fits above Camden’s legendary Underworld.
London 26 November 2015 This keeps on happening at the moment: two great gigs are on the same night. A couple of weeks back it was Graveyard versus Pentagram and tonight it’s Uncle Acid versus Om. It says a lot about the exponential growth of the doom/stoner/occult rock scene in the last couple of years that these two shows could coexist with each other on the same night […]
London 12 November 2015 It was my friend Lee Nite who first played me an album by High On Fire. I knew and loved Sleep’s work, but had kind of considered that HOF’s sound was a little too fast for my doom/stoner rock ears. He slipped on their first album and said something like “this is fucking brutal and psychedelic”. And he was right (as with most of […]
Riding Easy If this album were attending high school, right now it would be on its way to the principal’s office, about to be expelled for having been caught selling cheap speed to the younger kids at the school gates.
Arrow Films As I write this, the horror community is mourning the loss of Gunnar Hansen, whose turn (yes, that one, round and round with a buzzing saw in the middle of the road in the blazing sun) as Leatherface helped put Tobe Hooper on the map, Texas Chainsaw Massacre having not only been a huge hit, but unbeknownst to anyone having also changed the face of horror […]
Troum and Yen Pox – Mnemonic Induction Transgredient This disc shows the collaborative strengths of the German bliss-mongers Troum coupled with the menacing ambience of America’s Yen Pox, originally released by Malignant Records in 2000 and remastered for this re-release on Transgredient. Mnemonic Induction is a 63 minute journey divided into quarters, each track eating the tail of the next to make essentially one continuous dronescape, the whole […]
Hiatus The second in Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard‘s Sound X Sound series of 7″ singles, Music For 30 Chromatic Tuners follows on from Music For 8 Recorders in similarly trilling style. Where eight recorders together made for a sometimes gritty listen, Løkkegaard’s choice of not-quite instruments here leads him down somewhat different pathways.
London 16 October 2015 It’s a sold out show tonight, so there is a real buzz going around about Siena Root and this whole gig. Swedish bands do seem to be leading the way with the retro/occult rock vibe over recent years and have produced some outstanding bands, so this seemed to be the place to be as the winter nights begin to creep in. The Black Heart […]
London 31 October 2015 So it’s Saturday night in Camden Town, and it’s also Hallowe’en, which means picking our way through assorted ghosts, ghouls, clowns and supervillains to The Dublin Castle, there to see London’s mightiest punk/chanson/brass jazz ensemble, The Cesarians. They’ve got a whole new album’s worth of material to play us, and a perfect night to do it on.
Disco Gecko I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. I totally bought into the Planet Dog/Shamanarchy angle as a teenager and still buy in now. This compilation has been put together by Toby Marks AKA Banca de Gaia, one of the heads of the scene in the ’90s, a guy who used to be everywhere, whose music was played at and defined by West Country beach parties […]
London 23 October 2015 Can you imagine how hard it was being Gary Numan in 1989? A decade earlier, shortly after “Are Friends Electric?” had been released in May 1979, Tubeway Army made their triumphant appearance on Top of the Pops, and the sound of a generational gasp could be heard all the way from Truro to Inverness. Punk’s white light had burned away so much dead wood, […]
Awesome Tapes From Africa Oh, liner notes! I get that some people just want the music to speak for itself, but, frankly, that’s nonsense. I want someone to put it in a context, which is what Awesome Tapes From Africa have done here; thanks, ATFA. We learn that SK Kakraba comes from a line of gyil players, and we learn that the distorted buzzes on the slats is […]