Cleopatra Entertainment Disney‘s Beauty And The Beast famously likes to call itself “a tale as old as time”, but traditional though a young girl marrying a lion may be in the circles YOU move in, I’d argue an older tale was that eternal staple of the cautionary tale, the tale of the Devil’s bargain.
Yearly archives: 2017
239 posts
Distant Spore After luxuriating in the carnival like atmosphere of 2014’s full length Make It Look Like Nothing Happened and the head spinning smorgasbord of 2016’s Everything Is Magick, nobody could really second guess Impuritan‘s next move. The colours and textures employed in the previous releases made them a fantastic new discovery and I was intrigued to see what the next step would be.
LCR After the excellent atmospherics of Medusa’s Bed, Ms Lunch returns, this time on the other side of the mixing desk for her second excursion with violinist and noise-maker Mia Zabelka. The mistress of the strands, Lydia’s pulling this baby round as producer and joint composer
Hubro In comparison to the light wash of our reality that accompanied the Håkon Stene and Kristine Tjøgersen‘s recent album for Hubro, The Third Script combines the talents of Norwegian bassist Jo Berger Myhre and Icelandic drummer Olafur Bjorn Olafsson and spends time constructing an alternate reality, something which takes reference from its place of recording but then pushes it into new realms.
Ahead of the launch of Robert Sotelo‘s début album, Cusp, Iotar interviewed Sotelo while he was in Buenos Aires from his new abode in Graz, Austria. They talked about the drift away from a London-centred culture, the glorious meaninglessness of great pop and much more that is pertinent.
Cherry Red And with the coming of the seasons, lo a new Fall album. As ever, bastards to write about. You’ve probably established some sort of perspective on The Fall and, as I’m in my twentieth year of being a bit unwell about The Fall, I’m fairly sure that perspective is wrong.
Rockosmos It’s always interesting to hear a band you have not heard of before, especially when the words “space rock” and “prog rock” are being attached to their name and they are getting a lot of press attention. So I slipped my disc into the player and was prepared to take a trip in to the outer reaches.
Hubro Since 2009, the good people at Hubro have been diligently documenting the expanding Norwegian music scene that encapsulates jazz, improv, minimalism and whatever else lurks in the mysterious frozen spaces of that fascinating country.
More Than Human Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe conjures some extraordinary shapes here, a tangle of strange and mystical hieroglyphics that tingle, zone you elsewhere. Nothing lingers too long, everything remains elusive, dissipated on fractured suggestion, the timbre itch of random voltages painting strange immersive mirages inside your skull.
Adore Delano Adore Delano‘s third studio album is finally the record that we’ve all been expecting from the punk rock princess of season 6 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Her first two albums, Till Death Do Us Party (2014) and After Party (2016) topped dance charts and are played all across the world.
London 12 August 2017 Téléplasmiste appeared through the crowd, all leper bells and bagpipes, before standing behind their modular bookcases like spiritual telephonists bending a self-help guru’s words into slurring stutters
London 27 July 2017 Our Black Heart, on a dingy sidestreet in the middle of Camden, is rapidly becoming one of the capital’s finest purveyors of underground heavy music. Not only does it once a year double as the command centre for Desertfest‘s weekend-long celebration of all that is doomy and stoned
MiG Siena Root are a band I discovered a few years back and was instantly captivated by their sound. There were the big, heavy grooves and the wonderful melodies; but also there were sitars and a taste of the east that gave their hard rock sound a massive psychedelic twist, like it was 1968 all over again.
Cut Surface For Melt Downer‘s first release, they have chosen to issue a gorgeous double album in a subtle Technicolor sleeve. From the outside, it promises much and I am pleased to say that it delivers like an overloaded cargo plane, crashing through your neighbourhood, scaring the hell out of families quietly watching television and setting dogs barking and sirens screaming.
Klangbad Refreshing to have so many fluid points at play, this could have easily drifted in a altogether singular direction – gone all-out sinister rolling those doomic dice – but instead HJ Irmler and Carl Friedrich Oesterhelt tease us with a classical anarchism that isn’t affixed or preconceived.
7K! !K7 have been issuing releases which trade on an intelligent dance tip for the best part of twenty years now with the likes of Kruder & Dorfmeister and all those DJ-Kicks selections. Head honcho Horst Weidenmüller has chosen to set up a sub-label , 7K!, which is more in a neo-classical vein, but he feels will appeal to fans of the original label. Luca D’Alberto‘s Endless is the […]
Polydor So summer’s here (kind of), Twin Peaks is back on TV (and oh boy is it fucking BACK) and everyone’s favourite unofficially-Lynchian songstress Lana Del Rey is also back with her long-awaited new album Lust For Life, with a cover that couldn’t look more ’70s if it tried.
London 27 July 2017 Growing up in North Carolina with a fair amount of Baptist and other mountain church influence, I have been no stranger to shape note, or square hymn singing. It’s a strange old thing which the London Sacred Harp group has perfected for the here and now.