One Little Indian The beats might be more machine tooled than salvaged these days, but Test Dept still haven’t lost any of that rage or taste for addressing injustice. This return to form is snarling at the usual subjects, the dirty end of capitalism and its bankrupt ideologies.
Monthly archives: February 2019
20 posts
Enraptured Enraptured Records must be in their twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year now, and although things seem to have gone a little quiet on their front over the last few years, Coldharbourstores are still flying the flag for them and are back after a mere three years with their follow-up to 2016’s Wilderness. With Graham Sutton back behind the desk again
Version Studio Swedish duo A Swarm Of The Sun have been together for a good ten years or so, but this latest album is their first since 2015. Erik Nilsson, guitarist and pianist of the duo, is also chief of Version Studio Records, the group’s label; and vocalist Jakob Berglund arranged the beautifully monochromatic artwork, all snowy forestscapes and misty moods.
4AD Sadly, I wasn’t old enough to see Rema-Rema in the flesh — it was only as a result of being an avid 4AD label nut that I spied this curio in the mail-order catalogue back in the early 1990s, an EP that almost instantly became one of my treasured finds. A squealing black heart of a surprise that I can now some forty years later finally sample […]
Southern Lord After listening to these first two re-issues in a planned series, I can see why Southern Lord would want to be responsible. Thirty years after their initial releases, their legacy lives on in the sound and sweep of various members of the Southern Lord roster both past and present.
Editions Mego Thighpaulsandra‘s voice is all over this one, words full of shady vampirics and sliding context, your imagination stitching the suggestion as they suck in the scenery around them. He’s a great story-teller too (I reckon he has a lucrative future in audiobooks for sure), fleshy and descriptive, the narratives noir-flowering a certain flamboyance
Thrill Jockey Elena Setién doesn’t rush into releasing albums. This is her third in six years and her first for Thrill Jockey, who really seem to be expanding their palette at the moment, and so Basque-born but Danish resident Elena brings a kind of remote, subtle beauty to the fold. The songs contained within Another Kind Of Revolution‘ describe her love for everyday life and what nature has […]
New Heavy Sounds Hey kids, let’s talk about nominative determinism! You know, that thing where someone’s name informs what they do, like having a dentist called Dr Tooth or a Tory councillor called Mr Gaping-Anus. It’s fun! Thing is, it tends to work the other way round with bands, because traditionally they actually CHOOSE their names rather than being christened at birth.
Odin Scandinavian jazz quintet Atomic have been pushing the jazz boundaries since 2001, but on this latest album, their second since moving from Jazzland to Odin, they have chosen to reinterpret some unusual tracks from other writers and from other eras, dipping from the outer reaches of jazz to pop to pieces by Edgar Varese and Olivier Messiaen. It is a varied palette that gives the quintet ample opportunity
Consouling Sounds This recent collaboration between Belgian double bassist and drone composer Innerwoud with soprano Astrid Stockman comes drifting out of the speakers like mist floating across a long forgotten battlefield. There is a humanity here, fused with a kind of melancholy that envelops the listener in a web of distant memories.
Karlrecords Well, this one wrong-footed me, to be sure. The début album of Iranian composer and musician Saba Alizadeh, I had anticipated something of a showcase for Monsieur Alizadeh’s virtuoso stylings on his chosen instrument, the kamancheh, which he has been playing since the age of ten. Related to the redoubtable rebab, the compelling kamancheh is a form of long-necked four-string fiddle, played with a variable tension bow.
Thrill Jockey I have to say, this might be the most psychotic thing that Thrill Jockey have ever released in a twenty-five-year, nigh on 500 release career. In a nutshell, Japan’s Endon sound like an electronic-infested sludgy rock band standing around a pit while their vocalist is burnt alive, and recording the results. It is chaotic and more than a little harrowing, as vocalist Taichi Nagura visits the […]
Svart The band name is (possibly) a play on their instruments rather than their trade — it’s a trio of Finnish men playing on a bunch of junk instruments — a repurposed laundry rack, a wash tub bass, that sort of thing. It’s mixed by Einstürzende Neubauten‘s Alexander Hacke who, as you’re probably aware, knows a thing or two about ekeing elegance from repurposed industrial shrapnel.
Glacial Movements Eugenio Vatta is a Rome-based electronic musician who has been releasing stuff sporadically for quite some time. He has chosen his pseudonym of Frame to release his semi-ambient minimalist treatise on travel. Taken as a series of ten pieces, each named after a planet in our solar system with the ultimate being the arrival at an unknown point
Conspiracy International Sonically, Cosey Fanni Tutti‘s Tutti LP surfs in there with smeary cornet across tight electronic zip-wires. The canvas is full of Torvill and Dean ice slides and squishy purcussive skids, ingredients that send your brain in prism(ing)multiples.
Mas-Kina Recordings If you buy one grind album this year… I mean, I’ll be honest, I don’t really follow grind besides occasionally listening to a record or a playlist here and there. So this is fairly likely to be fairly close to the top of my best of grind releases. But I digress. Things that are great about “extreme” metal: it’s preposterous; it is fast; it involves shouting […]
Consouling Sounds Massimo Pupillo and Stefano Pillia are both doyens of the Italian underground scene and are serial collaborators. Here they merge their distinctive sounds with the aid of some female vocal assistance to produce an album of wonderful tones that, thanks to some exquisite production, just seems to seep from the speakers into the room and surround the listener in a gentle cocoon.
London 29 January 2019 A couple of months ago, the world lost perhaps its greatest showman, the driving force behind the creation of an entire universe: Stan Lee. Today, his creations and co-creations are everywhere — on our TV screens, at the cinema, in book stores and adorning all types of clothing, from socks to baseball caps. His influence on the world of popular culture was massive. As […]