Ear Music “Some people have a landscape written in their bones”, sings Justin Sullivan on Surrounded, his incredibly long-awaited follow-up to 2003’s Navigating By The Stars. (But cut the guy some slack, he’s been busy fronting New Model Army, one of the hardest-working bands in rock until Covid made it hard for bands to work. Still, they managed an epic fortieth anniversary live stream, so it wasn’t all […]
Monthly archives: May 2021
24 posts
(self-released) Drummer Jochen Rueckert uses his Wolff Parkinson White alias when he is in the mood for subverting the romantic notion of the soulful vocalist tugging the heartstrings of the listener. This he does by surrounding the singer in question with a barrage of sonic accompaniment that tests the strength of the singer’s ability to put across an emotion. Following on from last year’s collection Small Favours, which […]
Spoon / Mute The live CD is a precarious beast. Cementing the band’s reputation or besmirching it with cash cows. Or somewhere in between — servicing the more obsessive of a band’s fanbase, kneecapping the bootlegger. I’m often cautious — for a band like Can, how much is it adding to know that they could turn out the goods live? Well a fair amount. There’s a lot of […]
The Leaf Label Fernando Corona has been pushing the boundaries of recorded sound as Murcof for some twenty years or so now and for this latest, he is reunited with The Leaf Label; a fitting home for his restless innovation. The work on this double album was started four years ago as pieces for the Geneva-based dance company Alias. The fact that it was produced for such a […]
Atlantic Curve I’m loving this album’s cinematic sizzle, the slow sanguine accompaniment that grows round Lisa Gerrard’s voice, full of subdued simmer and deep-diving delight, then the drums kick in and spread the panoramics wide open. Rocky adrenalines that sparkle the headphones surrounded in quantising amber and torn turquoise, an aesthetic that has me hopelessly hooked as doubled-up gusts of echo breathe from within.
Upset The Rhythm Finally, more from Kaputt in the form of this delightful clear blue 7″. Only two tracks, I know, but what a frantic mood they bring to the party; slightly sickly, Fursy sax, high-pitched keening guitar, double-tracked inquisitive conversational vocals. It all just jumps in there, grabs your hand and starts running.
Constellation Godspeed You! Black Emperor are a very self-contradictory band. They draw you in and push you away at the same time. The arcane press releases, the obtuse packaging, all designed to confuse as much as entertain or educate. That exclamation mark in that unwieldy name. Everything about them says “difficult”. But then you bung them on and and they couldn’t be any easier to actually listen to.
À Tant Rêver du Roi Kong‘s sole album has taken thirteen years to finally be issued on vinyl, and its muscular insistence and discomfiting tension is great to have back in circulation. I can’t remember who suggested that the trio was the ultimate expression of the rock format, but these three certainly brought noise as well as the mania and the telepathic interconnection. It seems extraordinary that Snake […]
Cinema Paradiso WARNING – Contains filmic spoilers, conspiracy theories, adult themes, and chimpanzees. ADVICE – If you need a spoiler warning, that can only mean that you haven’t seen The Parallax View. Well, what the Sam Hell are you waiting for? It’s a masterpiece of the second golden age of Hollywood. Go and see it. Immediately. You can thank me later.
The most wonderful time of the gay year, isn’t it. How much we’ve gay learned, and gay we’ve all become. I mean joking aside, there’s a lot of people have had a chance to spend some time with themselves and have come out as fuck. So it’s not all bad. What is ambiguous from this whole lockdown stuff is the effect it’s had on Eurovision. Here’s the skinny: […]
Archaeological / Dio Drone The latest collaboration from these two denizens of the underground is quite a change from their previous release due to its live format and it being the only current recording of them performing together. When the Archaeological folk requested their appearance at the eighth Dio Drone Festival, people were perhaps expecting them to tackle pieces from Darkening Ligne Claire, but instead a wildly unexpected […]
(self-released) Debut record from a Brighton-based duo doing something oddly nostalgic. In a way that’s possibly not obviously nostalgic. I don’t know how many readers are familiar with that time in “post-rock” when it was more associated with Tortoise and being quietly cerebral than big instrument rockist gestures, but this is fairly close to that. Similar to that time as well there’s a kind of parity and austerity […]
Upset The Rhythm For me, Upset The Rhythm are turning into a kind of post-modern 4AD or Too Pure, the sort of labels on which you could take a punt and pretty much guarantee that what you had purchased would be good. So far, UTR have had an excellent hit rate, always managing to find the kind of interesting, whimsical and unique acts that make the listener sit […]
New York City-based artist Wolff Parkinson White has collaborated with Hayden Chisholm on a new self-released album, Off World, out from 14 May 2021. Of the record, they say: Close to a decade in the making, this highly anticipated collaboration between multi-instrumentalist, singer and poet Hayden Chisholm from New Zealand and German -born electronic artist Wolff Parkinson White from NYC finally sees the light of day.
Lava Thief Born from a Richard Brautigan poem of the same name, The Silver Stairs Of Ketchikan is a solo outlet of Thought Forms ringleader Charlie Romijn Barr. It’s always been an intimate, profoundly personal quest, often wrought in the improvised moment. Anybody that’s been lucky enough to see her live will testify to the witchy atmospheres she conjures, the abstracted emotions laid bare in looped violin, cello […]
Gagarin‘s The Great North Wood, released on Geo Records in late 2020, reflects on the ancient south London woodland of the same name. The track “Eskil” is premiered here in its “Green Shoots” remix, part of a series of what Graham Dowdall dubs “virtual 12″s”.
Crammed Discs That most dashing of European labels, Crammed Discs, is celebrating forty years in the industry, and in keeping with this are engineering a series of reissues, of which the first volume of their Made To Measure albums is at the front. Made To Measure served as an adjunct to the main label, releasing albums that were slightly out of the ordinary, often affiliated with other forms […]
26 March 2021 This pandemic malarkey’s weird as shit, isn’t it? Watching gigs online and all that. Sure, the seats are comfier and the beer’s cheaper, but it’s still a little odd. However, this particular online gig by Wardruna is just what the doctor ordered, what with me not having been able to see anything at all on the one occasion I managed to catch them in the […]