Considering their current roster, Constellation is the perfect fit for this series of tracks that explore the interaction between electronics and voice in a completely unhindered and boundaryless fashion. Having spent time in groups and working on the edges of experimentation, this album focuses primarily on what Erika can achieve and how far she can push her voice within the song format.
Monthly archives: March 2024
22 posts
I think of all the Velvet Underground effluvia this is the record I come back to most. I still massively rate Lou Reed as a songwriter but Nico is sheer vibes, like a cliff-face. From one angle she's massively unaffected -- the thin voice, that querulous vibrato. The proper folk singer approach of singing the notes largely undecorated. Nothing clever in her singing.
Desertshore is not an easy listen. Across eight songs, which together are scarcely more than half an hour in length, Nico leads us on a melancholy musical journey through a portrait gallery of those who were, or had been, close to her: Garrel, Andy Warhol, her mother, Brian Jones, Ari. For a woman barely over thirty, there is already an abundance of loss, pain and sadness here, as Nico plays the role of medium to the voices of those troubled and damaged souls towards whom she had gravitated during her passage through the effervescent 1960s.
A re-release of Abel Ferrara’s Fear City finds the cult classic as interesting in its flaws as ever. It’s the mid-'80s, New York is pre-clean up, still a landscape of neon, sex and hovering violence. Former Boxer Matt Rossi (Tom Berenger) and his business partner Nicky (Jack Scalia) run a management company for Manhattan’s best strip club dancers.
Recorded over two post-lockdown days, these recordings are consumed by a desire to play together in a room again after such a lay-off and that air of desire is palpable. This recording, encompassing the second day of the session, is alive with the possibility and their interaction and generosity is plain to hear.
As a fan of Suicide’s tainted pop aesthetic, it’s not surprising that I’m loving the compelling sizzle here. That sleazy love muscle dissonantly dancing in all that analogue compression on Martin Rev's first solo release from the 1980s, now beautifully resurrected by those bastions of contemporary culture, Bureau B.
Rooting For Love is a really welcome return for Laetitia Sadier and one that shows her willingness to merge experimentation with familiarity has lost none of its sparkle and for that we should be grateful.
A pleasant experience that hammocks in your mind's eye, serves as a precursor to the celestial awe of the last two lengthy excursions, both of which are born from a slow and considered start, but evolve quickly to seduce you with their expressive colour.
After some twenty-five years, 4AD are issuing an expanded pressing of the Pixies sessions for the BBC. Encompassing the years 1988-1991, it collects the recordings for five Peel Sessions and one for Mark Goodier in their apparent entirety rather than the bits and pieces compilation from 1998. Spilt across two discs on LP and CD, disc one contains two sessions from 1988 and one from 1989, all for John Peel, while the second disc contains two from 1990, one for Goodier and one for Peel, and the final Peel Session from 1991.
For Jan Bang's latest vocal album, he has gathered a fantastic array of like-minded travellers to assist in pursuing the dreamlike vision for this collection of gentle, heartfelt tales.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan maintains an eye for the sublime in hopelessness and vice versa in his latest epic.
Russell Walker's dreamy, louche delivery is ferried by the awkward rhythms and funky wandering bass that we have come to know over such a career. The grooves are often quite forceful and the guitar runs around in circles attempting to settle down but unable to; an antithesis to the gently questioning vocals. The spacey keys that appear from time to time are an unexpected treat and the whole thing bowls along at a fair old lick.
I know it’s the oldest trick in the book for distributors to sell their films in as straightforward a way as possible, but Jesus Christ, trying to sell La Chimera as a taut heist film is doing no one any favours. Its only resemblance to The Italian Job is that there’s Italians, and well bugger me they’ve got a job to do. What there is instead, in typical Rohrwacher fashion, a film that defies categorisation, that hovers at the space where divinity meets the reality of a world where greed curdles all corners of life.
Guitarist and Empty Birdcage supremo Daniel Thompson continues his investigations into the improvisational world with a collaboration involving saxophonist Caroline Kraabel and dancer Max Reed. Now, if this sounds intriguing, you are right; because not only does Max bring a certain atmosphere to the proceedings, but his shuffling steps and purring vocal outbursts lend further dimensions to an already tasty sax and guitar interplay.
This is the three-piece Fire!'s eighth album for Rune Grammofon and just in case the usual formula where the trio invites friends over to assist in the production of ever-more dramatic output has become tired, they have turned their back on all that. Instead, they headed for Illinois and spent two days with Steve Albini paring the essence of the sound back to sax, bass and drums and allowing rhythmic sturdiness as a framework for new adventures.
I honestly thought Xmal Deutschland’s lead singer wouldn’t ever return to music, (very much like the much-missed Danielle Dax), but I’m glad to have her back, here collaborating with long-standing friend Mona Mur and involving fellow Xmal bandmate Manuela Rickers to produce something that’s still haunted by that punk / gothic angst of yore, but is so much more considered, oozing with a refreshed sleekness that’s closer to Viva than the '80s glamourgast that was Devils.
Xmal Deutschland were born within the same German post-punk movement of the early '80s that produced such bands as Mania D, Malaria! , Abwarts and of course Einstürzende Neubauten. This was a fever pitch of creativity for young bands pushing boundaries within their musical styles with some, like Xmal, being swallowed up in the early goth scene in the UK along with lots of other bands that they bore no resemblance to musically.
Kayla Cohen's Itasca project has been running now for over ten years and has found a comfortable home of Paradise of Batchelors. This is the third album for them and with Robbie Coady of Wand behind the desk, and with assistance from Evan Backer and Evan Burrows as well as Gun Outfit bandmate Daniel Swire, a more guitar-centric sound has been uncovered and shown to the light.
It does well to initially evoke its era. The film’s primary tones are garish neon and sweat on skin, like a grimy San Junipero, and the set design and cinematography do well to create sense of a place where macho sleaze permeates every nook and cranny of the town. The problem is the characters that inhabit it feel too archetypal, too lacking in the eccentricities and unpredictabilities that would make them believable.
Not Applicable It is an intriguing combination; bass clarinet, electronics and percussion and one that renowned improvisers Lothar Ohlmeier, Isambard Khroustaliov and Rudi Fischerlehner utilise with equal parts aplomb and care, imbuing their sensitive imagery on In The Gloaming with space and time. The sounds initially are tentative, sussing out […]