If you like hazy guitar improv, this is solid. Four lengthy crafted excursions dusted in a ghosting of late ’60s psychedelia and geologically pinned to a Neolithic underground burial complex in Malta.
Yearly archives: 2025
112 posts
Given its largely banal story and undeniable visual flair, the obvious conclusion to draw is that Hurry Up Tomorrow is a 105-minute music video. Although director Trey Edward Shults works very hard indeed to shoot and cut the offstage action like a thriller, he drenches so much of it with a purple rain of pulsating epileptic light that it has a soporific effect which no amount of frantic cocaine-rush editing can awaken us from.
...his trust in and familiarity with the players comes across well in the live aspects of the recording process. It is that voice which you are buying into though; a stentorian baritone that also has warmth and vulnerability. Allied to the often reserved but flexible backing and with the addition of Ruth's sweet vocal counterpoint, this latest album sheds new light and shows a new way forward.
I’m Being Good are back with their somethingth album, and what a number something is. Difficult to describe IBG without reference to a bunch of ’90s bands, but for my money they’ve always had a wit and laconic element that’s missing from your Polvos and Truman’s Waters.
Each of the pieces here comes from a different perspective, using similar ingredients to create a very different feel, as if each track was a mini-soundtrack in its own right with the common thread being AVAWAVES’ collective imagination.
...a return-within-a-return from visual artist and onetime pastoral-psych legend Mark Fry. Having previously brought 2011’s baroque-tinged I Lived In The Trees (with backing assistance from The A. Lords) and 2014’s soothingly lush South Wind, Clear Sky to the 2L catalogue, after a decade or so’s gap arrives the meta-anointed Not On The Radar.
Angle Shades is the new moniker for the Richard Jones Trio whose previous album, itself entitled Angle Shades, was a joyful take on the jazz piano trio format. A couple of years has passed and the trio of Richard on piano, Joshua Cavanagh-Brierly on bass and Johnny Hunter on drums has re-entered the studio to see what further magic can be summoned.
After more than a decade away, the disembodied spectre of Death returns to haunt a new shoal of hapless victims by masquerading as a series of stylishly mounted and entertainingly ridiculous ‘accidents’. In an attempt to freshen its foul breath, this time the filmmakers have gone big AND gone home – the initial premonition of mayhem that kicks everything off takes place decades in the past, therefore our conceptual baddie decides that entire generations of a family need to be wiped out.
In scope and ambition, Alamut is a remarkable piece of work, performed live at a former Crusader castle in Ljubljana in 2022. Involving the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra, the Human-Voice Ensemble vocal group from Tehran, the Gallina Women’s Choir and AccordiOna, the canvas full and sonicly rich, expertly conducted by Iranian-born Navid Goharib and of course all superbly subverted by Laibach.
Although conceptually bonded around memories of the brutalist architecture and municipal communitarianism of the Sunderland Civic Centre, demolished in 2022, Chambers stands up as a low-tech yet otherworldly edifice built from its own sonic materials. Framed primarily through the stretched parameters of a basic analogue synth set-up, with some apparent deployment of his dusted-off drum kit, this ten-track tape / download delivery has some genuinely alluring and arresting moments spread across it.
Manuel Pasquinellli is probably best known as drummer for Sonar, the David Torn-affiliated group, but also plays with Schrödinger's Katze and the AKKU quintet. For his first solo album, Michael has come up with an intriguing idea; to use his heartbeat as a metronome and to perform a live set using the ever-evolving tempo as a starting point for extemporisation.
Gloriously mental psychological thriller in which Nicolas Cage’s frayed masculinity is subjected to a series of Herculean tests by a gang of malevolent larrikins on an Australian beach, when all he wants to do is hang ten in the swell (or whatever surfers do) while reconnecting with his teenage son.
These songs do feel stronger, with the organ ruder and more insistent while Michael's drums are more upfront, pushing harder than on The Love Pseudomorph.
A clinical psychiatrist gets a taste of his own medicine when his treatment of a semi-schizophrenic patient backfires, so that his own grasp on reality grows ever more tenuous, taking us on an arresting, genre-splicing adventure through a version of Hong Kong choking on the fallout of the 2008 financial crash.
...this debut album from pianist Yonglee and his group The Doltang is definitely an unusual beast, connecting dots between jazz, prog and the heavier more awkward end of US underground. Yonglee's capricious piano attack combines with synths, bass drums and guitar to form a unique sound that also harbours improv and experimentation, as well as hidden melodies that hark back to elements of history.
Whilst on paper a collaboration between a successful modern poet (Brian Bilston) and an ensemble co-led by indie-pop veterans (Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey’s The Catenary Wires) might suggest a slightly unwieldy and ephemeral vanity side-project, in aural reality Sounds Made By Humans proves to be a deeply entertaining and durable product from the creative conjoining of like-minded souls.
Although the vocals erupt with an in-the-bag fury, the scuzzy guitars rife with distortion and dismay still exert a punky groove that sees the feet tapping. The thundering drums and heavy bass riffs try to protect the guitars as they are set alight, the riffs simple yet satisfying. They aren't afraid to allow a little air into the proceedings either and in places the vocals sound as if they were recorded in the rafters, which adds to a slight sense of discombobulation.
...it's a cracking year. There's a lot of trance. There's a dearth of too-slow cack. I think all the proper tropes of this century are in place. English is slipping from the position as language of choice for much of Europe, which doubtless reflects a belief in a new internationalism; or if nothing else, reflects the dogged incapacity of Europeans to imagine a world beyond liberal paralysis. It's got silly, it's got sad, it's got belters, it's got goths. It's the most wonderful time of the year. Happy gay Christmas, one and all.