...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.
review features
27 posts
So I've been doing these wee previews for a while and there's always a faint sense, tickling in my head, that the Eurovision a person sees in Eurovision week isn't necessarily the whole of the thing. Because of course most countries have qualifying competitions. [...] Buoyed by this, I thought I'd go whole hog this year and see what the other competitions had to offer.
Visiting the international DIY electronica scene market these days never leaves pre-disposed listeners with a shortage of produce to choose from. However, with so many common core ingredients in abundance – such as vintage modular kit flavourings and conceptual protein – zooming in on those seemingly most able to refine their recipes, is a means to limit overstocking the synth pantry shelves. Enter then, four relatively divergent but loosely familial platters for a tasting session.
The annual tradition of Kev Nickells giving the entries to the Eurovision Song Contest the benefit of his particular opinions has come to Freq once more. Strap in for his guide to the ups, highs, downs and disappointments of the musical dream of the year to some, a nightmare of cheesetastic proportions for others. Albania | Besa “Titan” Is it good? It’s kind of OK, it does a […]
Boris have been ploughing a wide and varied furrow through the field of guitar-based music for more than quarter of a century. Dave Pettit has taken on the task of listening to all of their studio albums - here is part one of a series of reports as to what he found within them.
Polydor There is certainly something special about secretly listening to this album sitting on a dirty Paris street lined with overexcited kids eagerly waiting for those venue doors to open, to flood into a tiny downstairs room to hear these songs played live, some for the very first time. Yungblud is a twenty-five-year-old singer from Doncaster in England, who came up into the alternative pop-punk scenes over the […]
SPV It’s a strange feeling to be reviewing the last-ever Klaus Schulze album. Since 1981, I have been a follower of his work after after reading that he was connected to Tangerine Dream, who I was a massive fan of at the time. From that first listen I understood that Klaus’s music shared many elements with TD, but were very much distinctly Klaus as well. The album I […]
London 28-30 April 2017 Friday GP: It’s the one date on my calendar that I look forward to each year. Three days of having my ears pummelled by some of the heaviest bands around and a chance to see some artists perform in the UK for the first time, this is Desertfest. Across five venues in three days, Desertfest takes over Camden Town with heavy guitars and . Every year […]
Westworld …as I always say, anyone who looks at the Fall track-by-track, rather than the correct way, which is as one discrete body of work – is, no pun intended, a fool. Tobi Blackman, Dictionary Pudding When I was doing my masters, there was a seminar several times a week where the phrase “what is at stake with [x]…”
London 7 July 2014 Kev Nickells went to see Japanese kawaii-rockers Babymetal live in London, and loved it. Barnabas Y, however, offers a riposte to the popularity of the genre-bending phenomenon. Pictures by James Sting. The review You should probably be aware of Babymetal by now. I first came across them when “the hard man of Harsh Noise Wall” Clive Henry put a link up to it. It […]
Michael Rodham-Heaps tackles a trio of recorded documents from London’s Café Oto released for wider consumption on the ever-expanding Otoroku label… Decoy with Joe McPhee – Spontaneous Combustion This one grabs my attention first, the gritty screen-printed abstracts go well with first half of this tasty double, recorded back in twenty eleven. It’s a fragmented fermentation, loose dot-joining limbs avoiding the unusual scuffle cuffs jazzy improv seems to […]
Camber Sands, Sussex 29 November-1 December 2013 So it came, as the subtitle says, to the very end of an era for All Tomorrow’s Parties on the English coast. Returning full circle to Pontin’s at Camber Sands where it all kicked off 13 years ago (barring the festival’s origins with Belle and Sebastian‘s Bowlie Weekender a year earlier in 1999 at the same spot), ATP brought out its […]
Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire 17-19 May 2013 Bearded Theory is, pretty much by definition, a party that got out of hand. It started out as a birthday bash, and is now in its sixth year as a music festival. Somewhere in among this tangled web of history is an obsession with beards, and on the Sunday they have an attempt at the world record for the most fake beards […]
Norton For most bands, tackling that ‘difficult’ second album can be a daunting experience; the expectation, the pressure to top their debut, and the need to break new ground can all conspire to form a perilous trap for the unwary and the uninitiated. . Figures of Light, a ghost legion of the proto-punk army who fought almost single-handedly around New York and New Jersey during the early 1970s, […]
Cooking Vinyl / Recommended Records Pere Ubu evolved in a different universe to the rest of 70s rock. In mainstream history as we know and remember it, The Sex Pistols single-handedly swept aside years of proggishness, clearing a completely new path and establishing the new year-zero (OK, that’s a parodic exaggeration, but it isn’t far from what it felt like at the time). But in Ubu world, then […]
Label: 4AD Format: DVD+3xCD There is an air of finality about the title and contents of 1981-1998. With the dissolution of their musical partnership into separate solo careers, Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry are no longer Dead Can Dance, but as the extensive essay on the group included in the luxurious slip-cased hardbacked book (jam-packed with landscape photos) which makes up the packaging of the set observes, the […]
Label: Mute Format: CD,2LP As purposely obscure and enigmatic as ever, Laibach‘s return to the world of record releases and live shows steps up the pressure they bring to bear upon the listener’s expectations of what this most uncompromising of groups might actually intend and ultimately mean. Presented in German, English and occasionally Serbo-Croat to thumping beats of an orchestral Techno bent, WAT kicks off with one of […]
– Iranair Inflight Magazine – Red Madrassa – Jebel Tariq Label: Muslimim Format: CD – Arabbox Label: Soleilmoon Format: CD –In Search Of Ahmad Shah Masood Label: Nexsound Format: CD Recent months have seen the continuing flow of Muslimgauze releases slow down considerably – given that it is now five years since Bryn Jones‘ untimely death, this is hardly surprising, but that it has taken this long is […]