The Third Golden Age of Welsh Pop™ shows little sign of abating any time soon. Following his contributions to Cate le Bon‘s two extraordinary Cyrk releases and Euros Childs‘ sunshine classic Summer Special last year, Stephen Black now unleashes his own long awaited fourth album as Sweet Baboo. Originally from Trefriw in north Wales’ Conwy valley, SB has long been an integral part of the Cardiff musical community […]
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Bureau B Bureau B’s mission to ensure that one in every two CDs in the world feature Hans-Joachim Roedelius continues with the most unlikely collaboration of his career to date. Lloyd Cole is best known, in the UK at least, as the man who took a slickly polished dilution of ’80s indie-pop into the proper charts with hits like “Perfect Skin” and, err… I don’t seem to remember […]
27 April 2013 Out here on the periphery, the phrase ‘sole UK appearance’ instinctively elicits grumpy mutterings about ‘privileged Londoners’… after all, nobody ever does ‘sole UK appearances’ in north Wales!’ But what’s this?… Michael Rother presents the music of Neu! and Harmonia at Helsinki… Tilburg… Krems… St. Petersburg… Wrexham… Wrexham!?!… surely not THAT Wrexham? It turns out to be true – the recently established Focus Wales festival […]
Mute Mick Harvey‘s official biography says that he “has always thought of himself primarily as a collaborator” – understandable given the success of his collaborations with PJ Harvey, Rowland S Howard and Nick Cave, and in a way, Four (Acts of Love) can also be seen as a collaboration, although of a quite different nature. The album comprises a suite in three acts, pieced together from songs and […]
Yesmissolga/Acid Cobra/Lumberton Trading Company Amaury Cambuzat‘s début solo outing as Acid Cobra (while not playing guitar in Ulan Bator and one iteration of Faust) finds him hopping figuratively onto horseback for the opening guitar looper workout “Il y a des Cowboys!” The Western vibes blow dustily into the widescreen soundscape he plays, all descending figures circling like buzzards rising on a thermal to gain height for the annual […]
Rustblade Disc one of Kibako, and “Nigatsu Nijuugonichi”‘s abrasive banquet of blow torch and bruised industry is definitely a room clearer. Lurching around in shifts of attacking energies, fearsome, intense – full of percussive dynamite snipping at squalling hordes. It’s a weird kind of rapture, overwhelming the senses with spiky shards, enforced further by the screaming inferno of the following track “Operation Musashi.” Those clashing hertzological blizzards taking […]
Corsica Studios, London 25 April 2013 To Corsica Studios, for an intriguing evening of films and performances to launch Guapo’s new album History of the Visitation, a tremendous release that maintains the consistently superb standards set by this London-based instrumental rock outfit since their inception in the mid-90s. Proceedings began with a screening of Chris Marker’s 1962 short film La Jetée. It seems a little superfluous to review […]
Music For Nations Hi there. Can we talk about Justin Broadrick again? I like talking about Justin Broadrick. What’s that? Hymns remaster? That’ll do nicely. OK, let’s talk! Justin Broadrick has been responsible for more amazing music under more identities and in more bands than I have written pieces praising them, which is quite a lot. Final, Jesu, Techno Animal, Napalm Death, Pale Sketcher… the list goes on, […]
Divine Records This is what Time-damaged sounds like and I’m not sure this is a good thing. I don’t believe the sleeve notes any more than I believe the record. Something is very wrong about this record. Actually, that’s not true at all. In fact, there are too many things that are just right about it. It’s just too… convenient. A quick confession (for most of you this […]
London 27 April 2013 It’s raining. It’s cold. And it’s the West bloody End. But it’s also The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing‘s biggest headline gig yet, so let’s check it the fuck out anyway. As we walk in, Reprisal are onstage, and making quite a splendid racket. Three longhairs, heads down, studiously cranking out some loud as fuck death metal riffs, while a massive […]
Important I first heard Overhang Party via their contributions to a couple of PSF’s Tokyo Flashback compilations back in the ’90s and a CD-R of their second album 2 that cultural commentator Jon Savage gave me around the same time. Since then I have almost completely failed to find any records by this most elusive of Japanese groups, the sole exception being a copy of their (I assumed) […]
Staubgold It’s unusual to encounter a CD reissue where the ubiquitous ‘bonus tracks’ amount to more than inessential filler. The extras here, taken from the group’s first single and LP, turn out to be far superior to the actual album itself. The good news is that there are no less than 23 of them – swamping the LP proper’s meagre 17 songs and making this CD an invaluable […]
(self-released) If you have ever longed to hear La Düsseldorf covering The Damned‘s “Neat Neat Neat,” Polly Harvey backed by Wire and Hawkwind (at the same time!) or The Saints fronted by Lydia Lunch, then Art Trip and the Static Sound are the group for you. EP2 (I somehow missed EP1 – but will remedy that) is full of concise, no-frills rock ‘n’ roll – driving rhythms, grinding […]
Convexe (N America)/Salvo (Europe) At the end of 2010, the Metropolis television company organized a series of intimate concerts at their London studios, each showcasing a ‘heritage’ act to 140 people, each of who paid £175 for the privilege. Apparently a glass of champagne and a meeting with the artist was also included in this price. The series included Caravan, Barclay James Harvest, The Zombies, Roy Harper, Bill […]
Future Noise The Pop Group reunion gigs seem to have revitalised Mark Stewart. Rather than basking in the overdue glory accorded his old group, Stewart was straight back in the studio recording his first solo album for four years. The Politics of Envy came out last March, featuring guest spots from many of his punk era peers – Keith Levene, Gina Birch, Tessa Pollitt, Richard H Kirk, Youth […]
Handmade Birds Spluttering rupturing, discordantly eviscerating the sounds and tropes of analogue and digital synthesis, Takahe Collage arrives in three parts but leaves music (once again) shredded in to far, far more. The first two pieces, the title track and “Tendeko,” weigh in at around the half-hour mark each, and after a through listen their presence soon becomes inscribed upon the ears like a permanent tattoo. “Takahe Collage” […]
Drag City UK digi-dub veterans Alpha & Omega have taken on the task of remaking Om‘s track “Addis” from their recent Advaitic Songs album, transforming the original’s hypnagogic swell of doomy bass and mournful cello into a dub workout in two parts. Side A weighs in as “Ababa Dub,” Kate Ramsey‘s haunting vocal lifted into the echo chamber while the strings vibrate below, riding on a coasting undercarriage of […]
Monotype When listening to noise, collages, field recordings or other kinds of abstract music, new compilations have always been a welcome listen. Mainly as it is usually very diverse, and for me almost never tiresome. The Grief That Shrieked to Multiply is of course not a compilation as such, but a collection of remixes, done by a big number of well known and some unknown artists from the […]