Sacred Bones I’ve just spent a few days driving down the south coast of England and then around the Devon countryside, listening to John Carpenter’s Anthology all the way. And the first thing to say about it is, it works. Overlaid on any landscape you’d care to imagine – a traffic-jammed motorway, a small-town suburb, a swooping coastal road, a mist-sodden moor, a little high-tide cove – it creates […]
Fourth Dimension / Idioblast At times uncompromisingly brutal, Theme‘s Sacral Blood Warning barely lets up the pressure from the opening moments to its close what sometimes seems like a small aeon later. Along the way, they pummel and pound, rant and reverberate, shaking their groove as much as the walls.
Cherry Red I saw that car. You know which one. In Stockwell, where I used to stay at a mate’s brother’s squat. I think Thatcher On Acid or Blyth Power or someone lived there. It just sat on the street a few doors down and we took polaroid pictures of each other lying in vaguely provocative poses on the bonnet. Eventually, someone yelled at us to fuck off, […]
Barhill The wasted-sounding wastrels of Killflavour offer up the latest in a series of records that are aimed so far out that there’s a distinct possibility that they are heading for a fall off the edge of the known musical world.
Rabid Records The surprise announcement and immediate drop of a new Fever Ray album is some of the most exciting news all year. (Though it’s digital only today — you will have to wait until February 2018 to get a physical copy). And oh boy, it’s been a long time- – the magnificent first album from Karin Dreijer’s solo project appeared eight years ago, so to hear new […]
Bureau B The three man guerilla riot that is Camera have taken new directions, but following in their wake is Licht by Franz Bargmann and Timm Brockmann, both ex-members of the band, but both with a work ethic that means less than a year after the release of Camera’s Phantom Of Liberty (on which LP neither played) we have something a little different into which to sink our aural teeth.
Blue Tapes and X-Ray / Ici d’ailleurs For most people of certain age, the name of Gdańsk, Poland’s principle seaport on the Baltic, will forever bring to mind scratchy newsreel footage of world-historical importance: vast grey shipyards, cold hairy-looking men smoking furiously and wearing donkey jackets and, perhaps most vividly of all, legendary moustache-wearer Lech Wałęsa signing the Gdańsk Agreement of 1980
Front & Follow Ten years after its inception, Front and Follow‘s roster has grown up to be a very interesting beast indeed. Straggling left-field electronicia, folk and avant-pop, fostering strong recurring returns from Kemper Norton, The Doomed Bird of Providence and Sone Institute whilst always pushing further afield
Turquoise Coal Alan Holmes, one half of Spectralate and doyen of the Welsh alternative scene — which includes being part of the wonderful Ectogram — has been beavering away on those fringes for the best part of thirty years under a wide variety of different names and in different styles.
Rhino / Merciful Release It’s a sobering moment when you realise it’s been a full quarter of a century since Andrew Eldritch, The Dark Lord Of Leeds, has gifted the world with any new music. Despite the latest incarnation of the band being as prolific at gigging as any Sisters Of Mercy line-up has ever been, we’ve been given nothing new.
London 21 October 2017 On 21 October 2017, I was lucky enough to go see Frank Iero And The Patience at Omeara in south London. I did not arrive in time for the opening band, Paceshifters, unfortunately, but I did make it for the second half of the The Homeless Gospel Choir.
MIG This is Wucan’s second full-length album release and comes hot on the heels of their amazing performance at Desertfest this year. After the Vikarama EP and the album Sow The Wind, this time Wucan present us with a double LP in which they explore their sound, and start taking it in other directions.
(self-released) Meriheini Luoto is an improvisational violinist and a recent graduate of the Sibelius Academy. Her love of the forest and how sound can interact with that most glorious and mysterious of environments led her to produce this binaurally recorded, five-part piece which nods to Nordic folk music as well as a looser, more immediate style that dovetail well.
London 9 October 2017 It’s been a few months since I last went to see a band at The Borderline, so I was somewhat shocked as I entered the venue as it seems like a totally different place. The one little bar has now been replaced by a massive long bar and an elevated standing area has been removed.
Constellation I remember the first time I heard Godspeed You! Black Emperor; having my mind blown by the sheer enormity of the scale of that first album, the bleak drama and the frazzled audacity of it. With the second album, this ragged bunch of Canadians reached the apogee of what could be done using the basic constructs of rock music
Editions Mego An exquisite corpse figuring the familiar Edvard Graham Lewis and Thighpaulsandra, UUUU make for a interesting fusion. Matthew Simms, guitarist and singer for the lo-fi curiosity It Hugs Back and drummer Valentina Magaletti, who once played with Bat For Lashes, but is best known for her dapplings with prepared percussion in Tomaga are the unknowns here
Tapete Nick Nicely is a bit of a mystery. It would appear that he has been recording and releasing music for the best part of the last forty years, but this album released on Tapete is only his third non-compilation full-length record in that time. A series of psychedelic singles were released in the early ’80s and then a series of dancefloor-filling twelve inches in the nineties
Apollo Victoria Theatre, London 1 October 2017 For the last five years, a growing audience of podcast listeners have been being amused, entertained and just plain weirded out by the small-town cosmic absurdism of the mighty Welcome To Night Vale – community radio from a little town somewhere in the desert