Cleopatra Cover version albums are always an odd thing. People will either complain if tracks don’t sound close enough to the original songs or sound too different from the original versions, so bands who do them are always in a no-win situation. The best things to do is to try and ‘own’ the tracks themselves and make them yours – after all, some bands covers have outstripped and […]
Ektro Following on from their debut album Meronia (originally released in 1994) come two more remastered and re-released albums from 1997. For a goodly chunk of Meronia, Circle seemed to be wanting to show themselves as Finland’s very own Loop-worshipping post-metal dudes on a mission to out “Arc-Lite” the template of heavy-riffing guitars in collision with the metronomic sound of Munich, Cologne and Düsseldorf some twenty years earlier, all […]
The Jazz Café, London 10 November 2012 Anyone who knows anything about Krautrock will already know that Agitation Free were one of the most significant bands during the early ’70s in Germany. They will also know that both Manuel Göttsching and Christopher Franke are included amongst their alumni, and that the three albums that make up the core of their discography, Malesch, Second and Last, are some of […]
Photek Productions I was surprised to hear that Photek had released a new album – somewhere along the line I had heard that he had hung up his Sennheisers. When Freq asked for a review it was with some trepidation that I took it on. When someone has withdrawn from the scene at the top of their game, the inevitable question is whether their return will be triumphant […]
Agitated Anyone wondering what kind of album Mugstar would follow up the far-out and extra solid Lime and the soundtrack to Ad Margineum can now find out. Lime was the point at which all the ideas heard floating around (and sometimes above) …Sun, Broken… and Mugstar coalesced into something greater than the sum total of the band’s reference points (of which let’s just mention Hawkwind, NEU! and The Heads […]
London. 5 October 2012 Keiji Haino’s trademark wall-of-guitar noise, with its many layers and overtones, often puts me in mind of church organ music at its loudest and most resonant. so this mightily atmospheric and imposing place of worship felt like an oddly appropriate setting for his fabled power trio Fushitsusha’s headline slot at this triple bill. First up were Temperatures, a bass/drums duo who took your jaded […]
Fingertips Oud Vibrations. It’s a pun, you see? You do? Good. So, the fluff is that these are two of the earlier ventures by jazz hands into Arabic lands and this is a two LPs on one CD of two chaps who worked with Arabic stylings. There’s a faint sense that they’re both jazz sorts borrowing from Arabic ideas, but it’s essentially two fairly different records. So, I’m […]
Dirter Really glad to get a proper chance to listen to this again – disc rot, the scourge of so many early World Serpent gems (the un-initiated should see here) and barmy auction prices have totally scuppered my chances to get re-acquainted with its Frankensteined charms until now. Dirter, those bastions of the unusual, have done a sterling job of dragging A Sucked Orange back into the light […]
VCO VCO is a label that specialises in limited cassette-only releases. They have released tapes by Zombi, Majeure, Steve Moore and Jonas Reindhart, with most of these editions running between the 50 to 100 copies mark. This edition of music recorded in 1996 by Schickert has had a hundred copies made.* The album opens with “Morning,” tablas and percussion building a steady rhythm under an eastern-sounding guitar fugue […]
(self-released)/Front & Follow It makes sense to review these together, since whatever the actual chronology of these songs, one begat another. They are linked to each other by a strange umbilicus, a slurry wurm of flesh. The self-released Carn shows us the Coilish side of Kemper Norton’s sound; the voices here are muttered, liminal (everything’s liminal these days), lurking around in the dark. One track in and the […]
Koko, London 23 October 2012 When I said I’d review this gig, even though I have seen Amanda Palmer several times before, I really didn’t think through what I was letting myself in for. Let me explain. I pre-ordered the tickets for this show on the first day they were available. I like music, a lot. I like going to gigs. But this was different. I am a […]
7th In a time when most CD albums stretch beyond the 60 minute mark, to receive an album with only two tracks that lasts a mere 32 minutes seems rather odd. But what we have to remember here is that this is not any ordinary 32 minutes, it is 32 minutes of Magma, which is the equivalent to 70 by a lot of other artists. From its opening […]
Ipecac A lot has been written and said about the importance of Isis, that rare breed of heavy band who not only garnered widespread critical acclaim in the metal world but also succeeded as a crossover act, appealing to fans of shoegaze, post-rock, avant-garde and beyond. This crossover appeal, combined with vocalist/guitarist Aaron Turner’s (now sadly soon-to-be defunct) label Hydra Head Industries introduced the more curious fan to […]
Young God When Michael Gira announced that he was reactivating Swans (not a reunion, remember?) it came as a bit of a surprise; albeit one that garnered some excitement. The album that followed showed that the band had fleshed out the folk trappings of Gira’s Angels of Light project; instilling some of Swans heaviness onto the Angels’ southern twang. Some people liked it, some didn’t, but it was […]
Trestle When James Johnston releases a solo album, it is really difficult to know what to expect. To my knowledge, this is his very first solo album. Being a bluesy rock star front man of Gallon Drunk, guitar hero in Lydia Lunch’s Big Sexy Noise, or session and live musician with The Bad Seeds is only one side of this multi-talented Englishman. Collaborating with Philippe Petit, and a […]
Exceptional This is evidence of time travel. Not in a good way. In the future, we’ll still be in thrall to the past, still looking back and longing. We’ll still be unable to understand the terrible now. We’ll read and re-read Simon Reynolds’s Retromania (really must get round to that; it’s on my Christmas List. The irony of not reading it yet is killing me) and we’ll use […]
Constellation I believe it was the great Neil Young who sang “…only Swans can break your arm” back in the dim and distant mists of musical history, and up until now he’s been right. No band other than Michael Gira‘s monolithic spacegod-baiting machine has ever had the capacity to damage limbs simply through sheer heftiness. But all that’s changed now with the arrival of the new Godspeed You! […]
The Lexington, London 24 October 2012 The weirdest thing, it would seem, about tonight’s opening act The Oscillation, is that they didn’t go the whole hog and add an extra “e” to that pronoun. Because this is a band who take their psychedelia seriously. Possibly a little too seriously, but if you’re a psych band then you can’t really be blamed for that. They start straight into , […]