Esoteric Armaggedon (sic) have an interesting place in the fecund story of German music in the late Sixties and early Seventies. as guitarist Frank Diez tells it in the sleeve notes for this re-release, he was recruited over the phone and flown from Berlin to Munich to record the album over the space of six days with a bunch of musicians he’d never met before for the small […]
Southern Lord It’s somewhat startling to realise that more time has now elapsed since the release of Winter’s seminal doom metal masterpiece Into Darkness – twenty one years – than had passed since the release of Black Sabbath when Into Darkness first appeared. For a genre as oft derided, sneered at and generally treated with contempt by the mainstream of ‘serious’ musicians, forty years is a pretty fucking […]
Dingwall’s, London 27 April 2011 Though this gig is billed occasionally as a [post=”wovenhand-ten-stones” text=”Woven Hand”] performance, it’s decidedly David Eugene Edwards‘ show from the moment he steps onstage to a rapturous welcome. Accompanied by Woven Hand man Jeff Linsenmeir on various forms of percussion and keyboard, Edwards dispenses with onstage banter, instead launching into a set which covers his back catalogue including a goodly selection of 16 […]
Ankst Klaus Kinski is a scary man. As scary as Herzog. And also a vampire. I think. (That one was a documentary, right? RIGHT?) You know that guy, right? Opera house in the jungle? Crazy Conquistador dude? Not him. THIS Klaus Kinski is an equally scary proposition, but in a very different way. This Klaus Kinski is a band, only they’re more like a handful of rotting horse […]
Beta-Lactam Ring Swooping up from the depths of infrasound, Tecumseh bring a faint whiff of glitch and a hint of industrial shiver to the emergent doom on Return to Everything, and the electronics thicken into string-driven rumbling among the encroaching wall of full-spectrum FX. The metal starts to kicking properly as the second track (or movement might be more correct) “Apophis”fills the all-pervading drone with . There is no […]
Parallax Sounds Brian Ellis is the guitar player with the band Astra, whose album The Weirding was one of the best of a batch of progressive rock revival albums released last year. It swept majestically over musical fields covered by Yes, early Genesis and King Crimson. On what appears to be his sixth solo release, Quipu, Ellis touches upon and expands on all these elements to make an […]
Sub Pop There’s always a tension going on between artists and their audiences growing up. Back when we first encountered Low they were playing deliberately quietly, persistently black and white. . In a few years we all stopped being so bloody miserable; us, them, everyone. Although God knows there was plenty to be miserable about. Some people went off and had kids. We thought that was the last […]
Nascente Zion Train began around 1988 and was one of the late John Peel’s favourite live bands. Their music was an essential soundtrack to the free festivals and (new age) traveller scene of the early 90s, their heavy dub sound influencing bands like Back to the Planet to add dub flavours into their songs and inventing a whole new sub-genre of ambient dance music. These guys are important, […]
Modisti In 1961, Harold Pinter was in Paris, attending rehearsals for the French production of his play The Caretaker. Pinter’s critical reputation was starting to gain serious traction at this time, and the literary establishment were beginning to write about him as the natural successor to Samuel Beckett in the same way that they had once referred to Beckett himself as the successor to James Joyce. The play’s […]
The Purple Turtle, London 19 April 2011 It’s Sunday, it’s sunny, so a 6.30pm start time for a gig seems terribly early, especially when you have the choice between a sweaty venue or a cool pub beer garden, oh well….. Also putting on four support acts before a main band on a Sunday when public transport is hardly at its greatest (even Lori S from Acid King pointed […]
Crass “Feminism – what happened?” (Eve Libertine). (Writer checks footing on soapbox. ‘Secure? Good. Let’s go…’) This is a ridiculous record. I’ve never listened to Crass before, and I was still the other side of birth when it was released. Ridiculous and offensive, really. But not the record itself. Oh no. It’s brilliant. No-one. Obviously. The problem is that this should, by all reasonable rights, be a record […]
The Underworld, London 18 April 2011 From the very first beer-waving introduction to the crowd eagerly awaiting the return to what would seem to be their favourite London home from home, Weedeater arrive in cheery mood, lapping up the adulation and ripping straight into a fearsome “God Luck and Good Speed,” as powerful a statement of intent as any sludge-doom-stoner-rock band is ever likely to open a show […]
The Scala, London 12 April 2011 Sabbath Assembly is the rather surprising spin-off from noise-manglers and avant scribblers the No-Neck Blues Band. Surprising why, exactly? Not just because they show that, yes, they are actually good musicians, but that they can also play tight, Seventies-style power pop of the sort which has a solid groove at its heart and an earnestly-sharp, clear guitar raising the rooves, church-band style, […]
Llanberis Slate Museum 25 March 2011 to 3 Aril 2011 It was a soul-destroying experience to grow up in Wales back in the seventies in the knowledge that your entire country had only ever produced one single role model of any value. The frustration was further compounded by the fact that hardly anyone here seemed to have even heard of him, certainly not the Welsh media, and the […]
Dekorder In their download panic frenzy, labels and artists are coming up with ever more ingenious/desperate ways of providing attractive bonus content with their physical releases. It’s common for CDs to feature bonus video content, but as far as I’m aware, this is the first vinyl record to offer bonus video footage – on the actual grooves of the record itself! The aptly named Rotary Signal Emitter is […]
Monty Maggot OK, let’s start up here with a massive amount of respect to Lee Potts for putting this together. For from the above website, all you have to do is pay the P&P and the disc will wind its way to you from the cosmic reaches of outer space to brighten up your day. The album starts with the Omenopus track “Call Your Name,” a beautiful melancholic […]
Onomatopoeia The Rising of the Lights is a record that feels exceptionally English – if someone said it was some hitherto unreleased Canterbury Scene opus, or some obscure Matching Mole side project, I’d likely not arch an eyebrow. It’s a record that’s indebted massively to Drake‘s tenure in Cardiacs, though a great deal less acerbic and more light and whimsical. The first two tracks particularly shimmer in a […]
Bar-None Even at their peak, The Feelies were not the most prolific of groups, but this fifth album appears almost exactly twenty years after the fourth, making it a substantial wait for even long term Feelies fans. The group’s phenomenal 1980 debut Crazy Rhythms was one of the dozen greatest records of the twentieth century and it was no surprise that it took the group six years to […]