The Underworld, London 17 June 2010 With their tattooed limbs and trucker caps, their wall-eyed glares and N’Awlins shirts that might never actually have seen better days, Weedeater strike about as Southern image as can be imagined, straight out of Wilmington, North Carolina via the casting for a Rob Zombie slasher flick soundtracked by the leavings of the stoner blues. Set down like they were at home on […]
Minor Fall Records This is an EP that really wants you to like it from the moment you see the sleeve. It screams “Hey, I’m friendly, we could hang out and play Swingball!” First off you get a really endearing picture of a smiling jukebox as the sleeve art, and then the CD itself is pretending to be vinyl. It’s beautiful packing, it really is, and to an […]
Editions Mego The problem with the notion of Hypnagogic Pop was never the music, and Oneohtrix Point Never‘s superb Returnal demonstrates that fact perfectly. Brooklyn’s Daniel Lopatin makes tried and tested emotive music with plenty of precedent. Tangerine Dream is the most frequently cited, but you could equally choose any number of works by Vangelis or Jean Michel Jarre or Aphex Twin‘s Select Ambient Works
Southern From early avant-garde releases on the legendary Crass records as Annie Anxiety, to guest slots with artists as varied (and awesome) as Coil, Nurse With Wound, On-U-Sound and Collapsed Lung, to her current incarnation as Little Annie, Annie Bandez has been nothing if not prolific, apart from eclectic. Now she and long-term collaborator Paul Wallfisch (Botanics, as well as the criminally-underrated unofficial contender for Best Band In […]
Sublime Frequencies The third compilation of Omar Souleyman’s Syrian party music to be released by Sublime Frequencies doesn’t require much in the way of context for new listeners. It’s a dance-pop album. All that really matters is whether it’s catchy and whether it makes you want to flail around making an utter goon out of yourself. Happily both criteria are met with a resounding YES. Despite being culled […]
Atomhenge Ah, the mighty ‘Wind. Where to start? Let’s assume that readers have at the very least a passing knowledge of Hawkwind‘s classic 1970s material and mythos. That decade’s long strange trip went roughly thus for the Hawks: early ‘electronic barbarian’ days in the Ladbroke Grove freak scene, then the never-bettered industrial strength trance-riffage of the Space Ritual era, before moving on to leaner, tighter, sci-fi dystopianism in […]
Denovali French black metal hardcore act Celeste has realesed an album that is a proper dirty heavy black screaming noisy rotten piece of work that really takes me to some of my darkest places. Not only being dark, they are occasionally so heavy it makes my head want to go down and the rest of my body move underground. Don’t get me wrong; they are still a hardcore […]
Invada David Wrench received an epiphany while trapped in the worthy nu-folk purgatory of the Green Man Festival last year. Surrounded by polite and twee young indie kids who had discovered acoustic instruments and woolly jumpers, he despaired at how a once radical and iconoclastic social force had been reduced to yet another lifestyle and fashion choice. As synchronicity would have it, at that very moment he received […]
Groenland New NEU! Releases are by their very nature important events, their three classic albums having grown in stature year on year since their original release back in the early 70s. Most serious fans of the group will have bought NEU!4 when Ken Matsutani’s excellent Captain Trip Records released it briefly back in 1995. The masters used, recorded in 1986 but subsequently aborted, were supplied by drummer Klaus […]
Esoteric Forever doomed to be remembered as the one hit wonder god of hellfire, Arthur Brown is surely a true British eccentric maverick in the tradition of Syd Barrett, Peter Hammill and Genesis P. Orridge. After The Crazy World split, Arthur Brown put together the similarly theatrical group Kingdom Come in 1970. The group’s 1971 debut album Galactic Zoo Dossier was recently reissued by the people at Esoteric, […]
Gwymon The “quiet one” from Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci has been somewhat, well… quiet of late. In the five years since his former group officially called it a day we have been treated to no fewer than five releases from his ex-bandmate Euros Childs and yet We Went Riding is only Richard’s second solo offering, following on from 2006’s superb Seven Sleepers Den. As with his Beatles counterpart George, […]
Ipecac The Bride Screamed Murder is superb. Not at all what I expected, but sees the Melvins in fine form. A Senile Animal (2006) and Nude With Boots (2008) saw the Melvins gelling as a tight four piece unit, with Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover playing alongside Big Business’ Coady Willis and Jared Warren. Now I love both these albums, and I would have welcomed a third helping. […]
Ambolthue/Synesthetic Recordings Apparently this is the debut CD of Torstein Wjiik, which is really hard to believe when you look at his discography, where you can find lots of MP3 and CD-R releases. Wjiik is the alias of Norwegian experimental artist Kjetil Hanssen. Knowing that this young man has been around and producing sound since 2004, some would say it is about time he appeared on the proper […]
Pica Disk The May edition of Jazkamer‘s monthly series starts with an almost twenty minute long drone track. It’s very deep dark and with mellow synth sounds to start with, moving about in my headphones, almost without recognising it, the track creeps upon me, moving more, being more intense and distorted. I hear adding layers, adding sounds, but almost not noticing it. I am feeling relaxed by this […]
Pan Sonic‘s extirpated crackle and hiss approaches the low end of dub with a fiercely deracinated edge, not so far removed from the stepping imperative as might perhaps be assumed from its harsh extremity. This is the sound of oscillators and radio noise in decaying mutual orbits, the capture and release of tensed bass thumps and scarred metallic shards of noise describing the heat death of not only […]
Thrill Jockey Wow, this is a really different kind of Trans Am album. But wow in general, too, it’s also a pretty fucking great album. The first thing that struck me about Thing was its soundtrack-like quality. At points it is more like a vision of Blade Runner rather than the electro rock we know and love from Trans Am. Thing began life as project for a sci-fi […]
Thrill Jockey Lazer Crystal come from Chicago and this is their first full release. The title MCMLXXX is a real declaration of intent, or at least a real advert to the albums contents. And it is, but at the same time it isn’t. I’ve heard many bands that are really stuck in the 70s or 80s to the point of sounding like a stale copy. Lazer Crystal aren’t […]
Pure Pop For Now People Along comes the latest release from PPFN, the label run by Joachim Gaertner of German psyche/kraut powerhouse group S/T, and it’s another that explores the territory somewhere on the borders of electronica and a peculiar concept of pop music. As with most of PPFNs releases, the album is a heavyweight vinyl LP with equally characteristic high-quality hand-made covers. In this case its a […]