(Midwich) A folk group from Essex recording a concept album about the Lofoten Islands in Arctic Norway seems an intriguing though ultimately self-defeating idea. After all, isn’t the idea of folk music that it reflects the culture it comes from, rather than holiday snaps of exotic locations? Actually, it turns out that the two areas share a large amount of common folklore, dating back to Viking times, and […]
Pica Disk This release is the first in the Jazkamer 2010 Monthly Series. A card accompanying the CD states: “One new Jazkamer album on Pica Disk every month of 2010. One year of music and anti-music.” Perfomed by the two founders and regular members Lasse Marhaug and John Hegre, plus Jean-Philippe Gross, who also edited and mixed this CD very interestingly, Solitary Nail is one 30 minute track, […]
Koko, London 14 December 2009 The cavernous space of Koko, once known better in the days of music hall and indie rock dance club as the Camden Palace, turns out to be eminently suitable for hosting bands whose raison d’etre is shifting air pressure through the application of low end to the somewhat notoriously loud speakers of the PA. Koko may not exactly have the acoustics of a […]
Islington Mill, Salford 8 December 2009 Ever vampiric, the avant-guard periodically replenishes itself on fresh blood in pastures new. Jazz, psych, prog, industrial and Dance have all fallen prey during the past half century, and now it’s the turn of that seemingly most reactionary of genres, metal. The signs had been there as far back as the early 90s, with the Melvins, Sleep and Earth all forging new […]
Denovali Available on both heavyweight vinyl as a proper double-sided split LP and the more prosaic, though no less lovingly-packaged CD edition, this record serves partly as yet another waypoint on Nadja‘s seemingly unstoppable mission to collaborate with every possible combination of drone/doom-mongers across the known and occasionally unknown world. It also contains Kodiak‘s “MCCCXLIX The Rising End,” a piece which starts off in a slow accretion of […]
The Forum, London 17 December 2009 ‘Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the Forum, not a creature was stirring apart from that seething, thronging mass of goths, punks, crusties and beardy CAMRA-men that only New Model Army seem to be able to unite into one celebratory whole. And they’ve been doing it for a while now. Next year sees their thirtieth anniversary tour… this year makes […]
Thrill Jockey Trans Am‘s blend of rock/electro comes to the stage with live album What Day Is It Tonight? Many lesser bands wouldn’t be able to pull this kind of fusion off. Synthpop and hard driving rock are seemingly chalk and cheese. Lesser bands might have troubles, but this is what Trans Am do and they do it like fucking champs (and indeed sometimes alongside The Fucking Champs). […]
Fysisk Format There’s a lot to like about Necropsalms, Obliteration‘s second album, unless you don’t like doomy death metal that is. But, of course, everyone likes death metal. Obliteration hail from Kolbotn in Norway, that’s the home of Darkthrone amongst other bands. Their first album was released on Tyrant Syndicate, the sub-label of Peaceville run by Darkthrone’s Nocturno Culto. So you’d be forgiven for thinking Necropsalms was a […]
Thrill Jockey I wasn’t expecting Super Roots 10 to sound like this, which is what I have come to expect from the Boredoms and the Super Roots series. Super Roots 10 contains “Ant 10” and three remixes of it, and lives up to the impressive legacy Super Roots lays down. “Ant 10” itself continues the Boredoms’ recent love of tribal druming. Beginning with chanting, it then moves into […]
(Sinnbus) I Might Be Wrong come from Berlin and are, apparently, “supported by the Initiative Musik Non-profit Project Company Ltd. with project funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media on the basis of a resolution passed by the German Bundestag.” Splendid! – how can we resist an album boasting such venerable patronage? Naming your band after a song by your fave combo however, is rarely […]
uZu Music UnicaZürn was, apparently, a surrealist artist known for automatic drawing. I never knew that. Well, not until I just looked it up, anyway. The wonders of the internet. These days, at the touch of a button, you can learn all manner of things. You could, for example, go onto Freq and learn, from me, about the other UnicaZürn, whose début album, The Temporal Bends, I am […]
Cooking Vinyl / Recommended Records Pere Ubu evolved in a different universe to the rest of 70s rock. In mainstream history as we know and remember it, The Sex Pistols single-handedly swept aside years of proggishness, clearing a completely new path and establishing the new year-zero (OK, that’s a parodic exaggeration, but it isn’t far from what it felt like at the time). But in Ubu world, then […]
FatCat In a music world where the past is ever present, remarketed and remastered for future generations, The Twilight Sad seem to have chanced upon the dusty old trunk marked “The Eighties” and gleefully plundered its contents wholesale, though highly discriminatingly. Luckily, these resourceful Scots have what it takes to transcend the sum of their influences, rearranging the jigsaw pieces in a reassuringly wrong order – imagine The […]
Earache This takes me back. Sometimes innovations can be pinned down to very specific musical moments. In the same way that Eddie Van Halen‘s tapping on “Eruption” spawned a legion of followers, Mick Harris‘ death blasts on “Scum” set the pace and tone of metal drumming for decades to follow. Its hard to overstate the impact of “Scum” and late 80s UK hardcore. Suddenly everyone was listening to […]
Earache This isn’t what I’d expect from Earache at all. Cauldron are a “traditional” metal outfit from Canada. Not a hint of Grind Madness here. Maybe Cauldron are a sound of things to come. Growling and evil has dominated metal for quite some time now. Yeah it can be great fun, but its a little one dimensional isn’t it? And hey making devil horns and growls is quite […]
Constellation When Toronto’s Do Make Say Think emerged over a decade ago, they came over as an enjoyable but slightly generic example of the Canadian post rock scene of the time, seemingly doomed to live in the shadow of Montreal’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor, before fading away when the post rock bubble burst. In the event, things have turned out very differently and as G!YBE themselves seem to […]
Ipecac Unlike a lot of remix albums where an artist gets a song to work with, the artists on Chicken Switch were given whole Melvins albums to work with. So each track is a remix of a whole album. The Melvins chose experimental electronic artists for Chicken Switch, with such names as Matmos, Lee Ranaldo, Merzbow, Kawabata Makoto and Speedranch getting involved. The result is a pretty extreme […]
Easy Action While a 4CD set of murky cassette recordings of the same set from four different Stooges shows during Spring 1971 is clearly only of any real interest to hardcore Stooges fans, why would anybody not be a hardcore Stooges fan? The three holy relics that have sustained the Stooges’ reputation for the past thirty five years are in themselves perfectly realised works of unparalleled slobbering rock […]