Load The centrepiece of the recent All Tomorrow’s Parties documentary is a clip from a Lightning Bolt set at the festival back in 2006. The band, true to form, is set up on the floor of the venue and the crowd is jostling around Brian Chippendale‘s drumkit in a claustrophobic huddle of beards and sweaty t-shirts. In between songs, a greasy fan taps Brian on the shoulder, leaning […]
Salamander The Schiphorst 2008 CD is a live album, recorded at the festival held quite literally in the rural backyard of founder member Jean-Hervé Péron, and is as ramshackle as you like. The tone is set by the packaging, which successfully conveys a flavour of the event – the front cover photo depicts a microphone struggling for visibility amid dense clouds of stage smoke, and elsewhere in the […]
Thrill Jockey Are Tortoise feeling their age? Beacons of Ancestorship, their sixth album and first album proper in five years, is littered with references to age. Ancestorship is a reasonable pointer, with Tortoise being the ancestors of course. And the title “Prepare Your Coffin” is pretty explicit. Not that Tortoise are letting it show musically. Beacons of Ancestorship kicks out into a noisy fuzz-fest at points. It was […]
Midwich Records Ellen Mary McGee, founder of folk-rock band Saint Joan, has created a short but magnificently intense début album with The Crescent Sun. Its a dark lyrical collection of folk songs written, sung, and largely performed by McGee. She plays guitar, banjo, glockenspiel, drums, percussion and drafts in the help of other musicians ranging from organists to electric guitarists, which takes folk music into fascinating territories. At […]
Riot Season In which New Zealand polymath Campbell Kneale (Birchville Cat Motel, [post=”love-destroy-world-hate-numbers” text=”Our Love Will Destroy the World”], Lugosi, Sunship, etc etc etc) sets about recreating the thunder, chaos and crushing despair of one of World War I’s bloodiest battlefields, using sub-bass guitar drones with occasional percussion and samples. As a bleak and harrowing record, Verdun stands possibly without peer. Sonically, Black Boned Angel owes much to […]
London 26 July 2009 Southern Lord have been doing good business resurrecting their roster from the first time round, with some spectacularly lavish re-releases from Burning Witch, for example, making it strange to reflect that their twentieth anniversary isn’t too far off yet… So it’s only to be applauded that Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley of Sunn0))) (etc) are back with Runhild Gammelsæter and the rest of Thorr’s […]
Coptic Cat Well, here it is at last, the long-awaited new full studio album from David Tibet‘s ever-shifting collective Current 93. Their first since 2006’s apocalypse opus Black Ships Ate The Sky, it’s quite a departure from that album’s panoramic folk sound. Anyone who didn’t see any of their recent shows may be in for quite a surprise, though it’s a good one. Gone are the delicate crystalline […]
Full Time Hobby It seems like only a few months ago that there was an ill-fated, though entirely well-intentioned, campaign on popular young people’s stalking tool Facebook for Malcolm Middleton‘s cheery doom and gloom singalong “We’re All Gonna Die” (from the album) to be the Christmas number one. Actually, it was about eighteen months ago, but in that time the lad from Falkirk’s been busy, with another album, […]
Southern Lord Black Cascade, the third album from Wolves In The Throne Room, is truly epic stuff, clocking in at four superb monolithic compositions. For me it ticks all the black metal boxes: big guitar riffs, big keyboard parts, triplets galore, and tempos that run from the majestically slow to death blasts and back again. Black Cascade is symphonic, but not as furious as, say, Emperor. Nor do […]
Holy Mountain Restraint is not a word you usually associate with psychedelia. “Excessive”, yes, “silly”, perhaps, but “restrained”? Nonetheless Dos, Wooden Shjips’ follow-up to their 2007 self-titled album, is for the most part a very restrained psych record. On each of the album’s five expansive tracks the bass and drums are pared back to a hypnotic krautrock throb, and while the guitars enjoy a few overblown wigout moments […]
Interlink Audio Berlin-based Artridge, self-proclaimed purveyors of post-industrial chamber music and imaginary soundtracks, are back with a new full-length CD on German label Interlink. With a four-year gap since their previous album, Artridge have developed a knack for effortless eclecticism and a talent for lush orchestration. This all-instrumental CD takes in elements of krautrock, trip-hop, metal riffing, soundscapes, jazz, gentle breakbeats, and even a touch of the blues, […]
Nadja Bardens, London 22 March 2009 Having missed Nadja in 2008 I was on a mission to get to Bardens in Dalston. Despite the whole of East London being inexplicably gridlocked this particular Sunday evening, I wasn’t going to miss Nadja a second time. Fighting my way through the traffic was worth it, Nadja were awesome. Standing either side of a table of effects pedals, Aidan Baker and […]
The Cesarians – Flesh Is Grass/Woman Imprint Hailing from Hackney, The Cesarians have been packing out gigs for a while now, their frenetic live performances assuring them of a huge cult following (I thought I had a huge cult following once; unfortunately it turned out to be a typo. When he caught up with me he kicked my head in). So it’s interesting to see how their filthy, […]
Crystal Antlers – Crystal Antlers EP Touch and Go From the Comets on Fire school of sunshine-and-reverb-addicted, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink meltingpot psych come Crystal Antlers, the band with possibly the most unjustly off-putting name of the year. If you’re interested, the contest for the band with the most deservedly off-putting name of the year is currently a dead heat between Does It Offend You, Yeah?, and the Ting Tings. Anyway. […]
Monotonix – Body Language EP Drag City Israeli rock bands – I’ll bet’cha can’t name two. I’ve got a theory that countries with compulsory military service always have rubbish music scenes, because there just aren’t enough bored kids hanging around to start bands and go to gigs and buy records and scare old people and all that. The little buggers are all too busy doing press-ups, being shouted […]
A Slow Rip – For The Time Being Endgame For The Time Being is a double CD compilation of ambience, taken from material originally released between 2004 and 2007 by A Slow Rip on 7 CDR albums. The Wollongong based trio take the name from the initials of their first names: Rob Laurie (guitar, percussion, vocals and wind instruments), Ian Miles (analogue synths, guitar and bass), and Phil […]
Various – Advance 2000.3 Label: Mute Format: CD What are the folks at Mute up to right now? Advance 2000.3 isn`t really an album as such. It’s a compilation of the up and coming Mute (and Novamute) releases. You won’t find it in the shops, unless you work in the shops. 2000.3 has new releases from Erasure, Goldfrapp, Add N To (X), Cristian Vogel, Echoboy, Holger Hiller, Foil, […]