(Éditions Mego) I first became aware of Sister Iodine when my group Fflaps played alongside them in Lille way back in November 1992. I enjoyed them a lot – they played a thrilling high energy no wave inflected punk rock, full of dissonant guitar savagery, filtered through an inscrutable Gallic nonchalance. Maybe their sound at the time owed a little too much to Sonic Youth, whose Lee Ranaldo […]
Pop Montréal, Ukrainian Federation, Montréal 3 October 2009 The gathering krautrock-keen fans filled both levels of the seated, community-centre vibe auditorium known as the Ukrainian Federation which has hosted the likes of Patti Smith, Joanna Newsom, Loudon Wainwright III, and A Silver Mt. Zion. For Faust’s first ever show in Canada, heralding their entrance, Jean-Hervé Peron started by squawking and squealing on a trombone from the back of the […]
(Southern Lord) What We All Come to Need is Pelican‘s first full length release on Southern Lord and and continues their elusive path of powerful instrumental rock. Southern Lord have also announced a tour with stable mates Wolves in the Throne Room, which has the makings of some must see gigs. Two fantastic but very different bands. What We All Come to Need is a superb album. At […]
(Geo) Alarm bells ring when the press release quotes from Mixmag‘s review of Roshi‘s previous release And Stars: “Stunningly beautiful Welsh-Iranian electronica torch songs” conjures up visions of dinner party audio floss – an unsuspecting musical victim snatched from a ‘novelty’ country, tacked on to a politely unobtrusive trip-hop beat and polished to a mirrored sheen with Real World™ grade 1000 aural sandpaper. Happily, The Sky and the […]
(Babel) The sleeve notes to By Proxy quote Aldous Huxley: “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” But what Partisans express is not the arcane or ineffable but rather a straightforward affection for a rather uncontroversial jazz, probably circa whenever it was that Eric Dolphy was playing with Coltrane. The Partisans know what they are doing too, with guitarist Phil Robson and sax […]
(Gravid Hands) Leverton Fox have somehow largely cut themselves loose from contemporary cliches. Coming in a gorgeous Crayola-spattered cover, Country Dances is made of equal parts jazzy articulation and jagged electronic invention. Not that there’s anything obviously ‘jazz’ here, just heavily treated percussion and brass being moulded and distressed along with location recordings and plenty of abstract electronic tics and tears. Maybe the spirit of Han Bennink is […]
(Percepts) Apparently, Teleseen is the ‘primary alias’ of producer Gabriel Cyr, who claims to be “on the vanguard of combining dub and reggae with experimental electronic music” – a claim that’s true only in the sense that Daz really is a ‘revolutionary new product’, ie., not true at all. Such resort to unmediated hype is to be expected from someone who makes such a clunky show of his […]
Casa Del Popolo, Montréal 16 September 2009 Another Alien8 extravaganza at Casa Del Popolo in Montréal: guaranteed visceral jiggling with nice folks who make confrontational music. A panda bear stands behind a flower-strewn hill, arms aloft, beseeching a soldier. Rainbow beams explode from the bear’s mouth through the soldier’s torso. The contradictory poster for this Alien8 happening may have the candy-coloured hue of yesteryear’s psychedelia, but don’t expect […]
Dirter Hmm. Nurse With Wound. Nurse With Wound, Nurse With Wound, Nurse With Wound. What to say? Writing about Nurse With Wound is like trying to nail a jellyfish to the fourth wall. After what seems like over nine thousand albums of surrealist sound sculptures, Stephen Stapleton (and partners in crime Andrew Liles, David Tibet, and a whole bunch of other skewed prophets) hasn’t yet lost the ability […]
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, […]