A Music Club at The Others, London 25 July 2008 Glass used to have more members, but tonight they’re a duo who make their presence felt as is, shimmering and rattling their soft motorik way through a set which shows copius affinity for the soporific psychedelia of Spacemen 3 and Harmonia‘s elevated drum machine rattle and hum. Guitarist Ben keeps the mood vibrant on a cluster of simple […]
London Fields Lido, London 19 July 2008 Nurse With Wound at London Fields Lido. It just sounds so right. And it was, too: pleasingly strange, charmingly eccentric. It was the culmination of a series of underwater sound events, staged at various venues around the UK under the banner of Wet Sounds. Their website will tell you what you need to know there. Essentially, the set-up is this: music […]
The Underworld, London 15 July 2008 The first time I came across Part Chimp, a few years back, they were tipped as The Loudest Band in London, but now that the reanimated corpse of My Bloody Valentine has reclaimed that title with its rotting, maggoty fingers, Part Chimp have mellowed a little. They’ve also shed a bass player recently, and no doubt that has something to do with […]
Label: ATP Recordings Format: CD Fuck Buttons are fucking great. They are Bristol-based Andrew Hung and Ben Power. Their début album is superb – a huge wall of big buzzing electronic drones with more distortion and screaming vocals that your average stoner/doom metal band. Unlike some (most?) noise electronica though, there is much more to Fuck Buttons than a wall of noise for noise’s sake. Using an eclectic collection […]
Label: Beta-lactam ring Records Format: CD I dunno quite what you call the sub-genre of music which seemed to spring fully-formed from the head of Lee Hazlewood a long time ago before being kicked into touch by the punks and goths, but you know the one I mean. It’s got the Bad Seeds, Gallon Drunk, Tindersticks, Crime And The City Solution and other such magnificent acts in it, and […]
Sounds Familyre With a name like Wovenhand, one could be forgiven for expecting some sort of pagan/folk metal malarkey – you know, that whole portmanteau word thing, like Skyclad or Dragonsbum or something. When you learn that the reference is to hands woven in prayer, however, the picture changes somewhat. Perhaps something a little more fragile, more intimate… Then you put the thing on, and all these preconceptions […]
Label: TeePee Format: CD,2LP Earthless rock. Earthless know that rock isn’t found in the middle of the verse or tucked away politely in the corner of a chorus. Earthless know that rock is huge tube driven distorted excess. And that’s exactly what they did at Roadburn. One and a half hours of primal solo and riff on the main stage of the Roadburn festival. It wasn’t a gig they […]
ULU, London 23 April 2008 Ah, what better way is there to celebrate St George’s Day than to avoid all the jingoistic flag-waving nonsense and go and see a band who come from the other side of the world? Probably none. None whatsofuckingever. First up we get Growing, who I heard described by someone in the queue as “a friendlier Black Dice”. That’s not far off the mark, […]
ULU, London 19 April 2008 Merzbow was brutal. That could be the whole review. We went in knowing he would be brutal and he delivered. We came back out deaf, balance impaired, and probably several shades paler. Merzbow, aka Akita Masami, is one of the pre-eminent industrial noise artists and has had a prolific career since the late seventies. As with some of his other recent releases, the concert […]
Frenzy of the Absolute, by Belgian drone master Fear Falls Burning, is one of the sparsest and most haunting collection of drones it has been my pleasure to hear. It’s big, and sinister, and oppressive, and intensely doom laden. This is the first I’ve heard of his work, and I can see that I’ve been missing something rather special. On Frenzy of the Absolute he works in collaboration […]
The End Skin Turns to Glass is epic stuff, I love it. Huge shoegazer doom from Toronto-based duo Nadja, who began as a solo project of Aidan Baker. In 2005 Leah Buckareff joined him allowing them to leave the studio and go live, though this album was originally released in 2003 in a slightly different version with Buckareff on bass and vocals. Between them they make a sound […]
Label: Southern Lord Format: CD,2LP Boris love to surprise, and the opener “Flower Sun Rain” does just that. They go straight for Jpop in the form of a cover of a PYG song. My surprise came at All Tomorrow’s Parties seeing Earth, Boris, then SunnO))) and, reasonably enough, expecting a good wall to wall evening of drone and just not getting it: country doom, ballads, and on stage […]
Southern Lord The progression from early Earth to modern Earth makes perfect sense, to me at least. Behind the change from dirty droning guitars to country doom, Earth retain a distinctive quality. The sound has changed, and the lineup has changed around Dylan Carlson, but the quality remains: a slow slow moving riff looping round and round, seemingly going nowhere, and catching you out when you start to […]
The Underworld, London 10 and 12 February 2008 The day after a chunk of Camden Market burnt down, Southern Lord‘s finest black metal act touch down in The Underworld. Thankfully the conflagration was at the other end of the High Street, so the gig continued as scheduled with the only hint that something had occurred being the line of police officers across the road by the tube station. […]
The Institute for Contemporary Arts, London 30 January 2008 Here is my ATP festival experience. I always seem to miss the bands that I wind up liking the most. So, having missed Fuck Buttons at The Nightmare Before Christmas I wasn’t going to miss them again when they came to Ithe CA, and they more than lived up to my expectations. First on was fellow ATP label mate […]
Southern Lord Before Sunn O))) there was Burning Witch, formed in the mid ’90s by Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, although none of their recordings actually features Anderson who had started Goatsnake by that time. Crippled Lucifer is a reissue of their 1996 Towers… and 1997 Rift.Canyon.Dreams releases – two discs of fabulous doom. This release of Crippled Lucifer is expanded from the 1998 Southern Lord edition (subtitled Seven […]
Label: Music Video Distributors Format: DVD (Region 0, NTSC) Blind Eye Sees All is a true classic of the live music video genre, and now receives a long-awaited DVD release via those thoroughly hardworking people at Music Video Distribution. So why is it essential? Apart from featuring the world’s most wigged-out, demented and occasionally evilly silly band back in the days when they were busy redefining Psychedelic music […]
The Scala, London 20 November 2007 This has been a long time coming. Last time I tried to see Jesu (supporting Jarboe, in this very venue) it got scaled down to a Justin Broadrick solo perfomance as Final, which consisted of him hunched over his laptop making incredible noises. Now, while this may have sounded awesome, on every other level there was little to distinguish between the experience […]