Label: 4AD Format: CDS, 7″ “Son Of Three” finds The Breeders in ginding guitar-pop mode – but when have they ever been anything else? – chugging along their melodic road with carefree automobile enthusiasm. The soundtrack to a cheery buzzing taxi road movie where the lyrical concerns are as obscure as they are self-assured and disposably neat. Since the theme to Buffyalways sounded lie one of The Pixies‘ […]
Label: Kitty-Yo (Europe) Mute (North America) Format: CD/LP Tarwater return, enigmatic and phlegmatic as ever with Dwellers On The Threshold, charting journeys across an imaginary landscape of shifting borderlands and elusive edges. Opening with the hypnotic and immediately engaging “70 Rupies To Paradise Road”, with words spoken on this occasion by Tone Avenstroup, it is apparent that there is something special about this record. Partly thanks to a […]
Label: Ipecac Format: CD,LP Brimming with fractured beats and an omnivorous musical approach which draws in experimental influences from Industrial, Post-Rock and Jazz as much as from the conscious side of HipHop, Dälek‘s From Filthy Tongue Of Gods And Griots burns with a bright spark of questioning anger, musically as well as lyrically. Having collaborated with Techno Animal, 2nd Gen and Faust on occasion, coming at this outfit […]
Label: Beta-Lactam Ring Records Format: CD, Limited LP Argentinian three piece Reynols have been walking their own particularly strange path for nearly a decade, droning and chugging on a collection of home-made and improvised instruments and guitars, with everything underpinned by the percussive and vocal drive of Miguel Tomasín. Their sound is at first chaotic and then enveloping, with walls of distortion and other effects piled on the […]
Label: Tone Casualties Format: CD Can You Smell The Rain Between? was accompanied by “Enjoy ?” written on the press leaflet. Was I not meant to enjoy it ? Should I have endured an unpleasant hour or so ? The press release sets out to create an impression of something baleful and malign, which somehow made me think of the first Black Sabbath album. Anyway. The Controlled Bleeding certainly […]
Label: Thrill Jockey Format: CDS A five remix CD of a track from his album The Golden Age presents the man in full Seventies flow with lashings of Disco, Pop and Soul all decked out in fake chest wig, flares that defy measurement and cripplingly fashionable platform soles. The almost falsetto voice is all petulance with the ghosts of Marc Bolan and Michael Jackson jockeying for prominence. There […]
Label: Threshold House Format: CD Assembled by John Balance and Peter Christopherson with the early 2002 tour line up of Ossian Brown (from Cyclobe), Cliff Stapleton and Michael York and initially only available at those gigs, The Remote Viewer marks an intriguing shift in the scope of Coil‘s hyper-psychedelic sound. Running on a foundation of Lovecraftian electronics and the sinuous drones of Stapleton’s hurdy gurdy and York’s Breton […]
Label: Snapper Format: 2CD Summoned by that shadowy entity, The Pongmaster, the Ozrics come to you live from the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, a gathering place of eldritch forces. This troupe of space minstrels are celebrating 20 years of tantric trucking. Their vehicle, laden with synthesisers, flutes and guitars, has been unloading at carefully selected sites of festival throughout those years and now a portion of their celebrated utterances […]
Label: Staubgold Format: CD,LP I have to admit that now Faust are probably no longer a touring band I must rely solely on their studio recordings to feed a habit formed in the early 1970s. Their sound may have mutated from the early days to the vast, churning soundscapes of their live work such as Live In Edinburgh 1997 and Faust Wakes Nosferatu, but what it retains is […]
The Garage, London 8 June 2002 Circle look worryingly like they’re going to play pub-Rock covers of Judas Priest – but fortunately nothing could be further from the truth. Finland’s finest space rockers (with the emphasis on the rock) have all the churning drive of Hawkwind at their psychedelic wind-tunnel best, with all the extraneous Blues influences stripped down to the bare rage of fuzz and phaser set […]
Label: Klangbad Format: CD,LP If any band is ripe for some re-mixing, it is Faust. The elements that combine to form their music have already been through a process involving a stripping down, transformation and reformation both in the studio and in ‘live’ performance. To offer these elements to those who are influenced by and in sympathy with Faust’s working methods seems an ideal situation for both translation […]
Label: Rock Action Format: 12″,CDS Three tracks, barely eleven minutes in total and more accomplished than an hour of almost any other band you choose to name. The five piece Kling Klang – the original core trio of Joe McLaughlin , Amy Corcoran and Dave Smyth with Ali McDonald‘s drumming and Peter Smyth filling out the keyboard ranks – are a force to be reckoned with. The band […]
The Garage, London 7 May 2002 There’s been a fair amount of good press come Bobby Conn‘s way since he last visited these shores in February. Appreciative album and live reviews in the national papers. A full page photo (wearing a lurid 80’s shellsuit) and enthusiastic write-up from Ted Kessler in the 4th of May edition of the NME. Badly Drawn Boy Damon Gough‘s description of The Golden […]
Brixton Academy, London 13 May 2002 Quick question. Have you ever done, like, TONS of acid, read the entire works of HP Lovecraft AND watched Audition, all in one night? No? Well, whoever sorts out Tool‘s visuals certainly has. So we don’t have to. Let’s just say “thanks” now, shall we? But of the visuals, more later. Tool. A band I’d avoided for years, cos I thought they’d […]
The Mean Fiddler, London 30 April 2002 Just in time for Mayday, who better to start the riot early than everyone’s favourite shouty German anarchist popkid, Alec Empire? And, truth be told, he doesn’t disappoint. Support Leech Woman attempt to get with the whole Empire thing by scowling a lot, but, let’s fucking face it, in a scowling contest with the boy Empire he’s gonna come out laughing, […]
The Barbican, London 27 April 2002 Part of the Only Connect series of live events, tonight was self-described thus: “The history of computer games has also been a parallel history of the development of electronic music . . . this evening’s performances are less illustrations of these sounds and more works informed by this history.” Well, Plaid set the scene well. They lived up to the computer games […]
Featuring the films of Jean Painleve (1902-1989) Only Connect @ The Barbican, London 20 April 2002 Although Yo La Tengo are most often described in terms of the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth and Can, you only have to take a look at a setlist from one of their annual fund raising “request” shows to see just how diverse their influences and abilities really are. Sun Ra‘s “Rocket No.9” […]
The Albery Theatre, London from 4th April 2002 for 11 weeks Based on Heinrich Hoffman‘s dark fairy-tale Struwwelpeter, Shockheaded Peter originally opened in 1998 and last year alone played to an audience of some 80,000 West End theatre-goers. For its 2002 production, David Thomas & Two Pale Boys appear along with the original cast, to provide their own interpretation of the music of Martin Jacques and the Tiger […]