Sub Pop Over the last thirty years and ten or so albums, Built To Spill has been a revolving cast of characters, alumni of the independent music scene, and bold and adventurous musicians. Through it all though has been singer / guitarist and principle songwriter Doug Martsch, who has commanded the ship as benevolent leader or welcoming collaborator. He has woven his narrative, ever-unfurling guitar style and yearning, […]
Third Man (US) / White Rabbit (UK) Something that’s always useful, before going into a book, is to have some agency which is managing your expectations. Perhaps ultimately that’s why we have reviewers, like me, to hold your hand through a thing. We do the tutting so YOU, dear reader, don’t have to. Foreshadowing yeah? I’m going to go for the good bits off the bat. Harry Sword is […]
Odin The latest release from the fourteen-piece OJKOS is an absolute joy, with its agility and pace really belying the group’s number. It is beautifully summery with a tropical beat to opener “Safari Sundowner” that allows flute, glock and horns to shift and turn at will. It seems a far cry from Scandinavia, its sunny uplands shimmering with the arcs of Henriette Eilertsen‘s flute. Even Eivind Helgerød‘s cute […]
Century Media Electric Callboy are in many ways the very acme of a contemporary metal band; or maybe to put it another way, they have become that very acme. Their first decade was not perhaps as distinctive as their current incarnation, which may have something to do with the arrival of their new vocalist Nico Sallach in 2020. We shy away from describing him as a frontman, for […]
Intravenal Sound Operations Gargoyles are odd little things; like a lot of Christian ephemera they’re reminders of the impure relationship between the faithful and the spirit realm. In Catholicism, the church is a woman to whom the priest is married, hence their continued spurious and damaging homophobia within that institution. The major distinction between a gargoyle and a grotesque, legendarily, is that a gargoyle acts as guttering, a […]
(self-released) Produced for sale at UnicaZürn’s incredible IKLECTIK performance earlier this year, this thirty-minute CD-R features three live improvisations that are totally in the zone without edits nor overdubs. The slow and deliberate churn of track one, “Ancident”, sets the scene, its scattering fractals spaciously , an Arabian flavour that seems to tattoo the amorphous sands, pencilled in by scarab-chasing harmonics.
Discus It is incredible how many albums sax player Paul Dunmall has been involved with over the years with his own name groups running from quartet to octet. Here we have the second outing for his quintet, but essentially it is the sextet without trumpeter Percy Pursglove, so the comfort with which the players interact is there , with perhaps just a little extra space for them to […]
Label Kim Myhr is such an avid collaborator, releasing an album a year since the dawn of time, that when something comes out under his own name, it is definitely time to sit up and take notice. Recruiting some fellow travellers and long-time recording artists like Hans Hulbækmo and Ingar Zach amongst others, this latest album takes the premise of 2017’s You/Me and seems to expand it, pushing some […]
Polydor There is certainly something special about secretly listening to this album sitting on a dirty Paris street lined with overexcited kids eagerly waiting for those venue doors to open, to flood into a tiny downstairs room to hear these songs played live, some for the very first time. Yungblud is a twenty-five-year-old singer from Doncaster in England, who came up into the alternative pop-punk scenes over the […]
10 to 1 It is always heartening to see a new release from Mark Kluzek‘s Doomed Bird Of Providence, because you know that something of historical significance will have piqued his interest and then has prompted him to gather around friends and collaborators to turn it into some sweeping musical extravaganza. This time around, The Doomed Bird consists of eleven musicians plus the fantastic artwork of Judi Dransfield […]
Mute This one-shot adventure between Dome’s Bruce Gilbert, Graham Lewis and Mute Records‘ Daniel Miller is a sparse and abstract beauty rubbing up against some glowing new wave edginess, a crooked mix of soundscaping with a smidgen of songwriting. A serious art over commerce venture, that the relentless squishy bounce of “Hill Of Men” typifies. A soft and fleshy techno to muffled distant voices and a subtle hum […]
Leaf A welcome return from Szun Waves after a four-year break finds them in shimmering, dreamlike form; horns, synths and percussion in perfect unison, Earth Patterns conjuring up a journey through the kind of landscapes that are hard to focus on, wreathed in smoke or scattered with dry desert dust. Opener “Exploding Upwards” has the kind of slow drift that builds out of sight, with mournful horns sleepy […]
NEOS What an exciting listen — that creeping tension weaving the fragments is ace — a stretchy saturate for all that delicious atonal action to dance in divergent colour and sparing tuning. The surging symmetry of all those haunting little details jostling for your attention, somewhere a drunken Kurt Schwitters stumbles into a squabbling Punch and Judy, stapled in an uneven measure of ulcerated piano. The , leaking […]
Discus This new trio, formed by Discus head Martin Archer along with pianist Pat Thomas and percussionist Johnny Hunter, seems to be as much about the spaces in between the notes as about the sounds and textures themselves. Spread over four pieces that hover in the hinterland between dreams and waking, the sounds in opener “Rotten Start” eke out of the speakers, hints of horn more breath than […]
Zehra Devotional music is always so awkward to write about, and this collection of Gnawa music is no exception. And for why? Well, it’s never entirely clear what folk mean by devotional music, and that gets less clear the less information there is available about a group. And the Gnawa, well, they’re apparently the descendants of enslaved folk brought to Morrocco. What kind of devotional are we talking […]
Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil Dais As Coil albums go, Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil is an assault on the senses, as was the first time I saw them live. “Persistence is all” couldn’t have been a better expression of the fact, that skin-shredding noise / strobe fest of a finale still scars me with satisfaction twenty-two years later. One of those gig experiences that has yet to […]
Tenor-Vossa After the relatively recent reissues of Glass Bead Game and Between Happiness And Heartache, the time has finally come for new material from Breathless. Their gaps between album make the Blue Nile look prolific, but seriously each outing is worth the wait. Having prepared songs for this release, not only did they have to cope with lockdown delays but close to the time of recording, drummer Tristram […]
Faber and Faber Cosey Fanni Tutti is likely best known to readers of Freq as a musician of some reknown, part of the imperative of Throbbing Gristle and with a substantial discography (Chris and Cosey etc). Art mavens know her variously for her work in pornography and mail art (also etc). As of 2017, she’s found a new life as the kind of writer who gets featured on […]