(Applebush/Easy Action) The collections of ‘rare’ T. Rex material to have appeared in the years since Marc Bolan’s death in 1977 by now dwarf the official output released during his lifetime. Although much of them are deeply inessential, and sometimes indeed unlistenable, carefully sifting through these volumes of out-takes and […]
Alan Holmes
70 posts
(Hometapes) Hailing from Copenhagen, Slaraffenland have made an album that seems quite out of time without sounding in the least bit dated. Their sound is at once infectious and fidgety – a restless pop music that harks back to the days when groups had too many ideas to stop and […]
(Midwich) A folk group from Essex recording a concept album about the Lofoten Islands in Arctic Norway seems an intriguing though ultimately self-defeating idea. After all, isn’t the idea of folk music that it reflects the culture it comes from, rather than holiday snaps of exotic locations? Actually, it turns […]
Islington Mill, Salford 8 December 2009 Ever vampiric, the avant-guard periodically replenishes itself on fresh blood in pastures new. Jazz, psych, prog, industrial and Dance have all fallen prey during the past half century, and now it’s the turn of that seemingly most reactionary of genres, metal. The signs had […]
(Sinnbus) I Might Be Wrong come from Berlin and are, apparently, “supported by the Initiative Musik Non-profit Project Company Ltd. with project funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media on the basis of a resolution passed by the German Bundestag.” Splendid! – how can we resist an […]
FatCat In a music world where the past is ever present, remarketed and remastered for future generations, The Twilight Sad seem to have chanced upon the dusty old trunk marked “The Eighties” and gleefully plundered its contents wholesale, though highly discriminatingly. Luckily, these resourceful Scots have what it takes to […]
Constellation When Toronto’s Do Make Say Think emerged over a decade ago, they came over as an enjoyable but slightly generic example of the Canadian post rock scene of the time, seemingly doomed to live in the shadow of Montreal’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor, before fading away when the post […]
Easy Action While a 4CD set of murky cassette recordings of the same set from four different Stooges shows during Spring 1971 is clearly only of any real interest to hardcore Stooges fans, why would anybody not be a hardcore Stooges fan? The three holy relics that have sustained the […]
(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 […]
(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 […]