Thrones & Dominions tl;dr – the sort of prog album that’ll tickle prog-fanciers silly, and the sort of album that . ANTA, née Snakes on a Plane, which I’m sure they’ll appreciate being reminded of. Second album, but they’re all been around Bristol and Bath for something like a thousand years […]
Kev Nickells
202 posts
x2 Listen 1: Wahey, new Pet Shop Boys! [listens a bit] Wahey! Pet Shop Boys! [scratches] Wahey. Hmm. [more scratching, rolls fag] Is this… uh… well, albums aren’t necessarily the best format for pop. [wanders off] Popjustice.com – probably the only place that talks about pop seriously without going all […]
London 11 July 2013 So the first problem is always going to be that, writing after the fact, things get a bit distorted. Nazoranai were utterly amazing. To the extent that what, on any other night, would’ve been a totally formidable set from the Flower/Corsano Duo ended up falling flat […]
Kev Nickells interviews Bristol* noise merchants Thought Forms about their new album Ghost Mountain, among other things: *Or are they…? Listen in to find out.
I have a deal with a mate that if either of us ever manage to shout out ‘Baker Street!’ in the middle of a John Butcher performance, that person will receive a crisp £10 note and a hearty pat on the back. The irony being that, even if either of […]
An arena, London 2 March 2013 HERE IS A RUBBISH PICTURE THAT LOOKS LIKE GIRLS ALOUD HAVE AN ACTUAL TANK THAT HAS DISCO LIGHTS RATHER THAN WEAPONS AND IS THEREFORE ALL QUEER-FRIENDLY AND SUCH: The arena is a complete bastard. I’m no Belgianologist, but it could fit Belgium in it, […]
Tmymtur –Yusei ENSL AMDC So the blurb reads that Yusei (“Spring voice”) is all about frequencies that you can’t hear, up in those registers over 20kHz beyond human hearing. Which reminds me of those audiophile tropes about how analogue LPs transmit sounds well beyond human threshold which make for ‘fuller’ […]
Fingertips Oud Vibrations. It’s a pun, you see? You do? Good. So, the fluff is that these are two of the earlier ventures by jazz hands into Arabic lands and this is a two LPs on one CD of two chaps who worked with Arabic stylings. There’s a faint sense […]
Autostatic “It sounds like someone flushing a magical toilet over and over” – this courtesy of my dear partner. She then mimed flushing a toilet for a bit, did a puzzled face, then decided it was the Victorian style of toilet with the flush you have to stand up for, […]
Mute Problem the first: a month or so really isn’t enough time to deal with this. What I really wanted was a properly stodgy, fagend cash-cow studio slurry. Selfish, but it’s much easier to go ‘while there’s highlights on discs 2 and 3, ultimately it’s for the Can fanatic’. The […]
Crammed Discs The sleevenotes talk about this band being derided for being from the poor part of town; . I can’t help but feel that this is Tanzania’s answer to Happy Hardcore. Moreover, all the songs are towards the pulmonary-antagonising side of tempos, and tend to get faster. They’re also […]
Staubgold The press blurb says “If Morton Feldman, John Cage and David Tudor had formed a rock band, they might have sounded a bit like this.” Now. Far be it from me to pick holes in press releases [and to be fair they were quoting a review of an earlier […]
Sub Rosa Timeless Waves apparently started life as a ‘sonic work’ for a multi-channel installation of some kind (though the notes are unclear as to whether it was a conventional performance or gallery deal). I can get a bit sceptical of these things translated to disc, but luckily, Erdem Helvacioglu’s […]
Striate Cortex Striate Cortex seems to have gone, in just a few years, from another ‘yet another’ label putting out tiny editions of unheard of artists (or ‘no-audience underground’ as radiofreemidwich have it) to having a pretty heavy catalogue of exquisitely-packaged things. I can’t claim to be a completist but […]
Earache A-side – “You suffer…” FDR stands for full dynamic range. Remember that, I’ll come back to it in a minute. This is one of those records that I’ve had a million conversations about. Heavy crust/grind/metal/metalcore peeps will claim various things about it – it’s not the best/ it’s the […]
Terp It’s got text in Amharic on the sleeve! I assume! It’s about single length! It uses exclamation marks to describe itself, and this seems awesome! Because the music is awesome! … I remember when I first heard drum n’ bass, on Peel, sometime in the 90s. It was weird […]
(Not on label) Buh…yeah. -rock suffixes are lame. But this is good. GOOD I tell you. Ole’ timey two guitars n’ drums-core. Possibly fans of that K Records fallout . Y’know, Sleater Kinney, Urusei Yatsura, that kind of thing. But instrumental. No vocals and no need. And it’s steeped in a […]
Fire Right yeah, so – Pulp. WHAT I REMEMBER of the time of Different Class is that there was a bit of a sense of them being very much a “ooh, follow your dreams, keep plugging away and eventually you’ll make it” thing, in terms of what the press were […]
Important Oh, caveats. They’re buggers right? Yeah. Well, here’s one anyway – without wanting to get into the ‘how do ‘we the west’ appropriate non-Western music?’, there’s always a massive problem writing about this sort of thing. I’d not suggest that my lack of knowledge of Carnatic/ Hindustani music is […]