4AD The trailers for The Childhood Of A Leader tease of a tense cinematic feast, a chilling meditation on the rise of twentieth century fascism, that like White Ribbon before, focuses on the emerging evil of the next generation, here in the form of an angelic seven-year-old boy with a terrifying talent for manipulating the puppet strings of everybody around him to devastating effect. The film’s turbulent nature certainly finds […]
Michael Rodham-Heaps
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Zoharum At high volume this album is an immersive experience, throat-sung waves of wordless drone washing over you. A raspy, sinking sand that has a succulent SunnO))) depth to it. Full of rhythmic intones and surfacing undercurrents, half-formed vowels floundering in the slow friction, a slight bounce of drum skin barely detectable, a few padded percussives creeping its corners.
Bristol 20 July 2016 This was a hotly anticipated outing that didn’t disappoint. Belly were back for all the right reasons, including a bucket of cash the merch stall was obviously raking in. It all kicked off on the full-on assault of “Dusted”. That gut-quaking bass, those weevil guitar curves all thrown in thunderous unison. Tanya‘s and Gail‘s vocals blasting the human flower. A beaming rainbow that had you […]
Aphelion Editions What an opener, the snaking shape-shifters of track one take some beating. That soup of drifting unease that Liam McConaghy and Stuart Chalmers conjure up is first rate, trickles your skull in Del Toro-like shivers underpinned in subtle carcasses of snare. Emotional myriads that take pleasure in peppering you in paranoia, picking the locks to the less-travelled corners of your mind in revox doubles and warfing […]
Bureau B That bass is über meaty on the first track, steroid-injected, heavy on the recoil as a heavenly bounty of guitars burn up around it with Makoto intensity. A wow of toasty angles, quiver-toked in flinty sparks that curve-claw at the dark. This is just brilliant, clanking metallics and all, gathering in claustrophobic waves of pure joy and exploding contours. Wah-faring frets flying, mangled, percussively dancing that […]
4AD Now lushily re-duxed on girly marbled vinyl, Belly‘s first LP Star was/is a bright young thing, a glass-refracted dream stirring up a Brothers Grimm-like syntax. Tanya Donelly‘s bewitching delivery, swimming in our head, deceptively sweet with a sting of crazy paved darkness bleeding on through. Driven out on the feel-good adrenalin of immaculate guitar work with pools of teasing melody, Star is a super-assured vision, with some songs […]
4AD Dead Can Dance (1984) Born out of the dark and then-derelict Isle if Dogs in London, where Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry scratched out a living since relocating from Australia. This was Dead Can Dance‘s début – a collection of songs that had been percolating away for over four years before.
More Than Human A nice splash of exploratory electronics on this first LP from Beattie Cobell. A meld of surgical coldness with dirty analogues that comes across like a modern-day Throbbing Gristle eagerly eating into its rhythmic nihilism. Filling dimensionally light algorithmics with Reichian slips, euphoric juxt-a-posies and flirting undercurrents. Kinetic investigations creeping with interest.
“Noinge” / “Gloakid With Phendrabites” Dirter Promotions The first side is the sound of the playful Band Of Pain remixing Nurse With Wound‘s A Sucked Orange in a game of arrant right-angles and ink-splattered goodness where the original source material is utterly fucked over in malfunctioning attention deficits that splutter like a cyborg cat with a data hairball.
Bristol 9 June 2016 Matmos‘ new record Ultimate Care II is centred round a washing machine, and lo and behold that’s what is centre stage tonight at The Lantern, two microphones pointing at its innards. The rest of the stage is overrun with the band’s tech, squeezing the support UnicaZürn into the far reaches.
Zamzarec This is a truly haunting experience; think Mazzy Star with a whisper of Shelleyan Orphan or Alison Shaw from Cranes, but softer, swollen in the ambiguous. Its language a diffusion of hues, suggestions for your mind to play with, backed by switchblades of horizon that pull at the frame, inverting the scenery in cycling hooks of guitar, droning key-lines, tumbling percussives.
Play Loud! Oozing an off-kilter chemistry, Guru Guru were full of escape plans and wormholing excess filled with a real “let’s see what these toys can do” verve. The first three tracks of their début album UFO (re-released at last on both black and turquoise vinyl by Play Loud!) hold court to a certain rock joie de vivre, a freeform adventure that surges at you both explosive and mesmerizing, […]
TRI This is the first 46,000 Fibres release in eleven years and it’s been well worth the wait. I first experienced The Fibres back in 1995, snapping up their début offering Emanates at a local record shop that has long since disappeared back into the anodyne dullness of town. A strange brew that exacted a curious pull – a joy of glinting directions and vascular honeycombs. Now, years later, […]
Bureau B Some lovely head-spheres to had here; Bureau B have a penchant for headphoned fayre and this gem of new production that gathers together three renowned Berlin guitarists certainly hits the mark. A tirade of Neubauten‘s Jochen Arbeit, Ziguri‘s Günter Schickert and Schneider TM‘s Dirk Dresselhaus that literally dissolves into one cohesive whole, their usual weapons of choice circuit bent into a necropolis of simmering silica in […]
Rocket On the back of last year’s Infinity Machines double comes this dinky three tracker, the traumatic jazz of yore siphoned into some gloriously sculpted discord – 36 minutes that are seriously pissed off. A notion that gathers momentum on the slinky low-slung beginnings of the opener – a Jah Wobble dub, all languid and wanting. “There’s too many faces in the mirror!”, exclaims Paddy. “I can’t decide […]
Ici D’Ailleurs It’s great to hear Semtex again and what a fizzing refresher of fortitude “Sleep” still is – a bastardised drum foray tied to a ugly slurry of overdriven noise. Yeahhhh, as first tracks go, this is a tight shiny driven thing, a dervishing centrifuge storming the brain in raw energy.
Edamame The sky is bright blue, adrift with white motherships of the imagination – an inbound vision on which the shimmering haze of this recent four-tracker from Lush glides. Blind Spot marks a welcome return to the fray after the tragic death of their drummer halted their desire to continue far too many years ago. Listening to this handsomely designed EP (something Chris Bigg of 4AD fame has […]
Village Underground, London 19 March 2016 The expectation was unbearable. The support act, Autrenoir (an alliance of Paul Régimbeau — AKA Mondkopf — and Greg Buffier of Selenites and Saáad), had finished half an hour ago and the Nurse With Wound contingent were assembled hirsute by the side of the stage.