Dekorder In their download panic frenzy, labels and artists are coming up with ever more ingenious/desperate ways of providing attractive bonus content with their physical releases. It’s common for CDs to feature bonus video content, but as far as I’m aware, this is the first vinyl record to offer bonus video footage – on the actual grooves of the record itself! The aptly named Rotary Signal Emitter is […]
Alan Holmes
70 posts
Bar-None Even at their peak, The Feelies were not the most prolific of groups, but this fifth album appears almost exactly twenty years after the fourth, making it a substantial wait for even long term Feelies fans. The group’s phenomenal 1980 debut Crazy Rhythms was one of the dozen greatest records of the twentieth century and it was no surprise that it took the group six years to […]
MVD Audio This document of the reformed Stooges‘ performance at All Tomorrow’s Parties on 3 September 2010, seemingly shows the band to have not lost any of their visceral belligerence in the 37 years since the release of their classic third album. The CD contains versions of all eight of Raw Power’s songs (in a different order), together with lost single classic “I Gotta Right,” all . This […]
Bureau B After their welcome batch of [post=”cluster-roundup” text=”Cluster-related releases”], Bureau B now turn their attention back to the present, and a brand new album by one of Krautrock’s spiritual offspring. Kreidler have always seemed very much the children of Can with their real time grooves that somehow sounded more precise than machines. Their earlier austere miniatures have gradually given way to more expansive grooves and tonal palettes […]
Esoteric Six years after their surprise reunion, it still seems unreal to be listening to a new Van der Graaf Generator record. Stranger still, lowering the stylus onto A Grounding in Numbers instills the same rush of anticipation as when I ran round to David Hilton’s house back in April 1976 with the newly released Still Life because he had the nearest available record player to County Records. […]
Bureau B Hamburg’s Bureau B label are doing a great job of keeping the Kosmische blowtorch alight. Treating the legacy as a living heritage, they give equal precedence to lovingly presented reissues of lost classics and brand new releases by survivors of the scene and their spiritual offspring. Alongside brand new albums by [post=”faust-something-dirty” text=”Faust”] and [post=”kreidler-tank” text=”Kreidler”], they have just unearthed a whole batch of Cluster related […]
Topplers Topplers Records are an old-style independent label based in Scotland who specialise in limited runs of beautifully presented eccentric pop gems. Depending on your point of view (or age), it’s a sign of either the label’s willful obscurity or unquestionable genius that a high proportion of these releases are by ex-members or associates of Swell Maps. To someone whose formative years were soundtracked by the likes of […]
Applebush/Easy Action Back in the late 60s, Up were part of the same fired-up Detroit scene that gave us the MC5 and the Stooges but have been largely forgotten over the years. This is perhaps understandable as their only releases at the time were one and a half 7” singles – 1968’s “Just Like an Aborigine/Hassan I Sabbah” and “Free John Now,” which appeared on a split release […]
The Garage, London 11 September 2010 Reanimated musical corpses aren’t much of a news story these days – after The Velvet Underground and Throbbing Gristle reformations, nothing comes as a surprise. I was shocked then to realise just how stunned I felt to hear that The Pop Group had got back together to allegedly “blow the dust off the old songs and pick up where we left off…” […]
Not The Sixties Improvised music is sometimes more interesting in principle than practice, which so often involves accomplished musicians demonstrating consummate skill or immaculate taste (but rarely both at the same time). The Little Princess Orchestra happily have no truck with such nonsense, approaching communal music creation with the same primal inquisitiveness that Neanderthals must have possessed when they first discovered the joy in banging two stones together. […]
Casa Nueva Strangely enough, the first thing that comes to mind when listening to Kevin Dunn is just how quintessentially English he sounds – Brian Eno, Wire, TV Personalities – that kind of English. What a surprise then to read the sleeve notes and find out that he actually comes from Atlanta, Georgia. Having known the name but somehow missed out on the music at the time, this […]
Munster Mid-Sixties garage rock seems in retrospect to have been a grassroots movement on a truly global scale. Forty-five years on, obsessive labels like Munster and QDK Media are still unearthing lost curios, originating from ever more remote and unlikely locations. Who’d have thought that healthy garage scenes thrived in Cambodia and Iran? In comparison, Peru is pretty mainstream by now, a number of compilations having documented the […]
PMag Plymouth’s Pocket Magnetic arrive all packaged in dayglo yellow warning signs – kind of Autobahn meets Computer World. The cover certainly holds a clue as to what to find inside, but there’s more to Pocket Magnetic than a low budget menschmaschine. More than Kraftwerk themselves, Pocket Magnetic remind me a bit of Karl Bartos’ 2003 solo album Communication, with which they seem to share at least a […]
Invada David Wrench received an epiphany while trapped in the worthy nu-folk purgatory of the Green Man Festival last year. Surrounded by polite and twee young indie kids who had discovered acoustic instruments and woolly jumpers, he despaired at how a once radical and iconoclastic social force had been reduced to yet another lifestyle and fashion choice. As synchronicity would have it, at that very moment he received […]
Groenland New NEU! Releases are by their very nature important events, their three classic albums having grown in stature year on year since their original release back in the early 70s. Most serious fans of the group will have bought NEU!4 when Ken Matsutani’s excellent Captain Trip Records released it briefly back in 1995. The masters used, recorded in 1986 but subsequently aborted, were supplied by drummer Klaus […]
Esoteric Forever doomed to be remembered as the one hit wonder god of hellfire, Arthur Brown is surely a true British eccentric maverick in the tradition of Syd Barrett, Peter Hammill and Genesis P. Orridge. After The Crazy World split, Arthur Brown put together the similarly theatrical group Kingdom Come in 1970. The group’s 1971 debut album Galactic Zoo Dossier was recently reissued by the people at Esoteric, […]
Gwymon The “quiet one” from Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci has been somewhat, well… quiet of late. In the five years since his former group officially called it a day we have been treated to no fewer than five releases from his ex-bandmate Euros Childs and yet We Went Riding is only Richard’s second solo offering, following on from 2006’s superb Seven Sleepers Den. As with his Beatles counterpart George, […]
Brigadisco Instrumental surf music seems to be making something of a comeback this year, and a most welcome one too. I’ve recently thrilled to the live sounds of excellent Welsh twangsters Y Niwl on a couple of occasions and now the tide has just washed up this split 12” featuring two groups from Italy’s foam-drenched Tyrrhenian coast. The sleeve depicts a pointy-toothed delinquent with a Black Flag tattoo […]