With two primary percussionists, you could be forgiven for thinking this s a journey into rhythm; but it is far more thought-provoking than that and the opener "The Ggraveyard Of Sharks", with its distorted blasts of debris and simmering radioactive warehouse vibe, is a dense, compulsive introduction. The percussion spills and bursts, drifting into almost silence and the sense of unknown and echoing mystery hangs heavy.
Album review
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Discus It has been a couple of years since Carla Diratz‘s The Scale was released and you could be forgiven if the line-up for that album viewed it as a one-off; a unique meeting of post jazz rock minds. But when Carla contacted Martin Archer to suggest a more blues inflected album, suggestive of the current world malaise, both he and Nick Robinson jumped at the chance to […]
Fyear are a double drummer nine-piece with two spoken word performers which has chosen a suite of seven apocalyptic post-classical soundscapes to force across their message of human mistake, economic disarray and environmental disaster. The sound generated by the group and the thoughts expressed make them a perfect fit on Constellation, sharing recording venue Hotel 2 Tango with many of the label's other artists and a desire to raise consciousness in a new and unique way.
For Maridalen's third album, although the line-up of Jonas Vemøy, Anders Hefre and Andreas Haga remains the same, the venue has changed and instead of the self-referencing village church, they have decamped even further from civilisation to the island of Gressholmen, a boat ride from Oslo, which according to the lovely photographs is an apparently partly abandoned area redolent of the past.
Each subsequent album teetering between this rough'n'smooth threshold, the best a balancing act between and this latest sparsely packaged artefact, revisiting that Zickzack spidery black text and that ever-present dancing primitive swamped here by an acidic yellow, harbours some seriously lovely junkyard / alt-pop moments.
There is an intensity to the delivery especially when set against the stark tones of solo piano, the English words of the self-titled opener dancing into German as Katt Hernandez's lazy violin curls around the piano like smoke. These shards of violin that are spread throughout the album work as threads that draw the stories along, a serrated light into which the voice stares longingly.
For the first album under his own name, a more fluid group of musicians has gathered to flesh out musical expressions that have been approached in a way that highlights the melody and rhythm, but also allows plenty of room for extemporisation. The other lovely thing about the album is that, although it is born of Kjetil's ideas, he leaves acres of space for his guests often moving into the background to allow the likes of Arve Henriksen, Martin Myhre Olsen and Signe Emmeluth to step forward and lead the way.
Computer Students The Conformists have been toiling away in the St Louis hinterlands for nearly thirty years, crafting their awkward, distended “ugly rock music” and stretching it into new shapes, imbuing them with fresh perspectives and leading us away from leaden cruelty to a hypnotic, distorted romanticism that drags new blood and new earth from the cycle of days and seasons. Those arbiters of unusual time signatures Computer […]
Considering their current roster, Constellation is the perfect fit for this series of tracks that explore the interaction between electronics and voice in a completely unhindered and boundaryless fashion. Having spent time in groups and working on the edges of experimentation, this album focuses primarily on what Erika can achieve and how far she can push her voice within the song format.
I think of all the Velvet Underground effluvia this is the record I come back to most. I still massively rate Lou Reed as a songwriter but Nico is sheer vibes, like a cliff-face. From one angle she's massively unaffected -- the thin voice, that querulous vibrato. The proper folk singer approach of singing the notes largely undecorated. Nothing clever in her singing.
Desertshore is not an easy listen. Across eight songs, which together are scarcely more than half an hour in length, Nico leads us on a melancholy musical journey through a portrait gallery of those who were, or had been, close to her: Garrel, Andy Warhol, her mother, Brian Jones, Ari. For a woman barely over thirty, there is already an abundance of loss, pain and sadness here, as Nico plays the role of medium to the voices of those troubled and damaged souls towards whom she had gravitated during her passage through the effervescent 1960s.
Recorded over two post-lockdown days, these recordings are consumed by a desire to play together in a room again after such a lay-off and that air of desire is palpable. This recording, encompassing the second day of the session, is alive with the possibility and their interaction and generosity is plain to hear.
As a fan of Suicide’s tainted pop aesthetic, it’s not surprising that I’m loving the compelling sizzle here. That sleazy love muscle dissonantly dancing in all that analogue compression on Martin Rev's first solo release from the 1980s, now beautifully resurrected by those bastions of contemporary culture, Bureau B.
Rooting For Love is a really welcome return for Laetitia Sadier and one that shows her willingness to merge experimentation with familiarity has lost none of its sparkle and for that we should be grateful.
A pleasant experience that hammocks in your mind's eye, serves as a precursor to the celestial awe of the last two lengthy excursions, both of which are born from a slow and considered start, but evolve quickly to seduce you with their expressive colour.
After some twenty-five years, 4AD are issuing an expanded pressing of the Pixies sessions for the BBC. Encompassing the years 1988-1991, it collects the recordings for five Peel Sessions and one for Mark Goodier in their apparent entirety rather than the bits and pieces compilation from 1998. Spilt across two discs on LP and CD, disc one contains two sessions from 1988 and one from 1989, all for John Peel, while the second disc contains two from 1990, one for Goodier and one for Peel, and the final Peel Session from 1991.
For Jan Bang's latest vocal album, he has gathered a fantastic array of like-minded travellers to assist in pursuing the dreamlike vision for this collection of gentle, heartfelt tales.
Russell Walker's dreamy, louche delivery is ferried by the awkward rhythms and funky wandering bass that we have come to know over such a career. The grooves are often quite forceful and the guitar runs around in circles attempting to settle down but unable to; an antithesis to the gently questioning vocals. The spacey keys that appear from time to time are an unexpected treat and the whole thing bowls along at a fair old lick.