Thrill Jockey When TNT came out, some of the band members mentioned whilst interviewed that using Pro Tools had given them too many options, and that they had feared at one point that the album would lack direction. Lacking direction would be a harsh criticism for TNT, however it could definitely be said that it’s a sprawling album, and can become aimless and like something akin to sonic […]
Album review
2424 posts
Thrill Jockey By the time the second Tortoise album appeared on the scene, there seemed to be an inordinate amount of time dedicated to the discussion as to whether they were in the spirit of Prog, or Krautrock. This debate seems a little perplexing now, especially when one remembers that Tortoise started operations in the early to mid 90s. However, it’s important to remember that the year Millions Now […]
Thrill Jockey The arrival of Tortoise brought along a discussion surrounding the widespread use of a new genre term that described a supposedly emerging musical genre. The term was ‘post-rock’ and, at the time, seemed to be the focus for as much debate as the band were themselves. Supposedly coined by music journalist Simon Reynolds, the term appeared to be much maligned at the time. Deemed as po-faced, as […]
Ritual Productions The drone is king, it calls from the high mountain tops, it echoes in the valleys, it is the sound of ancient ritual or the smell of incense from temples, long may the drone exist. Bong have had number of releases over the past couple of years, many of them in limited editions; this is their second release on Ritual Productions and consists of two tracks […]
Exotic Pylon Jonny Mugwump’s label is throwing up some breathless oddbits. Every release is a tabula rasa, a slash and burn policy. Exotic Pylon is as fidgety as the radio show, a spastic in space and time and genre (never truly separated). He’s releasing stuff like a psychedelic squid. So far (and this is just the stuff I’ve managed to keep up with) there’s been the sweetly benevolent […]
Light In The Attic The Seventies’ favourite candy-coloured California cowboy, Lee Hazlewood stands alongside the likes of Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg in his stature (if not physically) as one of those perennially louche raconteurs of the counterculture whose influence has accumulated and expanded over the passing decades. The throaty baritone, the whiskey and tear-stained sheets, the twang and strum of a full-spectrum pop sound which still managed […]
Mute If someone had the bright idea of making a low-budget, crowdsourced skiffy film about Nazis found on the dark side of the moon, which artists should be asked to provide the soundtrack? Laibach, of course – who could be better suited to orchestrate the sound of fucked-up futurist fascism, the SS in space, of the ultimate Nazi holdout story – and so much the better if it’s […]
Mordant Music The sound of two hands not clapping. This is the latest monster release from the ever-prolific Ekoplekz, this time seeing him flip cassettes from selected live bits and bobs (more bobs than bits, judging from his live performances) to studio improvisations and back again. There’s a wealth of material here, unformed and fruity, mangled like he likes it (like we like it) Echo dominates, nothing goes […]
Clouds Hill I must admit that the thought of a new release from Gallon Drunk was a bit exciting. Lead singer, guitarist and organist, James Johnston has been a revelation to experience in recent years with Faust, though mostly creating fantastic sounds and noises with his guitar and organ. Terry Edwards comes along as a guest with his saxophone occasionally, creating additional depth to whatever is happening on […]
Rocket Girl I listened to this without looking at, without even seeing the title and it was still the first chimes of Summer. This is Spacemen 3 warm, a kind of druggy depth that might almost be twee if it wasn’t so headstrong, so sure of where it was going. I feel like I’ve spent over a year listening to Autumn and Winter records. The Tory/Lib Dem coalition […]
Baskaru Snoring into view, Francisco López‘ umpteen-hundredth record (many of them untitled, and here each track is unnamed and numbered instead) crepitates and crunches, rustles, whistles and sussurates with the close-mic’d presence of musique concrète, up close and present in the ears. López’ attention to detail is almost disturbingly intimate, sound sidling, shuffling and creeping around the stereo image. Across two discs of supremely directed environmental manipulations and […]
Hydra Head Twenty plus years and albums into the long strange trip that is Circle, Manner confirms that they are still a seriously out there band, whose œuvre can encompass punky noise and proggish metal with equal dexterity, a group who are never less than tight and whose playfulness is as convincing as their steely-eyed commitment to the very meaning of rock. This is the band who spearheaded […]
Fire The hardest working little man in show-business is back. Inventor of the Continuous Ca$h Flow System™, Anti-Christ, appliqué kitten fan, Chicago’s finest Juedo-Christian edutainer, Bobby Conn has, since his first album in 1997, taken more sobriquets for a walk than Tom Cruise has made turgid sequels to Mission Impossible. In a career with ludicrous highlights such as the original video for “Never Get Ahead” (eye-shadowed Bobby in […]
Bureau B This probably isn’t the D.A.F. you’re thinking of. The lines aren’t clean, the electronics are sort of around but incidental and hidden in shards of guitar noise and (real) drum bashing. This isn’t even the D.A.F. of the “Kebab Traume” track on the C81 compilation which was a gateway drug of a track I fell in love with and which set me on a path to […]
DFA Picture a disillusioned man – still barely 40 yet struggling with a spirit crushed by professional failure and a heart broken by disastrous marriages – reaching a point of exhausted resignation and moving in with his aunt. Withdrawing from life, in a few years time he will be dead. That man was Dr Hans Prinzhorn, a German psychiatrist, who earlier, in the course of his short and […]
Fruits de Mer Krautrock is a brilliantly meaningless term, full of meaning. Head Music attempts to show why. There’s motorik music (there’s some on here) which is often what people mean when they say krautrock (they mean it sounds like Neu! or the way Can’s drums flip over one another) and there’s the dense wiggy kosmische space music (which means it sounds like Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream). […]
Rune Grammofon Volcano The Bear have long done their best to confound the simplicities of classification; they’re not simple to sum up as an experimental or avant-garde project (whatever that might mean exactly), and on Golden Rhythm/Ink Music the range of emotions and auditory adventures they offer up is one which can easily – glibly even – be described as such, but which is also a case study […]
Riot Season Once upon a time, some enterprising music writer came up with (or popularised at least) the term “arsequake” to describe the sort of heavyweight sludgy rock which occasionally crawled out of Camden to force itself onto unsuspecting grunge audiences in the Nineties; usually talking about the sort of sounds which stepped very close to the definition of music, then trampled on it, bit off its head […]