Modisti In 1961, Harold Pinter was in Paris, attending rehearsals for the French production of his play The Caretaker. Pinter’s critical reputation was starting to gain serious traction at this time, and the literary establishment were beginning to write about him as the natural successor to Samuel Beckett in the same way that they had once referred to Beckett himself as the successor to James Joyce. The play’s […]
Album review
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Crass “Feminism – what happened?” (Eve Libertine). (Writer checks footing on soapbox. ‘Secure? Good. Let’s go…’) This is a ridiculous record. I’ve never listened to Crass before, and I was still the other side of birth when it was released. Ridiculous and offensive, really. But not the record itself. Oh no. It’s brilliant. No-one. Obviously. The problem is that this should, by all reasonable rights, be a record […]
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 […]
Onomatopoeia The Rising of the Lights is a record that feels exceptionally English – if someone said it was some hitherto unreleased Canterbury Scene opus, or some obscure Matching Mole side project, I’d likely not arch an eyebrow. It’s a record that’s indebted massively to Drake‘s tenure in Cardiacs, though a great deal less acerbic and more light and whimsical. The first two tracks particularly shimmer in a […]
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 […]
Drifting Falling Kontakte are one of those bands whose music is determined to make all the angst and cares of the world slip away into the place buried far, far away from the territory which they map out with bright-eyed enthusiasm, a landscape participated in through endless journeys and defined by bright colours sharply-defined in broad, dynamic strokes. This is not to deny the hint of melancholia, but […]
Esoteric He is the God of Hellfire, and he brings you FIRE! No really, he does. Back in his 1968 prime, Arthur Brown really wasn’t fucking around. Watch the contemporary Top of the Pops footage of the finest Yorkshireman ever to leave the Dales, his flaming helmet burning like Osiris reincarnated in Manchester, and then try telling me that Alice Cooper – and a whole generation of latter-day […]
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 […]
MVD Audio Where do you start with the Dwarves? Having listened to this album words like offensive and puerile spring to mind; I guess I am a bit older and wiser since I last listened to them. That being said I do have few of their albums in my collection and on very rare occasions when the family are far away and I fancy some mindless political incorrectness […]
Tin Angel Green and grey, the grass and the concrete, the juxtaposition between the natural world and the man-made built environment that must now co-exist with it, ideally in harmony, yet in practice all too often in conflict. Across the 11 tracks contained within, New York-based Canadian cellist Julia Kent builds a beautiful tone poem in which to explore the tensions inherent in humanity’s relationship with the world […]
L.M. Duplication In the early 1980s, Ivo, founder of the 4AD record label (historic home of acts including The Cocteau Twins, The Birthday Party and Pixies, and current label behind Camera Obscura, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Tindersticks and Scott Walker), was given an audio cassette by razor-cheekboned Bauhaus frontman Pete Murphy. Although it was an umpteenth generation copy, and probably sounded like it had been recorded through an […]
Lizard If prog is still heretical, NichelOdeon are some top league profaners. Il Gioco del Silenzio has lots to keep puritanical ‘keep it simple’ sorts foaming: plenty of sax, classical flourishes, frequent time signature changes, operatic singing in Italian… There’s also a generous helping of instrumental sections lingering too long to be realistically be chaperoning the vocals. And by God, it’s some of the most dramatic music I’ve […]
Important The paths of western musicians dabbling in world / global music or whatever you call it these days is strewn with heroic and not-so heroic failures; Bill Laswell please stand up. So when I first heard that members of Earth, Asva and Burning Witch( three personal favourites) and other Seattle luminaries including the great Alan Bishop were embarking on an ethno music voyage under the infantile moniker […]
Sonic Youth Recordings I can still remember the electric thrill that jolted through me on first seeing the picture of Sonic Youth on the rear cover of Bad Moon Rising: clustered around that Ed Gein Halloween scarecrow, under a bruised mid-Western sky, the look of sneering distain on Thurston Moore’s face beneath his thatch of blond hair, awkward yet threatening in his combat jacket. The feeling was crystallised […]
Southern Lord It’s four years since God Luck and Good Speed came out and in those four years I have probably played it as much if not more than any other sludge album or any album for that matter with the possible exception of Harvey Milk.When I heard that Weedeater were releasing a new album I was excited, and unwisely and contrary to my usual cynical disposition believed […]
Northern-Spy At the risk of prematurely blowing my journalistic load, this is a great record. And that’s the bottom line for any review really. It’s not, perhaps, a record that fits with Rhy Chatham’s reputation for Glenn Branca-baiting massed guitar works. Outdoor Spell is nothing like 2005’s Crimson Grail, at least in terms of instruments – trumpets, vocals, percussion for this record, rather than his better-known battery of […]
Drag City It’s easy to forget how dismal the nation felt when the early High Llamas albums appeared. Like an unwanted, puke-spattered drunk still hanging around at the morning-after clear-up of a party, the fag end of the (last) Tory government had clung on for years after Thatcher was driven away from Downing Street for the last time with tears in her eyes. It was an exhausted, morally […]