Black Axis I was never a fan of slow music. I have tried to get a kick out of Sunn O))), and my enthusiasm lasts for a while, but then I get bored. Same again if they have some interesting guests, but usually it never helps. But then I heard Kollwitz and their debut Like Iron I Rust. They really made me open my ears to doomlike music […]
Album review
2479 posts
Critical Heights Imagine that Animal Collective could be reformatted like a hard drive. Imagine some mad urfolk indie scientist, their senses dulled by slow cracks and too good weed, decided that the shimmering pop tarts of Merriweather Post Pavilion was just too much to bear, too damned hummable and so somehow found a way to just suck the Baltimore boys back to a time, circa Spirit They’re Gone, […]
Universal Egg I originally received a copy of this album a few days after the end of England’s summer riots. The town where I grew up had been one of the worst hit; I watched a business that had been there for over a hundred years burn to the ground as I frantically tried to contact family and friends who still lived there. An element of fear still […]
Easy Action Over the years there have been innumerable live Hawkwind releases, of varying degrees of officiality and legality. The majority of the officially sanctioned releases are worthy of attention, even those put out by latter-day, non-classic line-ups. The unofficial releases range from essential documents of the psychedelic warlords in full battle cry, to recordings so laughably poor that they were quite plausibly recorded on a dictaphone by […]
Paw Tracks “Rest in Peace”, the opening track of the latest Prince Rama album opens with a slightly strangulated House howl, the kinda thing you might have gurned circa 1990, which is then savagely dismissed without a thought, a discarded, non-devotional whore… the drum rumbles begin and then the Dead Can Dance Indian sweeps and suddenly we’re deep into what might be a psychosexual memory of Sinbad movies… […]
Vaultworks Following his return to live performance over the past year, Brian Lustmord’s increased activity shows no sign of slowing down. He has clearly been spending some time in the dusty vaults below Castle Lustmord rummaging for lost treasures and well-matured morsels to toss to his hungry followers. Last year’s Heretic was a fascinating alternative version of his classic 1990 album Heresy and now further exhumations bring us […]
Occultation In The Fall and The Blue Orchids, Martin Bramah founded two of the greatest British groups of the punk and postpunk (or indeed any) period. Any man responsible for Live at the Witch Trials and The Greatest Hit could happily retire in the certainty that they had contributed more to the world by the age of 23 than the rest of us will do in a lifetime. […]
Occultation Paul Simpson is the Adam Adamant of the music world, a gentleman adventurer awoken from a twenty year slumber to find himself in an unfamiliar world that both disgusts him and spurs him into action. The Coldest Winter for a Hundred Years finds him back to resolve unfinished business, sparking his swordstick on the banes of modern life and fearlessly banishing its villains with deftly soaring melodies. […]
Ellen Southern Well it’s 1969 OK, we got a war across the USA. As The Stooges were unleashing their debut album amidst the campus chaos unfolding in protest at the ever escalating Vietnam conflict, the Led Zeppelin was slipping its mooring to begin its stratospheric rise into the Rock firmament with the release of I and II, and Pete Townsend’s story of a deaf, dumb and blind kid […]
Leaf I didn’t hear Roll The Dice’s first album Live In Gothenberg but a quick bum around the blogs finds mentions of Tangerine Dream, Cluster, Kosmische slop in general (I’ve already written at least four reviews on this site where I reference Klaus Schulze, so this time I won’t). You can imagine. People either do this stuff well (Emeralds) or they don’t (insert unfave here). In Dust, their […]
Drag City It’s fair to say that the motorik template is now so firmly embedded into popular music that a waft of Klaus Dinger‘s beloved rhythm can trickle over the PA in an mid-range department store pretty much anywhere from John Lewis to Galeries Lafayette via Macy’s and no-one browsing there will blink an eye. But as the shoppers drift on to finger the latest seasonal offerings longingly […]
Important You might have heard this record before. If you’ve scuttled and scurvied around various Asian cities, found bands playing deep into the night in Ho Chi Minh cocktail bars, Tokyo splatterfest beer halls, Bangkok’s secret lock-ins. , playing because it’s the only thing keeping them up at this late hour. You’ll have seen them through a gauze of over-the-counter codeine, maybe sucked your consciousness through Mai Tais […]
Lo Alternative Frequencies Typical. A great summer album appears just after a dismal, wet August Bank Holiday weekend. Actually that’s not really fair. Whilst this year hasn’t exactly challenged 1976 for the ‘Golden Summer’ crown, nevertheless on Sunday afternoon we climbed into the car, slapped this onto the stereo and drove down the sun-dappled lanes of the Chiltern escarpment on the Oxfordshire Plain. Down the twisting, billiard table […]
Punch Drunk The title is revealing: throwaway and heartfelt, this is certainly intrusive (this is not ambient, except in the sense of enveloping) and it is a little incidental, a little sketchy in both senses of the word (cf everything else by Ekoplekz) but there’s more to it than that. There’s something else here. This is Ekoplekz unleashing his noise horde and the title might almost be read […]
Bureau B Some medical beast had revived tar-water in those days as a fine medicine, and Mrs. Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard; having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the best of times, so much of this elixir was administered to me as a choice restorative, that I was conscious of going about, smelling like a new fence.” Poor […]
Splendour This is music made from orchestral peak experiences and emotional aggregates; it’s big, a little brassy and, while perhaps not as overwhelming or pompous or Wagnerian as it might have been, it nevertheless has intent, like Laibach without moustaches and Lenin vests. Finnish quartet Siinai have created 21st Century marching music for non-psychick youths. You’ll have heard some of the guitar + synth textures before but rarely […]
Arka Sounds OK, so the thought of the world trance music wonders Suns of Arqa doing a cover versions album of Leonard Cohen songs didn’t at first leap off the page or even into my CD player at first. However, after the first initial shock of this venture the album works exceedingly well and creates . It would be pointless to compare the tracks to the original songs […]
Southern Lord It’s time someone finally said it; Ben Koller is quite possibly the Dave Lombardo of his generation. Now, Lombardo’s technicality may be outclassed by modern day metal standards, but what few drummers can match still is his propulsive feel. Koller is one of the special few. When he flies into an up-tempo 4/4 beat, you know it’s going down. And he absolutely tears it up on […]