Sublime Frequencies The third compilation of Omar Souleyman’s Syrian party music to be released by Sublime Frequencies doesn’t require much in the way of context for new listeners. It’s a dance-pop album. All that really matters is whether it’s catchy and whether it makes you want to flail around making an utter goon out of yourself. Happily both criteria are met with a resounding YES. Despite being culled […]
Album review
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Atomhenge Ah, the mighty ‘Wind. Where to start? Let’s assume that readers have at the very least a passing knowledge of Hawkwind‘s classic 1970s material and mythos. That decade’s long strange trip went roughly thus for the Hawks: early ‘electronic barbarian’ days in the Ladbroke Grove freak scene, then the never-bettered industrial strength trance-riffage of the Space Ritual era, before moving on to leaner, tighter, sci-fi dystopianism in […]
Denovali French black metal hardcore act Celeste has realesed an album that is a proper dirty heavy black screaming noisy rotten piece of work that really takes me to some of my darkest places. Not only being dark, they are occasionally so heavy it makes my head want to go down and the rest of my body move underground. Don’t get me wrong; they are still a hardcore […]
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, […]
Ambolthue/Synesthetic Recordings Apparently this is the debut CD of Torstein Wjiik, which is really hard to believe when you look at his discography, where you can find lots of MP3 and CD-R releases. Wjiik is the alias of Norwegian experimental artist Kjetil Hanssen. Knowing that this young man has been around and producing sound since 2004, some would say it is about time he appeared on the proper […]
Pica Disk The May edition of Jazkamer‘s monthly series starts with an almost twenty minute long drone track. It’s very deep dark and with mellow synth sounds to start with, moving about in my headphones, almost without recognising it, the track creeps upon me, moving more, being more intense and distorted. I hear adding layers, adding sounds, but almost not noticing it. I am feeling relaxed by this […]
Thrill Jockey Wow, this is a really different kind of Trans Am album. But wow in general, too, it’s also a pretty fucking great album. The first thing that struck me about Thing was its soundtrack-like quality. At points it is more like a vision of Blade Runner rather than the electro rock we know and love from Trans Am. Thing began life as project for a sci-fi […]
Thrill Jockey Lazer Crystal come from Chicago and this is their first full release. The title MCMLXXX is a real declaration of intent, or at least a real advert to the albums contents. And it is, but at the same time it isn’t. I’ve heard many bands that are really stuck in the 70s or 80s to the point of sounding like a stale copy. Lazer Crystal aren’t […]
Pure Pop For Now People Along comes the latest release from PPFN, the label run by Joachim Gaertner of German psyche/kraut powerhouse group S/T, and it’s another that explores the territory somewhere on the borders of electronica and a peculiar concept of pop music. As with most of PPFNs releases, the album is a heavyweight vinyl LP with equally characteristic high-quality hand-made covers. In this case its a […]
Klangbad Faust were the most radical and baffling of all the 70s German groups to acquire the ‘krautrock’ label. Their music was only tangentially related to the likes of Amon Düül, Can, or NEU! – on the group’s early albums, musique concret, tape loop experiments, folky guitars, parping saxophones, proto-industrial noise and impenetrable dadaistic lyrics all rub up each against each other in an endlessly fascinating musical and […]
Southern Rules of music journalism, part 479. Don’t trust any band, artist or performer who claims to actually be from space. Roky Eriksson? Roky Eriksson was actually NOT from space. He just took long holidays there. Sun Ra? Sun Ra was also NOT from space. Like Captain Kirk, he wasn’t FROM space; he just worked there. A cosmic commuter, if you will. (Interestingly, Hawkwind were once OFFERED a […]
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 […]
Applebush/Easy Action The world finally caught up with The Stooges when punk exploded, while Iggy himself ingeniously morphed into an alienated teutonic modernist, simultaneously retaining his appeal with the punks while appearing several steps ahead with his two 1977 Berlin albums The Idiot and Lust for Life. By 1979 however, he seemed to have back-pedalled slightly, recording the New Values album with latter day Stooges James Williamson and […]
Earache Canadian speed merchants Annihilator have really gone back to their roots for this outing, and it is going back a fair bit. Annihilator is their thirteenth studio album since 1989’s début Alice in Hell. They’ve undergone numerous line up changes over the years with guitarist, and these days also vocalist, Jeff Waters remaining the sole original member of the band. For all the years and changing line […]
Earache Wow, they don’t make em like this any more. What am I talking about, this is how they make em these days. Its like Nirvana and grunge never happened. White Wizzard, along with fellow Earache stable mates [post=cauldron-chained-nite text=”Cauldron”], are part of what sounds like a NWOBHM/hair metal revival. White Wizzard give us speedy riffs, powerful melodic vocals, and big anthemic sing along choruses … if you […]