(Sinnbus) I Might Be Wrong come from Berlin and are, apparently, “supported by the Initiative Musik Non-profit Project Company Ltd. with project funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media on the basis of a resolution passed by the German Bundestag.” Splendid! – how can we resist an album boasting such venerable patronage? Naming your band after a song by your fave combo however, is rarely […]
Album review
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uZu Music UnicaZürn was, apparently, a surrealist artist known for automatic drawing. I never knew that. Well, not until I just looked it up, anyway. The wonders of the internet. These days, at the touch of a button, you can learn all manner of things. You could, for example, go onto Freq and learn, from me, about the other UnicaZürn, whose début album, The Temporal Bends, I am […]
Cooking Vinyl / Recommended Records Pere Ubu evolved in a different universe to the rest of 70s rock. In mainstream history as we know and remember it, The Sex Pistols single-handedly swept aside years of proggishness, clearing a completely new path and establishing the new year-zero (OK, that’s a parodic exaggeration, but it isn’t far from what it felt like at the time). But in Ubu world, then […]
FatCat In a music world where the past is ever present, remarketed and remastered for future generations, The Twilight Sad seem to have chanced upon the dusty old trunk marked “The Eighties” and gleefully plundered its contents wholesale, though highly discriminatingly. Luckily, these resourceful Scots have what it takes to transcend the sum of their influences, rearranging the jigsaw pieces in a reassuringly wrong order – imagine The […]
Earache This isn’t what I’d expect from Earache at all. Cauldron are a “traditional” metal outfit from Canada. Not a hint of Grind Madness here. Maybe Cauldron are a sound of things to come. Growling and evil has dominated metal for quite some time now. Yeah it can be great fun, but its a little one dimensional isn’t it? And hey making devil horns and growls is quite […]
Constellation When Toronto’s Do Make Say Think emerged over a decade ago, they came over as an enjoyable but slightly generic example of the Canadian post rock scene of the time, seemingly doomed to live in the shadow of Montreal’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor, before fading away when the post rock bubble burst. In the event, things have turned out very differently and as G!YBE themselves seem to […]
Ipecac Unlike a lot of remix albums where an artist gets a song to work with, the artists on Chicken Switch were given whole Melvins albums to work with. So each track is a remix of a whole album. The Melvins chose experimental electronic artists for Chicken Switch, with such names as Matmos, Lee Ranaldo, Merzbow, Kawabata Makoto and Speedranch getting involved. The result is a pretty extreme […]
Easy Action While a 4CD set of murky cassette recordings of the same set from four different Stooges shows during Spring 1971 is clearly only of any real interest to hardcore Stooges fans, why would anybody not be a hardcore Stooges fan? The three holy relics that have sustained the Stooges’ reputation for the past thirty five years are in themselves perfectly realised works of unparalleled slobbering rock […]
(Éditions Mego) I first became aware of Sister Iodine when my group Fflaps played alongside them in Lille way back in November 1992. I enjoyed them a lot – they played a thrilling high energy no wave inflected punk rock, full of dissonant guitar savagery, filtered through an inscrutable Gallic nonchalance. Maybe their sound at the time owed a little too much to Sonic Youth, whose Lee Ranaldo […]
(Southern Lord) What We All Come to Need is Pelican‘s first full length release on Southern Lord and and continues their elusive path of powerful instrumental rock. Southern Lord have also announced a tour with stable mates Wolves in the Throne Room, which has the makings of some must see gigs. Two fantastic but very different bands. What We All Come to Need is a superb album. At […]
(Geo) Alarm bells ring when the press release quotes from Mixmag‘s review of Roshi‘s previous release And Stars: “Stunningly beautiful Welsh-Iranian electronica torch songs” conjures up visions of dinner party audio floss – an unsuspecting musical victim snatched from a ‘novelty’ country, tacked on to a politely unobtrusive trip-hop beat and polished to a mirrored sheen with Real World™ grade 1000 aural sandpaper. Happily, The Sky and the […]
(Babel) The sleeve notes to By Proxy quote Aldous Huxley: “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” But what Partisans express is not the arcane or ineffable but rather a straightforward affection for a rather uncontroversial jazz, probably circa whenever it was that Eric Dolphy was playing with Coltrane. The Partisans know what they are doing too, with guitarist Phil Robson and sax […]
(Gravid Hands) Leverton Fox have somehow largely cut themselves loose from contemporary cliches. Coming in a gorgeous Crayola-spattered cover, Country Dances is made of equal parts jazzy articulation and jagged electronic invention. Not that there’s anything obviously ‘jazz’ here, just heavily treated percussion and brass being moulded and distressed along with location recordings and plenty of abstract electronic tics and tears. Maybe the spirit of Han Bennink is […]
Dirter Hmm. Nurse With Wound. Nurse With Wound, Nurse With Wound, Nurse With Wound. What to say? Writing about Nurse With Wound is like trying to nail a jellyfish to the fourth wall. After what seems like over nine thousand albums of surrealist sound sculptures, Stephen Stapleton (and partners in crime Andrew Liles, David Tibet, and a whole bunch of other skewed prophets) hasn’t yet lost the ability […]
Load The centrepiece of the recent All Tomorrow’s Parties documentary is a clip from a Lightning Bolt set at the festival back in 2006. The band, true to form, is set up on the floor of the venue and the crowd is jostling around Brian Chippendale‘s drumkit in a claustrophobic huddle of beards and sweaty t-shirts. In between songs, a greasy fan taps Brian on the shoulder, leaning […]
Salamander The Schiphorst 2008 CD is a live album, recorded at the festival held quite literally in the rural backyard of founder member Jean-Hervé Péron, and is as ramshackle as you like. The tone is set by the packaging, which successfully conveys a flavour of the event – the front cover photo depicts a microphone struggling for visibility amid dense clouds of stage smoke, and elsewhere in the […]
Thrill Jockey Are Tortoise feeling their age? Beacons of Ancestorship, their sixth album and first album proper in five years, is littered with references to age. Ancestorship is a reasonable pointer, with Tortoise being the ancestors of course. And the title “Prepare Your Coffin” is pretty explicit. Not that Tortoise are letting it show musically. Beacons of Ancestorship kicks out into a noisy fuzz-fest at points. It was […]
Midwich Records Ellen Mary McGee, founder of folk-rock band Saint Joan, has created a short but magnificently intense début album with The Crescent Sun. Its a dark lyrical collection of folk songs written, sung, and largely performed by McGee. She plays guitar, banjo, glockenspiel, drums, percussion and drafts in the help of other musicians ranging from organists to electric guitarists, which takes folk music into fascinating territories. At […]