Label: DHR Format: CD,2LP Lurking behind the Atari Teenage Riot pastiche cover and name is of course none other than Alec Empire, but in ever so strange a mood as to be simultaneously at his most inspired and deranged. Sourced entirely from the programmable music edition of a Gameboy, We Punk Einheit! takes the machine to its limits. Bleeping and blipping like a demented games console circa 1983, […]
Album review
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Label: Staalplaat Format: CD Stepping to an appropriately martial, mechano-deconstructed beat, The Tape-beatles‘ Good Times weaves a mix of political speech snippets, training-film educational banalities delivered with the wooden certitude of a rigid economic concentration on accumulation of capital and the promotion of that greatest lie of all, free-market competition, into a sometimes thumping orchestral soundscape. Delay is the key, as fragments of a cultural canon splinters in […]
Label: M Records Format: CD,LP Ryan Moore‘s fifth solo album as Twilight Circus is billed as “Dub-Rock-Electronica,” which is about an accurate decription as needed – but with the emphasis as ever on the bass. Moore (who also plays bass with The Legendary Pink Dots, and is likely to batter audiences with inflatable hammers, while dressed in feather boas) has drawn a lot from the UK dub scene […]
Label: Klangbad Format: CD,2LP The big Krautrock album of ’99? Well, it’s certainly caused a lot of excitement in those circles. Fresh from turning London’s Garage into a gas chamber and ejecting long-time figurehead Jean-Hervé Peron, Faust land in the recorded arena with Ravvivando – twelve tracks of uncompromising noise of vintage quality. Phew! Original members, Hans Joachim Irmler and Zappi Diermaier have assembled four cohorts to continue […]
Label: WEA Format: CD,LP More Dub-based at heart than anything else, Bengali Bantam Youth Experience shows a musical development from Black Star Liner‘s début Yemen Cutta Connection which results in a more streamlined experience, with crisp production letting the bass reverberate around and under delicate keyboard tones, Bollywood strings and all manner of Eastern percussion. There’s some upbeat skanking beats on tracks like “Low BMW” and the laid-back […]
Label: Staalplaat Format: CD Originally released in 1993, The Grand Delusion takes as its themes the very idea of the American nation as a construct of media and cultural signifiers, especially as contextualised by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent events of the Gulf War. As a work of what The Tape-beatles mockingly trademark as Plagiarism®, the record also served as the soundtrack to their […]
Label: Asphodel Format: CD,LP The Heretic of Ether is one of those albums that comes out of the blue, hovers overhead and arond the ears and works its way into the subconscious. Seemingly a concept album concerning the life, death and re-birth of one Gashka Gavör, Moroccan Bedouin (or Badawi) heretic of the title, it makes a timeless quest romance in musical form which buzzes with passion and […]
Label: Silly Boy Lemon Format: CD Dave Brooks has had an interesting musical career, involving a court case taken against him by the local authorities over his playing his bagpipes on Hampstead Heath, a charge he defended by contesting that the pipes are a weapon of war, not a musical instrument. During the compromise which was reached in settlement, it was observed by the judge that bagapipes only […]
Label: Matador Format: CD I respect any album that contains references to Harry Harlow‘s somewhat cruel tests on Rhesus monkeys. The album is Quasi-Objects by Matmos, and the track is of course “Cloth Mother/Wire Mother”. You may not be surprised to find that the baby Rhesus monkeys preferred the cloth mother to the wire mother. What is more surprising is the fact that someone felt the need to […]
Label: Quarterstick Format: CD Rachel’s may be the logical conclusion of the tradition of Tortoise and Slint. This is not to say that they sound like either of these bands, but rather that one may trace an evolution in contemporary American music from a highly developed No-Wave to an end of millennium conservatoire music. Of course this music is not really specifically millennial either and at its best […]
Label: WEA Format: CD First off-yeah, I was suprised as fuck, too. Ministry. New album. Live dates. There’s a whole Snake Plissken thing going down here. (As in, I thought you were dead.) And I am pleased to report, continuing the Plissken metaphor possibly a little too far, that this album is no Escape From LA. I mean, yes, it rocks. As in ROCKS. As in R-A-W-fuckin’-Ks. Like several bastards. Absolute bastards. Nay, a WHOLE […]
Label: Go Beat Format: LP,CD Having ploughed the returns from their first two proper album releases into a full studio set-up, Fridge have been playing with the new toys to some good effect it seems. While there is much indeed to be said in favour of the recording of albums at home on four-track machines within tight time-constraints, previous releases have always seemed like not-quite complete sketches. Eph […]
Label: Warp Format: 2×12″,CD The first challenge to Autechre‘s latest release is which side to play. I received a blank CD, no markings, nothing to even hint that it had passed through the hands of Messrs Booth & Brown. I’ve not seen the version that’s going out for release, but I hold out the hope that it too will be just as uninformative. (It’s black – Ed.). EP7 isn’t really an EP, as it lasts for 70 […]
Label: Output Format: LP,CD Sharing less of the rock part of post-rock of his other band Fridge, multi-instrumentalist Kieran Hebden expands into wider areas with his debut album as Four Tet, leavening the cycling live drum kit and guitars of opening tracks like “”The Space Of Two Weeks” and “Chiron” with increasing amounts of synth burbles as well as more prominent Jazz elements. What emerges is a transition […]
Label: Cherry Red Format: 2CD Okay! Hands up everyone. Gimme your Alien Sex Fiend Moment (if you don’t have one, go out and buy this album and wait until something funny happens. May spoil the whole point of the review, but quite frankly, who gives one?). Mine? Here we go. Off me tits, so to speak, watching Sex Fiend at The University of London Union, oooh, a fuck […]
Label: Acrylnimbus Format: CD Hmmm. where to start with this one? From the packaging (which is, incidentally, very nice) and the track titles (which are, incidentally, very funny) you’d be forgiven for expecting something along the lines of Nurse With Wound. Funnily enough… …though I don’t remember the boy Stapleton ever having a passion for Drum’n’Bass. Think about that last sentence. Think harder. Yup, they said it could […]
Label: Satellite Format: CD Hmmm – I found myself reciting a mantra over and over as I loaded up the pretty blue-backed disc… “Please don’t let this be like Marilyn Manson, please don’t let this be like Marilyn Manson, please don’t…” It isn’t. At all. Psycho patience may as well get in the car and volume up, rev up, run over some beautiful people along the way. Like […]
Label: City Slang Format: CD,LP There’s a thing with prefixes and the word “Rock” (or “ROCK!” if you prefer) – Post-Rock, Art-Rock, sometimes (dare I say it) Prog-Rock. Salaryman seem content to slide about in this general area, not quite difficult enough to be Post-Rock, too much fun to be Art-Rock (“Thomas Jefferson Airplane” as a track title for example. Cool!) and never going quite that little bit […]