Regular readers will be aware that Datblygu are probably one of the better bands of this world, for my money, and there's a sideline there of enjoying an amount of Welsh-language music. I'm not as up as I should be, but I do know my Llwybr Llaethogs from my Fflaps. So imagine my delight (etc) when everyone's favourite Leeds-based Welsh-language mopey goth band released their debut.
Album review
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...Bureau B have taken it upon themselves to make it available again and not before time. Over eight unlikely tracks and forty intriguing minutes, Jimi takes us on a trip through his mind, paring the analogue with the synthetic in a way that was unexpected at the time, but in reality was a matter of necessity. Whatever the genesis though, what came out was strangely beguiling and due to the keenness of Tommi Gronland and Mika Vainio and their fledgling Puu label, so began a fascinating thirty year career.
...the more positive community-minded corners of social media and the increasing ease of home recording has produced a near-ceaseless flow of artists entangled in electronics, hybrid instrumental set-ups and wordless conceptual constructions over the last six or seven years. Yet, for all of this near-endless accessibility, it still requires small enterprises with big enthusiastic hearts and calm organisational heads to provide platforms for making sense of it all. One character providing such contextual curation services is the Doncaster-based Mat Handley.
Electronic / classical composer Tristan Perich has prepared the most intense vibes related album I have heard in a long time. Teaming up with Ensemble 0, they have taken three vibraphones and created a suite of glittering, polyrhythmic movements that showcase the instrument at its lightest and most fleeting; but allied to these, Tristan employs 1-bit electronics as a counter to the vibraphone sweetness.
As the Renaissance Man of the recently reinvigorated Paisely Underground scene family, Steve Wynn has enjoyed another purple patch over the last decade or so -- with a redemptive five-album reunion run for The Dream Syndicate and the first volume of his autobiography being top of the creative output list. So much so that we haven’t quite noticed the absence of a proper solo studio long-player since 2010’s Miracle 3-backed Northern Aggression.
Rafael Anton Irisarri and Benoît Pioulard don't convene too often to produce Orcas albums (this is their third in ten years), but on those occasions that they do, the time just drops away. That heat-haze waver that threads throughout the album, the soft warmth of Benoît's voice; an enunciated dreaminess that he shares with the long-lost Eric Matthews is all here as we would hope. Everything seems to shimmer as if heard through the clearest water and there is sedate sense of control that is struck with Ride-like explosions of shattered guitar splendour, showering over the lugubrious bass.
Ireland's Córas Trio tread a fine line between folk, improv and jazz; and on this, their first album, they have utilised the disparate elements of violin, guitar and percussion to create a suite of songs that with one eye on the past have their feet set firmly in the future. Their recognition of the tradition of Irish music is countered with how best to move it forward, and with such titles as "Jackie Fitzpatrick's" and "George White's", you feel that a get- together with friends down the local bar is as important an element as the songs themselves.
More than a decade since the last MxBx record and what have they learnt? Mercifully, not much. If you were blindfolded you'd probably pick this out as a Melt-Banana album even if your ears were clogged up and you were a bit hungover.
Their 2016 album release A Young Fist Curled Round A Cinder For A Wager was a startling journey through a hard Northern life, the ups and downs of the protagonist rendered in vivid detail by Johny and then instrumentally brought to life by Mark and James. It gave Rothko a new lease of life and certainly seems to have been mutually beneficial, with Mark undertaking duties in the touring Band Of Holy Joy.
Spiralling breath sonically sycamored; some songs feel more Cocteaus, others more Budd, with a few blurring the boundaries between each. His melancholic piano gloves that Cocteau glisten rather well. A lonely ambience full of rainy-day reflection, the malign beauty that stalks some of us more than others. The comforting echo of his Pearl collaboration with Brain Eno here somehow more skeletal in its haunting, comfortably offset by the other's opulence.
Nordic travellers Stein Urheim and Mari Brunvoll have played together on and off for some years now, their delightful vocal duet a magical salve to the current malaise. Bringing on board tricky trio Moskus to add some unscripted textures to some recently recorded songs is a recipe for genre-dodging if ever there was one. The quintet knows absolutely no boundaries and over the course of this forty-five or so minutes, they play the field as if trying to break the Guinness World Record for most diverse album.
Skilfully smearing together layers of guitars, bass, synths, piano and drum machines, with guest input from returning long-term accomplice Dustin Dybvig, in a four-track recording set-up, Corridors is rudimental as well as otherworldly in its rendering.
...if you know Galás of the last twenty-five years or so, you probably know what to expect. All 'covers' (if that description still holds any water to what Galás actually does) with her on vocals and piano. In this case a live recording from Seattle, US in 2017.
...the LIVE energy this duo are giving off here is insanely satisfying, pushing a mirage of over-driven echoes into the red. A devotional daggered addictive that whirls around shrill and crowing, wounded in the rewind dry whirr of a tape player. The cicada rub of maracas accenting them strumming lacerations, those stippling busts of air-raid siren, all abruptly cut off shortly after the nineteen-minute mark.
Drag City The Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, paraphrasing Aristotle (or maybe Aquinas), suggested that “the whole is something else than the sum of its parts” and here we are: two artists that I’ve followed and respected, both of them arch innovators with collaboration in their bones, joining their heads together in a new beast and it’s set me into a flutter in several ways.
Pearling a Pokemon itch, Xylitol opals an enviable optimistic. The maligned clubland default of drum'n'bass given a serious facelift as those needling hi-hatted hares of "Jelena" leap into some heavenly lifts and whispery ambient glows, something Kate Bunnyhausen expertly showcased at her recent Acid Horse outing.
I kept imagining that what I was hearing is what might happen if somebody kidnapped the B52s, got the band drunk and started slowly torturing them. It is not so much post-punk as post-apocalyptic, with rhythm crawling from flaming wreckage, a spiral of unsteady guitar body-slamming the bass and drums as the voices taunt and tease.
The first thing you notice is the sweet tone of the sax but the rhythm section, if you can call it that, of guitar and drums is irrepressible. The cheeky, supple lines picked out by the guitar support the sax well, but it is all subject to moments of doubt. Playful electronics fizz around the main instruments and all these differing facets take it in turns to propel.