Esoteric It’s always a daunting prospect to spin a new Van der Graaf Generator album for the first time: will it live up to expectations? Can the group still be vital and challenging thirteen albums and forty-eight years into their “career”? The answers are inevitably a disappointing “no”; and a second and third spin do very little to change that perception.
Album review
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Rocket Girl It might well be the case that you’ve spent the last twenty years not listening to Urusei Yatsura. Which is fine, I guess, but it does put you and I rather at odds. There’s only one band I own every release of and these are they. I have three copies of their first LP (1x clear, 1x orange, 1x blue, two with “geek rock” tattoo intact). So. Readers expecting […]
Turquoise Coal Spectralate‘s second LP finds Annie Pye and Alan Holmes (Ectogram, Parking Non-Stop, Fflaps, The Groceries, etc) embarking on a musical journey around Ynys Môn (also known as Anglesey to Anglophones), and it’s interesting to ponder briefly if the All Terrain Badgers of the title refers to beasts they encountered en route (whether real or imagined) or metaphorically to the duo themselves.
Hideous Replica It’s not clear how composed this is, but there’s bits that have the quality of being like someone’s writing harmonies (ahem) while under the influence of ketamine — it’s definitely happening, but at a pace just that smidge too slow to discern quite how it’s moving. Stephen Cornford I’m less familiar with but Daniel Bennett‘s; well, he’s always been a frighteningly meticulous musician and his attention to […]
Reprise Ten years ago, the already legendary My Chemical Romance released their third studio album. Now, The Black Parade represents so much to their fans; at the time of its release, the album transformed their fanbase into what is called the MCRmy, later to be called the Killjoys, an army that would wage war upon those who would attempt to stop them from being different, from being themselves They […]
Le Petit Mignon / Staalplaat Like the ages-spanning computer game tropes that oki-chu‘s eye-popping artwork celebrates and its music soundtracks, the dayglo psychedelic sounds of Sammo Hung Quest II: Cursed Demons Season are splattered across the soundscape, mirroring the pixelated sprites from the LP labels that find themselves reflected in the half-face visor of the skull-necklaced cyborg gamer that adorns the LP’s unfolding outer sleeve.
Chicken Coop It’s a dull September afternoon, and it’s been tipping down for hours now. In contrast to this dismal weekend, Simeon Coxe‘s gentle trippy vibes are happily churning my ear, gliding the consciousness blissfully.
Artoffact The Gregory Jacobsen cover wrapping this double album is a thing of warped beauty, but in no way prepares you for the flash flood of fret gymnastics it contains. An opener that literally takes your breath away, “Driving Through Darkness” is bloody brilliant, all hot proggy curves and carbolic rubs with a satisfying Pere Ubu-like underbelly chugging away all superconductive, combustive and ravenously hungry.
Rise The world transfigures us, little by little. Every day we are little bit different: we are okay; we are numb; we are broken. But our main goal is to be all right with who we are in the present. Not always happy, not excellent, not bad, not sad; just okay. And as we go along we pick up pieces of ourselves that we have lost, or new pieces […]
Drag City Back in 1978, The Mekons were riding high at the forefront of the emerging post-punk movement, only to seemingly miss their chance and disappear from view like so many others from the scene. Their resurrection with a new line-up in 1984 was as unexpected as the new direction they took. In the thirty odd years since, they have developed a music that sounds terrible in theory […]
Bad Seed It will cause no great controversy if I say that Nick Cave has been writing about love and death for most of his career. If The Birthday Party were the gleeful rictus grin of the Grim Reaper, then later work with the Bad Seeds saw him embrace grief as a response, rather than savage laughter.
Front And Follow Rolling in on thecacophonous curls of “Yadnik”, battering the shore like the after-FX trails of the still-crashing soundwaves of Flying Saucer Attack‘s Rural Psychedelia, Kemper Norton‘s third full-length album slips in from the sea like a summer storm heavy with stories to be told.
Cherry Red Early on in Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, Mick Farren’s majestic – and comic – memoir (its early years set against the growing pains of British youth culture), he relates an incident that took place whilst visiting his friends Paul and Beryl in Brighton one grey bank holiday weekend in the mid-Sixties. Sitting on a wall outside the Metropole Hotel, amidst the hand-to-hand combat and full-on […]
House Of Mythology Well, this is a complete surprise, bassist and founding member for Killing Joke, Youth (AKA Martin Glover) is supplying an excellent arena here for David Tibet to shriek, howl and party the apocalyptic on Create Christ, Sailor Boy. Youth did so back in 1984 as well, one of an extended list of people who configured Current 93‘s Golgothan Nature Unveiled, but this latest transfiguration as Hypnopazūzu is thankfully not as bleak, the […]
Cherry Red Nobody is evil, nobody is good All the guilty people have misunderstood I have a bit of a man-crush on Momus. It goes right back to 1987, just after this retrospective begins. He can’t do any wrong (even when he does lots of things wrong) and I’m probably the wrong person to do this review…
4AD The trailers for The Childhood Of A Leader tease of a tense cinematic feast, a chilling meditation on the rise of twentieth century fascism, that like White Ribbon before, focuses on the emerging evil of the next generation, here in the form of an angelic seven-year-old boy with a terrifying talent for manipulating the puppet strings of everybody around him to devastating effect. The film’s turbulent nature certainly finds […]
Riot Season So that time that the Butthole Surfers made a grindcore album — well, something closer to a “pure” grindcore album, anyway — that really happened, right? When Shit And Shine went back through a lysergic wormhole to an alternate 1989, cribbed the murky production (lack of) values and gibbering vocals, then shunted everything through as many effects as possible? That’s what this is, isn’t it? Because Teardrops sort […]
Southern Lord “Goooing to the chapel and we’re… gooonna get- wait, we’re gonna get WHAT???” Asschapel. They’re called Asschapel. Which is the best name for a band ever. And Southern Lord have just reissued their entire back catalogue. And, as befitting a band called Asschapel and a label with the rep of Southern Lord, it’s heavy as fuck.