Robustfellow Prods. Psychedelic trio Был замечен (transliterated and truncated to B-Z for short) bring the heavy noise from Kharkiv, dealt out with a steadfast determination to fry the listener’s brains while shaking the rafters that’s entirely admirable. Their second album стало ещё только хуже (It Just Got Worse) sets out on a mission to befuddle, bamboozle and all-out confuse over five tracks on two sides of compact cassette […]
Album review
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Sumerian The Black comes across as the perfect comeback album for Asking Alexandria, one of the plethora of incredible bands that have emerged from what My Chemical Romance dubbed Generation Nothing. Beginning with a confusing mass of seemingly incomprehensible voices timed with a warbling guitar, “Let It Sleep” gets your heart racing as it builds into an irresistible chant before running off and taking you on a breakneck […]
Instrumentarium Creative Listening is the second album from the South London-based trio, released on lovely vinyl. According to the credits on the back it say it was written and recorded “in strict adherence to the manifesto”, which sounds like something you would see on the back of a Throbbing Gristle or Psychic TV album many years ago. Instead, the manifesto seems to be about the use of electronics […]
Aagoo Diego Martinez has been active as Lumen Lab for half a lifetime, shifting Mexico’s underground electronic music scene into new and varied dimensions well outside its established comfort zones since starting out at the age of fifteen in 2000. Drawing on an evident love of hardcore punk and the many and varied forms that dance music has taken in its long journey from techno into something altogether […]
Öm Announcing its arrival in a trill of shimmering digital FX and a pounding rhythm, the second instalment of K-X-P‘s third album heaves into audibility with all the bombast and finely-tuned ear for a hook which the band have perfected over their last few releases.
No One Deserves Happiness Thrill Jockey Here’s a concept to consider: The Body have dubbed their latest misanthropic missive No One Deserves Happiness as “the grossest pop album of all time”, and they may just be right. Roping in Chrissy Wolpert and Maralie Armstrong from the Assembly of Light Choir to provide a more melodic vocal counterpoint to Chip King‘s enthusiastically atavistic yelping, the duo also utilise a range […]
Freaks R Us The Pop Group‘s reissue project continues apace with the release of their classic 1980 LP For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? This, their second studio album (and their last for 35 years) saw their overt politicisation, as the title will attest. To the cynical and jaded ears of someone coming to this in 2016, like me for example, there’s an endearing, almost […]
Rock Action Mugstar have been at the vanguard of the British space rock revival (though perhaps it never really ever went away) for a good decade and more now, and everything about their music can certainly be assessed in terms as broad and well-trodden as spacious, cosmic and psychedelic, and it conjures up all of the tropes — long hair, biker chic, salad lights, heavy wafts of fragrant […]
Purple Pyramid Beloved Gong frontman and Soft Machine legend Daevid Allen‘s posthumous album, recorded not long before his death in March 2015, finds this most extraordinary of musicians in the company of Don Falcone (Spirits Burning), Michael Clare (of Allen’s own University of Errors and occasional member of the far-out collective Mushroom) and one of three drummers, Trey Sabatelli (The Tubes), Jay Radford (also from University Of Errors, […]
Carpark The world has changed and moved on since Prince Rama were a three piece with ritual psychedelic overtones and a multi-coloured vision of India running through their music. Since then they have been whittled down to the two Larson sisters, who have taken the band in a very different directions from disco to almost noise music. Xtreme Now pushes this envelope even further out there.
Hallow Ground (vinyl)/Umor Rex (cassette) Eis Heauton is an eminently suitable title to describe what Driftmachine are up to on their second album under that name. The duo of Florian Zimmer (Saroos) and Andreas Gerth (of Tied & Tickled Trio) certainly allow and encourage their devices to live up to both the group moniker as well as the Greek term that refers to being in conversation with oneself. εἰς […]
Light In The Attic This Heat This Heat‘s self-titled 1979 début album is a document of three musicians finding their mojo in an abandoned meat locker. Although much of the LP was recorded elsewhere, it generally feels — for the most part — a very enclosed experience, as if (I like to think) you can hear the damp walls of those black’n’white promo-shots reverberating within the fibre of […]
Ankst It should be the case that this band don’t need any introduction, but they do, because the British are rubbish and refuse to celebrate anything beyond narrow trajectories of well-worn paths. There’s little about Datblygu that’s radically awkward or difficult to listen to, just songs in a language that’s not English (namely, Welsh). A big political point for me, especially as the Tories’ death march continues unabated, […]
Drag City (Americas) / Domino (Europe) “My job is just to sit here and sing these songs that have no purpose.” And yet Will Oldham, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy, aka Palace Brothers, aka Palace Music, has been singing these songs for more than two decades, and whether his purpose is found still remains only in the hearing of the listener. Oldham’s back catalogue is an intimidating place to […]
The Arkive Many years ago, I was all about The Bolshoi. Tipped-off by a friend at sixth form college, I borrowed their album Friends from the local tape library (for the benefit of our younger readers, tape libraries used to be a thing back in ancient history. As, of course, did tapes. And libraries.) and instantly fell in love with its marriage of . For a while back […]
Cosmo Rhythmatic It really makes a huge amount of sense for Mika Vainio and Franck Vigroux to have made Peau Froide, Lèger Soleil together, especially considering the latter’s storming Centaure 12″ of a year or so ago. There, Vigroux mashed up the hardest of beats in a welter of analogue electronics that bore easy and justifiable comparison to Vainio’s former outfit Pan Sonic; together they make a heavily […]
Hubro This third release from Møster! shows them in good from, even better than before. On the previous album, Inner Earth, they tried to move closer to prog, but with this album a more confident style is apparent. Although it is , a clear signature of the band flows distinctly throughout the album.
Matador When Savages‘ Silence Yourself burst onto the scene in 2013, with its rock-hard riffs that rocked hard but were never hard rock, it was genuinely refreshing — like a time capsule from the early ’80s that had somehow manage to attract modernism to itself rather than simply aping it, and had somehow managed to get here while entirely missing out grunge and metal. , it was impossible […]