Thrones & Dominions tl;dr – the sort of prog album that’ll tickle prog-fanciers silly, and the sort of album that . ANTA, née Snakes on a Plane, which I’m sure they’ll appreciate being reminded of. Second album, but they’re all been around Bristol and Bath for something like a thousand years in something like a million bands, many of which were brilliant but under-recognised (Loxondonta anyone? Thought not) I’m […]
Kev Nickells
204 posts
x2 Listen 1: Wahey, new Pet Shop Boys! [listens a bit] Wahey! Pet Shop Boys! [scratches] Wahey. Hmm. [more scratching, rolls fag] Is this… uh… well, albums aren’t necessarily the best format for pop. [wanders off] Popjustice.com – probably the only place that talks about pop seriously without going all Paul Morley/ “I’ve got a crit theory degree but no actual liking for women/ gay folk” – has […]
London 11 July 2013 So the first problem is always going to be that, writing after the fact, things get a bit distorted. Nazoranai were utterly amazing. To the extent that what, on any other night, would’ve been a totally formidable set from the Flower/Corsano Duo ended up falling flat in my retroactive estimations. That sounds a bit “damning with convoluted praise,” but it’s not meant as such. […]
Kev Nickells interviews Bristol* noise merchants Thought Forms about their new album Ghost Mountain, among other things: *Or are they…? Listen in to find out.
I have a deal with a mate that if either of us ever manage to shout out ‘Baker Street!’ in the middle of a John Butcher performance, that person will receive a crisp £10 note and a hearty pat on the back. The irony being that, even if either of us weren’t excessively polite gig-goers, we’d still have problems remembering how to speak. Butcher’s entirely one of the […]
An arena, London 2 March 2013 HERE IS A RUBBISH PICTURE THAT LOOKS LIKE GIRLS ALOUD HAVE AN ACTUAL TANK THAT HAS DISCO LIGHTS RATHER THAN WEAPONS AND IS THEREFORE ALL QUEER-FRIENDLY AND SUCH: The arena is a complete bastard. I’m no Belgianologist, but it could fit Belgium in it, twice. The beer cost me roughly four million pounds and was watered down foamy rubbish. The staff were […]
Tmymtur –Yusei ENSL AMDC So the blurb reads that Yusei (“Spring voice”) is all about frequencies that you can’t hear, up in those registers over 20kHz beyond human hearing. Which reminds me of those audiophile tropes about how analogue LPs transmit sounds well beyond human threshold which make for ‘fuller’ tones and all that jazz. I’m perennially ambivalent about these ideas – I like the idea that somewhere […]
Fingertips Oud Vibrations. It’s a pun, you see? You do? Good. So, the fluff is that these are two of the earlier ventures by jazz hands into Arabic lands and this is a two LPs on one CD of two chaps who worked with Arabic stylings. There’s a faint sense that they’re both jazz sorts borrowing from Arabic ideas, but it’s essentially two fairly different records. So, I’m […]
Autostatic “It sounds like someone flushing a magical toilet over and over” – this courtesy of my dear partner. She then mimed flushing a toilet for a bit, did a puzzled face, then decided it was the Victorian style of toilet with the flush you have to stand up for, rather than lean towards the cistern. Which piques any of the adjectives I could throw at it. I […]
Mute Problem the first: a month or so really isn’t enough time to deal with this. What I really wanted was a properly stodgy, fagend cash-cow studio slurry. Selfish, but it’s much easier to go ‘while there’s highlights on discs 2 and 3, ultimately it’s for the Can fanatic’. The review writes itself. Of course, that’s not the case, and I’m left with an album that’s better than […]
Crammed Discs The sleevenotes talk about this band being derided for being from the poor part of town; . I can’t help but feel that this is Tanzania’s answer to Happy Hardcore. Moreover, all the songs are towards the pulmonary-antagonising side of tempos, and tend to get faster. They’re also handsome swines. And they appear to have a dancer with one leg. And they look cool as fuck. […]
Staubgold The press blurb says “If Morton Feldman, John Cage and David Tudor had formed a rock band, they might have sounded a bit like this.” Now. Far be it from me to pick holes in press releases [and to be fair they were quoting a review of an earlier record– ed.] – everything needs a bit of fluff to buoy it up – that’s a bit of […]
Sub Rosa Timeless Waves apparently started life as a ‘sonic work’ for a multi-channel installation of some kind (though the notes are unclear as to whether it was a conventional performance or gallery deal). I can get a bit sceptical of these things translated to disc, but luckily, Erdem Helvacioglu’s done a good job of making it into a more album-shaped whole. It’s loosely themed around a set […]
Striate Cortex Striate Cortex seems to have gone, in just a few years, from another ‘yet another’ label putting out tiny editions of unheard of artists (or ‘no-audience underground’ as radiofreemidwich have it) to having a pretty heavy catalogue of exquisitely-packaged things. I can’t claim to be a completist but I’m seeing a lot of names on their discography of bands and people who are making great sounds […]
Earache A-side – “You suffer…” FDR stands for full dynamic range. Remember that, I’ll come back to it in a minute. This is one of those records that I’ve had a million conversations about. Heavy crust/grind/metal/metalcore peeps will claim various things about it – it’s not the best/ it’s the best/ it’s not the first/ it’s the first/ Carcass did it better/it’s better with triggered drums/ it’s better […]
Terp It’s got text in Amharic on the sleeve! I assume! It’s about single length! It uses exclamation marks to describe itself, and this seems awesome! Because the music is awesome! … I remember when I first heard drum n’ bass, on Peel, sometime in the 90s. It was weird and scary and made me feel a little bit sexy when being sexy was a weird feeling but […]
(Not on label) Buh…yeah. -rock suffixes are lame. But this is good. GOOD I tell you. Ole’ timey two guitars n’ drums-core. Possibly fans of that K Records fallout . Y’know, Sleater Kinney, Urusei Yatsura, that kind of thing. But instrumental. No vocals and no need. And it’s steeped in a lot of those dreadful and dreary tags that make you think of dogshit music students yet to realise […]