With virtually every public event in Europe and beyond cancelled, postponed or taking place on screens only, it comes as no surprise that the Eurovision Song Contest 2020 will not appear as a live and direct spectacle from Rotterdam to a billion television sets this May; but never fear, for Kev Nckells is still going to give each and every entrant into the non-happening competition a thoroughly superficial […]
Kev Nickells
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Eyeless Well, well, well. Look what these cats dragged in. There’s a witticism of Simon Munnery‘s that’s springs to mindd with this record: “Shakespeare says, ‘brevity is the soul of wit’. I say ‘Bum’. Thus, I win”. In Threads‘ schtick, such as it is, lies in vignettes of skittery improvisation, offering .
Unbound Barely a biography, but… to say this book is a labour of love would be misleading; love is typically überflüssig. This is a labour of precision. And when I say it’s unsentimental, I don’t mean it’s lacking in affection; rather this is a sober, reasoned, and concise exegesis on Jaki Liebezeit‘s work. For good reason, the theme of überflüssig haunts much of it.
London 19 October 2019 Compere: “Jesus is a …” Audience: “CUNT!” [giggling] This is about as highbrow as it gets all evening. Camp as the campest tits. There’s also a punter dressed as Jesus displaying his irritation at everyone wearing the “Jesus is a cunt” t-shirt. #lol #classicbants.
Cherry Red Choose your own opening pun adventure: BEATification; aPOPtheosis. Mark E Smith as can/n/on. In fact naïf-historiographical Fall are legions worse than Nicene method – the archive is interminably tumescent, engorged for torrid bores. Better still see what Falls off the table, innit. Method — you see, this boxset is all 1982. An auspicious year. The year I was born. Now, I’m not arrogantly claiming my presence […]
Zehra Cross-genre collaborations, eh? They’re sometimes banging, sometimes embarrassing. Gnawa trance from west Africa meets luminary of free jazz doesn’t fill one’s heart with hope, but rest ye assured, this is much closer to a banger.
Important At some point it’d be nice to talk about a composer who’s a woman without reaching for the term “overlooked”. But here we are. Éliane Radigue fits that pattern well: gorgeous tonalities, sensuous, modest, quietist… disinclined to shout about herself, letting the music do the talking. She operates somewhere on an axis between musique concréte and minimalism, primarily working with Buchla synths and generally being affiliated with […]
Babymetal Nine years into the fold, third album, first without Yuimetal. Where are we at with Babymetal? Well. Basically, the thing that was bangingest about the earlier stuff was that it was an astonishing mess. Stock metal riffs, abrupt major keys, hoover synths, super cutesy choruses and children way too young to have the slightest idea what they were up to.
Universal Music Enterprises It’s probably a fair assumption that the more rabid Velvet Underground fans clocked this on its first CD release in 2015. But if you’re not that, and also can’t be bothered with reading the remainder of this review – tl;dr – this is a very good live document of VU.
Important Pauline Oliveros, if you’re not in the know, is somewhat of a hero in twentieth century composition and music theory. She’s also criminally under-recorded. She’s also, perhaps most frustrating of all, very difficult to pin down on a recording. Discogs currently lists sixty-five releases, but few of those are anything like broadly available, and of what I’ve heard of the available / semi-available ones, there’s a number […]
Jeshimoth Entertainment Jute Gyte are somewhere out on the periphery of metal doing something that could probably best be described as “amazing”. It’s a one-man project of Adam Kalmbach, who has taken a look at metal and gone “I wonder what happens if I make something that’s a bit black metal, but using microtonal serialism” and then done exactly that.
Hastings, for those not hip to the south-east coast of England, is a funny old place. In some senses it’s got that run-down seaside town vibe. On the other some banging folk and a small but keen crowd of local weirdos turning out on a Tuesday night for an evening of rackets
Infrequent Seams There’s often something worth listening to when you get a not-entirely-composer working in a relatively (or entirely) “classical” setting. And here we have Elliot Sharp composing for an orchestra, a choir and (arguably something more typically Sharp-ian, if that’s not an oxymoron), electronics / bass clarinet.
Unrock So. A curio from the world of, uh, alt-world music? No, that’s entirely ridiculous and not a little bit condescending as fuck. What’s holding this split release together? Superficially, it’s all faintly “esoteric” or something like wonky improvisations writ with pan-Arabic influence but, uh, frankly there’s not a great deal in common musically with the two sides of Carte Blanche
Brighton 2 June 2019 The Albert‘s one of those venues that feels really empty up to a certain point, when it suddenly becomes a sweatbox. Luckily, Frank And Beans are only playing to gaps where people should be for a song or two. Fall fans (and by God did the crowd look like Fall fans) obviously need to get their time in at the bar to whinge about […]
Saustex It’s a band you know, but not for being this band. And their press thingy doesn’t mention that previous band. So I’m not going to either.
As per Freq tradition, Kev Nickells wades into every entry in the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest and ranks them on a slithery sliding scale from rubbish and pish via banging to poppers o’clock. So here we are, another year and another Eurovision. And what joys await us.
On The Dole The new wave of British heavy metal then. It can safely be said that your writer has minimal understanding of the genre. Actually almost deliberately. So why pick up a compilation of NWOBHM? Something to do with “history is always written by the victors”‘.