Universal Music Has it been twelve months already? Twelve months since Conchita Wurst swooped into our hearts and planted a big blue, pink and white flag in the heart of Europe for the second time in Eurovision‘s history. I realise that for a lot of people Eurovision is some chintzy, end-of-the-pier nonsense, but when you can have someone advocating trans* politics in front of millions of people across […]
Kev Nickells
207 posts
Acrobat John Coltrane then. I’ve not really listened to a great deal of ‘trane. So it’s probably pretty stupid to review a 4-CD box of stuff that’s likely for the jazz collectors market, right? Except, y’know, jazz is a thing that exists in the cultural memory, so if it’s just written by and for folk who are already in, it kind of stops being a live culture and […]
Staubgold Confusing record, that’s the synopsis. It’s got all the ingredients of a blinder — fully world-class players, uncommon mix of instruments, well recorded and mixed… but it’s lacking a certain something. That something being length. There’s arguably a problem with Jaki Liebezeit‘s pedigree — Tago Mago‘s one of my favourite records and, obviously, I’d really like to hear a version of that album with an hour-and-a-half mix […]
Crammed Discs A new year, another chance to get preponderous about whatever it is that makes us like a thing. Jozef van Wissem‘s Stations of the Cross is about seven years old now, a record I got and thoroughly enjoyed and always intended to follow up but entirely failed to. That was quite a shock at the time — just about minimal enough to sit somewhere near to […]
Brighton 10 December 2014 Gig-craft. It’s a tricky thing. Something that’s a perennial irritation for me is the way you’ll get a touring band and three-five clones of that band. I always have this problem with things like grindcore gigs where you just get five of the same band. Which is great, for about two acts, then I get bored. SO one of the things about this gig […]
Zeitkratzer (CD)/Karl (LP) Right then. First thing to say is that this is an awesome achievement. And one that I’ve been waiting to have a proper listen to for a while. Metal Machine Music (MMM) doesn’t, perhaps, stand up as the finest noise/tape collage records, but it does have a high degree of cultural relevance — at least in terms of being a quite unthinkable gesture from a […]
Mute Perennial problems of established bands — your new record is very good, but you also wrote… fucking hell, “Oh L’amour,” “Drama!,” “Ship of Fools,” “Blue Savannah,” “Victim of Love”… I mean, just the ornately extended “never” on “Drama!” is enough to merit a statue of Messrs Bell and Clarke on every street corner, let alone that they’re basically better than the Pet Shop Boys in terms of […]
Ankst So when a new EP comes out from Datblygu, Freq offers up not one, but two reviews. Firstly, Kev Nickells enthuses: In a caveat that might as well be me saying “this is why I don’t write for a living,” it’s tricky writing about Datblygu. Certainly from my perspective. If you don’t know, they’re broadly considered as arguably the most important Welsh-language bands of the last 32 […]
Tuff Enuff I was going to write something about this being “conceptually perfect,” but that feels a bit disparaging — it’s a tribute act, and it’s obviously important that a tribute act get their ideas right — but there’s a lot more thought gone into this than just “women playing the Monks called the Nuns! Brilliant.” But I’m going to come back to the actual record in a […]
London 7 July 2014 Kev Nickells went to see Japanese kawaii-rockers Babymetal live in London, and loved it. Barnabas Y, however, offers a riposte to the popularity of the genre-bending phenomenon. Pictures by James Sting. The review You should probably be aware of Babymetal by now. I first came across them when “the hard man of Harsh Noise Wall” Clive Henry put a link up to it. It […]
Brixton Electric London 27 May 2014 Since reforming – or, perhaps more accurately, reincarnating – in 2010, Swans have rapidly become one of the most extraordinary musical entities of our age. Their comeback album, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, was a fine release, and they soon re-established themselves as a formidable live act. But with 2012’s The Seer – a vast, audacious, […]
With the annual festival of all things Europop upon the screens of a continent and beyond, Kev Nickells runs through the entries. Eurovision – a cherished institution. Writing this has been a bit of a nightmare, to be honest, because Europe’s a lot bigger than you think it is. Spreads all the way over to Azerbaijan. And for all the tack/awesome stage-setting, it’s a timely reminder that Europe, […]
Brighton 18 March 2014 This was a funny evening. Good, of course. Sidi Touré is really quite the performer, and his band some of the finest. I kind of get the impression it’s not really a regular gig-going crowd. At one point there was a chap clapping out of time (clapping out of time is quite a feat, in a way). I clocked someone who seemed to take […]
Four releases from a shiny new label devoted to something like sound-art, but not as asceptic and dry as that genre has a habit of implying. Hopefully, label head Seth Cooke is already known to Freq readers, but if not his is a formidable CV – sometime Freq writer, engine, petrol and tillerman for Bang The Bore, previously one of spazzy rock’s finest drummers (Hunting Lodge), an improviser […]
Bureau B Ok, apologies for the absurd delay in this – these two Asmus Tietchens albums were re-issued in November of 2013 and a whole festive period and all the excessive faff that that entails has gone and left me only writing this far too late in the day. It’s relevant to this review because I tend to prefer giving a record a go in a way that’s […]
Thrill Jockey Getting the hastily-search engined blurb out of the way: Sidi Touré (no relation to the other famous musicians with the same last name from the same country) is from Mali; Mali’s had it pretty rough of late, and seems to be in a tempestuous state politically. I shan’t embarrass myself by feigning more than a cursory awareness but the appearance of a number of conflicting voices […]
Ex Cathedra / Words+Dreams …so there’s a thing with a lot of musical vaguely designated as ‘classical’ where the descriptions don’t per se tell you a great deal. ‘Pounding kraut vibes’ tells you most of what you need to know about a record but “ a palindromic movement structure, the quartet moves through a cycle of compositional styles from diatonic tonal material, to atonal, lyrical writing, to twelve-tone, […]
Iotacism Back in the day, there was tape-trading. Conducted by post, y’know, when there was a postal service rather than a mausoleum of “a good idea we used to have”. I used to do a fair amount of it. It was a great way to find out about stuff you didn’t know about. Someone would put together a selection of stuff they liked, and you’d do one in […]