Stephanie Hladowski & Simon Joynes – The Wild Wild Berry - January 2013 January 13th, 2013

The folk revival of the fifties interpreted traditional songs with rigorous detail, and the young Yorkshire folksinger Stephanie Hladowski and the Cambridge acoustic guitarist C Joynes deploy the same unfashionably sincere and Spartan reverence. On eleven traditional tunes, Hladowski’s willo the wisp vocal recalls the translucent purity of the folk figurehead Shirley Collins. Joynes’ meditative…

Major Stars – Decibels of Gratitude - January 2013 January 6th, 2013

In the late ‘80s, Crystalized Moments’ guitarists Wayne Rogers and Kate Biggar began their arch interrogation of psychedelia, stretching extended wig-outs to breaking point. At the end of the century, as Major Stars, they ditched vinyl-junkie in-jokes to become simultaneously simpler and stranger. Now a trad-ish Who-style combo given to free-jazz informed digressions, and fronted…

Mission of Burma – Learn How : The Essential Mission Of Burma - December 2012 December 16th, 2012

Mission of Burma infused melodic hardcore punk with chiming serial minimalism, disbanded in 1983 for twenty years, and returned this century as relevant as ever, having cleverly avoided a variety of flimsy fads that their sturdy blueprint was designed to outlast. This selection is split into two discs, post and pre sabatical, with no discernable…

Goat – World Music - December 2012 December 16th, 2012

From the belatedly Christianised northern Swedish village of Korpolombolo, the girls and boys of Goat arrive in leathers and feathers. Their kitchen cauldron soup of Can Kraut grooves, ritualistic chants, and black acid suggests they used Julian Cope’s Faber-endorsed cult rock overview, Copendium, as a rulebook. Begin at Goathead, where surging mercurial lead guitar battles…

Roil – Frost Frost - December 2012 December 4th, 2012

The pianist Chris Abrahams is best known as a member of the Australian trio The Necks, whose new album, Mindset, sees them once more translate improvisation’s confrontational processes into tasteful gamelan style drones. Abrahams’ second collaboration, as Roil, with the drummer James Waples and the bassist Mike Majkowski, is a rougher, more intimate, proposition. The…

Lawrence Hammond – Presumed Lost - December 2012 December 2nd, 2012

Hammond’s unheralded ‘60s Bay Area band Mad River blurred traditional American music with blazing psychedelic twin-guitars. Now an unreleased, cautiously unconventional, 1977 solo album emerges, blinking. Only the nine minute West Texas Border Patrol builds on Mad River’s expansive blueprint, but the other songs are all tiny shiny country rock period pieces. John Dere Tractor…