Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso UFO – Son Of A Bitches Brew - August 2012 August 19th, 2012

Kawabata Mokoto’s indestructible acid-improvisers swap their in-commune ’60s psychedelic playlist for a stack of ’70s electric Miles Davis jams. Jazz squares splattered on their spats in horror when confronted with Miles’ most out there 1975 monstrosities, Agharta and Pangea, both recorded on the same day in Osaka, but Japanese fans lapped up these otherwise despised…

Peter Cusack – Sounds From Dangerous Places - August 2012 August 12th, 2012

On the first of these two discs, Chernobyl, Peter Cusack presents unadorned field recordings from in and around the exclusion zone that still surrounds the failed Russian reactor. His radiometer whirrs in a deserted village. An abandoned Ferris wheel clanks mournfully. Flourishing wildlife twitters as power cables buzz. Transplanted peasants sing laments for land they…

The Cravats – In Toytown - August 2012 August 6th, 2012

Roaring out of late ‘70s Redditch, The Cravats played neurotic Weimar cabaret art punk, spitting clipped satirical statements and blowing fog horn brass, whilst John Peel lamented his failure to make them famous. Here’s their first album, and all their early singles, a listening experience akin to being hit over the head, repeatedly and rhythmically,…

Various Artists – Trojan Presents Freedom Sounds - August 2012 August 6th, 2012

Just when it seemed there were no more ways to repackage Trojan’s vast back-catalogue of Jamaican sounds, Freedom Sounds’ five themed CD, 108 song celebration of fifty years of Jamaican independence radically recombines typical Trojan material. Disc 2, “Jamiacan Hits”, surveys the usual suspects, Desmond Dekker’s syncopated 007, Junior Murvin’s Clash-inspiring Police & Theives, and…

Charles Gayle Trio – Streets - August 2012 August 5th, 2012

Streets is the accusatorily sad-faced clown Charles Gayle used to portray during live performances, the name a nod to the free jazz saxophonist’s homeless years. Narrowly post-dating the first wave of hard blowing, ecstatic jazz, pioneered by Albert Ayler and John Coltrane’s final works, Gayle is unencumbered by associations, free to fly. Streets is an…

Steel Pulse – Prodigal Sons, The Best Of - July 2012 July 29th, 2012

In the mid-‘70s, Birmingham’s Steel Pulse sold a dramatic live version of roots reggae’s studio bound sound to suspicious punks, and issued an astonishing debut of pressure cooked protest songs, Handsworth Revolution, bleeding flamenco guitar into deep heat dub-wise grooves. Five of that unsurpassed album’s eight cuts, and a b-side, feature here, along with some…