Geoff Farina – The Wishes Of The Dead - March 2012 March 4th, 2012

Farina’s early nineties post-rock scene contemporaries Codeine and Bitch Magnet are hauling gloriously their brontosaurus bodies over the comeback coals, but Farina’s band Karate always stood out from the tranquilised hardcore crowd, with their diminished sevenths and jazzy licks. Today he’s a born again acoustic troubadour, laying rewarding mid-west poetry professor verbiage over finger-picked traditional…

Roky Erickson And The Aliens – Five Symbols - March 2012 March 4th, 2012

The psychedelic pioneer and former Thirteenth Floor Elevator Roky Erickson was presumed destroyed by LSD and electric shock therapy and this 1980 comeback, painstakingly produced by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Stu Cook, remained unreleased outside Europe. Erickson bayed schlock horror lyrics, his philosophical musings now abandoned, over then unfashionably chiseled hard rock riffs. But this apparently…

Julian Cope – Psychedelic Revolution - March 2012 March 4th, 2012

Cope’s fifteen year reign as Britain’s quirky alterno-pop king lasted until the mid-nineties, bequeathing the stomping hit single World Shut Your Mouth and the acid-breakdown album Fried. Nowadays the shaman-trickster shrouds his instinctive melodic gifts with obnoxious seventies pre-punk filth and eccentric pagan politics. Though the first of its two discs is sluggish in parts,…

Evan Parker/Okkyung Lee/Peter Evans – The Bleeding Edge - February 2012 February 26th, 2012

Four days before this trio recorded The Bleeding Edge at St Peter’s Whitstable last May, they played in The Cheltenham Jazz festival’s now abandoned improvisation strand, playfully accommodating the rhythm of a resonant roof leak, as it rang into a downstage bucket. St Peter’s is a favorite venue for free improvisers. Perhaps it’s dry. The…

Peter Hammill – Pno Gtr Vox Box - February 2012 February 26th, 2012

The Seventies prog survivor Peter Hammill is stripped of the embellishments of Van Der Graaf Generator, naked but for piano or guitar, on seven recent live cd’s. Hammill’s declamatory plainsong refutes standard rock procedure, and when he touches your heart, it’s usually via the cerebral cortex. His piano pieces have an epic Weimar whiff, whilst…

Tindersticks – The Something Rain – City Slang - February 2012 February 19th, 2012

Ideally suited to smoked filled rooms long since legislated out of existence, Nottingham’s most cosmopolitan export have spent two decades finessing an exotic gallic soul noir, a perfect fit for the outpourings of moody mumbler Stuart Staples’ barely beating heart. Their ninth studio album, excluding four film scores, opens with a lava lamp lit, nine…