Juke Joint Pimps – The Gospel Pimps - January 2012 January 4th, 2012

The Juke Joint Pimps are a duo of a decade’s standing, who play fifties style Chicago electric blues with garage punk surface noise. Deacon T thwacks out tantalizingly truncated licks whilst the Reverend Mike blows harp and hollers enthusiastically from behind a stand-up kit. Only the occasional misplaced vocal inflection reveals the duo are in…

Bloodloss – The Truth Is Marching In - January 2012 January 1st, 2012

This still-active Sydney combo’s third album, from 1989, exemplifies a peculiarly Australian jazz-punk hybrid (see also Ed Kuepper’s Laughing Clowns). Mangrove swampland licks gutter in the loose-limbed shadow of Albert Ayler and his ecstatic ilk; saxes squawk over driving bass; a snowstorm of flailing drums blows grunge blueprints West to Seattle and into Mudhoney’s laps.…

Black Sheep VC – Orcadia - January 2012 January 1st, 2012

Two pseudonymous hairy biker types, Vybik Jon and Common Era, travelled to the Orkneys in the Summer of 2010 to sit unselfconsciously in Neolithic chambered tombs and improvise appropriate responses, using only their mouths and things they found on the floor. Seasoned vocal extemporists like Phil Minton or Yamantaka Eye might have pulled this off.…

Acid Mothers Temple And The Melting Paraiso UFO – The Ripper At The Gates Of Heaven’s Dawn - January 2012 January 1st, 2012

The Japanese commune rockers’ seventieth album focuses the usual free-form freak-outs into a flowing suite of sound. Chinese Flying Saucer is twelve minutes of hard rock riffing doused in disorientating swooshing; the quarter of an hour of modal blues droning and octopus poly-rhythms that comprises Back Door Man Of Ghost Rails Inn sounds like Jim…

The Grip Weeds – Under The Influence Of Christmas - December 2011 December 17th, 2011

Like The Jigsaw Seen and The Fleshtones before them, The Grip Weeds are a longstanding American retro-rock band inexplicably driven to release a Christmas album. The Weeds can pastiche late sixties/early seventies psychedelic pop perfectly, and alongside four acid-flavoured baubles they nail the nasal buzz of Jethro Tull’s modal hymnal A Christmas Song, slop out…

John Zorn – John Zorn’s A Dreamers Christmas - December 2011 December 17th, 2011

The saxophonist and strategist John Zorn sits in with other New York art loft eggheads on a Christmas album that avoids the obvious jazz noise trashing of the classics to find new flavours of festive fun inside some rather stale seasonal chestnuts. Winter Wonderland’s breezy solos float on a distinctly downtown guitar chug from Marc…