C.Bailey & H.Burns – Stranger - October 2011 October 30th, 2011

In 1976, Chris Bailey’s Brisbane band The Saints became Top Of The Pops’ first punk guests. Bailey’s recent European sojourns have furnished a collaboration with H-Burns, from the moody French post-rock group Dont Look Back, that rehabillitates his tarnished legend. A fresh take on the sound of all those inscrutable early Eighties American revivalists the…

Charlotte Hug – Slipway To Galaxies, Solo Viola and Voice - October 2011 October 23rd, 2011

Here’s eight real-time improvisations by Charlotte Hug, bowing, plucking, and scraping the viola, with studiedly inchoate vocal accompaniment. A Romantic whiff surrounds the affair, suggested in part by sleeve shots of the black frock coated musician, poised to perform, against abstract arty scribbles. Like Caspar David Friedrich’s mountaintop wanderer, facing into a sea of fog,…

Roy Harper – Flat Baroque and Berserk - October 2011 October 23rd, 2011

Seeing Harper live in the Eighties, it seemed astonishing to us that the venerable sixties troubadour still breathed. This Mancunian Methuselah would, of course, have been all of forty-five years old. Now, Harper’s seventieth birthday sees digital re-releases for his twenty-three albums. 1970’s Flat Baroque and Berserk, a marinaded acoustic set, only partially spoiled by…

Richard Buckner – Our Blood - October 2011 October 23rd, 2011

Richard Buckner wallowed in the wake of Alternative Country’s first wave, arriving in the mid-nineties with looks, licks, and sparsely affecting lyrics that hit home harder than his competitors’. His ninth release, delayed by business wrangles and questions regarding a headless corpse found hear his home, arrives trumpeted by feted followers, Bon Iver and Richmond…

Maria And The Gay – Greatest Hits Vol : 1 - October 2011 October 16th, 2011

Maria Dada, from Lebanon, and Manchester’s Amy Pennington, open their debut with Daddy’s Bulge, two shouty schoolgirls traversing the bristly ridge of Captain Beefheart’s Sue Egypt with a drum machine in tow. Doomed is bed-sit electro-pop, home-taped by Duracell Gary Numans, and Oh Boy She Moans is a sluggardly Seventies Fall rant. Eighties fixtions surface…

Giant Sand – Chore Of Enchantment - October 2011 October 16th, 2011

The back catalogue of Giant Sand, Howe Gelb’s durable desert rock disguise, has been leaking out anew from Fire Records, though usually without much bonus material. But the band’s pivotal 2000 release arrives as a laden double. A trio of name producers, including Jim Dickinson, coaxed the serrated edges and ragged rambles of Gelb’s unruly…