Matana Roberts – Live In London - February 2011 February 27th, 2011

Conservatives view the sixties jazz avant-garde as a dead end. In his Imagine documentary, Alan Yentob stared at John Coltrane’s empty chair and explained his post-1965 output as a mistake caused by religion and drugs, the ungrateful Afro-American making a hat out of his invitation to the Conservatoire. Four decades later the saxophonist Matana Roberts,…

Lewis Floyd Henry – One Man And His 30w Pram - February 2011 February 20th, 2011

Lewis Floyd Henry is a busker, one man band and Youtube phenomenon from South East London, channelling Jimi Hendrix, delta blues, and hip hop through an electric guitar, a tiny foot-operated drum kit, and a sound rig strapped to a pram. Despite its low-budget beginnings, One Man And His 30w Pram can sound vast, when…

Vialka – La Poursuite de L’Excellence - February 2011 February 20th, 2011

Vialka are a French duo, comprising Marylise Frecheville on drums and vocals, and Eric Boros on guitars, who essay an environmentally friendly progressive rock in miniature. Their seventh album finds the poly-rhythms, complex chord changes, and surges of mood usually associated with Seventies behemoths or hyrda-headed post-rock collectives leap forth in unusually lean and lithe…

Dustdevil and Crow – While Speaking Softly You Can Hear The Insects Sing - February 2011 February 13th, 2011

The Messthetics compilations have identified a lost strand of late seventies, low fidelity, British art rock, in which the minimally monikered ‘Bendle’ swam the surface noise with The Door And The Window. Today, he continues to confound with Dustdevil and Crow, whose second album suggests an art school Wicker Man soundtrack, or The Velvet Underground’s…

Drive-By Truckers – Go-Go Boots - February 2011 February 13th, 2011

Go-Go Boots, assembled from the same sessions as last year’s plaudit-plastered The Big To-Do, ditches scuffed roots rock for smooth country soul, perhaps reflecting Patterson Hood’s father David’s membership of the legendary Muscle Shoals Swampers. The album as whole finds the band’s downbeat narratives gaining extra resonance, pitched over uncharacteristically clean grooves like the twitchy…

The Dead C – Patience - February 2011 February 6th, 2011

Calling their 25th album Patience is a quietly hilarious move by New Zealand’s immortal gods of transcendental junk shop noise, The Dead C. Its opening track, Empire, is a testing eighteen minutes long. Guitar feedback, usually a gestural shortcut to bite-sized rock thrills, becomes translucent ectoplasm, smeared over stumbling listless drums, wrapped in rehearsal room…