Showing 21 results for: Album Reviews
Venom P Stinger – 1986-1991 - August 2013 August 19th, 2013
Venom P Stinger offered an indifferent Australia unwanted acres of tricksy, lurching, tempo-shifting, art rock sea-shanties, doubtless as difficult for the band to play as they were for the merely curious to tolerate. The guitarist Mick Turner and the drummer Jim White went on to supply tastefully distressed licks and off-beat percussive flourishes to Warren…
Various Artists – Electric Eden, Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music - September 2012 September 30th, 2012
Rob Young’s book Electric Eden, for which this double CD is a companion, charted the unruly assimilation of British folk music into Folk Rock. A rare demo version of Fairport Convention’s monumental 1969 epic A Sailor’s Life is a key track, jumping the hedgerow to a world of wyrd folk hybrids. A shortened version of…
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…
Various Artists – Weirdlore, Notes From The Folk Underground - July 2012 July 29th, 2012
Weirdlore encompasses a mystic strain of mushroom-flecked contemporary English folk, newly nesting in hedgerows between outright traditional music and the rootless folk-pop of The Mumford And Sons massive. Rapunzel & Sedayne’s Innocent Hare is a shimmering psychedelic drone. Starless And Bible Black arrive by way of West Coast California. The Scottish interloper Alasdair Roberts channels…
When the Suharto regime opened Indonesia to Western Influence, its previously repressed rock scene went overground, and here collectors who prize the region’s vibrant native hybrids of acid rock, hairy funk and indigenous melodies reluctantly share highlights of their hard to snag stash. It’s difficult to tell, from these twenty cherry-picked tracks, whether ‘70s Indonesia…
Various Artists – I’m A Romany Rai, Songs By Southern English Gypsy Traditional Singers - April 2012 April 29th, 2012
Whenever Topic trawls its archive for new Voice Of The People compilations, the aural artifacts they dredge seem ever more distant, ever more valuable. Taped in the ‘50s and ‘60s, these unaccompanied gypsy singers, their distinctive sound the musical manifestation of a lifestyle that today appears unsustainable, are moving, vivid and often quietly disconcerting. Seven…