Akode – Akode - March 2013 March 17th, 2013

Scandinavia embraced Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman while America still shunned them. Alan Wilkinson, punchy prize-fighting saxophonist of the London free improvisation scene, follows his spiritual forebears North to record, at last, with three long-time Norwegian collaborators. The guitarist Kim Johannesen’s dextrous velocity rings exhibitionistic alarms, but it’s allied to a heroic push to the…

Robyn Hitchcock – Love From London - March 2013 March 10th, 2013

Sixty this month, Hitchcock has abandoned the toy town imagery of his ever maturing acid-pop for personal tones, though pterodactyls still stalk the dark skies of Harry’s Song. He remains possessed of an effortlessly psychedelic voice, somewhere between John Lennon, a Cambridge don and a woodland shaman, proceeding directly from his septum to your cerebellum.…

Spencer P Jones & The Nothing Butts – Spencer P Jones & The Nothing Butts - March 2013 March 3rd, 2013

Spencer P Jones’ sideman status, playing second guitar banana on thirty years of canonical Australian classics, obscures his talent. His latest cross-generational venture ropes in the drummer James Baker, of Eighties retro-rockers The Hoodoo Gurus, and guitarist Gareth Liddiard, of modern day Melborne torchbearers The Drones, on an economic forty-minutes of dirty garage-blues. Jones’ spit-tobacco…

Lee Hazelwood – Trouble Is A Lonesome Town - March 2013 March 3rd, 2013

When he released his 1963 debut, Lee Hazelwood was a 34 year old journeyman producer and songwriter, not the minimalist country-pop visionary he was revered as by the time of his death in 2007. Trouble Is A Lonesome Town, originally intended as a weekly TV series, is a concept album about the inhabitants of the…

Family – Once Upon A Time - February 2013 February 24th, 2013

Defying digitization and the dispensability of music, here’s a 14 CD boxed behemoth of everything ever recorded by Family, 1967 – 1973, with a price tag pitched at now comfortable fans who formerly grooved in greatcoats, available only online at familyonceuponatime.com. As complicated as any of their Progressive Era peers, Family were distinguished by a…

Jon Brooks – Shapwick - February 2013 February 24th, 2013

As The Advisory Circle, Brooks has essayed an ambivalently nostalgic electronica, critiquing our relationship with British landscapes via the deployment of signifiers snatched from the schools television soundtracks of the collective subconscious. Under his own name, Brooks revisits the day he quit a congested motorway to drift in darkness through the Somerset village of Shapwick.…