Showing 311 results for: Music Reviews
Toma Gouband – Courant des Vents - June 2012 June 24th, 2012
Toma Gouband rolls flints, stones, and pebbles around on snare drums. Courant des Vents is a quiet, but startling, forty-five minute collaboration with the acoustics of St Peter’s church Whitstable, a room rapidly becoming the Sun Studios of European free improvisation. Gouband never allows his Neolithic clacks to coalesce into tasteful Steve Reich style rhythmical…
Witch – We Intend To Cause Havoc! - June 2012 June 24th, 2012
Emmanuel Chanda was selling collectors old albums by Witch, the band he lead through turbulent post-colonial ‘70s Zambia, to pay medical bills, before Now Again reissued his back-catalogue as this four disc box. Initially Witch, singing in English, channel American and European influences through chiming folk pop, bubbling hairy funk, locked groove hard rock, and…
Giant Giant Sand – Tucson - June 2012 June 17th, 2012
One in five of the roots rock revisionary Howe Gelb’s incessant releases sees his untrammeled talent torrent coagulate fully coherently. Album fifty. It’s that time again. Doubling his blurred collective Giant Sand to twelve with pedal steel and mariachi brass, hence the elongated name, Gelb’s country rock opera assimilates every style he’s dabbled with, from…
Neneh Cherry & The Thing – The Cherry Thing - June 2012 June 12th, 2012
Nineties pop-pickers remember Cherry’s adventurous hip-hop hits, but her apprenticeship with Bristol’s Roland Kirk inspired beatniks Rip Rig And Panic, and a childhood spent with her stepfather the trumpeter Don Cherry, make her the ideal collaborator for the Scandinavian free jazz trio The Thing, interpreting fifties and sixties New Thing, and seventies American sleaze punk,…
Codeine – When I See The Sun - June 2012 June 10th, 2012
Codeine are another early nineties American post-rock band recently rediscovered, like Bitch Magnet, by young people, ravenous for sacred sources, and caught in the time-collapsing vortex of the internet’s immediate availability of everything. Here’s Codeine’s slender oeuvre in one luxurious package, simple crunchy chords sliding into empty spaces over then radically restrained beats, their glacial…
Spain – The Soul Of Spain - June 2012 June 3rd, 2012
On previous Spain albums, smokily spiritual blues guitar drifts across the provocatively expansive spaces between vocalist Josh Haden’s bare bass parts. But The Soul Of Spain sees two uncharacteristically animated numbers, Because Your Love and Miracle Man, chug past in standard moody alt rock mode, and new drummer Matt Mayhall clings to metronomically regular rhythms…