Showing 311 results for: Music Reviews
The Nightingales – For F**k’s Sake - April 2014 April 12th, 2014
Birmingham’s Peel session perennials The Nightingales should be profitable post-punk survivors, a Fall or a Gang of Four, with submerged pop sensibilities that mean you can yodel along yourself. Is their balti bowl of rock and roll, Beefheart twang, throbbing krautfunk, and Robert Lloyd’s meticulous pop-cultural lyrics too hot for you? Album eight explodes with…
Dead Rider – Chills On Glass - March 2014 March 31st, 2014
Chicago’s Dead Rider remove the scaffolding from the ’70s techno-rock stadium. The big polyrhythmical beats and squeaky clean keyboards you’d hear on thriller soundtracks scored by members of Yes are pressed instead into service of a warped art-noise Captain Beefheart might have made if he’d lived in a chrome and smoked glass skyscraper instead of…
Angharad Davies – Six Studies - March 2014 March 24th, 2014
The four tracks on Angharad Davies’ Six Studies are titled as if they were exploratory exercises for the experimental violinist, (Circular Bowing Study, Balancing Springs on Strings Studies 1 – 3), and are sealed in an anonymous tin. Cat gut, metal and plastic scrape on string, at a succession of angles, sounds sawn from air.…
Belfi/Grubbs/Pilia – Dust & Mirrors - March 2014 March 17th, 2014
Italian electro-acoustic composer Andrea Belfi once recorded himself shaking the contents of a house. His countryman Stefano Pilia played punk before discovering drones. Kentucky’s David Grubbs blasted underage Eighties hardcore with Squirrelbait and is now a professorial presence on the experimental scene. Dust & Mirrors combines tonal minimalist repetition with hanging cadences of back-porch guitar…
Various Artists – Wayfaring Strangers : Darkscorch Canticles - March 2014 March 17th, 2014
You don’t need this record. No-one needs this record. These sixteen low-fidelity self-released tracks by ’70s American teens in thrall to Sabbath, Zeppelin, Tolkein, and weed are a desperate attempt to tickle the palettes of jaded hipster know-alls, and Numero Uno records knows it. And yet, and yet… the school doodle satanic imagery, basement boogie…
Drive-By Truckers – English Oceans - March 2014 March 10th, 2014
In the last few years critics have ‘come round’ to Athens Georgia’s Drive-By Truckers, accepting the band’s apparently incompatible stew of rousing redneck roots rock and Modern American Poetry professor wordplay as a deliberate artistic choice, rather than a naïve accident. The highlight of their 12th album is Primer Coat, where propulsive Byrdlike arpeggios sharpen…