Sleaford Mods – Divide And Exit - March 2014 March 5th, 2014

Like Happy Mondays, The Fall, and William Blake, Sleaford Mods are English visionary ranters, seeing the big picture reflected in the toilet bowl. The East Midlands duo’s second album throws Andrew Fearn’s decade dissolving scuffed dance loops and churning post-punk bass under Jason Williamson’s kitchen sink hallucinations, profanity strewn, furiously funny. Reporting from Poundland Britain’s…

Carla Bozulich – Boy - March 2014 March 2nd, 2014

Bozulich’s 2002 album Red Headed Stranger illuminated the itinerant art-punk survivor’s exhaustingly immersive world with familiar country and western sounds, but here she’s adrift in an alien landscape of tortured heroin-blues and unstructured torch songs, scarred by industrial noise and collapsing percussion. There are no simple signposts in this stormy sea, but if Boy emerged…

Sound/Track – Headland - February 2014 February 23rd, 2014

Luminaries of the Melbourne mafia gathered around the multi-instrumentalist Murray Patterson to soundtrack found ‘70s super8 footage of the New South Wales coastline. Patterson’s lap steel, its swooping sweeps familiar from Tex Perkins’ pellucid Dark Horses records, lends a rustic flavor to the group’s quietly expansive compositions, though there’s an empty space in the shape…

Guided by Voices – Motivational Jumpsuit - February 2014 February 16th, 2014

Approaching Ohio’s immortal Guided By Voices unaware of Robert Pollard’s intimidating 110 album back catalogue, you’d hear superstars in waiting inexplicably pollarding a succession of singalong psyche-punk classics, thrilling seconds short of their becoming irresistible earworms. And that’s what you’d have heard thirty years ago too. The Littlest League Possible, a knockout seventy-eight second celebration…

Peter Hammill & Gary Lucas – Other World - February 2014 February 9th, 2014

Peter Hammill spent forty-five years declaiming stentorian English experimental rock. Gary Lucas traded avant-blues tongues with Captain Beefheart and co-wrote the explosive ballads that branded Jeff Buckley. Their unlikely collaboration ought to fail. Lucas draws ghostly delta guitar shapes in air, while the Van Der Graaf Generator frontman, who usually appears shrouded in incense clouds…

Len Price 3 – Nobody Knows - February 2014 February 2nd, 2014

The Len Price 3 are British Invasion purists playing raw psyche-punk in the muddy Medway footprints of Billy Childish. My Grandad Jim’s nostalgic World War II recollections feature Pete Townshend power chords and Keith Moon octopus rolls. But the unexpectedly upsetting London Institute, a comparatively expansive four minute opus, pictures a window cleaner stumbling across…