King Crimson – The Road To Red - October 2013 October 27th, 2013

King Crimson’s epochal 1974 album Red remains progressive rock’s finest recording, collaborative and curiously egoless, its brutality as undeniable as its beauty. So, who wants a 24 disc set of American live dates leading up to Red? Someone, evidently. Crimson spew recent wrestles with free improvisation at the emerging edifice of supersized stadium rock, tilting…

The Devil – The Devil - October 2013 October 27th, 2013

For two decades Ben Wallers has been head-butting hotspots of race and gender, but his viscerally shambolic garage band The Country Teasers were sacred clowns, not dangerous dictators. The Devil, however, is a polished gothic edifice, Wallers dwarfed by the sepulchral keyboards and Frippertronic guitars of some Satanic ’70s Italian prog band. A stunning ten…

Talulah Gosh – Was It Just A Dream? - October 2013 October 20th, 2013

Formed in Oxford in 1986, Talulah Gosh were rock’s Brains Trust, vocalists Elizabeth Price and Amelia Fletcher going on to win the Turner Prize and helm the Office of Fair Trading respectively. The group reversed the mid-eighties malaise by retreating into a polka-dot sugar-punk Shangri-la, establishing the enduring global indie-pop template. Here’s everything they ever…

Richard Youngs – Summer Through My Mind - October 2013 October 20th, 2013

Since 1990, Glasgow’s Richard Youngs has been meshing the structures of folk music with the textures of avant-garde experimentation, sustaining unbearable and yet egoless levels of shamanic intensity that are profoundly transportative and quietly devastating. Summer Through My Mind, his 90th album, shares as much with the expansive acoustic retro-Americana of Gillian Welch’s Time (The…

Lee Ranaldo & The Dust – Last Night On Earth - October 2013 October 13th, 2013

Though as adept at atonal art grunge improvisation as his Sonic Youth colleagues of three decades, Ranaldo uses the New York experimentalists’ hiatus to deliver his most conventional album, Last Night On Earth, stretching suede denim 70s pop rock shapes, that Sonic Youth would have shredded, into slow-burning psychedelic epics. The closing pairing of Ambulancer…

Body/Head – Coming Apart - October 2013 October 13th, 2013

New York experimentalists Sonic Youth’s three decades of atonal art grunge are over. Thurston Moore now channels their signature sounds with Chelsea Light Moving. A liberated Lee Ranaldo weaves once verboten psychedelia with The Dust. And Kim Gordon, now 60, essays uncompromising guitar drones with Bill Nace as Body/Head, her keening bellow swaying amidst the…