Stomping Nick and his Blues Grenade – Punk Blues One Man Band - August 2011 August 21st, 2011

Seasick Steve narrowly pipped his contemporary, the less marketable Jawbone, to the lone position for punk-blues one-man bands in the casual consumer’s collection. There’s no house room for more hollerin’ lonesome hobos, yet, like H G Wells’ foolhardy martians, still they come. Reverend Deadeye, Lewis Floyd Henry, and now, from the unlikely blues cradle of…

Fountains Of Wayne – Sky Full Of Holes - August 2011 August 21st, 2011

In 2003, at the mid-point of their career, superstardom winked briefly at New Jersey’s Fountains Of Wayne, when their hit single Stacey’s Mom achingly anatomised adolescent trans-generational lust. But their fifth album finds them back in the box marked ‘underappreciated guitar pop classicists’, where their understatedly sharp, and wryly witty, portraits of suburban survivors’ mid-life…

Kourosh Yaghmaei – Back From The Brink, Pre-Revolution Psychedelic Rock From Iran 1973 – 1979 - August 2011 August 21st, 2011

Two recent compilations of Iranian psychedelia, Pomegranates and Raks Raks Raks, suggested hidden deposits, but this double set is the motherlode. Raised on Allied radio rock, Kourosh Yaghmaei slipped Western acid-pop into Persian scales, creating headily perfumed hybrids from reclaimed microtones. One in five Iranians bought his 1973 debut 7″, Gole Yakh, but Yaghmaei was…

Joe Morris & Augusti Fernandez - August 2011 August 14th, 2011

Recording a duet with Derek Bailey in 2005, the pianist Augusti Fernandez was drawn into stark stillness by the British guitarist’s meditative mood. The American improviser Joe Morris displays a more obviously kinetic approach. His fingers tumble around the frets of a bubbling acoustic guitar, the strings skewered and scratched, provoking liquid right hand cascades…

Various Artists – The Inner Octave - August 2011 August 14th, 2011

Mumford and Sons, and their singer-songwriter followers, aren’t really folk musicians. Folk fans, still looking to the likes of Topic records and the Waterson-Carthy dynasty for an uncut fix might wonder, wither the next generation? But the Rif Mountain label, comprehensively showcased here, offers a cross-fertilised family of younger artists, quietly future-proofing the form. The…

The Last Hurrah!! – Spiritual Non-believers - August 2011 August 7th, 2011

HP Gundersen spotted a special guitar tuning in Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Suite Judy Blue Eyes, and then spent two years playing only the modal drones it inspired, while the jazz prodigy Heidi Goodbye sang. The resulting album, augmented by other top Norwegians, centres around the thirty minute Ballad Of Billy And Lilly, a harmony-heavy,…