Jolie Holland and The Grand Chandeliers – Pint Of Blood - June 2011 June 26th, 2011

On her 2003 debut Catalpa, Jolie Holland’s simplistic guitar and mellifluous vocal suggested she’d just wandered down from some Appalachian peak. Eight years later her fifth album’s opener All Those Girls chugs out in a more standard country rock milieu and her voice has dropped a few octaves. Holland still sings, delightfully, like she’s chewing…

How I Escaped My Certain Fate - June 2011 BookSquawk - By Marc Nash - June 26th, 2011

Stewart Lee’s 2008 routine (one of three of his own shows he dissects and provides transcripts of in the book), is called “41st Best Stand Up Ever”, prompted by Lee’s bemusement at being placed so high in a TV all-time comedian chart. As Lee himself points out, such shows are just cheap screen time-eaters constructed…

The Waterboys – In A Special Place, The Piano Demos for This Is The Sea - June 2011 June 26th, 2011

To escape ‘The Big Music’, The Waterboys’ bombastic mix of Gnostic Christianity and Dylanesque drama, Mike Scott turned to folk for 1988’s Fisherman’s Blues. But Scott had claimed Steve Reich’s serial minimalism influenced 1985’s era defining album This Is The Sea, and these solo piano demos duly reveal him beating out percussive, unembellished two chord…

The Blue Aeroplanes – Anti-Gravity - June 2011 June 26th, 2011

It’s three decades since Gerard Langley first spieled professorial poetry over various combos of match-fit musicians, crafting kinetic explosions of mid-‘70s New York art-punk in the Avon delta. The Blue Aeroplanes are heavier on their feet these days, but more muscular than before, and feature Rita Lynch as Langley’s newfound vocal foil. Where once they…

Sunny Murray, John Edwards and Tony Bevan – I Stepped Onto A Bee - June 2011 June 11th, 2011

Working with Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler in the Sixties, Sunny Murray, the Dr Who of the drumkit, escaped the tyranny of time. Here he teams again with his British collaborators, the saxophonist Tony Bevan and John Edwards, the European improviser’s bass player of choice. Bevan and Edwards are in uncharacteristically bluesalicious mode here. Having…

The Long Ryders – Native Sons - June 2011 June 11th, 2011

In the early Eighties, The Long Ryders played country-influenced garage rock to LA crowds culturally programmed to despise it. Such is the subliminal influence of their 1984 debut, here with thirteen indispensible extras, that without it the whole world would sound very slightly different. Punked country stomps like (Sweet) Mental Revenge and Run Dusty Run…