In the mid-Eighties, Boston’s plaid-shirt romantics Buffalo Tom tried to cross the hardcore rush of Hüsker Dü with the parking-lot pot haze of the Seventies bands their elder brothers grew up on, and sadly the awkward frisson this ungainly pairing produced has been resolved, perhaps a little too politely, since the trio returned from a…
Traffic were pea and faggot Mods who became psychedelic popsters and ‘got it together in the country’. Their career-defining third album, from 1970, is reissued this week with a disc of live tracks and outtakes. Its floaty flute-augmented jazz rock, typical of the period, suddenly seems oddly contemporary, with modern day musicians like Wolf People…
How Sonic Youth tease us, with experimental offshoots and improvised side-projects. In denying fans a fix of that addictive ugly-beautiful Eighties art rock they improve us, against our will. And how they tease again, hiding their most Sonic Youth like album for ages on the sound-track to a French film. Though vocal free, this is…
Conservatives view the sixties jazz avant-garde as a dead end. In his Imagine documentary, Alan Yentob stared at John Coltrane’s empty chair and explained his post-1965 output as a mistake caused by religion and drugs, the ungrateful Afro-American making a hat out of his invitation to the Conservatoire. Four decades later the saxophonist Matana Roberts,…
Lewis Floyd Henry is a busker, one man band and Youtube phenomenon from South East London, channelling Jimi Hendrix, delta blues, and hip hop through an electric guitar, a tiny foot-operated drum kit, and a sound rig strapped to a pram. Despite its low-budget beginnings, One Man And His 30w Pram can sound vast, when…
Vialka are a French duo, comprising Marylise Frecheville on drums and vocals, and Eric Boros on guitars, who essay an environmentally friendly progressive rock in miniature. Their seventh album finds the poly-rhythms, complex chord changes, and surges of mood usually associated with Seventies behemoths or hyrda-headed post-rock collectives leap forth in unusually lean and lithe…