The Sails – A Headful Of Stars - January 2011 January 9th, 2011

On the tabla-propelled Travel, The Sails play sitar-flanged psychedelia in the style of The Beatles’ post-enlightenment incarnation. Yesterday And Today draws a line from Honeybus’ 1968 single I Can’t Let Maggie Go to The La’s’ wondrous eighties one hit There She Goes. Dogs plunders the twelve-string folk-rock of The Hollies, in the interlude between ditching…

Wire – Red Barked Tree - January 2011 January 9th, 2011

Even when first pedalling short sharp Seventies shocks Wire were essentially conceptual artists, sculpting minimal cubist punk. Thirty-five years later, all pushing sixty, their third album this century seems to be a typically tidy modern rock record, albeit one that also unfolds within invisible inverted commas. The Artful Dodger dropped aitches of old are replaced…

Damon and Naomi – False Beats And True Hearts - January 2011 January 5th, 2011

A quarter of a century ago, Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang sold the world that pervasive slowcore guitar sound with Galaxie 500, then split to work as a duo with subtler methods. Determinedly pedalling a diaphanous acid-folk-pop for two decades now, bowing their heads patiently as it billows in and out of fashion, the pair’s…

Michael Chapman – Trainsong: Guitar Compositions 1967 – 2010 - January 2011 January 5th, 2011

Sourcing fresh meat, a cabal of powerful Pygmalions, including Tompkins Square records and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, declare Michael Chapman not an overlooked English Seventies singer-songwriter, but an innovator in the vein of John Fahey and the American primitive school of tranced-out folk blues instrumentals. Now he’s the subject of a tribute record, Happy Birthday,…

The Fall – The Wonderful And Frightening World Of… / This Nation’s Saving Grace Omnibus Edition - January 2011 January 2nd, 2011

The Fall’s five releases from 1980-1983, – Grotesque (After The Gramme), Slates, Hex Enduction Hour, Room To Live and Perverted By Language – fused garage punk and droning Krautrock stasis with primitive improvisation, Mark E Smith in expansive lyrical flow. The Fall were the rock refusenik’s rock band. But in 1984 a pre-album single, the…

Shirley Collins – Sweet England - January 2011 January 2nd, 2011

Sweet England, the long unavailable 1958 debut by the grande dame of English folk Shirley Collins, conjures a simpler world, where children learned Cecil Sharp’s Folk Songs For Schools in assembly. Yes, there’s a whiff of Kenneth Williams’ folk singer character Sid Rumpo in the hey nonny vocaleese, and Shirley herself writes “as I matured,…