Showing 1134 results for: Reviews
Richard Dawson – The Glass Trunk - September 2013 September 8th, 2013
Last Summer, Richard Dawson was invited by Tyne & Wear Museums to visit their vaults, and spend half an hour a piece responding to objects found there. The Glass Trunk is a mesmerising and pungent selection of seven eerily keened faux folk songs, forced into form from scrapbook scraps and forgotten family papers, and interspersed…
Juxtavoices – Just Another Antichoir From Sheffield - September 2013 September 1st, 2013
Martin Archer has been throwing various combinations of sonic stuff at sticky Sheffield surfaces since the late Seventies. Assembling the forty, largely untrained, singers of Juxtavoices in atmospheric locations, he channels their breathy extemporisations through texts by Samuel Becket, Gertrude Stein and the venerable sound poet Bob Cobbing, who would have loved Juxtavoices’ inchoate evisceration…
Scud Mountain Boys – Do You Love The Sun - August 2013 August 25th, 2013
In 1993, The Scud Mountain Boys typified an emergent generation of professorial American songwriters with the same respect for the plangent Americana of Big Star and Gram Parsons their forebears showed to Robert Frost and John Cheever. Indeed, after leaving the band rudderless in the late nineties, Joe Pernice pursued a literary career alongside his…
White Hills – So You Are… So You’ll Be - August 2013 August 19th, 2013
White Hills, New York’s ageless Nigella Lawsons of kosmische punk, serve a delicious borscht of all the satisfying and shameful rock moves good taste denied us, which we nonetheless still crave. In Your Room finds inarticulate lycanthrope chanting over pixilated keyboards, Hawkwind guitar smog, and biker soloing; The Internal Monologue is a brain-fogging bubblebath backwash…
Venom P Stinger – 1986-1991 - August 2013 August 19th, 2013
Venom P Stinger offered an indifferent Australia unwanted acres of tricksy, lurching, tempo-shifting, art rock sea-shanties, doubtless as difficult for the band to play as they were for the merely curious to tolerate. The guitarist Mick Turner and the drummer Jim White went on to supply tastefully distressed licks and off-beat percussive flourishes to Warren…
Spontaneous Music Ensemble – Challenge - August 2013 August 11th, 2013
In 1966, three RAF band escapees coaxed a cautiously iconoclastic British response to American free jazz from like-minded experimentalists. The Spontaneous Music Ensemble’s debut is an ur-text of improvisation, here with the addition of percussionist John Stevens’ meditational ode to the son he hardly saw, Distant Little Soul. Challenge’s didactic sleeve notes continue to resonate;…