Tully – Loving Is Hard - June 2013 June 23rd, 2013

Ancient Australian bands currently setting vinyl speculators ablaze are crop-haired boogie-monster thug-visionaries like Coloured Balls, Aztecs and the mighty Buffalo. But Tully were Sydney psychedelic jazz-folkies, given to third-eye dilating keyboard drones and sublime incantations to Krishna. Their final 1972 album is reverentially re-released here with extra tracks. Occasional moments of soft rock blandness aside,…

Howe Gelb – Dustbowl - June 2013 June 23rd, 2013

Howe Gelb is enjoying an encounter with the mainstream. Transplanting the Scottish songwriter KT Tunstall to his native Tucson, he produced her acclaimed new album with a smorgasbord of avant-country collaborators. But here’s Gelb all but alone again, on piano, banjo, guitar and palm slap percussion, crooning fourteen fresh fragments as-live at home. Thirty years…

Kawabata Makoto’s Mainliner – Revelation Space - June 2013 June 16th, 2013

Mainliner first leaked from Japan in the ‘90s, their low slung Stooges riffs, plangent psychedelic feedback surges, and exhaust rattle improvisations unprecedented in their pulverizing intensity. The trio soon dissipated, guitarist Kawabata Makoto recording a subsequent sixty-two albums with the deeply dippy Acid Mothers Temple. But the title track of the reformed Mainliner’s album opens…

The Boys – The Boys - June 2013 June 16th, 2013

Despite being the first British punks to sign an album deal, for this eponymous 1977 debut, The Boys disappeared from the movement’s mythology, perhaps unsurprisingly. Sick On You sounds so silly it could be a contemporaneous punk parody and maybe fundamentalists baulked at the band’s boogie woogie piano and boozy lecherousness. But First Time is…

The Physics House Band – Horizons/Rapture - June 2013 June 9th, 2013

Like punk never happened, this youthful Brighton trio’s debut offers ugly-beautiful instrumental progressive rock that aging King Crimson fans think no-one can play anymore. Moogs squelch. Percussion ploughs complex furrows. The fusion stew suggests electric Miles Davis, but without the significant sweetener of Miles himself. When Radiohead, whose guitars the physicists echo, swerved progwards with…

Scott Walker – The Collection 1967 – 1970 - June 2013 June 2nd, 2013

Twenty-five years ago an adept I traded tapes with proffered a C90 of Scott Walker, then still misfiled in the forgotten kitsch crooner bucket, which proved revelatory. The collective subconscious was slowly rehabilitating Walker’s most significant four sixties solo albums, reissued here, wherein the former pop star suddenly steered his soul-searing vocals toward the phantasmagorically…