Showing 1134 results for: Reviews
Roil – Frost Frost - December 2012 December 4th, 2012
The pianist Chris Abrahams is best known as a member of the Australian trio The Necks, whose new album, Mindset, sees them once more translate improvisation’s confrontational processes into tasteful gamelan style drones. Abrahams’ second collaboration, as Roil, with the drummer James Waples and the bassist Mike Majkowski, is a rougher, more intimate, proposition. The…
Lawrence Hammond – Presumed Lost - December 2012 December 2nd, 2012
Hammond’s unheralded ‘60s Bay Area band Mad River blurred traditional American music with blazing psychedelic twin-guitars. Now an unreleased, cautiously unconventional, 1977 solo album emerges, blinking. Only the nine minute West Texas Border Patrol builds on Mad River’s expansive blueprint, but the other songs are all tiny shiny country rock period pieces. John Dere Tractor…
John Butcher, Guillame Viltard, Eddie Prevost – Meetings With Remarkable Saxophonists Volume 2 - December 2012 December 2nd, 2012
Eddie Prevost’s AMM, who have just released their 25th album, remain a major force in free improvisation, and inspired the ‘60s Pink Floyd’s edgier moments. Paired with John Butcher, best known nowadays for aiming his horn exploratively into the architectural voids of site-specific recordings, he and the bassist Guillame Viltard complete a superficially conventional jazz…
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats – Blood Lust - November 2012 November 25th, 2012
Last year, Uncle Acid’s home-burned CDR, the imaginary ‘70s horror movie soundtrack Blood Lust, became a genuine word of mouth phenomenon, as opposed to a carefully orchestrated major label master-plan masquerading as a word of mouth phenomenon. Black as early Sabbath, but cautiously funky-assed and glittery in a groovy glam rock way, the mysterious and…
Martin Rossiter – The Defenestration Of St Martin - November 2012 November 25th, 2012
The reluctantly rabble-rousing Gene were a more thoughtful band than the unambiguous Britpop era allowed, but after eight years away, front-man Martin Rossiter seems uncharacteristically comfortable alone at the piano. His unadorned debut’s starkly sparse opener, a ten minute minimalist meditation on failed fatherhood entitled Three Points On A Compass, is an unequalled highpoint, but…
Sam Rivers, Dave Holland, Barry Altschul – Reunion : Live In New York - November 2012 November 18th, 2012
The saxophonist Sam Rivers, who died last December, was ousted from Miles Davis’ mid-sixties quintet for his unfettered free playing, but on his final British dates, in 2004, he seemed constrained fronting a big band playing his own formal compositions. Happily, this posthumous double CD, a 2007 set by his classic ‘70s trio of the…