Tag: funk
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Joyous celebration
People whose names appear on albums are often not ‘professional musicians’ in the sense of someone who has honed their skills and technique in the exacting and instrumental way that implies. They are more often people whose primary drive could be summarised with a term like ‘self-expression’, or ‘creative fulfilment’—singers,…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
Finger-picked arpeggios fall with the regularity and impersonal melancholy of rain, offset by a vocal delivery that is hesitant not in its phrasing, but in its timbre. The sound of this four-song EP is intimate, extremely close to the listener’s ear, and it is formed from the kind of performative…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Idiom, style and musical history are important to all of the releases in this roundup, but to none more than to Gorgeous. To Ben Walker the question of style is one to be asked in respect of every song, in the same way as key and tempo, and one that…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
We’ve all seen some pretty rough justice in the wake of global capitalism’s recent crises, but Greece has suffered worse than any other part of the developed world. The Figures Of Enormous Grey And The Patterns Of Fraud appears to be a response to these circumstances, although it’s too complex…
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ZA! – Wanananai (experimental)
Post world-music is one term used to describe ZA! in their promotional materials; well, in the sense that such a term doesn’t rule out anything whatsoever, it’s not a bad characterisation! The music is experimental from start to finish, but it is the product of a process addressed directly to…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
A combination of electro-acoustic and programmed sounds are used here to create a sound that pays clear homage to African polyrhythmic percussion music, unpitched attacks mingling with sounds similar to idiophones or lamellophones, although they might come from almost any source. Then there are the synths, guitars and lo-fi samples……
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Alessandro ‘Saseko’ Motojima – Sendo Senshi: One Blade To Kill Them All (soundtrack)
Sendo Senshi is the title of an unreleased 1970s ‘whitexploitation’ movie, both directed and scored by Japanese-Italian Alessandro ‘Saseko’ Motojima. You can watch a trailer for it by clicking the link above; it promises violence, crime, gore, tits, shouting, sartorial intensity and all the garish, cartoonish traits of 1970s grindhouse…
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Review Of The Year 2012, Part 1: 12 Albums
It’s that time of year again, the nights drawing in, the pointless over-consumption going into overdrive, and the music bloggers arranging releases into spurious hierarchies of how hip they think they make them look. Well, let me issue the same caveats I always do: I don’t claim that these are…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Being able to afford soap is the new bling. That’s not necessarily a satirical conceit most artists would consider hanging an entire album off, let alone their group identity, but BIG $OAP MON£Y CR£W are not ‘most artists’, and that’s exactly what they do. Not that this is overtly a…
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Churn Milk Joan – One (avant-funk)
It’s very hard to know where to start talking about this record. Do I begin by describing its sound? The words I would use would have a hard job to distinguish these sounds from other, entirely less interesting music. I could tell you that it sounds like some kind of…
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Goosepimp Orchestra – Swagadelic Fertilizer Castle (funk/ latin/ jam-band)
Music has many functions, central among which is entertainment. For all that fans of its more abstruse, intellectual forms might claim otherwise, I would argue that it’s a central function of all music; the stuff that seems self-consciously serious, or which adopts a texture at odds with conventional notions of…
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Tiny Dragons – You Need To Relax (funk/ rock)
I’m just going to make a list. Imaginative arrangements, sonically creative production, intelligent songwriting, tight, propulsive playing, and a powerful, expressive, cleverly phrased vocal delivery. Rocking out and bringing the funk in equal measure, Tiny Dragons use a vocabulary that is very long established (an equivalent would be Jimi Hendrix…
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Fresh Like Dexie – Step In The Sun (funk rock)
Fresh Like Dexie are funky. Very funky. I’ve been a fan of funk since I first heard Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters and the Parliafunkadelicment Thang in my late teens, and I devoted a lot of time after that to studying the music, so I have some idea whereof I speak.Funk can…
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Big Block 454 – Bells & Proclamations (folk-funk/ psychedelic rock)
Big Block 454, named for a 1970 Chevrolet engine, are one of the oddest bands I’ve encountered in a while. They are creatively out there, full of weird sounds and transgressive stylistic collisions, and yet they are, to me at least, accessible, pleasing, and decidedly danceable. Apparently they’ve been around…
Oliver Arditi 