Month: August 2011
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Mouse Drawn Cart – Mouse Drawn Cart (experimental rock)
At the instrumental level Mouse Drawn Cart is not massively transgressive. There are some heavy guitars, chainsaw distorted bass, some metal riffing, some industrial-lite beats reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails (‘I’m Not Scared Of You’); there is a very dark and sophisticated approach to texture, and its arrangement into a…
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Tall Poppies – All The Rave (indie-pop)
I’ll call these pop songs, largely because they’re not rock songs, or folk songs, or Balinese wedding songs, but that doesn’t really cover it. These are literate, witty, intelligent and playful songs, and they are pop songs in the same way that Art Spiegelman’s Maus (to pick an utterly inappropriate…
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Saturday Summary 020
The big news this week is the return of the legendary Oliver Arditi to the world of regular music news posting. Okay, that’s bollocks. I don’t know what the big news is, because I haven’t been paying much attention, but here’s some links I found what you might find interesting.
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Paragaté – Stillness In The Mirror (experimental/ ambient)
Stillness In The Mirror is an album that effectively fuses a mechanical, or automatic sonic sensibility with a very organic, human one. That’s an interesting strategy in and of itself, but I don’t get the impression that this conceptual framework is the point of the music: the sounds on this…
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Paul Littlewood – Butterfly House (singer songwriter)
Paul Littlewood has a signature arrangement style, a way of doing songs. Simple, syncopated guitar parts are layered with glitchy electronic percussion, combinations of short repeated phrases accumulating into complex textures. There are dynamic variations, but over a limited range, for the most part, textural density is proportional to emotional…
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Sargasso Trio – Get To Grips (alternative dance)
Some songwriters tell it how it is, laying their raw emotion directly on the line with simple language and an impassioned delivery; others burnish their lyrics with so much metaphor and wordplay that we feel an ironic distance from their subjects, irrespective of the ostensible pathos they may describe; some…
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Cannabis Corpse – Beneath Grow Lights Thou Shalt Rise (death metal)
Stoner rock, when it is unequivocally metal, is usually doom or sludge. Those styles seem somehow appropriate to the haze of disassociated impressions that characterise the world of the dope fiend, with their mushy layers of distortion, their often slow tempos, and their obliteration of detail in the sheer rumbling…
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Awooga – V Column (progressive rock)
Long songs (by the standards of popular music) are often casually referred to as epics: obviously the idea of an epic refers to more than duration, and although such commonplace coinages pretend to nothing more than a disposable shorthand, I think it’s worth examining that idea in relation to V…
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Robb Appleton – The Wood (ambient/ folktronica)
Robb Appleton is a harmonica player, and his diatonic harps are a prominent voice on this album, but The Wood doesn’t sound like a harmonica album. In fact, it sounds more like an album made by someone who decided to get a harp player in because they wanted that sound.…
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Monday Musings: My Musical Utopia, What It Is, How We Might Get There, And Why We Won’t
Once when I was making my first, abortive attempt at getting a degree, I was sitting in a seminar discussing H.G. Wells’ The History Of Mr. Polly. It was stated, quite forcefully, by the tutor, that because it didn’t articulate a clear alternative, the book’s critique of Edwardian petit-bourgeois life…
Oliver Arditi 