Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • The Domestics – Routine and Ritual (punk)

    The Domestics – Routine and Ritual (punk)

    This is not music that’s meant to be engaged with as a text. It’s physical music, an onslaught of experience, that invites your participation or your absence. If its material impact has a politics, it’s a politics of action, a politics of fury, of atavistic solidarity and unmediated resistance. It’s music to enable the forging… Read more

  • Rhys Marsh – Sentiment (progressive rock)

    Rhys Marsh – Sentiment (progressive rock)

    The sweet clarity of Rhys Marsh’s voice unifies his album with a luminous, melancholy calm, effortlessly bridging the steepest dynamic gradients in arrangements that can swing rapidly from finger-picked acoustic guitar to weighty chunks of rock. The instrumental textures on Sentiment are dramatic and powerful, but there is never any doubt in which strand’s service… Read more

  • Reagan’s Polyp re-releases (satirical anti-rock)

    Reagan’s Polyp re-releases (satirical anti-rock)

    When I’m asked to review a fistful of reissues I might ordinarily feel a moment or two of guilt at never having listened to the band before (which is usually the case, given my perversely idiosyncratic listening habits). Not so with Reagan’s Polyp, an obscure and wilfully unappetising band from Little Rock, Arkansas. Rather than… Read more

  • Deerhoof – La Isla Bonita (avant-pop)

    Deerhoof – La Isla Bonita (avant-pop)

    There are many ways to do anything. There are musicians that spend their entire career mining one small patch of stylistic territory, exhaustively plotting its possibilities, immersing themselves in its world, refining its vocabulary until their creative utterances are as idiomatic as the language of everyday life. Then there are those that reinvent themselves continually.… Read more

  • Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker – Nothing Can Bring Back the Hour (folk)

    Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker – Nothing Can Bring Back the Hour (folk)

    I come late to most notable artists, since I’m not the sort of person that avidly follows the latest developments, or that cares much one way or the other about currency. It’s pure chance that I came across this most accomplished duo on the cusp of their currently burgeoning notoriety. I was lucky enough to… Read more

  • Various Artists – Singles and EPs

    Various Artists – Singles and EPs

    There’s a gentle oddness to these songs, cradled in gleefully brutal drum machine sounds and fugal laminations of electric guitar ostinatos. The executioner of the latter is subtly ‘off’, in both pitch and articulation, contrasting the fascistic precision of the former, but colluding with it to efface the performer, along with any notion of their… Read more