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Ashley Reaks – Compassion Fatigue (1-8) (avant-prog)
‘Concept’ albums have been a mixed blessing on the history of rock music. The idea that an album might have some connecting theme running through the various songs collected on it has been a controversial one, bitterly opposed at times by those with a strong doctrinal commitment to a particular model of popular music, and… Read more
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Stars In Battledress – In Droplet Form (avant-folk)
Music needs to be comprehensible; it is, after all, a form of communication. The more readily digestible it is, however, and the more easily it slips down, the fewer hooks there are to hang any unique meanings on it. There is an inherently unstable dialectic between the familiar and the novel, and somewhere around the… Read more
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Mark Harrison and his very capable band (whose members include the extremely talented duo Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker) play a curiously English take on American roots music. Their stylistic materials mine the cracks between country blues and old time country music, continuing a UK tradition that began with skiffle and was nourished by the… Read more
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Arch Garrison – I Will Be A Pilgrim (avant-folk)
A sense of native place is a sentiment most associated, in music, with folk styles, or with the strong blood-and-soil nationalist current in black metal, for example, and such sounds have sometimes been taken up by those with particularly unpleasant political agendas. Craig Fortnam is here to remind us, through his acoustic Arch Garrison project,… Read more
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Kevin Pearce – Matthew Hopkins And The Wormhole (indie)
There’s a lot of quality songwriters out there, ones that write sincere and sophisticated songs, and that, without necessarily straying too far from the kinds of musical materials that audiences find digestible, manage to say something particular and illuminating. Trouble is, they all sound the same. I mean, however good the material is, and however… Read more
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Richard Pinhas and Yoshida Tatsuya are legendary figures in the French and Japanese experimental rock scenes, respectively. ‘Experimental’ is a term that implies a bit of diversity, and the projects they’ve been involved with have covered quite a range of approaches, so there is nothing predictable about this record, and nor would there have been,… Read more
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