Category: Music
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The Inner Road – Visions (progressive rock)
Rock music is such an integral part of our audio culture that it has almost become invisible as a thing in itself: it doesn’t sound like rock music to many ears, in many contexts, but just like music. Furthermore, because of the way in which it is usually experienced, as…
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Various Artists – Singles & EPs
I’m not sure what Marie Craven is sorry about. Without overcoming my innate laziness and conducting a proper analysis of the lyrics, it’s hard to say whether she’s expressing regret, making an apology, or meditating on the nature of transgression. In fact the title is a little ambiguous itself: does…
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Dementio13 – The Hobbyist (electronic post-rock)
‘Style’ is frequently contested territory in popular music. Widely circulating ideas of authenticity have it that for a creative musician to think about style is to privilege the superficial surface of their work over the deep substance. Musicians are supposed to just be ‘true to themselves’, and the music that…
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Monday Musing: Musical Experience and And The Location Of Meaning
I often mention in the reviews I write, that I locate musical meaning in the experience of listening. This is in contrast to linguistic meanings, which are located somewhere other than the sound of the language, which points you at ideas to which it is only arbitrarily connected. This can…
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Neil Cousin – Bonfire (folksong/ roots rock)
Specifics are important. Little details are the warp and weft of life. Neil Cousin knows this: he knows that a hole in a jumper, a night-time swim in the sea, a man with painted toenails and hair worn in plaits are all important. Not important as in important to someone,…
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Pam Shaffer – As We Are (popular song)
‘Literary’ is an adjective customarily applied to works of popular music when their lyrics use words of more than two syllables, or when they attempt to convey meanings more sophisticated than ‘I like your tits, lets dance.’ Sometimes it’s warranted, when the music adopts discursive strategies that bear some similarity…
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Monday Musings: Your Local Scene Is A Weapon
On Saturday I went to RoastFest, a beautiful extravaganza of creative and utterly idiosyncratic music, all independent or unsigned, all uncompromisingly true to its various muses, and all performed for the sheer love of it (free entry to eight hours of music, including some acts who are pretty well known…
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Northern Oak – Monuments (folk metal)
Fusions are fickle things. Some that seem initially fruitful quickly date, sounding to ears beyond their immediate time and place of production like one thing stuck to another thing; others seek a level at which whatever edge their parent styles possess is lost in the anodyne mush of a lowest…
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Dialect – Laygate Hallways: unreleased 2001-2006 (hip-hop)
It seems that Dialect have been around for a good while. Even if you’ve never done anything (or nobody’s noticed you doing anything), just being in existence for long enough to release an album of early rarities is something of an achievement. I should like to point out that I’m…
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::M∆DE:IN:HEIGHTS:: – APORIA: IN THESE §TREETS (electronica)
It has become something of a cliché to describe a vocalist as ‘using their voice like an instrument’. It’s usually intended as a compliment, but it’s a pretty much empty statement, or even a self-contradictory one. After all, in music, whatever is used to produce sound is an instrument, and…
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Melted Cassettes – The Real Sounds From Hell Recordings (electronic noise rock)
Apparently (I read in the press release, in a rare fit of journalistic research) The Real Sounds From Hell Recordings refers to a project to record the sound of deep plate tectonics, which is rumoured to have accidentally recorded Hell. I would imagine that plate tectonics sound a lot lower…
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olds sleeper – plainspoken (folk/ Americana)
I get a lot of visual clichés when I listen to this album. I get sunset, Mr. sleeper’s weatherbeaten face, eyes hidden by the brim of his hat, battered boots on the rail of the porch as he plays, wonky rows of telegraph poles marching off across a flat, parched…
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The Bandana Splits (retro pop)
It seems to be an automatic attribution nowadays to describe any use of a historically located pop-cultural style as ‘ironic’. I caught myself on the verge of unreflectingly starting off about The Bandana Splits’ ‘ironic appropriation of 1950s pop tropes’ or some such bollocks, and then I thought, actually what’s…
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Monday Musings: Death of a Simplicity Geek
I’ve decided to devote this edition of Monday Musings to talking about Steve Jobs. You may wonder what a recently deceased technology corporation executive has to do with the sort of things I usually write about, other than iTunes, obviously. The short answer is that I’m not too sure, but…
Oliver Arditi 