Category: Music
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Cutleri – Let Me Show You My Sweater (folk/ Americana)
Production standards for self released music have become so generically polished and exact, that it has almost ceased to be meaningful or valuable to release a well recorded album. I’m being facetious, obviously, and of course I like to hear music I like sounding good, but sometimes the slickness of…
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Monday Musings: Information Wants To Be Free, or How Do You Own A Sound?
There’s a lot of thought being given, in all quarters, to how to turn music into money in the unprecedented circumstances in which we find ourselves. What is music worth? What is it about music that is tradeable? What parts of the traditional commercial landscape are worth defending? To what…
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Steve Lawson – 11 Reasons Why 3 Is Greater Than Everything (ambient)
The pieces on this album are indeed highly atmospheric, but don’t let this lead you to believe that ambience is all, or even principally, what the music is about. The principal quality of these tunes, their defining feature, and the central locus of Lawson’s creative effort, is melody.
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The Fierce And The Dead – If It Carries On Like This We Are Moving To Morecambe (post-rock)
This album contains, but does not start with, the follow up to TFATD’s initial release, Part 1, an EP consisting of a single eighteen minute track called ‘Part 1’. ‘Part 2’ is only a little over five minutes in length, but it does cram a remarkable amount of dramatic incident…
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Yonks – Yonks Marluk (electronica/ ambient)
This is the second release from Yonks, hence the name. What do you mean you don’t know what marluk means? It means ‘two’ in no less than three languages. Admittedly they’re only spoken in Greenland, but still. The guitar plus electronics duo continue to plough their distinctive and highly listenable…
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Pirate & Cobie – Pirate & Cobie (indie-rock)
Bass, guitar, drums, singing; these are well used ingredients, so for a band to stand out it needs to use them with a bit of imagination. Pirate & Cobie are in indie-rock territory, and that shapes their approach to a degree, but they give the impression of being there because…
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Simon Little – Rejectamenta (ambient/ jazz)
This is a five track collection of material Simon Little elected not to include on his forthcoming second album. These decisions were not made because the tunes didn’t make the grade, but because he felt they weren’t a good fit: they are, however, a good fit with each other, and…
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Monday Musings: Is The Meaning In The Lyrics Or The Music? and my weekly news roundup
A few of the recordings I’ve reviewed lately have challenged me to think about the relationship between words and music, and the location of meanings in vocal songs. I’ve never shied away from discussing music with a lyric in a language I don’t understand, but I’m always aware that I’m…
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Bing Ji Ling – Shadow To Shine (funk/ soul)
This is a record drenched in the seventies, literally dripping with honeyed, soulful, in-your-face, grinning disco lurve. I mean, look at the cover. Quinn Luke is a man who lives his creative convictions (or knows exactly how to give his audience the impression that he does). These songs are full…
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Caustic – The Golden Vagina Of Fame And Profit (electro-industrial)
The difference between the electro-industrial and powernoize genres can sometimes be no more than the degree of distortion involved. Much of this album’s beats and song structures could have sat quite happily on Matt Fanales previous Caustic release …And You Will Know Me By The Trail Of Vomit…
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Eleanor Williams – Orange Peel And Paper (acoustic/ singer-songwriter)
Naplew Productions, 2010, DD album, 29m 8s, £name your price (all proceeds donated to the charity Women’s Aid) http://m-s-b.bandcamp.com/album/orange-peel-and-paper I’ve been lucky enough a few times recently to find myself reviewing music that’s motivated by a creative generosity. This is not to say that it involves any expectation of gratitude,…
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Tim Oehlers – Guitarisms (acoustic/ improvisation)
This bold, confidently gestural and slightly glitchy visual design seems to represent in a very appropriate way the sounds it promotes: even the title perfectly evokes the assembly of phrases that the album contains, and with it’s echo of ‘truisms’, its creative intentions, if I read them right.
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Monday Musings: My Report And Frothing Rant From MusicConnex
I was lucky enough to spend three days of late April representing the fantastic DIY musicians’ resource Live Unsigned at the MusicConnexconference in central London. This was an event targeted primarily towards musical artists seeking to develop their careers through the use of digital resources
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Echo Rain – ‘Hold On’ and ‘Bad Guys’ (alternative pop-rock)
self released, 2010, DD tracks, free http://www.facebook.com/echorainofficial http://www.liveunsigned.com/Echo_Rain/ Echo Rain picked two tracks to send me, although there are several more on their Facebook page: one of the two reviewed here, ‘Hold On’, has a download button. The first thing I’ll say is that this is beautifully recorded and mixed,…
Oliver Arditi 