Category: Music
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Ashley Reaks – Before Koresh (avant-rock)
Ashley Reaks speaks from outside. His work is most obviously ‘outsider art’ if you look at his visual work, rather than his music: his collage-based pieces, deliberately ugly as they are (although they are often richly and decoratively patterned), with their disturbing, and frequently sexually explicit iconography, position themselves unequivocally…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Chris Saunders has released several more albums under the Interceptor rubric since he sent me this one, but he hasn’t submitted them for review, presumably because it’s taken me so long to get to this! I haven’t heard those yet, and this is old news now, but Angel In The…
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Orange The Juice – The Messiah Is Back (avant-rock)
The physical presentation of a release is an interesting issue. There are some who would argue that it’s irrelevant, that the only interesting thing is the sound on the recording, that the packaging is an aspect of nasty, dirty, anti-art marketing, or so superficial that authentic music fans shouldn’t care…
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Earthmass – Collapse (doom)
When you pull music apart and start to think about it, it often appears to be built up in several ‘dimensions’. These are our modes of perception, rather than qualities with the same independent existence as the the different materials that go into making a house for example, or the…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
The Stringers are a four-piece from Ontario, that plays rock music of the old school – which doesn’t mean that it’s ‘old-fashioned’, but that it’s pop music, god dammit! This is entertainment, with no pretensions to any kind of creative territory beyond that compass; all too often that can imply…
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Karda Estra – Strange Relations (avant-rock)
The Karda Estra brand has been built on continued invention and creativity: across the preceding eleven albums composer Richard Wileman has consistently and rigorously poked around at the fault-lines of his practice, finding ways to surprise the listener that nevertheless cleave to an established and instantly recognisable aesthetic. Although Karda…
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Adrian May – The Comedy of Masculinity (poetry/ singer-songwriter)
This is a review of a CD and a book, although there’s no particular reason to stop there. Adrian May is a performer, and although it says ‘songs and poems’ on the cover of his book, it’s pretty hard to draw a hard and fast distinction between them; poetry, music…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Golden Diskó Ship drop the listener immediately into a vast reverberant space, in which percussion thuds like a carpenter’s mallet and sweet vocal melodies drift tentatively into scene… Thus begins ‘These thoughts will never take shape’, and indeed there is barely time for the music’s forms to register in the…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
Oliver Arditi 