Category: Recorded music
-
Perfectly judged
Aaron Gibson’s songwriting is perfectly married to his delivery, each as gnarled and burnished as it is raw and young-at-heart. Stylistically, his musical materials are somewhere in the borders between alternative rock and Americana, with a powerfully narrative lyrical approach. Warm, triadic harmonies are built into dramatic structures in which…
-
Oblique unfolding
The world of stable objects and simple, obvious relations between them is not the real world. It’s one we like because it’s easy to think about, but it’s a fantasy, lacking in both beauty and truth. Truth emerges in art when it makes its way obliquely between the big colourful…
-
This stomping mechanistic racket
This, stomping, mechanistic racket has the distinct sound of its era, despite sounding decidedly atypical. Its huge, rectangular, electronic drum beats have that 80s electro vibe, and its guitars are heavy in a harsh, post-punk sort of a way. KMFDM is a band with a recognisable sound, and the elements…
-
Plugged, but not hinged
If you’ve heard of Perhaps Contraption you’re probably under the impression that they’re an avant-garde brass band, and you may even have seen them marching around summer festivals pushing a pram and making noises that are neither plugged nor hinged. Their debut album, ten years old this year, is something…
-
Pale glimmerings of ambiguity
Singer-songwriter albums often foreground the songs, to the extent that there is more or less nothing to distinguish the way they are performed or recorded from any other singer-songwriter album. Some appropriate, accomplished guitar work, some appropriate, accomplished vocals, some lyrics, and some melodies. When the writing itself reproduces established…
-
A mysterious semantic plenitude
Yugen Blakrok is a rapper who’s been gaining some notoriety. She had a verse in the Black Panther soundtrack, she’s shared a stage with Public Enemy, she’s released a collab with Copywrite. I wish her all the success in the world, but I’m also quite happy to report that she’s…
-
Truth, warmth and swing
Thelonious Monk was an iconoclast, a pianist and composer known for his idiosyncratic approach to life and music, with a reputation among his fellow musicians for being awkward to work with. Miles Davis famously asked him not to comp behind his solo on ‘Bags’ Groove’ in 1954, and some of…
-
Achimeric multistable fusion
Something said in a primary school playground in a dispute over parental status, one assumes, Hard Normal Daddy is one of my favourite album titles. It’s also one of my favourite albums, although I haven’t lived with it as long as other Squarepusher releases, having come at Tom Jenkinson’s oeuvre…
-
A socially situated erotic
Enigmatically named band releases enigmatically titled record featuring enigmatically titled songs (other than ‘Full Trance Effect’). I like some enigma in my groove, it makes me pay attention. Urban Homes emerged from a largely punk background (so their potted biog on the Altin Village & Mine Records website has it),…
-
Downtempo crepuscular negotiations
I don’t know who the DJ Fontana is who remixed this album, but it’s presumably not Elvis Presley’s drummer, who died last year at the age of 87. There is some minor overlap in track names between this record and the first Black Gold 360 release, but I couldn’t tell…
-
Hefty, rough-hewn cuboids of harmony
The river of jazz once had the appearance of a mighty current with many tributaries, but now it more resembles a great delta, where it meets a number of other broad waterways at the point of their issue to the ocean. The past of this river is populated with many…
-
The sound of the unnamed
H.P. Lovecraft, the lonely, bitter, racist, visionary poet of American horror, conceived ancient malevolences from the beyond the limits of the knowable, unnameable terrors from the vast gothic hinterland where knowledge is madness. It seems quite apposite then that his most famous creation was literally unnameable when Metallica devoted to…
-
Various Artists – Album Roundup
It has been a long while since I reviewed any music: my life became rather full of obligations, which reduced my output and eventually halted it altogether. Between then and now I have had the chance to reflect on what had become a somewhat procedural activity, and I have reached…
-
Various Artists – Singles and EPs
Finger-picked arpeggios fall with the regularity and impersonal melancholy of rain, offset by a vocal delivery that is hesitant not in its phrasing, but in its timbre. The sound of this four-song EP is intimate, extremely close to the listener’s ear, and it is formed from the kind of performative…
Oliver Arditi 