Ernesto Schnack – Worldbuilding (acoustic post-rock)

I’m going to begin this review by talking about myself. This is essentially a very bad habit in a critic, and except inasmuch as it is sometimes necessary to lay ones theoretical cards on the table, I try to avoid it. However, in order to explain precisely on what level this album resonates with my own sensibilities, I need to describe the marked coincidence of interest between my own creative concerns and those which informed the compositions on Worldbuilding. Music criticism is a hobby, which I pursue in my spare time; my principal creative pursuit, the consuming passion of my life, which occupies much of …

The Fierce And The Dead – Spooky Action (avant-rock)

It used to make a certain amount of sense to refer to The Fierce And The Dead as a post-rock band, and they have indeed been known to make use of that term themselves; I feel they’ve moved on, however, into some kind of a post-post-rock phase. Leaving aside my irritation at contemporary culture’s tendency to append the prefix post- to anything and everything, it’s a good enough term to describe a particular form of predominantly instrumental, texturally inclined music that employs the resources of rock; it’s a term with currency, pointing to an established set of stylistic practices, and to some…

Alun Vaughan – The Kindness Of Strangers (solo bass)

The long standing association between the solo bass release and a meaningless display of rippling technical muscularity is thankfully receding into history. It’s reasonable that it should have come about: to play something that is more agile and melodic than the traditional low thump of a bassline requires rather more application on a bass than on a guitar, and there was also, I think, a sense that if the bass player wasn’t displaying some extraordinary chops, why didn’t they stay at the back next to the drummer? The other thing of course, is that an album of any one instrument needs something to keep the listener’s attention, and even the most musical of players can make good use of some pyrotechnics to vary the texture.