Various Artists – Album Roundup

Abject and lonesome mid-fi folk, that drifts across the field of consciousness like a progession of washed-out, dusty photographs, before it becomes quite heavy and ominous towards the end of the album, and finishes with an unlikely cover of ‘Twerk’. One of Uhlich’s Bandcamp tags is ‘devotional’, and there is a sense of outsider ritual about this music, as though a set of the personal habits that make an individual were reified as doctrine: the songs are about something, certainly, but it feels like Uhlich is singing meaning to himself as much as he is singing meanings to us. Songs unfold at a steady pace, with static or slow …

Hobopope and the Goldfish Cathedral – Grunt Gullet Pogrom (pronk)

It’s tempting to say that the Hobopope project hasn’t been well documented enough, but I think I’m just saying that I wish Paul David Rhodes would write and record some more songs. This release, from a few years ago, brings together pretty much all the material that I’ve heard, in versions that I think can safely be regarded as definitive. It’s not easy to make much headway with a project like this. Few venues outside of major urban areas are going to want you to make a sound like this on their premises, it’s very hard to find musicians capable of playing such complex, abstract compositions, and although there’s a …

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 ear before they shift into something else: we are presented with a kind of deconstructed pop song, in which elements are presented serially, in isolation… Until, eventually, around halfway through, after an upper register surf-guitar figure has been presented on the song’s conveyer belt, they come together…

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 those that reinvent themselves continually. Both approaches are equally valid (as if I was in any way qualified to tell anyone whether or not their work was valid!), and as far as I can tell, both are equally fertile. I know of many artists, especially in genres like jazz and folk, where great store is …

Various Artists – Album Roundup

Idiom, style and musical history are important to all of the releases in this roundup, but to none more than to Gorgeous. To Ben Walker the question of style is one to be asked in respect of every song, in the same way as key and tempo, and one that should be answered with the same technical accuracy. There is a very sophisticated and erudite use of idiom at the centre of his creative practice, and his songs are crafted in thorough, rigorous detail, but they are nevertheless expressive rather than rhetorical. There is a refusal of any attempt to ‘persuade’ the listener, letting each song sink or …

Various Artists – Singles and EPs

Kibou Records is everything I talk about but don’t actually do. It’s a totally independent, DIY music label and online distributor, dedicated to uncompromising underground music, of the noisy punk variety. It’s basically the Revolution, as described by French anarchists The Invisible Committee, a parallel structure that is a challenge to the status quo simply by virtue of its existence. If everyone with music to distribute did this, and everyone bought their music from outfits like this, the corporate music industry would shrivel up and die. Of course the success of such an …

Diane Marie Kloba – It Is All An Illusion (avant-pop)

Diane Marie Kloba’s music, on this and the four albums that have preceded it over the past decade, is made out of recognisable stuff, and works in a recognisable way. Imagine a house: it’s made of bricks, timber, roof tiles, glass, all the usual stuff; it’s structurally sound and weatherproof; it has features, like doors, windows, gables and all the rest of it, that look like those features usually do. But imagine that they all meet at crazy angles; that the doors are upside-down, or leaning on their sides; that the conventional notion of visual proportion, that makes almost every domestic dwelling …

Various Artists – Album Roundup

Opening with an extended skit inspired by John Carpenter’s Darkstar, it’s obvious from the start that this Strange Gibberish mixtape is going to be heavy on the humour. It’s also heavy on the creativity and experimentation, with some of the beats straying well into avant-garde territory. It’s far too diverse for me to sum it up here, but the quality is consistently high; this is independent music, in every sense of the term, and most of the producers take a pretty freewheeling, eclectic approach to beat-making, while the lyrical themes are varied and unfettered. Although it’s often …

Various Artists – Album Roundup

The Trappers were kind enough to send me a CD, which usually results in a full length standalone write up, since I appreciate the expense of promoting a band, and also enjoy extending my collection. The fact that they’re in a roundup instead is no reflection on the quality of the release, but more on the kinds of things I tend to talk about when I review a recording. Although I will expand on it somewhat, basically all I can think of to say is ‘it’s roots rock, they do it very well, and I like it a lot’. That should certainly not be taken to say that there is no more content to it than ‘it’s root rock’ can tell you …

Various Artists – Singles & EPs

The struggle. It’s a recurring theme in conscious hip-hop from the underground (for much the same reason that a lot of mainstream, mass-market hip-hop concerns conspicuous consumption). Life is hard for young people from urban areas, living with no privileges and few prospects; but here’s a form of art whose practice is primarily accessible to the young urban poor. On the one hand it holds out the long shot of global fame and fabulous wealth, and on the other it offers a powerful tool with which to represent exactly who you are and what your life is like; whichever your long term goal may be, the short term experience is …

::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 we don’t gain much by being told so; the suggestion is usually implicit that, even though the vocalist is ‘just’ a singer, they do some things that are characteristic of a ‘real’ musician, as though singing was somehow too easy to count.

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 so ironic about it? I think they just like it. I don’t get the impression they’re historical re-enactment geeks, with their houses all done up 50s style, but they clearly enjoy the sounds and sights of that era…

The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players – Lost And Found (anti-folk/ art-pop)

Hot zowee! This long player is really a gas, boys and girls! If the family that plays together stays together, then The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players are one fantabulous bundle of cosmic togetherness: these three way-out cats are as groovy as a corduroy overcoat and as hip as a coxa (that’s Latin for hip). The sounds they bring us are so far out they’re in, and they’ll put a smile on the face of everyone who knows the score.

Tall Poppies – All The Rave (indie-pop)

I’ll call these pop songs, largely because they’re not rock songs, or folk songs, or Balinese wedding songs, but that doesn’t really cover it. These are literate, witty, intelligent and playful songs, and they are pop songs in the same way that Art Spiegelman’s Maus (to pick an utterly inappropriate example at lazy random) is a comic book, or Zaha Hadid’s Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion is a building: because they are, but not because they conform to any of the prejudices you may harbour regarding that extraordinarily broad church.