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 – Singles and EPs

Richard Wileman seems to be going through a particularly fertile patch of late, putting out releases somewhat faster than I can write about them (and the day he puts out something I don’t write about will be a long time coming). After the vigorous collaborative chops-fest (I simplify unfairly) of Strange Relations comes this short programmatic piece depicting the eventual collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. Wileman predicts a cooler, calmer and altogether more pastoral event than sprang immediately to my thoughts, although the vast and oblique affective compass of his alternately gelid and cosy …

Review Of The Year 2014: 20 Albums

My views on end-of-year roundups in general are quite aggressive, and can be read at greater length in the introduction to last year’s selection, here. Suffice it to say that I think anyone claiming to know which are the best few albums released in any given year is seriously delusional; my selection is simply some of the records I liked the most out of those I happened to come across. These records are all seriously good, but there were over a hundred other albums that could equally well have made it onto my list; my advice is, yes, investigate these records, but more importantly, go hunting for …

Regal Worm – Neither Use Nor Ornament (avant-prog)

‘A small collection of big suites’ is the sub-title applied to this ‘mini-album’; I can’t concur with either characterisation. Taken as a single work in several movements (it’s really two long suites with three short pieces as an entr’acte) this would be, at forty-six minutes, a respectable length for a Classical symphony. In other words, it’s quite short for a prog-rock album, but it’s a pretty substantial work; its predecessor, Use And Ornament, is about fifteen minutes longer, and I guess that the language by which this record is being promoted suggests we should expect a substantially longer release in the …

Stars In Battledress – In Droplet Form (avant-folk)

Music needs to be comprehensible; it is, after all, a form of communication. The more readily digestible it is, however, and the more easily it slips down, the fewer hooks there are to hang any unique meanings on it. There is an inherently unstable dialectic between the familiar and the novel, and somewhere around the mid-point of that duality’s oscillations are the sites at which it resonates with its listeners. The strangeness with which Stars In Battledress tend to strike the listener’s ear is not that of complete unfamiliarity; indeed, their music’s harmonies are primarily built

Various Artists – Album Roundup

Mark Harrison and his very capable band (whose members include the extremely talented duo Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker) play a curiously English take on American roots music. Their stylistic materials mine the cracks between country blues and old time country music, continuing a UK tradition that began with skiffle and was nourished by the likes of Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and the pop-jug-band sounds of Canned Heat. There’s a sense when listening to American performers in such styles, particularly the older ones, that they are singing from beneath a heavy encrustation of …

Arch Garrison – I Will Be A Pilgrim (avant-folk)

A sense of native place is a sentiment most associated, in music, with folk styles, or with the strong blood-and-soil nationalist current in black metal, for example, and such sounds have sometimes been taken up by those with particularly unpleasant political agendas. Craig Fortnam is here to remind us, through his acoustic Arch Garrison project, that an autochthonous sense of identity, a strong sense of connection to the landscape on which one lives, can be inclusive and nourishing. These songs are informed by an awareness of the difficulties and ambiguities around such ideas …

Regal Worm – Use and Ornament (avant-prog)

‘Detail’ seems to be the watchword by which this album was conceived and constructed; I hesitate to say that it’s all about the arrangements, as it’s clearly about much more, but a conspicuously enormous amount of effort has gone into them. Ideas abound in every area, in an album which is clearly a paean to much of the best music that progressive rock has produced; stylistic cues come from many sources, including folk, jazz and sixties psych-pop, and melodic or harmonic devices are presented in a rapidly cycling kaleidoscope of nuanced affective conditions. However, it is in the constant, subtly modulated…

Various Artists – Singles and EPs

This music is the brainchild of Michael Woodman, guitarist and vocalist in Thumpermonkey, written using the immersion composition techniques described in The Frustrated Songwriter’s Handbook. The method seems to work. I have no idea what method he employs when writing for Thumpermonkey, but that seems to work too, and for several reasons Eat Your Robot sound a lot like his other band. One reason is the lyrical style; another is the way the melodies are phrased; another is Woodman’s singing, which is highly distinctive; and equally important are his guitar playing and riff writing, which are a …

Believers Roast presents The Exquisite Corpse Game

The game of Consequences has a long history, probably in the order of two centuries, but quite possibly longer. Back when parlour games were essential lubricants to the passage of time, a progress not demarcated by the dazzling increments of the media age, such diversions had a far more prominent role in culture, and could provide a touchstone to other, less frivolous activities. The Surrealists, a diverse creative group committed to the elision of distinctions between the absurd and the profound, between work and play, between dream and waking, found the non-sequiturs …

These Curious Thoughts – Building Mountains From The Ground (roots rock)

The internet is full of interesting long distance collaborations; since everyone got broadband, audio files have been flying back and forth like nobody’s business. Obviously digital music production is most amenable to this approach, but it’s equally feasible for an ensemble recording to be assembled from separate performances in the participants’ own studios/bedrooms/wherevers. Mixing, and particularly mastering, have often taken place at a remove from the recording process, but now that nobody has to shuttle physical media around it’s commonplace for low budget projects to go through those processes in far flung locations. Things have changed, a lot. These Curious Thoughts are a collaboration of a relatively unusual sort, however, at least as far as I’m aware; although …

Luminous Monsters/ Guanoman – We Go Wandering at Night and are Consumed by Fire (drone/ math)

We Go Wandering at Night and are Consumed by Fire is a split release, split in the same sense as the protagonist of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club’s personality. Both of the projects contributing to this release are the sole work of one musician, although they possess quite distinctive characters; Guanoman is described as a ‘purveyor of doom-prog and math-noise’ (also as ‘avantelectrodeathspazzmathcore’, which is more amusing, but less illuminating), while Luminous Monsters is summed up as a ‘majestic creature, appalling and bewildering to human senses, its golden scales ablaze in the sunshine, its coils tumescent with sublime strength, its countless claws and horns crackling with crimson energies formed from the transmuted migrant souls

Review Of The Year 2012, Part 2: 12 EPs

In previous years I’ve assembled my annual review solely from album length releases; it’s interesting to note that the vast majority of music I come across, whether I actively discover it or somebody sends it to me for review, is in something resembling album format (notwithstanding that most of it reaches me as a sequence of ones and zeros). However, I do receive EPs and singles, and some of the very best music I’ve heard this year has come my way in shorter releases. It’s clearly time I reflected this in my end of year review, and as it would seem strange to compare two track singles with seventy minute albums, I’ve decided to assemble my favourites in two parts …

Mere – Mere (dark-ambient improvisation)

Improvisation is a complex matter, and often a contentious one: some degree of musical freedom is usually identified with it, to the extent that freedom is sometimes regarded as its defining characteristic, its essence, or indeed as the thing itself. Thus some more partisan free improvisers would not really regard formulaic improvisation (improvisation within closely bounded harmonic and rhythmic parameters) as improvisation at all. I’ve never had much time for debates that centre on the definitions of musical styles or characteristics, but I guess that if you’ve staked your career and practice on a particular ideology of creative freedom the stakes might look higher than they do to me. Personally I think there are other parameters of improvisation…