Tag: punk
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What punk is for
A lot of the time, I listen to contemporary punk records, and I wonder where the anger’s coming from. I mean, obviously there’s still as much to be angry about as there was in 1977, in terms of inequality and injustice, but sometimes it all feels a bit forced. Much…
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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…
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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…
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Die Goldenen Zitronen – Flogging A Dead Frog (art-punk)
Formed at the inception of what would come to be known as the Hamburger Schule (from which they vehemently distance themselves), Die Goldenen Zitronen had their beginnings as an identifiably punk band, but a commitment to creative, aesthetic and political rigour has led them to a variety of stylistic positions,…
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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…
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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…
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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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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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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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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;…
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Bitter Fruit – It Gets Worse (noise rock)
This bunch of raucous, abrasive noise-mongers from Oakland CA specifically describe their music as ‘queer death rock’. That raises a couple of issues as a genre label. The first is that given that the sound of this record is something that makes sense in an established set of musical practices,…
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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…
Oliver Arditi 