Rise The world transfigures us, little by little. Every day we are little bit different: we are okay; we are numb; we are broken. But our main goal is to be all right with who we are in the present. Not always happy, not excellent, not bad, not sad; just okay. And as we go along we pick up pieces of ourselves that we have lost, or new pieces […]
Reviews by Freq
2880 posts
Newhaven Fort, East Sussex 3 September 2016 It sounded like bedlam from the car park, quickly replaced by some deranged Frenchman chucking stuff around the parade ground, his shouts and clattering, laptop-captured from the fortifications and spurted back in jabbering cut-ups. Welcome to Fort Process part deux, spun off in blaring megaphone, smashed metal, .
Drag City Back in 1978, The Mekons were riding high at the forefront of the emerging post-punk movement, only to seemingly miss their chance and disappear from view like so many others from the scene. Their resurrection with a new line-up in 1984 was as unexpected as the new direction they took. In the thirty odd years since, they have developed a music that sounds terrible in theory […]
Bad Seed It will cause no great controversy if I say that Nick Cave has been writing about love and death for most of his career. If The Birthday Party were the gleeful rictus grin of the Grim Reaper, then later work with the Bad Seeds saw him embrace grief as a response, rather than savage laughter.
Front And Follow Rolling in on thecacophonous curls of “Yadnik”, battering the shore like the after-FX trails of the still-crashing soundwaves of Flying Saucer Attack‘s Rural Psychedelia, Kemper Norton‘s third full-length album slips in from the sea like a summer storm heavy with stories to be told.
Cherry Red Early on in Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, Mick Farren’s majestic – and comic – memoir (its early years set against the growing pains of British youth culture), he relates an incident that took place whilst visiting his friends Paul and Beryl in Brighton one grey bank holiday weekend in the mid-Sixties. Sitting on a wall outside the Metropole Hotel, amidst the hand-to-hand combat and full-on […]
House Of Mythology Well, this is a complete surprise, bassist and founding member for Killing Joke, Youth (AKA Martin Glover) is supplying an excellent arena here for David Tibet to shriek, howl and party the apocalyptic on Create Christ, Sailor Boy. Youth did so back in 1984 as well, one of an extended list of people who configured Current 93‘s Golgothan Nature Unveiled, but this latest transfiguration as Hypnopazūzu is thankfully not as bleak, the […]
London 18 August 2016 In a converted cinema in Elephant and Castle, protected from the outside world by the most stringent security this side of an airport, post-rock revolutionaries Godspeed You! Black Emperor are taking the stage. In darkness, of course, as is their wont.
Cherry Red Nobody is evil, nobody is good All the guilty people have misunderstood I have a bit of a man-crush on Momus. It goes right back to 1987, just after this retrospective begins. He can’t do any wrong (even when he does lots of things wrong) and I’m probably the wrong person to do this review…
4AD The trailers for The Childhood Of A Leader tease of a tense cinematic feast, a chilling meditation on the rise of twentieth century fascism, that like White Ribbon before, focuses on the emerging evil of the next generation, here in the form of an angelic seven-year-old boy with a terrifying talent for manipulating the puppet strings of everybody around him to devastating effect. The film’s turbulent nature certainly finds […]
Riot Season So that time that the Butthole Surfers made a grindcore album — well, something closer to a “pure” grindcore album, anyway — that really happened, right? When Shit And Shine went back through a lysergic wormhole to an alternate 1989, cribbed the murky production (lack of) values and gibbering vocals, then shunted everything through as many effects as possible? That’s what this is, isn’t it? Because Teardrops sort […]
Southern Lord “Goooing to the chapel and we’re… gooonna get- wait, we’re gonna get WHAT???” Asschapel. They’re called Asschapel. Which is the best name for a band ever. And Southern Lord have just reissued their entire back catalogue. And, as befitting a band called Asschapel and a label with the rep of Southern Lord, it’s heavy as fuck.
Bureau B During the late ’70s and early ’80s, Rolf Trostel was one of a few musicians exploring the landscape of Berlin School electronic music. At this time, most of these artists only made a handful of albums and Trostel’s legacy of work can be seen alongside artists such as Zanov and Didier Bocquet as creating this brief blip on the musical landscape.
Front and Follow At once a split release and a collaboration, the first instalment in Front and Follow‘s new series of joint releases, The Blow, finds IX Tab and Hoofus sharing the honours on this limited edition cassette and download edition.
London 29 July 2016 In 1991, I waited in anticipation outside the Brixton Fridge (as it was known then) clutching my ticket waiting to see The Orb’s first ever live show, not really knowing quite what to expect. I had bought the double album of The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld and had devoured every second of it, its sounds sending me off on some strange cosmic voyage […]
Zoharum At high volume this album is an immersive experience, throat-sung waves of wordless drone washing over you. A raspy, sinking sand that has a succulent SunnO))) depth to it. Full of rhythmic intones and surfacing undercurrents, half-formed vowels floundering in the slow friction, a slight bounce of drum skin barely detectable, a few padded percussives creeping its corners.
The Great Pop Supplement Formed by members of Holy Fuck, The New Lines and The Eighteenth Day Of May, Lake Ruth offer a disarming take on psychedelic indie pop with their début album Actual Entity. It’s a charming glimpse into a world of magic and wonder, although of course not one without its own darkness. Because otherwise pop music just doesn’t tend to work, and this manifestly does.
Trace From the opening strum and distinctive twang of Mark Beazley and Michael Donnelly‘s twin bass strings, Discover The Lost sweeps up the listener in its warmly-curving arms, holds on tight and soothes the cares of the worlds outside away. This it does over the course of the next ten instrumentals with a similar ear for the simplicity found in detail, the subtleties perceived in a deft turn and an […]