Robustfellow Prods. Psychedelic trio Был замечен (transliterated and truncated to B-Z for short) bring the heavy noise from Kharkiv, dealt out with a steadfast determination to fry the listener’s brains while shaking the rafters that’s entirely admirable. Their second album стало ещё только хуже (It Just Got Worse) sets out on a mission to befuddle, bamboozle and all-out confuse over five tracks on two sides of compact cassette […]
Sumerian The Black comes across as the perfect comeback album for Asking Alexandria, one of the plethora of incredible bands that have emerged from what My Chemical Romance dubbed Generation Nothing. Beginning with a confusing mass of seemingly incomprehensible voices timed with a warbling guitar, “Let It Sleep” gets your heart racing as it builds into an irresistible chant before running off and taking you on a breakneck […]
Village Underground, London 19 March 2016 The expectation was unbearable. The support act, Autrenoir (an alliance of Paul Régimbeau — AKA Mondkopf — and Greg Buffier of Selenites and Saáad), had finished half an hour ago and the Nurse With Wound contingent were assembled hirsute by the side of the stage.
Instrumentarium Creative Listening is the second album from the South London-based trio, released on lovely vinyl. According to the credits on the back it say it was written and recorded “in strict adherence to the manifesto”, which sounds like something you would see on the back of a Throbbing Gristle or Psychic TV album many years ago. Instead, the manifesto seems to be about the use of electronics […]
London 17 March 2016 St Patrick’s Day in chilly London, and I’ve opted out of going out drinking in pubs filled with (mainly English) people wearing green hats and pretending they always liked Guinness in favour of going to see some rock’n’roll, in the alarmingly hipsterised Roundhouse (a craft ale stall? Bar snacks ranging from “nuts” and “crisps” to “bags of meat”? Crikey), because the mighty Savages are […]
Aagoo Diego Martinez has been active as Lumen Lab for half a lifetime, shifting Mexico’s underground electronic music scene into new and varied dimensions well outside its established comfort zones since starting out at the age of fifteen in 2000. Drawing on an evident love of hardcore punk and the many and varied forms that dance music has taken in its long journey from techno into something altogether […]
London 13 March 2016 Sunday night on Pentonville Road, and The Lexington is rammed. At first it’s hard to tell who’s here for the bands and who’s just here for a pint, but then the first act take the stage upstairs and people flood upwards. And it’s not hard to tell WHY they’re here for the bands — as Teeth Of The Sea fiddle around with their eclectic […]
London 14 March 2016 Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, the Jules Rimet still gleamed in the trophy cabinets of old Albion, Patrick McGoohan was recognisable to the nation as Danger Man John Drake rather than some arsy bloke being pursued across a Welsh beach by a weird white ball, and Harold Wilson was the dynamic, thrusting young politician thrilling the body politic. Around […]
London 16 March 2016 I had not been to the 100 Club in many years, so had forgotten what a strange space it is. The fact that the stage is put against a side wall so there is actually more standing space either side of than in front of it is kind of odd. But in the end none of this mattered as I was there to witness […]
Öm Announcing its arrival in a trill of shimmering digital FX and a pounding rhythm, the second instalment of K-X-P‘s third album heaves into audibility with all the bombast and finely-tuned ear for a hook which the band have perfected over their last few releases.
No One Deserves Happiness Thrill Jockey Here’s a concept to consider: The Body have dubbed their latest misanthropic missive No One Deserves Happiness as “the grossest pop album of all time”, and they may just be right. Roping in Chrissy Wolpert and Maralie Armstrong from the Assembly of Light Choir to provide a more melodic vocal counterpoint to Chip King‘s enthusiastically atavistic yelping, the duo also utilise a range […]
Freaks R Us The Pop Group‘s reissue project continues apace with the release of their classic 1980 LP For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? This, their second studio album (and their last for 35 years) saw their overt politicisation, as the title will attest. To the cynical and jaded ears of someone coming to this in 2016, like me for example, there’s an endearing, almost […]
London 11 March 2016 I had not been to King’s Place before, but had been reliably informed that the venue was excellent acoustically for folk concerts. The place has an almost Barbican feel about it, and is quite old school in that no intermission drinks were allowed in the venue, which saw people necking them pretty quickly before Vashti Bunyan’s set. The concert hall is beautiful, though and […]
Rock Action Mugstar have been at the vanguard of the British space rock revival (though perhaps it never really ever went away) for a good decade and more now, and everything about their music can certainly be assessed in terms as broad and well-trodden as spacious, cosmic and psychedelic, and it conjures up all of the tropes — long hair, biker chic, salad lights, heavy wafts of fragrant […]
Electrowerkz, London 26 February 2016 Visiting London’s Electrowerkz in 2016 after spending far too many nights here at the legendary Slimelight in the ’90s is a singularly disorienting experience. It’s the same building, but where once there stood a dingy warehouse now stands an actual venue, even though they’re the same bricks in the same places. Indeed, it’s so disorienting that we may as well be on all […]
London 29 February 2016 Monday is never the best night for gigs in London. There certain left-over feeling in the air from Sunday and for most it’s the first day of the working week. So an evening of dark esoteric music may not be high on most people’s radar. But this being The Black Heart, there is always a regular group of heavy metal freaks to pack out […]
Purple Pyramid Beloved Gong frontman and Soft Machine legend Daevid Allen‘s posthumous album, recorded not long before his death in March 2015, finds this most extraordinary of musicians in the company of Don Falcone (Spirits Burning), Michael Clare (of Allen’s own University of Errors and occasional member of the far-out collective Mushroom) and one of three drummers, Trey Sabatelli (The Tubes), Jay Radford (also from University Of Errors, […]
Carpark The world has changed and moved on since Prince Rama were a three piece with ritual psychedelic overtones and a multi-coloured vision of India running through their music. Since then they have been whittled down to the two Larson sisters, who have taken the band in a very different directions from disco to almost noise music. Xtreme Now pushes this envelope even further out there.