Multi-instrumentalist Jan Todd's fourth album has Frostlake has her once again teaming up with Terry Todd to provide bass tones; but the addition of Andy Peake on piano has imbued the pieces here with a timeless air and a real sense of the soft hush of a dreamworld.
album review
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Having recalibrated themselves somewhat with 2021’s towering epic Burials, Cambridge’s Fuzzy Lights return belatedly with the logical extension that is Fen Creatures. With Rachel Watkins retaining sole lead vocal and lyric-writing duties, alongside her role on violin, Xavier Watkins (guitar), Chris Rogers (guitar), Daniel Carney (bass) and Mark Blay (drums) continue to turn up both the turbulence and atmospherics, the folk-psych-rock melding appears even weightier and wider in its reach.
Terrazoku: an Earth tribe of the future brought into being by the climate apocalypse of the late twenty-first century; a ragbag of survivors for whom life on Earth is a very different experience from those of their predecessors.
An immediate ignition; a series of fluttering electronic sound signals arrival. The where is hard to spot as the constant chirrup of unknown variables the static stutter of distant disturbances. A settled reflection sits atop a burr of metallic brogue that is alive with chatter, the ironic sound of rebellion.
There is undoubtedly no productivity crisis in the broad spheres of nouveau shoegaze and DIY electronica, with complementary manoeuvres and convergence playing out between them to boot. This is certainly apparent in sifting through another review pile on the verge of toppling over, replete with a lot of familiar suspects from some reliable sources.
Swedish composer Joel Danell has been trading under the name of Sven Wunder since 2019's Doğu Çiçekler (Eastern Flowers) and each release seems to refine his romantic take on widescreen instrumental music, touching as it does on soul, jazz, yacht rock and soundtracks.
"Do we need Fall reissues" seems like the wrong question. We're getting them and they're going to be somewhere between glut and porcelain. Though it being the Fall you take the rough with the less rough. It's a wheat from the chuff review.
This dark and contemplative work, inspired by the blazing spike of William Blake's Albion, is a haunting torchlit journey into some imagined underworld, something the opener "The Milk White Path" unloads in plentiful supply. That farm-gate creak, bathed in a slow dronic yearn, pitted in plunging bass.
Truly, Slightly, Overflowing, Whereabout Of Good Will is a darkly foreboding and quite a tough listen, but it's oddly charming throughout. There's a lot of careful weighting to contributions and a good amount of careful listening and pivoting -- so far as musicianship goes it's a grand exemplar of a certain trend in often-quiet texture-based improvisation. Haino is a terrifying vocalist so having a whole set where he can go off vocally is a treat.
This curious mix of circumstances gives the album a sense of sense of statelessness; a sense that things could go in any direction, Liv's playful and ever-elegant piano either shadowed or mobbed by the scattered percussion of August Glännestrand and the warm languid bass of Georgia Wartel Collins.
By some miracle the entire thing was generated from a single seven-hour session; the basic quartet of bass, drums, synth and trumpet is augmented by guest vocalists and smatterings of guitar and flute, but the basic line-up gives more than enough texture as it is.
Where the previous album compiled four compositions from each of the three players, here a composition each from Martin, Charlotte and Martin rub shoulders with some long twisting improvisations that drag the listener on a set of expansive adventures that turn away from the previous work and set sale for pastures new... It is wild, florid and fantastic in its scope and yet another shining feather in the Discus cap; a must for all those seeking adventure.
Gala feels very summery to me, the staring at the sun splintering of "Sweetness And Light" -- that over driven roar that just erupts, released on a daisy-chain sparkle, something the sun-kissed cursives of "Sunbathing" heightens, scuttered in stormy subtleties. The bright-eyed bleed and steady kick of "Breeze" dipping gorgon-headed into a saturated sea of effects gorgeousness, tightly wound round some wickedly catchy refrains.
After the best part of fifty years in the game for Colin Newman and over forty for Malka Spigel, you could be forgiven for thinking that they had run out of things to say. But this latest album, from their long-running collaboration Immersion, casts a stark eye over the state of the world. However, where a lot of people may find only darkness and despair, WTF? attempts to see a positive way out and urges the listener to search within for a strength that may pull them through.
Linda Oláh and Giani Caserotto have been in various separate bands for the best part of twenty years, with Linda also spending time with the French Orchestre National de Jazz. Having known one another for some time, this is their first outing together as Lovers, and with Giani's multi-instrumental and production prowess, Linda's impressive vocal range and a shared love of all things musically adventurous, this is a match made in heaven, with the album being a production in thrall to love in all its guises.
Some tracks from the cassette release Riva and their first untitled vinyl release have been compiled to show how quickly the basic idea of Kreidler fell into place. Some of the assembled tracks are tiny snippets that seem to be just an idea waiting to be fleshed out, but there is nearly always a resonant groove that runs through a lot of them; a swirl of dubby drums, a deep bass rhythm and and expansive sprawl of synths.
What an adventure this is. All The Horned Animals have taken a massive bite out of the impossible task of documenting Nigel Ayers’ (the man behind Nocturnal Emissions' enduring existence) ever-evolving soundscapes.
Clocking in at a mere thirty-six minutes, Love Chant certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome, which means inviting it back for repeat airings is not hard to do. Although it won’t catapult Dando back to crossover celebrity status -- which is arguably a good thing -- Love Chant is a commendable regeneration for The Lemonheads, one that hopefully won’t take quite so long to spawn a sequel.