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.
album review
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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 […]
Medical We should all rejoice in the fact that finally the first two Pram albums proper have been given the re-issue treatment, and what a lovely job Medical Records have made of them: coloured vinyl, recent interviews amongst the sleeve notes and a clear appreciation for the magic contained therein.
Artemisia Long out of print and originally put out in 2006 by small DIY label Vendlus, then emerging on Southern Lord a year later, Diadem Of 12 Stars has now been remastered and re-released on Wolves In The Throne Room‘s own Artemisia Records.
Fourth Dimension Like a woozy descent into the abyss, Gary Mundy‘s latest emission as Kleistwahr seizes control of the horizontal hold as well as the vertiginous, propelling the listener into a seemingly endless spiral of dissolution and unheimlich disturbance.
Aphelion Editions What an opener, the snaking shape-shifters of track one take some beating. That soup of drifting unease that Liam McConaghy and Stuart Chalmers conjure up is first rate, trickles your skull in Del Toro-like shivers underpinned in subtle carcasses of snare. Emotional myriads that take pleasure in peppering you in paranoia, picking the locks to the less-travelled corners of your mind in revox doubles and warfing […]
Bureau B That bass is über meaty on the first track, steroid-injected, heavy on the recoil as a heavenly bounty of guitars burn up around it with Makoto intensity. A wow of toasty angles, quiver-toked in flinty sparks that curve-claw at the dark. This is just brilliant, clanking metallics and all, gathering in claustrophobic waves of pure joy and exploding contours. Wah-faring frets flying, mangled, percussively dancing that […]
Leaf Jherek Bischoff‘s new record Cistern is beautiful. I was already expecting this, knowing as I do that he is the master of melody and a conjurer of clever arrangements that can tug the heart and ensnare the senses. I loved his first record, Composed, and so I was ready to be beguiled by Cistern. It is a very different record, entirely instrumental and beautifully orchestrated: it has […]
4AD Now lushily re-duxed on girly marbled vinyl, Belly‘s first LP Star was/is a bright young thing, a glass-refracted dream stirring up a Brothers Grimm-like syntax. Tanya Donelly‘s bewitching delivery, swimming in our head, deceptively sweet with a sting of crazy paved darkness bleeding on through. Driven out on the feel-good adrenalin of immaculate guitar work with pools of teasing melody, Star is a super-assured vision, with some songs […]
Capitol 1966: A fixed point in time; a distant place, another country, an alternate reality. People had yet to walk on the moon, the American civil rights movement was only just gaining momentum, there were no home computers, no email, people wrote letters, sent telegrams, long-haul travel was a luxury most could not afford and The Beach Boys were a clean-cut, all-American pop group.
4AD Dead Can Dance (1984) Born out of the dark and then-derelict Isle if Dogs in London, where Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry scratched out a living since relocating from Australia. This was Dead Can Dance‘s début – a collection of songs that had been percolating away for over four years before.
Zoharum Presented in a double-disc package containing both CD and DVD versions, the former holding the music in standalone album format, while the latter combines it with the visuals, which are not merely an addendum, but integral to WIDT‘s work.
Young God (North America) / Mute (Rest of the world) The Glowing Man marks the culmination of what frontman Michael Gira calls “the current phase” of Swans, and is the fourth album by the current twenty-first century line-up which has been delivering uncompromising beauty and brutality since 2010’s My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky. It shares with that album a returned fascination with […]
More Than Human A nice splash of exploratory electronics on this first LP from Beattie Cobell. A meld of surgical coldness with dirty analogues that comes across like a modern-day Throbbing Gristle eagerly eating into its rhythmic nihilism. Filling dimensionally light algorithmics with Reichian slips, euphoric juxt-a-posies and flirting undercurrents. Kinetic investigations creeping with interest.
“Noinge” / “Gloakid With Phendrabites” Dirter Promotions The first side is the sound of the playful Band Of Pain remixing Nurse With Wound‘s A Sucked Orange in a game of arrant right-angles and ink-splattered goodness where the original source material is utterly fucked over in malfunctioning attention deficits that splutter like a cyborg cat with a data hairball.
Sparrowhawk Perch is seemingly smudged into shape from the leftovers of Fat Bicth, one of Brighton’s embarrassment of “why didn’t they ever gig further than London?” bands. The Bicth were, perhaps, somewhat closer to Brighton stalwarts (your I’m Being Goods and Sweet Williamses) than Perch, so let’s hope this is the band to thrust Perch/ Bicth mastermind Chris Mitchell slightly further afield than London Road.
Thrill Jockey Back in March of this year, Sumac unleashed “Rigid Man” on to YouTube as a taster of what was to come from their new album What One Becomes. Personally, I was very excited indeed, so excited in fact that while listening to the song on headphones on a packed train pulling out of London, I didn’t realise that this utter racket was also being played full […]
Zoharum Recorded between 1989 and 1992, Maëror Tri‘s Hypnobasia, Sensuum Mendacia and Somnia were originally released on cassette by various European labels, the latter appearing as one side of a split tape with Nostalgie Eternelle.