Black Plague Operating at the intersection between the dingiest of dark ambient, noise and post-industrial electronic gloom, Hell Follows turns out to be a more spacious affair than Aderlating‘s previous delves into the murk and mire. However, Maurice De Jong (Gnaw Their Tongues, Seirom, Cloak of Altering etc) and Eric Eijspaart leave no drone unturned nor mordant exposition too clearly laid out — while there is now a certain […]
album review
2632 posts
Sulatron Let us journey in to the far reaches of space. Let our mind travel through dark matter and push forward the boundaries of human knowledge. What soundtrack should we have for this celestial voyage to the outer regions? Why, Sula Bassana’s new album, of course.
ISO/Sony/Colombia New Bowie album. For years that meant bollocks all. LOCATION <DOESN’T MATTER, REALLY> TIME <xx111994> I remember a mate saying to me back in 1994, on turning up on a Saturday night, “Here’s the new Bowie album”. “NEW Bowie album? It’s the fucking ’90s. That’s not a good selling point. Just play some old ’70s ones, we’ll be cool”. . It was Outside. It blew the top […]
earMusic It was the late Seventies when I discovered Yes via a friend of mine. At first I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. There were all these complex time signatures and chord sequences flying around from my stereo that at times it felt like music from another world. Soaring over all this alien music was the voice of Jon Anderson, high in its register, seeming almost […]
4AD More loveliness from the vaults of 4AD, and the label have pulled out all the stops on this one. A five-disc Lush retrospective housed in a glossy hardback book, surely destined to become an instant collector’s item. Not only are the historical releases Gala, Spooky, Split and Lovelife captured, there’s tons of session tracks, demos and previously unreleased miscellany appended to each disc too – in all […]
Rocket It’s the shortest day of the year and Hills’ Frid album is bringing some summer warmth on a midwinter’s day — blasting, beautiful, fuzzed-out freak beat psychedelia from Gothenburg’s finest. “Kollektiv” is like a slab of 1969 all rolled up in a glorious joint of mellow psychedelic madness. From its fuzzed out opening to its sitar-laden exit, this is . It so perfectly captures a certain era […]
The Arkive/Beggars Banquet Gary Numan’s Top Of The Pops performance of “Are Friends Electric” was the Bowie “Starman” flashpoint for my generation (those creeping around the 50s age bracket). In school the next day we had many discussions about it, the weird music, the weird look, etc; it was like Kraftwerk but darker and, to be honest, just seemed alien to us. That performance changed lots of people’s […]
Young God (North America) / Mute (Rest of the world) Disc 1 — White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity After a disastrous flirtation with a major label on The Burning World, White Light From The Mouth of Infinity was a self-financed regaining of confidence for Michael Gira. The acoustic spirit of Burning World was still high on the agenda, but the lacklustre verve that cursed that LP was ditched […]
Troum and Yen Pox – Mnemonic Induction Transgredient This disc shows the collaborative strengths of the German bliss-mongers Troum coupled with the menacing ambience of America’s Yen Pox, originally released by Malignant Records in 2000 and remastered for this re-release on Transgredient. Mnemonic Induction is a 63 minute journey divided into quarters, each track eating the tail of the next to make essentially one continuous dronescape, the whole […]
Disco Gecko I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. I totally bought into the Planet Dog/Shamanarchy angle as a teenager and still buy in now. This compilation has been put together by Toby Marks AKA Banca de Gaia, one of the heads of the scene in the ’90s, a guy who used to be everywhere, whose music was played at and defined by West Country beach parties […]
Awesome Tapes From Africa Oh, liner notes! I get that some people just want the music to speak for itself, but, frankly, that’s nonsense. I want someone to put it in a context, which is what Awesome Tapes From Africa have done here; thanks, ATFA. We learn that SK Kakraba comes from a line of gyil players, and we learn that the distorted buzzes on the slats is […]
Important Composition’s kind of ridiculous to write about in that you have to write about (broadly) two things — the composition and the delivery — and differences between various recordings can be relatively minimal. Usually, the appeal of composition from about the ’40s onward is that it falls into one of two categories — shit, therefore over-recorded (Phillip Glass, most Americans) or amazing, therefore under-recorded (usually by Europeans). […]
Bureau B ESB’s album lands on my doorstep at the same time as the first pictures of Pluto filter through the cosmos and are shown for the first time for all humanity to see. Somehow the music created by the trio of Yann Tiersen, Lionel Laquerrière and Thomas Poli is fitting as its soundtrack. “Market” is the album opener, and it’s full of glistening synths that seem to […]
Sofa Sometimes, you just want to write a review made up of ephemera and snatches of observations rather than, y’know, syntactically cogent sentences. I would say “poetic”, but what I really mean is that I find my own notes hilarious and disingenuous and the idea of having a series of shit kōans in place of a record idea is amusing.
Night School (Europe) / Sacred Bones (Americas) Today we’re here to talk about the idea of perfect pop music, and in the ’80s, that decade where pop ruled the world, there was no band more perfect than Strawberry Switchblade, who burned ridiculously brightly for one lone album and then dissolved in acrimony.
The Spheres Swastikas For Noddy was my favourite of Current 93‘s work until Thunder Perfect Mind stole its glory some years later. It’s very much a family affair, a pulling of disparate threads directed by David Tibet chasing his hallucinogenic vision of a crucified Noddy.
Tin Angel It’s harvest time and the nights draw in and we prepare for the long winter ahead. In a few weeks the warmth of long summer days will be a distant memory and we will count the days down to the sun’s warm return.
Sulatron Krautzone have to be one of my favourite new bands of the last couple of years. Not only are the covers of the albums (by Komet Lulu) so beautifully designed, but the music is powerful, hypnotic, trance-like and just plain out there. Here, we are treated over two CDs to the complete recorded works of the band, plus one never-before released bonus track that gives you enough […]