Chris Sawle, Author at Backseat Mafia

Live review: This is the Kit, Falmouth, March 4th – West Country meets West Coast and proves a very fine blend

WE’RE not quite there, you know, not yet; not quite. Back to normal, that is. It’s taken me until early March to lose my 2022 gig cherry, mostly because the…

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Album review: Shane Parish – ‘Liverpool’: pulling sea shanties leftfield and forward, forward, ho! for a post-industrial, post-rock generation KICKERS

IF YOU don’t know Shane Parish and his oeuvre – and chances are, unless you’re a regular reader of Wire and the deeper corners of Pitchfork and suchlike, you possibly…

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Album review: Duncan Marquiss – ‘Wires Turned Sideways In Time’: Phantom Band guitarist conceives of an instrumental, pastoral motorik for a place yet to exist

FROM disastrous events that upend your world can sometimes come good things; sometimes, I’m no Pollyanna here. Fortunately for Duncan Marquiss, guitarist with Chemikal Underground’s The Phantom Band, a major…

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Album review: Matchess’s ‘Sonescent’: an irresistible flow of experimental, meditative drone recollection and conscious absence

WHITNEY JOHNSON has been releasing albums that explore gorgeous deep inner space in song and sound as Matchess for a number of years now. She began in 2015 with the…

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Album review: The Jazz Butcher – ‘The Highest In The Land’: one final pop postcard from Northampton’s foremost gent

THE JAZZ BUTCHER is one of those artists who make indiepop kids of a certain generation go misty eyed, and with good reason; Pat Fish, the man behind the jazz…

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Album review: Black Flower – ‘Magma’: a perfumed souk of North African psych jazz from the Lowlands quintet

THE WORLD of Belgian Eastern jazz outfit Black Flower is a well-woven and beautiful one; the quintet this week unveil their sixth full-length album for Ghent’s rather groove-obsessed Sdban Ultra…

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Album review: Beirut – ‘Artifacts’: a masterful and beautiful voyage through Zach Condon’s early years in EPs, Bs and offcuts

MISSION CREEP. One of those pseudo-economic terms that make the decent among us go “eeep”, defined in dictionary terms as “a gradual shift in objectives, often resulting in an unplanned…

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Album review: Group Listening – ‘Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works, Vol. 2’: essential ambient reworkings with a real sense of place

GROUP LISTENING is a pairing of two very fine Welsh musicians: Cardiff’s Paul Jones, a deft jazz and experimental pianist and arranger who first worked with his partner on this…

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Album review: Claude Cooper – ‘Myriad Sounds’: taut, essential Bristol jazz breaks and cinematic LSD groove

CLAUDE COOPER: a jazz breaks legend in his own lifetime, should he even exist; for who CC is remains a complete mystery. Certainly to me. Certainly to you. One physical…

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Album review: Die Wilde Jagd – ‘Atem’: a dark, occluding drone masterwork

DIE WILDE JAGD – it translates as “The Wild Hunt”, Anglophones, which will surely be the only possible connection to Swedish troubadour The Tallest Man on Earth we shall ever…

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