ALBUM REVIEW: Kelly Lee Owens – ‘Inner Song’: leftfield tronica beauty soars
IT’S been a quite a journey that’s led Kelly Lee Owens to the place where she is now, garnering critical praise from all quarters and Welsh queen-elect of that sweet spot where halcyon pop meshes into intelligent dance music with a deft touch. I really don’t think there is anyone else who has such nuance …
TRACK: Liam Bailey – ‘White Light’: tough-edged reggae soul on Big Crown
BROOKLYN’S Big Crown, those fine curators of great groove nuggets where’er they unearth them, has just dropped a new single in the shape of “White Light” by British soul-reggae diamond Liam Bailey. It’s the second single he’s dropped for Big Crown, following last year’s deep toasting melodies on “Champion” / “Please Love Me Again” 7″; …
SAY PSYCH: ALBUM REVIEW: Moon Duo – ‘Escape’: fuzz psych-meisters’ debut, expanded
TIME can really slip by. It’s ten whole years – yep, a decade – since Moon Duo span out of Wooden Shjips with that band’s Ripley Johnson teaming up with keyboardist Samae Yamada to forge a psych-side hustle. Hell, that means it’s almost nine years since I saw Wooden Shjips at End of the Road …
EP REVIEW: Max Cooper – ‘Earth’: cutting-edge IDM for our life on it
IN FORMER times, he’s what you would call a renaissance man, a polymath, Max Cooper: active and proficient in so many fields of creativity and science; jack of all trades, oh; master of them, too. A childhood dalliance with the violin proved a false dawn; instead he pursued biology and was awarded a PhD in …
TRACK: Metronomy – ‘The Light’ (Kero Kero Bonito remix): a modern synthpop marriage
IT MAKES absolute sense, when you think about it: take the art-synth-pop of Metronomy, take also further intelligent pop experimenta via the futurist J-pop and shoegaze-informed stylings of Kero Kero Bonito, and put ‘em together. Why had no one thunk of that before? Metronomy haved shared a new remix of “The Light”, the cool, detached, …
ALBUM REVIEW: Fritz Pape – ‘From My Guitar At Homes’: inventive sonic studies for the ambient-minded
FRITZ PAPE began his musical journey under the alias Zijnzijn Zijnzijn!, under which banner he undertook to create impenetrable, even frightening, waves and barrages of guitar, right up in your face a la Swans or Boredoms. With an eye to the trail laid by Glenn Branca, he’s also been known to put together ensembles of …
NOT FORGOTTEN: The Irresistible Force – ‘It’s Tomorrow Already’: the loud, great finale of British rave-ambient
“IT’S TIME to lie down and be counted”: so goes Mixmaster Morris’s brilliant call to very relaxed arms for the 90s’ British ambient scene. It was a manifesto banner that he jointly flew with The Orb’s Alex Paterson in that era, 1991-95, when the appetite for strange interweavings of found sound, Krautrock washes, environment recordings, …
NEWS: Hamilton Leithauser announces new album, live launch stream
HAMILTON LEITHAUSER, the massive voice behind such The Walkmen hits as “The Rat” and “In The New Year”, has announced a new album – a live set – and to go alongside, a live stream launch party from Woodstock. He said: “I didn’t realize at the time that the five shows I played in January …
TRACK: China Bears – ‘Statue Still’: a proper big indie guitar thing outta the west
CHINA BEARS – up and coming on cool indie Fierce Panda – haven’t had the best run of luck this year. Firstly, their appearance at Austin, Texas’s acclaimed SXSW festival in March, for which were booked to play a number of slots, fell victim to, y’know, the thing; the consolation of a spring tour became …
SEE: The Dawdler – ‘Lava Lamps’: a study in beautiful acoustic sadness
THE DAWDLER is the low-key musical alias of Tyneside singer-songwriter John Edgar, who describes himself on his Twitter profile as “Ambient pop. Sad.” He’s just signed to London indie Akira Records and by way of marking that partnership has just released a lovely (and admittedly, sad) little tune entitled “Lava Lamps” in tribute to his …