Album Reviews
Album Review : Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile’s ‘Lotta Sea Lice’
Maybe you were like me(or maybe you weren’t) that when you heard Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile were making a collaborative album together it just seemed like the perfect match. There’s a care-free quality about both of them that a coming together of these two seemed like the right thing. The essential thing, even. I’ve …
Album Review : Carlton Melton’s ‘Hidden Lights’
Whenever you drop the needle on a Carlton Melton album you can almost always expect to be taken on a journey. Their albums are these sonic doorways into alternate realities that are sometimes serene and sometimes gritty. The musical world of Carlton Melton is an often gauzy trip into hazy synths, swaths of guitar, and …
Rude Bootleg – Cardiacs Live, Reading Festival 1986
Once a year in my adopted home city of Liége, Belgium, there’s a mini festival in a rough-and-ready part of town. One time a local character, sat smoking on his doorstep and looking like a cross between Al Pacino and Popeye, engaged me in conversation, energised by the influx of young revellers. He asked me …
Album Review: Pale Bird – Ten Things Which Aren’t Love
Pale Bird, aka Martin Austwick, or the artist formerly known as the Sound of the Ladies possesses an instantly identifiable folkish indie sound. Part of this is down to Austwick’s oddly soothing voice, his guitar work, or the feeling of space his production techniques provide between each instrument. It acts as an audible thread connecting …
Classic Compilation: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – Anthology: Through the Years
Tom Petty – a Dylan disciple, a Byrds with harder-wearing tunes, a Bruce Springsteen for the rest of us. Few artists have defined approachable Middle-American rock and roll radio quite like Petty and his loyal band, and no one has made such a consistently good job of it for as long as he did. Anthology: …
Say Psych: Album Premiere: Vuelveteloca – Sonora
Rating: 8/10 Chileans Vuelveteloca caused a stir with their electrifying performance at Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia two years ago, it therefore comes as no surprise that Fuzz Club Records have snapped up the release of their fifth album Sonora and here at BSM we are proud to present you with the premiere. Having formed …
Album Review: Trupa Trupa – Jolly New Songs
Trupa Trupa’s macabre poetic outlook has much in common with contemporary exponents of psychogeography, such as one Iain Sinclair, whose wanderings around London’s orbital networks elicit a meandering prose that seeks to uncover concealed essences of the city. Wanderlust also inhibits the work of this Polish four-piece, who hail from Gdansk. Like London, their city …
Album Review : John Carpenter’s ‘Anthology : 1974 -1998
I believe we’ve entered the John Carpenter renaissance. Five years ago the man was on the bitter end of a film career that had seen better days. To those in the know the man was and is a filmmaking icon. His subtle nuances, patient tension building, exquisite camera work, and of course his film scoring …
Album Review : Primus’ ‘The Desaturating Seven’
When Primus put out their musical tribute to the Gene Wilder classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the aptly-titled Primus & The Chocolate Factory with the Fungi Orchestra back in 2014, everything about the Bay area prog/funk/freak trio seemed to make perfect sense. Les Claypool, the elastic bass genius and singer for the band has …
Album Review: Steve Miller Band – Ultimate Hits
Released as both single and double disc compilations, Ultimate Hits is an odd one. The single disc does everything a compilation should do, giving the listener the feel for the Steve Miller Band’s long career, whereas the double disc version I am reviewing is a game attempt to fill a particular niche. The single disc …