Album Reviews
Album Review: Preoccupations – Preoccupations
Preoccupations is the band formerly known as Viet Cong. Viet Cong was a band that put out one of my favorite albums of 2015. Preoccupations is a band that may have put out one of my favorite albums of 2016. Not only for the fact that their self-titled album is a beautifully dark concoction of …
Album Review: Purling Hiss – High Bias
Purling Hiss are a band that can’t really be labeled. As soon as you think you know who they are the sound changes. Mike Polizze and his Purling Hiss project began as an experimental outlet for him to record his white noise and fuzz-drenched solo songs, but it turned into more than that. Comparisons to …
Album Review: Conrad Schnitzler/Schneider TM : Con-struct
Conrad Schnitzler was a German experimental music pioneer. He founded Berlin’s legendary Zodiak Free Arts Lab, a subculture club, in 1967/68. He was also a member of Tangerine Dream, showing up on their debut record Electronic Meditation. He left Tangerine Dream and then formed Kluster with Roedelius and Moebius. Schnitzler recorded three albums with Kluster then …
Album Review: Matt Berry – The Small Hours
Matt Berry has is someone who has stealthily raised his reputation in the music industry in recent years without the wider world really noticing, slowly but surely increasing his audience size by word of mouth, putting out a new album every year since 2013 and playing rapturously received gigs. While The Small Hours hasn’t received …
Album Review: Young Guns- Echoes
After a three year break between their second and third albums- the latter of which came out last year- Young Guns have not messed around this time. Just fifteen months after their last album Ones and Zeroes, the High Wycombe (recently diminished) four-piece are back again with Echoes, their fourth full length offering. Whilst each …
Say Psych: Album Review, Hjärndimma by Centralstödet
Centralstödet is yet another band that is new to me, and yet another band from Sweden that has just blown me away as soon as I heard it. Hailing from Gothenburg it is a four-piece, comprising Ulrik Lindblom and Daniel Johansson (guitar), Joni Huttunen (bass), and Jonas Fredlund, (drums). I think its fair to say that, as much …
Album Review: Stillhound – Bury Everything
Stillhound have spent years immersing themselves in their music, and their homeland, to form a sparkling diamond of a debut album. This Edinburgh based trio of Fergus Cook (vocals/guitar), Laurie Corlett-Donald (synths/guitar) and Dave Lloyd (synths) – joined by drummer Cat Myers for this record (also of Honeyblood) – started making music together at high …
Wilco : Schmilco
I can only imagine that at some point in an artist’s life taking yourself and your art so seriously can get pretty heavy. Eventually real life will start to outdo you in the drama department and what you once took so serious doesn’t seem all that important anymore. Health crisis, getting older, losing loved ones …
Say Psych: Album Review, Drakkar Nowhere.
One of the most instant tracks that I have heard this year has been Drakkar Nowhere’s ‘Higher Now’. I instantly put it on one of my playlists, and hoped that it would be representative of the album as a whole. That was nearly two months ago and the fear, of course, was that something that …
Album Review: Kishi Bashi – Sonderlust
Singer. Songwriter. Violinist. Producer. Multi-instrumentalist. All words I should be using to describe Kaoru Ishibashi AKA Kishi Bashi. But to me I can describe him simply as a creator of beautiful things. I first became aware of his work on the release of his song ‘Manchester’; a song about writing a novel. Lyrically it stood head …