album review
Album Review: Palace celebrate resilience in the midst of fear with ‘Shoals’.
“Consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?” Herman Melville. If I were to try and capture the essence of empowering narrative behind The Palace’s new album ‘Shoals’, this would be it. A depiction of the inner and outer conflict ; the dichotomy …
Album Review: Emily Barker and Lukas Drinkwater release the shining new covers album ‘Room 822’ and announce Emily Barker tour dates
Emily Barker has just released a ‘Room 822’ her new album, which is a homage to 10 iconic Australian songs. The album was recorded in a Perth hotel room when Barker and husband, Lukas Drinkwater were in quarantine in a Perth hotel during October 2021. The pair are based in the UK and knowing that …
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 explore – is the sonic project of producer and songwriter Sebastian Lee Philipp. Across three albums from 2015’s self-titled debut, through 2018’s Uhrwald Orange and …
Album Review: End Scene’s debut album ‘All My Ghosts’ is a masterpiece that jangles with a dark pop intent and an indelible shimmer.
There is a recognisable antipodean jingle jangle thrum in Sydney band End Scene‘s debut album ‘All My Ghosts’. Essentially, End Scene is James Jennings and Tom Dufficy and together they have produced an indie pop delight with instrumentation that chimes and rings, given a celestial reach by an acerbic and droll undercurrent in the vocals and …
Album review: Cluster – ‘Cluster 71’: the German electronica scene on the cusp of breaking through, lovingly reissued
AS WELL as hosting a whole stable of contemporary bands that are mainly spinning in the leftfield electronics and synthpop galaxies, Hamburg’s Bureau B has also been doing sterling work in curating the krautrock archive, keeping the torch burning with deep dives into the unreleased tapes of Conrad Schnitzler, reissuing lost gems and offering that …
Album review: John Thayer – ‘Supermundane’: a palimpsest of nuanced, intelligent ambience
NEW YORK percussionist, audio engineer and all-round musical polymath John Thayer, fresh from two collaborative, cassette-only albums last year – Untangling The Ghost, on which he sparred with reeds player Stank Zenkov, and Mountain Rumors, in tandem with Craig Schenker – is not about to depart this grinding year of our lord 2021 without dropping …
Album Review: Seven Days And Doesn’t Die – Seven Days And Doesn’t Die
When we reviewed their last single, we described Seven Days and Doesn’t Die as “snarling, sneering, punk-tinged rock n’ roll, with an aggression that many bands aspire to but so few pull off with such aplomb, yet filled with singalong, gang-vocal chorus and hooklines that sink their teeth in and refuse to let go”. Seven …
Album Review: Land Trance & Aging produce utter cinematic-sonic immersion with ‘Embassy Nocturnes’
Very rarely does a record manage to capture a spectrum of cinematic detail in it’s profoundly illustrative composition, spinning yarns across it’s runtime like neighbouring scenes. However – with far greater ambition and grace than any crassly conceived concept album – the new collaborative project between Land Trance and Aging does just that, envisioning a …
Album Review: Aliens – 30lbs of Air
Aliens have dodged a bullet with 30lbs of Air – a “concept album” that captures the essence of war while escaping the clichés. The term “concept album” tends to send a shiver down my spine. This turned into a shudder when I heard that the concept of this particular album was the ordinary men and …
Album Review: Smote – Drommon
Newcastle has been a veritable hub for a wide spectrum of psych and noise, from the raw trio of Blóm to the relentless clamour of Pigs x7; the same city’s Smote offers a different, but similarly singular, vision of psych. Drommon comprises the previously released titular, two-parter, bookending new material ‘Hauberk’ and ‘Poleyn’; a more …