album review
ALBUM REVIEW: Yves Jarvis – ‘Sundry Rock Song Stock’: a thrilling solo quirk-psych vision
WHEN historians of future days come to write up the glowering all-round evils of 2020, they will, hopefully, take note of one glimmering shaft of light through the fog-plague; how great the sphere of quirky Canadian music has been this year. There’s been another sonically luxuriant missive from Montreal’s Braids in the shape of Shadow …
ALBUM REVIEW: Olivier Alary and Johannes Malfatti – ‘u,i’: beautifully humanist post-classicism, listening to the world talk to itself
ISDN, fibre-optics, the web. Sharing platforms, Skype, Facebook, Zoom; instantaneous transmission, the world shrunk to a pebble’s dimension. Our modern world, and especially the broader swathe of this fractured year 2020 would be unimaginable without it. And the latest offering from FatCat’s ever-intriguing leftfield imprint, 130701, a collaboration between Montreal-based Toulousain Olivier Alary and Berlin’s …
ALBUM REVIEW: A Certain Ratio – ‘ACR Loco’: taut Mancunian future funk and effortless electronic pop
“THIS album is a culmination of everything we’ve ever done,” says A Certain Ratio’s Jez Kerr. “We’ve got some real momentum at the moment.” He’s talking about A Certain Ratio’s first album in 12 years, ACR Loco, which drops this week. Excited much? You wouldn’t bet against a musician so steeped in the groove; A …
ALBUM REVIEW: Various Artists – ‘Sunrise On The Blues: Sun Records Curated By Record Store Day Vol. 7’
SAM PHILLIPS’ Sun Records imprint is arguably the first truly great label of the modern era. It was founded in Memphis in February 1952 by Sam, Alabama born, who lived through the great American depression and who cut his musical teeth at the Muscle Shoals radio station WLAY, which didn’t categorise its music by colour …
Album Review: Napalm Death – Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism
There are a few bands out there who have the years behind them yet are still rising to the challenge and blowing expectations. 2015’s Apex Predator – Easy Meat certainly did that and now five years later Napalm Death are back with another album, Throes Of Joy In The Jaws Of Defeatism’ which carries on the great …
Album Review: The Electorate – ‘You Don’t Have Time To Stay Lost’
We’ve already met and fell in love with Sydney band The Electorate after the release of their single ‘Decades in a Day‘. If life is a series of unrelenting miseries leavened by brief moments of sunshine, then The Electorate manage to capture the former and express them perfectly into the latter through their songs. ‘You …
ALBUM REVIEW: Big Bill Broonzy – ‘The Midnight Special: Live In Nottingham 1957’: music of truth delivered with power
BIG BILL BROONZY – he’s one of those names you hear in hallowed tones, whispered and discussed on forums and in the music press, alongside such company as Robert Johnson, Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, as being right in there at the roots of modern black music; in the blues, the devil’s music, which of course …
PREMIERE: Free Country – ‘The Life Of Riley’: wistful, essential lofi from his hometown basement
FREE COUNTRY is the indie pop project of LA’s Jason Ribadeneyra, a man with an ear for a wistful, low-key melody delivered with weary truth in his voice. Tomorrow he releases his latest six-tracker, the introverted, pretty-as, guitar and piano indie pop stylings of The Life of Riley; but tomorrow, as Annie sings so famously, …
ALBUM REVIEW: Osees – ‘Protean Threat’: John Dwyer trips us further into prog-tinged fuzz garage
JOHN DWYER’S Osees. I mean, they’re an absolute force of nature; a vivacious, fiery, disciplined, fun, piledriving force. If you’ve never seen them, by jiminy you need to: kinda meh at Vampire Weekend on the main stage, I wandered into their second-stage headline set at End of the Road in 2018 and stopped dead. Absolutely …
EP REVIEW: HAAi – ‘Put Your Head Above The Parakeets’: a quartet of hard future tronica floor-fillers
HAAi is the future tronica smithy of London-based, Australian-born sound forger Teneil Throssell. She’s taken a meandering journey to become who she is musically now, moving through a myriad of scenes and influences in order to fashion the sound she’s arrived at for Mute. A teenage guitarist with a vision of where she wanted to …