album review
ALBUM REVIEW: Liela Moss – ‘Who the Power’: pop that takes one last dance as the world ends
OVER the past couple of years and one very warmly received LP, Duke Spirit member and Bella Union solo artiste Liela Moss – watch your vowel placement with care, folks – has carved herself something of a niche for a strong and dark pop draught, heady with intensity, 80s’ melodicism, courage and a complete willingness …
ALBUM REVIEW: Conrad Schnitzler/Frank Bretschneider – ‘Con-struct’: beguilingly far out in sound deconstruction
Frank Bretschneider’s instalment in Bureau B’s occasional ‘Con-struct’ series is a fascinating, rewarding and wholly synapse-rearranging glitchtronica journey – do not operate heavy machinery under the influence
ALBUM REVIEW: Conrad Schnitzler – ‘Con’: Tangerine Dream man’s ’78 LP gets first UK issue
Tangerine Dream founder’s 1978 LP of synthy motorik receives its first UK issue: spacious, eerie and polyrhythmic by turns
ALBUM REVIEW: El Goodo – ‘Zombie’: at the corner of Haight and (Mountain Ash)bury
SOMEWHERE in the Welsh village of Resolven, deep in the Vale of Neath, there is a tap. As with all such fonts, miles of pipes lead the one end to the other, far up above in the Welsh hills, to a reservoir. As you approach that source, in your mind’s eye, you notice the visuals …
Album Review: Haneke Twins – Astronaut
Deep down inside Switzerland’s CERN Laboratory, working hard on the Hadron Collider and the Higgs Bosun particle, a couple of scientists from Greece have found something else quite exciting. Paschalis Vichoudis (vocals and bass guitar) and Stefanos Leontsinis (guitars) are at the core of Haneke Twins – a post punk/shoegaze group that has just released …
ALBUM REVIEW: Figueroa – ‘The World As We Know It’: shimmering psych-tronica from Amon Tobin
AMON TOBIN has been in there for quite a while now, toying with our heads with very fine, playful, exploratory and sometimes just wonderfully weird sonic artistry. Rio-born, he arrived with Ninebar Records as Cujo, fashioning these trademark deep bass surges out on the edges of drum ‘n’ bass, like spitting thunderheads. He came out …
ALBUM REVIEW: Box of Chocolates – ‘Fearful Symmetry’: early Brooklyn stirrings from Will Oldham, et al
EVERY era of music has those great, lost nuggets which slip out, are adored by the knowing few, lost to the many; are whispered about and traded for ever-inflating sums until they break cover once more. It’s a cycle that can sometimes take a generation, as the actual chaff falls away to leave little beauties …
Album Review: The Psychedelic Furs – Made of Rain plus tour news
There is something about Richard Butler’s voice in The Psychedelic Furs that induces a warm feeling of nostalgia for a certain era when the Furs were such a unique and distinctive force. But the new album from The Psychedelic Furs, ‘Made of Rain’, has nothing whatsoever to do with nostalgia nor is it in any …
ALBUM REVIEW: Romare – ‘Home’: fashioning broken beat into a cerebral confection
HE’S been around a bit, has Archie Fairhurst, the artiste who releases cerebral and multifaceted grooves for Ninja Tune as Romare. It’s an overused trope, but Archie really has: he spent his childhood travelling constantly with his family as his parents moved around the world for work, before finally settling in the UK. All that …
Album Review: Fontaines D.C. – A Hero’s Death
If there is one thing Fontaines D.C. have stressed on the eve of the release of their second album ‘A Hero’s Death’ it is that people should not simply expect part two of their outrageously good debut, ‘Dogrel’. This is a Fontaines D.C. reboot, not a sequel. Singer Grian Chatten puts it quite buntly: I …