album reviews
Album review: Tom Dissevelt – ‘Fantasy In Orbit’: seminal Dutch space-age electronica gets a deserved reissue
WELCOME. Now, before we fasten your belts – they’ll keep you safe against the enormous Gs as we break the atmosphere, gain the vast promised land of outer space – it’s as well as we run through a final checklist to ensure a safe and enjoyable journey. So. Question. When names like Broadcast, Stereolab, Vanishing …
Album review: Devin Hoff – ‘Voices From The Empty Moor (Songs of Anne Briggs)’: the canon of the Notts folk free spirit judiciously reinvented
BASSIST Devin Hoff may well be one of those names little known to you, but whose invaluable contributions to a record you’ve likely loved; as a four-string sharpshooter of absolute repute he’s contributed to not far shy of a hundred releases by the likes of Julia Holter, Nels Cline, Xiu Xiu, Cibo Matto, Sharon Van …
Album review: Poppy Ackroyd – ‘Pause’: solo piano pastoralism excellently captures a life lived this past year
WITH four albums proper, so to speak, under her belt – Escapement and Feathers from further back last decade, and a brace for what’s now One Little Independent in 2017, an acoustic mini-album, Sketches and the full-length Resolve – we really haven’t heard nearly enough from Poppy Ackroyd in recent times; but then what with …
Album review: Penelope Isles – ‘Which Way To Happy’: Jack and Lily line up a second set of ambitious, technicolour pop psych
PENELOPE ISLES, the gorgeous Brighton combo led by brother and sister Jack and Lily Wolter, are releasing their second album this week – that’s cause for joy as winter looms. surely. Until The Tide Comes In, their album from 2019 and first for Simon Raymonde’s excellent Bella Union imprint, was a slice of shoegazey guitar …
Album review: David Lance Callahan – ‘English Primitive I’: raw punk-raga and a septet of scorching tales
OVER two phases of potent reports from the real England, with an interregnum of two decades between, David Lance Callahan and The Wolfhounds have consistently filed detailed documentation from the real England – not the England of climbing roses and parental-secured internships and unearned increments, but the England I knew and grew up with: the …
Album review: Spiritczualic Enhancement Center – ‘Carpet Album’: filmic, psychedelic and enveloping – travel deep, travel wisely
IT’S ONE of those sentences you hear periodically when chewing the fat about the music: “Ooh no, though, I really don’t like jazz”. Which, each to their own, live and let live, vive la difference without question; but, which, you imagine may be based on some particularly untethered, free-associating inversion of the style, say, Coltrane’s …
Album review: Scrimshire – ‘Nothing Feels Like Everything’: expansive, opulent soul-jazz with a real beating heart
ALBERT’S FAVOURITES is a label bringing the sounds of the South London scene to the world with heart; genuine heart, and care, and soul, in all iterations of that word. One only need look at the label’s name, and the tribute it pays. I’ve written about this before but it is worth reprising, since it …
Album review: Mildred Maude – ‘Sleepover’: From Cornwall with beautiful, incendiary love
SONIC CATHEDRAL: it may not be the most prolific of labels in terms of releases – but never mind the width; feel the quality. Just take a look back, wouldya, over the past year and a bit of releases: an excellent, excellent new generation of the ‘gaze debut from East Yorkshire’s vowel-free but guitar thrill-replete …
Album review: Pie Eye Collective – ‘Salvation’: genius future broken beat and addictive intricacy map a curious world
PIE EYE COLLECTIVE is the solo project of Bristol-born, London-based sound scientist Matthew Gordon, who melds elements of ambient, broken beat, dub-techno and hip hop, all refracted and discoloured via a spectrum of tape-saturated synthesis; and thus makes a beats-driven and -occluded magical underground to immerse in. Sprite-like, enveloping, oozing with intelligence and devoted to …
Album review: Craig Fortnam – ‘Ark’: North Sea Radio man gathers his world in a prog-pastoral-folk craft of intricacy and thoughtfulness
ARCH GARRISON, whose lovely odyssey of modern Wessex psych-pastoralism The Bitter Lay we loved for all its exploration of thorny byways last year; a half-dozen or so long-playing outings in the North Sea Radio Orchestra; even back before the century’s turn, a solitary album with Shrubbies. In all these incarnations we’ve enjoyed and explored the …