The Incredible String Band : 1000 Spirits or The Layers of The Onion 1967 The Incredible String Band are a bit like Marmite…you love them or hate them. How can you be into Stockhausen and Hendrix and be a String Band freak? Many of my friends were (and still are!) This is the cover […]
Lucretia Dalt ¡Ay! RVNG Intl Is Lucretia Dalt getting her groove on? Kind of! Her work over multiple albums and soundtracks has always had the influence of her native Colombia incorporated as an essence within complex abstractions. Here, though, the bolero, mambo, salsa, and merengue are vividly present – albeit slowed down, stretched and […]
Gurriers. Remember the name because they are starting to cause a stir. They’re raging, visceral and their riffs will make you punch the air. Synthesise the raw ferocity of a (melodic) Metz with the confident rock n roll swagger of early Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and you can start to get the idea of Gurriers’ […]
Principia – out now on Trouble in Mind Records I’m glad to report that all is well in the En Attendant Ana camp. The Parisian quintet are back with Principia, their third and, in my opinion, best record yet. According to vocalist and principal songwriter, Margaux Bouchaudon, the songs were composed from a place of confusion about […]
Boris – W Sacred Bones In 29 years of playing and 26 in this lineup, Japanese rock trio Boris have never stood still. Thus, they follow ‘NO’, 2021’s album of furious, and relatively lo-fi, crustpunk, with one of the most detailed, sonically advanced records they’ve ever made. ‘W’ ranges from spooky abstract-but-intimate songs through ‘Loveless’ […]
Mazen Kerbaj Sampler / Sampled Morphine So, this is just all the way out there. On ‘Sampler’, Lebanese trumpeter Kerbaj pushes his instrument as far as it will go in all directions with various processing to produce hundreds of snippets and blurts of the most gloriously weird noise, intended for sampling and manipulation. On ‘Sampled’, […]
Carmen Villain Only Love From Now On Smalltown Supersound The Norwegian-Mexican American instrumentalist and producer Carmen Hillestad has matured record by record and collaboration by collaboration. Her fourth solo album is next level even by her lofty standards. At times it leans to ambient, fourth world, dub techno, Steve Reich-ish minimalism and more but it’s […]
Lucy – Lucy Plays Wanton Witch Stroboscopic Artefacts Bangkok-resident Malaysian artist Wanton Witch has already radically redefined industrial techno / electronica aesthetics with her 2021 self-titled debut album. Now the sounds are turned on their head again as Stroboscopic Artefacts founder Lucy, not so much remixes the record as builds a whole new one from […]
There aren’t many UK bands in the Punk genre that have had the lasting impact that Crass have. The collective have received an equal amount of love and hate over the decades and all without having any mainstream success. There was no crossover hit, no jeans commercial “sell-out” mega-hit and most folks in the street […]
War – The World Is A Ghetto When I was 14 in Thornton Heath visiting the record store by the station, a cover caught my eye. It was so different, and in many ways years ahead of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti album cover. What was inside the album was even greater than that brilliant cover, […]
