TRACK: Bill Callahan reveals ‘Pigeons’ from new album
IT TURNS out he wasn’t joking. Last week’s announcement of a new Bill Callahan record in September included a cryptic passage, chatty and hyperbolic, stating: “Ten Whole Weeks until Gold Record drops? Why, that sounds like an eternity! “Thankfully, the Gold Record rush begins much sooner than that – if you think of every weekend …
TRACK: GANG OF FOUR – ‘Day Turns to Night’: in tribute to Andy
LOOKING back, perhaps the first real portent of the way this year would unfold more sourly than most was our loss of that architect of the scratchy, jagged riff and leader of the Gang of Four, Andy Gill, early in February. At midsummer, casting our eyes over the first half of a year turned upside …
TRACK: Jaga Jazzist’s “Spiral Era” remix is heading for other galaxies
GRADUALLY and cultishly, Norwegian octet Jaga Jazzist have been building probably the most interesting and wide-ranging catalogue in the modern jazz sphere; wholly unafraid of leaping genre fences, taking and tempering and incorporating strands of other musics in the most creative way. Listen to an album such as 2002’s A Livingroom Hush, or 2015’s Starfire, …
NEWS: Penelope Isles, Marissa Nadler for Elliott Smith charity live stream
ARTISTS including Penelope Isles, Marika Hackman and Marissa Nadler will be appearing in a charity benefit show streaming on Instagram this evening, Monday, June 29th. The live-streamed show, entitled “Everybody Cares”, in which participating artists will play their favourite Elliott Smith song, aims to raise money for a trio of LGBTQ+ charities. Showtime is at …
ALBUM REVIEW: King of the Slums – Our Favourite Trainers
THEY emerged from Hulme in 1986, breathing sour fire and an eagle eye for unfashionable detail. Second cousins of The Fall in the way they filtered and spat language to reach deeper, following the grimy thread of it back through 21st-century estates and the Industrial Revolution to a lost, almost medieval rural folk tongue, as …
TRACK: Race Banyon’s ‘Pressure Off’ drinks from the deep house well
EDDIE JOHNSTON, who is carving out something of a name for himself in his native New Zealand with a brace of contrasting musical identities, has released a rather tasty little nugget as a teaser for his forthcoming EP wearing his Race Banyon hat, which is pencilled in for a July 7th release. “Pressure Off” presses …
SAY PSYCH: album review: Venus Furs – ‘Venus Furs’
IT’S an album that’s been even longer in the creation than My Bloody Valentine’s legendary Loveless. Five years to write, five years to record and hone; but finally Montreal psych-shoegaze perfectionist Paul Kasner is poised to release Venus Furs’ self-titled debut LP. Paul says: “”This album has been a long time coming, and I could …
TRACK: Thiago Nassif – ‘Santa’: tropicalia is reborn in glitch
LIKE the Tropicalia movement of the late 1960s, in which artists such as Os Mutantes and Gileberto Gil turned to the creation of music as a pushback against political extremism, Thiago Nassif is leading a a musical reaction to the chaotic populism of the Bolsanaro era in Brazil. He debuted in 2009 with Garconnière, an …
ALBUM REVIEW: Khruangbin – ‘Mordechai’
THEY weren’t an outfit that was hyped into the musical consciousness worldwide by a huge machine, fully packaged and billboarded; rather Houston’s Khruangbin have seeped into the world gradually but effortlessly via all the coolest of channels. First breaking through in the UK on the back of their inclusion on Bonobo’s LateNightTales mix compilation, they …
EP REVIEW: JOCKSTRAP – Wicked City: we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto
WARP debutantes Jockstrap – the duo Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye, jazz and electronics students respectively in a previous life – really do screw with the ol’ head, in the nicest possible way. It’s not like you haven’t heard many of the influences they draw on before, perhaps; but it’s the insouciant way they combine …