Album Reviews
Album Review : Adam Ben Ezra – ‘Heavy Drops’ : funky and reflective jazz fusion from the irrepressible bassist.
Jazz musician and ‘YouTube sensation’ may seem an unlikely combination but double-bass player Adam Ben Ezra straddles both camps with a natural ease. A self-taught multi-instrumentalist, born in Israel and now based in Portugal, he’s played throughout Europe and the US over the last decade with such luminaries as Sarah Jane Morris, Mike Stern, Pat …
EP Review: The Wonder unveil a magnificent slice of incandescent ‘Pop’.
The Wonder have just released their new EP entitled ‘Pop’ and it certainly does what it says on the label: delivering five indelible tracks that are positively ripe with melody and stature and threaded through, as any good pop songs are, an air of gently melancholy. The band are an international group consisting of Australian vocalist …
Album Review: Steve Kilbey & the Winged Heels take ‘The Road To Tibooburra’ – an exquisite dreamy journey through the Kilbey expansive universe.
Ass soon as the anthemic jangles begin in the opening rack ‘Adrift’, you know you are back in the heavenly spheres of Kilbey land: where endless melodies flourish like the greenery after a downpour in the outback desert, and epic instrumentation arcs across the night skies like meteorites. Steve Kilbey & The Winged Heels is …
Album Review: Dash The Henge – Mercy (Featuring Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry)
Dash the Henge is thrilled to unveil the new vinyl Mercy, an innovative and genre-defying record featuring the legendary Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, alongside visionary artists Peter Harris and Fritz Catlin. Set for release on February 28th, the album is available for pre-order here. Beguiling and strikingly unconventional from the outset, the album opens with ‘Whale:Fisherman’, …
EP Review: Street Legal release their debut EP ‘Bruxism’ – an eclectic vibrant synth-driven collection of gems ahead of national tour.
‘Bruxism’ (named after the medical term for teeth grinding) is the debut album from Adelaide band Street Legal, and it is a joyous blast of synth pop fun that blasts out with all of the noise and bluster of a shoulder-wielded beatbox threaded with a visceral message. Singer Matt Heyward says: Over the past few …
EP Review: Power popsters Hexham Heads release dynamic bursts of sunshine in self-titled EP, ahead of launch gigs.
There’s nothing more essential as an antidote to the current dark climes as a burst of radiant power pop from Naarm/Melbourne outfit Hexham Heads. Their self-titled EP, released on the inimitable Cheersquad Records & Tapes, is out now and it is as bright and fizzy as a soda bottle that’s been shaken around, opened up and …
Album Review: Cluster Lizard – Herts
The pulse of the path. In a massive heartbeat, daring waves rise one after another. The unbreakable tide of the lightning dance, where life and death collide in the eternal vibration of consciousness. In previous centuries, Ukrainian warriors invented an audacious macabre ritual called Herts, a courageous death dance. Before the battle, a few ruthless …
Album Review : Nina Garcia – ‘Bye Bye Bird’ : Taking noise guitar deeper and further.
You could say that guitar led experimentalism is having a moment. Away from the revered Frith/ Orcutt/Ambarchi/Anderson/Connors conclave, a new wave of fretboard deconstructors are cranking up their own kind of volume. Jules Reidy, Chuck Roth, Eli Winter, Ava Mendoza and Farida Amadou (doing it four string style) have pushed into muso consciousness with their …
Album Review: Maud The Moth – The Distaff : a dramatic, intense avant-rock statement.
Celestial, ethereal, bestial and brutal, woven with beauty and darker mysteries, you need a tapestry of adjectives to describe the music of Maud the moth. The project of Spanish-born / Scotland-based pianist and singer-songwriter Amaya López-Carromero, each Maud the moth album has been unapologetically ambitious but not at the expense of authenticity. Following her debut …
Album Review: Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Nik Brinkman envelopes us in a shimmering veil of dreamy pop in his sophomore album ‘World Within’.
There is a dreamy heartbreakingly beautiful shimmer to the new album from Aotearoa/New Zealand artist Nik Brinkman that glows like the stars over the expansive southern hemisphere skies. Brinkman last blew us away here at Backseat Mafia back in 2021 with his debut album ‘Secret Stairs’ (see my review here) and in the intervening time has …