album review
ALBUM REVIEW: Osees – ‘Protean Threat’: John Dwyer trips us further into prog-tinged fuzz garage
JOHN DWYER’S Osees. I mean, they’re an absolute force of nature; a vivacious, fiery, disciplined, fun, piledriving force. If you’ve never seen them, by jiminy you need to: kinda meh at Vampire Weekend on the main stage, I wandered into their second-stage headline set at End of the Road in 2018 and stopped dead. Absolutely …
EP REVIEW: HAAi – ‘Put Your Head Above The Parakeets’: a quartet of hard future tronica floor-fillers
HAAi is the future tronica smithy of London-based, Australian-born sound forger Teneil Throssell. She’s taken a meandering journey to become who she is musically now, moving through a myriad of scenes and influences in order to fashion the sound she’s arrived at for Mute. A teenage guitarist with a vision of where she wanted to …
ALBUM REVIEW: El Ten Eleven – ‘Tautology’: ambitious, thrilling post-rock triple set from LA duo
YOU have to admire the scope and ambition of Los Angeles postrock duo El Ten Eleven, who are about to release their eighth full-length LP, Tautology, on September 18th. You certainly get a lot of bang for your buck. They’ve been releasing it bit by bit in the digital world for months now: Tautology I …
ALBUM REVIEW: Arch Garrison – ‘The Bitter Lay’: a psychedelic folk song of the Wiltshire downs
ARCH GARRISON is, in some ways, the flipside of the coin to Craig Fortnam’s excellent, self-styled alternative chamber group North Sea Radio Orchestra. But it’d be wrong to think of them as the ‘other’ band; although perhaps it’s the latter outfit who claim the higher profile, they’re both remarkably potent musical creations. North Sea Radio …
ALBUM REVIEW: Junkboy – ‘Sovereign Sky’: fraternal pastoral-psych excellence finally gains a proper issue
ONCE you’ve taken a listen to Junkboy’s Sovereign Sky – out on Fretsore on September 25th – you’ll have reason to thank label boss Ian Sephton. He signed the band, at whose heart are brothers Mik and Rich Hanscomb, and released their rather lovely album from last year: the baroque acoustic wondrousness of Trains, Trees, …
ALBUM REVIEW: Huw Marc Bennett – ‘Tresilian Bay’: Welsh psychedelic Afro-jazz warmth
EMERGING from the London jazz and groove scene, South Wales producer and bassist Huw Marc Bennett is a low-key enigma whose musical vision means he won’t stay that way for long. What do we know of Huw? He’s a South Wales boy, as he evidences in the title of his debut LP, Tresilian Bay, named …
Album Review – Marilyn Manson – We Are Chaos
Marilyn Manson’s eleventh studio album ‘We Are Chaos’ has just been released via Loma Vista Recordings. Co-produced by Manson and GRAMMY® Award winner Shooter Jennings [Brandi Carlile, Tanya Tucker], the ten-track opus was written, recorded, and finished before a pandemic blanketed us all. “Making this record, I had to think to myself: ‘Tame your crazy, stitch your suit. And try to pretend …
Album Review: Tolouse Low Trax – ‘Jumping Dead Leafs’
TOLOUSE Low Trax is the recording pseudonym of German composer Detlef Weinrich, and this is his fourth album under that name. The eight-track album is a 38-minute smorgasbord of all manner of musical genres, ranging from krautrock to 80s’ electronica, with pinches of avant-garde, post-rock and ambience whisked into the buffet. The album starts as …
ALBUM REVIEW: Ambassadeurs – ‘Human Stranger’: majorly uplifting, humanist floor-fillers
AMBASSADEURS is the project of Sussex producer Mark Dobson, a man who’s approach to music is deeply personal, involved. He doesn’t churn it out because he has the means; he fashions and creates and recreates and channels, he sends tunes out into the world when they’re ready to communicate what is intended. He’s got one …
ALBUM REVIEW: Sam Prekop – ‘Comma’: further into wordless ‘tronica melodies
EMERGING from that Chicago scene so ripe with cross-fertilisation and ideas around the turn of the century, Sam Prekop was part of that fountain of creativity that brought us Tortoise, Bobby Conn, Jim O’Rourke’s shift into pop melodicism, Freakwater; many more. Sam himself cut his recording teeth alongside Archer Prewitt and John McEntire in The …