rescuing musical virtue in distress.
There was a time when the musical demarcations separating musical style and genre were fixed, immutable, to be crossed on pain of death. Well, not death but perhaps ridicule and ostracisation from the gatekeepers of the tribal sound. You were a raver or a goth, a hip-hop head or an indie kid, popster or rocker,... Continue Reading →
Words paint pictures. You hear words like Dance or terms such as EDM and your mind conjures images of packed clubland dance floors moving to euphoric and bombastic electronica. Hear the word ambient and you think of drifting minimalism and gossamer light sonic threads. Yet Present Paradox manages to blend both of these mutually exclusive... Continue Reading →
If Rollcall, the first piece of succulent sonics from this artist to find its way to my ear, seemed to be built from swirling, tendrils of music gradually teased from a raw, hazy industrial-ambient drift, Allinputs is a song which gets to work immediately. It is also immediately conjured from more robust and complicated stuff.... Continue Reading →
Music as a whole generally evolves and finds its way forward through unexpected collisions, left-field genre-splicing and half-planned creative fusions. Some are the obvious merging of music which has long been easy travelling companions, other times opposites attract, meld, battle, blend and give creative birth and what emerges from the sonic wreckage is a totally... Continue Reading →
Well, it is the season for the cover song, a time when everyone from the established mainstream music-maker to the reality show, also-ran celebrity…and I use the word celebrity quite wrongly… is crooning out a Christmas tune in an effort to pay for a new wing on their Cheshire manor or perhaps pay off their... Continue Reading →
Too many artists spend too much time looking backwards, hoping to trade on nostalgic sounds and past pop glories, that they forget to embrace the future as it rises up to meet them. JPOPD1 is not one of those artists and Deep End is definitely the sound of someone looking forward rather than behind them.... Continue Reading →
Trying to work out exactly where 5G4B’s music fits in to the scheme of things depends entirely upon which thread you pull at first. Tug at one funky rhythm and you get a slight inkling as to what’s going on but grab another and you might find yourself holding a soulful break or a hip-hop... Continue Reading →
Evolution is the sound of 80’s sonic glitter being scattered over a wonderfully modern alternative dance track. It may be easy to draw a line between Julian Shah-Tayler’s latest creation and earlier, post-punk, keyboard pioneers but only in the same way that you can connect an Umberto Eco novel with an illuminated medieval manuscript. Everything... Continue Reading →
There is no denying that we live in a world of polar opposites, of entrenched beliefs, of conflicting ideas and clear points of demarcation. It is an attitude which affects, or perhaps infects, every aspect of life from which football team you support to which political camp you fall into. Thankfully, music seems to have... Continue Reading →
There has, for obvious reasons, been a wave of artists making music reflecting the times of late. After all it is in times of adversity when the most interesting music is made. Rock 'n' Roll, Punk, Hip-Hop, Rave…all music born out of heady combinations of frustration, disenfranchisement, rebellion, a desire for cultural or political change... Continue Reading →
“Dance music for the end-times.” That’s what it says on the band's own page and as descriptions go, I’d say that is pretty hard to beat. Vision Video certainly make an A-pop-alyptic noise, the perfect blend of dance and dystopia, dirge and disco, art and Armageddon…but I’m just throwing easy alliteration about now. In My... Continue Reading →
The strange and beguiling spoken word intro to the wonderfully named Made in Snoring pretty much sets out the mission statement for the man behind the Rural Manifesto. Over odd, meandering and slowly building electronic ripples he underlines the much held view that, compared to the city, everything that takes place in the countryside is... Continue Reading →
Music which comes labelled with the name Jamit on it, and in this case his regular sonic partner in crime Kroissenbrunner too…is, to reappropriate a much used cliche, like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get. But at least here you can make a few educated guesses based on... Continue Reading →
This latest song from Xalser takes pop along some interesting sonic pathways. It starts off in fairly familiar territory, a chilled, soulful, R&B groove built of sultry tones and casual beats, doing exactly what you might expect it to. And then about a minute in it mutates into a wonderful, futuristic, alternative-dance hybrid. Although dance... Continue Reading →
If you haven’t fallen in love with The Mystery Plan by the mid point of opening salvo Those Stars, then you really should see a doctor, or perhaps even a psychiatrist. How could you not find everything you need in its drifting textures, louche beats and sultry saxophone? If there was a decent bookshop nearby... Continue Reading →
There is something wonderful going on in Jamit’s music, and for once I’m not talking about the sonic intrigue and or the out of the box approach to alternative dance music making, we will get to that shortly. It is a more holistic thing that says something about the turning of the modern world. The... Continue Reading →
It’s been a while since anything popped into the review pile from Jamit, you start to get worried, but it turns out that his absence from the in-box was more than justified. A wholesale relocation of your whole life can affect you in lots of ways, some expected, some less obvious, so as I span... Continue Reading →
Music makes the perfect platform for people who have something to say. In fact having done the work to get your creations to a point where you have a captive audience, where you have developed your own sonic signature so effectively that it is heard above the white noise of the modern musical world, it... Continue Reading →
Just because the vote doesn’t go your way doesn’t mean that you have to stop making the argument and at least the return of Boris Johnson, a resounding return at that, means that Cabinet of Millionaires will have no shortage of subject matter to work with. Not that they were ever stuck for things to... Continue Reading →
Collisions between the classical and contemporary music world have always gone on and to varying degrees of success. I guess where one is the realm of discipline and exactitude the other is more often the home of feeling and improvisational jamming. Getting the two to work together probably relies on being able to switch mindsets... Continue Reading →
This has to be one of the strangest albums I have had under the reviewing pen in a long time. But strange is good. In fact strange is better than good as it is the opposite of words like predictable, conformist, expected, mainstream, generic and normal and those are certainly not words you, as an... Continue Reading →
The Big Takeover have just posted my latest interview with Paul Furio of Watch Clark. To find out about what's going on in, on and around his latest album Couch and what the future holds for him have a read here. http://bigtakeover.com/interviews/AquickconversationwithWatchClark
Ahhh, Fassine, it’s been a while. Far too long. But all that will be put right soon with the announcement of Forge, a new album for March next year. In the mean time Limbs has been sent out into the world to test the water. So what has changed? Well, they seem to be a... Continue Reading →
For a middle-aged geezer like me, the music made by ensemble (I would describe them as a band but a band is generally made up of musicians armed with an instrument, The Moods are more like ‘music makers’ incorporating producers and poets, as well as musicians) seems miles from the stuff I have in my... Continue Reading →
If there is one thing that spills out of this latest offering from Infinite Soldier it is euphoria. Even before you engage full with what is going on in the track, before you absorb the music on a deeper level, before you examine the lyrics or the music’s raison d’etre you, the listener, find yourself... Continue Reading →
Chemical Smiles is built on one thing. Energy! Okay, it’s built on many things, addictive grooves, structured beats, a wonderful sense of dynamic and a series of intense builds which refuse to resolve as and when you expect them to thereby adding a frisson and charged atmosphere to the proceedings. But it never wavers or... Continue Reading →
Sitting somewhere between pure electronica and the clubland house scene, between those early keyboard pioneers and the cutting edge of today’s tastes and technology, between song-making and soundscaping, the here and now and that what’s yet to come…you find Rude Audio. And within those very broad demarkations these electronic troubadours splice and re-invent all manner... Continue Reading →
Dance music, for all its good intentions, all to often easily gives up the search for cutting edge escapes and new paths to explore and as a result most of the music that falls into such that genre can be as predictable as formulaic pop or cliche-ridden rock. What I love about this futuristic blast... Continue Reading →
AALTA continue their collaborative creation of slick indie-pop and chilled, early hours dance music with this latest release, featuring the German born Lenachka and vocals that move effortlessly between the soft and sultry and the anthemic and sky-scrapping. It’s a great use of dynamic, to be able to rise up from the restated pulses of... Continue Reading →
Art often has its roots in the strangest of places and Misophonic’s point of origin goes something like this. “Can you chew a little quieter please?” “Excuse me? You’re saying that I’m chewing loudly?“ “No but…” An argument, a near break-up and a week in the studio putting the idea that the person who you... Continue Reading →