rescuing musical virtue in distress.
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 →
Is a song ever truly finished? Can there ever be a definitive form, one that can’t be improved on? Isn’t there something to be gained from revisiting, reimagining, reclothing music which is already close to your heart? These are all the sorts of questions which must concern Michael Ciravolo and in trying to answer them... Continue Reading →
Ahead of a new e.p. Say Goodbye to the Light, Thrillsville delivers a cool slice of dirge-disco, one part industrial edge, one part gloom-beat…is that a thing… let’s assume it is…one part sultry and twisted electronica. It’s a dark and sullen affair, one which is strangely addictive too but then it is that element of... Continue Reading →
The appropriately named Stories With Unhappy Endings sounds like a horror movie writing its own soundtrack. Whereas someone setting about composing such a score is trying to make music sound like evil acts and depraved urges, mindless violence and heart-wrenching terror, this sounds the other way around, as if it is the acts themselves which... Continue Reading →
No-one does a cover like John Fryer’s Black Needle Noise. Some people understand the idea of making a song your own, even if it is such a permanent fixture of the musical landscape, as we find happening here. A few have the imagination to subsume familiar music into such shockingly dark sonic underworlds. But no-one... Continue Reading →
And the winner of the best song title of 2020 goes to Swiss goth ’n’ rollers Hell Boulevard, namely, You Had Me At Fuck Off, a phrase which seems to both sum up their belligerence and anti-establishment stance as well as the underlying attitudes currently bubbling up in society given the tiring tirade of global... Continue Reading →
I’m not sure how I feel about this. But that has to be a good thing, right? Music should confuse rather than conform... shouldn’t it? And the coming together of such a well-respected producer and artist and such an iconic song is going to blip on a lot of people's radars. But anyone expecting a... Continue Reading →
As someone wiser than myself so eloquently pointed out “John Fryer has practically soundtracked your entire life,” and it is particularly true if you have wandered a musical path littered with alternative sounds and underground bands, off-beat noise and cross-genre experimentation. Everyone from Nine Inch Nails and Cocteau Twins to HIM and Depeche Mode owe... Continue Reading →
Want a quick review of m1nk’s debut album? Sultry! Oh, you want more, how about…really sultry. Okay, I’ll play nice, but as opening track Some Elusive floats from your speakers, no other word is sufficient to describe this dark and slightly dangerous vibe, this weave of the illicit and the exciting, this transient and intangible... Continue Reading →
The title might suggest that I have downloaded the wrong music file and am attempting to write a review of a supercar chop shop business in downtown Shanghai, that is until you work out that the name is actually an anagram of Andrew Golding, founding member of C86 pioneers The Wolfhounds and what is before... Continue Reading →
Bands with such provocative titles tend to go one of two ways. Either the name is chosen for purely emotive reasons and the whole affair turns out to be a bunch of 17 year old screamo-metalheads who think such mystique is a sure way of getting a girlfriend (it isn’t, believe me) or it is... Continue Reading →
Pas Musique seem to revel in confusion, in a good way of course. Even within their chosen electro-industrial sphere they seem more mercurial, more wilfully tricksy, more difficult to grasp than their contemporaries and you have to look back to the early art-attacks of the likes of Throbbing Gristle to find their parallel. The Phoenix... Continue Reading →
Well, that’s just plain silly. Or perhaps it is a stroke of genius. After all the two are often the same thing and shift from one to the other only depending on how you look at them. It’s probably something to do with Heisenberg’s Uncertainly Principle…well, it all feels a bit quantum to me anyhow.... Continue Reading →
Dance music doesn’t have to be predictable. Although a lot of what is produced in that broad genre does seem to follow very tried and tested lines, plays safe and stays within its musical comfort zones. Occasionally you find someone who is deliberately making music without the safety net, who is happier leading than following,... Continue Reading →
Indie? Possibly not but their music is so weird, genre-hopping and changeable that I'm not really sure where it fits in so this is as good a place as any. Most of my postings in this category have been real blasts from the past so far but as these splendid people are currently on tour... Continue Reading →
I tend to use the word soundscape a lot in reviews because when put together right, when suitably structured, when layered with intricate textures, when music moves beyond the familiar, it has the ability to build new worlds. They may be sonic worlds but they can be as beguiling, as varied, as wondrous as anything... Continue Reading →
Time spent in Jim Johnston’s mercurial and beguiling musical world is never time wasted. We know by now that genres and other such journalistic short cuts aren’t really going to cut it, you could make a point that his music sits in a left-field, indie-rock world but as the songs move between dance beats, strange... Continue Reading →
Cyborg Asylum has always been great at blending a sort of clinical, cold war, drama with a slightly apocalyptic musical vision. Their great art has always lain in their skill for looking at the political machinations and social choices being made today and extrapolating their views of where those decisions might takes us. And to... Continue Reading →
One of the fun things about reviewing new music is the chance to make up intriguing, though ultimately pointless, new generic descriptions about the music under the spotlight. The fact you can do it at all says something about the band in question, to be able to find a new way to describe them in... Continue Reading →
No matter what anyone tells you about current musical fashions, what the zeitgeist might happen to be blowing in from cooler taste making circles, what the papers say is the next big thing or any of that sort of rhetoric, one thing never changes. The underground, the outside, the left field, the other…call it what... Continue Reading →
The role of creativity is many and varied, to inform, to entertain, to reassure, to challenge, to confound, to frighten. If you find some of your preferences in the second half of that list then the wonderfully named Silent Disco Sex are probably for you. They come from a dark musical place, one that draws from... Continue Reading →
There are times on We Are Fucked, gotta love an album title that honest, that it sounds as if someone has built a machine and programmed it with just the vaguest outline of how to make music and let it just work out the rest for itself. Whilst it follows the basic laws of melody... Continue Reading →
If you can tell the character of a person by the company that they keep, you can tell a lot about a band by who they ask to re-mix their music. With the likes of Daniel Ash, Assemblage 23, Rodney Anonymous, Mindless Faith and Gost Remix II all working their magic, or at least re-working... Continue Reading →
I love music that confounds me, music which doesn’t fall into easy journalistic boxes. That is one of the things I love about Generation Kill, just one of many. So firstly, where does this fit into the musical landscape? Doom disco? Dystopian pop? Industrial dance? You get to a point where you are just inventing... Continue Reading →
You can always rely on Nasty Little Lonely to throw a spanner in the works, it’s the reason that you have to love them so much. Just when the music scene seems to have found its beige balance of acoustic troubadours in wide brimmed hats, skinny-jeaned alt-rock fashionistas and production line pop liberally sampling the... Continue Reading →
I think the word we are looking for here is intense. Right from the off, as the opening salvo of Some Cop blasts its way into the listener’s consciousness, the album comes on like some sort of New York No Wave nightmare blended with PIL’s darkest and most gritty sonic secrets. I’d hate to be... Continue Reading →
AUTOBAHN have created an ambitious album that comfortably sits beside the darker parts of Brian Jonestown Massacre with moments of purposeful hesitation that underpin the self-doubt and uncertainties inherent in understanding the moral crossing. _______________________________________________________ Something dark and near biblical lies at the heart of AUTOBAHN’s post-rock progressive second L.P. ‘The Moral Crossing’ Leeds based... Continue Reading →
If someone like Nick Cave best typifies the dark, sweeping and majestic end point of the western blues derived musical experiment; this is the flipside of that coin. Portland/Atlanta trio, We Are Parasols, makes music which comes from a younger, though similarly angst ridden, oddly sultry and intense place, but one that has evolved out... Continue Reading →
If someone like Nick Cave best typifies the dark, sweeping and majestic end point of the western blues derived musical experiment; Gongkreeper is the flipside of that coin. Joe Cherry, the man driving this creative vehicle, makes music which comes from a younger, angst ridden and intense place, one that has evolved out of the... Continue Reading →
If Science Fiction in print and on the screen has been the perfect vehicle for discussing and exploring ideas of where society is headed and what the future might look like, it was the Blitz Kids and the New Romantics who best provided the soundtrack to that conversation. As the future, by it’s very definition,... Continue Reading →