This Chapel Hill five piece is at least superficially crafting big, noisy rock songs, with more than a passing nod to classic grunge, but with an approach that is closer in spirit to the free jazz configurations of Ornette Coleman than any traditional metal group. With hard panned dual drums, and bass and guitar segregated to left and right channels, respectively, the result is a highly structured racket that runs the gamut of rapid fire hardcore to slow, lugubrious sludge.
Look up Music for gazing upwards brought to you by Meat Beat Manifesto & scott crow, +/-, Aurora Borealis, The Veldt, Not Waving & Romance, W.A.T., The Handover, Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri, Mulatu Astatke, Paul St. Hilaire & René Löwe, Songs: Ohia, and Shellac. Aurora Borealis image from California by Steve. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
|
Ashley Hutchings and John Kirkpatrick caused a rumpus of sorts with Morris On, an audacious electric folk treatment of Morris dancing tunes. Next they created this treasure, a project spanning about seven centuries of dance music in England. They broadened the folk-rock palate by focusing more on traditional instruments such as crumhorn, spinet and viol, and linked musical pieces with historically relevant spoken word passages read by actors such as Sarah Badel, Michael Horden and Ian Ogilvy.
This split single presents two very different takes on art damaged rhythm music. While both cuts are rooted in popular dance idioms (Dub, Afro-Beat, Drum & Bass), Urick and Willet seem more interested in demolishing genre conventions than cultivating them. They share a penchant for wobbly, amorphous productions that incite more head-scratching than ass-shaking.
Pianist Espen Eriksen’s debut album with his trio stands out but not in a good way. The insipid compositions are more at home in the background of an expensive restaurant or bar rather than on my stereo. Monotonous and emotionally detached, this collection of instrumental jazz fades into the background far too easily. The term "audio wallpaper" gets thrown about far too freely but You Had Me At Goodbye certainly deserves this classification.
This album has been sitting on a shelf for 15 years but it sounds as vital today as it would have had it seen the light of day back then. Featuring the kind of rhythm section that can be charted on the Richter scale and pose the danger of serious structural damage, this is one of the best "lost" albums to surface in recent years.
Tucked within the psychedelic and synthetic lo-fi of Shawn Reed's Night People label is an album that is as much an anomaly to the label as it is a sibling to it in its reimagining of classic sounds. Broken Water, a trio from Olympia, Washington, tap into their region's roots to dig up the blue collar crunch of a past as quickly forgotten as it was widely embraced. Whet touches every stepping stone of grunge without falling into the tar pit of predictability, not only proving rock and roll is still a powerful genre but that it can be as weird and untamed as the bands that call Night People home.
Beginnings are sacred, even for punk rockers. Whatever path they may follow later, musicians carry their formative experiences with them like a talisman. The Endtables carry that kind of sacrosanct aura. Their influence trumps any concern about style, recognition, or even competence. For a few freaks in Louisville, Kentucky circa 1979, they were the most important band on earth.
Galaktika is an album full of welcome surprises. A miasmic mish-mash of otherworldly electronica it ranges free form through a whole gamut of seductive sound. A narrative arc can be traced through the way the songs unfold sequentially while still brimming with unpredictable squelches, pitter-patter, and bizarre vapor trails. Richly layered and tightly woven it never feels too dense, but is rather evocative of the ever changing astral imagery of a serialized dream, each sound expertly placed to tantalizing effect.
Pat Maherr, the man behind this project, has assembled a large, intensely atmospheric collage exclusively from old recordings of Richard Wagner’s works. Weighed down with history, it is sometimes hard to separate Wagner’s music from the man and the events which occurred after him to which he has become linked (the rise of anti-Semitism, in case it needed spelling out). Maherr has reclaimed and reduced Wagner’s music into its barest form, only the faintest whisper of recognition remains. Yet, like the composer’s original works, this album seems to go on for an eternity.
This music was inspired by the words of Italian poet Alda Merini, institutionalized away from her family for much of her life, renowned for the unflinching honesty of her work. Years into this project, when copyright problems forced Silvia Tarozzi to create lyrics of her own, she followed Merini’s example and drew upon her own experiences and relationships mainly from 2008-2019. During this period, Tarozzi married, had a child, lost family members, and moved to another country, all of which inform this rich, varied, and deeply personal work finely balanced between firm structure and breezy abstraction.
