While I feel that their peak is still 2005's masterful Horses in the Sky, this new album's energetic stomp is by no means a disappointment. Whereas that last album was heavily focused on vocal harmonies, here Silver Mt. Zion let their rage flow freely through their instruments. High volume riffs and squeals of feedback come to the fore, a rock monster that has been carefully concealed behind the careful arrangements of earlier releases.
Hotter than July. This week's episode has plenty of fresh new music by Marie Davidson, Kim Gordon, Mabe Fratti, Guided By Voices, Holy Tongue meets Shackleton, Softcult, Terence Fixmer, Alan Licht, pigbaby, and Eiko Ishibashi, plus some vault goodies from Bombay S Jayashri and Pete Namlook & Richie Hawtin. Solstice moon in West Midlands, UK photo by James. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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Every once in a while a record comes along that does something a little different with a particular genre– it admittedly doesn't happen very often but when it does it makes me sit up and take notice. Such is the case here with this debut full length disc by German rhythmic industrial dance act Ahnst Anders.
Baby Dee's latest album and her first for Drag City is somewhat of a departure from her previous work in a lot of ways, yet many of the new songs still retain the fragility that made her earlier material so intimate. Backed by a band of admirers that includes Will Oldham, Matt Sweeney, Bill Breeze, John Contreras, and Andrew W.K., her music comes alive like never before.
Originally recorded for a radio broadcast, Vini Reilly is joined by Bruce Mitchell on drums for this live set of mostly new material. The concert is a good snapshot of a prolific period in the group's history, and shows another side of some of their better work.
Andrew Liles shuts the door on the Vortex Vault with this final installment which includes contributions from Steven Stapleton, R.K. Faulhaber, and Matt Waldron. It's an atypical entry in the series and one of the most intriguing if only be cause of its spectacular finale.
The San Diego band’s sophomore album ticks a lot of boxes. Loud; heavy; and off-kilter time signatures. When they get into it, the music flows remarkably well for such jerky rhythms. However, the longer the album goes on, the more it feels like something is missing. Sleeping People are able to make solid slabs of rock but at times they live up to their name too much as it sometimes feels that they are on autopilot. At the very least their music is fun, the odd rhythms do not sound totally contrived and instead add a bit of spice to what could have been a boring album.
Of the four albums reissued in this series, this is the most recent studio album, originally being released only 12 years ago on Belgium's Les Disques du Crepuscule.
LTM have recently begun reissuing albums by Vini Reilly's Durutti Column, one of the acts who found a home on the late Tony Wilson's Factory Records. This particular album was originally released in April 1986 on the offshoot Factory Benelux label, a venture between the Manchester label and Les Disques du Crepuscule; this present edition features the original ten tracks in addition to ten bonus pieces, including five culled from various compilations and a further five tracks from the cancelled 1983 album Short Stories for Pauline.
Written for one of the composer's former students, this solemn and fragile piece for piano is played beautifully by Stephane Ginsburgh. The constantly shifting music is like a kaleidoscope; chords change character and fragment into smaller, more discrete fractions before collapsing back into a solid chord again. My description may make it sound frantic but it is delicate beyond description.
A work purely of modular analog synthesizer, Piotrowicz uses the simplicity of the sonic pallet to his advantage, creating a work that captures both the experimental dissonance of what is colloquy known as "noise" while propping up the entire work on a structure that’s more akin to electro-acoustic composition than the average Merzbow disc.
