Despite playing and recording with various groups for nearly ten years this is the first solo release by Norway’s Thomas Strønen. It is a fine way to start a long overdue solo career. Pohlitz is a delightful album focussed mainly on Strønen’s speciality of hitting unusual objects with drumsticks.
Give us an hour, we'll give you music to remember. This week we bring you an episode with brand new music from Softcult, Jim Rafferty, karen vogt, Ex-Easter Island Head, Jon Collin, James Devane, Garth Erasmus, Gary Wilson, and K. Freund, plus some music from the archives from Goldblum, Rachel Goswell, Roy Montgomery. Rubber ducks and a live duck photo from Matthew in the UK. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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For Todd Drootin the commonly held belief that most band's earlier records are better than their later ones must hold true. Dinosaur Dinosaur is a fun record, one that I still listen to; Throw Down Your Laptops surpasses it on every level, however. It's not just a better record and a better place to start with Books on Tape, it actually manages to make sense of the term "beatpunk."
With Six Organs of Admittance, Ben Chasny has orchestrated both guitar-themed and noise-based releases, and on the latest masterpiece he has split the album in half with six bright, guitar heavy songs on one side and a single, deep, dark, and sprawling drone-based song on the other.
Niblock makes drones that, even at low volumes, fill the entire room. At more appropriate volumes the drones replace the room with a thick goo of sound. This three disc album is intimidating to say the least. It is a fulfilling and gratifying endurance test to listen to it all the way through.
Reverence is a powerful force that shapes the way we hear music. Matmos' most recent record channeled that force and constructed new music for outsiders and artists of strange history. Ekkehard Ehlers' approach is different; if the past haunts the present, it is evident in how this music sounds, not in how it was created. The deep dark blues are alive and well, swelling up in new places, but telling a hauntingly familiar story.
I would be lying if I didn't say that Mojave 3's fifth album was immediately met with a whole lot of trepidation, however, a few songs into the record I found myself bebopping to Neil Halstead and co's most upbeat release ever.
This deluxe 5xCD set acts both as a box for collectors wanting some restored concert recordings and a fantastic archive of Wire's 1970s studio albums all in one place for those who might not own them already. While the covers are artfully restored, the accompanying booklet is immaculate, and the mastering is stunning, it doesn't make the 1995 Japanese CDs nor the Behind the Curtain release obsolete (yet).
Originally performed as part of All Tomorrow’s Parties “Don’t Look Back” series, the Melvins decided after they had played the gigs to actually record the album. So they hired a warehouse and ran through the set without an audience. The end result is an album that shows how ahead of its time Houdini was; it still sounds as relevant and powerful today as it did thirteen years ago.
