Part of the fun culture fall-out, Freq Nasty is the kind of guy who can lop out his lap top and let spill a killer roll of shattering breaks and beats in the time it takes most others to say ‘it’s bangin’. A limited EP featuring 4 tracks from Freq Nasty’s forthcoming album, Bring Me The Head Of Freq Nasty (due to be released on Skint Records on 15 September 2003) this is a sampler that alone outstrips by a Continue Reading
The first single from the soon to be released ‘Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts’ on Groom Disques, Run Into Flowers sees dusky French duo Anthony Gonzalez and Nicolas Fromageau run headlong into moving, fuzzy techno. Sparse, minimalist and with only the faintest whisper of a vocal melody, the single combines european style and grace with dry as ice noize music. Backed by some cooky, ambient remixes by Jackson and some frankly noisy ones by KG, the single just goes Continue Reading
Whereas Norah Jones’ voice is the sound of half-light, dusky and seductive,former labelmate Rachel Loshak is a brighter, less original but nevertheless charming addition to the gentle wave of acoustic based chamber-pop currently washing over the airwaves. English-born, New York-based Loshak’s new album ‘Mint’ combines a sense of intimacy, with arrangements and production that pull it away from jazz toward a slightly more US college radio based sound, so that tracks such as ‘Rain’ ‘The Dreamer’ and ‘I Know I Continue Reading
This album might be out of time, but it’s certainly not out of place. That’s to say that it is still relevant, with its blood-stained bilious tirades against the ongoing evils of the world how could it not be, but that its fires were lit a long time ago. Again, that’s not to say they burn any less fiercely now, just that some things never change. There’s an almost archaic sense to everything here, the raw materials were certainly harvested Continue Reading
That’s a name of some grandeur they’ve given themselves. Quite something to live up to too. And we know little of the monarchic qualities and customs in previous royal Spanish hierarchies, but we’re sure such erratic changes of tack can do little to endear you to a nation. You can have your face on a stamp but there’s something to be said for leadership. So maybe they’re just hitching a ride on the cloak tails of previous established institutions, which Continue Reading
Turning the guitars down. Against all rational thought indeed. But this is the daft idea the band had way back in 1996, when the Mendoza Line were holed up in downtown Athens, Ga – home of the fabulously jangly REM, Apples In Stereo, Elf Power and the so-called ‘Elephant Six’. You will be glad to know that the idea was a temporary aneurysm in an otherwise healthy brain and The Mendoza Line prepared a series of tracks that twinkle and Continue Reading
Accompanied by a fairly generous DVD on the making of the album, and an extra CD of remixes, alternate versions and oddities, David Bowies’ 1993 ‘Black Tie, White Noise’ is now reissued as a strictly limited edition CD boxed set. True to his word, Bowie is again seen questioning all established values, all taboos – and searching only for that dislocate sense of self that a true visionary could trace and then expand. Only this time those values are his Continue Reading
Frank Black limbers up for the release of new ‘Catholics’ album ‘Show Me Your Tears’ due for release on 8th September on Cooking Vinyl. Including two previously unreleased tracks – cover versions of Reid Paley’s “Take What You Want“ and The Rolling Stones “Down In The Hole“ – the single is full of the same tinkling saloon bar pianos and country messages that made ‘Black Letter Days’ so black. Who knows, what with the election of the first openly gay Continue Reading
If this were UK tabloid material the headline might read ‘At The Drive In Crash In On Prog-Rock-Suicide-Benz’. Steeped in a dense lyrical labyrinth of myth and speculation, the album cites the death of artist friend and collaborator, Julio Venegas in 1996 as it’s broad and brutally skewed conceptual basis. The alleged free spirit and free-thinker, bearing the scabby welts and scars of a radically tortured soul attempts suicide with a morphine overdose and lapses into a coma from which Continue Reading
That the irreverent trans-stylist Jarvis Cocker and the delightfully bonkers Fat Truckers have yet to concede defeat with their loose and eccentric DJ collective, the Desperate Sound System perhaps shows the sheer tenacity of character these daft Sheffield folk have in pursuing the fantastic and the bizarre in the most brutal of everyday places. Pulp charted this territory better than anyone with their priceless and eerie narratives on psychotic suburbia, but it’s apparent also in the volatile, monster-pop of Baby Continue Reading