VA – The Eraserhead – Music Inspired by the Film of David Lynch – Unexplained Sounds Group In the cult cosmos of David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’, silence drips like oil, and the industrial groan of existence becomes its own character. The original soundtrack – the brainchild of Lynch and Alan Splet – wasn’t just music. It […]
Music’s strangest séance gets its final incantation – tea brewed, minds blown. Three albums into their collaborative endeavours, we can safely remove any semblance of novelty from this album. Now able to record together in Peter Buck‘s basement, with Scott McCaughey, one of music’s safest pair of hands on bass, and Linda Pitmon on drums, […]
The Residents’ ‘American Composer’s Series‘ – Cherry Red There are bad years for music. Then there’s 1983. It was the year everything got airbrushed. Bowie traded Berlin’s paranoia for peroxide and pastel suits. Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ was less an album than a an attempt to allocate him his own GDP. UB40. Just…UB40. MTV had turned […]
Sonologyst – Planetarium Cold Spring Records Ah, to be floating, gliding, soaring through the silent everlastingness of outer space. Or, as the latest album from Sonologyst makes clear, the incredibly ominous, doom-laden rumble through the blackness. If NASA ever needed a house band for the heat death of the universe, Sonologyst would be first on […]
Heat Wave – The Intoxicating World of Nexotica as Dug by Lux and Ivy I’m sure I said I wouldn’t get any more of these, but here we are. It seems entirely reasonable that some, if not all, of these records were owned by the fair, jettisoned by 50s hipsters when their family began to […]
Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry Presents Confusion: The Jamaican Upsetter Singles 1971 One of the reasons I love music is the way that it captures an unrepeatable moment in time – thoughts, emotions, character, mistakes, genius, and madness saved forever, to be savoured long after everyone concerned has passed away. Little captures that feeling of peering into […]
va – Motor City is Burning A Michigan Anthology 1965-1972 If Motown’s brilliant PR is to be believed, Michigan’s contribution to music starts and ends with Detroit soul. Actually, that’s unfair. You’d get a token gesture of MC5 or maybe even The Stooges thrown in as well. Sorted. Except that Michigan was bristling with music […]
Split into three acts, the latest new material from The Residents draws heavily upon two significantly troubling events of the late 20th Century – the trial by puppets of Judas Priest as they defended themselves against accusations of hiding subliminal messages within their songs which could drive the vulnerable to attempt suicide, and Jack Kevorkian, […]
When a magician breathes no more, there are no sliding doors nor sleeves big enough to rustle up an escape route. That’s all, folks. But that cannot be the last word in the wizard fraternity – a sorcerer’s corpse worth its salt must undergo the broken wand ceremony. The notion of a magician’s demise or […]
Dinosaur Jr: Puke + Cry – The Sire Years 1990-1997 4 CD Set There will be rabid fans who no doubt decry Dinosaur Jr’s exploits on a major label as sell-out behaviour of the worst kind and the material as comfortably the worst they ever recorded. You could, of course, replace the band name with […]
