Wild Billy Childish & CTMF ‘House on Fire’ / ‘Keep Mojave Weird’ EP – Damaged Goods Three years on from Failure Not Success, CTMF return sounding anything but rested. ‘House on Fire’ is exactly what the title promises: scorched, restless, and lit from underneath by that familiar Medway voltage. The formula hasn’t dimmed. If anything, […]
The Broken Islands – ‘Desolation’ The Broken Islands are the gift that keeps on giving. Back in the early days, I described their work as sweeping, grand, criminally ignored. They were a band who sounded like thirty people without an ounce of fat, filling a void in music that was hard to name but glaring […]
RhaD – ‘Ghost Music Library’ – Unexplained Sounds RhaD has always been the place where Raffaele Pezzella lets the wires show. Under his Sonologyst name, he’s meticulous, almost architectural in how he builds sound, but RhaD is the opposite impulse. It’s the part of him that rummages in the dark, grabs whatever is humming, and […]
The terror surrounding AI remains unwavering. How will YouTubers ever be able to make a living unboxing things with computers taking over our minds? How long can we expect to be able to select the required spin cycle before washing machines punch us in the face? That seems to be the gist of it. Instead, […]
The Residents – ‘Animal Lover’ – Cherry Red Animal Lover has always carried a strange reputation. Some listeners treat it like a puzzle that demands explanation and a map, a late‑period curio that sits awkwardly in the Residents’ catalogue, too murky to decode and too melancholy to shrug off. Listening now, with the benefit of […]
Various – ‘This Can’t Be Today – A Trip Through the US Psychedelic Underground’ – Cherry Red There’s a particular kind of compilation that arrives already carrying its own mythology, and ‘This Can’t Be Today’ is absolutely one of them. A 3CD sprawl promising to chart the American psychedelic underground from 1977 to 1988, it […]
Various – ‘Electric Dead Speak – Music for Electric Voice Phenomenon’ – Eighth Tower Records When I was little, I remember very clearly that my sister, Tracy, had a flexi-disc featuring not hits of the moment but the voices of dead people. How could she have possibly come upon such an item? She wasn’t much […]
Mark Hjorthoy – ‘Future That Never Existed’ – ZeroK Mark Hjorthoy’s The Future That Never Existed arrives steeped in the ideas of Mark Fisher, the British writer who spent his career diagnosing the strange temporal condition of late capitalism. It wasn’t an immediate draw to me either, but bear with me. Fisher argued that we […]
Runes Order – No Future (Eighth Tower Records, 2026 Reissue) Some records don’t return so much as seep out of the firmament like a will-o’-the-wisp, never quite burned out, finally drifting back into view. ‘No Future,’ first released in 1993 in a run of just thirty hand‑numbered cassettes, is one of those artefacts: a tape […]
Various – CBGB – A New York City Soundtrack CBGB mythology tends to calcify around the same five names – Television, Ramones, Blondie, Patti Smith, Talking Heads – the pantheon that debuted within fifteen months of each other between 1974 and 1975. Some I love (Ramones, Suicide, The Cramps), and some I’d happily never hear […]
