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 […]
For the last couple of years, I have slowly – that is to say, quite quickly, become addicted to attending car boot fairs. Luckily, the small Cambridgeshire village I live in is equidistant to two fairs – one on Saturday, the other the day after. I don’t think I’ve ever come away with nothing, though […]
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 […]
A two-in-one review of releases from The Residents that have made the journey from fan myth to bedraggled bootleg to majestic restoration. ‘A Nickle if Your Dick’s This Big’ – a coming together of the fabled ‘Warner Bros Album’ (or, as it’s still referred to on the sleeve, ‘The W***** B*** Album’) and ‘B.S.’ (‘Baby […]
