Crumbling Ghost – Crumbling Ghost - July 2011 July 31st, 2011

Crumbling Ghost’s rough hewn debut is a glorious mess of Seventies British prog structures, needling Krautrock jams, gut-churning doom metal riffs, and spritely modal English folk tunes. Perhaps there’s too many sketchy instrumentals, and second guitarist John Mosley’s occasional vocals are somewhat tentative, but The Collector, sounding like the German space-heads Amon Düül 2 playing…

The Silos – Florizona – Blue Rose - July 2011 July 24th, 2011

In 1987, Rolling Stone declared The Silos America’s Best New Band. A quarter of a century on the wider world remains unconvinced, the group carry the ‘Big In Germany’ curse, and Florizona’s sleeve depicts the American Dream as an airbrushed fantasy. Walter Salas-Humara’s romantically wrecked voice growls lyrics indulging the usual Alt Country ennoblement of…

Shonen Knife – Free Time - July 2011 July 24th, 2011

A chapter of Simon Reynolds’ Retromania details Japanese predilections for exact recreations of Western pop. But even if it’s worth sounding like The Ramones would if they were three women from Osaka, is it worth doing for thirty years, as Shonen Knife have? To be fair, the trio’s range has broadened of late. The topical…

Epic 45 – Weathering – Make Mine Music - July 2011 July 17th, 2011

Every generation feels it witnesses the slow death of its culture. Arriving in the glens in 1773, Johnson and Boswell were advised the real highlanders disappeared twenty years earlier. And having decamped to Cornwall in the fifties, the artist Ithell Colquhoun observed an apparently vanishing way of life in her memoir The Living Stones. Closer…

Sandra Cross – The MMs Bar Recordings - July 2011 July 17th, 2011

Making weekly London to Leicester rail journeys, Sandra Cross secretly taped hundreds of buffet announcements, and edited them into this thirty minute piece. Focusing tightly on the small, and usually unvarying, list of fayre generates a maddeningly mundane musicality. Seven minutes in the unprecedented non-availability of hot drinks suddenly seems catastrophic. Different announcements, with vastly…

Lol Coxhill and Alex Ward – Old Sights New Sounds - July 2011 July 17th, 2011

Enter free improvisation’s world of no tunes jazz through this gateway recording. Coxhill and Ward play soprano sax and clarinet respectively, both trustworthy blowing instruments, and the four decades age chasm between them reveals free improvisation as a shared language for both initiators and inheritors. The cd sleeve uses cinematic conceits to expose the process…