Various Artists – Before The Fall - March 2011 March 13th, 2011

Before The Fall is a superbly sequenced selection of rock and roll, vanilla soul, reggae, garage, country, psychedelia, prog and novelty nostalgia, each track having once been covered by Manchester’s art rock survivors The Fall. Approach in ignorance and emerge thoroughly educated by The Fall’s front-man Mark E Smith, whose ears, though famously waxy, remain…

Van Der Graaf Generator – A Grounding In Numbers - March 2011 March 13th, 2011

A friend fled a Peter Hammill performance, horrified at “the least musical music” he’d ever heard, but Van Der Graaf Generator were progressive rock’s Tractarian renegades, lacing the movement’s musical orthodoxies with liturgical ceremonialism, rather than the usual elfin splatterings. On their new album, the pellucid and beautiful Your Time Starts Now rubs up against…

Klaus Kinski – Skellington Horse - March 2011 March 6th, 2011

Citing their influences as Bauhaus, Satanism and Herzog, Klaus Kinski explode out of Llanfairfechan playing moronically furious music that’s also deceptively intelligent. “Ecce Homo”, a screaming, serrated song about indecent exposure that ends unpleasantly, takes its Latin title all too literally. Yes, Klaus Kinski might suggest any number of British imitators of the Birthday Party’s…

Buffalo Tom – Skins - March 2011 March 6th, 2011

In the mid-Eighties, Boston’s plaid-shirt romantics Buffalo Tom tried to cross the hardcore rush of Hüsker Dü with the parking-lot pot haze of the Seventies bands their elder brothers grew up on, and sadly the awkward frisson this ungainly pairing produced has been resolved, perhaps a little too politely, since the trio returned from a…

REISSUE – Traffic – John Barleycorn Must Die (Deluxe Edition) - February 2011 February 27th, 2011

Traffic were pea and faggot Mods who became psychedelic popsters and ‘got it together in the country’. Their career-defining third album, from 1970, is reissued this week with a disc of live tracks and outtakes. Its floaty flute-augmented jazz rock, typical of the period, suddenly seems oddly contemporary, with modern day musicians like Wolf People…

Sonic Youth – Simon Werner A Disparu - February 2011 February 27th, 2011

How Sonic Youth tease us, with experimental offshoots and improvised side-projects. In denying fans a fix of that addictive ugly-beautiful Eighties art rock they improve us, against our will. And how they tease again, hiding their most Sonic Youth like album for ages on the sound-track to a French film. Though vocal free, this is…