Mars Classroom – The New Theory Of Everything - April 2011 April 9th, 2011

The quirky indie-pop Gary Waleik penned for Big Dipper was incinerated in an early ’90s major label backdraught. The pathologically prolific post-mod Robert Pollard’s fourth album of the year siphons eleven plangent tunes from this slumbering giant, over which the former Guided By Voices front-man free-associates his oddly affecting shred and stick poetics and classic…

Mani Neumeier and Kawabata Makoto – Samurai Blues - April 2011 April 3rd, 2011

Kawabata Makoto’s bands – Musica Transonic, Mainliner, Acid Mothers Temple – have a cannibalistic relationship with the underground’s first flowering, regurgitating exaggerated forms of psychedelia, hard rock and proto-punk. Here he teams with a genuine first generation innovator, the percussionist Mani Neumeier of the Seventies krautrockers Guru Guru, a kind of free jazz Stooges. On…

FOUND – Factorycraft - April 2011 April 3rd, 2011

Edinburgh’s art school guitar popsters FOUND insist on capital letters. Their sometime scratchiness will satiate those weaned on scuffed Scottish indie rock from way back, like Josef K or Fire Engines, but they’re clean and lean and melodic enough to clobber the casual consumer with chiming guitars and suckable hooks and falsetto vocal leaps, and…

Rome Pays Off – There’s No Simple Explanation - March 2011 March 27th, 2011

As part of the trio of electric bassists Rothko, Crawford Blair and Mark Beazley made abstract, throbbing, low-end noise with an edge of danger, sculpted for swooping shots of arctic landscapes in Discovery channel documentaries. Now playing as the duo Rome Pays Off they sound instead like a continuous edit of de-contextualised snatches of jazz…

Mary Waterson & Oliver Knight – The Days That Shaped Me - March 2011 March 27th, 2011

Last years Brits declared a pop-friendly facsimile of folk newly fashionable. But our venerable Waterson-Carthy clan continue plying the family business, unheralded by host James Corden. Siblings Marry Waterson and the guitarist Oliver Knight weave a hybrid of traditional textures and contemporary colours, cousin Eliza Carthy’s occasional fiddle their stark debut’s only adornment. Mary can…

Trembling Bells – The Constant Pageant - March 2011 March 20th, 2011

When folkies like Fairport Convention or Trees rocked out in the early Seventies, they assimilated then contemporary sounds. Attempts to ape them today, as in swathes of the Philadelphia psych-folk underground, can whiff of costumed re-enactment. Praise John Barleycorn, then, for Trembling Bells, whose third album is both stoically historic and heroically now. Confidently proclaiming…