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…

Matana Roberts – Live In London - February 2011 February 27th, 2011

Conservatives view the sixties jazz avant-garde as a dead end. In his Imagine documentary, Alan Yentob stared at John Coltrane’s empty chair and explained his post-1965 output as a mistake caused by religion and drugs, the ungrateful Afro-American making a hat out of his invitation to the Conservatoire. Four decades later the saxophonist Matana Roberts,…

Lewis Floyd Henry – One Man And His 30w Pram - February 2011 February 20th, 2011

Lewis Floyd Henry is a busker, one man band and Youtube phenomenon from South East London, channelling Jimi Hendrix, delta blues, and hip hop through an electric guitar, a tiny foot-operated drum kit, and a sound rig strapped to a pram. Despite its low-budget beginnings, One Man And His 30w Pram can sound vast, when…