Showing 1135 results for: Reviews
The Jayhawks – Tomorrow The Green Grass : Legacy Edition - January 2011 January 16th, 2011
The Jayhawks’ Hollywood Town Hall, one of Alternative Country’s two or three key recordings, is also reissued this week, but 1995’s follow up, Tomorrow The Green Grass, is augmented by a disc of ‘The Mystery Demos’, fascinating lost 1992 recordings. The album proper builds on Hollywood Town Hall’s template, windblown Stonesey country rock with an…
The Sails – A Headful Of Stars - January 2011 January 9th, 2011
On the tabla-propelled Travel, The Sails play sitar-flanged psychedelia in the style of The Beatles’ post-enlightenment incarnation. Yesterday And Today draws a line from Honeybus’ 1968 single I Can’t Let Maggie Go to The La’s’ wondrous eighties one hit There She Goes. Dogs plunders the twelve-string folk-rock of The Hollies, in the interlude between ditching…
Wire – Red Barked Tree - January 2011 January 9th, 2011
Even when first pedalling short sharp Seventies shocks Wire were essentially conceptual artists, sculpting minimal cubist punk. Thirty-five years later, all pushing sixty, their third album this century seems to be a typically tidy modern rock record, albeit one that also unfolds within invisible inverted commas. The Artful Dodger dropped aitches of old are replaced…
Damon and Naomi – False Beats And True Hearts - January 2011 January 5th, 2011
A quarter of a century ago, Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang sold the world that pervasive slowcore guitar sound with Galaxie 500, then split to work as a duo with subtler methods. Determinedly pedalling a diaphanous acid-folk-pop for two decades now, bowing their heads patiently as it billows in and out of fashion, the pair’s…
Michael Chapman – Trainsong: Guitar Compositions 1967 – 2010 - January 2011 January 5th, 2011
Sourcing fresh meat, a cabal of powerful Pygmalions, including Tompkins Square records and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, declare Michael Chapman not an overlooked English Seventies singer-songwriter, but an innovator in the vein of John Fahey and the American primitive school of tranced-out folk blues instrumentals. Now he’s the subject of a tribute record, Happy Birthday,…
The Fall – The Wonderful And Frightening World Of… / This Nation’s Saving Grace Omnibus Edition - January 2011 January 2nd, 2011
The Fall’s five releases from 1980-1983, – Grotesque (After The Gramme), Slates, Hex Enduction Hour, Room To Live and Perverted By Language – fused garage punk and droning Krautrock stasis with primitive improvisation, Mark E Smith in expansive lyrical flow. The Fall were the rock refusenik’s rock band. But in 1984 a pre-album single, the…