Meat Puppets – Rat Farm - April 2013 April 28th, 2013

Meat Puppets sickened Eighties hardcore punk puritans with country, bluegrass and psychedelic additives that eventually became palatable. Today, after decades of drugs, departures, and detainments, the resilient Phoenix trio’s signature sound is a fleet of foot, tie-dyed, hillbilly acid rock hybrid draped on the nimble exoskeleton of Curt Kirkwood’s languidly lysergic licks. The title track…

Guided By Voices – English Little League - April 2013 April 28th, 2013

Robert Pollard’s vast discography, with ninety-three albums in thirty years including twenty five helming Guided By Voices, ought to be intolerable. But Pollard’s long surpassed his Oedipal impulse to outdo The Who on his Ohio basement four track and is now officially an auteur, endlessly and obsessively recombining spontaneously regenerated psychedelic mod-punk-powerpop tropes until sometimes,…

David Grubbs – The Plain Where The Palace Stood - April 2013 April 21st, 2013

David Grubbs is a Brooklyn college professor of music and literature with a shady past in Eighties hardcore punk. On his sixth song-based solo release he takes trebly electric guitars and twangy acoustics in hand to play folksy arpeggios, furiously fuzzy modal speed-drones, bursts of taut sinewy math rock, and dainty miniatures of baroque complexity…

Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats – Mind Control - April 2013 April 14th, 2013

Uncle Acid have conjured a substantial following from their Cambridge coven, finally breaking cover to promote this, their third album, live. The ordinary looking quartet play evil ‘70s Satanic metal riffs and redneck biker boogie rhythms drenched in paisley psychedelic fuzz and nasal late Beatles harmonies. Devil’s Work builds via unexpectedly plangent guitar parts and…

Gail Brand and Morgan Guberman – Dig A Ditch & Get In - April 2013 April 7th, 2013

Brand and Guberman’s 2002 debut was a classic of free improvisation, Brand’s too human trombone trauma and Guberman’s possessed vocal extemporizations blending in a heady gumbo of exhaled breaths. Second time around, New Yorker Guberman uses more recognisable words, a bronchial and feacally fixated Beefheart, and the British Brand’s baked responses are redolent of a…

The Fallen Leaves – If Only We’d Known - March 2013 March 31st, 2013

Disappointed rock tourists, wandering Carnaby Street forty years too late unaware the beat had moved East, could still stumble into The Fallen Leaves’ 12 Bar Club residency and drink from the source. The sharp-dressed quartet play the hook-heavy sixties sounds of The Who and The Pretty Things in the seventies punk style of The Jam…