David S Ware & Planetary Unknown – Live At Jazzfest Saalfeden 2011 - November 2012 November 4th, 2012

The American saxophonist David S Ware died last month, at the age of 62. His final album, here leading a quartet including the ubiquitous William Parker on bass, offers three ecstatically elongated workouts typical of his approach. Ware’s sound was forged in the slipstream of John Coltrane’s explosive and expansive late sixties experiments, and he…

Land Observations – Roman Roads IV-XI - October 2012 October 28th, 2012

James Brooks’ Appliance failed to flog clever clogs electronica to Britpop Britain. His new project, Land Observations, drives the cyclical sound Kraftwerk applied to German autobahns, but at a gentler speed, and along Roman Roads. The album begins in Hackney with Before The Kingsland Road, tracing Ermine Street north, pointillist pin-pricks of treble guitar bursting…

Wicked Lady – The Axeman Cometh - October 2012 October 21st, 2012

Lead guitarist Martin Weaver later fronted Dark, whose 1972 album is one of rock’s most valuable rarities, but initially he flecked Sabbath style proto-metal with the fading strains of psychedelia in Wicked Lady. Weaver’s Northampton pub rockers never entered a studio, and their reputation might appear inflated by cultish obscurity. But the rough and ready…

Bo Ningen – Line The Wall - October 2012 October 21st, 2012

Bo Ningen, a Tokyo quartet resident in London, resist geographical and musical categorization. Their second album launches at hardcore velocity with Soko, but douses the explosives with swathes of psychedelic guitar; Chitei Ningen Mogura and Daikaisei Part II channel Hawkwind’s space-biker blues; Nichiyou is louse-infested funk-metal; 32 Kaiten is a downtown New York drone shadowing…

Crime & The City Solution – A History Of Crime Berlin 1987-1991 - October 2012 October 14th, 2012

Morphic resonance meant The Boys Next Door’s Nick Cave and Crime & The City Solution’s Simon Bonney both hit that same big-mouthed Jim Morrison punk yowl in mid-seventies Melbourne, but it gave Cave a longer career. Here’s the final incarnation of Bonney’s band, decamped to a Berlin in flux, with art house German accomplices, playing…

Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell – Don’t Hear It… Fear It! - October 2012 October 14th, 2012

The sleeve of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s debut reveals the trio in 1972 flares and trainers. A bulbous bird head apes countless album covers by the Seventies Welsh blues rock wranglers Budgie. But the period product within is dispatched with a New York 1976 punk energy and flanged with iridescent late Sixties psychedelic effects. Don’t…