Belbury Poly – The Belbury Tales - March 2012 March 12th, 2012

Sleeve notes for Belbury Poly’s 5th album suggest the soundtrack to a travelling salesman’s adventures with an acid-spiked ploughman’s lunch, somewhere in early seventies rural England. Belbury Poly play like dispirited sixties psychedelic survivors, reluctantly meeting the demands of television or advertising commissions in the subsequent decade, redeeming their banal compositions with snatches of haunting…

Carpet Remnant World. Norwich. - March 2012 Beccles & Bungay Journal - By James Goffin - March 11th, 2012

For a man who professes to dislike the internet so much, Stewart Lee is an ardent fan on one of its trendiest aspects: the meme. His act is almost entirely based around the recurrence of motifs: building them up in the audience’s mind and returning back to them again and again, hoping that the growing…

Earth – Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light II - March 2012 March 11th, 2012

In the nineties, Earth taught a generation of stoned seekers to slow Sabbath riffs into abstract endurance tests, and disappeared. A new Earth features Dylan Carson on crawling king snake guitar, the jazzy drums of Adrienne Davis, the sphincter-dilating cello of Lori Goldston, and the modestly minimal bass of Karl Blau, forming a sentient musical…

The Plimsouls – Beach Town Confidential - March 2012 March 4th, 2012

The Plimsouls played melodic sixties mod pop with punk aggression, Peter Case’s grazed white soul vocals and Eddie Munoz’ plangent guitars bleeding through the surface noise and cheerleader air-punch rhythms. This 1983 live recording, the group in explosive form after their second album, betters their studio output in terms of sheer energy and reveals The…

Geoff Farina – The Wishes Of The Dead - March 2012 March 4th, 2012

Farina’s early nineties post-rock scene contemporaries Codeine and Bitch Magnet are hauling gloriously their brontosaurus bodies over the comeback coals, but Farina’s band Karate always stood out from the tranquilised hardcore crowd, with their diminished sevenths and jazzy licks. Today he’s a born again acoustic troubadour, laying rewarding mid-west poetry professor verbiage over finger-picked traditional…

Roky Erickson And The Aliens – Five Symbols - March 2012 March 4th, 2012

The psychedelic pioneer and former Thirteenth Floor Elevator Roky Erickson was presumed destroyed by LSD and electric shock therapy and this 1980 comeback, painstakingly produced by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Stu Cook, remained unreleased outside Europe. Erickson bayed schlock horror lyrics, his philosophical musings now abandoned, over then unfashionably chiseled hard rock riffs. But this apparently…