It’s funny, but Lee won’t tell jokes - January 2012 The Mail On Sunday - By Mark Wareham - January 22nd, 2012

Stewart Lee, it has to be said, will never be a household name. Sure, his recent two series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle on BBC2 met with much critical acclaim and the show was nominated for a Bafta. But Lee obstinately refuses to play the fame game. When he won a brace of Comedy Awards…

Precious Jules – Precious Jules - January 2012 January 16th, 2012

In 1978 Kim Salmon split Perth’s Cheap Nasties for The Scientists and invented grunge. As recently as 2007, his archly lumpy Rock Formations album offered a constructivist critique of The Riff. His new duo Precious Jules suggest a dirty minimalist reading of The New York Dolls’ camp cavemen aesthetic, until Shine Some Darkness On Me…

Guided By Voices – Let’s Go Eat The Factory - January 2012 January 16th, 2012

In 1983, Ohio schoolteacher Robert Pollard stood in his basement and magically willed into being the ultimate rock group, a Brit invasion beat band inaccurately reassembled by thirty-something punks, nostalgically nibbling the lost lobes of their still ringing teenage ears. Guided By Voices’ colossal catalogue of thousands of two minute sugar hits shames the supposed…

Agitation Free – Shibuya Nights, Live In Tokyo - January 2012 January 12th, 2012

Formed in Berlin in 1967, and fusing analogue electronics with Eastern scales, Agitation Free are unfairly forgotten in favor of Krautrock contemporaries Can, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk. Their 2007 induction into the Tokyo Tower Progressive Rock Wax Museum prompted three reunion shows, filleted here for release. The band’s best album, the epically abstract Last, is…

Fingerbobs – Music From The Original TV Series - January 2012 January 8th, 2012

Created in 1971, the fondly remembered thirteen episode BBC TV series Fingerbobs invited children to imagine the minimally augmented gloves of the Canadian folk musician Rick Jones were a host of vivid characters, most famously the ebullient felt rodent Fingermouse. The dedicated pop-cultural archivist Johnny Trunk has assembled and polished the series’ previously unreleased original…

The Bats – Free All The Monsters - January 2012 January 8th, 2012

Today, The Bats enjoy sudden profile spikes via a global circuit of scholarly rock festivals curated by bigger names, who fashioned themselves partly in the New Zealand veterans’ image. The quartet’s eight album in thirty years and the band still sounds like a downbeat Byrds running on rusted Velvet Underground rhythms, but In The Subway…