Perusal #76: Howling Bells, The Odes, Magda Drozd, Yoshiko Sai…
February 5, 2026
A world of sonic/musical discoveries reviewed by Dominic Valvona. All entries in alphabetical order.
Magda Drozd ‘Divided By Dusk’
(Präsens Editionen) 13th February 2026
Coupling a renewed interest in Polish folklore, its history and roots with time spent in Japan, the composer, violinist and sound artist Magda Drozd inhabits an often alien, mysterious and experimentally intensity of field recordings, atmospheres, the neo-classical, avant-garde, serial and most hauntingly ethereal.
It’s as much an apparitional-ambient and dream-like album as it is dramatic and full of a certain otherworldly drama. And for some of that time it draws not only from the two countries that inspired it, but also from natural phenomenon: an eclipse to the album’s dusk divided title. For in-between worlds, the Warsaw born, but living between Zurich and London artist Drozd inhabits a sonic and vocally invocative landscape that is one part Theatre Of Eternal Music and another part Noémi Büchi.
Working in part with Japanese foils Rai Tateishi and Koshiro Hino – both of the Osaka rock minimalist troupe goat – Drozd absorbs the sound of the high-pitched Japanese shinobue bamboo flute and the NE Thailand and Laos khaen bamboo mouth organ into a partly neo-classical and abstracted drama of aria-like voices, the slightly industrial, willowy, ghostly and folkloric.
Folk songs transformed, stirred up and given a new impetus meet with klezmer and the courtly (especially on the near fairytale and whistled-pitched ‘Piosenka Ludowa’; a free-form transported interpretation of the folkloric folk song), or come up against heart of darkness style guitar, vocal callings, electronic filaments, ghostly reverberations, and the incantations of crickets and insects. The mood and soundscape are enhanced and given a secondary geographical feel by the use of various instruments and electronic/effects apparatus, including the Lyra-8 – described as an organismic analogue synth, its eight varied generators are referred to as voices that resemble the tones of an old electric organ. And with the addition of both wordless and lyrically sung spells, siren songs and cantos of an abstract kind, the whole album hovers and strains between the esoteric symphonic and the strangely folkloric; between Japanese traditions and environmental music, the harrowed depths and pulls of East European and something not quite of this world. Nightmares and dreams, realities and folklore meet in a new space and time.
Howling Bells ‘Strange Life’
(Nude Records) 13th February 2026
An unforced return and obligation, with enough time (just over twelve years) and distance to make a mature judgement, the Howling Bells are back with a new, and crucially, pretty damn fine album of grown-up indie-rock, indie-pop and the psychedelic.
It must be said however, that in the crazy divisive decade since the band’s initial break-up many of the issues that perhaps led to the split are still to be resolved. Bossing it with a flurry of more stripped-down solo albums, one half of the sibling team that instigated the band, the vocalist and guitarist Juanita Stein has spent the intervening years writing and producing music that erases everything but the most vital, emotionally receptive and connective elements of the Howling Bells sound to produce confident (despite the fragility and vulnerability in places) songbooks of personal memories and identity. Even though Juanita’s brother Joel is just as much an integral wellspring of ideas, motivation and creativity, and despite a number of lineup changes during the band’s career trajectory, the focal point, the spotlight, has always shone brightest on their front woman. That light can also burn, and Juanita’s time spent out at the front hasn’t exactly been a positive one – as referenced on her solo work, especially on 2024’s The Weightless Hour; one of my choice picks of that year. Whilst the bane of music press cliché, the allure of the front woman is nevertheless a phenomenon, a selling point throughout an industry previously dominated by males. It’s felt and seems to perhaps be referenced on this album’s own winding indie and spiky ‘Heavy Lifting’, that relationship and in the press, Juanita was carrying around a lot of weighted expectation on those slim shoulders of hers. Perhaps, now, in more recent years, from the viewpoint of motherhood, Juanita wishes to set things straight, to pass on her knowledge and resolutions from sagacious advantage point, having come out the other side, still persevering and still standing strong.
After originally leaving their Australian home to pursue a music career abroad, Howling Bells moved to London where they quickly stood out amongst the dying embers of the MySpace era and its concentration of raggedly male indie bands and post-post-Britpop wannabes. After being championed to a point by such rags as the NME, they soon hurtled up the ranks and earned a spot supporting one of the biggest, if most boring, bands of the era, Coldplay on a stadium tour. This acceleration would have its drawbacks. But with singles like ‘Setting Suns’ (I would say one of the best, certainly among my favourites, from the early noughties) they managed to be both relatively popular and yet highly credibly creative wise. That time hasn’t been forgotten, and after the first split, made after the band’s 2014 album Heartstrings, there seems to have always been a desire or need to gather back around the Howling Bells catalyst.
But Strange Life is much more than that, it’s also a statement of dreams, plaints and diaphanous psychedelic rock carousal rides on the subjects of nostalgia, ideas of home and resilience. On this theme we can pick out the Echobelly and Mazzy Star-esque ‘Melbourne’, a song with a sad cooed tone that speaks of the letdown in finding that despite returning to the bosom of home and its attractions, the reality is quite different: friends, and those you grew up with more or less all moving on and away. Better to perhaps move forward than back and dwell on the past. Meanwhile, ‘Halfway Home’ seem to catch them cut adrift and homeless yet finding a reassuring candour of belonging.‘Unbroken’ is a great opener, a single if not already in the making, and ‘Angel’ seems to be a real departure for the band towards circus Britpop.
As I’ve already described, there is a new sense of confidence about these songs; the scope of influences and range subtly expanded, helped in many ways by Juanita’s solo pathway, which emphasis the “light” touch over the heavy and raging. Vocally speaking, that voice is just as diaphanous, but able also able to turn on the Grace Slick switch, or to escape down the rabbit hole into metaphorical and allegorical dreaminess. Both Joel and drummer Glenn Moule lay down a solid backbeat that switches between echoes of Jet, the Cocteau Twins, Britpop and Juliana Hatfield. Everything is just so; energetic when needed, subtle and sympathetic at other times, and even psychedelic. As reunions go, it’s a very successful one. The vulnerability shorn, the dreaminess ramped up, and the songs speaking with a more mature strength. I for one am glad to see them back anyway.
Ira Dot ‘In Blue Time’
27th February 2025
In development for the last five years, the debut album of disarming indie-blues melancholy from the Ira Dot collaborative partnership of Eddy Wang and Ryan Akler-Bishop seeks comfort and reassurance in these most disconsolate and plaintive of times. Drawing on a wealth of lament, or yearned expression, and a sense of detachment from not just race but the universe, both foils in this project exude a cosmic, fairytale, whimsy and Chinese-operatic patchwork of early noughties influences in their hour of neediness and slacker-like indolent sadness.
Powered as much by such melancholic dreamers, observers and unfortunates as Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust as by the writings of the cultural theorist and American literary scholar Anne Anlin Cheng, In Blue Time is essentially rooted, or unrooted as it were, in both the psychological and all too real problems of racial identity. With the musician, filmmaker, Pennsylvania PhD alumni and Toronto Experimental Translation Collective member Wang left a little wanton and dejected over his Chinese heritage and identity, the album’s lyrics – mostly enchantingly downcast or twee – often reference ideas of belonging and detachment. Cheng interestingly, has written much about this, especially from the Chinese and Southeast Asian viewpoint (Cheng is herself of Taiwan heritage); an identity that seems to slip down the virtuous order of importance on the race meter, with Cheng voicing her own criticisms when Asian women are left out of the debate, the picture, and out of the protest movements for social justice despite facing hostility, racism and various forms of abuse. As one of the oldest communities in America if not anywhere, the Chinese are embedded in the fabric of our landscape and culture. However, this relationship has relied mainly on exploitation of one kind or another. But as is often the case, and through the negative effects of the authoritarian rule of the Chinese communist party, the country and its people have been subjected to scrutiny and racial abuse. There’s so much to unpack, and I haven’t the room. But suffice to say Wang’s cultural separation from those roots, growing up in the West, have left a void that needs addressing.
This main thrust is answered by lyrical displays of the longing, wanton and dismayed, put to the production and music of the multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker and co-editor of the Big Toe magazine Akler-Bishop. With sympathetic pianos, some light but emotionally effective strings, Casio-like shimmies, tropical and celestial atmospheres, various frequencies and interference, the tunning into one sampled or captured narration or metaphor, the accompanying delightful female shadowed vocals, and reverberations the album traverses a whole spectrum of moody blue shades. And within that palette there’s hints of The Unicorns, Jonathan Richman, The Books, Olivia Tremor Control, Frog, Mercury Rev, The Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt!, Broken Social Scene, early Eno, Chinese opera, the Muppet show musical parts and the exotic.
Despite the title it never feels like a malady, nor does it come across as anything but a most lovely indie album of sentiment and belonging. It just gets better on every play, like a musical comfort blanket.
The Odes ‘Déjeuner Sous L’Herbe’
(Not Applicable) 6th February 2026
A union of the untamed, Blurt’s legendary frontman and wild squawking, stonking saxophonist Ted Milton teams up with the electric trick noise maker, sound artist, software developer and composer Sam Britton for a double-album feature of both sonic assemblages backed free-improv/free association vocalisation and shorter poetic vignettes.
Already pretty much a cult progenitor of a sound that could only be riotously described as post-punk-no-wave-protestation-mutant-jazz, Milton’s testaments amd rages transformed the group he founded in 1979 with his sibling and former English prog-psych outfit Quintessence band member Jake and guitarist Peter Greese. And although that group mutated constantly over the following decades, the revolving set-up near enough always featured Ted as chief instigator/performer. Whilst it would be disingenuous to those artists on the vanguard of the 80s scene that took over the downtown scene of NYC and Europe, Ted could be singled out as one of the earliest originators of no wave and its various offshoots. Joined now in 2026 by Britton, who channels much of his idiosyncratic Isambard Khroustaliov alias and work with such troupes as Scarla O’Horror, both Ted’s wild saxophone skonks, squeals, squeezes and drifts and partly Dadaist, partly beat, partly avant-garde and partly snide, sneery and pitying digs at nationalism and the state of society are transmogrified or laced with warping, crunching, enveloping claps of thunderous electronica; punched, slapped and singularly whacked synthetic drum pads; 8-bit and binary distortions; and Populäre Mechaniks.
Forty-five tracks in all, divided into two parts; the first section, the surrealist impressionistic and situationist imbued Déjeuner Sous L’Herbe (which I believe translates as “Lunch Under The Grass”) draws both foils together in a post-punk, fucked-up jazz and leftfield dance music collaboration, whilst the second part, Anti Climb Paint, feature Tim unaccompanied performing over thirty short (some lasting only the time it takes to read out the title) poems of the absurd, politically charged, pitying, silly, observational and comedic: sung at times but mostly spoken, Tim invokes a fusion of Lydon, Ken Livingstone, music hall, a bastardised and updated wrathful version of the WWI poets and Jon Sinclair. The latter section features everything from “stringing up” the Westminster front bench to loud shirts (“Braille for the sighted”), corporate office jobs on the Moon, Captain Tom’s charity walk during Covid (“he kept a walking, flapping his gongs”), and his uneasy relationship, so it seems, with “dad” (a theme that stretches across a number of readings).
The more musical, rhythmic but highly experimental former section could be described as a meeting between the sax of Archie Shepp, Andy Haas, Colin Stetson, Biting Tongues, James Chance and Konk and the off script improvised tubular scaffold effects, wraps and reverberated noise of Britton’s various hidden sources and apparatus: often sounding particular Germanic.
A generous offering of words and sound, anointed under the more lyrically and near disarming (certainly giving zero indication of the nature and to the sound of this duo) The Odes union, Déjeuner Sous L’Herbe and its second act cement reputations, encapsulates the current messy, fucked-up state of the society and politics, and offers up a performance of equals working out on the peripherals of the music world.
Pefkin ‘Unfurling’
(Morc) 30th January 2026
Both drawing from and fascinated by the landscape, the history of Western Scotland and the many islands that sit between itself and Ireland, Gayle Brogan (under the Pefkin alias) once more embodies a both abstracted and devotional near otherworldly vision of that old home. The first album since moving across the Scottish border to the North of England and Sheffield, Unfurling, as its title would suggest, does just that as it unfurls a simultaneously beatific, sober, haunted, mysterious and misty soundtrack to the seasons and the Irish saints sent in their Gaelic etymologically named small lightweight coracles across the sea to pagan Scotland. It’s the mystique, the hermit’s life and the early rituals, the conversion that intrigues.
Emoting a both haunting and hymnal-like atmosphere throughout, Brogan invokes the abstract feels of the environment in a cycle that traverse’s winter and spring. This is done through the use of either apparitional-like or transformative folk choral voices, the use of the viola and violin (erring towards John Cale, and a touch of Jed Kurzel), various drones and purrs, throbs and the sound of the landscape itself: the lapping tides of either the sea or the waters that wash up on Scotland’s dramatic loch topography.
I was reminded in part of Delphine Dora, Susan Alcorn and Simon McCorry. But this album is mostly unique in capturing a mysterious essence and the feel of each season’s embrace or shroud: winter really does seem quite sober, ghostly but also beatific; I can see the heat rising off the damp and melting moss on the opening ‘Green Bound In Ice And Snow’. At other times it feels like a transformative vision of the Gaelic; old songs and geography transcribed beyond the parchment and recordings of scrolls on to the air and into the ether.
An extraordinary work of both the short and long form, Unfurling emotionally and intimately soundtracks a feeling of time and place, of history, and of religious myth.
Yoshiko Sai ‘Mikkou’
(Wewantsounds) 13th February 2026
The famous silk road, from Europe and Persia to China, formed the backdrop or mood for the ethereal and clean-cut siren Yoshiko Sai’s second studio album Mikkou, released back in 1976. Tying the atavistic with the contemporary, picturing in words and music that fabled trade route and the lands it crossed – the Takalamakan desert and such – Sai longingly, seductively and achingly transports the listener to magical, dreamy and mirage-like realms. And yet, despite the fantasy, the relaxed near show-like and almost cabaret funk, the bluesy influences and brassy resonance of such peers as The Far East Family Band and worldly prog, the album is anchored with references and plaints to femineity, freedom and the “passage of generations”.
The singer-songwriter and artist (for it is her fantastical/mythological painted cats and nudist sprites, nymphs, muses that don the various album covers) released a flurry of albums between the mid and late 70s, before talking a considerable respite, and picking up again in 2001. In fact, this latest album to be released from Wewantsounds’ series of Sai vinyl reissues (many receiving a proper international release for the first time) features a new interview with the Japanese cult star. But for those yet to experience her most evocative crystal voiced metamorphosis and vision of folksy-blues and balladry, and know little about her, Sai was born in the old Japanese capital (during the 8th century) seat of Nara, located on Honshu in the 1950s. Surrounded by shrines, temples, architecture and a landscape of great cultural importance, Sai absorbed herself in myth, the dream-realism, the dark and the bizarre literature of such notable Japanese authors as Mushitarō Oguri, Yumeno Kyūsaku and others. It was whilst recovering from a kidney disease and putting on hold her law study at Doshisha University that she began to paint and write poetry and songs. After competing in a number of competitions and submitting songs, she was invited to perform as the opening act for Rabi Nakayam – anointed the female Japanese Bob Dylan. Proving a successful leg on the ladder, Sai was swiftly signed to the Teichiku label, with her inaugural album being released on that label’s subsidiary Black in 1975; produced by the notable Japanese jazz muso Yuji Ohno no less.
Revisited in 2026, accompanied by Hashim Kotaro Bharoocha’s informative liner notes and interview, the Mikkou LP entwines faraway dreamt lands and islands with a most beautifully envisioned songbook of the weepy, sublime and drifted. Creating the right atmosphere of Turkic, Samarkand and Persian allure is the spindly-lattice and springy reverberating sounds of the dulcimer and what sounds like tablas – produced and arranged by the noted Isamu Haruna. But making his mark throughout is the famous Japanese guitar hero Masayoshi Takanaka, who channels his most bluesy credentials with folk, psych, Latin America and country on the silk road of travails and magic.
Soulfully and softly fluctuating between flourishes of old Persia, the Caucuses and China, but also seemingly embracing touches of the Iberian, of the Caribbean lilt, of funk, and the Laurel Canyon, Sai effortlessly oozes fantasy, love and lamented aches. Almost filmic, ambitious yet very much contained and sentimental, Sai’s second LP is a silkscreen of yearning escapism.
Here’s the message bit we hate, but crucially need:
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Our Monthly Playlist selection of choice music and Choice Releases list from the last month.
Apologies, as I’m writing this from my bed in the Renal Unit of the Queen Elizabeth mega hospital, waiting on my weekend free pass for home and recovery in much more inviting surroundings. If you haven’t yet heard, I was rushed into Acute last Thursday lunchtime and ended up in the kidney specialist unit; prodded, tested, observed, scanned, observed more, biopsy and trialling various meds: some of left me pretty unfocussed and groggy. You get your own room, own shower and facilities, plenty of sockets and pretty good free WiFi, so it isn’t that bad a stay. Just waiting in limbo for action plans, lifestyle change advice and long-term medication. I will however at least try to get the site on some sort of regular track whilst all this is going on, but events may hinder this, and my state of health may make it impossible sometimes, but we shall see how it goes.
Saying all that, I’m able, or at least in a more awakened state to finish off the month with a revue playlist and selection of choice releases list from January 2026. This list includes both those releases I or my contributors (Matt Oliver and Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea) managed to feature and review on the site and those we just didn’t get the room for – time restraints and the sheer volume of submissions each month mean there are always those records that miss out on receiving a full review, and so we have added a number of these to both our playlist and releases list.
CHOICE RELEASES FROM THE LAST MONTH OR SO:
Elea Calvet ‘Spurious Transmutations’
Chosen by Dominic Valvona
Geologist ‘Can I Get A Pack Of Camel Lights?’
(Drag City) DV Link
Clémentine March ‘Powder Keg’
(PRAH Recordings) DV Link
DakhaBrakha ‘Ptakh’
Chosen by DV
Roc Marciano ‘656’
(Pimpire Records/Marci Enterprises) Chosen by MO & DV
Minor Dents ‘Sitting With The Fish’
EP – (Rose Hill Records) Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea Link
Reine des Lezards ‘Lady Coca-Cola’
EP – (Metal Postcard Records) BBS Link
Sis and the Lower Wisdom ‘Saints and Aliens’
(Native Cat) DV Link
Wilson Tanner Smith ‘Perpetual Guest’
(Sawyer Editions) DV Link
Tachube ‘Mincminc’(Inverted Spectrum Records/PMGJazz)
DV Link
Charles ‘Poppy Bob’ Walker ‘Double-Wide’
Album – (Castle Dome Records) DV Link
Leo Wolf ‘Veiled In Light’
(The Oldest River) DV Link
PLAYLIST:
Sis and the Lower Wisdom ‘Luce’
Tinariwen Ft. Sulafa Elyas ‘Sagherat Assani’
Reine des Lezards ‘I’m Made Up’
Robert Stillman ‘Reality Distortion Field’
Neo-Magics ‘Acid Tongue’
Clementine March ‘After The Solstice’
The God Fahim & Nicholas Craven ‘Bik Luster S’
Roc Marciano ‘Vanity’
Doctor Nativo ‘Chokolate Kakao’
Shabaam Sahdeeq, Es-K & General Steele ‘Top Tier’
Under The Reefs Orchestra/Catherine Graindorge ‘Banquise’
Occult Character ‘Her Name Is Terriible’
The Bordellos ‘Who Do You Think You Are? Paul McCartney?’
Geologist ‘RV Envy’
Sniff, Caneva & Hush One ‘Polo Jacket’
Fliptrix, Forest DLG, Coops ‘Freedom?’
Toni Geitani ‘Ya Sah’
Wilson Tanner Smith ‘Cherry Picking’
DakhaBrakha ‘Kosari Kosait’
Elea Calvet ‘Bad Joke – Transmutation’
Sweeney ‘Lonely Faces’
Cashell ‘These Things Take Time’
Foster Neville ‘Hob Moor’
Strangebird-Sounds ‘CALCITE’
Charles ‘Poppy Bob’ Walker ‘Winterhaven, 1978’
KatzPascale ‘GBTC’
Sonnyjim & Sebb Bash Kezza’
Minor Dents ‘Rituals’
BRIAN ‘BORDELLO’ SHEA’S REVIEWS ROUNDUP – INSTANT REACTIONS.
Fran Ashcroft ‘Truth Love And Justice’
Single – 28th January 2026
This is a fine single, a song of wistful tinged country jazz; an arch eyebrowed swipe at Trump and his ICE goons; a song of revolt and revulsion; a resigned whisper of acid dropped venom moanfully performed as the sun goes down on a once great nation as the ghost of Roy Rogers quietly weeps.
Comet Gain City Fallen Leaves’
20th Anniversary Reissue Album – (Tapete Records) 13th February 2026
I love this album. It’s probably one of my most played albums over the last twenty years or so. It’s an album of wonderful lyricism, beautiful melodies and a heartfelt angst, and as any who knows the music of my band The Bordellos, I do love mentions of pop culture in the lyrics.
Comet Gain are one of those special bands (I call the Go Betweens Syndrome) that really deserve to be heard by a wider audience, and you never know maybe a well-deserved reissue of this magical bewitching collection of beautiful beat poetry will help do the trick. I also may add that Draw A Smile On An Egg and The Ballad Of A Mixtape never fail to give me goosebumps no matter how many times I hear them.
Knight’s Ferry ‘The Autumn Leaves On 14th Street’
Single – (Teeth) Out Now
Knight’s Ferry supply us with a cultured jingle-jangle of a guitar indie pop sweetie that was so all-encompassing of my late teen years. Yes, C86, a longtime ago I know but guitar jingle-jangle never grows old, it just grows melancholic with age and teases the memories of how good and bad those days where. Yes, life is indeed like a 7-inch single with a hand drawn label.
Minor Dents ‘Sitting With The Fish’
EP – (Rose Hill Records) Released 23rd January 2026
Minor Dents’ Sitting With The Fish EP is an example on how to make interesting and bewitching music. Jazz, psych and krautrock combine to make an EP of delightful curveballs songs – you do not know what is going to happen next -; songs that have a smooth undercurrent of sex and sophistication.
Minor Dents are obviously a band that does not think invention is a dirty word, and think that music lovers are all brain dead lager drinking Fred Flintstones wannabes who love nothing better than listening to the paint by numbers so called Alt Rock /indie guitar tedium that currently inhabits my inbox.
Occult Character ‘Her Name Is Terrible’
Single – (Metal Postcard Records) Out Now
With the current shitshow in America, Occult Character is by far one of the most important artists in the US Underground today. Her Name Is Terrible is an inventive, short, mad as bonkers single as one could ever wish for.
All you can say about Occult Character is he sounds like no-one else but himself. I am sure it is only a matter of time before one of the big hitters in the music business will discover the genius of the man and get his music out into a wider audience.
Reine des Lezards ‘Lady Coca-Cola’
EP – (Metal Postcard Records) Out Now
The subsonic discordant blast of a no-wave fantasy, the Lady Coca Cola EP is a demonstration on the value of the underground. Let’s be honest, you are very unlikely to hear this on primetime national radio and that is a bad thing as experimental fervour is a fervour that needs experiencing at least once in your life. So, I am afraid to say that this three-track ep will go unheard by your friendly neighbourhood milkman unless he is down with the angular tomfoolery of Dandelion radio. And so his whistle will not be heard whistling this gem of angsty experimental punk rock blowing on the breeze on a cold winter’s morning, which is a sad thing indeed.
Kevin Robertson ‘Birdy In The Window’
Single – Released 16th January 2026
I am both a fan of Kevin Robertson and Scott Robertson, who have both released some fine guitar music over the last few years, both solo and in their mutual various bands. They are Father and Son, and once again I do like bands/duos that feature the father/mother and their offspring because there to me always seems a melancholy and madness and obvious communication that carries over into their art.
Birdy In The Window is a fine introduction to their forthcoming album, a song that has one thinking of Teenage Fanclub, Buffalo Springfield, Mathew Sweet, and is rather lovely indeed.
Schizo Fun Addict ‘Pasteline Dream’
Single – (Fruits de Mer) Out Now
‘Pasteline Dream’ is both a taster for the new Schizo Fun Addict album and a limited-edition lathe-cut 7-inch single release on Fruits De Mer in March. And what a fine single it is too. All shimmering and jangling guitars ala early Stone Roses and those Scottish indie darlings The Pastels, with a wonderful slight whiff of the B52’s girls’ dreamlike magic. ‘Pasteline Dream’ is a wonderful way to start a New Year as it is the first new song I heard in 2026 and hopefully the musical magic will continue all throughout the oncoming year.
If you’ve enjoyed this selection, the writing, or been led down a rabbit hole into new musical terrains of aural pleasure, and if you can, then you can now show your appreciation by keeping the Monolith Cocktail afloat by donating via Ko-Fi.
For the last 15 years both me and the MC team have featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world: ones that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored, and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love or interest in. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to say thanks or show support, than you can now buy us a coffee or donate via https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail
The Digest for January 2026: New Music/The Social Playlist
January 16, 2026
The monthly Digest includes a clutch of accumulated short new music reviews and the social inter-generational/eclectic and anniversary albums celebrating playlist.
___THE NEW (All those latest & upcoming releases in brief) ___
The Bordellos ‘Who Do you think You Are? Paul McCartney?’
Single – (Metal Postcard Records) 7th January 2025
More The Rutles’ Stig than The Beatles’ McCartney, the latest self-depreciated, no-fi buzzing guitar string strummed piece of “silliness” from The Bordellos family (that’s Brian Shea and his brother Ant, and Brian’s son Dan) pays a handsome tomfoolery homage to good ol’ Paul.
The Bordellos were behind Half Man Half Biscuit and the Cleaners From Venus in the dole queue of the 1980s; powered by aphorism, a ridicule of the current industry, and a litany of muthafuckers from across the golden age of rock ‘n’ roll, punk and post-punk, psych and garage. Brian will be no stranger to followers of the Monolith Cocktail, having regaled us with his reviews over the years, and of course gracing these pages as a solo performer: think John Shuttleworth meets Sparklehorse.
This latest single to be released by the Metal Postcard Records hub was influenced (I quote) “by [Brian’s] love of Paul McCartney and memories of walking up to Dead Fly Rehearsal rooms in the 80’s with my guitar and every time an old man in his garden would shout “Who Do You Think You Are? Paul McCartney”. As I walked past…it never got old for both him and me…I was tempted occasionally to buy a gun and shoot him and shout who do you think you are? John Lennon!”
If skiffle-indie-punk was a thing, then here it is in all its rudimental, near distorted jangled and sprung glory. It actually sounds less Paul and more like a sarky Lennon…that and a touch of Frank Sidebottom. No one quite manages to summarise a feeling, an era, a memory like The Bordellos, nor sound so brilliantly shambolic and devoid of even the rubber bands to replace the long loosened/slackened and fucked bands in their Tascam 4-track recorder. Off to a fine rambling start in 2026.
Greg Stasiw ‘Guesswork’
Album – (Hidden Harmony Recordings) 2nd February 2026
Greg Stasiw could quite rightly be called a polymath with a worldly scope of influences, having travelled and spent time in New York, Tokyo, Toronto, Paris, Boston, and Bratislava. Home, I believe, is New England on America’s Northeastern edge. The CV includes the occupations of experimental musician, visual artist and writer, but also include the study of anthropology, animation and illustration. Channelling all that into a musical sonic practice and the results are less happenstance than that title might suggest.
Guesswork was actually intended as a collaboration, a response to a visual stimulus created by the artist Phillipe Shewchenk. For one reason or another it was shelved, but Stasiw decided to continue experimenting and formulating a ponderous biomorphic set of ideas relating to a range of subjects, from plumbing systems for plants, to real locations and adjective prompts; many of which seem to point to nature, geography and the weather.
Ending up as Stasiw’s debut album, this amorphous blending of vignettes, studies, semi-improvised experiments sounds like a field trip conducted by Walter Smetek, Nicolas Gaunin and Hiroshi Yoshimura. It’s both recognisably trudging through the lush, the humid and exotic environments of Earth, yet simultaneously otherworldly and near sci-fi. To label it ambient would be a mistake, but minimalist all the same with its airs and the skying sound-scaping, the synth effects of kosmische and the new age combined with Harold Budd and his like.
Real sounds, like the bird life under a rich canopy, mix with percussive tools like a pestle and mortar, the knocks of heavy objects, the drawing of chains and desert sonar-like signals. A shuddery and often lovely reflective piano can be heard alongside a church-like organ producing the most melodic of paused moments. Thrusting gleams of light on the horizon; tunnelled chutes to new worlds; windy tundra’s; playful landscapes of bulb-like shaped notes; Stasiw magics up a stimulating, often pretty and with a sonorous depth, soundscape of possibilities and artistic mystery.
Tachube ‘Mincminc’ (Inverted Spectrum Records/PMGJazz)
Album – Released 4th January 2026
An international combination of band members and album facilitators/labels makes for a truly ambiguous and amorphous experiment with the latest moody and wild post-jazz exploration from the improvisational trio of Tachube. Based in the Serbian city of Novi Sad, a culmination of various musical strands and influences brings together Saint Petersburg electroacoustic/noise musician and founder of the Intonema label Ilia Belorukov (who performs on both the alto sax and rudimental, playful fluteophone), plus two active members of the Novi Sad free and ambient jazz and psychedelic dub scenes, Marko Čurčić on effects pedals and electric bass, and Nemanja Tasić on a minimised drum kit.
Their third collaborative release, platformed in conjunction with the independent boutique label and booking agency that spans in Hungary, Serbia and Turkey, Inverted Spectrum Records and the Macedonian label PMGJazz, Mincminc sounds like Anthony Braxton, Andy Haas and Sam Rivers creeping, prowling and consumed on a mysterious plain with Krononaut. It’s a combination of the improvised Polish and American freeform jazz schools, but also an emotional fit and squeeze of mythology, the darkness and the arid; enveloped as it all is by meta and the depth of the trio’s expanded spheres of influence and skills.
Incipient stirrings and jangles create the right mystique, with blows and the driest of alto expressions, quivered and shivered and shaved cymbals, busy undulated and descending bass runs and the knocks and mulch sounds of hidden sources building a serial and abstract atmosphere that vaguely invokes the Balkans and its geographical history, psychogeography and mystery. Something different in the jazz field; an expansion of ideas and moods and the extemporised.
Roudi Vagou & Läuten der Seele ‘Taghelle Nacht’
Album – (Quindi) 6th February 2026
Once more stepping out behind their aliases, the collaborative union of German artists Matthias Kremsreiter and Christian Schoppik (respectfully reimagined as Roudi Vagou and Läuten der Seele) transduce and manipulate ripples in time to invoke both blissfully dreamy and more mysteriously haunting sonic and musical ideas of nostalgia, German nationalism and geography.
Drawing upon their personal connections, their relationship to the lands and the city that moulded and influenced them both, this latest union could be filed under the hauntology label – a very good label as it happens, one that perfectly, if overused and misdirected on occasions, fits this interdimensional album of filmic score passages, vignettes and looped hallucinations. For Taghelle Nacht captures the “day-bright night” character of a simultaneously pastoral Heimatfilm era vision of German cinema, of the surreal, of fairytale and mirages whilst providing a suitably ghostly and occultist atmosphere.
It’s as if Roedelius and Moebius, or even Popol Vuh, fed the movie scores of Hans J. Salter, Philip Martell, Harry Robinson and Ronald Stein into a German time machine. Old matinee and classical suites, songs of the romanticised, the near ethereal coos of apparition sirens and angels, a fairground Bavarian Wurlitzer, the call of an esoteric nature (the field recordings of trampled walks across the land, the birds in the trees), and the sound of woodwind and brass are looped or obfuscated by the sounds of hidden whirly, unoiled sound sources, of Fortean machines and valves, folksy horror soundtracks, the concertinaed and bellowed and surface noise of old wax cylinders. Melodies and the wistful embrace of that old age are embraced and then somehow made more unreal and otherworldly as if transmitted through a séance or played on a possessed record player from an earlier age. And then again, you can pick out hints of Belbury Poly and their ilk, Martin Denny and Drew Mulholland across a haunting backdrop stepped in historical values, horrors and the mystical.
Charles ‘Poppy Bob’ Walker ‘Double-Wide’
Album – (Castle Dome Records) 10th February 2026
Outsider art from the 1980s, the left behind recordings of the fabled Charles ‘Poppy Bob’ Walker have already filled one such album of haunted imaginings, of mirages and dusty Western peregrinations. Released back in 2024, the Dirt Bike Vacation collection platformed a near secret archive of desert renderings, of loosened and ambient-esque country sketches. It reads however like one of those concocted projects, the alias of a very much still-breathing silent partner hiding behind anonymity. But reassuringly, this “normal guy”, who worked hard, kept some friends, though never married or had kids, liked nothing more than to drive off on various recording adventures in his old, yellow Datsun pickup.
The remembrance of an unassuming outsider, articulating or washing or crafting or letting his inner thoughts and observations and meditations of places in and around his Yuma, Arizona home ghostly emit through the lo fi amplified strings of his Martin D-28 guitar, onto his trusty and rudimental Tascam 4-track recorder. And as such an unassuming amateur working in the field, Walker’s music has, refreshingly, no one to please, no one to serve other than its creator’s own vision and perhaps improvised musings and contouring’s of the landscape, the thoughts and reification of mood and place.
At one turn taking on the mantle of a hidden Ry Coder soundtrack, or indeed invoking certain passages and refrains from Dylan’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid soundtrack, this latest collection’s controlled, mediated and shortened cinematic qualities build towards an alternative country-waned and mirage-like score. From incorporating a rustic banjo to the electrified vapours and more concrete panning and splayed strums and strikes of his guitar and the chorus of hidden sounds (from the railroad barrier’s bell-rung-like signal to the occasional use of reverberated lo fi synthetic drums, the esoteric rattle snake shaken ceremonies of the second cut, the windbreakers and even the sound of the tape’s hiss and surface sounds) Double-Wide feels like we’re watching a dreamy, hallucinating film of the surreal American West.
If you dig the art and experiments of such alt-country company as Myles Cochran, The Droneroom, the Gunn-Truscinski duo, Daniel Vickers and Chuck Johnson, then Walker should be as much a revelation as a familiar companion on the transformed leftfield road of such maverick artists.
___/The Monolith Cocktail Social Playlist Vol. 104___
The Social Playlist is an accumulation of music I love and want to share, with tracks from my various DJ sets and residencies over the years and both selected cuts from those artists and luminaries we’ve lost on the way and from those albums celebrating anniversaries each month.
In the latter camp we have the following anniversaries to mark:
The oldest celebration this month falls to Them’s mighty garage R&B raver I Can Only Give You Everything, taken from their 1966 LP Them Again. Van the man Morrison in full on maximum R&B glory; turn it up you muthafuckers! Still the best, guaranteed to get every dancefloor riotously jumping. The whole LP is peerless.
David Bowie’s Station To Station is 50 this month, and I’ve picked the Word On A Wing version used in Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream spectacular. Bowie’s epitaph Blackstar is 10 in January. I’ve decided on Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime).
Bob Dylan’s Desire is also 50 this month. Not the most sympathetic of subjects to mythologise, what with equal opportunities pain-in-the-neck Mafia types like Joey Gallo, but there’s merit with Oh Sister and its sublime backing vocals by Emmylou Harris (apparently, and very rare, overdubbed a day later). The musical attempt to clear the former middleweight boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter on Hurricane is overlong and sanctimonious in comparison.
Another 50th anniversary special, Cheyenne Fowler’s Cheyenne’s Comin’ boards the funky Stevie Wonder goes indigenous funk train. I was nice enough to give this original LP to my old pal James Bull a number of years; it probably now sits in his collection, getting an occasional airing on his turntable making in California.
Lou Reed’s country bar room bell-ringers Coney Island Baby is another LP celebrating the half century mark this month. I’ve gone for the opener, Crazy Feeling, not the best track, but still a favourite.
Only just making our albums of the year list last month with their first album in a decade (Touch), Tortoise’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die is unbelievably 30 this month. An album that defined a post-everything scene and year. And so, what to pick. How about the various gears-changing Glass Museum.
Very different, but from the same era. Britpop’s The Bluetones‘ Expecting To Fly is an unmistakable example of that era’s sound. Slight Return was the single, and track that made them, and still their best moment on wax.
Beth Ditto’s Gossip fired up the noughties, arriving with the vanguard of attitude post-no-wave, funk punk and such titans as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Some incredible fiery matriarchs stamped all over the sensibilities of the male dominated indie and rock scenes. The trio’s debut Standing In The Way Of Control is twenty this month, and I could have picked anything from an album that is almost a perfect encapsulation of the times it was made. But here’s Jealous Girls.
I never really need an excuse to feature Serge Gainsbourg, but to honour the memory of that French muse, chanteuse of new age French cinema and 60s starlet Brigitte Bardot here’s Initials B.B and the outlaw duet Bonnie & Clyde. Remarkably still such an icon, despite her best and most of her work being in the 1960s: retiring more or less early to concentrate on animal welfare for the next sixty years of her life.
From the newer section, or those recentish tracks that missed out on a place on the site’s Monthly Playlists, a smattering of tracks released in the last few months (occasionally a little further back). From the Live In Mestre Venezia series of outstanding performances, Get Happy by the ’84 union of sax and jazz pianist icons Sam Rivers and Mal Waldron; made available near the end of 2025. Also, and I’d bet a very popular choice amongst my peers, The House That Doesn’t Exist from Melody’s Echo Chamber’s Unclouded album, released last month; Leave by NEDA, released back in September; Volcano by Penza Penza, released last month; Pete Evans and Mike Pride’s exploratory alchemy of Substance X, also put out last month; Deanna Petcoff’s Not Too Proud, another December release; and Papernut Cambridge’s I’m A Photograph Of You, released just in the last couple of weeks.
From across time, across genres, across geography, a number now of tracks I either played in my various DJ sets over the years, wished I’d owned, or just came across in my research. This includes the mellotron imbued prog-rockers Gracious and Introduction; another prog obscurity, Kingdom Come and Spirit of Joy; American jazz trumpeter Kamal Abdul Alim and Al Nafs; German electronic and kosmische luminary and progenitor Conrad Schnitzler and Convex 4; the Memphis snot rocking garage thumping R&B outfit Compulsive Gambler’s and The Way I Feel About You; the Chicago post-rock-avant-garde Shrimp Boat and Pumpkin Love; the Cleveland garage-prog troupe Damnation ( their name whittled down for some reason by their label from The Damnation of Adam Blessing) and their funky-psych-Hammond cover of The Monkees’ Last Train To Clarksville; hip-hop royalty from the golden age, Showbiz & A.G. with Silence Of The Lambs; strange sampled fruit from Ether Bunny with the Bunny Jump; and because I was recently reminded of this song through Apple TV’s Palm Royale series, Moonshot by the dodgy, or found out, Buffy Saint Marie – not so indigenous American as she had us all believe, and yet, the music is just as sublime, the lyrics incredible.
As a special this time around, and to show at least some support for those bravely taking to the streets of many of Iran’s cities to protest against its authoritarian theocracy, and the crippling cost of living crisis (burdened by Western sanctions), I’ve chosen to include some choice music from the country’s inspiring female underground. Written – and just to show how these protests have continued since the pandemic, flaring up after brutal crackdowns, executions and state murder – back in 2023 my review of AIDA and Nesa Azadikhah’s co-founded Apranik Records compilation platform of Iranian artists is receiving another airing today (read below, with some modifications in light of recent events).
I’m also adding a number of tracks to this month’s social – the least I can do. The left’s moral compass seems stuck at outright condemnation. In fact, it has fallen completely silent on the matter, as thousands of body bags mount up on the Iranian streets. Whilst American influence, and Trump’s threats to strike at the regime if it doesn’t stop murdering its citizen protesters all feed into the conspiracy theories of Western interventionism, it must be pointed out that all previous protests – and we are talking a sizable percentage of the population that are fed up with the hardline authoritarianism; a whole younger generation wishing to have the same freedoms enjoyed in the West, the same opportunities – have failed under heavy handed suppression and sanctioned violence.
Let’s hope the Iranian people can make that change for a much better future.
Various ‘Intended Consequences’
(Apranik Records)
With a hellish multitude of flashpoints and distractions across the globe keeping the continuing fight for women’s liberation in Iran off the news rolls, it has become apparent that the Iranians themselves have been left to carry on the struggle with little support; that is until late last year and early 2026, with Trump weighing in with threatening strikes upon the regime and those that keep them there. In an ongoing war between the forces of the authoritarian religious state and a younger generation demanding an end to the erosions of their civil liberties and freedoms, heavily impeded by sanctions that began as a consequence of the country’s nuclear programme, the crisis in the country entered a dark bloody chapter in 2022 with the murder, in custody, of Masha Zhina Amini by the “morality police”.
After a rightful campaign of protest and action at such a heinous crime, a brutal crackdown by the state led to mass arrests and even executions (mostly of male supporters and activists, usually on trumped up charges). Further restrictions were invoked. And just as horrifying, in 2023 there was a nationwide spate of deliberate poisonings of schoolgirls (one of the groups who mobilised against the authorities in the wake of Amini’s cruel death). Defiant still, even in the face of such oppression, the brave women of Iran have strengthened their resolve only further.
In the face of such attacks, clampdowns, the music scene has responded with a strong message of resistance and solidarity. Despite everything, cities like the capital of Tehran have a strong music scene of contemporary artists, composers, DJs and performers working across all mediums, including art (which is probably why so much of the music is also so visceral, descriptive and evocative of imagery). One such collaborative force of advocates, AIDA and Nesa Azadikhah, co-founded the Apranik Records label, a platform for female empowerment.
Following 2022’s earlier Women Life Freedom compilation, a second spotlight volume delves further into not only the Tehran scene but picks out choice tracks from those female Iranians working outside the country in such epicenters as London (AZADI.mp3) and Berlin (Ava Irandoost).
Sonic wise it covers everything from d’n’b, trance, deep house and techno to sound art experimentation. The range of moods is just as diverse in that respect, from restlessness to the reflective and chaotic.
Contributions from both Azadikhah (the hand drum rattled d’n’b breaks and spacy, airy trance ‘Perpetual’) and AIDA (the submerged melodious and dreamy techno ‘Ode To Expectations’, which features the final love-predicament film sample, “You know that I love you, I really do. But I have to look after myself too.”) can be found alongside a burgeoning talent pool. The already mentioned London-based producer and singer AZADI.mp3 opens this collection with a filtered female chorus of collective mantra protest, set to a sort of R&B, 2-step and bass throbbed production, on ‘Empty Platform’– just one of many tracks that uses the sounds of a more traditional Iran, especially the daf drum, alongside modern and futuristic warped effects. The sound artist and composer Rojin Sharafi likewise features the rattled rhythms of hand drums and some hidden spindled instrument – like running a stick across railings – on her entrancing kinetic techno ritual of “trauma”, ‘dbkk’.
Abji_hypersun allows the sounds of the environment to seep into her slow-building track of field recordings, collage and breaks (two-stroke scooters buzz by as distant female conversations reverberate on the street). Part jungle breaks pirate radio, part Matthew David, Jon The Dentist and LTJ Bukem, ‘Resist The God Trick’ evokes a tunneled vision of haunted reminisces and resistance in the shadows.
Emsho’s ‘Down Time’ is a rotor-bladed electro mix of Basic Channel and The Chemical Brothers, and Aida Shirazi’s mysterious wind of dark meta ‘R.E.V.O.L.U.T.I.O.N’ spells out the rage with a shadowy, near daemonic scripture of wrath and revenge – a gothic synth sinister avenging angel promises that the women of Iran will neither “forget” nor “forgive” their oppressors, torturers and murderers. Farzané seems to evoke the alien, the sci-fi on her experimental, sometimes disturbing dial twisting and crackled ‘Quori’ transmission, and the Berlin-based DJ, video artist and music producer Ava Irandoost draws on Laraaji-like dulcimer tones for her dream mirrored kosmische evocation ‘CINEREOUS’. The Tehran composer, pianist and bassist Ava Rasti draws a close to the compilation with a classical-tinged, harmonic ringed, saddened piano-lingering performance, entitled ‘Eight Night’ – an atmospheric troubled trauma is encapsulated with the deftest of touches.
It might be my own nostalgic penchant for 90s electronic music (my formative years of course), but this series (if we can call it that) could be an Iranian version of the Trance Europe Express compilations brought out during that decade; a treasure trove of discoveries and whole scenes that opened up a world of previously unknown music to many of us not living in the epicenters of North America, the UK and Europe and beyond. Hopefully this latest platform of innovative artists from across the arts will draw the attention it deserves; the message hardly virtuous, in your face, but sophisticated: the very act of female Iranians making a name for themselves despite censorship and bans a sign of empowerment and resistance in itself. Few groups deserve our support (which in the West has been sadly absent) more, but don’t just purchase for the cause but for the musical strives being awakened and produced under tyrannical oppression, and because this is a solid collection of great electronic music.
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Our Daily Bread 651: From the Archives: A David Bowie Special
January 9, 2026
Anniversary Albums/Playlist: Dominic Valvona
It’s now been a decade since the passing of David Bowie. A decade that can only be described as depressingly bleak and hugely divisive in the extreme.
Alexander Larman’s Lazarus : The Second Coming of David Bowie biography, complete with, we’re told, the inside information on Bowie’s health scares over that same decade (apparently, as we are led to believe, and through inner circle confidents, he had an unnatural amount of heart attacks before being diagnosed in 2014 with the cancer that finally killed him two years later) was released at the start of the year. Pretty much the final word, or at least most comprehensive catalogue of not only the latter half of Bowie’s career, but also the events that led up to his death.
But rather than dwell on the subject, the eulogy, I wish to celebrate and honour; to escape from societal breakdown and the anguished age of high anxiety. And so, I once more want to share my original piece on Bowie’s last act: ‘★’ from 2016. I originally wrote a review like so many others, not knowing about Bowie’s fate – this isn’t entirely true; a musician friend, who’s father somehow was a pal or knew one of Bowie’s oldest school friends, relayed the info of Bowie’s cancer diagnosis to me at the time, but with no way of following that news up, of clarifying or getting confirmation, I left it at that. Just after the album’s release, and with the death of Bowie, I added a preface: my original review however did obviously pick up on the obsession and themes of mortality and death. It felt like he was leaving us a testament.
A special in fact, not only is Bowie’s epitaph ten years old this month but Station to Station is fifty years old this January. Both of my pieces on these albums can be found below, backed up with the playlist I made on hearing of his death and links to my long love letter, album guide in four parts.
‘★’ (ISO/RCA) 2016
A Preface
With hindsight, ‘★’ now seems an obvious epitaph. The clues where all there. The afterlife, resurrection and a string of final farewells hang over the album like a ticking countdown to David Bowie’s death. He did it all of course with a grand flourish, and in some cases, beautifully.
Not wholly plaintive and morose, his eulogy dared to offer up intriguing and ambiguous thoughts. The music itself both referencing some of his most experimental and edgy work, from Diamond Dogs to Outside, and up until the last daring enough to experiment as he adopted a West Village jazz troupe to play rock music in off-kilter, cerebral manner. And if it is true, Brian Eno’s tribute in recent days referred to a possible return to the duo’s Outside project: “About a year ago, we started talking about Outside – the last album we worked on together,” Eno wrote. “We both liked that album a lot and felt that it had fallen through the cracks. We talked about revisiting it, taking it somewhere new. I was looking forward to that.” Muted it seems as a serious potential, the often morbid, avant-garde and industrial art school concept album feels like it did seep into the fabric of, or at least influence ★. I for one will be gutted that he never made it. Cancer got there first. And so, we will never know how that Eno reunion would have turned out.
Looking back now, only actually a week on, at my review I was properly a little harsh on poor Bowie. Songs I mostly dismissed have seduced me since. Though, as I unfortunately pointed out, it did feel like a eulogy, an obsession with mortality. And now we all know why. Yet I will stand by it, as Bowie’s death shouldn’t change, what I believe was a balanced critique. So here it is again in full in case you missed it or need reminding:
Review
Still preoccupied with that old messiah complex and the anxieties of the times, David Bowie unveils his latest ode to resurrection ★ (pronounced Blackstar). Preoccupied with jazz, though as we’re told like a mantra, “This isn’t a jazz album. It’s a rock album played by jazz musicians”. There is a fundamental difference. Off-kilter leanings and daft nuances from the progressive jazz catalogue permeate this album, but that is all. There is no sudden embrace of be or hard bop, or spiritual, modal or psychedelic consciousness. There aren’t even any traces of that much maligned and cringe worthy offshoot “fusion”. Instead, Bowie’s recently recruited hip West Village jazz troupe, led by Donny McCaslin, adds an inventive, fresh lilt to the favoured rock and pop music tropes to create something unique.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise however, Bowie’s very first musical stirrings being on the saxophone as the young Mod about town in the early 60s before he changed his name from the one his mother gave him, David (Davy) Jones, to the immortal Bowie. The long hairs of the psychedelic age beckoned, and Bowie cut loose the restraints of jazz to wear dresses, take on mime and reinvent himself as a cerebral vaudeville troubadour.
He raises, he soars and then he falls, Bowie’s usual cycle of creativity builds and then wears out each new character he adopts. Yet left to his own devices, somewhere out in a metaphysical space, Major Tom is still causing Bowie sleepless nights it seems. The title track from his ‘Wide Eyed Boy’ meets Outside, ‘Blackstar’, was accompanied by a video that featured an unnamed astronaut, fallen and lain dormant covered in dust in Bowie’s apocalyptic cryptic world. Whether he comes to bury old ghosts or inject life into them, the leitmotif of resurrection once again looms large. Mortality preys upon his mind, and why wouldn’t it, as his own trifles with death and the rate of ageing starts to take its toll. Despite the shuffling but tight jazz drum breaks and mourning on a New York dock scene saxophone, these elements are attentive, dampened even, and composed. The title-track a flat beat ten-minute minor opus, rich with hints of Black Tie White Noise, Diamond Dogs (6:50 minutes in) and some melodious reverent classicism, is a song in more or less three parts. Strewn with those obligatory clues and references (which have nothing to do with ISIL and the present Syrian crisis we’re told) it is an ambitious if ambiguous start, and like many songs from the Bowie cannon, its cunning and complexity unveils itself on repeated plays.
So far meeting with worldwide acclaim from critics – the ones allowed to actually hear the LP in its entirety before the official release – Blackstar is musically an improvement on the straighter laced rock songbook of The Next Day. That record is now considered a songbook of nostalgic reminisces; yet he apes if not carries on with the same concerns on this short – more a Station To Station in length and track numbers – follow up. He has even brought back or decided to return and finish the story of The Man Who Fell To Earth, revisiting the tragic alien stuck in exile figure of Thomas Jerome Newton for a Broadway play entitled Lazarus – see, again with the resurrections! Stupefied with the vices and almost resigned languid resentments of Earth, Walter Tevis’s original character made pallid flesh by Bowie in Nicholas Roeg’s stunning, evocative movie adaptation, was last seen in a near somnolent state, more or less beaten, his mission failed and his loved ones dying in the drought that parched his native homeland. The second track to be shared from the album, ‘Lazarus’ features that recurring sweetly forlorn saxophone – found throughout the back catalogue – played over a maudlin, and at first very stark, indulgent wallowing backing track. With usual ambiguity, Bowie once again croons about scars, heaven and breaking free, his slow building indulgence unfurling its depth and maladies at a crawl. Closer to Heathen and Reality, ‘Lazarus’ is influenced to a degree by the critic’s darlings of the music scene Kendrick Lamar and Death Grips but sounds more like TV On The Radio and The XX.
Already gaining airplay and floating around for a while, ‘Tis A Pity She Is A Whore’ is golden Bowie, and the track that gave life to the rumours of his acquired penchant for jazz. Riffing on the infamous 17th century John Ford tragedy of the same name, a forlorn crooning Bowie sings oblique lines over a plaintive saxophone and heavy drum barrage on the fieriest track from the album. In a similar mode, a new punchier version of 2014’s ‘Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)’ is a less shaky untethered rock and speedy break beat hurtling improvement. And once again features a resigned downcast Bowie taking on the role of a sucker-punched sap. This leaves a trio of material that hasn’t until the album’s release been aired or teased out over the net. ‘Girl Loves Me’ has a harassed Bowie yodelling, wistfully sighing and yearning with his Berlin trilogy style vocals to a methodical striding march, as he converses in a mix of Polari and A Clockwork Orange. Quite a change in tempo and style, ‘Dollar Days’ is again a reflective take, perhaps even a regrettable lament. Plaintive in a ballad style, Bowie almost eulogising, the lyrics are delivered and beautifully caressed. In a similar vein, the album’s finale ‘I Can’t Give You Everything’ is another wistful dip back into the Black Tie White Noise album. Repeating a most poetic set of verses that both unravel and confound, it is a majestic, diaphanous if sad curtain call.
Despite the gloom, Bowie is still a sprightly creative artist, celebrating his 69th birthday with a new album that stretches the imagination and puts most of his peers to shame. Of course, it still isn’t as daemonic, unsettling and untethered to the boundaries of pop and rock music as we’re led to believe; Scott Walker it ain’t, Bowie still transmogrifying his Crowley/Kabbalah/Nietzsche/Occult/Norse and beyond cycle of references into a more sellable pop format no matter how many genres he absorbs. Walker has gone into the abyss in comparison and almost removed any earthly links to melody and song structure. Can the same be said for Bowie despite his recent long-winded jazz influenced opuses?
Saying that, this could be the purest, at least concerned, version of Bowie yet. Resurrected free of his characterisations, the gilded “Blackstar” is just as uneasy and scared at the anxieties, stresses and daunting prospects of the future as the rest of us. Fame, celebratory is mere smoke after all and offers little in the way of comfort and safety in the face of the impending end times. Yet despite being easily his best album since Earthling, it’s still underwhelming and falls short of being a classic. It isn’t even as experimental as Outside, which is a criminally underrated album, and lacks a real punch. But it is moving in the right direction, and instead of listening to those younger hip cats, he’d be better off paying more attention to that other famous Capricorn, Scott Walker.
Station To Station (RCA) 1976
A distressed primal howl for the alpine air and culture of Europe were the main motivations for Bowie’s Station To Station LP. It may have been recorded in L.A, but the intention was to reach out across the Atlantic: an escapist gesture of hope to crack the drug habit.
Imbued, or just unashamedly sucking up the innovative vapours of the Teutonic music scene, those previous soul allusions were now entwined with the pan-European express of Cluster/Harmonia (and all the various Roedelius and Dieter Moebius projects), Kraftwerk and Neu!
The autobahn was already spoken for, so it would be the allure of continental train journeys that oiled the wheels of the album’s minor opus title track. Heralding the “return of the thin white duke”, Station To Station traversed disco boogie funk (‘Stay’), doo-wop futurism (‘TVC15’) and featured Bowie the Shakespearian glib, warbled crooner (‘Word On A Wing’, ‘Wild Is The Wind’). Oh yes, the note register was high all right, a resounding plaintive cry before that all-immersive dip into the Berlin years.
The Playlist
A Most ‘Fantastic Voyage’, my eulogy to Bowie still stands. Added to sporadically since putting it together on news of his death, alt takes, live versions, sessions and those favourites of mine are all collated and curated for a most pleasing fashion/experience.
PS:
Links to my Bowie guide, written to celebrate the oeuvre.
A Celebration Part 1: Debut to Pin Ups
A Celebration Part 2: Diamond Dogs to Scary Monsters
A Celebration Part 3: Let’s Dance to Black Tie White Noise
A Celebration Part 4: Outside to Black Star
Here’s the message bit we hate, but crucially need:
If you’ve enjoyed this selection, the writing, or been led down a rabbit hole into new musical terrains of aural pleasure, and if you able, then you can now show your appreciation by keeping the Monolith Cocktail afloat through the Ko-Fi donation site.
A world of sonic/musical discoveries reviewed by Dominic Valvona. All entries are in alphabetical order.
Geologist ‘Can I Get A Pack Of Camel Lights?’
(Drag City) 30th January 2026
Owing to their inarguable influence and impact on the American and international indie and underground scenes of the noughties, any release from a member of the Animal Collective fraternity is news. No less a debut solo, the inaugural album from the collective’s original founding member Brian Weitz, under the Geologist nickname that stuck since collage (apparently a friend misheard his major, but it also refers to the headlamp he wears to see his electronic apparatus during live shows) proves transitional; a step away almost entirely for the material he’s known for with his foils David Portner (better known as Avey Tare) and Noah Lennox (Panda Bear).
Incidentally, and still working in one way of another with his former band mates, Portner, another piler of the long since hibernated Animal Collective, pops up on bass alongside a host of contributions and help from Adam McDonald, Emma Garau, Alianna Kalalal, Ryan Oslance, Shane McCord, Micky Powers and Adam Lion. There’s also an intergenerational appearance from Wietz’s son Merrick on acoustic guitar, playing something resembling an indie-grunge rhythm on the strange bird hooting and whirly ‘Government Job’.
Under a throwaway entitled line, used repeatedly over time as a kind of in-joke, a winking aphorism, Weitz instrumentally and sound wise soundtracks his observations, traverses, reflections, the places he recalls and moments of both retrospection and introspection. But musically, this album is very different, taking as it does inspiration from the noted inventive guitarists Bill Orcutt and Susan Alcorn – though both artists, musicians’ talents extend beyond just that instrument. The steel pedal-like atmospheric and more wiry freeform Americana playing of these influences can be heard throughout, coupled also with Bill’s more gnarly free-post-punk-blues-jazz contortions and distortions (a touch of Bill Frith too for that matter). The second main influence is that of the hurdy-gurdy, its droning windups more in line with Ethan James’ reimagined Medieval tapestries and ceremonies, and Dorothy Carter, Le Tene, and GOAT. Its signature conjures up all sorts of imaginary landscapes, plateaus and scenes; from Tibet and the Himalayan holy valleys to the mirage arid dry lands of the America’s West and a dreamt-up revision of olde pastoral Europe.
With variations on each track, the mood and direction changes often: even if it inhabits an overall thematic musical world of drones, frequencies, circular blows, Chris Corsano-like free drums, the electrified, walking basslines, the hypnotic and near mystical. Period pieces via the Velvet Underground, Matthias Loibner and Emmanuelle Parrenia sit or run into wrangled post-punk post-rock tracks that sound more like a toss-up between PiL and Tortoise, and soundscape scores that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Daniel Lanois production. And then there’s the near native dances of tracks like glittery dusted, hurdy-gurdy wound, and padded foot stomping drummed ‘Pumpkin Festival’, and despite its title, ‘Not Trad’.
From highway oracles to dust bowls and soundtracks paid to the late repeated Altman player and Kubrick whipping girl ‘Shelly Duvall’ and the final desert peregrination turn splashing cymbal dusted and electric band motivated moving ‘Sonora’, the Can I Get A Pack Of Camel Lights? album is an open-ended enquiry of moods and memories; of exploration and the time spent in various places, landscapes. An interesting turn from the member of a band I once called a postmodernist noughties Beach Boys. A very different, unique direction indeed.
Clémentine March ‘Powder Keg’
(PRAH Recordings) 9th January 2026
The French-British chanteuse Clémentine March effortlessly swoons, coos, waltzes, saunters and hovers between the French and South American art pop decades with a multilingual ease on her latest, and third, album. And although its title, Powder Keg, was taken from a lyric out of Bonnie Tyler’s 80s power ballad, a ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’, the inspiration and music sounds less sentimental big hair belter and more like a freed-up chamber-pop, alt-folk, country waned and glitterball hybrid of gathered thoughts, romantic encounters and introspections voiced by Brigitte Fontaine, Cate Le Bon and Gina Birch.
But that’s only really one part of this album’s scope, with the repertoire and influences opening up even more once March’s cast of friends and foils alike is brought in. Take the former Goat Girl band member turn solo folk singer Naima Bock, who March supported on a tour of the UK. Taking in some of Bock’s shared Greek-Brazilian heritage and folk signature March pays a bit of a homage on the opening song, ‘After The Solstice’; though to my ears, I’m picking up hints of John Cale, Aldous Harding and Dana Gavanski – it’s one of my favourites by the way. The latter of those names on this feathered country art-folk number, Gavanksi, is actually present as one of the many congruous ensemble members of March’s expanding circle. March is flanked throughout by Ollie Chapman on bass and Sophie Lowe on drums, but at any one time you’ll hear pop up a famous artist or musician across this songbook of the heart-pranged, fun, wistful and more driven. For after also paying a tribute of a kind to the Os Mutantes turn three-decade solo Brazilian icon Rita Lee on the suitably South American lilted ‘Lixo Sentimental’, March duets, in a style, with Evelyn Gray on the disco-indie spun ‘Fireworks’. Gray seems the ideal vocal partner on a more upbeat dizzy turn under the glitterball whilst alluding to “romantic encounters” at the Green Man Festival. The song takes in a Come Dancing Blancmange, Postcard Records, Lizzy Mercier Descloux Mambo Nassau and Hercules & The Love Affair.
The title-track itself sounds like a missing McCartneys family song whipped up by the SFA and Stereolab, and ‘Honestly’ sounds like Susana Vega borrowing an old Neil Young number. Little touches cause the ear to wander: the sax on ‘The Power Of Your Dreams’ reminded me of Don Weller’s sessions with 80s Bowie, and the faint Appalachian/bayou stirs of maverick bluegrass and Cajun ‘You Are Everything’ conjured up images of Isabelle Pierre or Karen Dalton fronting The Band. And then you get the more fuzzed-toned and powered-up indie-rock blast of ‘Upheaval’, which sounds like a cross between Husker Du and The Misfits.
As open as always, imbued by but never quite adopting the aloof coolness of the French new wave and its art pop existential chanteuses, March finds a personal, less cloying way of navigating sentiment, romance, the passing of time and how we measure it, the recall of memories and joy. A unique voice, constantly expanding and trying things out, March’s latest magical tour de force is both escapism and a dance around issues that both plague and enrich her life. Already one of my favourite albums of 2026.
Foster Neville ‘Through Lands Of Ghosts’
(Subexotic) 16th January 2026
Imbued by the late travel writer progenitor H.V. Morton and his quest to unearth, contextualise and celebrate the “mythical soul of England” from the 1920s to the 1940s, experimental musician (also the role of sound editor for the digital copy of the Trebuchet contemporary arts magazine) Foster Neville navigates his own sound map of these islands; atmospherically and unnervingly crossing national borders by starting his journey in Scotland before moving south throughout Northern England and the Southwest.
Morton’s never-out-of-print series of guides, written and often an accumulation of his columns for the Daily Express newspaper, have arguably influenced generations. Responsible for around forty such books, the topics covering not only England and Scotland but his numerous journeys throughout the Holy Land, Morton’s idiosyncratic English manners (often travelling in his typically unfussy and understated English motor, a bull-nosed Morris) and vignettes style embodied a near spiritual but difficult to encapsulate essence that bonded old England and its people. His reputational stock has however taken a severe knock ever since the publication of Michael Bartholomew’s biography. Through old dairy entries and letters Morton’s more distasteful and outright disgustingly racist prejudices came to light, most notably his Anti-Semitism but also slights on democracy (not a fan) and various other nationalities – he once described the US, dismissively, as “that craven of Jews and foreigners”. The famed journalist scooper, there at both the famous and infamous opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb, held not just questionable views but unfortunately seemed to flirt with fascism in the run up to the war, declaring that he found many of Hitler’s ideas appealing.
Parking that controversy aside, Foster is personally interested in Morton’s most famous totem, and much lauded In Search Of England, which could be said to lay some of the groundwork for the future study of “psychogeography”. A problematic term that now connects with Foster’s latest work, and pretty much one that is now dismissed by those who are said to embody it, the leading light of such dense readings and speculation of the land, or specific sites and communities (in this case, the Eastend of London) is the rightfully hailed Iain Sinclair. Preferring such terms as “deep topography” (as coined by the “London perambulator”, Nick Papadimitriou), detaching himself from an overused tag, one made almost redundant and often out of context, Sinclair’s own works merge old ghosts with history through the ages, the occult and multiple layers of cultural text. It’s why he was asked to pen an “appreciation” of Foster’s album, or rather the limited-edition vinyl version of Through Lands Of Ghosts – I’ve not had access to this by the way.
Tying together such esteemed authors, Foster’s album carries some weight; a touch of the studied even. And, despite the dismissal by some, uses the psychogeography description in the label’s press briefing; although they also use the more appropriate term of “hauntology” to describe this mystical ghostly and whispered, wisped and Kosmische-style take on the lie of the land.
Foster now builds his own picture; one steeped in the supernatural, of the memories and tracings and scars of locations marked by either death or the movements of time. These places seem empty of everything except its apparitions, its left recordings of voices and the sound and apparatus of subtle atmospheric and ambient equipment. A presence exists throughout; the haunted visitations that occupy a liminal space between the paranormal and more settled visions of an intriguing past and its elementals; of how it speaks to us now.
Sonically capturing something throughout this circumnavigation that seems to wander from the antler framed Highlands of Scotland and its most southern point on the Mull of Galloway and across the border to the site of a rail accident in Derbyshire, a nameless abandoned village and the neolithic chambered tombs of West Kennet’s famous long barrow excavations. Somewhere between the near sci-fi, séance, ambient music and Vangelis Olympian, new agism and apparitional vocals, Fowler engineers an often-veiled mystery of forgotten time and chapters from a both atavistic and more present age: The haunted “residue” of the Chapel-en-le-Firth freight train wreck tragedy, immortalised by Ewan McCall and Peggy Seegar in ‘The Ballad of John Axon’, the train driver who gave his life to avert an even greater disaster (posthumously awarded the George Cross for his actions) is invoked through the spectre aria shoos and coos and movements of sounds and what could be the environment around it.
From observing the dying flickers of lives once lived in the rural villages of WWI England and the absorption of an unseen ancient people who once roamed and buried their dead into the barrow mounds of that same countryside more than three millennia before, Foster connects various epochs, various events and the ebb and flow of time to conjure a 21st century quest to unearth the soul of the UK. I’d recommend this album to attentive listeners with an ear for the works of Oliver Cherer, Cold Hands Warm Heart, Ancient Plastix, Pye Corner Audio, Bagski and Tangerine Dream. A most successful, and I’m going to say it despite myself, psychgeography experience that could well lead to further exploration and investigation of the subject matter and locations mapped out sonically.
Sarah/Shaun ‘In Silence Love Speaks Loudest (EP)’
(Hobbes Music) Digitally Released December 2025/Physical Release 30th January 2026
The Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra of synthesized dream-pop, the Edinburgh wife and husband team of Sarah and Shaun McLachlan finish of an 18-month triptych run of EPS with this year’s simultaneously optimistic but ached and plaintive In Silence Love Speaks Loudest. Like a space-chartered St. Etienne, the couple’s latest four track showcase for the Scottish capital’s leading leftfield electronic and dance label Hobbes Music is another celestial bound flight of diaphanous pop and trip-hop break-like and trance-y electronica: stepping out on to the neon lit dancefloors on occasion too.
Making their debut in 2024 with the highly rated It’s True What They Say? (see my review of the stargazing EP), followed up by last year’s Someone’s Ghost, the duo has been busy on the live circuit making new allies and fans. And now ahead of the debut album, promised sometime this year, they’ve released this stardust sprinkled songbook of both heartache and romantic reassurances.
You might well recognize Shaun from his previous band, Delta Mainline. Coupling up with the missus, and most wooing of vocalist’s, Sarah, Shaun has concentrated all his efforts on expanding those musical horizons further. When we reviewed his band in the past, we compared them to an angelic Jesus And Mary Chain, OMD, Wilco and Spiritualized. And as it turns out the latter of those references now pops up here, with the group’s Tony ‘Doggen’ Foster adding some subtle sentimental rainbow arcs and bendy guitar/slide guitar to the dry-ice trapped-in-a-French-noir-movie-like floated ‘Desperation Looks Ill (From The Other Side)’. Appearing alongside Foster on that same track is Bruce Michie on Eno/Hansa Studio type romantically alluding saxophone duties and supplying the introductory French wafts of dialect Rebecca Growse.
As always there’s an extended cast number of foils ready to join the ranks, with both serial offenders Jaguar Eyes (a band mate of Shaun’s in Delta Mainline, contributing guitars and synths and arranging strings, programming drums and on engineering duties as well as co-producing the last three records by the coupling), and Darren Coghill (of Neon Waltz fame, providing some percussion, drums and effects) both cropping up. But also, this time around the addition of Roy Molloy (the Alex Cameron mucker appears with a soft toned saxophone sentiment on the finale, ‘Who Just Wants To Survive?’) and Exterior (a fellow Hobbes Music signing adding synths to ‘Heart Started Beating (Backwards)’).
As I’ve said before, the couple have an affinity for the ending of the Star Man movie, and its romantic allusions, but in particular the film’s score, twinned with, to my ears, the sound of dream pop, of waned country music, 80s electro-pop and Sarah Records. With songs that stretch right back to the Covid pandemic (the reassuring, despite the travails, ‘When We Dance’), or at least their inception, to songs written during the most tumultuous of periods, as the world falls apart around us, this third EP in the beautiful cosmic saga recalls hints of Air, The Tara Clerkin Trio, Beach House, The Sundays and the Cocteau Twins.
Tethered to the Earthly pains of the heart but looking towards the stars and the escape hatch, both co-writers, multi-instrumentalists and vocalists draw emotions of desperation and love from an understated but no less ambitious and anthemic production. The mood music of which varies between the near melancholic to the airy and wisped; the sad and more wistfully dreaming. Keeping up the quality, a congruous bookend to the series, In Silence Love Speaks Loudest further expands the sound and scope; an indicator perhaps of what to expect with that near future album.
Sis and the Lower Wisdom ‘Saints and Aliens’
(Native Cat) 9th January 2026
Disarmingly enchanting with the healing balm, the pliable near weightless songstress and multi-instrumentalist Jenny Gillespie Mason once more inhabits the role of generous light-bringing sister or Sis on a most beautiful album of hippy pop excellence.
Surrounded once more with a friendly circle of artis/musicians (named the Lower Wisdom) – you can hear the reassuring thumbs up from the recording studio sound desk on a couple of tunes, but feel a general support system of musical encouragement throughout -, Jenny weaves Alice Coltrane vibes with Fleetwood Mac and Alabaster DePlume to create a sort of jazz-pop-light magic version of new age 70s/80s songwriting.
Alighting the celestial staircase into a yoga retreat of snuggled and drifty serenaded and wafted saxophone, airy mystique and mirages, Saints and Aliens is a poetically descriptive album of both moods and songs. Bringing visitors from the stars to a world imbued by Jenny’s spiritual studies, the philosophical teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Sanskrit language are called upon once more: or at least referenced on tracks like the near ethereal floaty jazzy calling ‘Yasholipsa’ – which translates into the desire for glory, the aspiration for fame, victory and power, and a spiritual striving for achievement and deep yearning for renown or divine accomplishment.
Away from the Gaia, the Indian divinities and the Gnosticism there’s a lovely blooming of soulful pop free-flowing singles like ‘Luce’ and the almost trippy and poetic opener ‘Crocus Man’: a sample of which is, “Quicksilver clown, you’ve been through hell”.
As diaphanous as it all is, there’s an undulating tone of travail; the lyrics often referring to overcoming various obstacles and finding a way out, the air to breath once more or height to elevate towards: Salvation awaits once you learn that the key is inside all of us.
The Sis alias delivers once more with a near faultless album of dipsy, sprite-like free pop and spiritual altruism. A great start album to start of the new year with.
Wilson Tanner Smith ‘Perpetual Guest’
(Sawyer Editions) 13th January 2026
Tying together the omnipresence, both in the past and in the now, of conflict, the Helsinki-based composer, improvisor/artist Wilson Tanner Smith uses site-specific performance art and music to evoke an essence of what was contained within the walls of the long since disused Kreenholm Textile Factory in Estonia’s Narva region. To be exact, located on an island in the middle of the river that gives its name to the city, slap bang in the middle too of the border with a threatening, overreaching expansionist Russia.
A flashpoint in what’s described as NATO’s most eastern flank, it has been breached in recent months by Russian soldiers – possibly testing reaction and defences. Narva has the largest Russian-speaking population, proportionally, in the EU at 97% (its total population is around 60,000). This is down to a legacy of historical invasions and the transporting of thousands of workers from Russia to work in its factories over time. Sitting across from its Russian counterpart of Ivangorod, the city is fatefully targeted as one of the starting points, if it ever comes, for WWIII: Putin has already mused in that sly threatening way he has that Narva was historically part of Russia and would be “taken back”. The city was of course under Czarist rule for a time until the revolution and Estonia’s fight for independence between 1918 and 1920.
Fast forward a generation and Soviet Russia invaded Estonia at the start of WWII. They lost it to Nazi Germany a short time later, before once more taking it back behind the Iron Curtain after Hitler’s catastrophic failure to invade and knock Russia out of the war. This situation remained right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union’s collapse at the start of the 1990s. For a long time after that period, Russians and Estonians moved freely between the two borders; the influx of Russian workers, as I mentioned earlier, living in a now industrialised Estonian city would frequently hop over that same border for shopping trips to St. Petersburg and the like.
With the heinous invasion of Ukraine in the last four years, and ramped-up – despite the talks of bring the conflict to an end – rhetoric of Putin and his expansionist plans to march right into Europe, that all came to a divisive halt. An uneasy situation prevails, with Estonia distancing itself from Russia – Estonia’s first female prime minister Kaja Kallas has been on the front-foot in supplying weaponry to Ukraine and fought to implement sanctions on Russia whilst also offering asylum to Russians escaping conscription. Kallas was at one point, put forward as a possible candidate to lead NATO; an organisation that Smith’s adopted country of Finland joined in 2023 following a rapid policy shift from military non-alignment to alliance membership in response to Russia’s aggression. Finland, which until that point had never countenanced joining, has prior aggrievances with Russia of course: a history that goes back to the Finnish War of 1808-1809, when Alexander’s Imperial Russia, allied with Napoleon, invaded and conquered Finland from Sweden, turning it into the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, and much later when fighting off Russia during both the Winter War of 1939 and 1940, and the Continuation War of 1941-44. Despite being heavily outnumbered on all fronts, the Finns managed to fight them off, albeit with a loss of some land. Their example may prove an omen, as Russia have likewise failed to steamroll the Ukrainians; the initial invasion planned to take months if not weeks to fully capture the country and force it back into Russian hands.
Before this becomes a geopolitical, military essay on the state of Eastern Europe and Russia, I should really focus now on Smith’s project; a series of performances created using both instruments brought to the space and the dust, the accumulation of memories of the environment itself. The prompts, the reference points as such or indicators and sparks for creativity reference the various scrapes of signage and other detritus found lying around, or reference and tie together both a shared bond between Finland and Estonia; the closing performance of ‘Läksin minä kesäyönä käymään’ (which can be translated into English as “I went out into the groove on a summer’s night”) is a kosmische-style beamed cathedral wonder of magic that features a melody borrowed from an obscure suite on Finnish Themes by the Russian composer and pianist Dmitri Shostakovich. Embarrassingly for the Soviets, it was meant to be played in Helsinki once it had been conquered during the first of those wars between the two countries. It never happened of course, and now acts in a manner as a reminder of overreached aggression and expansionism coming unstuck.
In this theatre, Smith performs a number of pieces of conceptual and environmental imbued and motivated musical and atonal art. Seeming to speak much of the times, and yet evoke a history of Eastern European malady, toil and travail.
Smith has connected the space and columns that hold it up the factory’s huge celling’s with rope and string, which he pulls on at points in this performance; dragging lightly, fragments of glass or what looks like metal along the floor to elicit a serial percussive sound. At other times, Smith is part of an avant-garde chamber trio of strings and woodwind and apparition vocalist calls from the ancestors; drawing on the labour, the emotive pulls of those that once worked this factory, whilst also referencing the geographical and looming presence of its neighbouring behemoth, Russia. But primarily, Smith is seated in front of the album’s most permeating instrument, a well-used antique harmonium that he found and repaired on site; and itself, handed and passed down from a church to a school, a living room and basement. It’s used to produce some of the most venerable of bathed pastoral drones, resonated chords, concertinaed waves and evocative reverberations. But its frame and lid is used too; the picking up of the hands as they press on the keys, or the foot pedal pump. And yet there’s also passages in which those bellowed-like breaths and airs, beds of layered tones, produce vibrations that are more unsettling (not quite Krzysztof Penderecki-like but getting there), and at other times, closer to psychedelic-folk.
Fluctuating at a slow pace between suggestions of the neo-classical, the work of Cage, Cale and Conrad, and brought forward into to the realms of Colin Stetson, Alison Cotton and Jeff Bird (I’m thinking of his more recent Cottage Bell Peace album), all the instruments and apparatus involved are simultaneously as harmonic as they are expressive in describing the abstract psychogeography of the factory, a location now standing on the edge of potential conflict; perhaps, but lets hope not, about to once more witness Russian expansionism.
Strangebird–Sounds ‘Minerals From The Crust’
(Audiobulb Records) 16th January 2026
Inspired by the natural jewels and gem-like minerals that lie beneath the Earth’s crust, the Belgium experimental composer Gregory Geerts, under the Strangebird–Sounds guise, transforms those crystallised forms into a most pleasant, subtle ambient-techno soundtrack and set of movements.
Materialising, metamorphosing and breathing each track is built around sonically capturing the abstract colourisation, the way the light plays, reflects or gleams on each chosen subject; add to that the soft use of environmental field recordings, the enervated veils of the surroundings and the just as subtle use of the everyday world in the form of various undulating captured voices, of play and people going about their business.
From the more commonly found Calcite to the rare quartz of Ametrine found almost exclusively centuries ago in just one mine in Bolivia, Geerts amplifies a sense of allure and mystery; but also feeds into the marvel of each element as it glistens and grows; pulses and vibrates. In doing so he opens up to the etymology and history, covering a millennia of usage: The atavistic Egyptians used to carve Calcite, relating it to their goddess Bast – hence part of the origins of the word alabaster -, and Ametrine, though long discovered by the native peoples of what would later become Bolivia, was, it’s been documented and said, to have made its way to Europe as part of the dowry between a local Ayoreo princess and Spanish conquistador in the 1600s. Sometimes these references are mythological: see the silicate mineral Neptunite, which is named after the Roman god of the sea of course, though because of its origins and locality of discovery is associated with the Scandinavian god of the sea, Ægir.
With the innovative use, we’re told, of a Eurorack modular apparatus our sound geologist presents an often lush, semi-tropical world of exotic birds, botanical foliage and replenishing life-giving waters. The underground is brought to the surface you could say, out into the open as it meets with the celestial and radiating. This is a subterranean world brough to life.
Both arpeggiator and freed-up notes bobble and bounce, or float like bulb-shaped and translucent particles and gentle specks against the biosphere; the synthesized; the occasional paddled tubular rhythms (on one occasion, almost like a Jeff Mills minimalist techno samba). The sounds of techno at its most sophisticated and ambient music, polygons and crystals, needles and sulphites all merge wonderfully to draw comparisons with the work of Xqui, Boards of Canada and Japanese environment music. Audiobulb continues to release some of the best work in this field, under the radar, out on the peripheral. Geerts Strangebird-Sounds vehicle is no exception; experimental without losing the listener; finding a most pleasant, inviting but also intriguing method, from the ground to the orbital, of giving sound to geological abstracts. `
Leo Wolf ‘Veiled In Light’
(The Oldest River) 13th January 2026
Following up on last year’s excellent I Saw Your Shadow On The Wall, North Carolina artist/musician Leo Wolf once more captures the abstract through the use of ambient, atmospheric and filmic granular processes, sampled material from classical records and field recordings and acoustic instruments; this time focusing on bringing the light in a range of descriptive, atonal and evocative ways.
Secular and venerated, stained glass anointed, veiled light sources cast circular-like beams and impressions on suitably invocative surfaces, columns and precious objects to capture a scenic and textural form of sonic and cinematic mysticism. Like longform and short form scores, a gradual slow movement of whispered and wispy disembodied and scaly voices, tubular machines, generators, apparitions and aliens, the sounds of hive-like buzzes and flies are echoed and reverberated to great descriptive effect. It reminded me in part of Ambient Works Aphex Twin, but also His Name Is Alive and Laraaji’s Baptismal collaboration with Kramer. And on a couple of occasions, when oscillating to an unsettling otherworldly vision of supernatural sci-fi György Ligeti.
Titles give some reference point; although I’m not sure if on the briefly gothic-like announcer’s tone narrated ‘Blood Meets The Iris’ if it is a reference to the revered Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle, which mentions some of the descriptive language of the track; especially the ritual part. They could be used of course just to set in motion an idea, theme or initial spark before opening up to be interpreted by the listener.
In ecclesiastical settings, in wet subterrains, from the centre of divination and various rituals, and out on cerebral planes of contemplated life and death cycles, I love how Wolf builds such plays between the venerated and unknown. Ebbing away or in constant motioned waves, the veiled presence and concrete inspirations are exaggerated or made new on an album that challenges as much as envelopes. Is something reaching out to us from the gauze, the soft and wispy shrouds? Only you can work that out. Another sophisticated and immersive ambient score from a deeply engaging composer.
Here’s the message bit we hate, but crucially need:
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25 for 25: an alternative hip-hop retrospective
December 17, 2025
Matt Oliver’s Choice Hip-Hop Releases of 2025
Armand Hammer & The Alchemist ‘Mercy’ (Backwoodz Studioz)
Armand Hammer = uncommon carnage and luxuriously slow violence, where “everything justified when you’re starving, right?” Challenging Alchemist time signatures give the MPC twisted blood, finding the unfazed ELUCID and billy woods counteracting with formidable, structurally-dismissive street riddles and artisan rambling from beyond off-the-top. In a game of who’ll blink first, a band of drizzly soft rock head nodders (‘Peshawar’ and ‘Calypso Gene’ reflecting ALC’s work on Evidence’s ‘Unlearning Vol.2’), turn the page in a surreal, open-ended world filtering between pure, “aura matte black” menace, Alchemist looping on his merry way and a kind of spectral connection/disconnect (‘Nil By Mouth’ and the magnificently dead of night ‘Crisis Phone’), as if ELUCID and billy woods are occupying disembodied mid-regeneration. Riding designer gangsterisms into town with bulletooth brainteasers where “every story tell a story that’s already been told” and barely allowing any breathing space, Mercy is a tour de force, probably reaching unexpected new levels of notoriety.
Batsauce ‘Echolocation’ (Full Plate)
Apollo Brown ‘Elevator Music’ (Escapism)
Lord Finesse ‘The SP 1200 Project: Sounds & Frequencies in Technicolor’ (Coalmine)
Leading the instrumental set this year, classy head nods and hip-hop time-outs from Florida’s bespoke Mexico-crossing beat director Batsauce red-carpets an instrumental set waiting for a soundtrack call-up. Echolocation darts between suited-and-booted scenarios, that even with the wind in its hair and its cufflinks checked, like the casting of a retro Bond who wants a Blaxploitation assignment via some folky replenishment, doesn’t forget the requisite thump of the breaks.
‘Elevator Music’ doesn’t do the creamy, calming creations of Apollo Brown any disservice; it’s his long established craftsmanship and detail, politely shushing vocals (few would be worthy of having the mic passed to them anyway – Bronze Nazareth a worthy accomplice on July’s collaborative LP ‘Funeral for a Dream’). Summoning the fading of summer with autumn leaves paving the way, whispered realisations of it being better to have loved and lost than not at all, and palm tree flutters found in finessed keys, this is a resplendently solemn, Michigan state of mind.
Legendary Bronx boardsmith and Diggin in the Crates PhD Lord Finesse keeps the boom bap simple and uncluttered with his weapon of choice, not forgetting the omnipotent sleigh-bell and horn stab combo that any emcee worth their salt sought out in the 90s. The SP1200 Project lets its warm elements breathe in the fresh air of the streets, creating smooth joints and vibes that cliques will want to huddle around and call their own, and whose exclamation points snap on instrumentals for cold calculations and dramatic entrances. Both a preservation and cracking open of a boom bap time capsule.
BlackLiq & Dub Sonata ‘Much Given Much Tested’ (Dub Sonata)
Blackliq has got prime previous with Monolith Cocktail after 2023’s Choice Is A Chance and The Lie, that mercilessly intelligent cackle-drawl from Virginia (‘I’m not a musician, I’m a conduit’) pulling New York’s Dub Sonata into his orbit. Production regularly resembles a marching orchestra bundled down the wrong side of the tracks, thrust down mystical rabbit holes. While ’10 Black Commandments’ is a smart re-up of Biggie’s classic shopping list to live by, the key here is the ferocity of rhymes that are comfortable in loosening the armour. ‘Traumatized’, ‘Me Too’ and ‘The Ride’ put everyone on an even footing, and ‘Rockwood’, with a combustible mixture of pride, defiance and bitterness, reminisces on the crest of sweeping black & white movie strings. Rugged, ruthless (the title track issues the mother of all bruises) and with rich trains of thought, Blackliq going for self ends up as catharsis everyone can tap into.
Black Milk & Fat Ray ‘Food of the Gods’ (Computer Ugly)
Detroit dream team business overdue a re-up after 2008’s The Set Up, Food of the Gods is ripe for metaphors about being a feast of beats and rhymes. And rightly so, with that Fat Ray stare down, fuck-around-and-find-out flow, and Black Milk’s production that’s customarily funk & soul-rich. An anxious patina runs through the LP’s early stages, before the Gods open the throttle (literally, on the road-ready ‘CANE’) and pop the cork so that swirls of colour mingle with record crate dust catching the light. Milk’s expressiveness and Ray’s staunch stance, elevated further (while inversely feeling looser) during the album’s latter stages, brokers a laser-like focus, as if every 16 is a business deal, reflected in the short 11-track time. Therefore, there’s no need for overcooking – just know the recipe and let it set, with Guilty Simpson, Danny Brown and Bruiser Wolf passing through a prize pick-me-up for your palette.
Buck 65 ‘Keep Moving’ (Bandcamp)
Packing 31 tracks into 50 minutes, prolific Canadian vet Buck 65 acts as someone whose thumb is constantly hovering above the pause button in the hope his mixtape can become local currency. Dressed in old skool garb (more a Beastie Boys tracksuit than a gold chain and fat laces) and where keeping it real reflects the joy of receiving a Bandcamp payment – also seeing his leftfield standing way off into the distance – it’s no problem that some of the samples and breaks you’d have heard umpteen times before. The craft of Buck’s transitions is twofold: there’s the undeniable funkiness of his sub two-minutes throwdowns, and his unphased, Ugly Duckling-meets-Paul Barman nerdiness (“hip but I’m not pelvic…I’m Robin Hood giving the nerds their lunch money back”), knowing when rhymes need a natural full stop and pause for thought after racking up rat-a-tat word associations. Always engaging, Keep Moving does indeed make you wonder where’s he gonna turn next.
Cappo ‘Houses’ (Plague)
Cappo’s subtle advancement of the art continues. In the aftermath of STARVE and Canon, Houses has Nottingham’s elite kitchen sink dramatist rhyming, daft as it sounds, more from A to B (though no less expressively or bloody-mindedly, as he does on the bit-between-teeth follow-up ‘ITO’), rather than going off on name-dropping tangents. Understandably so perhaps, given the gravity of the subject matter in this ode to domesticity and its surrounding killjoys. Sleepless nights, debt collectors, personal loss, striving to defeat stacked odds, provider’s pride and just ‘being’, and where the overlapping of all of these activates the closing in of walls – the ghosts seem to talk back on the greasily uneasy ‘Will We’. Ultimately, the need to have backbone and staying power to see things through is never in doubt, over suitably pensive, wary production. Coupled with some excellent HMRC-themed packaging and promo from Plague, Cappo continues to preserve his national treasure status.
Confucius MC & Bastien Keb ‘Songs for Lost Travellers’ (Native Tribe)
A definite hip-hop outlier in this list but all the better for it, a folky; lute-plucking, through-the-looking-glass rumination whose deep sighs and woodwind washes nullify outside noise while relaying being burdened and battered by it. Confucius MC’s always nice, levelheaded South London pen game allows the cradle-rocking narration of gentle lullabies (‘Little Man’) to become easily transferable to the grit of the screen-burnt real world (‘Fairytale’ finding itself “taught between the lines and the margins: life really is quite a sentence”; ‘Question Or Consume’ finding idylls pulled from under). Midlands Midas Bastien Keb sends you to catch Zs (‘It Would Speak’), his fantastical micro concertos and sub-Tolkien worlds conversely challenging you to a spiritual, danger-laden quest attached to “the burden of a heavy chain, the urgency of heavy shame”. The cocooned hush slowly develops into a more of a jazzy, beat-lead murmur, without the pretention of a poetry slam or coffee house special, as the pair craft a precious sonic compass.
Crimeapple & DJ Skizz ‘Rose Gold’ (Different Worlds Music Group)
After collaborative albums Wet Dirt and Breakfast In Hradec (both referenced on the track ‘Trifecta’), this latest, consummate gangster experience from Skizz and the never static Crimeapple is beautifully tailored as an NYC’s kingpin day-to-day – heads will roll, and stylishly so, with conviction always trumping the ostentatious. With the audacity to interpolate R Kelly (‘Taste Like Butter’) Lisa Stanfield-Notorious BIG (‘Congratulations’) and what we’re pretty sure is Skizz messing about with Wings’ ‘Jet’ on ’97 Tape Master’ – and steadfastly meaning it – Rose Gold represents cold-veined composure when there’s panic in the streets, but where there’s always time for a punchline for that extra chef’s kiss of respect. ‘Paradigms’ runs rampant, hook-less rhymes to destroy ciphers like drug rings, crystallising that subhuman/beyond emotion strand of focus that won’t stutter, but project the voice. As both promote the quiet storm ethic amidst the Blaxploitation resets, the pair then take it to the church on ‘The Pastor’s Whip’ as Rose Gold racks up the carats.
Defcee & Parallel Thought ‘Other Blues’ (Parallel Thought LTD)
One of the coolest sounding albums of 2025 – deferred from 2022 – Other Blues humbly never sets out to achieve such Holy Grail status of electric relaxation. New Jersey duo Parallel Thought achieve this by glossy funk and soul that learns to see past the red carpet light bulb flashes with reverent mastery of the MPC. The conversational grown man rhymes and down to earth done goodness of Illinois 9-to-5er Defcee (‘You Still Rap?’ downplaying status by being “not even Chicago famous”) develop into lore without ever yelling at any clouds, getting front rows straining to reach out in appreciation of his clarity and pragmatism. ‘Graduation Picture’ is a storytelling what-might-have-been highlight, while ‘Beasts’ emerges from the happy-to-be-here dwelling to apply a sabre prefix to being long in the tooth. A road trip of carefree origins before home truths start hanging heavier in the air (nothing realer than ‘Big Sisters’), Other Blues is everything that the beats-and-rhymes bedrock should be.
doseone & Steel Tipped Dove ‘All Portrait, No Chorus’ (Backwoodz Studioz)
2025’s grungiest, most super-villainous flow belongs to doseone; but those who know their Anticon archives will understand how these things work. Seemingly burying his hissing, cackle-cracked flow under bedcovers by torchlight and then capable of twisting his jowls double-time, in a Hanna-Barbera-meets-death metal fashion, doseone has long perfected the classic of sermons being at their most haywire when all seems hushed (‘Went Off’), bending the leftfield to his will (“semantics steadily setting these idiots free”) and leaving nothing to chance on the eye-popping ‘Inner Animal’, sustaining a Busta Rhymes-Sticky Fingaz hybrid. With the shakiness of a Blair Witch camcorder, Steel Tipped Dove’s production dares to dream, strikes out with forked teeth, holds its ground, and recognises every variable is fair game in keeping up with/goading doseone’s mindstates. The mad scientist writ large on ‘Epinephrine Pen’, it’s uneasy listening, but All Portrait, No Chorus will definitely prise ears open, by fair means or foul.
Farma G ‘How to Kill a Butterfly’ (High Focus)
Still posing one of the most potent, be-careful-what-you-wish-for flows, Task Force’s Farma G challenges himself on the mic after a prolonged spell producing underground heaters and artefacts, making a bold call for album of the year in January. How To Kill A Butterfly is an enjoyably bruising experience, the UK hip-hop legend shrouding himself in a fog weighing the world down which turns everything on the brink of lopsided, while muscle memory maintains the straight and narrow (‘Bearskin Coats’, ‘Classic Tech’). A technician, of the mould seemingly rubbing his eyes from slumber but whose survivor instinct never dulls, is always enlightening in staring down struggles and close-to-home tribulations (“the all consuming battle between happy and sad”). The likes of ‘Say It How You See It’ encompass Farma’s rounding up of weary troops to offer a sense of rain-lashed, underdog belonging; and his way of floating like a ‘Butterfly’ is to swarm opposition into suffocation.
Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals ‘A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears’ (Phantom Limb)
The axis of provocation and punishment – but then you shouldn’t expect anything else from a title screaming that this is not a drill. Maryland duo and Kneecap-supporters Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals are pourer of fuel on fire with the sort of rhymes that are done tolerating the world mark 2025 (“the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million – is a statistic”). Conspiracy quashing and intense namedrops are all part of the game, but their loose canon nature (“alcoholic househusband, I was made for that”) is actually heightened by genuine moments of calm, sometimes pastoral reflection/dysfunction. Quieten the vocals, and you’re subject to a warped, cut-n-shut jukebox of clppng-like static and metal blackouts, with glossy R&B, psychedelic Bond themes, OutKast-like groove and folk acoustics. Showing moments of universal appeal on the theoreticals of ‘Sometimes, Papi Chulo’, the pair pleasingly offers as much intrigue and complexity as the obvious DGAF shock value on display.
Jansport J ‘West Covina Prayer’ (All Attraction No Chasin)
Hard at work as ever through 2025 with ‘The Weight of the World’ and ‘Hard 2 Hate’ bookending this ode to California, the evergreen Jansport J pushes a local feelgood factor bathed in West Coast warmth and well, coasting, as only the Golden State knows. J’s mixboard smoothness, where cruise control supplants hydraulics, throws in a handful of 80s throwbacks stark (‘T-Top’), glossy (‘Brown Suga’) and with water pistols cocked (EDF running the cook-out of ‘$100 Soup’), and works with a juxtaposition of swaggy emcees that won’t retreat to the shade – the heat only makes them work harder (West Covina’s motto is “live, work, play”, so it checks out). It also comes with a touch of danger when the LA temperature turns slightly redder and mistier, exemplified by album highlight ‘It’s A Game’ featuring AJ Snow & Polyester The Saint. Just over half an hour long, but well worth the visit.
Lee Reed ‘Pitchforks & Torches’ (Strange Famous)
“I don’t know who needs to hear this – but you’ve been warned”. Armed with the baying mob’s titular weapons of choice, veteran Canadian Lee Reed is the classic antagonist elect going against the world’s current negative, vegetative, corrupted and fat cat-rewarding state – from cost of living to the declaration that “this ain’t rap, this is class war” and then directing the placards on ‘This Economy’ – with an outlaw status sipping liquor neat and done taking no for an answer. The sound of vengeance from producer ripple-eh-hex is rock-n-roll brawl, bang-your-head ready with a little voodoo seeping in, and it’s easy to imagine Reed marching from town to town in a swirl of backwater dust and scorched vocals, pistols cocked and movement mobilised to the jangle of cowboy spurs. No pauses for thought or reflection, this is undiluted and unapologetic: just as the world likes it right now.
LMNO & D-Styles ‘Three Mimes & An Elephant’ (Perpetual Stew)
This starts with slightly American gothic/folky backwater production from Beat Junkies associate D-Styles, immediately putting this 10-track album down in the trenches. With an elephant’s turn of speed it then moves into funk delivered on the low, then into super catchy stripped back loopage, and then back again to tread on eggshells. Underground Cali stalwart and Visionaries alumni LMNO is the tale-teller whose solemn, soft-edged delivery doesn’t mean it should be taken lightly (‘Hip-Hop AF’ knows the ledge, issuing a notice to turn the screw). For when the backpack starts to weigh heavy – eyes of innocence or a thousand yard stare? – ‘Three Mimes’, featuring an appearance from the ubiquitous Blu, is an ideal after-hours soundtrack bursting into life and making the shadows dance. The lane drifts, continuing with ‘Bloody White Flags’, ‘Garlic Braid’ and its line of “diarrhoea of the mouth, it’s a vowel movement”, are unexpected sneak attacks beyond the first listen. Such more-than-meets-the-ear stage management creates an absolutely rock solid, cult listen for 2025 that’s “a masterpiece born out of catastrophe”.
miles cooke ‘ceci n’est pas un portrait’ (Rucksack Records)
2025’s slurpiest, most rottonous flow belongs to miles cooke; from the first bar the Brooklynite is great at plugging ears with cranky-to-put-it-mildly disdain on the Company Flow-themed ‘negus’, a flow baptised in dirty water or birthed in Oscar the Grouch’s trashcan. Beats get lighter and varied over the course of the LP, but cooke is not a horses for courses emcee, consequently creating a savage contradiction never skimping on syllables, as an antihero not in the business of sympathy (“just trying to keep the roof over my head daily”). The refusal to budge from his wallowing, worn down by his environs and American dreamisms so that his sneer becomes unadjustable, weaponise ‘sangria’ and ‘dismiss the fear of being you’ as two of 2025’s bleakest landscapes. It’s safe to say that you shouldn’t look at ‘…portrait’ the wrong way when cooke declares “I’m half altruistic, half horrible/but you won’t find me resting on my laurels”.
Mr Muthafuckin eXquire ‘Vol 2: The Y.O.UPrint’ (Old Soul Music)
While we’ll probably never get the sleeve to Kismet out of our head and some of the barbs on the self-titled 2019 album won’t ever be safe for work, Mr eXquire continues to quell the rage of moral panickers by continuing as an older and wiser Brooklyn headhunter. Not to say he’s downgraded to a PG13 status of adult situations, but as a leader (‘It IzwWhat it iZ’) rather than a pure troublemaker (living the most opulent gangster life on ‘Y.O.Utopia’), eXquire as ghetto Sherpa (‘The Magician’ might surprise you) hits upon one of the year’s most consistent albums in terms of no skips from first track to last. In a 43 minute ball of sweat, muscle and no little wit (the pure show and prove of ‘The Soloist’) over a funky clatter of beats from KRILL, MonkeyRad7, Griff Spex, Enoch and EV – with some bars still beyond pardoning – do as the man says: “if you want some understanding, then humbly, listen to me”.
Nacho Picasso & TELEVANGEL ‘Séance Musique’ (Last Epoch Records)
Put your hands together for Séance Musique’ Woozy with a capital ‘ooh’, Portland’s TELEVANGEL, who also came correct with Lord OLO on Demon Slayer 2 in 2025, absorbs the energy of irrepressible supersonic Nacho Picasso, whose husky wisps and horizontal, Lyrics Born-meets Mr Eon flow with a mouthful of munchies, delivers zingers by the dozen. Séance is cloud-sent, undoubtedly chill and will make your lights flicker, but through the smoke there are moments of vigilance (‘Skylar’), and Nacho’s snaking through the nooks and crannies with a preference for simple structures, is a stoner style you can still follow word for word despite sitting below the mix. ‘Toast to the Chaos’ typifies both Nacho working the axis of slack and locked on, and TELEVANGEL’s intelligent lacing of the psychedelic with sufficient anxiety. The burning of incense as a perilous pursuit is hammered home on the VHS imbalance of ‘Fly Ritchie’, featuring a surprising guest hook from Mayhem SAS.
PremRock ‘Did You Enjoy Your Time Here?’ (Backwoodz Studioz)
Of an arid drawl that barely looks up from the mic – engaging in eye contact is asking for a hiding to nothing lest he loom over you – New York’s PremRock would probably dismiss adjectives such as enigmatic and scoff at being labelled leftfield. Production from ELUCID, YUNGMORPHEUS, Blockhead, Controller 7 and more elevate their target, coming in off the beaten track with a degree of admiring lo-fi mystique smuggling a reserve of trip wires (‘Aim’s True’ sounds like Pandora’s Box being jacked open). PremRock perpetuates a recluse (“complicated man, simple needs” / “up Schitt’s creek without an either/or” / “hello darkness my old homie…you’re lucky I’m so low-key”) who won’t beckon you to come closer: so listen very carefully when he starts piling up syllables while barely giving himself a run-up (and usually within a three minute timeframe). The title may be rhetorical, but you’ll get lost in this one quickly as Backwoodz Studioz chalk up another victory.
R.A.P. Ferreira & Kenny Segal ‘The Night Green Side Of It’ (Ruby Yacht/Alpha Pup)
Aboard the good ship Ruby Yacht out of Nashville, Green represents the smoothness and disruption of jazz, a rash and a methodical finding of notes, partnered with chatting where the beats don’t go and the exacting precision of line and length. Segal’s clatter of free-jazz spitballing and the sheer fucking around of ‘Blood Quantum’, is embraced with a cocksure rebuttal of “can you find the difficulty in this style?” – the atonal and off-kilter deserving of Ferreira’s acute turns of phrase (“I emailed God once, reply came back from a Mailer-Daemon”). Showing-and-proving between feeling himself and look-what-I-can-rhyme-over, Ferreira owns the double bass dope of ‘Dazzle on the Casual’ and thoroughbred jazz hop of ‘Defense Attorney’, and has the underground pluck to chronicle the ultimate triumph in adversity of ‘The Night Dreamer’s Flu Game’. All shades of green are game when he poses conundrums and reveals fleeting vulnerability, detailing that “I’ve been everything from a poet to a punching bag, an inspiration to a coulda-had” on ‘Credentials’.
The Cool Kids ‘Hi Top Fade’ (Fool’s Gold)
Generational retro from Midwest MySpace graduates Chuck Inglish and Sir Michael Rocks. From the on-point sleeve to the title to their resumption of redressing low-rider music that they’ve been doing since 2008’s The Bake Sale, the pair still have the skills to back the B-boy stances. Drum machines locked in with monster kicks for your hydraulics (the unavoidably catchy ‘Rockbox’ – an open house party invite), interplays over jazzy recliners (‘We Got Clips’, the great ‘Cinnamon Pt.2’ flipping 50 Cent), and with more than a little mining of peak era Neptunes (‘Foil Bass’), their pick-up-and-rhyme styles bearing a slight Clipse equivalency, don’t always feel they have to lock together to form a single mouthpiece. Slick and willing to knock out frauds in a second, but also in it for a summery good time with a touch of 80s electro-fied flossing, ‘Hi Top Fade’ will cause a spike in ghettoblaster sales – “this not for airpods, you gonna need good speakers”.
The Expert ‘Vivid Visions’ (Rucksack Records)
This year’s one producer-extends-invite to underground emcee roster package belongs to Ireland’s The Expert, encouraging the everyman for himself ethos while attempting to sneak a unifying headswim through each track. From humbly funky beginnings, highlights are the prescription posse cut ‘Take A Trip’, the downright nasty, leather jacketed boom bap of Buck 65’s gangster geekin’ ‘What It Looks Like’, and the cop chase ‘Acid Test’ with its scraping, TikTok-ready percussion. It’s an 18 track whole or 18 individual stand outs without a weak moment to be found, subsequently leaving you poring over the back catalogues of the album’s contributors. Playlisters can separate from the psychedelic and the flat out, the long-gamers will revel in the back and forth of the full on and easing back. ‘Running’ provides the bridge, a slide guitar loop ridden by Andrew & Defcee, who then provides a closing, slightly more caustic commentary on ‘In The Style of Bigg Juss’. A vast yet compact collection, big on discipline and the disciplines.
Von Pea & The Other Guys ‘Putcha Weight On It’ (HiPNOTT)
A collaboration well versed in hip-hop fundamentals (see 2017’s The Fiasco), there’s much to appreciate about the quality and calibration of the loops laid down by DC’s The Other Guys – on the surface there’s nothing complicated about the funk, but then there shouldn’t be with the best snare-snapping, soul/jazz refitting boom-bap. This’ll sort stiff necks immediately in one chiropractor-sacking 32 minute appointment such is their complete measure of the MPC. Von Pea’s lyrical demeanour over this rugged luxury gambols down the street, passing through (and owning) as many street corner ciphers as possible, with a little singsong in his voice (‘Slide Off With Her Homie’) and call and response prompts at all the right points adding to his too-cool-for-school knowledge (“does music even exist without wi-fi?”) that packs a deceptive amount of heft (“don’t confuse my energy with meek, I’m making chess moves as we speak”). Add spots from Che Noir, Skyzoo, Oddisee and Tanya Morgan teammate Donwill and ‘…Weight…’ represents cracking pound for pound value.
Honourable mentions:
Open Mike Eagle – Neighborhood Gods Unlimited
TELEVANGEL & Lord OLO – Demon Slayer 2
J Littles & Kong the Artisan – Furthermore
Aupheus – High Artifice
Da Fly Hooligan – Nocturnal Hooli 2.0/3
sleepingdogs – Dogstoevsky
Brother Ali – Satisfied Soul
OldBoy Rhymes – Curly Head
Verbz & Mr Slipz – The Way FWD
Jesse The Tree – Worm in Heaven
Oh No – Nodega
Extras: Matt’s essential hip-hop soundtrack to 2025; 108 tracks that represent the last year in rap.
Matt Oliver
End of the Year Revue For 2025: Part Two: N to Z
December 15, 2025
Choice Highlights From The Last Year Part Two
In case you missed Part One of this illustrious list, here’s a recap.
I said I wasn’t going to do it this year. And this may be the last. But here is the second part of a comprehensive revue listing of choice albums (some extended EPs too) from 2025 that we returned to the most, enjoyed or rated highly. See it as a sort of random highlights package if you will.
As usual a most diverse mix of releases, listed alphabetically – numerical orderings make no sense to me unless it is down to a vote, otherwise what qualifies the placing of an album? What makes the 25th place album better than the 26th and so on…
Whilst there is the odd smattering of Hip-Hop releases here and there, our resident selector and expert Matt Oliver has compiled a special 25 for 25 revue of his own, which will go out next week.
Part One: A to M can be perused here
N……………
Neon Crabs ‘Make Things Better’ (Half Edge Records)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Noir & Superior, Che ‘Seeds In Babylon’
Picked by Dominic Valvona
Novelle & Rob Mazurek, Alberto ‘Sun Eaters’ (Hive Mind Records)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Nowaah The Flood ‘Mergers And Acquisitions’
Picked by Dominic Valvona
O……………
Occult Character ‘Next Year’s Model’ (Metal Postcard Records)
Picked by Dominic Valvona
P…………….
Philips Arts Foundation, Lucy ‘I’m Not A Fucking Metronome’
Reviewed by Brian Bordello Shea here
Phill Most Chill & Djar One ‘Deal With It’ (Beats House Records)
Picniclunch ‘snaxbandwitches’
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Pound Land ‘Can’t Stop’ (Cruel Nature Records)
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Q……………..
Querci, Cosimo ‘Rimane’ (Quindi Records)
Review by Dominic Valvona
R………………
Robertson, Kevin ‘Yellow Painted Moon’
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Rose, Sophia Djebel ‘Sécheresse’ (Ramble Records/WV Sorcerer Productions/Oracle Records)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Rumsey, Andrew ‘Collodion’ (Gare du Nord)
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
S……………….
SAD MAN ‘Art’ (Cruel Nature Records)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Salem Trials ‘Heavenly Bodies Under The Ground’ (Metal Postcard Records)
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Sanders, Pharoah ‘Love Is Here – The Complete Paris 1975 ORTF Recordings’
(Elemental Music Records) Picked by Dominic Valvona
Schizo Fun Addict ‘An Introduction To…’ (Fruits der Mer)
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Schnitzler, Conrad ‘RhythmiCon’ (Flip-Flap)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Scotch Funeral ‘Ever & Ever’
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Silva, Maria Elena ‘Wise Men Never Try’ Review
‘Wise Men Never Try Vol. II’ Review by Dominic Valvona
Širom ‘In the Wind of Night, Hard-Fallen Incantations Whisper’
(Glitterbeat Records) Picked by Dominic Valvona
Sleepingdogs ‘DOGSTOEVSKY’ (Three Dollar Pistol Music)
Picked by Dominic Valvona
Soft Speaker ‘Rippling Tapestries’ (Cruel Nature Records)
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Sol Messiah ‘War of the Gods’ Picked by Dominic Valvona
Staraya Derevyna ‘Garden Window Escape’ (Ramble Records/Avris Media)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Stewart, Macie ‘When The Distance Is Blue’ (International Anthem)
Review by Dominic Valvona
T………………..
Teamaker, Marc ‘Teas n Seas’
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Theravada ‘The Years We Have’ Picked by Dominic Valvona
Toivanen Trio, Joona ‘Gravity’ (We Jazz)
Reviewed by Dominic Valvona here
Tomo-Nakaguchi ‘Out Of The Blue’ (Audiobulb Records)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Tortoise ‘Touch’ (International Anthem X Nonesuch Records)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Toxic Chicken ‘Mentally Sound’ (Earthrid)
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Trupa Trupa ‘Mourners’ (Glitterbeat Records)
Info/Singles Review Feature by Dominic Valvona
U…………………
Uhlmann, Josh Johnson, Sam Wilkes, Gregory ‘Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes’
(International Anthem) Review by Dominic Valvona
Ujif_notfound ‘Postulate’ (I Shall Sing Until My Country Is Free)
Review by Dominic Valvona
V………………….
Various ‘TUROŇ/AHUIZOTL’ (Swine Records w/ Fayuca Retumba)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Various ‘Wagadu Grooves Vol. 2: The Hypnotic Sound Of Camera 1991 – 2014’
(Hot Mule) Review by Dominic Valvona
Vexations ‘A Dream Unhealthy’ (Cruel Nature Records)
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Violet Nox ‘Silvae’ (Somewherecold Records)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Voodoo Drummer ‘HELLaS SPELL’
Review by Dominic Valvona
W…………………..
Wants, The ‘Bastard’ (STTT)
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Warda ‘We Malo’ (WEWANTSOUNDS)
Review by Dominic Valvona
West Virginia Snake Handlers Revival ‘They Shall Take Up Serpents’
(Sublime Frequencies) Reviewed by Dominic Valvona
Winter Journey, The ‘Graceful Consolations’ (Turning Circle)
Reviewed by Dominic Valvona here
Y…………………….
Yellow Belly ‘Ghostwriter’ (Cruel Nature Records)
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Young Mothers, The ‘Better If You Let It’ (Sonic Transmissions)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Z……………………..
Zavoloka ‘ISTYNA’ Picked by Dominic Valvona
For those that can or wish to, the Monolith Cocktail has a Ko-fi account: the micro-donation site. I hate to ask, but if you do appreciate what the Monolith Cocktail does then you can shout us a coffee or two through this platform.
End of the Year Revue For 2025: Part One: A to M
December 11, 2025
Choice Highlights From The Last Year
I said I wasn’t going to do it this year. And this may be the last. But here is the first part of a comprehensive revue listing of choice albums (some extended EPs too) from 2025 that we returned to the most, enjoyed or rated highly. See it as a sort of random highlights package if you will.
As usual a most diverse mix of releases, listed alphabetically – numerical orderings make no sense to me unless it is down to a vote, otherwise what qualifies the placing of an album? What makes the 25th place album better than the 26th and so on…
Whilst there is the odd smattering of Hip-Hop releases here and there, our resident selector and expert Matt Oliver has compiled a special 25 for 25 revue of his own, which will go out next week.
Without further ado….the first half of that selected works revue:
A.
A Journey Of Giraffes ‘Emperor Deco’ (Somewherecold Records)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Alien Eyelid ‘Vinegar Hill’ (Tall Texan)
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Allen, Marshall ‘New Dawn’ (Week-End Records)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Armstrong ‘Handicrafts’
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Audio Obscura ‘As Long As Gravity Persists On Holding Me to This Earth’
Review by Dominic Valvona
Aus ‘Eau’ (Flau)
Review by Dominic Valvona
B..
Balloonist, The ‘Dreamland’ (Wayside & Woodland)
Review/Piece by Dominic Valvona
Barman, MC Paul ‘Tectonic Texts’
Picked by Dominic Valvona
Bedd ‘Do Not Be Afraid’
Review by Dominic Valvona
Bird, Jeff ‘Ordo Virtutum: Jeff Bird Plays Hildegard von Bingen, Vol 2’
(Six Degrees Records) Review by Dominic Valvona
Blanco Teta ‘‘La Debacle las Divas’ (Bongo Joe)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Bordellos (with Dee Claw)/Neon Kittens, The ‘Half Man Half Kitten’
(Cruel Nature Records) Review by Dominic Valvona
Braxton, Anthony ‘Quartet (England) 1985’ (Burning Ambulance)
Picked by Dominic Valvona
Brody, Jonah ‘Brotherhood’ (IL Records)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Brother Ali ‘Satisfied Soul’ (Mello Music Group)
Picked by Dominic Valvona
Burning Books ‘Taller Than God’ (Ingrown Records)
Reviewed by Dominic Valvona
C…
Cindy ‘Saw It All Demos’ (Paisley Shirt Records)
Reviewed by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea here
Craig, Kai ‘A Time Once Forgotten’ (Whirlwind Recordings)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Crayola Lectern ‘Disasternoon’ (Onomatopoeia)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Cross, Theon ‘Affirmations: Live at Blue Note New York’ (New Soil)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Cubillos, Julian ‘S-T’ (Ruination Record Co.)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Cumsleg Borenail ‘10mg Citalopram’ (Cruel Nature Recordings)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Joel Cusumano ‘Waxworld’ (Dandyboy Records)
Review by Dominic Valvona
D….
Dammann Sextet, Christopher ‘If I Could Time Travel I Would Mend Your Broken Heart aka Why Did The Protests Stop’ (Out of Your Head Records) Review by Dominic Valvona
Darko The Super ‘Then I Turned Into A Perfect Smile’
Picked by Dominic Valvona
Dyr Faser ‘Falling Stereos’
Picked by Dominic Valvona
E…..
Eamon The Destroyer ‘The Maker’s Quilt’ (Bearsuit Records)
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Expose ‘ETC’ (Qunidi)
Reviewed by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea here
F……
Farrugia, Robert ‘Natura Maltija’ (Phantom Limb/Kewn Records)
Reviewed by Dominic Valvona here
Fir Cone Children ‘Gearshifting’ (Blackjack Illuminist Records)
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Fortunato Durutti Marinetti ‘Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter’ (Quindi Records/We Are Time)
Review by Dominic Valvona
G…….
Goldman, Ike ‘Kiki Goldman In How I Learned To Sing For Statler And Waldorf’
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Good Ones, The ‘Rwanda Sings With Strings’(Glitterbeat Records)
Review by Dominic Valvona
H……..
Haas & Brian g Skol, Andy ‘The Honeybee Twist’
Review by Dominic Valvona
Howard, John ‘For Those that Wander By’(Think Like A Key)
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
I………
Ishibashi, Eiko ‘Antigone’ (Drag City)
Picked by Dominic Valvona
iyatraQuartet ‘Wild Green’
Review by Dominic Valvona
J……….
Jay, Tony ‘Faithless’
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Johanna, John ‘New Moon Pangs’(Faith & Industry)
Review by Dominic Valvona
K………..
Kheir , Amira ‘Black Diamonds’(Sterns Music/Contro Culture Music)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Khodja, Freh ‘Ken Andi Habib’(WEWANTSOUNDS)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Kweli, Talib & J Rawls ‘The Confidence Of Knowing’
Picked by DV
L…………
Lassy Trio, Timo ‘Live In Helsinki’ (We Jazz)
Picked by Dominic Valvona
Last Of The Lovely Days, The ‘No Public House Talk’(Gare du Nord)
Review by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Lt. Headtrip & Steel Tipped Dove ‘Hostile Engineering’ (Fused Arrow Records)
Review by Dominic Valvona
LIUN + The Science Fiction Band ‘Does It Make You Love Your Life?’
(Heartcore Records) Review by Dominic Valvona
Locks, Damon ‘List Of Demands’ (International Anthem)
Reviewed by Dominic Valvona here
M………….
Mikesell, Emily & Kate Campbell Strauss ‘Give Way’ (Ears & Eyes Records)
Reviewed by Dominic Valvona here
Mirrored Daughters ‘S/T’ (Fike Recordings)
Review by Dominic Valvona
Mohanna, Nickolas ‘Speakers Rotations’ (AKP Recordings)
Review by Dominic Valvona
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For the last 15 years both me and the MC team have featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world: ones that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored, and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love or interest in. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to say thanks or show support, than you can now buy us a coffee or donate via https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail
Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea’s Reviews Roundup – Instant Reactions. All entries in alphabetical order.
The Conspiracy ‘Dungeness’
EP (Metal Postcard Records) 23rd November 2025
The Conspiracy are back with another fine EP of post-punk art rock; a band that are as British as watching cricket on a summer’s day. The Fall, The Kinks, The Only Ones are all lovingly stroked and warped into a mesmerising shuffle of old man’s fancy. This is the sound of modern-day England as seen through the eyes of middle-aged men who can remember when rock ‘n’ roll had a meaning and need to the young, and soundtracked young rebellion, and was not just something they streamed from their phone as they nip down to Nando’s to ignore their friends as they watch videos on tic tok together but apart.
I Am Hands ‘Lastings’
Single 5th December 2025
This is the debut single by I Am Hands and it is no hands, feet and bumps a daisy but a lovely sail down the river of peaceful tranquillity, a song of the supreme confidence of knowing that your supreme confidence has never been painted in such a blue shade of subtly. It really is a rather lovely track that fans of the first Trembling Blue Stars album might clutch to their cardigan encrusted breast.
The Last Sound ‘All That’s Missed’
Album (Cruel Nature Records) 28th November 2025
This is the sound of candy filled sugar pop, the kind that you might see on Top Of The Pops in the glory madness days of the 80s when Strawberry Switchblade seductively swooned from your transistor radio and pop could be both wonky and bliss like and whisper sweet nothings into your ear like an ethereal Green Gartside. All That’s Missed is an album that really is not to be missed. It’s yet another off-kilter pop wonder released by Cruel Nature Records, a label that certainly specialises in releasing off-kilter pop and or just plainly the off-kilter.
The Lounge Bar Orchestra ‘E.N.D.A.N.G.E.R.M.E.N.T. & The Room of Wrong Reflections’ Album (Self-Release) 26th November 2025
E.N.D.A.N.G.E.R.M.E.N.T. & The Room of Wrong Reflections is a collection of the tracks that made two-vinyl only releases on The Heavens Lathe label. The Lounge Bar Orchestra, who I have written about a number of times in the past, make a magical concoction of easy listening splenditude. The sort of thing one may hear on old sixties spy thrillers or takes you back to the golden age of seventies tv: you can easily imagine Bruce Forsyth willing on contestants on The Generation Game as they attempt to mold a mug in the shape of Anthea’s backside as “The Girl with Golden Hips Plays”.
Once again, The Lounge Bar Orchestra magically transports me back in an aural time machine to the days of Texan chocolate bars, Saturday night bath time, and watching Cilla duet with Marc Bolan as my dad eagerly awaits Starsky And Hutch and Match Of The Day. Yet again The Lounge Bar Orchestra proving why music is the most magical of all arts.
The New Tigers ‘Off The Wall/Butterfly’
Single (Soliti) 21st November 2025
These two tracks are a catchy foray into indie rock/pop, sounding not unlike The Bluetones with just a hint of what Teenage Fanclub might have produced during their heyday. All semi fuzz guitars and delightful melodies, and there is nothing wrong with that, let me tell you.
Origami Horses ‘Scenes’
EP (Metal Postcard Records) Released 23rd November 2025
I do not know if this EP was released to prove that post punk, garage rock, prog and psych can be melded into a hardy brew of rock ‘n’ roll finery. If not, it should have been as in fact that is what this EP is; one wonderful sparkling concoction of all the aforementioned, and track two, ‘Access Denied’, is an eight-minute gem that proves the point, and really needs to be heard by all, and takes one back to those hot summers days in 1989 when Madchester ruled the airwaves. The Scenes is another gem to be added to the aural crown that is the criminally ignored Metal Postcard Records label.
Sir Robert Orange Peel ‘A Man Dressed Up’
Single (Metal Postcard Records) Released 22nd November 2025
‘A Man Dressed Up’ is a beautiful Christmas symphony of seeing the magical time of the year through children’s eyes. A track filled with memories and nostalgia and an innocence to life that we all at one point in our life will lose. The perfect song to soundtrack sipping a sherry and watching the Christmas lights reflect from the baubles hanging from the tree and wishing you or your kids were young again.
Toxic Chicken ‘Quirky & Perky’
Album (Earthrid) 7th November 2025
Toxic Chicken is insanely brilliant and brilliantly insane. And Quirky & Perky is a fine introduction to his crazy world.
TC takes dance electronica and game music to new and unexplored levels of madness, and quite wonderfully tuneful melodious instrumental shenanigans are oozed from one’s speakers.
I would love Toxic Chicken to have made an album with Jim Morrison as for some reason his keyboard skills had me thinking this is what The Doors may have sounded like if they were brought up with the Game Boy and not the blues. A truly great fun listen.
Vlimmer ‘Hintersommer’
Album (Blackjack Illuminist Records) Released 21st November 2025
Ah yes, Vlimmer is back to offer all those lovers of Gothic Euro disco with a hint of post punk synth shoegazery a new Vlimmer of light. Those who’ve never tasted such a shot of pulverising gothic industrial tuneage since members of Fields Of The Nephilim, Smashing Orange and Depeche Mode were chased through the streets of a rain paved Wigan by an angry mob of spotty faced chavs on undersized bikes all holding out for sponsorship by the North Face clothing company whilst waving knocked off vapes into the air like an ancient Greek Olympian wielding his flaming torch. Yes indeed, Deliveroo has never witnessed such a wave of free advertising.
Hintersommer gets around the snag of being sung in German by both Vlimmer being German and myself not really giving a fuck as the tunes are blissfully dark and encouraging enough to imagine that what he is singing about is a worthy subject. So yes, an album I entrust will soon be in the collections of all you old and young goths who still roam this earth.
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