Monolith Cocktail Blog

REVIEWS
Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea

Thirty Pounds Of Bone and Philip Reeder ‘Still Every Year They Went’
LP/ 29^th November 2019

This is a bewitching LP of old sea shanties recorded on a working fishing boat at sea; a wonderful idea and quite stunningly performed. There is a beauty in the loftiness which captures the dark magic romance of the sea and also keeps alive some quite genius beautiful old folk songs.

Acoustic guitars blend beautifully with the sound of crashing waves and sea birds weaving a spellbinding web of sound. In this day and age of here-today- thrown-away-tomorrow it makes more than a refreshing change to hear a album that you will keep and play and be a mainstay in your music collection for the rest of your days: a truly beautiful collection.

Lark ‘Bleeding Songs’
(Wormhole World) LP

This is the fourth LP by Lark, originally released in 2014 and now re-released by the wonderful Wormhole World label – available as a limited edition CD release and download. Once again we find Lark soundtracking the darker side of the psyche with their alternative guitar sounds that at times remind me of the Spear of Destiny and Theatre Of Hate and early Nick Cave. Songs that bark and whirl and reach for the stars, grabbing and devouring the nighttime sky, spewing out reams of beautiful poetical bile. An album that lovers of late 80s early 90s alternative music will take to their black and decaying hearts.

New Art School ‘The Chosen Ones’
(Metal Postcard Records) Single/ 25^th October 2019

The magic of a Stones like riff really cannot be underestimated; there is a beauty to it, there is a certain life affirming quality that really cannot be denied. This the third single in as many months from New Art School is as essential as the first two. ‘The Chosen Ones’ is a song that once again captures the vim and vigor of youth, a remembrance to the days when music really did matter and the radio and a 45” single was your god.

Pieter Nooten ‘Se Dire Au Revoir’
(Rocket Girl) LP/ 22^nd November 2019

Music like time is a great healer, and this is an album of exceptional instrumental beauty; an album to help heal yourself, with music to lose yourself in, to wrap yourself in the memories of total forgiveness; a sound solid state of lost rapture and misunderstandings, the aftershock of melancholia and sadness colliding to leave the etched image of the birthmark you will no longer stroke and caress; the semi drunken smile of a semi drunken lover you will no longer have the honour of taking for granted, watching them walk away for the last time, the streets forever stained with the holy image of your regrets. Music like time is indeed a great healer.

TROIA = Pascal Deweze + Helder Deploige + Sjoerd Bruil ‘S​/​T’
(Jezus Factory) LP/13^th December 2019

This is actually quite a commercial sounding album; not what I was expecting at all: funk, retro spy theme craziness interspersed with chopped up backward piano and atmospheric melancholia Sci fi wonkiness and Krautrock sensibilities abound.

Available to buy on a ltd edition cassette, only 50 copies, or on download I would certainly recommend to anyone with a taste for the unusual or anyone wanting to dip their toe into the slightly avant-garde before submerging themselves into the joy of the madness, as this LP really does have some fine melodies. A wonderful little adventure of a record; like watching a split screen TV showing Bagpuss and The Clangers.