Monolith Cocktail Blog

A quick shifty, glance, a perusal of the mounting pile of singles, EPs, mini-LPs, tracks, videos and oddities that threaten to overload our inboxes this month by me, Dominic Valvona.

This week’s roll call includes the following picks: Gawd Status, Ghostwood Development Project, Adam Green, Irreversible Entanglements and Lunar Bird.

Gawd Status   ‘Admiral Byrd’
(Tru Thoughts)   Video/Happening Now

Taken from last year’s debut LP Firmamentum, the ether emanating Hip-Hop conspiracy hallucination ‘Admiral Byrd’ is the latest video to drop from the unholy Gawd Status union of leading UK rap architects King Kashmere and Joker Starr. Making our albums of 2019 features (picked by our resident know-all on the Hip-Hop essentials, Matt Oliver), the visionary psychedelic combo enter the sanctum of the tinfoil hat brigade to merge the real life exploits of the famed and heavily decorated American explorer, navel hero and aviator Admiral Richard E. Byrd with flat and hollow Earth rabbit hole lunacy. Byrd is notable amongst other things, for being the first to fly across Antarctica; a flight that may or may not of been sanctioned as a deep cover operation to find Nazis and UFOs in the uncharted frozen wastes. The mind boggles as a silver-suited adorned Gawd Status set out to unlock a truth.

Matt Oliver had this to say about them and their debut LP, Firmamentum, back in 2019:

‘When the Big Bang wiped everything out first time around, Gawd Status saw it as an opportunity, in which Kashmere’s Strange U spaceship nosedives into the jungle, moondust dementia still sputtering from its exhaust, and Joker Starr swaps the battle arena for the cannibalistic, kill or be killed lawlessness of the Firmamentum outback. The Gawd Status is a complicated one, seriously heavy at a skinflint eight tracks long (even in the current age of artists finally getting album length right, 28 minutes is a bit of a choker), fiercely standing up for itself in articulation of black rage and examination of conspiracy theories, and reveling in The Iguana Man’s thick doomsday fog. The event completed by some utterly bumping soul sisterhood from Fae Simon, its arrival at Tru Thoughts is a slight surprise. Nonetheless it’s a work of art that burns bright like a brilliant, tumultuous dream.’

Ghostwood Development Project Feat. Kool Keith   ‘Gulley’
(Nepotismo Records)  Single/6^th March

Lazer guided, Lee Brunskjill hooks up with one-man cult Hip-Hop progenitor Kool Keith on his new electrified cosmic project the Ghostwood Development Project.

Dr. Octagon throws out a heavy-reference potted cosmology over a dialed calculating electrical field on the project’s inaugural single, ‘Gully’. Originally conceived after the pair met at Mike Patton & The Melvins curated chapter of All Tomorrow’s Parties Nightmare, all the way back in 2008, an initial spark was ignited over a mutual love of Sci-Fi movies, music and horror movie soundtracks.

This whole project has been a long time in the making, Lee was instrumental in putting together Leeds based Punk outfit Autopsy Boys and after they disbanded he went into social isolation to reevaluate his music and what it meant to him.

Lee rebuilt everything he’d known about music and self taught himself to mix, master and scratch and even built his own syths, which you can hear throughout this track.

By the time Lee had got his newfound skills on point he’d created ‘Gulley’ and found himself in need of a vocal and knew there and then that only Kool Keith would work. Having swapped numbers Lee contacted him, played him the track to which he said “This shit is hot!”. Lee remembers: “Within two days Kool Keith recorded his part and sent back his vocals. With that I set about mixing and mastering my first solo release. I wanted to announce my new project with something special but never imagined it would turn out this good.”

The Ghostwood Development Project moniker is a Twin Peaks reference as Lee explains:

“A few people have asked where I got the name from. It was a plan originally spearheaded by Benjamin Horne to build a country club on the location of Ghostwood National Forest. An intriguing subplot in Twin Peaks. Had this plot continued, I believe it would have revealed the imminent destruction of the town and elaborated on the evil spirits as well as the backstory of Bob, and his Lucifer-like nature. It also plays along nicely with the Twin Peaks‘ narrative of “evil in the woods.” The idea is to present my own personal experiences from an alternate timeline within the Twin Peaks universe where the project did happen and chaos was unleashed. My imagery, music, art, narrative and videos come from the area known as Ghostwood. “Stop Ghostwood” is a recurring theme throughout the saga. Naturally I adopted the term ‘Vote Ghostwood’ insinuating hell on earth has arrived.”

Irreversible Entanglements   ‘No Más’
(International Anthem/Don Giovanni)  Teaser/20^th March 2020

The third of my recommendations this week is a tumbling and bowed untethered work of conscious jazz from the free-welding Irreversible Entanglements. Taken from the quintet’s upcoming album Who Sent You?, ‘No Más’ is a sublime rolling gauzy horns wafting teaser for what sounds like a beatified tapestry of poetic actions and contemplations.

Join Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), saxophonist Keir Neuringer, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Tcheser Holmes now on this political remonstration.

Lunar Bird   ‘A Walk’
Single/6^th March 2020

Transforming vulnerability into something positively and celebratory spellbinding and golden, the psychedelic gauzy pop band Lunar Bird turn on the translucent diaphanous charm for their brand new single, ‘A Walk’. Valuing instead of diminishing fragility and all it entails, the Italian formed, but in recent years Wales-based, band wash away all the travails with a most radiant dreamy pop mirage that evokes ethereal and lush moments from Beach House, Stereolab, Diva Dompe and Deerhunter.

A reference to Joan Miró’s famous abstract bronze sculpture of the same name, Lunar Bird is a cosmic fantasy duo spearheaded by Roberta Musillami and Francis George, that on this particular gorgeous recording expanded to also include Eliseo DiMalto on bass guitar and Andrea Rizzo on drums.

A Walk precedes the band’s debut album, released sometime in the Spring.

Adam Green  ‘All Hell Breaks Loose (Misfits Cover)’
(30^th Century)  Track/Available Now

A lot of homages going on in one place here, as the former Moldy Peach turn left banke troubadour Adam Green pays his respects to the Misfits’ towering influential instigator Glenn Danzig with a cover of the band’s Western gallop homage to Scott Walker and John Franz, ‘All Hell Breaks Loose’. Green corrals the talents of producer Loren Humphrey (who also played drums), James Richardson of MGMT (guitar, bass, piano, brass arrangement, brass), and Jesse Kotansky (string arrangement, strings) on this heightened dramatic sweep through the imaginative mind of Danzig, who as it happens is apparently releasing a new album next month of Elvis covers.

In short, this is a congruous cover version that wouldn’t look out of place on Green last nostalgic songbook Engine Of Paradise; an album that channeled Lee Hazlewood, Burt Bacharach, Harry Nilsson, Ian McCulloch, Jim Sullivan and Father John Misty to produce romantic and candid swooners, Midnight Cowboy like cocktail ruminations on love in the context of a society in the grip of an ever intrusive and alienating social media, and folksy ditties imbibed with strolls in the Greenwich Village.


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Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world 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. 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 buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.