Monolith Cocktail Blog

Dominic Valvona’s world of sonic/musical discoveries reviewed by Dominic Valvona. All entries in alphabetical order. Proudly AI Free.

Cocanha Photo Credit: Amic Bedel

Leah Callahan ‘Our Lady Of The Sad Adventure’
1^st June 2026

Between affirmation and the sacred initiations of confirmation, and with a title that evokes something of the saintly modernist poetry of Bob Dylan, Leah Callahan takes a road trip back through her Boston hometown with a songbook of previously unresolved heartaches, breakups and vulnerabilities.

Although once part of the Glass Set band, the Bostonian singer-songwriter Callahan has already released five former solo efforts. Her sixth (and 13^th studio album thus far), Our Lady Of The Sad Adventure, sees a continued partnership with foil Chris Stern of The Sterns fame, and a continued adoption of the new wave/Brit-pop/power-pop/punkish/shoegaze/C86/psychedelic sound that has served so well.

As with each chapter, there’s further extensions, roads taken to newish destinations and newish horizons breached; for example, there’s a softened punky-pop 80s vibe take on the late English poet and musician Molly Drake’s (famously the mother of the tragic Nick Drake and the actress Gabrielle Drake) “gut-wrenching sad tally of broken-hearted memories” loaded ‘I Remember’, and glitterball indie-dance and synth pop influences on the funkier title-track and, most surprising of them all, the Japan in Art Deco Xanadu Hollywood ‘Clouds’.

With equal power and tenderness Callahan throws another dime in the Boston jukebox, referencing neighbourhood haunts and scenes of both epiphany and abuse whilst evoking Bends era Radiohead, The Misfits, Blondie, The Cars, and on the opening apocalyptic dazed ‘Fall In Love With Your Mind’ a throwback of the Madchester scene of the early and later 80s (some Stone Roses meets The Smiths action), a touch of outlaw country and early R.E.M..

The driven and the hazy both converge on songs dedicated to support networks, the harrowing accounts of abuse victims read in the news, and an anecdotal bar room scene that features Gloria Gaynor’s most resilient anthem. If Johnny Marr joining Interpol or Echobelly is up your proverbial street, or indeed, appeals to you, then Callahan’s distinctive and unique takes are essential. 

Cocanha ‘Flame Folclòre’
(Bongo Joe) 15^th May 2026

Playing on France’s foundations, pulled together in dominating fashion from various connected but distinguished former independent kingdoms and regions, and the erosion or indeed forced erasure of languages and cultures like the Occitan, the now parred down to a duo of Cocanha set out a manifesto of radical-folk resistance against the domineering forces of nationalism. Though some nationalistic movements seem more in favour than others, France’s flirtations with fascism during the time of the Vichy regime’s collaboration with their Nazi overlords during WWII infamously, and most dangerously, used various folk traditions as state and ideological propaganda. Wrestling those same traditions now, and within the context of attacks in more recent decades on Occitan speakers and its alliance or take-up by activist groups locking horns with the French government, the Toulouse-birthed Cocanha pairing of Caroline Dufau and Lila Fraysse wish to liberate this music and its songs, its lyrics, from the forces of conservatism, misogyny and the stain imposed upon it by the tyrannical: They bring, as the title roughly translates, a politically motivated vision of “flamboyant folklore”.  

Whilst a far more in-depth and researched take is needed on all the ramifications, the nuances and the political outcomes, the strive and acts of resistance that have been imbued within this, the group’s third, album, the main Occitan culture that has been adapted and woven into the fabric of this contemporary take can be traced back to the patchwork of Medieval realms in what is now Southern France. A romantic language porously spreading out from its geographical namesake (loosely, I believe, formed on the model of Aquitaine, which is now known as Languedoc) into pockets of the Pyrenees (and so Spain too) and further afield into Italy, Occitan is roughly still in use, spoken by at least (depending on where you get your stats) a couple of million people. It’s poetic and lyrical turns, its polyphonic harmonies now provide the foundations of this latest songbook and movement of redress.

With the departure of Maud Herrera, the newly adapted duo has had a creative rethink; one that involves the input of two producers (mostly notably Raul Refree, who’s known for his “incendiary” collaborations and productions with the flamenco artist Rosalia and Fado revivalist Lina) and five mixing engineers.

The vocals are as beautiful and ethereal as ever, like some kind of spiritual religious invocation at times from the side of the mountain holy sanctuary, and at others like a breaching of the barricades and a near riotous almost spontaneous wildness. You could call it a rustic form of punk or the diy spirit that’s been merged with age old forms like the Rondeau (or rondo) and polyphonic harmonies of a traditional bent. You can hear the former on the linked-together trio of ‘Diuré tremblar’, ‘Diuré samsir’ and ‘A l’amistat’. The first part pulls us straight into the contemporary climate of activist revengeful violence, with a broadcast news snippet on the murder of the UnitedHealtcare CEO Brian Thompson before tunning or changing the station to a broadcast of the duo beginning their rondo form of a principal refrained theme that alternates with contrasting episodes and couplets. During this triumvirate of clapped and smacked rhythmic performances and buzzy stringy guitar (almost African in style I’d suggest) they also draw upon on the activities and disobedient protests of the “ecoterrorists” charged Les “Soulèvements de la Terre and story of Occitan speakers and their experiences in 1970s Paris.

Changing the clattering, shuttering and springy rhythms, introducing various instruments and sounds and experimenting with phonetics and the cadence, the duo invokes old Occitan myths – the “drac” amphibian dragon of lore that lures its victims from beneath the waters of the Southeastern French River that bares its name – alongside urgent strikes against the current regime and its campaign of environmental destruction and erosion of old cultures and languages.

And throughout it all the crossovers or at least echoes of further afield influences, whether on purpose or just coincidental, seem to recall the Basque, the North African, South American and even Eastern European folk borders of Ukraine. It’s as if Staraya Derevyna, Širom, The Raincoats, Walter Smetek, the Red Crayola and Tarta Relena had been born in a Southern French mountainside village together.  

From arenas to the placard waving streets of modern France, the Cocanha duo liven up and breathe a new impetus into an age-old tradition of resistance and independence.

Column of Trout/Partager ‘Split/Lop’
(DAAM) 29^th May 2026

The inaugural release in a new split series dedicated to experimental songwriting, the shared experience of Kerchiefs and One Eyed Ancestors’ Ben Wiggs and his latest side-project Column of Trout, and label-boss Distant Animals’ more musically orientated project, Partager. DAAM have brought this pairing together for a surprisingly congruous, complimentary experience; the perimeters of which are pliable, bleeding into an untold range of styles and ideas.

First up, Wiggs bendy and loopy hallucinated slacker-indie-psych Split offering of despondency and lament. A quartet of wallowed and also enervated woes and lovelorn gestures, like Skip Spence and Jeff Buckley being drawn under and into the whirlpool, there’s parts in which the music recalls Ed Penfold, Pavement and The Unicorns, and other times, The Books, and on the stuttered grungy and fuzz rocked ‘Ear’ a lo fi Squeeze.

Wavey and wobbled throughout there’s both lucidity and staccato-like sticks on this mirage of bandy, plaintive songs.

Siding up to Wiggs on this split EP, Partager expands musical horizons further with a non-vocalised songbook of instrumental strangeness that never rests on any particular style. And so, you have musical excursions of the soundtrack variety, recalling Bunny And the Invalids if they’d met Babybird in the mid 90s (‘Heaven Room’); David Sylvain’s backing meets an Indian Talk Talk (‘Lesser Ex’); melodica-like dub pulled through the metal-marching reverberations of grunge and progressive rock (‘Sea Dive’); and a bell-tolled and clanged ghostly and creepy vision not unlike the work of Belbury Poly (‘Earth Turn’). It’s like the most unlikely score to a work of imagination, forewarning and the unsettled.

Recommended for those seeking something different, familiar but very strange and out on the boundaries.

Furcloy ‘Purple Sage’
(Adventurous Music) Released 9^th April 2026

Adventurous Music for a reason, the highly prolific ‘micro-label’ platform and magazine (under the EX! Exclamation moniker) facilitates the latest project of ebbs, loops, cycles and oscillation effected guitar absorptions and evocations by David Bradley.

Although now a mainstay of Michigan, Bradley developed this electroacoustic and drone layered work whilst living in the Eastern European city of Prague and playing in his duo Wailstrom.

Thanks to the RHS Plants website for the following description, the purple sage of the title is, ‘an attractive, upright perennial with aromatic, grey-green foliage, which is initially flushed with a reddish-purple as it emerges. From early summer the branching stems are topped with spires of lilac-blue, two-lipped flowers, which are particularly loved by bees.’ Not so much a natural blooming wonder as applied tones, drones and wave forms that form a mist over various methods of guitar playing, dwelling, dwindling, hovering, sustain and melting, the flora inspires a both mechanised and sci-fi-like vision of the landscape and sense of place and feel.

A mirage or hallucination that subtly tracks the horizon, the set scenes, Purple Sage features near languid melodious guitar touches with the evaporated and, on occasion, a sense of the rhythmic. Hidden below and inside the electricity, the magnetic and ghostly I was reminded of a very eroded and obfuscated Jesus And Mary Chain, the Spacemen 3 (that will be the first of two references in this reviews haul), Daniel Fichelscher and Conny Veit’s guitar work for Popol Vuh (although the synthesized parts, and the atmospherics recalled Popol Vuh’s Affenstunde debut), Daniel Vickers and Eno.

For those with daring tastes but who also wish to be immersed in a very different vision of scenery, of pylon and analogue-like currents manifesting into patterns and prompts of the haunted and the illusionary, then feel free to pick this perfectly crafted discovery.

Meiko Kaji ‘Otoko Onna Kokoro No Aika’
(Wewantsounds) 22^nd May 2026

In trouble of repeating myself after reviewing a string of such revived LPs from the iconic Japanese actress and singer, from what I’ve gained from the press release, and despite the so-called Tarantino effect, the cult garnered Japanese starlet Meiko Kaji’s iconic run of early to mid 1970s albums have never been reissued on vinyl until the last few years by the specialists at Wewantsounds – one of our favourites in this regard.

With the usual quality control of repackaging such lauded obscurities (including usually the original artwork) the label, in conjunction with both the artist herself and the original label that released this quintet of showcases, Teichiku (between the years of 1972 and 1974), have called upon the services of Hashim Kotaro Bharoocha to interview Kaji, and fill us in on all the background, with insightful, informative linear notes to each song and chapter in the life story.

A sort of third or even fourth revival you could say, the star of various “Japanese Exploitation” franchises inspired the one-time golden boy of auteur pulp, who not only loosely based the plot of his Kill Bill doublet on one of Kaji’s most (in)famous roles as the revenging angel of The Lady Snowblood period-drama revenge shlocker series but also placed a number of her songs in the movie too. This obviously shone a spotlight on the star of such cult curios as Female Prisoner Scorpion, Blind Woman’s Curse and Stray Cat/Alleycat Rock.

In more recent years Kaji has popped up with her own Youtube channel and been coveted and once more invited to various galas and events in light of renowned interest.  And as I’ve already stated, and in recent years, a vinyl reissue run of her 70s move into the recording industry, prompted by the film studios cashing in this icon’s popularity.

Coaxed into the recording booth, to initially sing songs associated with the films she starred in, the Tokyo-born actress nervously and with some trepidation, recorded her first album, Hajiki Uta, with the highly experienced TV, film and incidental music composer Shunsuke Kikuchi. The producer was able to put his charge at ease however, as Kaji recalls: “I told Shunsuke Kikuchi that I couldn’t imagine myself singing the songs. He said I could ignore the melody that he wrote, and just sing it the way I wanted to. That really lifted the pressure off my shoulders, and I decided to sing the song as the character in the film. The director was also happy with that idea.”

Following in the wake of the Hajiki Uta LP, reissued for the very first time by Wewantsounds, Tarantino’s crush and untold influence for many over the decades, the star of many infamous Japanese schlock and brutal revenger horrors and violent killings sprees’ debut LP, Gincho Wataridori was the next LP to be revitalised and given a special reissue.

In a similar mode, style and production wise, Otoko Onna Kokoro No Aika (that’s “Lament of Man, Woman and Heart”) showcases the beautifully heartachingly effortlessness of Kaji’s voice across a number of softly connected and layered styles: from the performative traditional form of Enka (a style that often carried masked messages of political texts, and was later on stylized with modern pop sensibilities in the post-war period), both lounge and theatrical balladry, Kayokyoku (another Japanese pop style with simple melodies and lyrics easy to play and sing along to) and quasi- Bacharach Western maladies and horizon gazing sentimental yearnings.

Throughout Kaji inhabits each role, telling the story of each song with swanned, soaring and plaintive hunger and unrequited sorrow. The roles of actor and songstress merge into one.

The album (originally released in 1974), once translated, makes it abundantly clear the intentions and themes. But despite the lament, each song is pretty in its cooed, wooed and subtly dramatized delivery. Notable songs include a rendition of the theme song from Siejun Suzuki’s 1966 Yakuza themed movie Tokyo Drifter, ‘Tokyo Nagare Mono’, sung to a soundtrack of Ennio-like Italian Western meets the glow of sixties era Tokyo city snazzier pop vibes and a faint use of electric guitar fuzz and rattle snake percussion. And a Mexican border town scene meets Mediterranean-like woozy take on the popular pre-World War II ditty of ‘Uramachi Jinsei’, originally made famous by Bin Uehara and Michiko Yuuki; banned as it happens by the government of the day. From a similar era, another throwback modelled in the glow of the 60s and early 70s, ‘Sake Wa Namida Ka Tameika Ka’ (“Alcohol turns into tears and sighs”) is retuned with the sensibilities of Enka and a softened 60s backbeat and the concertinaed swoons of the accordion.

Elsewhere, the production stirs up friendly and warm echoes of John Barry’s dreamy bulb-shaped and chiming spindles (‘Meiko No Yuma Wa Yoru Hiraku’); an enervated fuzzy-soul-funk version of The Temptations sound (‘Ginza No Cho’); and soothed senorita coddled accompaniments (‘Shiretoko Ryojo’). 

Theatrical, showy and filmic at every turn, this album further showcases the finely attuned and sentimental heart aches, plaints and touchingly delivered songs of a Japanese star and luminary of the cult film world, who manages to blur the boundaries between styles and disciplines with such effortless timeless grace.  

Alex Roth ‘(Dis)possessed’
Released 1^st May 2026

Back on familiar sacred ground you could say, Alex Roth continues to capture both the abstract and all-too tragic consequences of his ancestors in the Eastern Europe Jewish diaspora.

A member of the MultiTraction Orchestra multiverse of musicians that draws in members from GoGo Penguin, Supersilent, Melt Yourself Down, Crash Ensemble, Sly & The Family Drone, Hen Ogledd and beyond, Roth made a personal odyssey and album a couple of years back with the Cut The Sky trio of Wacłew Zimpel and Hubert Zemler. Informed by Roth’s artist-in-residence spell at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, the Esz Kodesz album found a troubling absence in a land once awash with its vibrant Jewish culture. Only emancipated in 1867, when ruled under the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, that community which had given so much to this region of Eastern Europe, were victims of numerous pograms and even extermination – from the tumultuous fall-out of post WWI Ukraine to hostility under the Soviets, and then by the Nazi’s. A sizeable majority of that Jewish community would end up in Israel (another major destination being neighbouring Poland, but further afield too, and on to America) fleeing persecution. Where once those thriving bastions stood, only the ghosts now remain; the imagery accumulation of left objects and the remnants, as displayed in that museum’s main exhibition, can’t help but evoke a deep sadness; commemorating as it does, 800 years of a Jewish presence in Western Galicia. The titles of each section of that main exhibit drive home that tragedy and loss: ‘Jewish Life In Ruins’, ‘Jewish Culture As It Once Was’, ‘The Holocaust Sites Of Massacre And Destruction’. They also make clear the act of remembrance, of never forgetting what went before: ‘How The Past Is Being Remembered’ and ‘People Making Memory Today’.

With a different process and methodology at work, under the project title of a sound installation but in a similar same vein, Roth was commissioned by the Warsaw located POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in 2024 to celebrate the educational hub’s tenth anniversary; invited to respond to objects in the collection that were made out of “(mis)appropriated” Torah parchment during and after WWII. Quantifying a sense of desolation, and yet shared universal commonality, Roth conjures up metaphors of “dispassion” and “repossession”, drawing upon Moses famous/infamous possession of the promised land (Canaan) as laid out in the Book of Deuteronomy; driving out the indigenous King Sihon of Hebron led Ammonite people in the process – although arguably before being assembled under the Israelites banner, those same people, returning from generations of enslavement in Egypt, were also indigenous to those lands too; hostile neighbours but closely related to the Semitic Ammonite who ruled east of the River Jordon, alongside the Moab and Edomites. The Bible describes them as being descendants of Ben-ammi, the son of Lot (Abraham’s nephew) and Lot’s younger daughter.

But let’s pan out before we start getting all scholarly.

With anti-Semitism at an all-time high across Europe and North America in the wake of the barbaric terrorism of Hamas on October 7^th, and the ensuing destructive retaliation, obliteration of Gaza by Israel, and the ever expanded war that has led to the USA’s destruction of the heinous Iranian regime, and attacks on Hezbollah in the Lebanon, division has been sown down political lines of grievance: you either stand with Palestine or Israel it seems, with no room for nuance, the complexities let alone balance. The sheer mindlessness and oblivious lack of decency by many is staggering; with opinions cast, placards held, and slogans shouted by people without the faintest clue, knowledge of what they pontificate. You can quite rightly rile against or denounce both parties in this escalating conflict, but to only take one side is disingenuous at best, at worst, deplorable. Yes, the catalyst argument is trotted out every time, but if we want history lessons and context, we should go back not just 70-odd years but a thousand, two thousand. Conspiracy theories, fuelled by social media, have been left to rally and even prompt acts of violence and terror against the Jewish communities in the West, especially here in the UK.

With this in mind, it’s either a brave or dangerous move that will neither appease nor gain much in the way of sympathy depending on which side of the activist division you stand to release a sonic work of such complexity and emote certain passages from a history that many would now vocally and emboldened, knock or dismiss. But Roth has produced a work of ambience, sound art, atmospherics and field recordings that would suit the soul of the late divine styler Florian Fricke; one continuous forty-minute piece that finds passages of melody and expresses the hallowed from the reverberations of artifacts and musical instruments “(mis)appropriated” from pieces of parchment of the Torah. A sacrilegious act in itself, Roth gained permission and guidance by the Chief Rabbi of Poland to employ his special technique of capturing the sounds from these objects without touching them; recording using contact microphones, Roth would attempt to pick up the very vibrations or pick up their resonating frequencies when laying boxed in storage. Amplified of course from their metaphorical burial, and ritualised further with the help of the accomplished Cantor Rachael Weston and her vocal Cantorial melodious prayer – the Cantor leads this form of Jewish vocal prayer, which blends together elements of Eastern European folk with ancient modes, and is used as a display of powerful Jewish spiritualism – and a MIDI keyboard transferred palette of virtual instruments, Roth invokes the very passages of the Torah still visible despite their misuse. Another layer, and one that feeds into a message of not only remembrance and historical record, is of co-existence; the technique of “radical acceptance”, as used in dialectical behaviour therapy to manage painful situations outside one’s control, finding its way in an abstract fashion on this immersive experience.

Surface noise acts as a bed as mystique grows from the hum, the tubular and pipe-like blows of air and wind, the dust caught floating in beams of light and the long sinewaves-like forms that take shape in the sanctified space. There’s a real beauty here amongst the glints and signals, the recording equipment and the cylindrical vapours. But then, after a time, distorted frazzled and near vaporizing bass hits like the toll of a funeral procession making its way in an esoteric and plaintive motion towards the final burial spot. Other spots feature shuttered-like wooden percussion, intermittent rhythms and the obscured sounds of a Frame drum. But then strangely we hear what sounds like a rusty buzz saw and various tools, further removing us from or maybe bringing us closer to those misappropriated uses of the Torah parchments.

We are privy to a moving experience; a burial of a kind and documented abstracted sound experiment that transcribes fate and the scares of the missing. And yet, this abstraction provides sanctuary and relevance to objects that would normally, through religious beliefs and rules, be destroyed or buried and hidden from sight. Transformed and taken in a different direction, this installation soundtrack is far more subtle with its Jewish roots, creating something sonically and performance wise quite unique.

Solar Seas ‘Kraken’
(Somewherecold Records) Released 1^st May 2026

An oceanic convergence of myth and legendary sonnet in an alternative sci-fi dimension, the sonic pairing of Mark Cross and Mark Skelton prompt shapes, forms, feelings and themes from a squall and drone-operation of reverberance, resonance, sustain and barely contained tubular vacuums of noise on their debut album as the Solar Seas.

Brought together by a mutual respect for each other’s projects and bands (for Cross that’s 9-Volt Velvet, Viva Voce and The Northern Lights, and for Skelton, Aberrations Of Light, Alpine Slides and Youth Club), and facilitated by the highly prolific North American countercultural label Somewherecold Records, this freshly instigated partnership uses a particular methodology informed by the use of that affordable diy bedroom and rudimental but vital godsend, the four-track recorder, and by extension the cassette tape. Creatively invigorated by such barriers, the pair limited themselves to just two tracks each, which they then swapped between their respected homes in Tennessee and Georgia. And under the “less is more” mantra, and with a theme set in aquatic motion, they’ve gone all submersible and contemplated the many metaphors, readings of Tennyson’s famous Sea monster imbued sonnet/poem The Kraken.

Depending on sources, of which there are exhaustively many, Tennyson was harking on about either the Victorian’s own anxieties of the time (geology, evolution and Biblical literalism), the prospect of the working classes rising up, the apocalypse, or reflecting on his own struggles with the creative process. What warnings, augurs and premonitions are awakened here is left to speculation. As that fabled Nordic legendary beast of the deep sea is invoked and evoked to draw upon a soundtrack like experience of ambient electricity, metallic blocks of heavy meta(l), tubular shaped underwater beams amongst the murky light and noisy squalls.

Influenced in part by that much forgotten (or at least rarely if ever referenced) Bristol band Flying Saucer Attack, Sonic Youth and Medicine, I’d like to throw in the Spacemen 3, and even a passing of Ash Ra Tempel. On the synth preset-like drum programmed and flange guitar mirage ‘Washed’ I’m picking up Gary Numan and the Cocteau Twins. And on the otherworldly, near Lovecraftian ‘Starfish and the Seadragon’ it’s the FSA doing a Hawkwind impression to the flail of distressed guitar trills and distorted screams.

There’s much to deduce and pick up on from the balance of slabbed and more cosmic ray-like breaks from below the heavy surfaces of water: various communications and readings, obfuscated on purpose; the sonar-like rings of guitar imitation; the melodies that emerge from the static and fuzz and scuzz; and the oscillations and portal draws towards alternative worlds.

A great start to a debut project that offers up a suitable alien and electrified vision of a great work; once more awakened, the Kraken has a taste for downer, shoegaze, heavy droning and explorative guitar effects on a lo fi but no less epic scale.  

Here’s the message bit that 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.