Our Daily Bread 511: Anton Barbeau ‘Power Pop’
April 18, 2022
ALBUM REVIEW/Graham Domain
Anton Barbeau ‘Power Pop’
(Big Stir Records)
The new album by, Sacramento native, Anton Barbeau is called Power Pop. The irony is that it is not power pop! It is however Pop! More accurately, it is Pop with the sound of the early 1980’s, when bands like Vince Clarkes’ Depeche Mode and Howard Jones troubled the charts!
The new single ‘Rain, Rain’ is a case in point and comes across like the Eurythmics with male vocals! Complete with thunderstorm sound effects, the lyrics are standard Pop fare “rain on me, wash away my tears, set me free!”
Similarly, ‘The Never Crying Wolf Boy’ sounds like a cross between Yazoo and the Human League with its pulsing bass synth and daft lyrics… “The sound of silver tambourines spells out my name at Halloween.”
The short instrumental pieces between songs, such as ‘Slash Zed Zip’ and ‘Pompadour Toupee’ sound like off cuttings from The Art of Noise but don’t really add anything to the album!
The song ‘Power Pop’ meanwhile, begins like an alternative dance record before morphing into acoustic rock dourness, but still manages to have throwaway pop lyrics like “if this is war I’ve had enough, my mouth is full of power pop!” Sometimes, the songs stray into pure pastiche of the comedic type (like Neil Innes or The Rutles), for example, ‘The Drugs’. Elsewhere, the guitar pop of ‘Julian Cope’ reveals some terrible rhymes such as “Julian Cope, how do you cope?” and “I saw you Vibing, we beamed up Croyden Style-y, next thing it’s Bracknell and we’re backstage getting smiley!”
Overall it’s a fine pop album even if it’s a bit Retro in its sound and vision.
Premiere: (Video) Mike Gale ‘I’m Really Gone’
April 15, 2022
VIDEO PREMIERE/Dominic Valvona
Mike Gale ‘I’m Really Gone’
Taken from the upcoming Mañana Man album, released 20th May 2022
Although he’s adopting the procrastination title of “Mañana Man”, the former Black Nielson and Co-Pilgrim instigator turn soloist Mike Gale isn’t putting off his talent for capturing the mood with a beautifully, often woozy and wavy disarming musical palette. Releasing a laidback songbook (sometimes two) every year since the early noughties, his latest, and 18th, album sees a slight change in methodology; expanding upon the use of samples from last year’s brilliant Twin Spirit album, Gale returns to more traditional song structures and feel.
“Twin Spirit was the first album I’d used samples almost exclusively, from the writing process to arrangement of the songs. I really enjoyed this way of working and wanted to carry it on with Mañana Man. Twin Spirit was rather haphazard and more like a collage of sounds in places, so with Mañana Man I was trying to make an album of more traditional sounding pop songs while still utilising samples as the primary method of creating. I still played guitars and Bass etc. on almost half of the songs as well and I think this mix of samples and instruments is where I’m most comfortable.”
Channeling the Wilson Brothers as always like a lo fi Beach Boys serenade of one, Gale’s mañana mood permeates a gentle but deeply felt songbook of wistful dreamy, balmy longing and beachcomber ruminations.
The languorous comforted feels swim in the waters of late 70s Californian troubadours, soft rock, and dream and surf pop. Swaddled ‘Pumpkin Feet’ leave traces in the sand to the sound of The Flaming Lips, Lionlimb, Panda Bear, Ned Doheny, Gene Clark, Harry Nilsson and The Cry. That title-track is a lovely tropical, semi-Cuban instrumental with a surprising nod to Henri-Pierre Noel’s piano led Hispaniola dances, whilst ‘How Long’ seems to evoke the washed-out vibes of epic45.
Gale however reaches for both the stars (on the Spector Christmas album-style lilted ‘A Place Of Going To The Stars’) and heavens (on the harp-laced, mirrored and sweetened ethereal ‘You’re My Hand Glide’) from that beachfront escape.
Taken from that driftwood lullaby and flange-wash retune of a beautiful album, the Monolith Cocktail is premiering the video for the cosy ‘I’m Really Gone’. Perhaps casting veils of nostalgic locations and surrealism over a trippy ripple of lucid, hazed sadness, Gale dons a poodle mask whilst floating, bending to a psychedelic dream: imagine a kaftan wearing Carl Wilson fronting Morgan Delt or the Animal Collective. A waltzing couple, images of the Trevi Fountain and a park underpass form a background for the band – all Mike Gale I assume -, as the music melts; soaking up all the grief and malady.
Mañana Man is due out on the 20th May. You can pre-order it now via Gale’s Bandcamp page. Expect to see it included in our end-of-year recommendations, but sooner than that, a summer essential.
ALBUMS AND EXTENDED RELEASE REVIEWS/PLUS A SPECIAL LITTLE SOMETHING/Dominic Valvona
SPECIAL LITTLE SOMETHING
IFRIQIYYA ELECTRIQUE ‘Nafta Naghara’
From the 25th March 2022
From our friends IFRIQIYYA ELECTRIQUE, a mesmerizing, loud and incredible dynamic fusion of unworldly chthonian elements, Sufi trance, spirit possession performance and post-punk electronics; recorded live in the last month at La Casa Musicale in Perpignan, France.
Originally formed in the Djerid Desert, a coloration between field-recordist and veteran guitarist of the politically-charged Mediterranean punk and “avant-rock” scenes, François Cambuzat, and bassist Gianna Greco – both of which occasionally join forces with that livewire icon of the N.Y. underground, Lydia Lunch, to form the Putan Club – and Banga musician Ali Chouchen – joined in the live theatre by an expanded cast of fellow voices, krabebs and Tunisian tabla players from the community, which has featured Tarek Sultan, Yahia Chouchen and Youssef Ghazala – the lineup has fluctuated over two stunning albums and live dates.
Performing a track from their second album Laylet El Booree (released back in 2019) ‘Nafta Naghara’ sees both Syna Awel and Dyaa Zniber (on both voice duties and percussion) change the dynamic once more as they join Greco (voice & bass) and Cambuzat (on guitar, choir & computer) for breathtaking communal.
ALBUMS
Jane Inc. ‘Faster Than I Can Take’
(Telephone Explosion Records) 22nd April 2022
Although the musical DNA was there from the start, through her dance pop duo Ice Cream with Amanda Crist and contributions to Darlene Shrugg and Meg Remy’s ever growing U.S. Girls ensemble, Carlyn Bezic effortlessly shimmied towards the disco, dream-pop dancefloor with last year’s Number One album debut as Jane Inc. – one of my choice albums of 2021.
Bearing all the strains, vulnerabilities but shorn of pity, Carlyn makes good on that previous congruous change with a both disarming fantasy and more heartbreaking plaintive songbook, fit for the age of high anxiety, self-doubt and connection through the computer, smart phone lens.
Life just never feels right, and time…well, time seems to have sped up, hijacked by those seeking to consume all our precise use of it, concentrated down the portal of a constantly changing feed of attention grabbing, virtue competiveness and narcissistic obsessions. Without the space to breathe, process, to take it all in, we’ve been mostly reduced to vacuous, fleeting well-wishers; meaningful, deep connections just for a few, because whose got the time to offer anything lasting. Ok, I’ve gone slightly off the rail, but our epoch, lurches from, but then forgetting, one crisis to the next: though in recent months that carousal has swung from the climate emergency to Covid to the cost-of-living and Ukraine. Who wouldn’t be anxious, drained mentally under such an onslaught?
On the album’s opener, and first single, ‘Contortionists’ Carlyn sings about the effects of time anxiety, of being both trapped simultaneously in the past, present and future, all in the same moment. Transfiguring a 80s musical palette, this crystalized arpeggiator emotional pull dances through softened shades of n-r-g, robotic soul pop, fitness video music and disco: with a certain echo of Chaka Khan thrown in. Fellow Toronto collaborator Dorothea Pass adds a touch of ethereal cooing to a vulnerable but danceable highlight.
Although a mostly synthesized, electro affair, Carlyn finds the human soul, a connectedness throughout. No more so then on tracks like ‘Human Being’ (for obvious reasons), which explores isolation, the requirements of instagram, and that always living your ‘best life’ crap, in an online world to the dualist Giallo glitterball pop, and suggestions of the Juan MacLean and St. Vincent (via Wendy & Lisa). Dreamy realism meets with a haunted reflection, with another signature mirror turn. In a similar lamentable disconnect, the four-to-the-floor, Vogue era Madonna ‘Dancing With You’ projects a romantic embraced dance at the Paradise Garage, but is really a dance for one in front of the computer screen in a bedroom.
Amongst the glitterball emitting lasers Carlyn expands the musical scope, sauntering down to Rio like a 70s Joni Mitchell sharing a fantasy with Seu Jorge on ‘Picture The Future’ – which actually, despite its accompaniment of soft-paddled samba moves, describes a calendar rota of metaphorical growth. ‘An Ordinary Thing’ takes an acoustic direction towards the troubadour sorrow of Evie Sands or Catherine Howe on a cathartic, candid Baroque turn of resignation. The close, ‘Pummeled Into Sand’, features strains of both reversed phaser and Brian May guitar licks, hints of Aldous Harding and Eleanor Friedberger on the Mexican border.
I’m drawn however to the gorgeous if heartbreaking ‘Every Rip’. A Diplo remixed Vangelis patterned lush ache of vulnerability, this dream-wave pop lament will bring a tear to the eye.
The absence of the physical (love, friendship) echoed through the full spectrum of emotions couldn’t sound more effortless. Even if the artist feels fragile, this second album under the Jane Inc. flag couldn’t be more assured in pop brilliance. Taking the familiar tones of disco, pop, new wave, fitness video n-r-g, Carlyn takes a more carefree, danceable approach to deeper feelings in an era of rapid change and disorientation. You won’t hear much better.
Birds In The Brickwork ‘Recovery’
(Wayside And Woodland)
The first in a promised series of multimedia releases from Benjamin Holton’s latest inspired alias, Birds In The Brickwork, the Recovery album contours a both faded and quintessentially damp English landscape; as seen through Holt’s photographic lens.
A concomitant partner to the gauzy, washed guitar and synth music of epic45, his longstanding duo with foil Rob Glover, Holton once more plugs into a familiar, if far more dreamy and beautifully languid, mode.
Before we dive in though, a little background to this newly adopted moniker is needed. Sympathising greatly myself with this, Holton was forced to give up work due to a ‘massive flare-up’ with his back. During a time of recovery (hence that title) the Staffordshire native attempted to document the period with the tools-at-hand. This included that already mentioned guitar (both acoustic and electric by the sounds of it), a camera and computer.
Finding all life’s answers, pathos and bathos in the natural typography and its artificial markers, structures, the focus of this project is on the landscape; something that could be seen as a reoccurring feature, theme in much of his work, especially the pylon straddled haze and nostalgic glaze of My Autumn Empire.
Capturing the ephemeral through various instrumental traverses, Holton sculpts magical, mysterious radiating versant slopes, hills and the ghostly pastoral visage of a village hall, as he wells up a mood board of the wondrous, universal and cerebral. Evoking a languorous Land Observations without his bass notes, the descriptive and higher-purposed guitar playing of Craig Ward, Spiritualized Jason Pierce and Myles Cochran, Holton evokes the halcyon, conversational, the empirical.
Through lingered, floated, finely attuned guitar work, synthesized washes and waves, pitch-shifts and attentive drums he gently encompasses the fields of post-rock, the psychedelic, shoegaze, acid-country and kosmische; whether that’s unveiling the enormity of the great expanse or in solitude, waiting to get back out into the world of small wonders: ‘small glimmers’, the ‘old blossom’ and the reconnected resonance of ‘people talking’. All things missed and now documented with a lightness of touches.
The inaugural visions of a geography taken for granted, barely noticed, comes to life in the first Birds In The Brickwork audio setting. With art prints, DVDs and postcards still to come Recovery puts down the marker for a fruitful new musical horizon: even if it was borne out of pain.
Kota Motomura ‘Pay It Forward’
(Hobbes Music) 22nd April 2022
Although it’s been a few years, the experimental Tokyo artist Kota Motomura makes good on his previous free-floating, swimmingly jacked-up House and Balearic flowed EP for the Hobbes Music imprint with a just as tropical, eclectic album.
Pay It Forward once more sees Kota reunited with his foil Mutsumi Takeuchi on reeds. Later on, with this album’s paradise plaint closer, ‘Flowers’, a second guest, Akichi, joins the twosome, adding a wistful but dreamy Balearic acoustic guitar accompaniment, sat under a canopy of heavenly bird song and humid tropical heat. That curtain call is the most placid, scenic track on the whole album, with the rest destined for the club environment: albeit set in the rainforests or in some futuristic vision of 80s Tokyo.
The actual entitled ‘Paradise’ features Mutsumi’s snozzled jazz-house toots, spirals and drifted hazy rasps and Kota’s detuned, almost distorted, piano stabs over a sort of Japanese 80s new wave pop production with shooting lasers: imagine a bit of Haruomi Hosono shaking it down with Yasuaki Shimizu.
A change in style, ‘Tropical’ sounds more like an ethnographic sampled lost treasure from Byrne and Eno or, the sort of no wave experiment Basquiat would have been throwing down in ’82. Native voices, pneumatic drilled samples, shuttled sticks and hand drums evoke the veldt, the Maasai, as remixed by Coldcut and the 900ft Jesus.
‘To Be Free’ is an upbeat number of Farley Jackmaster Funk’s Chicago grooves, handclap beats, arpeggiator patterns and funk, whilst ‘Emotion’ sees Mutsumi on flute, blowing merry suffused charms over a pumped N-R-G meets New Orleans Mardi Gras House music groove.
The highlight for me though is the constantly changing, evolving percussive and drumming relay, ‘Rhythm’. It could be a Brazilian Samba band, the African diaspora or even a Cuban rhythm section on a coked-up Miami night, but the beats just keep rolling and rattling, even galloping.
Pay It Forward is essentially a well-crafted, fun experiment in dance music genre hopping. It’s House and Techno music with a spirit of adventure that’s never idol and always up for taking the audience across a movable dance floor.
OK:KO ‘Liesu’
(We Jazz) 15th April 2022
Named after its drummer-composer/bandleader Okko Saastamoinen, the Finnish OK:KO quartet have been accumulating fans and acclaim alike over the last five years. Now onto their third album with the leading Euro jazz label and festival hub (and now quarterly magazine) We Jazz, they once more show-off a signature sound that’s imbued by the roots of hard-bop, free jazz and the more explorative, envelope pushing of a small tight combo. The notes sum up that style perfectly as, ‘adventurous but accessible’.
In practice that means Coltrane and Harden on the Savoy label, Charlie Parker, the Bill Evans Trio, Nate Morgan and Sonny Stitt taken on a scenic, poetic ride across the Finnish pastoral. Mikael Saastamoinen’s double-bass on the most naturalistic composition, ‘Kirkkis’, even manages to emote an oaken tree spreading its branching: The bass actually begins to sound like a cello against a wooded stretch of rim rattles and brushes. Later on, with that same composition, the quartet moves towards both the blues and luxuriant swing; beamed and trained on 60s NYC.
Bandleader Okko’s drums follow a constant leitmotif of splashed cymbals and rolling maelstroms that never quite penetrate the sea wall defenses, as Jarno Tikka goes high with flighty spirals and lower register rasps and descriptive lulls, and Toomas Keski-Säntti plays piano with a sense of both freedom and emergent-gestured melodies.
Tunes vary between expressive dances and erudite scene-setting emotions. The opener, ‘Anima’, goes for a visceral encapsulation of that title’s Latin origins – the breath, soul, spirit of vital forces -, whilst ‘Arvo’ pushes into more serious, noirish directions: like a bluesy but mysterious sassy accompanied skulk in a 1950s stripe joint. Throughout this album were constantly drawn back to the sea; both a very real Baltic one but also a metaphorical one of choppy emotions and swelled intensities. There’s drama yet nothing that ever proves too frantic, fierce, as this quartet keep it all in check, constantly flowing no matter how high those waves get. I love it, and still think Finland is producing some of the best contemporary jazz in not only Europe but beyond that. OK:KO’s reputation is save and broadening on the strength of this third album of the lively and emotive.
Kloot Per W ‘Arbre A Filles’
(Jezus Factory) 22nd April 2022
Despite doing it all so well, the maverick Kloot Per W, as a Belgian from the other side of the multi-linguistic quandary that is Belgium, apparently should be frowned upon, snubbed for singing in the French vernacular. In a culture, historical battle I’m unwilling to get drawn into, there’s a whole legacy of political backlashes against those with the Flemish mother tongue singing or speaking in the much-guarded French language: Jacques Brel aside. Actually that’s a terrible example, as Brel’s Flemish family actually dropped it to adopt the French language.
Anyway, the seven-decade spanning journeyman Kloot has decided to give it another bash, following the success of his inaugural Francophone EP, Nuits Blanches, from last year. Like the already mentioned Brel, and because of a history of reinvention, sagacious wit and self-depreciation, the Flemish cult artist dons a gauloise smoking jacket with élan and a certain fuck you attitude on his new songbook, Arbre A Filles (or the odd phrased “girl tree”).
A sort of intergenerational project, again, Kloot calls upon the production, collaborative help of Pascal Deweze: a full twenty-years Kloot’s junior we’re informed. And swinging by the studio, repeat offender foil, guitar-slinger for hire and ex dEUS band member Mauro Pawlowski and his collaborative partner Randy Trouvé add a bit of (middle-age) youthfulness; a taste of contemporary alt-rock to the songs. Keen Monolith Cocktail followers will of course remember (hopefully) that Marco and Kloot brought out their very own dysfunctional, knockabout White Album, called Outsider/Insider, a while back (making our choice picks at the time).
A road well-travailed, Kloot’s numerous musical changes – stretching back to the late 60s and early 70s as a bassist for The Misters and as a guitarist for The Employees, to a solo spell and the JJ Brunel produced Polyphonic Size – have lent the music a wise ring of authenticity; a life well-lived and experienced. And on this new songbook themes range from such timeless concerns as facing one’s mortality and more contemporary fare like Internet conspiracy theorists, cultural divisions. This is a grown-ups album then: despite the reference to Kloot’s worries on his cock size, though thankfully not a French speaker, I have no idea where this obsession springs-up on the album, as it’s only pointed out in the accompanying notes.
It all begins with the opening fuck you attitude of the French new wave, via Lou Reed, Mick Harvey and Anton Barbeau, styled ‘Tu Me Troubles’ (“you disturb me”), which has both bristle and sophistication, coquettish doo wop female backing singers and a touch of Britpop melody. ‘Le Pays’ (“the country”) moves the action towards a smoky blend of the Jazz Butcher and the Bad Seeds, as satellites’ twinkled communications blink over a psychedelic starry, starry night café scene. A spooked Morricone creeps around on the vibrato, cooing female-voiced backed ‘Girl On The Phone’, but it’s Blixa Bargeld fronting the Os Mutantes in a haunted jazz lounge on the title-track.
Raspy, grizzled and also mooning when not crooning, Kloot’s lyricism is fitted with a movable backing of both salon and Muscle Shores piano, strokes of beat music, glam, rock ‘n’ roll, radio city music hall, a touch of Cohen, and on the “lalala” flittered ‘Super Likeus’ a hint of both rebel country and the paisley underground. Yet everything is still contained in the French vogue, if from a unique perspective.
There’s a lot to like about this album, and it goes someway to Andrew Bennett (Jezus Factory’s one-man cottage industry founder) aggrandisement that Kloot is “Belgium’s best kept secret”. If there was any justice in the world (you’re kidding, right?!) this album would reach a wide audience and shine a light on, certainly, one of Belgium’s great talents. It’s also a killer French language songbook that proves the Flemish can indeed sing the Frenchman blues.
Jörg Thomasius ‘Acht Gesänge der Schwarzen Hunde (Experimenteller Elektronik-Underground DDR 1989)’ (Bureau B) 15th April 2022
From the steel curtained side of the Berlin Wall, a second GDR dedicated showcase of electronica from the noted Jörg Thomasius. At various times an artist in his own right (under the Tomato moniker), but also a member of the Das Freie Orchester, a radio show presenter, author, boiler man and exhibition technician, the East German maverick knocked-about with the likes of Andreas Grosser, Lars Stroschen and Conrad Schnitzler – working with the last two to set up the Tonart label.
It was the former, the renowned technician Grosser who opened up a whole world of electronic exploration, and instigated a train of events that led to Jörg meeting Terry Riley: freely handing out LSD at the time. Whilst under the authoritarian grip, Jörg still managed to connect with the burgeoning scene in West Berlin. And his experiments, collected together here from three different sources, easily fall into the greater Kosmische and new wave brackets.
Acht Gesänge der Schwarzen Hunde brings together diy explorations, peregrinations, sketches from his 80-85 documented Schwarze Hände (“black hands”) cassette, his own Kröten Kassetten label’s Gesänge der Komparsen (“songs of the extras”) 89 release, and the 90s After Eight – released again on another of his own label hubs, just after he left Das Freie Orchester.
Across the majority of this collection each modulated, oscillated, effected idea weighs in under the three-minute mark; glimpsing at, vanishing clips of what could be more expanded, drawn-out scores. The opener, ‘Besen Im kopf’ (“broom in the head”), seems to feature a strung-out, deconstructed orchestra of the avant-garde, classical and even Fluxus kind: Low ship horns sound, the inner workings of a piano resonate with a brassy metallic spindly sound. ‘Okoschadel’ (“eco skull”) and ‘Erste Himmelsmelodie’ (“first heavenly melody”) have more than a hint of early computer tech sampling; the kind Sakamoto was experimenting with in the early 80s. A mix if synthesized cut-ups, tubular bell percussion and staccato fashioned splurges.
‘Küss Mich Mien Liebchen’ (“kiss my love”) features (I take it) Jörg’s vocal ravings over a squiggled loon of underground tape culture, post-punk, Faust and Populäre Mechanik weirdness.
Ghosts in the machine, aerial whirled chattering space birds, slapped beats, timpani and lo fi computerized effects permeate the first nine oddities on this compilation. The tenth and final track however is an expansive twenty-minute plus sun rays ‘Meditation’. In that languid, relaxed time frame, Jörg astral-planes hints of Popol Vuh, Frosse, Ocean Of Tenderness Ash Ra on a new age equinox of spiritual alignment.
The Hamburg label Bureau B continues as custodians of Germany’s past and present electronic, experimental, Kosmische and new wave genres with another intriguing showcase come reminder of East Germany’s part in the underground music scene that defined a generation. Fans of those musical fields will find this an interesting addition to that story.
Qrauer ‘Heeded’
(Nonostar Records) 22nd April 2022
The most electronic signing yet to Alex Stolze’s burgeoning Nonostar imprint, the congruous fit of Christian Grochau and Ludwig Bauer coalesce their respective disciplines once more as the Qrauer duo.
With Christian’s percussionist, production and remix and Ludwig’s pianist, multi-instrumentalist and composing skills, Qrauer’s latest EP is a sophisticated shift of layered electronic body movement techno and reverberated spells both on and inside a neoclassical attuned piano. In the former camp, the EP’s first trio of tracks includes the subtle air-pinched filtered, cybernetic convergence of Four Tet, Carl Graig and trance style techno ‘The Mess’; the tinkling, translucent bulb mirrored short ‘Stardoll’; and the more clean-cut beats meets mysterious and gauzy wooed ‘No Sh.Left’, which features the wafted, ghostly and vaporous vocals of the German singer Sea Of Love.
Taking a slightly different path, the title-track is a sort of experiment in scoring a mini electroacoustic soundtrack. ‘Heeded’ is highly atmospheric, with the echoed resonance of a piano’s guts being touched by various textured materials, and a moving melody of both singular and a more uninterrupted flow of notes played from the keyboard itself. Almost a seamless follow-on, ‘Lustend’ features staccato cut-up samples of a voice and piano, but soon, in a relaxed fashion, bobs along to jug-poured and steel drum reverberated techno effects – like a calypso Phylyps on Basic Channel.
Sounding in many ways like a remix of chamber piano work, with all the original elements washed-out, the Heeded EP is a cerebral version of techno, trance and electronic dance music for people who hanker after more than just a four-to-the-floor beat and repetition.
Astrel K ‘Flickering I’
(Duophonic Super 45s Mail Order) 29th April 2022
Like one long mirage, a psychedelic tinged wavy trip inside the preoccupations of Rhys Edwards, the newly imagined Astrel K set-up sees the one-time Ulrika Spacek member swim in solo Scandinavian waters.
Although a solo platform, a moniker under which to pursue his songwriting, Astrel K does in fact include an array of local musicians from Rhys new(ish) home of Stockholm. We should of course name them at least: Lili Holényi, Milton Öhrström, Niklas Mellberg and Thomas Hellberg; all of whom make it possible for this hallucinogenic musical world to float.
Leaving behind the now defunct Spacek music factory, KEN, in (one of my old stomping grounds) Homerton, Rhys finds inspiration in the Swedish capital. Via the mail order label, Duophonic Super 45s, his debut Astrel long-player (the first single, the wobbled, languid and quivered Beatles and Velvets jangle, ‘You Could If You Can’ sold out rapidly on vinyl) swimmingly and with a gauzy lushness balances hazy winding L.A. scenery detective and romantic movie scores and tinkled ray-shining Library music with somnolent Floyd, Edward Penfold and Flaming Lips psychedelic pop, dreamwave and distant lingered, suffused trails of saxophone. All elements that come together across golden slumber cooed songs and shorter Stereolab and KPM like instrumental interludes.
Actually, one of the album’s best tracks is the expanded burnished and sax-swaddled ambient score ‘Forwardmomentum’ – reminding me of the Canadian school of such astral peregrinations, Matthew ‘Doc’ Dunn’s work.
Whimsy, wistfulness and druggy stupors hide pressing matters in the real world: the anxieties of the environment and online worlds especially. Certain paradoxes and idiosyncratic observations, plaints are dreamily wooed to a most fluid and softened backing of light and shade. Occasionally there’s a touch of fuzz, a little electric grind, but it’s mostly a lunar and tropical affair of psychedelic pop, enervated soundtrack strings, quirky changes, knowing easy-listening and beautifully conveyed, soulful songwriting.
No matter what the themes are, Flickering i is a languorous, swell and trippy bubble of a place to sit and reflect.
Sinnen ‘Hawk Moth Man’
(Hreám Recordings) 11th April 2022
I’m going to be honest with you all. I’m going in blind with this slow-release of pent-up energy; woes and guitar pedal effects sustain contouring.
Released on the always intriguing, and reliable, Hreám Recordings, Sinnen’s latest drudge and cymbal-splashed resonated traverse has an esoteric menace running throughout its gnawing and yearned core. A psychogeography of darwave, grunge, slowcore, the industrial, doom and the dreamy, the sword and sorcery title referencing Hawk Moth Man reimagines Mike Cooper fronting Sunn O))). Well, at least some of the time.
Shafts of soulful despondency, a release of abstract imagings languidly emerges from a slow-motion dissipation of shimmy and halftime beaten drums and amplified hums, drones. After one of those amplifier-contoured lead-ins, the first expanded track proper, ‘Painting Daisy’, grinds through a sludge of Codine, Fritch and Dinosaur Jnr.; a haze of the occult and that already mentioned grunge sound.
As the title would suggest, the next slow driven gruel, ‘Bury Your Regrets In Frozen Ground’, drags the listener across a harrowed soundscape. By contrast, a brief pause, an interlude of a sorts, ‘Shifter’ is an ambient (almost) vignette of holy orders as preached by Popol Vuh and Vukovar.
Personally I’m hearing shades of Outside Bowie on the very strange and curious ‘Hill’: a creeping sense of menace, trauma that seems to reach back into civil war period England. But it’s the semi-epic slowcore and flange wave, force field vibrating ‘Se Boda’, which sounds like Michael Stipe singing with The Telescopes, in some alternate universe, that I especially love.
There’s much to untangle, demystify from the heavy atmosphere of suspended pain, discord: one being, why the reference to the swordsman character from the 80s cartoon adventure, The Black Cauldron, ‘Taran’? What’s that all about then?
In all that slow dissonance there’s still some light, and so it never feels too dark, too much to bear. Having never crossed paths with the band/artist before, this could be their stock-in-trade signature: or not of course. Anyway, it gets a recommendation from me.
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.
BRIAN BORDELLO SHEA’S REVIEWS JAMBOREE
Unless otherwise stated, all release can be purchased now.
Papercuts ‘Palm Sunday’
(Labelman)
This is a rather fine jangly pop song well written with a melancholy air that should be bottled and released into atmosphere to seep into the summers day and soak and enrich the lives of we the general public; a song that captures a snapshot, a brief still of a beautiful girl, a beautiful boy, a moment in time that will forever be etched onto our hearts.
Crystal Eyes ‘Like A Movie’
(Bobo Integral Records) 22nd April 2022
There are some fine radio friendly guitar pop singles being released at the moment, and here we have another one. It reminds me of Catatonia with rather fetching breathy vocals and chiming grungy guitars and a semi ‘Be My Baby’ drum beat: a lovely ballad. So what on earth is there not to like…I will tell you… there is nothing not to like. So yes, as Simple Simon would say, “I like it”.
Otoboke Beaver ‘Pardon’
(Damnably)
If sparkling punk pop is your thing then I would advise you to check out this short blast of pure fun from the all girl Japanese band Otoboke Beaver. It rams you in the gullet with its nonsensical charms dipping your brain into an infectious mix of madness and melody goofiness, its like losing yourself in a chocolate inspired dream after overdosing on milkshake spiked with happy thoughts.
YOVA ‘Make It Better’
(Quartertone)
I like this single it has a subtle political(ness) about it and a great nagging violin sounding [I do not know if it is a violin, but it sounds like one] riff picking away, clawing out your eyes and picking worms from your unsettled mind like a big black angry crow shouting fuck you in between pecks. Yes, I’m a bit of a fan of this single and through further investigation I’m becoming a bit of a fan of Yova: who it seems has just released her debut LP, Nine Lives.
East Portal ‘Untitled #3’
(AKP Recordings)
This sounds like something from a beatnik black and white horror film from the 60s; a road movie featuring scary gipsy children who like to devour their victims’ souls with egg spoons whilst offering their spittle to the charred remains of their god; a Mister Punch doll worked by top hatted old raggedy gentleman who has no teeth but a lot of self-belief in the power of coffee houses and backward performed poetry. You are not going to hear this track on Radio One. And it is all the better for that.
Evan Kertman ‘Rancho Shalom’
(Perpetual Doom) 29th April 2022
Rancho Shalom is a rather fetching album of baroque alt country; an album stuffed full with beautiful well-written songs. Songs with melodies that pull and twist your emotions and lyrics that both make you want to smile and cry. Evan Kertman is a man blessed with a honey rich voice that oozes class and emotion with a heart in the same place as Kurt Wagner, and Evan’s music affects you in the same way that the mighty Lambchop does.
There is just something so beautifully laid back about this album, an album to laze about in the sun to as you drink yourself into a silent oblivion with only birds and memories for company, and this album is such great company. ‘No Good Reason’ is a rather stunning song of break up and heartache with one of my favourite lines from the album, “I left you first, but you left me better”. A quite stunningly beautifully written song amongst an album of stunningly beautifully written songs.
The Legless Crabs ‘Always Your Boy’
(Metal Postcard Records)
The legless Crabs are back with another blast of sonic rock ‘n’ roll; once again proving why they are the band to be kicking the decaying corpse of culture not just in the USA but life in general everywhere. Who couldn’t agree with the sentiment of “Fuck Your Boss” from ‘Time Theft’, and anyone who couldn’t have any love for the myth of rock ‘n’ roll, does not do cartwheels, when hearing the quite wonderful JAMC like ‘Fake Weed Emergency’ hasn’t an ounce of joy left in their once thriving rock ‘n’ roll soul.
The Legless Crabs as I have mentioned so many times are the true sound of adventure and seedy darkness in the underground, and are probably ignored by many other blogs for that reason, as attitude and a devil care telling of the truth does not settle well with the meme inspired Instagram friendly culture that is currently rotting and killing our beloved mainstream alternative scene.
The Legless Crabs are not power pop; they do not cover their music in a coating of authentic rose petals from the 60s; do not make auto tuned radio friendly pop, but listen to ‘Give It A Wiggle’ and not think it’s perfect pop, as it is short catchy and pretty perfect. And Always Your Boy is an album filled with sonic adventure, be it short blasts of pretty perfect alternative punk rock or longer tracks of scuzzed up bass experimental splendor; an album that needs to be in the record collection of anyone who remembers the true magic of Rock N Roll the emphasis being on the N Roll!
Mercvrial ‘Brief Algorithms’
(Crafting Room Recordings) 29th April 2022
This is a very enjoyable album of 80s sounding indie guitar music, the kind House of Love used to tempt and seduce us with all those years ago. That can be explained by the fact that Mercvrial features the talents of one Terry Bickers on lead guitar, and the songs are awash with Terry Bickers’ guitar genius.
The songs chime with magic and melody, dipping in and out, taking me back to the days when the Sunday pub was followed by Snub TV. Ah, yes, those where indeed the days, but this is not an album of nostalgia it is an album of finely crafted and performed guitar songs and will appeal to anyone who loves well-crafted guitar indie/alternative music from any decade.
Monolith Cocktail Social Playlist #65: Karen Dalton, Dr. John, Taylor Hawkins, Mira Calix…
April 10, 2022
PLAYLIST/Dominic Valvona
The blog’s imaginary radio show, the Social is a rummage through Dominic Valvona’s record collection, and an accumulation of music he’s picked up other the decades, plus some newish tracks that didn’t make the Monolith Cocktail’s monthly playlist of brand new releases. With no themes, no lines drawn, choice music comes from across the generations, from across the world, and from any genre you can think of.
As with previous editions Dominic marks certain picky album anniversaries (Dr. John’s Gumbo, and Big Star’s #1 Record albums from ’72, and Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds’ Henry’s Dream from ’92) and deaths (really in this case, the all too soon loss of experimental electronic innovator Mira Calix, and Bonham incarnated, and here on this track, an incarnation of Dennis Wilson, Taylor Hawkins).
Smattered amongst that lot are 30 other eclectic tracks from Karen Dalton (a Beat Club of ‘One Night Of Love’, recently unearthed and released by Light In The Attic), Jamie Branch, Bruiser Wolf, Gil Trythall, July, Bill Nelson, Yukihiro Takahashi, Donny Hathaway and Clinic. See the full 38-track list after the link below:
IN FULL, THOSE TRACKS ARE::::
Joyce Street ‘That Man Of Mine’
Karen Dalton ‘One Night Of Love (Live at the Beat Club, 1971)’
Dr. John ‘Little Liza Jane’
Jaimie Branch ‘theme 001’
Caetano Veloso ‘Alfömega’
Eris Drew ‘Quivering In Time’
Bruiser Wolf & Danny Brown ‘I’m An Instrument’
Dead End & Secondson ‘Let The Music Talk’
Rodney P, DJ Die and Indigo Kid ‘Holes In The Building’
Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood Of Breath ‘MRA’
Saãda Bonaire ‘Woman’
Léa Sen ‘Hyasynth’
Mira Calix ‘I’m In Love With The End’
Gil Trythall ‘Last Date’
Marcello Gigante, Aristide Bascerano, Nora Orlandi ‘Gardenia’
Franco Battiato ‘Bandiera Bianca’
Krisma ‘C.Rock’
Stark Reality ‘Pretty Music’
July ‘Jolly Mary’
The Stroppies ‘No Joke’
Ed Dowie ‘Number Eight wire’
Body/Head ‘Actress’
Coágul ‘L’edat de bronze’
Paul Leary ‘What Are You Gonna Do’
Nick And The Bad Seeds ‘Brother, My Cup Is Empty’
Bill Nelson ‘Banal’
Big Star ‘The Ballad Of El Goodo’
Loose Fur ‘Laminated Cat’
Willie Dunn ‘I Pity The Country’
Taylor Hawkins ‘Holy Man’
Ghost Funk Orchestra & Golden Rules ‘Asphalt Homeland’
Dashiell Hedayet ‘Long Song For Zelda’
Yukihiro Takahashi ‘2021 – Youshinori Sunahara Remaster’
Von Südenfed ‘The Rhinohead’
Pacho Dávila, Daniel Correa, Hector Marín ‘Sombras de Siboney’
Donny Hathaway ‘I Love The Lord, He Heard My Cry (Pts. I & II)’
Clinic ‘I Can’t Stand The Rain’
The Brothers And Sisters ‘Just Like A Woman’
ALBUM/Dominic Valonva
The Good Ones ‘Rwanda…You See Ghosts, I See Sky’
(Six Degrees Records) 8th April 2022
Once more returning to the rural farmlands of a genocide scarred Rwanda, producer polymath Ian Brennan presses the record button on another in-situ, free-of-artifice and superficial production. The fourth such album of unimaginable stirred grief, heartache and reconciliation from the country’s nearest relation to American Bluegrass, The Good Ones latest songbook arrives in time to mark the 28th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide in the mid-90s; a 100 days of massacre, the fastest ever recorded of its kind in the 20th century with the true figures disputed but believed to be around the million mark.
Triggered, its argued even to this day, by a history of tribal warfare, insurrection, civil war, foreign interventions and the assassination of the then president Juvénal Habyarimana, the events of that three month period in 1994 saw a sudden death cull, ethnic cleansing of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority at the hands of the majority Hutus: though even moderate Hutus, along with Rwanda’s third main tribe the Twa were also far from safe, with many caught-up, trapped in the ensuing bloodbath.
Barbaric beyond any semblance to humanity, victims were brutalized, raped, cut to ribbons or herded together in buildings, churches, and schools and burnt alive. Unlike so many previous genocides however, most of those victims were murdered by hand with machetes, rudimental tools, weapons and gallons of Kerosene. No family was left untouched, with both The Good Ones dual roots vocalist set-up of Adrien Kazigira and Janvier Havugimana both losing loved ones, siblings and relatives.
On the remote hilltop farm where he was born and still continues to work, but record too, Adrien managed to hide and survive. But Janvier lost his older brother, a loss felt considerably by the whole trio who looked up to him as an early musical mentor. As a healing balm all three members, including the as yet unmentioned Javan Mahoro, all represent one of Rwanda’s main three tribes: Hutus, Tutsi and Twa. And so bring each culture together in an act of union, therapy and as a voice with which to reconcile the past.
Instantly drawn to the band during a research trip in 2009, Ian recorded their debut international album and the subsequent trio of records that followed: 2015’s Rwanda Is My Home, 2019’s Rwanda, You Should Be Loved, and now in 2022, Rwanda…You See Ghosts, I See Sky. Ian’s wife and longtime partner on both this fourteen-year recording relationship and countless other worldly projects, the filmmaker, photographer, activist, writer Marilena Umuhoza Delli was the one to instigate this Rwanda field trip. Marilena’s mother herself ended up immigrating for refuge to Italy, her entire family wiped out..
In between numerous productions in dangerous and traumatized spots (from Mali to Cambodia and Kosovo) the partners recorded the fourth volume of Glitterbeat Records Hidden Musics series in Rwanda (back in 2017); bringing the incredible stirring songs, performances of the country’s Twa people (or pygmy as they’re unfortunately known; bullied and treated with a certain suspicion by others) to a wider audience.
Back again on Adrien’s farm and haven, this quintet was reunited to record a thirty-song session. Already receiving accolades aplenty in the West, working with an enviable array of admirers, from Wilco to TV On The Radio, Gugazi, Sleater-Kinney and MBV, it’s extraordinary to think that these earthy harmonic songs were produced in an environment without electricity; music that’s made from the most rudimental of borrowed farm tools in some cases.
The true spirit of diy, raw emotion, The Good Ones speak of both love and the everyday concerns facing a population stunned and dealing with the effects of not only that genocide but the ongoing struggle to survive economically. The album begins on a reflective tone of disarming hope however, with the tinny scrappy cutlery drawer percussive and rustic natty-picking bluegrass leaning, ‘The Darkness Has Passed’. From the outset those beautiful of-the-soil sagacious and honest vocals and harmonies prove moving and powerful. Whilst songs like the Afro-Cuban and bluesy bandy turn ‘Columbia River Flowers’ sound positively romantic; a sentiment that also permeates the almost childlike abandon of ‘Happiness Is When We Are Together’, which sounds not too dissimilar to a sort of African version of Beefheart or Zappa. ‘Berta, Please Sing A Love Song For Me’ is another lovely romantic smooch, which features the Orlando Julius like serenades of the noted NYC saxophonist Daniel Carter.
Often, the outdoors can be heard as an integral, fourth band member, with the farmyard, cowshed gates struck like a percussive metal rhythm, as on the poetically romantic ‘Beloved (As Clouds Move West, We Think Of You)’.
Considering the themes of the last three albums, the fourth is said to be the group’s most personal yet. ‘My Son Has Special Needs, But There’s Nowhere For Him To Go’ has a more edgy tone, featuring a sort of post-punk dissonant electric guitar – almost Stooges like – and relates to Janvier’s struggle to get educational assistance for his son who has special needs. ‘My Brother, Your Murder Has Left A Hole In Our Hearts (We Hope We Can Meet Again One Day)’ makes reference to those lost in the genocide, and in this most personal of cases, a sibling but also musical mentor. Again, the sound of the rural escape can be heard, its chorus of chirping birds mingling with a banged tambourine.
Existing almost in its own musical category, its own world, The Good Ones play real raw but also melodic, rhythmic roots music that sways, resonates with vague threads of folk, bluegrass, rock, punk and even a touch of the Baroque. Ian, a man with an enviable catalogue of productions behind him, from every region of the globe, considers Adrien ‘one of the greatest living roots writers in the world, in any language’. That’s some praise; one I’m willing to believe and repeat.
The Rwanda trio expand their sound and bolster their artistic merits to produce another essential album of honest graft, heartache and longing for better times on the most incredible of songbooks.
Our Daily Bread 508: Matt Donovan ‘Habit Formations’
April 6, 2022
ALBUM REVIEW/Dominic Valvona
Matt Donovan ‘Habit Formations’
Through a semi-nostalgic lens and to a baggy, languid, synthesized throbbing and snarled beat and rhythm, Matt Donovan escapes the current tumult and lost years with captured reflections and dreamy moments of a better time.
Holding on in an almost hallucinatory manner to fondly recollected connections and romantic gestures, the in-demand drummer/percussionist turn multi-instrumentalist, composer and solo artist lyrically conveys both the personable and universal whilst still experimenting with a unique eclectic musical palette of influences from his formative years, on the follow-up album to 2021’s Underwater Swimming.
A continuation of that album’s Ibiza and dreamy haze of C86, Madchester, industrial indie and cosmic feels, only much richer, layered and broader in scope and death, Habit Formations is anything but habit forming; the ideas and music flowing freely, and often finishing somewhere completely different to where they started.
The former motorising and propulsive drum beat behind Eat Lights Become Lights and one half (alongside Nigel Bryant) of the psych-Krautrock-post-punk-folk-industrial duo The Untied Knot, Matt distils past sonic ventures with the sounds of the 70s, 80s and 90s. This sophisticated but dynamic imbued source of sounds can be heard brilliantly on the album’s opener, ‘Black Crow’. The nagging ominous feathered symbol of that song, shrugged off the shoulder on which it drip feeds an unending chorus of doubt and negativity, slinks in on a trippy dub mirage of Jah Wobble, Crime And The City Solution, BAD, Renegade Soundwave and Sensations Fix. Despite that looming harbinger of Norse mythological bad omens, Matt encourages love, unity and connectiveness all the way.
Already by the second swimmingly track, ‘We Learn’, Matt borrows Numan’s synth whilst spaced-out Johnny Marr flange guitar riffs envelope shades of Syd Barrett era Flyod, Andrew Hung and Karl Hyde on an exercise in unburdening pent-up frustrations. In a more new wave mood, ‘Dappled Light’ draws together searing film score strings and the Killing Joke in a corridor of progressive light. With a heavy leaning towards the German’s vision of new wave this time, the time-delayed drumming ‘Grasshopper’ imagines Moroder producing Front 242.
It wouldn’t be a Matt album however without at least some Krautrock inspired offering. ‘The Focus’ finds our cosmic courier motoring with the Dinger Brothers, Camera and Minami Deutsch. Vocally this could be a languorous Düsseldorf incarnation of Mark E. Smith or Ian Curtis, offering less morose and more enlightened words of self-discovery.
A pleasant surprise lies with the semi-acoustic numbers; the mentally fatigued, forlorn mythological entitled ‘Erebus’ (named after the primordial personification of darkness, born out of chaos) and the fireside evocation ‘A Quiet Goodbye’. The former, despite its title and lyricism, transforms from a wistful gentle rhythm and shakers accompanied psych-folk sentiment on the mental strains to a beautifully synthesized choral escape into Vangelis’s clouds. The latter could be a lost John Martyn or Mike Cooper cymbal shimmering rattled reminisce about holding onto those warm romantic empirical moments: “No need for conversation, just a loving warm hand.” Matt Donovan’s new album offers a sanctuary in which to process the dramatic grinding gears of so-called progression, whilst holding on to the magic of a recent past now fondly missed.
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.
A Special by Matteo Maioli
Over the last few years the Monolith Cocktail has been sharing a post each month with the leading Italian culture/music site Kalporz. This month Matteo Maioli celebrates the late enigmatic Pat Fish, aka The Jazz Butcher.
How many times does it happen that the legacy of a band becomes important after they break up, or if the artist leaves us prematurely? Pat Fish, a London-based singer-songwriter based in Oxford known to all as The Jazz Butcher, passed away on October 5th at the age of 63.
As soon as he graduated, he devoted himself unconditionally to music with Sonic Tonix by releasing a single on Cherry Red, just before coining (in ‘82) the name of the project for which he will always be remembered – since the other aliases The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy and The Jazz Butcher And His Sikkorskis From Hell are already more difficult. In the first records for the Glass label he played with David J and Kevin Haskins of Bauhaus, while Max Eiderhe will remain Pat Fish’s main collaborator until the last days: a four-year period, that of 1983-1986, best covered by the vinyl of ‘Bloody Nonsense’ that I found years ago at a flea market for two coins but which today is a level artistic testimony and harbinger of jewels such as ‘Big Saturday’, ‘The Human Jungle’ and ‘The Devil Is My Friend’: A mix of worker folk, Velvet Underground and soul music.
The ball then passes to Alan McGee, who with Creation released eight The Jazz Butcher albums, up until 1995. Fish becomes a sparring partner here, as the budget is oriented towards other bands (House Of Love, Primal Scream), amazed at the disorganization and the coarseness of an indie without any connection with the American market: therefore tracks like ‘Next Move Sideways’ and the psychedelic ‘Girl Go’, from ‘Cult Of The Basement’ slide without leaving a trace.
The only exploit comes in spite of himself from the acid-house style cover of ‘We Love You’, the Rolling Stones hit in 1967, which would guarantee him participation on Top Of The Pops; to understand the integrity of the artist Pat Fish it is enough to read the exchange of views he had with McGee in this regard: “Pat, You won’t believe it – 400 kids on the floor punching the air to your record!” “Yeah, right.” Yet even looking at Upside Down: The Creation Records Story we note the pride of Fish in having lived that fundamental period for English music, albeit as a gregarious but with personality, loved and respected by all.
For about ten years there was no news of The Jazz Butcher, when in 2012 he returned with Last of the Gentleman Adventurers, proudly self-produced. His work is characterized by a fervent passion for literature and cinema and social commitment, elements that also permeate the last album released by Tapete on February 4, 2022. The Highest Of The Land joins epitaphs such as Blackstar by David Bowie and Rowland S. Howard’s Pop Crimes, similarly recorded in the last days of life and who do everything not to be: we fight against the end, taking talent over the obstacle.
Between poetry and jazz settings, reverence for Bob Dylan and the new-wave, Pat Fish puts together a collection of splendid songs, including sarcasm (“My hair’s all wrong / My time ain’t long / Fishy go to Heaven, get along, get along” on ‘Time’) and urgency (“I said I would break my stupid life in two / For half an hour alone with you” on ‘Never Give Up’) with a cosmopolitan touch for ‘Sea Madness’. The album produced by Lee Russell (formerly with The Moons and Nada Surf) is the ideal starting point to discover this great songwriter, man of the world bringer of peace.
Our Daily Bread 507: Violet Nox ‘Eris Wakes’
April 4, 2022
ALBUM REVIEW/Dominic Valvona
Violet Nox ‘Eris Wakes’
Infinity Vine Records (USA)/Aumega Project (GER)
Attuned once more to Gaia, the universe and the subconscious state of being in an ever infringing technological epoch, the electronica-ambient Boston duo of Dez De Carlo and Andrew Abrahamson send waveforms, fluctuations and cathartic evocations out into the cosmos.
More an ensemble, collective consciousness than dup though, Violet Nox’s astral synth pilots open up and out to embrace the transformed saxophone, guitar and thumbed tine Kalimba of Alexis Desjardins and the ethereal dreamy vocals of Fen Rotstein (also credited for offering sampling and digital turntable contributions), Noell Dorsey and Karen Zanes. That last couplet also, between them, wrote the often siren-in-the-machine, new age lyrics for four of the Eris Wakes album’s quintet of astrological, mythological imbued tracks.
Offering the more ‘granular’ cyber voices, a sort of post-punk style of guitar, some vocals and synth, Dez and foil Andrew, with a synthesis of apparatus and ‘clocked machines’, draw all the various elements together across a cerebral-dreamt, symbolic exploration of the inner mind and outer space.
Landing in the hallucinatory force fields of ‘Spaceport 5’, the ensemble clock-up algorithms, geometry and particles whilst A.I. robots talk, whisper to an enchantment allure of wispy veiled vocals. Sophisticated subtle palpitations of Techno undulate this Orb-like matrix.
In tribune to the goddess warrior of discord and chaos, also the mythological name that was bestowed upon one of the largest known objects in the solar system, ‘Eris’ oscillates in a tumult state that mirrors the chaotic developments below, on Earth. Vague suggestions of Sven Vath and Ippu Mitsui Trance and Techno converge with Celtic water goddess maidens, Moroder and Synth-Pop to produce another fusion of Mother Earth eco and machine music.
Another astral name-check, ‘Bellatrix’ is the third brightest star in the Orion Constellation, and originally, another Greco-Latin figure: the female warrior. Here, in this sonic form, Dez voices reassuring lyrics of spiritual wellbeing; floated in a gauze of trance-y rave beats, circa 1989. The neutron star ‘Magnetas’, with its extremely powerful magnetic field, is given a House music rhythm, buoyant drum-pad bobbles and plenty of suckable airflow. Finally, the ‘Ghost Star’ brings concertinaed cybernetic voices, Djax Upbeat and The Future Sound Of London into a halcyon, gaseous realm; a heavenly celestial viewing platform.
Violet Nox circumnavigate the subconscious whilst astral-planning a N-R-G, Techno, Trance, Rave, and Synth-Pop cosmology of sounds. Most importantly, these futurist visions of spaceports, machine intelligence, and incredible science fiction never lose sight of the spiritual, the soul. And feel organic rather than machine-engineered: well, to a point. Electronic music made by humans.
Our Daily Bread 506: David J ‘What The Patrons Heard’
April 3, 2022
ALBUM REVIEW/Graham Domain
David J ‘What the Patrons Heard’
(GIVE/TAKE)
The new album by David J (one-time bassist with Bauhaus and Love and Rockets) is a collection of 10 songs recorded over the past 34 years and now released for the first time on CD, Vinyl and download. It is a mixture of original and cover version songs that cover a variety of musical styles from folk, country to punk, goth, blues, and poetry.
The first song ‘Lay Over And Lay’ sounds like the Clash or the Pogues. It has the brashness of an alternative song from the early 1980’s with its punky folk-country charge along!
The second song ‘(I Don’t Want to Destroy) Our Beautiful Thing’ sounds uncannily like Mark Lanegan in both voice and musical accompaniment: sounding not unlike the songs on Whisky for The Holy Ghost. Never the less it is an accomplished song and performance and is perhaps the best song on the album.
The next song is a rendition of Neil Youngs ‘Vampire Blues’ with funeral organ and drums underpinning intermittent heavy guitar chords and resonance. The vocals sound worn and tired like an old blues-singing preacher.
John Lennon’s ‘Gimme Some Truth’ follows sounding like a cross between Barry Adamson and The Eels. It is an interesting twisting version that adds to the original.
‘His Majesty The Executioner’ is an original song that begins like an ambient David Sylvian piece of music with acoustic guitar and looped piano before being overtaken by a storied narration, part horror, part mystery. Unfortunately, the voice is not engaging enough and the words too repetitive to sustain repeat listens.
Track 6 is ‘The Shadow’, a kind of gothic folk song, part murder ballad. It sounds like a folk song from the late 60’s or early 70’s and is reminiscent of such folk singers as Fred Neil or Nick Garrie. Perhaps it will be covered by other artists in the future.
‘The Rape of The Rose Garden’ follows and is a melancholy tale using a Rose Garden in decline as a metaphor for the decline of the American dream after the death of JFK. Musically it is a folk-country piano ballad and is successful in its telling and construction.
In ‘Scott Walker 1996’, an acoustic guitar figure repeats creating an air of mystery, suspense and drama as David J recites a poem about Scott Walker living in Holland Park, 1996, the album Tilt had been released and had put him back in the spotlight once again, but he still craved his anonymity, invisibility, wearing his baseball cap as disguise, ‘dark blue glasses for eyes’…
‘Down In the Tenderloin’ is another original song that David J sings in a higher register sounding a bit like David Bowie with the acoustic guitar somehow reminiscent of Blue Oyster Cults ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’.
‘A Girl in Port’ – is a cover version of a song written by Will Sheff for his band Okkervil River. David J here sounds like a cross between John Bramwell (I Am Kloot) and Richard Ashcroft (The Verve). A nice countryfied version of the song.
Overall, a good album. However, given the time period over which the songs were recorded, it does lack cohesion. Nevertheless it has some good songs, ‘(I Don’t Want to Destroy) Our Beautiful Thing’, ‘A Girl in Port’ and ‘Lay Over And Lay’ being the stand-out tracks.
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