A Look At What’s Out There In The World Of Music And Sonics/Dominic Valvona
Singles/Tracks/EPs:
Pons ‘The Pons Estate EP’
13th August 2021
A rambunctious gatecrash trample across aristocratic lawns, the ever-disjointed, disturbed and thrashing Pons trio gallop back onto the scene with this new EP. A somehow melodic and exciting shambles – a right tear up -, this high class troupe have expanded upon last year’s volatile, chaos in motion, stonker Intellect (which made this blog’s choice albums of 2020 features); reaching out to embrace a bastardised version of techno and nu rave. Tracks like the drum machine bobbing, electronic scattered ‘Johnny Persuasion’ knocks the shit out of the Klaxons and Late Of The Pier, whilst the erratic Lynchian inspired ‘Leland’ is a real sleazy, creeping mind-bender of The Liars, LCD Soundsystem and Swans hovering up killer lines on the set of Twin Peaks: an imaginary dungeon discotheque to be exact.
If you’ve picked up our Pons recommendations then you’ll know that the band’s signature is to make constant gear changes in their songs; from the strung-out to the dashing; noisy to surprisingly tactile; the discordant lo fi to indie-pop. This holds up well on The Pons Estate; the caustic opener, ‘Imbound!’, sprinting between wild horseplay, hints of White Denim and The Strokes (having a stroke) and the in the red looning Black Lips, yet able to throw in a more melodious no wave style saxophone or two. ‘Bardo’ by comparison, is a much more sulking languid affair of lo fi grandeur that reverberates with quivered viola (a new instrument in the Pons repertoire).
Other than that we’re looking at a brilliant manic power-up of The Parquet Floors, Tokyo Police Squad, Glamor For Better and an air, I dare say, of petulant Smiths. It’s another unruly blast of young energy and moodiness that pisses over the stately gardens of the mundane, and captures the discord of our times with rowdy flair.
Sebastian Reynolds ‘Crows EP’
(Faith & Industry) 6th August 2021
The crows are circling, which can only usually mean one thing. Yet, instead of harbingers of doom, augurs for the fall of civilizations, this carrion is reflected both with lofting clarinet majesty and an acidy techno pulse.
No stranger to cerebral contemplations, posed quandaries and spiritual philosophy, polymath composer/artist Sebastian Reynolds follow’s up The Universe Remembers and, the more recent, Nihilism Is Pointless EPs with a split release of original scores plus two treated remixes.
Featured umpteen times over the years for a multitude of collaborations and projects (from the Solo Collective triumvirate to the Maṇīmekhalā dance drama), Reynolds has only, relatively, recently taken to releasing music under his own name. The collaborations continue however, with both the adroit clarinet player Rachel Coombes (who also added evocative swanning feel to Reynolds’s The Universe Remembers) and former drummer and founding member of the Oxford band The Guillemots, Grieg Stewart appearing on the EP’s titular suite.
Coombes adds a low tone register of long wafted clarinet to the skying opener, whilst Stewart joins in slowly with a short shot of kick drum and snare as Reynolds conjures up suitably atmospheric synth throbs and ambient strokes. The mood and urgency change completely on the avian title-track; Reynolds twists the dials towards the acid techno of Mike Dred; turning up the synthesized pulsations, fizzles and mechanics on a EDM vision of the Utah Saints rewiring Amorphous Androgynus and the Public Service Broadcasting: Stewart’s drums get more of a work out that’s for sure.
Remix wise, Thai producer Pradit Saengkrai filters the original ‘Crows’ through a frazzled static rasp force field; a generated spell where the drums are rebounded and warped, and the synths made to sound more alien. L’ Étranger (the Camus inspired French house music alias incarnation of the UK’s beat maker Ben Thomas) for his treatment gives that same track an electro Basic Chanel production of 808 preset toms, drum machine tight-delay percussion and handclaps and whipped fizzes. A repeated tubular bell tolls at the end.
Reynolds vision is ambiguous on this occasion, musically and sonically experimenting with the neo-classical, electro and ambient genres yet expanding the horizons to filter techno and a sort of indie-rave Klaxons. Intentions wise, those naturally dark cloaked birds remain pretty aloof.
Albums::
Paxton Spangler Septet ‘Anthem For The New Nation’
(Eastlawn Records) 4th July 2021
Treading the fertile pathway of South African jazz, imbued by that region’s pioneers and greats for over three decades, the co-led Paxton Spangler Septet once more hone in on the magic of the pianist/composer Abdullah Ibrahim.
Paying a special homage to the fecund of talent and signature sweltered toil, spiritual and activist driven vibes that has poured out of the much troubled South Africa, trombonist Tbone Paxton and his percussionist foil RJ Spangler have collect various awards for various album projects; from recordings with the Sun Sounds Orchestra to their work with the PD9 Township Jazz troupe. Musicians from the latter of those make an appearance as part of the Septet on this latest Ibrahim dedication; the heralded Anthem For The New Nation, a title with so many connotations, released as it was on America’s Independence Day, yet from the perspective of the icon they are covering, an anthem prayer for the birth of a new, anti-apartheid South Africa.
This faithful to the course rainbow nation imbued group is ‘built’ (we’re told) around the splashed and rolling drums of Sean Perlmutter, noodling flexed bass of Damon Warmack and spirited Ibrahim recondite piano of Phil Hale. That set ups extended by Dan Bennett on tenor sax, the flute player and alto saxophonist Rafael Leafar, and second alto saxophonist Kasan Belgrave, with special guest spot on flugelhorn (of all things) from James O’Donnell. Together they make a great job of breathing life into Ibrahim’s 70s and 80s dawning back catalogue; a relaxed at times, warmly enthused saunter and pride of Safari animals like run through some of the legend’s most important, emotive pieces.
Once anointed by Nelson Mandela as ‘South Africa’s Mozart’, the rightfully lauded jazz star added a certain languid homeland groove and the classical to the jazz he’d absorbed playing in the States with such luminaries as Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Max Roach and Ornette Coleman. Signing as Dollar Bill for a while, until converting to Islam in the late 60s, Ibrahim went from the intimacy of a duo to a twelve-piece band, composing both lush hymns to his country and unofficial national anthems for the anti-apartheid movement. Anthems like ‘Manneberg’, originally released in 1974. Here the septet place it together with the title-track from the ’77 LP, Cape Town Fringe; alternating between a blend of slow bass note piano, drifting horns and a familiar township groove, and a sudden waters-breaking cascade of combined instrument duets and come alive saxophones. ‘Soweto’, the title-track from the titular ’78 LP, is another township anthem handled by the group. More celebratory, with a great Afro-jazz verging on mardi gras side ordering of funk, that 70s joyful freedom dance proves a perfect choice for this Detroit troupe, who roll the original into a new century.
This homage-performed album is dotted with Ibrahim favourites; from the lovely peaceable bustle of the balmy Highlife meets early 60s classic jazz imbued ‘African Marketplace’ (another titular composition, from the ’79 LP on Elektra) to the classical mode, trinket shaking ‘Moniebah’ (taken from the ’73 LP Good News From Africa). Optimistic undulated paeans to not only South Africa but the African continent as a whole are given a faithful soundtrack of elephant trunk trumpeted and spiralled horns, flighty flute, soulful dotted and dappled organ and shuffled drums by the ensemble in a show of respect, but also to share a love and passion for the music of an often in-turmoil land. Fans of Ibrahim won’t be disappointed, put it that way.
Giacomelli ‘Interplanetary Thoughts’
(Somewherecold Records) 30th July 2021
Machine sculptured but inspired by both Earthly nature and the cosmos, Steve Giacomelli peruses sonic ‘interplanetary thoughts’ on his fifth album for the constantly illuminating Somewherecold label.
Regular readers may have seen my premiere last September of the Silicon Valley composer’s ‘The Best Of Both Worlds, Part II’; taken from the epic sprawled Cosmic Order album of ARP synthesised lunar kosmische riches. Using that same iconic 70s apparatus for this new celestial and sun bathed, if often dramatically mysterious, set of suites the composer invokes shades of Froese, Schulze, Cluster, a bit of Eno and some Olympiad Vangelis on a glorious fanned spread of ambient waves, oscillations and equinox majestic worship.
From an enviable commanding studio lab view, perched above the Santa Cruz Mountains, light beams and life-giving forces are made concrete; captured in serene and arcing magic. Broad awakenings and phased ripples meet more Tangerine Dream imbued three-parter scaled hovers in the starry expanses of space. For this is a filmic like soundtrack that has visions of a light-playing mirage shimmered terra firma, and the fluted, whistled, solar wind blowing realms of a mystical galaxy: one that’s constantly expanding, throbbing in concentric rhythms. Both of these phenomenons take centre stage; unfurling an organic beauty and weight of awe-inspiring gravitas.
It seems odd to speak of the composition’s organic, almost naturalistic qualities, considering everything you hear is engineered electronically. Yet that’s how it feels and sounds: natural light transduced through an analogue filter.
Interplanetary Thoughts is another unheralded album of ambient brilliance from the West Coast electronic composer.
Sølyst ‘Spring’
(Bureau B) 13th August 2021
Springing, fizzing, sizzling and bouncing along to a moody and kinetic beat, Kriedler drummer (a mark of true quality if any was needed) Thomas Klein arrives with his fourth Sølyst alter-ego album.
Slotting, genealogy wise, with the Dusseldorf composer’s previous trio of albums (2011’s Sølyst, 2013’s Lead and 2016’s The Steam Age), the Spring movement of metallic and tubular percussion and beats proves a congruous fit.
Made up of material explorations from the last three years, with some elements either discarded or reworked, this latest succinct series of entitled tracks seem to be named after each composition’s rhythm and evocation. So ‘Flex’, for example, does just that; flexing between a processed drum kit of kling klang nu-wave sparks, chipping away metal blocks, and a vague flavor of lilting jug poured Africa sounds. The following track, ‘Thief’, lurks in the industrial shadows, creeping about as softened reverberated distant drums bang away – evoking a steel mesh echoed conjuncture of Die Wilde Jagd and solo Moebius.
Elsewhere it’s a case of a modern autobahning Kraftwerk motoring down neon highways; buzzing quarks and a removed affected version of cosmic steel drums; a taste of Cosey Fanni Tutti; and paddled hallowed tube beats on a highly sophisticated album of rhythmic manipulation and overlapping networks.
Xqui X SEODAH ‘Sufficiently Disconcerting’
(Wormhole World) 6th August 2021
The full name of at least one of the sonic partners in this unsettling affair should tell you all you need to know about this both Latin liturgy and supernatural inspired collaboration: Sound Effects Of Death And Horror describes this unholy union well; a six track pairing of sonic antagonist Xqui and the abbreviated, morbidly curious SEODAH.
This is the inaugural team-up; a balance of the disturbing and monastic; between unease and cathedral like choral gravitas. Half the material is a synthesized transmogrification of established Latin choral music; originally meant for solo soprano or baritones and choruses; for chamber or string quartets. ‘Timete’, ‘Exultate’ and ‘Oculi Mei’ are the suites cast in that mould; the first a merger of Tangerine Dream and Jerry Goldsmith’s Omen score, the second, a calmer glassy bauble floated and ether probing version of Popol Vuh, and the third, a kosmische traverse of metal tapped rhythms.
In between those transformations, apparitions are the panic attack deranged symphony mirage of Library Music and sampled Yank veiled, ‘An American Man Stole My Balloons’; the phasered circular drone with serial piano notes airy phantasm, ‘Probosis (Wins By A Nose)’; and the, full length horror soundtrack in its own right, Giallo scene-munching and drudge metal marching three-act ‘Hallucigenetic’.
Faith will be tested on an unnerving, ‘sufficiently disconcerting’ disturbance in sonic dread and mystery.
Viktor Timofeev ‘Palace Of Peace & Reconciliation’
(Lo Bit Landscapes) 13th August 2021
Five years on from the unexpected shutdown of label facilitators Lo Bit Landscapes’ Brooklyn home, Viktor Timofeev’s much-delayed caustic sprawl, Palace Of Peace & Reconciliation, finally emerges from all the misery and setbacks.
Originally set to follow in the wake of the noted visual artist and composer’s debut album GIVE_HEALTH999, this voyage into both the disturbing and code calculating depths of an ever alienating digital world fits in congruously with the current climate of stressed unease, uncertainty and fear.
Timofeev’s epic soundtrack like album draws you into a speed-shifted, reversed and reverberated spool-squealing, shuddering matrix. Its divided along the lines of more coarse sci-fi abstract immersions and gabbled-like sped-up manic chakras and obscured churned lo fi garage. The second half is in fact like a weird Faust like transmogrification of vague Indian music, ceremony and echoed ramblings beyond the calico wall. The first half by comparison sounds like Bernard Szajner reversing church bells as a busy signaling of date hovers overhead, on the opening unsettled nine-minute ‘Tevek Fritoiov’ suite. The atmosphere then changes on the following loop pedal guitar, pattered beat ‘Memoriatrium’: think Land Observation meets Federico Balducci.
The mysterious Alienboy featured ‘Pyramid Of Accord’ cast His Name Is Alive out into a metallic rainstorm in space. I’m not sure if it’s the so-called guest or not, but gaseous, burbled exhales and monastic moans permeate wave after wave of static frying noise and mooning.
Distortions in the fabric, unholy organ kosmische and more serene inner space meditations wait on an epic lengthened album of dissonance and warped strains; peregrinations and digital explorations. Put it this way, it’s well with the long wait.
D:Rom/Shreddies ‘Sucker’
(New Haven Tapes) 11th August 2021
What a time to be an electronic artist or DJ, yet despite the slow slog towards reopening the clubs and live venues (to a point; COVID passport of a kind holders only) one Welsh sonic dance music maverick has decided to take the plunge and set up a new label venture. Although originally envisioned solely as a vehicle for the founder, Shreddies, music, the New Haven Tapes imprint has expanded to include other like-minded noise-makers from the region’s underground scene; such as the fellow techno and footwork artist D:Rom.
The inaugural longplayer is a congruous split release, with three tracks from each artist. D:Rom kicks things off on sucker with a trio of fuzzy-squalling, warped and pumped lo fi acid from another age. Run through a reverberated, bit-crush filter ‘I Kuw Gna Paly Me’ gallops to a space invaders 8-bit and ping-pong bounce of oomphing tropical disco NRG house and Djax-Up-Beat techno, whilst ‘Bleachful’ mellows the pace a touch, as the synthesized 303 or 808 hi-hats press away to shades of slag Boom Van Loon’s ‘Poppy Seed’ and softened recollections of early Jeff Mills.
Up next, Cardiff’s won Shreddies races through resonating hi-hats and a Basic Channel like techno dance beat on the airy, melodic sinewave ‘Fuego’; mutates a fusion of trance-y 808 State and R&S Records on the housing ‘Texacco’; and goes for something altogether more shimmered and mirror-y on ‘(no body)’: imagine Laraaji refitted for a Chicago house dancefloor.
Sucker marks a positive start for this underground platform; it’s dance music, but not as you know it.
Ester Poly ‘Wet’
(Hummus Records) 20th August 2021
Four years on from their blazing feminist, contorting debut Pique Dame, and the Swiss canton post-punk rocking Ester Poly duo are back. In all that time there’s been a whole opprobrium of protestation material and issues to cause the already riled piqued dames to leap into action.
Still with the commodification and unsolicited, unwanted interest of sexual desire on their minds, the cross generational, cross cities duo of Martina Berthes and Béatrice Graf titillate with suggestive visuals and lyrics on the innuendo entitled Wet.
With that signature mix of strong female led influences (from The Slits to Delta 5 and Girls At Our Best) and a slice of humour, the busy partnership of electric bass and drums (shared vocal duties) both smashes and offers more erotic whispered sloganism on the topics of diversity and racism: A call in a manner for self-love and acceptance that implores us all to stop following “the mainstream”. (I’d add Twitter, FB et al to that list of vile, fame hungry platforms).
Despite the limitations of their instruments, Ester Poly use both abrasive and more space-y effects to widen the scope and influence of sounds. They also sing, shout, pant and breathlessly communicate tin English, German and French to varying degrees of excitement and salacious protest. It’s a sort of mantric chant however that’s used on the album’s opener and recent single, ‘Reject My Speck’: a rattled sticks on drum rims recall of The Stray Cats meets The Raincoats stumbling and scowling down a dark alley; the repeated refrain of “respect/accept” rings throughout.
They prowl and creep into the Dead Kennedys territory on the Teutonic ‘Braun’, and offer an avant-garde panting vision of Royal Blood on the French language ‘Presses’. Elsewhere they offer up tangles of post-rock, math rock, and on the album’s last couplet of remixes, an indie dance and a retreated version of Italo house meets French electro (on the Berthes and Franca Locher remix of the titular tune from the riotous grrrls debut album).
Sexual slang by-words and scented metaphors are floated or thrown around in a vortex of strong-willed feminine wiles and irony throughout this fruity exchange. It seems there’s still enough “pique” to go round, as the Swiss duo demands ownership and respect in a fit of post-punk and beyond energy.
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.
The Monolith Cocktail Social Playlist #58: Hus KingPin, Mick Ronson, Lotus Eaters, The Who, Shriekback, MF Grimm…
August 10, 2021
The Eclectic & Generational Spanning Playlist/Dominic Valvona
An imaginary radio show, a taste of our DJ sets, the Monolith Cocktail Social is a playlist selection that spans genres and eras to create the most eclectic of soundtracks. With tributes to those albums celebrating anniversaries this year too. Compiled by Dominic Valvona. This month’s edition includes nods to Cypress Hill (their highly influential West Coast Hip-Hop stoner raged debut is thirty years old this August), The Rolling Stones (Tattoo You is unbelievably forty years old this month) and The Who (their monolith piss stop, Who’s Next, is fifty years old).
Joining them are newish and old tunes from the Brazilian force in rap, Hus KingPin, a recently resurfaced Mick Ronson at the Old Grey Whistle Test live recording, a couple of cover versions of Brian Wilson magic from Jem Records recent celebratory compilation of California’s favourite son, and a high fluting meandering stunner from Jeremy Steig. Plus music from the Lotus Eaters, Bunalimlar, Black Randy & The Metro Squad, Les Shleau Shleu, Dennis Wilson, Shriekback, MF Grimm and loads more of the good stuff.
Settle for no substitutes; expect to hear anything and everything.
Those Tracks In Full Are:
Barbara Acklin ‘I’m Living With A Memoary’
Shriekback ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’
Jeremy Steig ‘Love Potion’
The Art Of Lovin’ ‘The First Time’
Geza X The Mommymen ‘Rio Grande Hotel’
The Intelligence ‘Celebration Ratio’
Perth County Conspiracy ‘Take Your Time’
Volo Volo ‘Manman’
Bunalimalr ‘Başak Saçlim’
Jiraphand Ong-Ard ‘Siamese Boxing’
Otis Jackson Jr. Trio ‘Free Son’
Cypress Hill ‘Hand On The Pump’
MF Grimm ‘Crumbs’
Binary Star ‘Conquistadors (Ft. Senim Silla & One Be Lo)
Piero Umiliani ‘Tiger Jazz’
DMZ ‘Watch For Me Girl’
Black Randy & The Metro Squad ‘Beer Shit/Disco Loner’
The Gold Needles ‘Love And Mercy’
The Folksmen ‘Start Me Up’
Hus KingPin ‘Mab’s’
J Scienide ‘Greetings From Bora Bora’
Ugo Busoni, Massimo D Cicco & Paolo Ferrara ‘Tokyo’
Mick Ronson ‘Play Don’t Worry (Live)’
The Beach Boys ‘Fallin’ In Love’
Geoff & Maria Muldaur ‘Catch It’
Richie Havens ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’
Les Shleu Shleu ‘Gratteur’
Riz Ortolani ‘Picco Di Adamo’
Elizabeth Wyld ‘Something You Might Regret’
The Rolling Stones ‘Waiting On A Friend’
Dyke & The Blazers ‘Call My Name’
The Grip Weeds ‘Heroes & Villians/Roll Plymouth Rock’
The Tiffany Shade ‘One Good Question’
Gary McFarland ‘Suburbia Two Poodles And A Plastic Jesus’
The Lotus Eaters ‘Untitled 2’
Selector: Dominic Valvona
Our Daily Bread 462: Seaside Witch Coven, Snowcrushed, Emily Isherwood, William Carlos Whitten…
August 5, 2021
Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea’s Reviews Roundup
The cult leader of the infamous lo fi gods, The Bordellos, Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea has released countless recordings over the decades with his family band of hapless unfortunates, and is the owner of a most self-deprecating sound-off style blog. His most recent releases include the King Of No-Fi album, a collaborative derangement with the Texas miscreant Occult Character, Heart To Heart, and a series of double-A side singles (released so far, ‘Shattered Pop Kiss/Sky Writing’, ‘Daisy Master Race/Cultural Euthanasia’ and ‘Be My Maybe/David Bowie’). He has also released, under the Idiot Blur Fanboy moniker, a stripped-down classic album of resignation and Gallagher brothers’ polemics.
Each month we supply him with a mixed bag of new and upcoming releases to see what sticks.
Singles/Tracks.
Seaside Witch Coven ‘A.E.O’
16th July 2021
I like this: Well obviously or I would not be arsed writing about it. But I like how it captures the days of Newport when it was being called ‘The UK’s Seattle’, and my days of rehearsing in the Disgraceland rehearsal rooms, and going watching bands at the Legendary TJ’S, and also how it reminds me of the wonderful, should have been more successful, wonky ALICE – maybe the finest band ever to set foot out of Oldham.
Yes this track has a genre jumping magic about it; punk rock psych with a melody one can hum while you lose yourselves in memories of your youth; back to the good old days when your body worked and you still believed you could change things with a guitar and a pen and a melody. And you never know, Seaside Witch Coven may succeed where I failed.
Bloom De Wilde ‘Garden Of The Sun’
23rd July 2021
The Fabulous Bloom De Wilde is back with a summery light pop ska tinged single to brighten up our daily lives. Once again shedding love to the masses through melodies sublime and her wonderful voice – a voice that could melt the hardest of hearts. How we need Bloom to weave her romantic musical magic on the world, to put a spring into our collective steps and spread joy. She is a true to life cartoon character that should be embraced; a throwback to the times when pop stars where otherworldly; when we thought Marc Bolan was a glam prince from a Tolkien novel and Bowie was from another planet.
‘Garden of The Sun’ is a brief glimpse into a shimmering sun; an explosion of innocence and purity of pop. It even finishes with the sound of a child’s laugh and nothing is as pure and innocent and magical as that.
Emily Isherwood ‘See You Go’
(Breakfast Records) 16th July 2021
There is something of the Harriett Wheeler about Emily Isherwood. She had the same melancholy clarity in the vocals; the same as their voices soar, their hearts break, sound of baring souls and feelings in her art. And ‘See you Go’ is a beautifully performed and written song: and really one could not ask for more. It’s not a song that kicks you between the legs but one that gently tugs on your forelocks and whispers in your ear.
Albums/EPs..
Various ‘The Rough Guide To The Best Country Blues You’ve Never Heard Volume 2’
(World Music Network/Rough Guides) 30th July 2021
In some ways I should be showing thanks for being sent so much unexciting bland generic new music to review over the last few weeks or otherwise I would not have listened to this fine 26 track compilation of old country blues music; a music steeped in soul heartache and dark humour. Plus it also appeals to my lo-fi loving soul and is filled with a certain magic music really does not quite capture as much these days. Why is that I do not know as we’re certainly living in troubled times. Maybe a microphone placed in front of a talented songwriter/performer is frowned upon, but there is something special about hearing an artist open his soul without studio trickery and sheen. Maybe it’s the way forward.
These 26 tracks are all brilliantly written, performed with, as I have already mentioned, deep soul and a fine grasp of beautiful simple melodies. Tommie Bradley‘s ‘When You’re Down And Out’ being a fine example: a song with a melody so sweet it could make a statue weep. And there is something that makes you warm inside hearing an out-of-tune harmonica and nonsensical stream of lyrics pouring forth from a cheap acoustic guitar toting Bogus Ben Covington, who’s ‘It’s A Fight Like That’ is just one of the many highlights on this beautifully entertaining compilation; an album that asks maybe it’s time we turned our back on tech and relied on pure song writing talent instead.
Graham Domain ‘Without The Darkness…The Stars Could Not Shine’
(Metal Postcard Records) 9th July 2021
The wonderful unique sound of Graham Domain is back. And he’s back with his best album yet; nine songs recorded in last year’s lockdown that capture the uncertainty and sadness and madness of the times.
Graham takes his love of tinkling piano hand held percussion and string synths to a new level on Without The Darkness…The Stars Could Not Shine. At times the slightly deranged beauty of Graham’s songs is really quite heart stopping, dark, mysterious but with a subtle musical humour: ‘Limbs Of Loneliness’ reminding me of how the soundtrack of Bagpuss might have sounded like if written and performed by David Sylvain. But as I have already said, Graham Domain is unique. You can hear his influences (Scott Walker, Japan, Marc Almond/Soft Cell) but he adds his own strangeness; adding an almost layer of lounge based homemade psychedelia: If Syd Barret had not done acid and played a Casio keyboard he might have sounded like this. And you can tell that Graham is a huge Motown fan as ‘Giving Up On Heartache’ is a wonderful soul song, and you could easily imagine Smokey Robinson crooning it quite beautifully – and is also my favourite track on the album, a gem of a song. And that is what so magical about Graham Domain, a man with a love of music in its many genres in which he soaks up and releases in his own unique way.
Without The Darkness…The Stars Could Not Shine is a fine album and deserves to be heard by a larger audience.
Corduroy Institute ‘Eight/Chance/Meetings’
21st June 2021
I like artists who try and make pop music interesting; they should be rewarded by people taking notice of their endeavors, and that is what attracted me to this LP: an album with a sense of adventure and trying to keep things interesting.
I could have easily chosen to write about another quite good album with guitar and bass and drums with songs about girls and love and such, but why waste my time when there is an album of sublime beauty and depth to listen to. And Eight/Chance/Meetings is such an album; an album of ‘Pure Improvisation’ and cut up lyrics, and at times it reminds me of Bowie/late Scott Walker and the Talking heads with a touch of the David Sylvain’s about it. So yes it is arty, but music is art: probably the greatest artform.
It won’t appeal to the Oasis fan on the whole, but anybody who loved one of the best albums of last year Sum Total Of Insolent Blank by the Santa Sprees will absolutely adore it, and with very good cause because the album is adorable. It has wit, adventure, darkness, and has so much style I feel I should be wearing a velvet smoking jacket whilst listening to it. Yes, one of my albums of the year I feel…an album of experimental pop grace.
Snowcrushed ‘A Frightened Man’
21st July 2021
The Debut album by Snowcrushed is a wonderful thing; the sound of a soft and slow descent into slumber only to find nightmares waiting to taunt and poke you in the ribs and call you a cunt when you arrive into a land where Alice would buy her dream home only to find that all the other inhabitants are lesser cardboard mortals who spend their days in a constant merry go round of drudgery and conversations of what happened in last night’s episode of Coronation Street.
A Frightened Man is a rare and magical thing, an ambient album that embraces melody, an album that softly sucks you into its vacuum and tells of a story of being trapped by your imagination and the lack of other peoples. I think I may have stumbled onto something special here, maybe the new star the new kid on the block in the strange world that is the ambient music scene: maybe the new Beatles in that genre. I think after hearing this the excellent Submarine Recordings and Wormhole World records might be giving themselves an almighty kick at not having the chance to release this.
A frightened Man is an album that is both haunting and beautifully rewarding.
Various ‘Summer Sampler #8’
(Howling Banana Records) 16th July 2021
What we have here my little cockylorums is a free download sampler from the wonderfully named Howling Banana Records, and it is an album that skips from the Ramones like fun of Johnny Mafia, whose track ‘TV & Disney’ is a sunshine ice cream split of punk adventure, to the country-tinged Glama Rola of The Da Freak’s ‘Coco Cola’, through to the Shoegaze pop of Pop Crimes’ ‘There Were Smiles’.
Yes, this is an album for the lovers of the indie guitar; an album that will please and caress the earlobes of those who seek pleasant strum-along indie guitar in its many forms: all melodies and tuneful meandering. An ideal soundtrack to your days in your garden or beach soaking up the sun.
William Carlos Whitten ‘My Life In Cinema’
(Wormhole World) 23rd July 2021
William Carlos Whitten has a bit of the early 70s Bowie’s and Lennon about him, which is certainly not a bad thing. And he certainly knows his way around a catchy melody and how to write an old-fashioned pop song, as this album is full of them: You cannot go wrong with home recorded synths drum machines and homespun melodrama.
I can imagine Williams’ bedroom wall being covered with Mott The Hoople posters and him owning at least one copy of every Lou Reed 70s album. This is an album that deserves an album review by the late Lester Bangs, but as he is dead I expect one shall not be forthcoming, unless of course he is channeling me as I write this. But I somehow doubt it, unless one loses 90 per cent of your talent from the other side.
This is a rather splendid album that is worthy of Charles Douglas and the more I listen the more I wish I had heard about it before the ltd cd had sold out. But that I am afraid is the joy of being on a tiny label. But cannot one speak higher praise than to say that I would have paid hard earned cash to add this cd to my large collection, as would have you if you had heard about it. A lovely pop gem that is authentically lovely with a touch of sleaze.
Girl No. III ‘High-Five For Five/Four’
(Illywacker Records) 30th July 2021
The unusual sound of disturbance; an unbalanced tray of musical disco fanny; a subdued look into the mind of a psychotic zookeeper, or, the heart of a beating living mechanical tombstone. Yes, this strange avant-garde journey through Jazz and spiritual invention game-playing tomfoolery is one worth listening to, but not if you have a headache or in need of space for quiet reflection, as this gem of invention is all over the place and best listened to on headphones unless you want the death stare from other family members.
This is an album for lovers of alt jazz or more experimental works of synth wielding Coltrane fanatics.
Sorrows ‘Love Too Late’
(Big Stir Records) 13th August 2021
Not to be confused with the classic 60s British beat band The Sorrows, led by Don Fardon, but the late 70s early 80s American power pop band Sorrows, who are back with a brand-new album, or in fact a rerecording of their second album, which they were never happy with on the label that spills forth power pop goodness on it seems like a whim: Big Stir Records.
So, you know what to expect: jangling guitars, melodies sublime and songs of love and girls and all things power pop songs are about. No surge into the mists of dark wave or outpourings of contempt for the powers that be; no rapper appearing mid-way through the song extolling the virtues of a big booty then pissing off again. No, what we have are eleven songs of well self-written guitar-based pop – well 10 actually, as there is also a decent cover of the Kinks ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’.
They make no attempt at hiding their love for mid-sixties Beatles, especially on the Lennon like ‘Rita’: although it is not mentioned whether she was lovely or not. Sorrows obviously love the power and magic of rock ‘n’ roll and are entrenched in its spirit: If you cut them I’m sure they would bleed 12 string guitars, the power chord and melody.
Our Daily Bread 461: Uncommon Nasa ‘Only Child’
August 3, 2021
ALBUM REVIEW/DOMINIC VALVONA
Uncommon Nasa ‘Only Child’
(Uncommon Records) 6th August 2021
Encompassing the local and surrounding areas of the city he’s never left, the leftfield candid hip-hop artist Uncommon Nasa takes a poignant look back at his roots on his sixth studio album, Only Child. For a rap artist known for their open delivery, this latest soliloquy and sagacious lyrical roll is possibly the most personal yet.
Now into his early forties (the release date is actually the day after Nasa’s 43rd birthday) and as the slurred and slowed down sample on the album track ‘Your Hands will Turn To Rust’ remarks, “I’m the kind of a guy who is now in that ageing late thirty, early forty bracket in which suddenly there is a tremendous bittersweet poignant feeling about wanting to go back to another time…” And so it is the same for Nasa: dispensing wisdom, the short tales of those who made an impact on his life, and the growing pains, memories of those formative years on both Long Island and Staten Island (where he still lives).
The album title describes Nasa’s unique perspective, growing up without siblings; spending a lot of time alone but developing a rich, cerebral imagination, lyrical skills and an eclectic taste in music. Now decades on, and with his long time partner the open-minded reflective rapper runs, meanders and drops lines about all the connections and ‘what ifs?’ About the tropes that so many of us in a similar age bracket (that’s me: the only child) either agonize over or ponder. With no children of his own (again, that’s also me), the lineage stops when Nasa leaves this mortal coil (God forbid!). Although the musical legacy and his view of the world will live on: “If I die, just see it as I did”.
Nasa flies solo on this album: and all the better for it. So many hip-hop artists fill their work with umpteen cameos – the bread and butter of so many emcees, hoping to appeal to a multiple of fans. Only Child is however produced by the Baltimore ‘beat-placer’ Messiah Musik , who’s lent his trade to Mach-Hommy’s ‘Pray For Haiti’ and cuts by Billy Woods and Quelle Chris. Messiah has worked with Nasa before of course, on the 2014 release, New York Telephone. He now provides a highly atmospheric, often psychedelic, moody and mysterious cosmic soundscape on this brilliant epiphany. Against Nasa’s intelligent trains of consciousness that production proves a congruous fit; subtle, minimal at times, with the most evocative of leftfield jazzy-prog touches. The elemental particle opener, ‘Quark Strangeness In The Hour Of Chaos’, for instance has that echo-y atmosphere of harmonic pining jazzy-prog looseness (bordering on Pink Floyd), as Nasa’s strung-out and just as loose inner thoughts drip and starkly limber up. It actually reminded me a little of Sex And Violence era BDP, with its almost foreboding unveiling of thoughts from a dark tech dystopia.
Already picked up by Monolith Cocktail collaborator Matt Oliver (who also included Nasa’s Kount Fif produced 2019 album, City As School, in our choice albums list) for our monthly revue playlist, precursor single ‘U86’ features some reworked Southeast Asian or Japanese soundtrack; the Oriental bed for a track about tuning into the localized TV station of the title, which offered a window into a whole world of music for a young Nasa, including Tears For Fears. Not shy in conveying his feelings, Nasa raps, “Tears For Fears, I cried when I heard that song, I don’t know why I listened to it for so long.” By the time we reach the Run The Jewels mirage title-track the production has changed to embrace a lunar Peruvian panpipe! Later on, the theme music from some 70s detective or thriller series, accompanied by crunched turning over drum breaks, wraps itself around another album single, ‘Brooklyn Soup’: a psychogeography like walk in the boroughs.
That eclectic ear for a sample, break continues with ‘Vincent Crane’; a discovery that Nasa implores as, “just one example of things you should, might know.” The fateful travails of the bi-polar Crane, who spent most of his life in and out of clinics after suffering a mental breakdown during his first tour of the USA with the Crazy World Of Arthur Brown in 1968, permeated an evocative songbook, which decades later left an indelible mark upon Nasa. Before a tragic overdose in 1989, Crane would collaborate with Brown on a “deep cut” album and set up Atomic Rooster with a pre supergroup ELP Carl Palmer. I think Nasa uses a short piano break from Atomic’s Made In England LP (the introduction before ‘Breathless’) as he waxes lyrical about not only Crane but the common trajectory of all music genres in general over time: “Turns out that if you give a genre a few decades, the same roads are sought.”
Only Child is a mature, often bittersweet, review of a life lived and the characters that made it what it was and is; from Nasa’s parents to the uncompromising figure of ‘Metal Mike’). Nasa goes deep; entangled in a multitude of slipstreamed thoughts and mixed feelings; observations and reflections on the realties of middle age in a society that doesn’t ever want to comprehend their own deaths, let alone grow old. Certain memories pop up and prove relevant in this process, from his mother’s repeated echoing warnings (“If you touch that fence, your hand’s will turn to rust”) to the more innocuous details of his Brooklyn diorama.
It’s not just age that prays on the mind, but the unprecedented times in which we all find ourselves; sixteen months on after the initial Covid lockdowns and fear prevailed miasma of a virus determining how we live. This proves a good as any time to take stock and reflect; something Nasa does with dexterous skill and a cerebral half spoken winding brilliance (close in tone and brilliance to Aesop Rock). Nasa’s just claimed a top spot on the hip-hop pyramid with one of the best albums in 2021.
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.
PLAYLIST SPECIAL/Dominic Valvona/Matt Oliver/Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Already plowing through the summer of Covid Year Two era, the Monolith Cocktail has chosen another eclectic jamboree of choice tracks from the last month: mostly from albums/singles we’ve reviewed, but a few we never got around to featuring on the blog. There’s a heavy Beach Boys presence, what with California’s greatest sons releasing the eagerly anticipated Sunflower and Surf’s Up sessions and goodies box set, Feel Flows, next month. We also have the return of Los Lobos, who cover their fellow Californian neighbours’ ‘Sail On Sailor’ for their new album Native Sons.
We also have Matt Oliver on the rap control, sorting through July’s tsunami of new hip-hop releases. Matt also pays homage to the late idiosyncratic golden age innovator Biz Markie, who died only a few days ago at the age of 57.
Expect the usual unusual, with tracks from the Regressive Left, Xhosa Cole, Pozi, Luaran Hibberd, Project Hilts, The Doppelgangaz, Joe Blow, Ed Scissor & Lamplighter, CIX, Faust, Jason Nazary and more.
Tracks:.
Regressive Left ‘Cream Militia’
Jean-Pierre Djeukam ‘Africa Iyo’
Xhosa Cole ft. Soweto Kinch & Reuben James ‘Untitled Boogaloo’
Biz Markie ‘Pickin’ Boogers’
Native Soul ‘Dead Sangoma’
N’Famady Kouyaté ft. Lisa Jên Brown ‘Aros I fi Yna’
Contento ‘Al Lao del Río’
Pozi ‘Sea Song’
Werewolf Hair ‘Throw Me A Bone’
Lauran Hibberd ‘Bleugh’
Yammerer ‘Tell Me What The Ancient Astronaut Theorists Believe’
Jack Name & Aoife Nessa Frances ‘Watching The Willows Burn’
Los Lobos ‘Sail On, Sailor’
The Beach Boys ‘This Whole World (Alternate Ending)’
The Poppermost ‘Yes It’s True’
Platonica Erotica ‘I Can’t Be Your Everyting’
Project Hilts ‘Dark Side’
Nick Roberts ft. Ash The Author & DJ JabbaTheKut ‘Codebreaker’
The Doppelgangaz ‘Triple D’
Joe Blow & Mr. Substance ft. DJ Jaffe ‘Hypertension’
Roughneck Jihad ‘Handbook’
Swindle ft. Loyle Carner, Kojey Radical & JNR Williams ‘LOST’
Ed Scissor & Lamplighter ‘R U Alone?’
Kety Fusco ‘Ma Gnossienne’
Anton Barbeau ‘I Love It When She Does The Dishes’
Heyme ‘Without A Paddle’
The Telephone Numbers ‘Pictures Of Lee’
Reuban Vaun Smith ‘Flee The Coop’
Devin Gray ft. Ralph Alessi & Angelica Sanchez ‘Melt All The Guns’
Juga-Naut & Giallo Point ‘Smoke Filled Room’
Web Web (Max Herre & Yusef Lateef) ‘Akinuba/The Heart’
CIX ‘Whirl’d In The Pool’
Tekilla ‘Se Eu…’
Saba Alizadeh ft. Andreas Specthl ‘Phasing Shadows’
Belcirque ‘Sumac y Cúrcuma’
Karen Zanes ‘Carnival Mirror’
Wyndow ‘Pulling On A String’
Jason Nazary ft. Grey McMurray ‘Days & Nights, for Em’
Girl No. III ‘An Impressed Imp Rests’
Liliane Chela ‘Charr’
PTČ ft. Vazz ‘PAPAGAJ’
Sandy Chamoun ‘Siret El Ro3eb’
Passepartout Duo ‘Plainness’
Occult Character ‘Cool Kid Mummy’
Faust ‘Fernlicht’
The Beach Boys ‘Surf’s Up (A Cappella)’
Our Daily Bread 460: Xhosa Cole ‘K(no)w Them, K(no)w Us’
July 27, 2021
ALBUM REVIEW/DOMINIC VALVONA
Xhosa Cole ‘K(no)w Them, K(no)w Us’
(Stoney Lane Records) 30th July 2021
Collecting an enviable array of accolades already, at such an early point in their career, the Jazz FM Breakthrough Artist of the Year in 2020 and BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year in 2018 tipped saxophonist Xhosa Cole, can boast quite a resume. With it however comes great expectations and anticipation.
Xhosa certainly has the skills, as shown when performing at the BBC Proms and at Ronnie Scotts’; rubbing shoulders with the UK’s stalwart jazz luminary Courtney Pine and Monty Alexander. There’s also been the most congruous of guest spots on both Soweto Kinch’s The Black Peril and the R&B songwriter Machalia’s Love And Compromise albums.
That’s the professional CV out of the way. Let’s now talk about Xhosa’s formative years, exposed to the African-American progenitors of jazz. Various anecdotal experiences that unleashed a passion in the saxophonist are channeled into this debut album of jazz standards reinterpretations; and surprisingly a number of smoother 1920s romantic serenades from the great American songbook,
Through a contemporary ‘black British lens’, as it’s framed, K(no)w Them, K(no)w Us (which adopts and repurposes Dizzy Gillespie’s original homage quote about Louis Armstrong: ‘no him, no me’) is a largely faithful attempt to capture the spark, joy and essence of creating something new with old jazz favorites. Although loaded with a biography in the press spill, with all good intentional references to Xhosa’s LGBTQIA+ community identity, the issues of race, and campaigns to help black hopefuls to get a decent break in the music industry, this album isn’t so much a cry for justice, opportunity and equality but a very decent, sometimes exceptional, transformation from a different, contemporary perspective of jazz music that in its own way was just as fresh, dynamic and game changing back in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. An expression of fluidity and freedom you could say that finds room to expand and play with the original signatures of those seven classic compositions.
Joining Xhosa on this homage to the greats, the innovators, and sweet spot inspirations are Jay Phelps on trumpet, James Owston on double bass and James Bashford on drums. This set up is further expanded with guest spots from fellow Birmingham jazz talents, the already mentioned saxophonist Kinch and pianist Reuben James. All of who prove as adroit, masterful and dynamic as their focal bandleader.
It all begins with a free rolling NYC style skyline tooted and spiralled horns version of Woody Shaw’s Hungarian folk opera and Lydian mode free jazz march ‘Zoltan’. Originally the kick starter on the organist Larry Young’s iconic ‘post-bop’ classic Unity, for the equally iconic Blue Note label in ’66, Xhosa and quartet turn it inside out with dry spit rasping horns, splashes and cushioned tight drilled drum rolls. They do however maintain the core drive and melodies of the original.
The great innovator extraordinaire and saxophone god Ornette Coleman, has his turn-of-the-60s ‘Blues Connotation’ composition injected with a well-oiled dynamism that feels quite faithful to the source again. Appearing on Coleman’s fifth album, This Is Our Music, with his quartet, that track followed a thematic concept; blending all the various strands of group improvisation, from Dixie to the progressive, and of course the blues and swing. This take of that class performance skips, quickens and even rushes along to that same set of influences, both wildly and in step; loose and fluted; swinging and abstract.
Another of the great jazz progenitors, Thelonious Monk sees his ’59 ‘Played Twice’ composition handled with care by the quartet. The original of course featured on Monk and his quintet’s (hence the album riffed title) 5 By Monk By 5 album. With a dash of be-bop swing and leaning towards Dizzy, this contemporary version seems to be constantly on the move in a dot-dash like progression.
Album finale, ‘Untitled Boogaloo’ by the fatalistic trumpet demigod Lee Morgan also gets into the swing of things; Boogaloo alright, bordering on driving R&B and Stax like soul. The original appears on a couple of posthumously released late 70 albums (on the Blue Note catalogue), but was recorded a decade before. A real hot-stepper groove, Xhosa uses it to announce and credit each member of his band; all of who get a little solo spot. Just as cool, rambunctious and fun, the ensemble makes a great job of it.
In a less busy mode, and playing to the romantic in Xhosa, there’s a trio of pre-war standards. The oldest of which, ‘Manhattan’, first appeared in the Garrick Gaieties revue of ’25. Composed by Richard Rodgers with words by Lorenz Hart, this meandrous jolly lovers budget tour of the city skit made lyrical “delights” out of Manhattan’s least desirable spots and cheap side landmarks: “We’ll turn Manhattan into an Isle Of Joy”. Wordless on this occasion, the quartet play hard and fast with the original score; refashioning the piano parts to resemble Oscar Peterson’s idiosyncratic touch rather than roaring 20s gaiety. It must be stated at this point that James’ pianist skills are very, very good; with keyboard patterns that seem to flow like a waterfall, merged with more loosened trills, dabs and off-kilter singular stabs.
A moonlit serenade, Tadd Dameron’s (in this version arranged by W. Markham) bluesy caress, ‘On A Misty Night’, is played with a tenderness. This legendary composer and arranger worked with a litany of the crème de crème: from Count Basie through to Coltrane and Dizzy. And this song has been reinterpreted by the best of them to in the past, with Xhosa’ version sailing closest to the latter of those great names.
Also close to Xhosa’s heart is Bob Haggart’s original 30s torch song, ‘What’s New’, which a year after its initial unveiling by Bob Crosby and his Orchestra saw Johnny Burke add ‘casual conversational lovers’ style lyrics. Again, covered by a litany of legends, from Louis Armstrong to Dexter Gordon, and made extra special and stirring by Billie Holiday, Xhosa and guests conjure up a sentimental enough and elegant performance of wandering languorous yearned saxophone and walking basslines.
If anything, all these reinterpretations prove just how innovative and even pleasurable the source material was, and still is. And this album remains a touching, respectful tribute to those pleasures. There’s always enough space to chance something a little different and fresh; some individual flares, expansions and concentrated thrills. Despite all the outside motivations that are funnelled into this debut, it remains a loving homage to the unadulterated joys of discovering music in your formative years; especially something you can instantly relate to, or that makes the growing pains, woes and uncertainties of youth seem so much clearer: an inspiration rather than drawback. Whilst never personally really thinking at all about the sexuality of those that have gone before in the jazz community, Xhosa offers a fresh perspective, musical language in what is, at least from my experiences, still an overwhelmingly heterosexual male dominated scene: an extremely egotistical and snobby one at that.
What Xhosa does is now help to widen that community and scope, whilst still keeping faithful to the music. And what a talent Xhosa is; backed by a more than capable, in fact highly adroit, band that feels its way around a great legacy. One to keep an ear out for; the potential is great in this rising jazz star.
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.
Our Daily Bread 459: Heyme ‘Moving On’
July 22, 2021
ALBUM REVIEW/DOMINIC VALVONA
Heyme ‘Moving On’
(Jezus Factory) 15th July 2021
A solemn lovelorn Scary Lodger In Another World, confined to the attic troubadour Heyme Langbroek is at it again with another despondent songbook of self-flagellation and modern world bewilderment. Still imbued by the oozing snozzled saxophone of Hansa Studio period Bowie and Eno and forlorn Northern European maladies, Heyme’s fourth solo release is yet another understated album of pained, resigned and cynical post-punk crooning.
The former Kiss My Jazz, I H8 Camera and Lionell Horrowitz maverick and general Benelux underground alt-rock instigator (rubbing shoulders with ex-members of the dEUS brethren), splits his Moving On songbook into scuzzy rockers and more lingered, slower jazzy numbers: though the jazz in this case is a transmogrified version of the smoky lounge set, and often sounds like a knowing pastiche.
A deeply voiced, almost emotionless, mix of Blixa Bargeld, a dive bar Scott Walker and very removed Leonard Cohen, Heyme’s white man’s blues delivery ruminates on various ill-fated relationships and travails, weary noted observations of a social media, mobile phone obsessed world. There’s also a punchier fuzz-scowl plead for an end to the madness of the Covid restrictions that have strangled the life out of live music, but also the promise of tactile human connection: ‘Ready2Roll’ takes a swipe at streaming with a “fuck Spotify” sneer. Most often than not, the anger and rage; the longing and suicidal love lost angst, are disarmed by the languorous, romantic music. A sort of mellowed doo-wop meandrous walk for instance, enervates the intention behind the Jello Biafra-does-the-most-odd-Cohen-impression antifa anthem, ‘It’s A Beautiful Day (To Kill A Nazi)’. And the country Dylan-esque harmonica breezed and folky ‘Without A Paddle’ almost conceals the “up shit’s creek” despair of a suicidal breakup or divorce: Alone, isolated, left with nothing but a “guitar and the bills”, and so low and penniless that he fails to do a Cobain because his ex even took the bullets from his gun in the settlement.
Swaddled cornet-trumpet, Hunk Dory subtle Ronson guitar arches and bends, Casio keyboard preset rhythms and malingering sax all mingle on an album of stark humored resentment, lament and (again) the blue. It’s a melancholic, isolated toll of the times we find ourselves; the detached sulky plaints of a Northern European romantic, stuck indoors with only his thoughts to keep him company.
A Look At What’s Out There by Dominic Valvona
THE SINGLES/TRACKS/VIDEOS SELECTION:
Motorists ‘Through To You’
(We Are Time) Out There Now
Jangling towards the sound of power pop, with excursions to the golden age of Athens, Georgia, the Toronto-based Motorists channel a disarming melodious, infectious miscellaneous of R.E.M., The Weather Prophets, Guadalcanal Diary, The Three O’ Clock, Teenage Fanclub and fellow Canadians, Sloan on their ‘preview type’ showcase, ‘Through To You’. Dropping in the long lead up to the trio’s debut album Surrounded (released on the 3rd September) as an sort of introduction statement of intent, the rather marvelous underground paisley chimed and driving gentle, winding rocker certainly gets my seal of approval.
‘Through to You’ we’re told, is a song about ‘a yearning to connect with other people, attempting to peel back the curtain of solitude that has engulfed us over the last 15 months or so. Written during the first lockdown, when hope for a bit of familiarity was starting to blossom, it zeroes in on the desire to feel close to someone without having to speak a word.’ We can all relate to that.
Speaking about the song, Motorists guitarist/vocalist Craig Fahner (flanked in this set up by Matt Learoyd on bass, and Jesse Locke on drums) has this to say: “It’s an unabashedly nostalgic song, both musically and lyrically. It’s about teenage love, fucking around in the summertime, and most of all, the joy of finding a shared language beyond words to connect with the people around you – a language that operates outside of the rigidity of everyday life.”
The video that accompanies it was created by Fahner and Michelle Lemay, and features the band performing live in-studio. It harkens back to the ’70s and ’80s German TV program Beat Club, which featured live performances from musicians playing against a backdrop of analog video psychedelia.
The rock ‘n’ roll tropes of getting away from it, escaping in a cult automobile – even if the realties of driving in an ever gridlocked world prove contrary to that myth -, are all in evidence as the band investigate the “isolation” of a “technologically saturated society, laden with romanticism around radical togetherness.” Expect a full review later this year when that album drops.
PTČ ‘PAPAGAJ Ft. Vazz’
Out There Right Now
Yeah I know: Slovenian Hip-Hop, who’d have thought it! And yet it exists, and I can confirm it’s actually very good. This shortish skit from the Ljubljana based duo of PTČ is the last in a series of singles to drop from their upcoming debut album ‘NEKI TKO VSAKDAN’ (or Everyday Similes). Featuring fellow compatriot rapper Vazz, ‘PAPAGAJ’ features stark stanzas peppered over a playful but edgy hip-hop beat. The accompanying video visuals are said to combine ‘the bleakness of abandoned military hangars with youthful naivety’.
The much-contested Central European Republic gateway to the northern alpines, southern Balkans and east has seen its fair share of history and conflict; in the great break up of Yugoslavia in the 90s, Slovenia once more broke loose. Going through some the duo’s previous tracks, it seems they reinvent the Slavic culture of old and romanticised feudal traditions with low rider east coast American rap, R&B, Jeru The Damaja and the Wu-Tang Clan (amongst many others). The results of which provide a fresh new unique commentary on the contemporary; a whole different perspective. I implore you to check both them and Vazz out as soon as possible: you’ll thank me for it.
ALBUMS SELECTION:
Kaukolampi: We Jazz Reworks Vol.1
(We Jazz Records) 30th July 2021
Barely recognizable, the first ten albums from the Helsinki-based label We Jazz are transformed, transmogrified and taken to the outer limits of an ambiguous cosmos – a place, level, dimension where Pharoah Sanders breaks bread with the Drum Circus, Syrinx, Ariel Kalma, Amon Düül II and Madlib – in the first of a new series of outsider reinventions.
Fellow Finn and sonic force behind K-X-P, foil to Tuomo Puranen, Timo Kaukolampi is the inaugural artist to take on the challenge of reinventing that contemporary jazz imprint’s back catalogue. With complete freedom Kaukolampi has created an impressive, untethered kosmische, krautrock and abstract progressive jazz soundtrack in ten parts. Unveiled and performed originally at the We Jazz Festival showcase in 2018, but subsequently built upon on over several further studio sessions, this reworked venture frazzles, reverberates, effects, bends, pulls apart and samples bits and bobs from records by such roster acts as Alder Ego and the Bowman Trio, amongst others: though without any reference points in the notes it’s anyone’s guess as to what exact phrases, performances, drum breaks appear, reconstructed out in the expanses of an echoed space.
Saxophone trills mutate, float or snozzle in various ethers and on various planes, whilst the trinket tingles, resonated and splashed gongs and bells create a mystical atmosphere: a pathway to transcendence. Although divided into ten parts, each passage, traverse, experimental drama flows into the next, like one long continuous suite. Yet some parts traverse replenished insect chattering rainforests, whilst others touch upon satellites, comets and the unidentified objects of a cosmic courier galaxy. The drums however become staccato breaks in the fashion of UNKLE, or something from the Anticon and Mo Wax stables on the album’s biggest splurge of heavy beatmaking: ‘Part 8’.
Astronautically far out like a mysterious mirage, Kaukolampi’s adventures in We Jazz label transformation are extraordinary. New worlds merge from the source material, as a semblance of jazz is drawn, stretched out and strung out in a stellar and often supernatural exploration. If you thought the originals were already pretty experimental and on the fringes, then you’re in for a surprise with this treatment that take’s the label’s first ten albums to an entirely new level. At the moment We Jazz and its roster can do no wrong; easily one of the best jazz labels on the planet and beyond, as this experiment proves.
Requiem & Simon McCorry ‘Critical; Mass’
(Hush Hush Records) 19th July 2021
An ambient neoclassical symphony of incipient drama, forebode and reflection, the Critical; Mass album from the transatlantic collaboration of Requiem and Simon McCorry emerges from the pandemic miasma of the last 18 months to move both the soul and mind.
Cinematic in scope despite the subtleties and minimalistic approach, this album’s trio of synthesized, electrified and acoustic suites transforms the growing concerns of our day and the specter of Covid into a deep, slow burning soundtrack that builds and builds towards swells of either esoteric unease or cathedral-in-the-sky arching beauty.
The adroit ensemble behind this meeting of minds has enviable and wide-ranging form. No stranger to this blog, the highly prolific UK-based classically-trained cellist, composer and producer McCorry has worked across various arenas (from theatres to contemporary dance), whilst the Washington D.C. Requiem duo of Tristan Welch and Douglas Kallmeyer are both solo artists in their own right with varied backgrounds in experimentation to draw upon. Welch, when not sonically pushing the envelope as a guitarist, working his way from the diy noise and rock scenes of the US capital, works full-time as a funeral home director. Unsurprisingly this gives him a rather unique and close relationship to mortality. Welch’s foil, Kellmeyer, is a real multi-disciplinary musician with experience in playing bass, soundsystems, audio equipment, live mixing, production, and is also the ‘driving force’ behind the Verses Records label. If not busy enough, he’s also working with a range of human rights campaigns, including projects centered round the effects of music and PTSD awareness.
All this scope of experience is channeled into an album of semi-colon couplet related thoughts and expressive washes; steered evocatively by barely recognizable wanes, faints and concentrated brow stirred cello and guitar. Across three different multi-layered peregrinations, the trio tenderly and in airy translucence sky past clouds; place us amongst foggy shrouded beasts and leviathans; and gradually build towards a symphonic heavy atmosphere and shapeless ambient finale.
Unsettled drama and obscured anguish meet ambiguous reflections on a seriously good, moody collaboration: a minimalistic ambient, verging on the classical, soundtrack for the uncertainty of our present times.
Also Read:
Simon McCorry ‘Nature Is Nature’
Simon McCorry ‘(Premiere) Pieces Of Mind’
Taras Bulba ‘Sometimes The Night’
(Riot Season) 30th July 2021
Transducing a healthy miscellaneous diet of Kung-Fu horror flicks, David Lynch, Noir crime movies, Jean Cocteau and the works of the controversial, ‘seppuku’ committed, Japanese polymath Yukio Mishima into both the ethereal and a more raunchy, drugged and grinded rock ‘n’ roll, the former Earthling Society instigator Fred Laird unveils his lockdown preoccupations, influences on his third album, Sometimes The Night.
Laird, as you may know, called time on the liberal kool-aid swigging krautrock and acid psych Earthling Society a few years back. The band’s swansong was a madcap alternative soundtrack to a ridiculous psychedelic supernatural chop suey movie. This latest album kicks off with a congruous leftover from that last minor filmic opus, with another laughable sample from some Shaw Brothers or obscure Kung-Fu flick, before steaming and growling into something altogether different and transformed. For Laird, during the period of last summer and the beginning of this year, was also getting heavily into the self-recorded primal music of Hasil Adkins and Link Wray’s eponymous entitled first album for the Polydor label (that iconic cult favourite from 1971, which saw Wray donning Native Indian garb, marked the changing times and moods whilst staying close to roots and blues music).
Less cosmic, or psychedelic, and instead more salacious, with a penchant for the Bad Seeds, early Crime And The City Solution, The Cramps and servings of Wray and Bill Justis, Laird’s, sort of, solo outing is a darkly gothic laced version of 50s and early 60s rock ‘n’ roll horrors and druggy beat poetry era pastiche. Guitars are often skeletal or quivering in a Dick Dale fashion, whilst the piano offers up Nick Cave-like bar room blues and swag. Meanwhile a haunted organ replicates Gene Moore’s strange unnerving score for the cult Carnival Of Souls classic B-movie. A creeping gauze and heightened spell of the spooky seeps into the slinky, rowdy thickly laid on phantasm of post-punk blues.
Exceptions to the rule are made when Laird’s two guests show up: Vocalist Daisy Atkinson’s Lynchian like style diaphanous siren call from a shoegaze ether that’s part All About Eve, part Strawberry Switchblade on the Jean Cocteau dedication ‘Orphee’. On the surprising music change, big production job, ‘Sometimes The Night’, she offers a certain MBV like heavenly lush vocal over what could be a slow released epic by Spiritualized, or even the Besnard Lakes. Playing accentuated and melodic scaling romantic serenaded saxophone, Mike Blatchford provides the untethered and wafted to Laird’s more reverberated, phaser and whirlpool organ mysteries and grind on both the ‘The Big Duvall’ (dedicated to Andy Duvall of Carlton Melton infamy) and ‘House In The Snow’ tracks.
Another change of musical scenery, ‘The Sound Of Waves’ is like a Japanese version of GOAT conjuring up the ritual rites to some Amicus production folk-psych Green Man – those waves incidentally, do appear much later, after a dose of Bamboo music fluted krautrock.
Funeral slumber lounge music meets blue Hawaii and Swans, whilst early Zombie invasion scores get swept into a heavy strung-out dirty vision of rock ‘n’ roll on an epic size, omnivorous devouring album. Sometimes The Night is an altogether different and enthralling adventure in dirge-y and more translucent esoteric music.
The Tape Recorders ‘Wire’
(Somewherecold Records) 23rd July 2021
Inviting us all into the both literary and kosmische imbued dreams of The Tape Recorders’ Argentine author and music maker Gabriel Rojo, the analogue and synthesized throwback Wire album could be a missing concept from the old German Ohr (or even Sky Records) label. New age visions and vague hints of Klaus Schulze, the Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Mythos and Jean-Michel Jarre stir the emotions on Rojo’s debut album for the ever-expanding Somewherecold label.
With additional encouragement, help from Mel Helmick (who provides extra atmospheric field recordings and touches, and the artwork) and Diego Masarotti (collaborating on the album’s pleading, confessional narrated filmic soundscape, ‘Why We Forgive’), the Buenos Aires sonic explorer brings the outside world, title references to philosophical journeyed literature, and a deep sense of mysterious forebode into his geometric pulsing dreams.
That ambient and neoclassical lucid state of dreaming features both cushioned melodies and more sonorous, deep looming synthesized bass. It also features messages, augers from the ether, and plenty of sprinkled Library music stardust, tubular beams and UFO wobbles.
Multi-layered vapours, rays and arpeggiators build curious horizons and mindscapes: from Tron-like life in the machine to contemplation. These kosmische-traveller peregrinations are littered with subtle movements; with real world motorbikes revving alongside the racing acceleration of imagined futuristic craft and various nodes.
Appearing at the middle mark of the dream that started this whole journey, the incredibly influential luminary John Cale makes an appearance. There’s no obvious reference to his music however, only the vague illusions to the more abstract uses of the viola.
Wire is a successful kosmische style flight into the imagination; an album that also channels South America’s own burgeoning adventures in electronic and analogue experimentation in the 70s; a dream cast traverse.
Antonello Perfetto & Greg Nieuwsma ‘Aquarium’
(Submarine Broadcasting Co.) Available Now
A fecund of experimental music has grown out of a Krakow hothouse in recent years, centered on the strange sounds of Sawak and the inventive Krautrock replicents Corticem. The latter’s last brilliant opus, Planetarium (which made my choice albums of 2020), was a bunker produced cosmology of Swans, the fa US t pairing of Jean-Hervé and Zappi Diermeir, Mythos, The Cosmic Range and Ash Ra Tempel. Many of those same names pop up on this new breakaway union of Corticem and Sawak band members: the Antonello Perfetto and Greg Nieuwsma collaboration.
Prompted by the loss of their previous shared rehearsal space and recording studio during the pandemic last year, the two set up an impromptu, rudimental space in Perfetto’s living room. Due to sharing their last one and various time constraints, most of the music was originally spontaneous, more improvised. But then a roomier studio became available, which meant that the duo’s aquatic themed new offering could be planned in advance for the first time. But though they wanted to keep within the same realms as the previous Planetarium epic, drummer Perfetto and his foil Nieuwsma decided to mess around with synthesizers: midi synching two synths together without any more than a basic understanding of these instruments.
‘Outside’ their comfort zones and inspired by avid book digger/collector Nieuwsma’s off-the-wall Fish Diseases: Diagnosis And Treatment read (mostly flicked through when seated on the bog), the sonic partnership submerged their heads beneath a cosmic-psych, krautrock and kosmische refracted aquarium.
What begins as a sort of joke ended up as a loose concept, with every track on this underwater misadventure named after some exotic or other fish: each signature different, the scope varied and always mysterious. The ‘Chocolate Frogmouth Catfish’ (which I can’t believe exists as anything but a fantastical dreamt up hybrid) for example, is represented by an odd Cajun banjo plucked shuffle and chorus of happy whistlers, whilst the ‘Green Terror’ is represented by Higamos Hogamos or Holy Fuck jamming it out. Some tracks offer floatation tank mindful drifts, and others, garbled, sporadic tangles of gnarled post-rock guitar and off-kilter drum splashes, hits and shimmers. Swimmingly eloping to an often alien fish tank archipelago where the Tangerine Dream merge with Hailu Mergia in an English fairytale horror (‘Black Parrot Cichild’), or, circular Wurlitzer’s spin a choral siren call of deep water mystique (‘Bleeding Heart Tetra’), the fruitful ideas bouncing duo with little knowledge of synths manage to create a psychedelic and avant-garde underwater opus.
Rhombus Index ‘Planar EP’
(See Blue Audio) Available Now
Under the equilateral Rhombus Index moniker of anonymity, the mysterious Halifax producer behind the alias treads an ambient pathway through an inspired West Yorkshire landscape on their inaugural EP for the burgeoning Spain-based label, See Blue Audio.
With a series of previous EPs and soundtracks for several theatre productions on the resume, Rhombus Index’s Planar showcase is rich with suffused big scale panoramas and gravitas, and algorithmic incandescent bulbs and synth notes that dance like life-giving microbe forms under the microscope.
Method wise filed recordings and found sounds ‘sourced in the open spaces around’ that scenic countryside county, recorded just after heavy rainfall on a Spring day in 2019, are used as the foundation for further studio manipulation and transformation. This process creates something iridescent and deeply reflective: from the earth, the elements, yet somehow more mysteriously sensory: even spacey at times. ‘Node’ for instance, as it title suggests, has various signals and bleeps and piano notes cross, branch out from the fissures-in-the-fabric and hovering bass drone network: sounding like Basic Channel meets late the Tangerine Dream. ‘Leptusol’ may make reference to the soil – that title being a geological name for both very shallow soils over hard rock, or, deeper soil that’s extremely gravelly – but sonically and rhythmically there’s a swimming light breeze of the Balearics, and enervated hints of North Africa, on that enveloping patterned minimal electronic dance suite. Another scientific nature reference title is ‘Xylem’; one of two types of transport tissue found in vascular plants, which transports water from the roots to the stems and leaves, but also carries nutrients too. Ecology aside this finale features layers of transformed xylophone recordings, which overlap: some with an almost glassy texture, others, like an uninterrupted quickened trickle. Over and in the centre you can hear tiny molecules playfully bobbing and travelling.
Close at times to Warp, and at others, the serial majesty and lightness of new classical ambient Roedelius, the Planar EP prompts a degree of deep reflection with contemplations at the enormity of it all. This is a slow brilliant ambient release of melodic calm and inspired wetted landscape observations that flows along with nature’s rhythms to convey the abstract.
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.
Our Daily Bread 458: Anton Barbeau, Brian, Lauran Hibberd, Rob Majchrowski, Daniel Vujanic, Yammerer, The Telephone Numbers…
July 15, 2021
Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea’s Roundup
The cult leader of the infamous lo fi gods, The Bordellos, Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea has released countless recordings over the decades with his family band of hapless unfortunates, and is the owner of a most self-deprecating sound-off style blog. His most recent releases include the King Of No-Fi album, a collaborative derangement with the Texas miscreant Occult Character, Heart To Heart, and a series of double-A side singles (released so far, ‘Shattered Pop Kiss/Sky Writing’, ‘Daisy Master Race/Cultural Euthanasia’ and ‘Be My Maybe/David Bowie’). He has also released, under the Idiot Blur Fanboy moniker, a stripped-down classic album of resignation and Gallagher brothers’ polemics.
Each month we supply him with a mixed bag of new and upcoming releases to see what sticks.
Singles/One-Offs/Tracks/Videos
Lauran Hibberd ‘Bleugh’
I like Lauran Hibberd. I think she might have something interesting to say, and she has a true-life observant humour in her lyrics that is both refreshing and entertaining: something my dear friends that all music should attempt to contain. It also contains a wonderful two chord guitar riff that has been used so many times, and I am certain will be used many more times in songs, because it is a great two chord guitar riff and all indie glam garage rock songs at least should attempt to use it.
Yammerer ‘Tell Me What the Ancient Astronaut Theorists Believe’
(Restless Bear Records) Available Now
Yammerer are from Liverpool and remind me of the kind of band I used to go and watch all those years ago in the 80s, in the clubs and venues of Liverpool and Merseyside. A wonderful time with some wonderful venues with some wonderful bands, and Yammerer would have fitted well into those times as there is revolution in the air, fuck the Tories, fuck unemployment, the future is now, we have a voice and we are going to use it. Yes, Yammerer are an enjoyable force of nature, reminding me of The Levellers 5 and the much missed A House. Can you pay a band a higher compliment than that? No I do not think you can.
bigflower ‘Hanging On’
Available Now
So, for the latest release from the masterful bigflower we have a rather fetching and warm moody romantic guitar drenched version of the Supremes‘You Keep Me Hanging On’. To my mind one of the greatest pop songs ever written, and this version brings to mind the sun scorched sky, a tear in the eye, and lips full of quivering regret etched onto a scratched vinyl copy of Neil Youngs’ Decade, which was the last LP she ever played of yours before departing into the night to destroy somebody else’s life…yet once again beautiful.
Brian ‘Cycle Super Highway’
(Time For Art Records) Available Now
I really like this. It has a beautiful shimmering summer quality about it, like if The Beach Boys were young men and just starting out today. Eloquent harmonic vocals float and drift with electro synths and drum machines to supply us with a four-minute plus aural treat. The subtlety slowly washing over the listener pulling us into a state of blissed out dreamland like heaven.
Albums/EPs
Anton Barbeau ‘Oh The Joys We Live For’
(Big Stir Records) 16th July 2021
There is something quite beautiful about this album. There is a beauty in the way Anton describes life with a slightly outsider eccentric point of view. This is an album of perfect domesticity, an album that takes the mundane and every day and makes it magical. The final track for instance, the Beatley ‘I Been Thinking Of You’, beneath the chiming guitars and perfect beatastic melody lies a song of love, wanting, escape and the mundane (“I am a teenage man in a minivan squeezing milk for an old cup of tea”). And that is a special talent to have: not squeezing milk for a cup of tea, although that does indeed come in handy, but being able to take the everyday and paint a velvet wash of lyrical surrealism that is based on everyday life.
Anton Barbeau has that special lyrical knack/talent of doing so, a little like what the great Julian Cope also does, and can draw a warm smile on the listeners face with his words of poetic delight. The music and melodies that wrap around the fine lyrics are drawn from a love of folk /synth pop and psych and a little dose of experimental guitar pop; in fact some of the songs could be described as synth folk: ‘Cowbell Camembert’ being a perfect example: squelchy synth, a simple disco drum machine beat and chiming 12 string guitars; as if Roger McGuinn had joined the Legendary Pink Dots for an evening. ‘Oh The Joys We Live For’ is an album of love warmth and humour, and like this album is something we all need in our life.
The Poppermost ‘Hits To Spare’
30th July 2021
The Poppermost is one-man band Joe Kane, who is a raving Merseybeat fanatic who loves all things Fab Four, and this fine album is his tribute to the music from those swinging days. This is not just a whitewashed Beatles album that so many power poppers have recently forced on us, with shit lyrics, second hand melodies and Beatle mop top haircuts. Joe is actually a very talented songwriter who would not have seemed out of place emerging from a transistor radio, the dial set to Radio Caroline or one of those other legendary pirate radio stations.
What makes this album even more impressive is that it actually sounds like a band, not just one-man in his home studio painstakingly layering down very authentic 60s riffs and harmonies. There are so many highlights, from the opening track ‘Egg and Chips’, which you could imagine the Big Three performing in the Cavern, to the very Beatles like ‘Yes It’s True’ being an unreleased track from The Hard Day’s Night album, and the very Jimmy Campbell-esque ‘One Of The Gerliss’.
This is an album of beautifully written and performed sixties inspired beat pop songs. Anyone who has ever sat and got misty eyed over Billy J Kramer’s Best Of album (which I admit to), this is certainly a must buy album and another fine release from the wonderful Think Like A key Label; an album that deserves to be top of the hit parade pop pickers.
Daniel Vujanic ‘Paramnesia’
(Submarine Broadcasting Co.) Out There Right Now
To shy away from experimental music and to just listen to guitars and drums and bass and vocals is foolhardy for many reasons: one being that you are obviously emotionally and artistically stunted with little outlook for adventure and sublimity, and another, you are missing out on this fine musical journey into the world of genre hopping eccentricity, part Faust part Miles Davis part Silver Apples. Yes, an album of eight mid to longish instrumental leaps into the unknown; eight tracks to lose and find yourself and re-find yourself in only to discover at the end of the album you are not who you thought you were in the first place. A beautiful work of aural art.
Rob Majchrowski ‘Summer 2021’
Available Now
I like Rob Majchrowski, he seems like a bit of a character, and the kind of chap who I think I might like to spend an hour or two chatting in a pub to. I enjoy his homemade music. He has a wit and charm and down at heel glamour and romance, and is a fine songwriter; and as you know, anyone who knows or reads these little reviews, I’m rather fond of fine lyrics and Rob M certainly writes some fine lyrics. “Out for sex but finding fights,” says it all; a perfect description of this seven track excellent album.
Musically it has the same feel as early Pulp with a touch of Beck and Grandaddy/Mercury Rev, and deserves to find a wide audience, as it really is rather splendid stuff indeed. It can be download on a pay what you want basis from his Bandcamp and I would certainly suggest you do.
The Telephone Numbers ‘The Ballad Of Doug’
(Paisley Shirt Records) Available Now
The Telephone Numbers The Ballad Of Doug is a lovely jangle pop of an album. An album full of melodies, charming harmonies and chiming guitars; one that takes you back to the halcyon days of when the likes of the June Brides and the Chesterfields and the Go Betweens would share mixtape space as you strummed along on your recently bought and recently just learned how-to-play Fender copy guitar.
Yes, an album that captures the never grow old charm of a lovingly written ode to love, music and everyday life, and the Telephone Numbers write and perform their aural magic very well indeed. The Ballad Of Doug is an album that captures all that is good about guitar pop.
Occult Character ‘The Song Remains The Stain’
(Metal Postcard Records) Available Now
A new album from my friend and fellow Metal Postcard Records label mate Occult Character is always a welcome thing as I think he is a bit of a fine songwriter: in fact one of the finest. A man with originality and dark wit who raises his middle finger to life in the USA, who lyrically hits his targets with the accuracy of a sniper’s bullet.
The Song Remains The Stain is an album made up of 27 shortish songs, and on this one ignores his guitar to give us a guide in how to make an alternative electro album. So this is an album of electro throbbing synth bass, chiming drum machines and wonderful mechanical ice cream like melodies, and of course his wonderful lyrics and vocal styling: part Lou Reed, part Roky Erikson, part deranged robot.
Occult Character is indeed a one off and will one day be seen as one of the greats. And The Song Remains The Stain is an enjoyable and rewarding listen; an album filled with originality wit and intelligence.
ALBUM REVIEW/Dominic Valvona
Ed Scissor + Lamplighter ‘Joysville’
(High Focus Records) 15th July 2021
From one winter of discontent to the next, the dystopian visionary collaborative pairing of unique wordsmith Ed Scissor and atmospheric soundscaper and sparse beat maker Lamplighter navigate and survive yet another nightmare miasma. Together again, though methodology wise (and not just because of the pandemic restrictions) working apart in different locations, the duo provides a sullen, brooding, resigned commentary on lives lived in ‘lockdown one’.
Probably aggrieved and anxious enough at the height of the initial panic back in March of last year, as this new album shows, both artists’ are numbed by the time the groundhog daily routine of Covid variants hits the second and (most probably) third lockdowns. However the ironic entitled Joysville was produced over the internet during the first wave of restrictions, and compared to the unflinching and darkly moody post-Brexit 2016 vote album, Tell Them It’s Winter, the subject matter is on a whole new level of apocalyptic doom.
A concept album that follows a certain thread of disappointment, loss and isolation, this vivid if often worn-down delivered soundtrack features Ed’s rich untethered and highly descriptive lyricism and Lamplighter’s signature minimalist bed of perfectly placed deep techno and leftfield hip-hop beats, bass and sound environments. It’s possibly the best record they’ve made too: most candid and honest.
This time around the process was approached differently, evolving into a complete work from initial instrumental sketches. But then the strain and rich material of such a remarkable, once in a century, event can inspire such grand concepts, no matter what. And Joysville paints a both bleak and disturbing vision of England in the grip of a pandemic; though by the end of the album a mournful church service announces a less than bright emergence from a climate crisis, a hundred years on in a charcoaled land riven by rising oceans and floods. From one disaster to the next, that two-part finale points towards the augers of The Road: an unceasing acrid rain drenches the populace that’s left. That same rain falls a lot during the course of the album, both marking out the passages of time and used as a sort of bad omen. It appears and pours down on the brief ‘One Year Later’ passage for example, the chocked engine of which metaphorically represents the constant stalling promises of lifting lockdown and return to a normality that never arrived.
Despite the album’s spacious soundscapes this is a world of claustrophobic anxiety and stress; an inner city dome of grimy lit empty motorways, disturbed character portraits, uncared for “Burger King tumble weed” environments and online paranoia. Within that framework a whole lexicon of personal connections, memories of attractions and love, and far more sinister, menacing dramas – one of which, ‘Picture A Day’, features an ambiguous one-way mobile phone conversation on the beach that turns sinister and violent when we hear a woman squeal, the sound of broken glass and a number of deadly shots from a gun ringing out.
This partnership works extremely well, with Ed weaving in a mix of trap-like staggered rap, unguarded soliloquy and more soulfully sung lines over his foil’s pocket calculator Kraftwerkian and Japanese imbued synthesizer waves, rays and arpeggiator, and lingering piano and static hums. Great lines are too numerous to pull out of their context, but Ed is able to poetically wind a whole cosmology of language around some of the most mundane actions, woes and, almost so insignificant as to be the most important, tactile descriptions of life in a dragged down gig economy.
Joysville encapsulates the divisive, paranoid times with sonorous chimes of lament and truth: a truly incredible embodiment of unease and lockdown fatigue. An unsettling but important work, this is the duo’s most evocative and creative album to date.
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.
Monolith Cocktail Blog 