psychedelia
Album: Alan Vega - Alan Vega After DarkThursday, 05 August 2021Following in the slipstream of wide critical acclaim for posthumous album Mutator, released earlier this year, comes Alan Vega After Dark by the former Suicide frontman. It’s a starkly different album to its predecessor, swapping concrete collisions... Read more... |
Album: Tomu DJ - FeministaWednesday, 04 August 2021The endless circles and spirals that dance music moves in can take you to some strange places.It is, after all, a little peculiar that a producer from California, who was first turned on to DJing by the edgy, claustrophobic, ultra-modernist sound of... Read more... |
Album: Peyton - PSAWednesday, 21 July 2021For 25 years now, LA label Stones Throw records has become one of the most reliable brands in music. It began with, and has always been associated with, the leftfield hip hop of founder George “Peanut Butter Wolf” Manak, and regular contributors... Read more... |
Album: Craig Fortnam - ArkThursday, 15 July 2021Craig Fortnam’s music – solo or in the bands North Sea Radio Orchestra and Arch Garrison – sounds like a lot of things. It sounds like the 70s prog-folk-jazz interface of Kevin Ayres and Robert Wyatt as its influence feeds on into Kate Bush. When he... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Yardbirds - YardbirdsSunday, 04 July 2021Instability coursed through the Yardbirds in 1966. When their first studio album Yardbirds was issued in July, the band seen on stage was not the one which had made the album. Bassist and in-house producer Paul Samwell-Smith had left between its... Read more... |
Album: Emma-Jean Thackray - YellowFriday, 02 July 2021Emma-Jean Thackray is not lacking in audaciousness. This is, after all, a white woman from Leeds barely into her thirties, raised on bassline house and indie rock, making music whose most obvious comparisons are with some of the most revered (in the... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Elton John - Regimental Sgt. ZippoSunday, 27 June 2021Empty Sky, Elton John’s first album was released in June 1969. Now, an album titled Regimental Sgt. Zippo has turned up. It’s marketed as “The debut album that never was.” The 12 tracks are annotated loosely as having been recorded from November... Read more... |
An Oral History of Glastonbury Festival 1992Thursday, 24 June 2021There is never one Glastonbury Festival. There are as many Glastonbury Festivals as there are people who attend. Thus it ever was, even back in 1992 when the capacity was only 70,000 (plus multitudinous fence-jumpers!). What follows, then, is a... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Dungen - StadsvandringarSunday, 20 June 2021Dungen’s October 2005 appearance on Late Night With Conan O'Brien was incongruous. Here was a Swedish band on an independent label, singing in their native language, playing live on coast-to-coast mainstream US TV. The show’s host making a great... Read more... |
Album: The Cult of Dom Keller – They Carried the Dead in a UFOThursday, 03 June 2021While so many bands of a psychedelic bent treat the genre as if it has been pickled in aspic since the swinging sixties of London and San Francisco or maybe the motorik sounds of mid-70s West Germany, the Cult of Dom Keller don’t give any impression... Read more... |
Music books to end lockdown: Sam Lee, Hawkwind, Dylan, Richard Thompson, and the Electric MusesFriday, 14 May 2021It won’t be long now before concert halls and back rooms, arts centres and festival grounds fill with people again, and live music, undistanced, unmasked, and in your face, comes back to us. In expectation of this gradual reopening of the stage... Read more... |
Album: Raf Rundell - O.M. DaysThursday, 08 April 2021The career of Raf Rundell has had one of the most satisfying trajectories of any in UK music – a steady process of self-realisation, from record label staff via DJing and artist management, through being a serial studio collaborator, to becoming a... Read more... |