Tagged: Echoes and Dust
Ex Eye – S/T
Over the years I’ve found the best music often comes from the places you least expect it to. Not that you wouldn’t expect good stuff from a collaboration between saxophonist extraordinaire Colin Stetson and Liturgy drum whirlwind Greg Fox. But you might not expect it to be this good – and especially this much fun.
Black Bombaim & Peter Brötzmann – S/T
Portuguese psych rock masters Black Bombaim teaming up with veteran free jazz nomad Peter Brötzmann for a live recorded freak out? Yes. Yes I will have some of that.
Terminal Cheesecake – Dandelion Sauce of the Ancients
Despite admitting quite recently that the name Terminal Cheesecake meant absolutely nothing to me until not so long ago when the chance came to review their new record I decided to dive in and act like I knew what I was talking about. I think I just about got away with it.
Review (and exclusive track premiere) over at Echoes & Dust.
MoRkObOt – GoRgO
I’d like to claim to have some kind of process when it comes to deciding what I’m going to write about. That I have my ear to the ground at all times, waiting for just the right vibration to come my way that demands to be captured in 7/800 words of pithy criticism. That I’m Captain Zeitgeist, a lightning rod for what’s Important in 2016 that channels the electricity of the Now directly down into vital content for the masses.
In reality I just look around every now and again and think something like, “hey look – an entirely baffling twin bass wielding Italian metal trio! I should review that for a handful of interested weirdos!”
It’s not much but it keeps me entertained.
Review over at Echoes & Dust.
MAKE – Pilgrimage of Loathing
MAKE are an angry bunch. But then of course they are – if you’re not angry at the State of Things right now then you really can’t be paying attention. Their latest album Pilgrimage of Loathing is a must hear for anyone struggling to make sense of the news on a daily basis, a cathartic blast of blackened post-metal that works as a much needed reminder that the world may make you sick to your stomach but that you are at least not alone.
Review over at Echoes & Dust.
Big Business – Command Your Weather
There’s no point trying to pretend this review could go either way – I love Big Business and went into Command Your Weather entirely expecting to love it. It didn’t disappoint. They never do.
Wanna know how much I loved it? Witness me singing it’s praises over at Echoes & Dust.
Khünnt – Failures
It’s been a bit quiet on here of late. Apparently buying and moving into a house is quite time consuming and stressful. Who knew? I feel bad for leaving Kenzo Kelly’s Heroes in limbo for so long, but what can I do? Not spend my scraps of free time putting 30-odd hours into Dark Souls 3? I don’t think that was ever an option.
I’ve had little time to invest in flinging words at music either. But I made some time to attempt to describe the 40 minute nightmare dirge that is Khünnt’s Failures. It’s quite the experience – I don’t think I did it justice. I’m just not good enough at this writing business to make reading my prose feel like being abducted and tortured by some surrealist distortion-wielding terror cell.
Review over at Echoes & Dust.
The Comet is Coming – Channel the Spirits
This one is one of the tougher reviews I’ve written. I claimed it from Echoes & Dusts release list because I was absolutely in love with Neon Baby from their self-titled ep, a ridiculously infectious whirlwind of chiptune swing and a hurricane of cool-as-ice sax playing from Shabaka Hutchings. It’s a bit cheesy, a bit silly, a lot brilliant. I described it as being like Acoustic Ladyland meets Adebisi Shank to anyone who know what that might mean. I was very, very excited.
So what do you do when the album you’ve built up in your head doesn’t correlate with the album on your stereo? How do you review what it is instead of what it isn’t? I had to ditch the review for a month, try and forget the whole thing and come back to it afresh. But even then, whilst there’s a lot I did like in Channel the Spirits, I still came away a little disappointed.
Dälek – Asphalt for Eden
I first started this blog for different purposes to the catch-all scribblings on Music and Gaming it became. It was primarily for my use only, essentially as a Happy Place for my sad self to return to to find solace in a big list of things I loved. It was an ongoing series of reminders that the world wasn’t entirely a festering nightmare of disappointment. Eventually it convinced me that writing about this stuff was really good for my mental health in and of itself. And so: here we are.
I deleted most of those Let me tell you why I love.. posts apart from the Dark Souls one, which I was quite fond of. One of the lost posts was a love letter to Absence, Dälek’s terrifying 2005 album, a record that production-wise sounds like a city under siege from monolithic metallic monsters. There’s nothing quite like it: ‘Apocalyptic’ is an overused adjective in music criticism, and one that has rarely been as apt as when applied to Absence. It’s something I have to brace myself whenever I put my headphones on to get dragged into it’s hellish world.
They released the excellent Abandoned Language after that, and finally the slightly lackluster Gutter Tactics before disappearing into the ether. So I was a bit nervous when Dälek announced they’d be back after a 5 year lay-off, especially as they’d be creating without producer Oktopus. Without the man who created that sound, what would they have to offer?
Spoiler: quite a lot, actually.
Coffinfish – Epilogue
Post-metal Lovecraft fans Coffinfish released one of my favourite records in recent times in last year’s I am Providence. Now they’re back with Epilogue a single 20 minute track (also called I am Providence) – which is both something of a victory lap and a sign of even better things to come for them.
Full review over at Echoes and Dust.
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