Mike Patton is something of a musical polymath. Away from the two main bands he’s known for lie all sorts of musical diversions, all coloured with varying degrees of strangeitude. One of them, but probably not the oddest (that’s Fantomas)…
View More tētēma – Necroscape
Be-Bop Deluxe nearly passed me by during their brief but brightly burning four year existence between 1974 and 1978. It was only on borrowing their Hot Valves EP from a school friend in 1976 or ’77 that I became aware…
View More Be-Bop Deluxe – Axe Victim (Limited Edition Deluxe Boxset)
I watched Kavus’s album launch gig for Hip to the Jag the other evening, beamed alive and grinning from his living room. About 10 minutes in I had to pause it, to get the dinner out of the oven, not…
View More Kavus Torabi – Hip to the Jag
Cacophonous and hypnotic, the fast and interweaving beats of this Baltimore quartet are as thought provoking as they are undoubtedly unsettling, pushing musical boundaries and expounding a socialist outlook, both in a similar revolutionary manner to our very own Gnod.…
View More Horse Lords – The Common Task
To tie in with the release of MFTJ, the recent collaborative release between Mike Keneally and Scott Schorr, Roger Trenwith spoke to Mike about how this pairing came about, as well as offering a brief insight into the music. Mike…
View More Mike Keneally
Frank Zappa only recruited the best players into his band, as there were exacting standards expected of any musician who passed through the Zappa band ranks. One of those was guitarist Mike Keneally, who having since had a long and…
View More MFTJ – MFTJ
According to Google Maps, it takes 12 hours 28 minutes to drive the 859.2 miles from Austin, Texas, home to the splendid Southern Gothic skewed Americana rock of Lord Buffalo, to Nashville, Tennessee. This gives an average speed of over…
View More Lord Buffalo – Tohu Wa Bohu
Writing reviews of albums that hardly anyone will listen to is becoming an increasingly pointless task, as I ponder its usefulness while far more pressing matters take up one’s time. I suppose if it serves as a diversion from the…
View More Toby Driver & Nick Hudson – Black Feather Under Your Tongue
Sometimes, an album inspires me to write in a fashion that mirrors its artistic endeavour, and avant guitar wrangler Stian Westerhus’s last album, Amputation, was one such. Words such as “fraught”, “twitching”, “maelstrom” and “melancholic” abound, and that’s just the…
View More Stian Westerhus – Redundance
This album was released in June 2019 (November 2018 in Norway), and usually I would consider it way past the sell-by date for a review… but this is such a HUGE album I just had to wax lyrical about it!…
View More Møster! – States Of Minds