Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Reissues: Review

Entering the world of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion can be perplexing for the uninitiated. The band’s roughshod feeding of rock and soul signifiers through a gnarly punk filter manages to pitch them somewhere in between pastiche and sincerity, where plastic showmanship and achingly indebted riffage is chained to buckets of sweat and a James Brown-like desire to entertain a crowd. Naturally, this is all best experienced in a live setting, although Spencer and his group have never had too much trouble translating their frenetic showmanship to vinyl, where they sensibly make up for the lack of physical presence by widening the Blues Explosion’s scope to include string sections, brass, female backing vocals, and guest rappers. Now, the Shove! label has issued a set of the band’s earliest works over the space of six CDs, which are packed with extra tracks, lavish packing, extensive liner notes, and all the Jon Spencer ephemera you could ever want in your life.

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Third Eye Foundation - The Dark: Review

It may be a surprise to some to see Bristolian Matt Elliott operating under his Third Eye Foundation moniker once again. It has, after all, been ten long years since he last threw on this guise. That’s ten years in which his former label Domino has transformed from a licensee of abrasive American indie-rock into a chart bothering mega-stable of talent; ten years in which Elliott has ducked away from the pulverizing drill'n'bass exhortations of yore and instead poured all the light in his music into his folksy singer-songwriter material; and ten years in which his unnerving ability to match spleen and sorrow and turn it into a palatable (and disjointedly danceable) whole have been subtly exhumed and worked into genres such as dubstep and the spurious witch house movement.

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Brian Eno - Small Craft on a Milk Sea: Review

In Michael Bracewell’s excellent book on Roxy Music’s point of commencement, Re-Make Re-Model, Brian Eno defines successful pop as 'the creation of a new, imaginary world, which beckons the listener to join it.' Eno has spent a decent part of the past couple of decades furiously back-pedaling from that conceit, via his wretchedly earthy work in the production chair for Dido, Coldplay, Andrea Corr and countless other artists who revel in the mundane instead of shifting listeners away from it. Thankfully, he’s gotten back into the business of creating imaginary worlds on Small Craft on a Milk Sea, Eno’s first album for Warp, which was born out of sporadic collaborations between guitarist Leo Abrahams and electronic composer Jon Hopkins.

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An Oral History of Oneida’s Each One Teach One

There are still artists out there who are causing music to buckle and strain at the seams, who are finding new and inventive ways to turn familiar ideas inside out and bend some fresh life out of the archaic “rock” format. It can take patience and understanding—two qualities currently in perilously scarce supply—but anyone who is in this for the long haul is bound to come around to Oneida eventually. Most people are still trying to get their heads around Rated O, the band’s triple album opus from last year, but here we turn to a similarly ambitious double record they delivered for the Version City label in 2002.

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CMJ 2010: The DiS Review

The 30th anniversary of the annual CMJ Music Marathon brought plenty of surprises. Daft Punk and Phoenix jammed on a Close Encounters of the Third Kind riff at Madison Square Garden, Pitchfork set up its rival #Offline festival and got Kanye West to appear, and the hotly tipped Glasser had to endure a power cut at the Fader Fort and a raid by the cops in Greenpoint. In amongst the chaos, DiS sent Amanda Farah and Nick Neyland to investigate the five-day event in New York City.

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A Guide to Brooklyn Venues

Coco 66
66 Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11222
This new-ish former wood shop turned venue was put firmly on the map earlier this year when M.I.A. joined Sleigh Bells on its stage for a couple of verses of ‘Rill Rill’. It’s the archetypal sweaty back room of a bar, making it a dark and dingy anomaly compared to all the high-end restaurants opening up at a furious pace in this part of Greenpoint. Fortunately, anyone whose ears are affronted by the noise billowing from the cramped venue can escape to the cheap food and booze in a separate bar area at the entrance of the venue.

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A Reflection on the New York Music Scene (2000-2009)

The first thing that struck me when I moved to Brooklyn in 2002 was how many anglophiles there were everywhere. I’d been to New York a few times prior to actually making the city my home, and on those trips I’d often connected with blowhard music fans who wanted to chew my ear off about obscure North American punk singles they’d dredged up after countless hours of crate digging. But this time something was different. Posters for 24 Hour Party People were everywhere, a number of bands had started using samplers, and the early live shows and debut EP of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs indicated that pop was no longer a thing to be feared, dressing up could be fun, and meshing loud guitars with processed beats was something to be fully embraced.

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Antony and the Johnsons - Swanlights: Review

Antony Hegarty has only amassed a slim discography in his 12-year stint in the musical spotlight with Antony and the Johnsons, but the emotional gravitas of that work casts a long shadow over anything that follows it. His 2009 album, The Crying Light, was an invigorating intertwining of gender politics and environmental themes, but Antony has made the step of broadening his pallet this time, ultimately producing a less concept-heavy set of songs. Familiar themes still surface, with the natural world continuing to loom large in Antony’s conscience, but much of Swanlights is ambiguous and less easy to decipher. It’s essentially a set of love songs penned to an unknown object of his affections, all set to the deathly minimalism of the Johnsons, whose work beautifully atrophies over time, coming ever closer to devolving into dust with each passing recording.

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David Bowie - Station To Station: Review

Great strips of mystique have been peeled away from the recording process in our quest to thoroughly pull apart music history, ultimately de-mythologizing years of carefully created hyperbole and mythmaking. But there are still some obstinate beasts out there, a few hallowed recordings that are never going to be fully gutted and dissected, whose secrets are likely to go to the grave with their makers. Uncut magazine took a shot at going in-depth on David Bowie’s Station To Station a few months back, with distinctly mixed results. Producer Harry Maslin refused to be involved, guitarists Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick both claimed credit for the riff for ‘Golden Years’, and no one can quite recall how E Street Band keyboard player Roy Bittan got involved. And Bowie? His famous quote about the recording sessions is: 'I know it was in LA because I've read it was'.

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Grinderman - Grinderman 2: Review

It’s appropriate that the four members of Grinderman saw fit to don gladiatorial garb for the promo video for ‘Heathen Child’, the first song to be lifted from Grinderman 2. Their eponymous debut was a battle record, a chance to eviscerate people’s expectations, an opportunity to wipe the slate unclean, all executed with such visceral glee that it induced a disorienting feeling, akin to being told a tasteless joke whilst being punched in the gut. In many ways that album’s fecal tales of malice and animosity, punctured by gloriously atomised guitar and organ noise, felt like the definitive word on Grinderman. The only course to take once you’ve hit a particularly brutal passage of middle age — when you look in the mirror and see hair sprouting from your ears and receding from your head, where hangovers last for days and that belly flapping over your waistline just caused a trouser button to ping onto the floor — is to pick yourself up by the lapels, dust yourself down, and get your life back on track. Right?

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ATP New York 2010: the DiS review

The New York incarnation of ATP may only come around once a year, but few folks who have braved the charmingly decrepit surroundings of Kutshers Country Club can resist its lure. Most of the lineup this time around is made up of 40-something musicians who are lifers at this game, working every shitty day job imaginable to support themselves, playing notorious flea pits all over the globe, and finding a home of sorts in the shape of multiple ATP festivals. Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch is on board as a curator, porn star Ron Jeremy is stalking the corridors, Bill Murray is rumoured to be in attendance (false, sadly), and Thurston Moore is talking about hummus at a Q&A. Just another vintage weekend in the Catskills for what is hopefully now an annual trans-Atlantic jaunt for the ATP organisation.

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Ghostface Killah - Supreme Clientele: DiS Favourite 50

Supreme Clientele was all about bucking trends. It came hot on the heels of some distinctly limp wristed Wu-Tang solo efforts, as anyone who can remember Method Man’s Tical 2000: Judgment Day, GZA’s Beneath the Surface, Raekwon’s Immobilarity, or U God’s Golden Arms Redemption will recall. But while the RZA’s alchemical input on those releases was minimal, perhaps offering a reason for his most famous charges seeming out of sorts, he also only surfaced sporadically on this second sole effort from Dennis Coles (aka Ghostface Killah, aka Tony Starks, aka Iron Man). On paper, the recruitment of Juju from the Beatnuts, former Tupac acolyte Choo the Specializt, and Wu-Tang backroom engineer Carlos Bess (among others) in the production chair(s) didn’t exactly bode well in light of the RZA-shy solo Wu efforts that had come before.

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ATP Founder Barry Hogan: Interview

The summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains may no longer attract the hordes of vacationing New Yorkers who were drawn to the Borscht Belt in the early to mid-1900s, but one man has found a unique use for the still-functioning Kutshers Country Club in Monticello. Barry Hogan founded the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival after he witnessed Scottish indie rockers Belle & Sebastian successfully bring together an impressive pool of musical talent to play at a Pontin’s holiday camp in the south of England in 1999. Fans stayed in chalets, artists played on indoor stages, no corporate sponsorship was allowed, and the bands mingled with fans due to the distinct lack of snooty VIP areas. The ATP organization has subsequently expanded, but those basic tenets have always remained.

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Andreya Triana - Lost Where I Belong: Review

The steady build up to the release of this debut album from soulful South East London singer Andreya Triana positioned her as an artist with impeccable credentials. An appearance with Flying Lotus on ‘Tea Leaf Dancers’ - from the Reset EP in 2007 - was the first inkling of a major talent emerging. Then, Triana hooked up with downtempo chill-out producer Simon Green, aka Bonobo, to contribute to his Black Sands album. Together, Bonobo and Triana sliced up a vast soporific landscape in which to work, where they could serenely slide into a comatose state while concocting quiet moments of 3am musical euphoria. All that’s missing from this further collaboration between the pair, titled Lost Where I Belong, is a husky voiced DJ to whisk us into the witching hour in-between each song.

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Twin Sister Interview

Living in the city can be a blessing and a curse for any new band. On the plus side, there’s easy access to the press, venues, labels and like-minded artists. But spiraling rents and being shackled to a day job can easily sap creative urges. Twin Sister is a five-piece band made up of members who have shuttled back and forth between their hometowns in Long Island and adopted residences in Brooklyn during the group’s two-year lifespan. A few months ago, four members of the band lived in Brooklyn and one in Long Island, but now the inverse is true, with only keyboard player Dev Gupta remaining in the city.

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K-X-P - K-X-P: Review

To say that Timo Kaukolampi and his krautian Finnish group K-X-P have kept some impressive company during their nascent spurt of activity would be putting it mildly. Kaukolampi formally played in feted bands Op:l Bastards and Larry and the Lefthanded, and has garnered acclaim in more recent times for being the producer of Norwegian popstress Annie. When he started K-X-P, Kaukolampi quickly caught the attention of the folks behind Optimo in Glasgow, who have remixed ‘18 Hours (Of Love)’ from this album and were due to give the band a slot at one of the final nights of the club before that pesky Icelandic volcano intervened. Needless to say, this self-titled debut from the group has been highly anticipated in certain circles.

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Department of Eagles - Archive: 2003-2006: Review

The release of In Ear Park on 4AD in 2008 took Department of Eagles on a rarefied journey toward fully-formed band status after commonly being regarded as an endearing side project partially conducted by Daniel Rossen from Grizzly Bear. Naturally, every artist involved in a side project hates it being called thus, but the scattering of recordings that preceded In Ear Park never really gave any inkling that this was anything other than a couple of former college dorm mates messing around in their bedrooms for fun. Perhaps the pairing actually missed that status, because they’ve returned to their origins, ransacked various tapes, and put together this compilation of recordings from the early days of the band.

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Twin Shadow Interview

There are many fantastical stories about artists growing up in small towns in unconventional circumstances and then fulfilling their dreams by moving to the big city. George Lewis, Jr., who records as Twin Shadow, took the path to New York five years ago after being born in the Dominican Republic and spending his childhood in a small town named Venice on the west coast of Florida. His journey later included encounters with a circus, the Baptist church, stints in Berlin and Copenhagen and the pursuit of a woman.

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James Holden - DJ-Kicks: Review

The ever reliable DJ-Kicks series is a small bastion of hope for the compilation album. The abundance of music available online and the ability to drag and drop files into playlists may make the mix CD seem redundant, but there’s still value to be had in a well-constructed set that has been expertly chosen and seamlessly blended together. The esteem in which the series is held shouldn’t be underestimated either. With past sets from Carl Craig, Four Tet and Hot Chip to consider, not to mention an excellent upcoming mix by Kode9, producer, DJ and remixer to the stars James Holden was practically forced to up his game to maintain the impeccable standard of the series.

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Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today: Review

There’s a passage in Bill Drummond’s The 17 where he recalls traveling to Los Angeles in the mid 1980s, ostensibly to oversee the work of a hair metal band in his capacity as an A&R man for WEA. While trying to find the group in a labyrinthian studio complex, Drummond stumbled across a bloated Stevie Nicks, who was dancing eyes-closed to one of her own songs, lost to herself and the world. There are many styles covered on this, the first album by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti since signing to 4AD, but that glassy Fleetwood Mac production, which flourished on Rumours, gloriously saturated their sound on Tusk, and continued to be an obsession for Lindsey Buckingham on later hits such as ‘Big Love’, is glazed all over Before Today.

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Thee Oh Sees - Warm Slime: Review

Occasionally a band will rend open a prodigious black hole, an all-consuming void that sucks in their sound and spits it out with such righteous fury that it’s in danger of making the rest of their music redundant. It takes some nerve to push an act of such grand folly out into the world, especially when it tugs so many ideas to logical extremes, implicitly drawing a line under them in the process. Fortunately, former Coachwhips frontman John Dwyer appears to have been born into one of the Faraday cages built by scientist Michael Faraday in the 1800s to make machinery impervious to electromagnetic radiation. In short, he’s built Thee Oh Sees into a Teflon coated vessel that spews out countless records at a furious clip and plays live with such intensity that it feels like the band members have noticed the Doomsday Clock is about to strike midnight.

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Kelis - Flesh Tone: Review

Is there a more frustrating figure in the contemporary R&B scene than Kelis? She’s released a clutch of killer songs, including ‘Caught Out There’, ‘Milkshake’, ‘Bossy’, and arguably ‘Acapella’ from this, her fifth studio album to date. By now, Kelis should be a globe-straddling pop superstar, and while she has enjoyed a decent amount of hits (albeit, all of them eclipsed by the nova-like ‘Milkshake’), there’s always something missing from the finished product, something that stops her from blazing into the rarefied territory occupied by the biggest stars. She’s a singer who pioneered a slightly off-kilter brand of R&B infused pop, both in image and sound, but has been thoroughly eclipsed by people (Lady Gaga, Rihanna) who have enjoyed huge mainstream success with work that is clearly indebted to the space Kelis was mapping out for herself in the early Noughties.

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Javelin - No Más: Review

That pounding of hooves you can hear is the sound of impatient music fans charging toward their computers, demanding to hear new artists approximately 0.333 seconds after their names have floated out into the blogosphere. Take Javelin, for example. George Langford and Tom van Buskirk are two crate digging cousins from New York, who swiftly released an entire album of demos titled Jamz n Jemz in 2009 after their name bubbled to the surface. Now, less than a year later, we get their proper full-length debut, No Más, which includes many reworked versions of the Jamz n Jemz tracks. It’s almost as though someone sent back No Más in 2009 and told Javelin we needed to see how they sketched out the diagrammatical workings of the album before it was released.

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Sleigh Bells Interview

Sometimes the hype machine accelerates out of all control. Take Brooklyn based two-piece Sleigh Bells, for example. Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss formed the band with a love of pop structure, hip-hop oriented grooves and a heavily overdriven guitar sound in mind, all topped off with the ballsiest female vocals you’ll hear this side of a Bikini Kill record. The band was suddenly ubiquitous after a few CMJ shows in 2009, with blogs, print media and fellow musicians striving to be affiliated with the group—all achieved without Sleigh Bells actually releasing a record.

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Sweet Apple - Love & Desperation: Review

Sweet Apple’s Love & Desperation promises much. Firstly, there’s the fact that it’s the debut collaboration between J. Mascis, Dave Sweetapple from retro metalheads Witch, and Tim Parnin and John Petkovic from glitzy punk band Cobra Verde. Then there’s that album cover, which appears to be an attempt to recreate Roxy Music’s Country Life sleeve with a couple of Suicide Girls. Throw in the touching story of Petkovic writing much of this material while overcoming the death of his mother, add the excellent leaked first single ‘Do You Remember’, and it appears we’re onto a winner. Right?

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The Fall - Your Future Our Clutter: Review

The pro forma approach to reviewing a new album by The Fall in the 21st century is to declare it a return to the band’s glory days, wherein Mark E Smith recruits a group of young bucks who really ‘get’ the groundwork laid down by the likes of Craig Scanlon and Steve Hanley, while simultaneously riddling Smith's lyrics with just the right amount of spit and bile. There won’t be any such claims for Your Future Our Clutter here. These are certainly strange times for The Fall — a lengthy gap between releases, a relatively stable band lineup, and even rumours that new label Domino rejected an earlier version of this album. But it would be difficult to call this a return to form when that ‘form’ has rarely ebbed since Are You Are Missing Winner in 2001.

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The Remarkable Career of Malcolm McLaren

The music world has lost one of its most influential, eccentric and (at times) maddening figures. Former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren passed away on April 8, and he continues to confound and confuse in death, much as he did in life-—the announcement of his demise was compounded by conflicting reports on the location of his passing, which could have been in a clinic in Switzerland, or may have been in New York City. Just one last little dab of chaos from a man who positively thrived on pulling a strange, raucous and compelling kind of beauty from disorder.

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The iPad and the Publishing Industry: A Match Made in Heaven?

Stephen Fry has posted a lovely reminiscence on the TIME website, which looks back on his early days playing with a Mac computer back in 1984. Fry and author Douglas Adams were the first two people to own Macintosh computers in England, and they would regularly meet up to exchange floppy discs and rearrange their desktop icons. The article discusses how those early dalliances with the Mac brand were the first time that computing had been a fun experience for both Fry and Adams—-something Steve Jobs and his team would ultimately build on as they produced the iPod and the iPhone. But expectations for the iPad, released this past weekend, inhabit some strange middle ground in the suite of Mac products, with a certain industry banking on it to blow some much needed air into the lungs of its failing business model.

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Malcolm McLaren R.I.P.

The music world lost one of its most charismatic figures yesterday (April 8) when former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren passed away. His influence spread far and wide, from work with the New York Dolls to the controversial near-nude pictures of 14-year-old Bow Wow Wow singer Annabella Lwin that decorated the band’s debut LP cover. McLaren also had a notable music career of his own, which principally centered on the 1983 Duck Rock album. The record helped spread the word about hip-hop to some far flung corners of the globe, and that work pinged right back to the United States as his “Buffalo Gals” single became a much-sampled staple. His other single from that album, “Double Dutch," paid warm tribute to a group of high-school age New York skipping champions, and remains a song of unbridled joy—it even pre-dates Vampire Weekend’s pilfering of “African” guitar rhythms by several decades.

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High Places Interview

Their origins may be in the still-thriving DIY scene in Brooklyn, but Mary Pearson and Rob Barber of High Places have always had a glassy pop edge to their music. Subtle stylistic shifts marked the transition from their earliest singles to their self-titled debut album, and further changes are afoot on the new High Places vs. Mankind. Their live set now features plenty of guitar playing from the pair, occasional vocal interjections from Mary’s sister, Laura, and even that most un-punk rock of instruments—the bassoon. DiS called High Places in their adopted home of Los Angeles, where we spoke about Judas Priest and Saturday Night Fever, their work on Liars’ Sisterworld, and how they felt about moving from New York to California.

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High Places - High Places vs Mankind: Review

High Places were always something of an anomaly in the Brooklyn scene. If music and art is intrinsically linked to the environment in which it is made, Rob Barber and Mary Pearson took one look at their surroundings and veered in the polar opposite direction. They appeared to be using their bucolic take on electronic music as a means of primitive escapism, as a way of wiping the grime of New York from their faces, to disappear for an hour or so into songs flooded with a rustic, agrarian light that you could never find in the city.

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Effi Briest Interview

Working in the visual arts can be a lonely experience. After completing an undergraduate degree at SVA, future Effi Briest songwriter and drummer Corinne Jones toiled away as a painter. The inherent creative confinement sparked an urge to push her art in a different direction, to connect with people and filter her impulses into a collaborative force. “It was so isolating, that way of working, and I needed to do something else, have another outlet,” she recalls over drinks at Soft Spot in Williamsburg. “So I just asked a lot of friends if they wanted to get together and make some noise with me.”

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The New Era of Pop Exclusitvity

Everyone hates an exclusive club, unless they’re asked to join or can somehow force themselves in. For a long time, the Internet has operated in direct opposition to such exclusivity-—it’s a free-for-all, where user generated content is king, and anyone with a half-realized idea can easily foist themselves onto the public for five seconds and then shrink back into anonymity. This way of working hasn’t been kind to the music industry, which once thrived on the removed other-ness of pop idols. Those kids in the '70s who spoke in awe-struck tones about David Bowie coming from another planet now seem impossibly naïve, their wide-eyed wonder replaced with an all-knowing savvy, because we’ve all been drawn so much closer to the people whose art has inspired us. We can even interact with many of them directly via MySpace, Twitter, Facebook or [insert name of preferred social networking tool here].

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Alex Chilton R.I.P.

The sudden death of Alex Chilton on Thursday (March 18) has sparked an outpouring of grief from the music community, with many friends, acquaintances and fans paying warm tribute to a man who has touched most of our lives at some point. Chilton was certainly a difficult man and a willful contrarian, but he didn’t need to speak to us through interviews or conversation—his deeply personal, sad, touching and sometimes funny songs did all the work for him.

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Rob Swift - The Architect: Review

In the hands of Queens native Rob Swift, the master turntablist who has collaborated with everyone from Blue Man Group to Mike Patton, hip-hop is a pliable tool, a genre to be warped and moulded and parlayed into a musical force shorn of recognisable boundaries. He first tumbled into Patton’s orbit as a member of the X- Ecutioners, who went into battle with the singer on General Patton vs. The X-Ecutioners in 2005, and has since toured with Peeping Tom. The Architect firms up that relationship by becoming Swift’s first solo release on Patton’s Ipecac label, which gives him a chance to pull deep from his bottomless pit of beats and move away from his jazz-y roots, instead forcing a symbiotic relationship between the worlds of hip-hop and classical music.

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Led Er Est - Dust on Common: Review

Listening to this album by Led Er Est, the synth-happy New York trio of Shawn NoEQ, Samuel Kklovenhoof and the disappointingly named Owen Stokes, it’s clear that ‘cold wave’ is something of a misnomer as a rote descriptor to attach to their music. Dust On Common is anything but cold. It’s full of the warm rush of analog keyboard, the very-human vocal stylings of Kklovenhoof, and a giddy love of song structure. If Pieter Schoolwerth’s Wierd label and club, which are releasing this record, have any burgeoning stars in their midsts, it’s in the shape of Led Er Est, who manage to filter their avant impulses (Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire) through a clear and demonstrable affinity for the destroyed-love pop of Soft Cell and the Human League.

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Loscil - Endless Falls: Review

Scott Morgan is one of those rare musicians who fully grasps the notion that it’s as much about what you don’t play as what you do. This is his fifth album as Loscil, which continues to plunder the same vein of chilly ambient electronica as his previous efforts. This is music designed to be played loud, preferably with ears hermetically sealed in high quality headphones, so listeners can really submerge themselves in all the subtle textures and nuances of Morgan’s recordings. Like much of Loscil’s output, it’s often difficult to detect a human hand at work on Endless Falls. This is the sound of isolated machine noise hollowed out and whittled down to its fragile essence, a set of songs left teetering on the brink of actually existing at all, a sort of ghostly paean to the beauty found on the cusp of complete silence.

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Fur - Witches: Review

The internet isn’t a great harvester of scenes. In the past, bands balked at being associated with other likeminded artists due to an intrinsic desire to stand alone, to make something special, that didn’t bear all the hallmarks and trappings of anyone else’s work. But secretly, they knew that riding a popular wave, whether it was grunge or Britpop or some other fly-by-night scene du jour, was just about the best thing that ever happened to them. Scenes help people turn a blind eye to the paucity of original thought in most music, to allow all the ne’er-do-wells a chance to hitch a ride on the bandwagon until it falls apart and they go back to work in banks or pet shops or real estate.

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Cluster- Qua: Review

It’s unlikely any contemporary band would be able to navigate the same Byzantine career turns that Krautrock legends Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius have mapped out over the years. This will be the sixth decade in which they’ve operated as Cluster, or Kluster, as they were originally known. They began with a record deal struck with a religious group who insisted some appropriate sermonizing was included on their recordings, to which Roedelius and Moebius respectfully agreed, then took in collaborations with Brian Eno, Holger Czukay and Michael Rother (in their Harmonia guise) along the way. The third part of the original Cluster triumvirate, Conny Plank, is sadly no longer with us, but the two core members have soldiered on to record Qua, their first album in over a decade, released in the year that the sprightly Roedelius will celebrate his 76th birthday.

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Screaming Females and JEFF the Brotherhood at Bowery Ballroom

You know you’re doing something right when fans start chanting your name before you’ve even struck a note. So it was on Saturday night when Nashville’s JEFF the Brotherhood took to the stage at the Bowery Ballroom, mid-way through a seven-band bill assembled to celebrate the mighty Don Giovanni Records.Singer Jake Orrall began the set dressed in leather and teetering on the top of a stack of amps, ending it 30 minutes later amid the sinewy limbs of sweaty stage divers and an exuberantly bludgeoned mosh pit. In between, we got bone-gnawing riffage, never-ending smiles from Jake’s brother Jamin, on drums, and a set of songs that are surely about to propel their quirky take on Neanderthal rock tropes to a wider audience. Judging from the front row here, that process is already well underway.

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JEFF the Brotherhood Interview

Jake Orrall fixes the crowd with a piercing stare from beneath his bowl haircut, brandishes his guitar in front of him like a sword and then steps into the throng like a medieval jouster about to spear an opponent. A meaty guitar riff billows out from Jake’s amp behind him while his younger brother, Jamin Orrall, pounds away at his drum kit, unable to wipe the fixed grin from his face.This is the scene at Pianos during a sweat-drenched CMJ show in October 2009, just one of many appearances at the festival by Nashville two-piece JEFF the Brotherhood. It was during this time that innumerable people were converted to the cult of JEFF, having been won over by the sunbaked ’70s rock riffage and Jake’s affinity for donning leather trousers and dangling a raccoon tail from his guitar strap.



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Gil Scott-Heron - I'm New Here: Review

It’s been a long, hard road to redemption for Gil Scott-Heron, the influential musician, poet and author, whose last full-length album, Spirits, was released 16 years ago. In the interim, he’s been in and out of jail on various drug-related offences, his taste for narcotics sapping the creative impulses that once burned so brightly. Scott-Heron’s saviour came in the unlikely shape of XL Records boss Richard Russell – the man responsible for rave classic The Bouncer by Kicks Like a Mule – who offered to produce an album by the singer during his stint in Rikers.

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Bob Blank - The Blank Generation: Review

The Mutant Disco revival that emerged at the beginning of the last decade gave some long overdue credit to a group of diverse musicians who congregated in New York during the early Eighties. But one man seemed to slip through the cracks when the critical plaudits were being handed out, despite his near-ubiquity on the compilation albums that were swiftly glued together and shoved out. If you squint at the producer credits on those records, the name of Bob Blank crops up more often than not, his steady hand helping to guide and shape the dissident visions of Lydia Lunch, Sun Ra, Arthur Russell and August Darnell. Fortunately, someone at the excellent Strut label had their reading glasses on and has released The Blank Generation, a compilation of wildly disparate tracks that were pieced together in his Blank Tapes studio in Chelsea.

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Midnight Masses Interview

Notions of redemption, death and resurrection run rife throughout the music of the Williamsburg-based Midnight Masses. Singer Autry Fulbright was transplanted from Los Angeles to Atlanta at a young age, subsequently spending much of his youth listening to the brittle punk of the Minutemen and X, and spreading the word of the Jehovah’s Witnesses with his mother. Somewhere between these two worlds lies Midnight Masses, the sweetly melancholic group Fulbright fronts with various friends and indie rock luminaries.

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Chicago Underground Duo - Boca Negra: Review

Boca Negra is a slang term in Spanish, used to denote someone who is foul-mouthed or abusive. It’s also a type of cake. Somewhere in between the sour and the sweet lies this album from Thrill Jockey mainstays Chicago Underground Duo. Cornetist Rob Mazurek and drummer Chad Taylor have been around the block a few times, collaborating with the cream of the crop of Chicago musicians. But for this, their fifth album for Thrill Jockey in 12 years, they traveled to São Paolo, Brazil, where they cut an album that combines their love of scattered improv work and tightly confined grooves.

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Gang Gang Dance and DJ/Rupture at Music Hall of Williamsburg

The appearance of DJ/Rupture (AKA Jace Clayton) as a support act to Gang Gang Dance illustrated the sharp divide in the headline act’s audience. Half of the crowd was made up of tranced-out club kids who were happy to dance to a mix that includes the old (Aaliyah’s still-radiant “We Need a Resolution”) and the new (Joy Orbison’s all-encompassing “Hyph Mngo”). Meanwhile, the indie rock contingent stared blankly at the stage, feeling short-changed at having a DJ as an opening act and hoping none of the revelers spill their beer.

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