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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