Godless Noise is that rare thing of beauty, pitched between the clipped, impatient grindcore of longhaired punks like Napalm Death, Repulsion, and Nausea (and many other highlights of old Thrasher flexi-discs), and the storm-in-heaven rumble of black metal. The result is a constantly shifting, malleable hybrid that often feels like panning two different records back and [...]
Thoughts on Leonard Cohen in Tampa….. A note on the audience — this is a graying, older audience tonight, there’s no other way to put it. I hear snippets of conversation like, “saw him in ’72,” “bought the DVD on PBS,” “went because my husband has loved him for 20 years,” and I see mother-son [...]
11.09On Niccolo Paganini
“As Paganini toured Europe in triumph, these indistinct remors of a dark and gruesome past pursued him, and his extraordinary technical feats were often put down to some Faustian Pact with the Devil. Willingly or not, in the popular imagination Paganini became a sort of musical “fatal man,” related to fictive personages such as Schiller’s [...]
With Outside Love, Mountaintops’ main man Stephen McBean — pictured on the back sleeve, poised on the edge of an armchair in a natty sweater and unruly hair, natch – has fused his usual love for star-crossed chamber pop balladry with a flair for the dramatic, thrift store Xmas records (check out the sleigh bells [...]
The actual “songs” are gloriously loud and violent; born from primitive 4-track experiments, the sound has filled out incredibly to a host of panicked, grabbing hands with grime-caked nails and guttural, alchemical roars. Every instrument is soaked in reverb, bleeding all over one other. Spidery lead guitar drips and flows into the cracks between lurching [...]
Sandoval stepped off the pop culture treadmill and immersed herself in music, at her own pace and of her own choosing. Collaborations with Jesus and Mary Chain, Bert Jansch, Massive Attack, and Air followed, as did an album with a new group of collaborators, the Warm Inventions (Bavarian Breadfruit), in 2001. Now going on eight [...]
How can music from four renowned tech-obsessives like these come out sounding so fucking organic? Angular plastic aliens in multicolored dresses no doubt dance and shimmy to these weird miniatures. Songs are much briefer than you would expect, save for a couple of mammoth ten-minute-plus tracks in the middle, and though often tending toward the [...]
11.01Alegria! Alegria!
My newest Music For The Masses: Purchasing Tropicalia for public libraries over at Library Journal.