naat has written the following articles:
The density, the sheer weight of this album, is hard to convey in words. It’s as if the elements of almost everything we understand to be popular music have been rolled and pressed, compacted and ground down, so that here we follow through seams and strata, jazz, folk, spoken word, drone, ballads, noise, even punk.»
It’s not often that a side-project produces an album that deserves anything more than a footnote mention. Loose Fur deserves its own cult.»
As gloomy as the San Francisco Bay in January, there is a cathartic feel to Like Trees… – in a kind of wandering around in the rain, fists clenched tight, sobs stuck in your throat sort of way. Sometimes we all have moments like this. »
Almost like a short hand Harry Smith, the album is an anthology of American music – although instead of the academic approach that Smith took in painstakingly, comprehensively capturing and cataloguing the pure folk and bluegrass of old, JOMF take things from memory, putting their own freewheeling spin on folk, spirituals, blues and jazz and moulding it into a modern sound all their own.»
DiS' Natalie Moore delves into conversation with Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney on being veterans, politics, commerciality in music and its the ‘deadening and watering down’. Gentle words then...»
They tinker with leads and tune up and then, with barely a howdy or hello, slam straight into ‘The Fox’, the opener on new LP The Woods. The tune is indescribably heavy - it’s like treacle tart. It’s like 10 million pounds of sludge from New York and New Jersey. It’s Zeppelin heavy.»
The Velvet Underground’s self-titled album is unquestionably the blueprint for the ‘other’ rock 'n' roll; The rock 'n' roll that had the amps turned down, the lights turned out and, with eyes wide and voices whispered, explored tenderness and regret and discarded everything that was showy and macho about rock n roll...»
I swear I don’t understand why a song like ‘Hey Charlie, Hey Chuck’ couldn’t be number 1. It’s a Hubba Bubba ‘Space Odyssey’ about saving the population of our planet by colonizing the forehead of Charlie Brown, with a melody sweet as candy floss.»
The NC3’s opening salvo is not a song. It’s a crunching, screeching, thumping thirty-second HOWL designed with one response in mind – to get the fuckers in from the bar. It’s an expert manoeuvre. The call to arms has an immediate effect and the wide expanses of dingy, sticky carpet around me are filled in seconds. Respect, it seems, is due - Neils Children have got this gig thing down.»
Now first impressions are clearly important to Bloc Party. Have you noticed how from the instant one of their songs begin, you’re hooked? Whether it’s a beat, a sound or a shout, from the very first listen to the thousandth time you’ve played it, they have an impact that you feel almost before you hear.»
When was the last time you heard a band singing about justice? I bet you can’t remember. That’s because, all of a sudden, it seems a very old-fashioned thing to do. And an unfashionable thing to do. No one sings protest songs anymore.»
“I remember the t-shirt I was wearing and the exact colour of the sky when I walked into the record shop and pulled Surfer Rosa off the shelf…” “…when my then-girlfriend put the needle to side A and the opening riff of ‘Debaser’ rang out, the spot-varnish of Doolittle’s sleeve glinting like fire in our eyes, I knew I was going to spend then rest of my life with her…” “The day I heard the Pixies had split was the day that music died…”»
Sunburned Hand of the Man are one of those mysterious, nebulous ‘free-folk’ collectives that some of my geekier friends get real excited about. Hailing from the backwoods of Massachusetts and seeing through the past six years with a variety of self-released LPs and CD-Rs, I pictured these kids in my mind in grainy super-8 living a life that was, well, way the fuck out-there. You know, every one of them wandering around naked and bearded (including the girls), hand-fashioning their record sleeves out of burlap and lentils, chanting and casting spells while tin pots and wind chimes created the background music that they lived by.»
When you think about it, there aren’t actually that many truly terrifying bands out there. OK, so we all fear some bands – some of those Norwegian death metal bands maybe? Slipknot? Hmmm, not really though. Keane? Yeah, definitely, but for different reasons, so they don’t count. You see? It really is difficult to think of many people producing music that one could honestly describe as disturbing; it’s usually the face paint and gallons of fake blood that do the trick and not the music itself.»
Animal Collective have a kind of folk tourette’s. Music pours from them in fits and starts. Noise and melody, lyrics and beats, come tumbling out in streams and rivulets almost, it seems, without them being able to control it.»
Lightning Bolt unleash their furious noise from the centre of the crowd itself. And towering over them is the tallest, widest, LOUDEST Marshall stack this side of a Darkness video.»
Hella's songs twist and turn away from the obvious - they hit a groove and then screw it up, hit another groove, then smash it to bits. It's incredibly powerful stuff.»
