Lost 10 of 2010 - #4: Meursault All Creatures Will Make Merry
Our Lost 10 of '10 list rumbles on with Alexander Tudor's pick...»
Articles
spawk has written the following articles:
Moonface - Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped
If Spencer Krug wants to keep the fans guessing – mission accomplished. If he really wants to lose them, he’s going to have to try a lot harder to stop writing those tunes. »
Larsen - Cool Cruel Mouth
In a nutshell, this record sounds like Can, Neu!, or Harmonia with the acid-freak ranting replaced by a torchsinger (which is a good nutshell to be in).»
Stuart Murdoch - The Celestial Café
The Celestial Café collects the diaries of Belle & Sebastian's frontman, and lyrical genius, Stuart Murdoch, from the years the band toured the world. »
Marnie Stern - Marnie Stern
If Marnie Stern feels she has less to prove, and less to say right now, then there’s still plenty to feel, and she’s more than deserved a chance to stop analysing and just express some joy.»
Jandek: Year Zero for Lo-Fi...?
It’s 1978. Tom Waits is still a Nighthawk at the Diner, yet to embark on his game-changing Frank’s Wild Years Trilogy. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are about to trade one-take / lo-fi folk for synth-gospel. Bruce Springsteen dominates the airwaves with The»
Les Savy Fav - Root for Ruin
This album isn’t a step forward for Les Savy Fav, and Root For Ruin is marginally less vital than Let’s Stay Friends, but LSF are a step forward for the music we grew up with, so keep listening; these are our songs. »
Favourite 50: Marnie Stern In Advance of the Broken Arm (chosen by Alexander Tudor)
There’s a track on Marnie’s forthcoming record called ‘Female Guitar Players Are the New Black’, which (for the moment) has a rather delicious ambiguity to it. Does she mean something like John & Yoko did, with a certain cringeworthy song, or that n»
Summer Sundae Festival, Leicester, 13-15 August - The DiS Review
DiS went to Summer Sundae last weekend. We had a stage and everything. Here, three DiS scribes share their highlights from the weekend that was...»
Mark Lanegan & Isobel Campbell - Hawk
Hawk is the most energetic record yet from the pair, with several pointers towards the sound of the enduring record they may well have in them. »
Sun Kil Moon - Admiral Fell Promises
Admiral Fell Promises is another set of exquisitely detailed portraits of places and people, bound by no compunction to invent a narrative or moral (which can easily kill the realism), but just to keep alive the time you shared, to honour the person, or the spirit of the place. »
Wintersleep - New Inheritors
With Tony Doogan producing, Wintersleep have added strings and brass, and for tension-building effect, gone back to the scratchiest riffs to start songs rather than diving straight in, as before.»
Xiu Xiu, Woom, Blue on Blue at Plan B, Stockwell, Sun 06 Jun
Last year, Jamie Stewart’s solo shows proved that less can be (frighteningly, excoriatingly) more, because one man onstage – screa»
The Whiskers - War of Currents
Fans of Frog Eyes, Sunset Rubdown, Destroyer et al. make magnificent third album. Available to download now, or pre-order CD (due April 27th).»
First Listen: The National High Violet
IT'S BACK: DiS' Alexander Tudor gets a first listen to The National's forthcoming album, High Violet.»
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Henry's Dream (remastered)
Having de-camped to Buenos Aires, and taken on Neil Young’s producer (David Briggs), The Bad Seeds could have been succumbing to rock-star cliché, but Cave found all new inspiration in the favelas, where the local buskers played a kind of stripped down, acoustic murder ballad – improvising their lyrics over frantic, percussive, chordal guitar playing. In 1992, The Year Punk Broke™, they sounded like no-one else (as the sleevenotes point out), but they also managed to be more punk than most grunge bands, showing up the banality of the fashion-sense, the narrowness of the musical pedigree, the superficiality of the production values. »
The Triffids - Come Ride With Me...Wide Open Road
Newcomers – start with the compilation, or the undisputed classic, Born Sandy Devotional. Old hands – you know you want this. »
Baby Dee - A Book of Songs for Anne Marie
Maybe check out Safe Inside the Day first, but whenever you discover this, you’re guaranteed a unique voice. »
My Brightest Diamond - Shark Remixes
The new remix album from genre-hopping, classically trained Shara Worden is – no, wait! Come back! Please. Really. I know what you’re thinking. Fact is, this might be the best remix album since Nine Inch Nails’ Further Down the Spiral.»
DiS meets Alan Sparhawk from Retribution Gospel Choir and Low
With the release of the second Retribution Gospel Choir album, Alan Sparhawk’s “side-project” from Low looks set to become an equal partner. As ever, the deceptively simple music manages to be as powerful as Neil Young & Crazy Horse or Iggy & The Stooges without being a re-tread of either. DiS caught up with the man himself...»
David Bowie - David Bowie (Deluxe Edition)
Often swept under the carpet by his fans, David Bowie's 1967 debut starts like a pastiche of music hall, but by the end shows the chameleonic Bowie so capable of assimilating his peers (the Stones, Donovan, etc.) it's only a mattter of time before he writes the defining anthems of the next decade.»
DiS meets Jonathan Meiburg of Shearwater
It's been a long while since Shearwater transcended their low-key, nocturnal, alt-folk beginnings, and who remembers there was ever another songwriter onboard? With their chamber-orchestration, and Jonathan Meiburg's astonishing vocal range, Shearwater's best songs are in a league with Low and Antony & the Johnsons. With Shearwater's most exciting and fully realized album due in a few weeks, DiS met Jonathan on promotional duties... »
New Model Army @ Kentish Town Forum, December 17
At the end of the decade in which reunions and Don’t Look Back concerts became an integral part of the musical landscape, it’s crucial to stress that New Model Army are not a nostalgia trip. They're going strong, even if they're going back to the punk-verging-on-metal roots... »
Molina And Johnson - Molina and Johnson
All in all, a fine introduction to the compelling Will Johnson, but a peculiar idea, to make a painfully intimate album with two songwriters rather than just one. »
Rob Young - The Wire Primers: A Guide To Modern Music
The writing in The Wire Primers is generally excellent, and never less than crystalline, lucid, to-the-point. »
Richard Youngs - Under Stellar Stream
On his new record for Jagjaguwar, it’s a surprise to see how minimal Richard Youngs has become. Over the six tracks, mostly running to six minutes apiece, Youngs accompanies his simple chants with sparse piano lines, and what sound like singing bowls, bells, and bowed cymbals, to mesmeric effect. »
themselves - CrownsDown
DoseOne reunites Anticon's finest for the first Themselves record in seven years. Rivalling Why? (his old partner in cLOUDDEAD) for work ethic and all round genius, this is another essential Anticon release. »
The Antlers - Hospice
Even if you had no information about the concept behind the record, you’d guess there’s some personal backstory lending weight to »
Joe Pernice - It Feels So Good When I Stop
As an author, Joe Pernice (of The Pernice Brothers) cut his teeth with a critically acclaimed response to Meat Is Murder for the 33 1/3 series. It Feels So Good When I Stop is his first novel-proper, paired with a “soundtrack” of covers. »
Times New Viking - Born Again Revisited
Net impression: it sounds like TNV are trying to recreate the charm of listening to a chewed-to-death dub-of-a-dub-of-a-dub of some teenagers in a basement, yelling slogans about what they want, and when they want it, in their little world of wherever. »