Archive for the ‘CLASSIC ALBUMS’ Category

The COURTNEYS – ” The Courtneys II “

Posted: December 29, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Vancouver all girl trio The Courtneys are exponents of a catchy harmonic new wave pop, whilst also being home to some very gnarly guitar textures. Their sound is fat and driving, and, on “Minnesota,” Courtney Garvin’s guitar manages to sound like an overdriven keyboard. Vocalist Jen Twynn Payne is also the band’s drummer and she keeps the rhythms lean and uncluttered. The highlight is the closing “Frankie,” where Twynn Payne’s sad autumnal vocal melody is kept in motion by a precise motorik groove.

The Courtneys have such a sweet and amazing sound. I can’t quite identify what it is about their music that I find so completely endearing, but I absolutely love it. The combination of fuzzy guitars and driving beats along with Jen’s vocals (and a hint of 80’s nostalgia) make the Courtneys one of the bands I never tire of and look forward to hearing more from. This album has made the the lengthy wait since their last release worthwhile.

There may be trace elements of Sonic Youth or Joy Zipper in their sound, but over the spread of this album, The Courtneys create their own distinct world. Sunshiney slacker pop with just a pinch of melancoly that could have featured on one of my cool older sister’s pre-grunge mix tapes from the early 90s. Both this and their debut album are absolute gems, beautiful harmonies, fuzzy guitars. just pure happiness. reminds me of the days when Blake Babies were ruling indie pop. the contrast of vox and guitar noise is beautiful. Sunshiney slacker pop with just a pinch of melancoly that could have featured on one of my cool older sister’s pre-grunge mix tapes from the early 90s. Both this and their debut album are absolute gems.

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Released February 17th, 2017
The Band
Crazy Courtney: Bass + backup vocals
Classic Courtney: Guitar + backup vocals
Cute Courtney: Drums + lead vocals

Flying Nun Records 

FEVER RAY – ” Plunge “

Posted: December 29, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Taking a plunge into Karin Elisabeth Dreijer’s sound world can be as unsettling as it is exhilarating. Even though the sometimes brutal yet oddly buoyant electro-pop of her (now-defunct) sibling duo The Knife remains a fundamental element of the songs she creates as Fever Ray, the project continues to expose her broad range of influences, from dark metal to African music to the soundtracks of David Lynch and Miami Vice to the work of Meredith Monk and Kate Bush. And while the cumulative effect can be as chilly as a New Year’s Eve party in Göteborg, there’s always a charge—and sometimes even a warmth—thanks to the stormy emotions and vulnerabilities that exist just below the surface.

Eight years have passed since Fever Ray entered cryogenic sleep, and Plunge’s deliriously bright first single, “To The Moon And Back,” marked both a welcome return and a breath of fresh air for Karin Dreijer’s haunting synth-pop project. The album as a whole turned out to hold much darker, more intense pleasures, not unlike 2013’s Shaking The Habitual, the last album Dreijer released with brother Olof as The Knife.

Fever Ray – Mustn’t Hurry. Taken from the new album ‘Plunge’ which is out now:

But Plunge anchors its relentless provocations in the most relatable of matters: desire, particularly the forbidden kind. The record’s danceable mania and confrontational spirit, summed up in the line “One hand in yours and one hand in a tight fist” (“A Part Of Us”), make it one of 2017’s most brazen, guaranteed to leave your heart racing and your lip bleeding.  Stand out track “An Itch” twitches and scratches with monomaniac insistence, whereas “Wanna Sip” is like an electro Bond theme performed by a lost tribe. The mood here is definitely a shade perkier than Fever Ray’s debut, with “To The Moon And Back” initially suggesting she’s flirting with a Hi-NRG pop approach. But the song’s strange and erotic lyrics swiftly remind you that Dreijer is as fascinated by extremes as ever.

ULRIKA SPACEK – ” Modern English Decoration ” Best Albums Of 2017

Posted: December 29, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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London-based Ulrika Spacek released their new record on June 2nd via the good people of Tough Love Records.  Ulrika Spacek’s sound is dominated by their three guitarists. On a song like the slowly chugging “Dead Museum,” the densely enmeshed riffs and drones of this Reading five piece recall the kind of blissful noise summoned up by The Band of Susans or mid period Sonic Youth.  But there’s also something of Deerhunter about the band’s gauzy but winsome vocal melodies.  The album’s highlight is probably “Victorian Acid,” with its tense central melody drowning in waves of overdriven distortion. The hilariously titled “Protestant Work Slump” closes the album in a brighter mood, with a distinct gleam of Big Star.

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Much like their debut LP The Album Paranoia released in early 2016, the band chose to record, produce and mix the entirety of the record of Modern English Decoration in their shared house – a former art gallery called ‘KEN’. Modern English Decoration is, in part, a self-effacing play on an interior design cliché that references the meticulous creative processes the band adheres to: “Doing everything ourselves is not just necessary: it’s important to us, as it allows us to truly create our own world,” they said.

EZRA FURMAN and the VISIONS – ” Love You So Bad “

Posted: December 29, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Ezra Furman

The Boyfriends are dead, long live The Visions. Describing upcoming album, “Transangelic Exodus”, Ezra Furman has suggested it is, “not a concept record, but almost a novel, or a cluster of stories on a theme, a combination of fiction and a half-true memoir. A personal companion for a paranoid road trip. A queer outlaw saga”. We can’t be alone in thinking that’s the most exciting description of a record we’ve heard in many years. This narrative vision is matched in a different approach to recording and writing music, one that is accompanied by a change in backing band, or at least a re-christening of an old one.

Ahead of Tranangelic Exodus’ release in February, Ezra Furman has recently shared the video to his latest single, “Love You So Bad”. Propelled by an energetic string quartet, Love You So Bad is adventurous, inspired pop music; unique and intense, at once very Ezra Furman and entirely different to anything he’s previously produced. Lyrically, it’s a record of contrast and contradiction, surmised in the opening lines, “you know I love you so bad, I don’t believe in love”. Throughout the track, Ezra seems to question his place in the world, and how much of that was down to opportunity and fate; Ezra presents snapshots of a youth at, “the back of the classroom” in a “garbage, small town rat trap”. Perhaps the ultimate damnation of the injustice at heart of the track is presented in the off-hand way Ezra quips, “I always knew I was bad”. In a world where so many aren’t ever given the chance to make a life for themselves, Ezra Furman is singing for the downtrodden, persecuted and oppressed, and simultaneously stepping ever more confidently through his own personal journey; an artist always on the move and more vital than ever.

Transangelic Exodus is out February 9th via Bella Union. Click HERE for more information on Ezra Furman.

ALAN VEGA – ” DTM “

Posted: December 29, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Along with Martin Rev, who was his companion in the pioneering New York synth duo Suicide, Alan Vega was a visionary artist who saw the future, then helped create it.  When he sadly passed away last year, at the age of 78, he was working on his first solo album since 2007’s neglected Station. And it transpires his last album, more political than personal, is an indisputable career highlight. “DTM” is a fiercely looping surge of electronics with Vega’s unmistakable vocals riding them with tense determination. “Motorcycle Explodes” sees Vega’s lyrics veering between the cautionary and the celebratory as a clangorous Throbbing Gristle-style electro-rhythm roils beneath.  As final statements go, this is pretty special album.

DEMEN – ” Nektyr “

Posted: December 29, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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This is a debut album which is alive with confidence and well judged minimalism.  Its dream doom. when your soul is a cloud that is slowly crushed into a million soft pieces, but those pieces are delicate and tragically exquisite.There are definite moments, such as on the romantic swirl of “Niorum” or the grandiose high church atmosphere of “IIIdrop,” where you may be reminded of Dead Can Dance or This Mortal Coil. And yet the album places Orm’s impressive and evocative vocals amid shifting soundscapes which are equally haunted by the ghosts of trip hop, Industrial and dub. An album which is gothic in the true sense – without being Goth – Nektyr resists clichés, to present the sound of one woman’s finely honed vision.   This haunting music creates its own nighttime, its own stars

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WIRE – ” Silver Lead “

Posted: December 29, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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They may not take the leaps into new territories they once did, but instead explore the detail in the terrain they themselves uncovered. Thus, repetitive rhythms nestle alongside walls of fuzz. However, this is a slower, more melancholy Wire, one that finds them at their most melodic and enigmatic. As ever, it requires more than a thesaurus to unravel lyrics such as “Skippering a skiff, in the typhoon season” and “Have you got a shed of ions?” But Diamond Cups and A Short Elevated Period are some of the strongest tunes they’ve ever done. The faster-paced latter song sees – as an old compilation was once titled – Wire play pop, but in a manner that pushes at the form, with a chorus only arriving at the end. Wire continue to thrive on their own terms.

Opening with the plangent “Playing Harp For The Fishes”—where Graham Lewis’ rich baritone intones over Colin Newman and Matt Simms FX-drenched waves of guitar—this is an album as intense as it is playful. Robert Grey’s spartan but immaculately nuanced drum patterns lift the arrangements throughout. And, whilst Wire are still the go-to band for angular psychedelics (“An Alibi”) and oblique but melodic post punk (“Short Elevated Period”), Silver/Lead sees them experimenting with a more glam inflected template.

“Forever & A Day” suggests the elegant swing and compressed drama of early Roxy Music, and the buzzing and glinting “Diamonds in Cups” has a flavour of T-Rex at their most groovesome. With Silver/Lead, the group prove once again that late-period Wire can easily lay claim to being best-period Wire.

The HOLD STEADY – Boys And Girls In America ( Full Album Shows ) The Electric Ballroom 9th-10th March 2018

Posted: December 29, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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DAVID RAWLINGS – ” Cumberland Gap “

Posted: December 29, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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From the new album , out now on Acony Records. Shot on location in Tennessee with acclaimed director James Lees. Southern This gothic tune appears on the singer-songwriter’s new album ‘Poor David’s Almanack,’

There are few figures in the Americana community who are as respected and beloved as David Rawlings. The songwriter, guitar slinger, producer and longtime Gillian Welch collaborator is one of the pioneers of the form, having played integral roles in such monumental releases as Welch’s 2001 Grammy-nominated Time (The Revelator), Ryan Adams’ 2000 solo debut Heartbreaker, and Old Crow Medicine Show’s 2004 self-titled studio debut. a new track from Poor David’s Almanack, the Southern Gothic stomp “Cumberland Gap.” As Rawlings explains, the track was a vital piece in finishing out Poor David’s Almanack, as it was one of the last songs to be completed in what he describes as “the fastest [they] ever made a record.”

FLAMINGO SHADOW – ” Riding On The Wind “

Posted: December 29, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Hailing from Atlanta, Georgia, Flamingo Shadow are in their own words “a genre-hopping, tropical punk band”. Recently the band released their new single, Riding On The Wind, their first new material since their 2016 debut EP, Vibe Control.

The track is a beautiful merging of styles, the vocal has a bright new-wave quality, fluttering above tremulous guitars that float ethereally around frenetic bass-lines and driving, post-punk influenced beats. It builds to a thrilling crescendo as the vocal becomes an impassioned yelp, repeating the line, “I’m good man, don’t you worry”, as the music swells to a brilliantly energetic finale. With an as yet untitled debut album on the way in the Spring, Flamingo Shadow sound like a band ready for huge things in the coming year.

Riding On The Wind is out now. Click HERE for more information on Flamingo Shadow.

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