Albums

Boards of Canada are a peculiar phenomenon. They put out one of the best records of the 90s with their stunning classic Music Has A Rights To Children. It was perfect; a masterpiece; a wholly new sound, that to this day remains mostly all their own. The album spoke to a generation. And yet as deeply in command of their craft as they clear were in making it, one has to wonder how they've failed to continue to innovate and inspire in the way that they did with that recording. Yes, they did put ...

Another album of smooth, house from the Compost Black Label series. This one is fairly mellow and may be less dancefloor-oriented than some. Muallem delivers a strong track as always in Holland Tunnel, a very straightforward house number with brass stabs, vibraphone and saxophone samples. Marcel Robert's Let's Take Off (Yoruba Soul Instumental Mix) is a particular highlight featuring driving Rhodes piano, absolutely gorgeous synth brass parts and a slick driving four on the floor beat with sn...

Mr Parrotfish starts off with A.R.G.O. (Ian Pooley Remix) – vocal driven house. Smooth brass chords punch out the bars, some minimal rhodes stabs scattered around as well. The male vocals are subdued and remind me a tiny bit of Tarwater. Sustained bass notes pump out a rhythm. A distorted guitar sound pumping away, some vaguely pipe organ-sounding pads. Not a bad track. Next up is the original mix and a far stronger track, which features a really superb, more well-defined rhythmic bass lin...

Dekontrol are a Serbian duo who've previously released on Detroit label Incorrect Music. Their latest two-track single Reaching For You, on Nasty Funk Records is a slick, solid, vocal-driven house music effort buoyed as expected by four on the floor kick, claps, and hats with some nice rim shots patterns. Both tracks on Reaching For You benefit from quality, driving bass lines. Reaching For You is a bit more subdued, a fairly minimal production, awash with reverb, and filled out by pads, an...

A pleasant album by producer Datalog based out of Brooklyn, New York. Haarp is an album of bubbling, cheerful electronic music. Previously a keyboardist with rock band The Upwelling, Conor Heffernan is now focusing his efforts on the Datalog project. Four on the floor kick drums are a theme through the album that kick off with opening track Gampi, but methinks the album is more home listening than dance floor fodder. It would also be at home in a wine bar, cocktail lounge or dinner party....

A blessing of a Remora album, ‘Scars Bring Hope’ sees Brian John Mitchell bring the solo guitar drone project out of lo-fi bedroom recordings and into the studio with Brian Lea McKenzie (Of Electric Bird Noise) at the producer helm, focusing three hours worth of demo tape into a sci-fi themed concept album. ‘Awake, Arise’, thematically based around the resurrection of a soldier, has all the eeriness and creep of previous remora tracks but with a fuller richer sound thanks to some studio ma...

Hotly anticipated by fans previously earned from releases ‘Res Cogitans’ and ‘Without Number’, Boston four-piece Plumerai strike another effective post rock result with ‘Your Guilty Pleasure’, their latest on Silber Records. Reintroducing listeners to Elizabeth Ezell’s sultry vocals, ‘Strike’ brims with delicate brooding and tight guitar & drum composition, highlighting the level of development and competence the production levels of the band have reached. Jaunty and melodic, ‘Spinn...

Martin Newman’s Goddak project picks up where his last album left off, with N◦2 providing more ambient post-industrial soundscapes to lose yourself in. ‘A Snowy Walk Home’s canny use of its title helps bring out the air of ominous foreboding inherent in the looped guitar and distortion and sets expectations high from the offset of the audible journey to follow -‘Apples and Lilies’ is subsequent in a similarly mesmerising composition. Meditative and sombre, ‘An Hour of God’ echoes with deso...

Another day, another Black Metal album, this time from some disturbed brethren of Norway; Throne of Katarsis. ‘Ved Graven’ meaning ‘At the Grave’ provides pretty much what you’d expect BM to provide; harsh, bitter lyrical contents, lo-fi analogue sounding thrash drums and guitar riffs speeding headlong and hurriedly into the void. Don’t get me wrong, ‘Ved Graven’ is a fucking awesome album to play at nasty volumes, ‘Helvete Kaller’ is so primeval and sordid in manifestation that no blac...

Officially on hiatus since 2001, San Jose’s Sludge outfit Nootgrush were, for those in the know, a force to be reckoned with in the now overtly popular subgenre, constructing brutally heavy tracks that only went to prove how depressing it was when they bowed out of the circuit, unsung heroes of the scene. Ten years later and Southern Lord are the heralds of Nootgrush’s return, with some reunion shows scheduled for Autumn 2011 as well as the release of ‘Live for Nothing’ a one hour twenty m...

Megaton Leviathan hail from Portland Oregon and as their name no doubt suggests are creating sounds of a loud and coarse nature. Indeed Megaton Leviathan infuse occult sentiment with slow and sludgy doom, encapsulating that black magic feeling that has been married so well with groups of a similar ilk before. So what does this behemoth named group offer that’s new and refreshing? Well to be fair this is pretty much staple diet stuff, ‘Water Weath Hell on Earth’ is heavy, slow and hypno...

‘Beneath Black Robes’ is Silber’s offering of remixes and re-imaginings of Detroit, Michigan virtuoso Sarah June’s latest album ‘In Black Robes’ and as an added bonus the majority of these remixes come courtesy of Remora’s Brian John Mitchell and Brian McKenzie of Electric Bird Noise. ‘Brand of Bitterness (Shoegaze Mix)’ expertly combines the drones and dark ambience of Remora with June’s childlike ethereal voice (reminiscent of Katie Jane Garside) creating a dreamlike, eerie atmosphere th...

A soon to be sought after reissue for those who missed out on the original in 2000 and the limited edition LP version that came earlier this year; Neurosis’ Sovereign EP is an exceptionally crafted release that has lost none of its power despite being over a decade old. “Payer” works as a great opening track, with layers of vocals and drums increasing methodically with the teasing notion that a guitar crescendo is on the horizon, however the group, ever unpredictable, decide against this...

Hailing from Charlotte, North Carolina, ‘From Autumn to Oceans’ create heavy, brooding post metal soaked in a nostalgic air of early 90’s alt rock/grunge sentiment. Their new EP; ‘The Flood/ The Fall’ (each track on the EP named accordingly) grabs your attention straight away with ‘The Flood’, nine minutes of loud shoegaze rhythms and distortion, evoking My Bloody Valentine and Isis simultaneously which no doubt will turn heads from fans of both. Lastly ‘The Fall’ ups the ante by introdu...

Despite dozens of appearances with Silber’s acts on compilation albums and live shows, this is officially the very first album released on Silber by Brian McKenzie’s experimental post rock outfit, filtering ten years worth of output into thirteen choice cuts of instrumental madness. With two minuscule tracks as openers it is ‘Proti Village- Meteora-Odeon of Herodes Atticus’ that really begins the album proper, mixing barking dogs, bells and guitar instrumentation to create a unique music...

One of the few genuine contemporary artists continuing what Steven Stapleton and Nurse With Wound began in the 70’s, Scotty Irving’s Clag Quartet began life as a way of recording audible expressions of The Passion of the Christ, often using found sound elements via makeshift instruments of saws and crutches found in his home. With ‘Ava’, we bear witness to a harsh, cacophonic and visceral thirty minute live performance that was recorded in 2008 as part of the Ava Gardner film festival. O...

Azalia Snail has been active as a music producer and underground film maker since the 1980s and in this time her fans & collaborators have included Alan Sparhawk and Beck to name but a few. With ‘Celestial Respect’, Snail creates a hopeful space pop melodrama, that seeks to reignite human kindness through music that feels and sounds electronic and mechanical, creating an intriguing dichotomy to muse over while listening. ‘Solar Riser’ and ‘Space Heater’ are the first two examples o...

Oakland metal pioneers, Neurosis continue to re-master their early releases with ‘Souls at Zero’, their third studio album originally released in 1992. As you might expect from Neurosis this is sludgy, doom based metal indulgence and as an album, hallmarked a change in sound for the group, abandoning the thrash sound of early recordings to follow a slower, more poised orchestration. The proof is evident from the offset with ‘To Crawl Under One’s Skin’ which, as the title suggests, impacts...

Imagine Courtenay Taylor Taylor singing along to Ladytron and that is exactly the feeling of how Guitaro’s latest album, JJ’s Crystal Palace jumps off. With the classic electro pop sounds, the album is both ballsy and dreamy. You get a sense of sentiment while listening to the vocal textures, and harmonies blend with fierce synthesizers and electric guitars. Being a Vancouver expat, I am disappointed that I never had a chance to hear Guitaro live. Unfortunately, Vancouver can be a tou...

Jerry Granelli is a Halifax-based jazz drummer, hailing originally from San Francisco. A prodigy, he studied early on with Joe Morello, and moved quickly into professional jazz gigs with big names like Vince Guaraldi– that’s him playing drums for the Peanuts soundtrack – Denny Zeitlin, Charlie Haden, the list goes on. A tireless innovator, he pushed onward into the Haight’s burgeoning psyche scene, participating in cross-disciplinary happenings that went way beyond the boundaries of the tradi...

Knowing where to begin is the utmost challenge to creating to comment on something as stunning as the Baths’ debut release Cerulean. Among a few of my dream labels, Anticon is in the top 3, so when I read of a new artist on Anticon, I can usually trust that it will be both quality, odd-but-catchy and extremely intelligently arranged music and/or lyrics. Anticon never seems to disappoint a listener like me and usually it is not to my surprise that I will become a fan of any of their artists....

Electronic beats meets Botswana street music in MaSuper Star’s brilliant and supremely uplifting Masalacism Records debut album, Airtime. The duo features Soops on a homemade guitar made from a can outfitted with a couple of metal strings, and vocalist Kenny. Airtime also benefitted from production by Ruff Riddims producer Moemedia Ramogapi. Before they hit Botswana’s Ruff Riddims Studios, the group had just performed at bus stations, malls, bars and other makeshift venues in Mahalapye. Ken...

I have a hard time in my creative old age at best coming up with an EP of songs that no one wants to hear every couple of years, meanwhile the Joel Plasketts and Rodney Decroos of this world are throwing out double and triple albums without breaking a sweat. Goddamn! Decroo’s latest, Queen Mary Trash, is one of his finest efforts – as long as the two continue to release solo records, in my mind Decroo and Rae Spoon have set themselves up with the herculean task of surpassing individually the ...

Based on a show I’d seen Bernard Falaise do at the Montreal free-jazz hotspot Casa Obscura, I know that the guy’s just a totally mental guitar player. There aren’t many people you’d want to plunk down into the middle of a recording session with this guy: who could keep up? If I remeber correctly, some of the other otherwise very talented players he holed up with that night kinda fell by the wayside in my mind, with the exception of Halifax hotshot Pau Cram, who also really shocked and awed, b...

Based on my one previous experience with Gord Grdina, a very sedate set at Bukowski’s in Vancouver, I wasn’t expecting too much excitement from this one, but considering the company the dude keeps – François Houle, TOmmy Babin, Mats Gustafsson, etc – I should have know better than to prematurely pigeonhole the guy as a mild-mannered, middle of the road jazzbo. This album is a rager. What can really be said? Music like this just needs to be listened to, preferably live. A stellar lineup of Van...