From hereon in the big list I think, everything is a potential number 1. All of these are truly excellent. Each time I listen to one of ‘em, I want to move it straight up to the top, until I play the next one in line again. And, the records in parts #1 and #2 weren’t bad either. Such a fine year for ears, if not for most other organs and appendages.

 

 

Mixing near-eastern processional/celebratory music with the scuzz-drenched tape cut-up methodology of the western noise underground, N.R. Safi aka Naujawanan Baidar makes a racket as original, incendiary and authentically psychedelic as anything the brutalised culture of the 21st century has to offer. Wherever music finds itself heading in future years, MORE OF THIS SORT OF THING would seem like a good start.

From June 2020:  

“..combining traditional Afghan instrumentation with a bewildering array of loops, radio textures, distortion, digital effects, drums, Western/South Asian instruments and more besides, [this] dense and beguiling set of heavy psyche-blasted quasi-enthno semi-forgeries basically sounds like the wildest dream of some Sublime Frequencies junkie, obsessively scanning the scanning the short wave dials in search of mind-blowing pan-global audio to rip and reconstitute for hungry ears.

Beautiful collage artwork, vintage field recordings and track titles like ‘Blood Can’t Clean Blood’ speak of a legit and powerful engagement with the issues of cultural displacement and transformation which inevitably surround this music, which pulses and shrieks across imagined and real airwaves, like an affirmative signal of resistance for Middle Eastern and North American deserts alike.”

Side D of the album, comprising ‘Shakl-e-Barqi’, ‘Nagin Saaz’ and ‘Panj Ruz Pesh’, strikes me as particularly choice. 

 

 

I wouldn’t be a Stereo Sanctity best-of-year list without Mike Vest sticking his oar in at some point, and the most noteworthy project undertaken by the UK’s leading maximalist guitar savant during 2020 was undoubtedly Ozo, a studio-bound trio in which Vest’s distinctively uncompromising bass and guitar work goes head-to-head with the Equally forthright sounds of Karl D’Silva (sax) and Graham Thompson (drums).

Of ‘Pluto’, my favourite of the two LPs, I said in July 2020:  

“Moving at least slightly closer to realising the elusive space-rock / free jazz ideal Ozo are allegedly aiming for, this one is a heavy, heavy trip – a hulking motherlode of King Crimson-accented sonic gloop which feels more ‘high gravity planetary surface trek’ than ‘interstellar joyride’, stumbling over boulders on the way back to the landing module as the low-hanging sky overhead behind to look like this album’s cover.”

‘Saturn’ is well worth a listen too however, particularly for fans of Thompson’s powerhouse drumming, which effectively assumes lead instrument status through much of the LP, his meteor shower beat-downs often pummelling both Vest’s galaxy-questing, ‘Space Ritual’ bass lines and D’Silva’s squalling, disembodied ‘Funhouse’-in-a-hall-of-mirrors sax echoes into submission. A uniquely wild and disorientating new sound in the space-rock firmament, whichever way you look at it. 

 

 

The interplay between bassist Dezron Douglas and harpist Brandee Younger was a big part of what made the New York side of Makaya McCraven’s ‘Universal Beings’ double LP so sublime, and here the duo return with one of the world’s first real lessons in how to make the concept of a “lockdown album” really work.

Culled from a series of lunchtime live-streams the couple undertook from their NYC apartment through the peak of the city’s first wave in March-June 2020, Douglas & Younger’s instinctive / off-the-cuff playing here succeeds in providing a veritable beacon of good ol’ peace, love and understanding in a cold and threatening world, proving (lest the thousands of such recordings made during the 20th century left us in any doubt) that with the right players, and the right feel, one half-decent microphone is all that’s needed to make an album for the ages.

Concentrating largely on melodically potent material which will likely be at least distantly familiar to most of their listeners, ‘Force Majeure’ is probably at its best when the duo explore the jazz repertoire, working over such touchstones as John Coltrane’s ‘Equinox’ and ‘Wise One’, Alice Coltrane’s ‘Gospel Trane’ and Pharaoh Sanders & Leon Thomas’s ‘The Creator Has A Master Plan’ with a sense of warmth and constant harmonic discovery that it’s near impossible not to be moved by. Their (instrumental) interpretations of pop songs are good too, particularly when Younger takes the lead on comparatively simple, heart-rending reimaginings of Clifton Davis’s ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ (you know, the Jackson 5 one) and Kate Bush’s ‘A Woman’s Work’.

On a slightly snarkier note, I would also like to state that this is the one and only occasion upon which this blog will provide positive commentary on a release which includes a track composed by Sting (that being Douglas’s solo bass take on a something named ‘Inshallah’ on side # 2). You may have won me over this time with your good-natured banter about coffee and human togetherness and your vast musical talent guys, but c’mon - don’t push it. 

 

 

As I mused way back in July, the extended vocal cuts led here by Chicagoan percussionist/singer Kahil El’Zabar often veer more toward a kind of spaced out, discombobulated soul than to anything in the jazz canon, with the simple hypnotic rhythms of El’Zabor and bassist Emma Dayhuff backing up the band leader’s resonant, mantra-like, sometimes entirely non-verbal, incantations, resulting in a sound which perhaps recalls the methodology of Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ taken to it’s furthest extreme, or perhaps Gil Scott Heron getting waa-aay out there on a jazz tip, if he’d stuck to pot rather than hitting the hard stuff.

At the same time though, as I’ve lived with this record over the past six months or so, it’s the instrumental cuts I come back to the most. Side # 3’s ‘Katon’ in particular spends quite a while digging into territory not too distant from the slow burn, ambient minimalism of Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society, until saxophonist David Murray eventually weighs in with some stark, unmistakably Trane-like tenor ruminations, paying heed to the feather-soft groove even as he briefly tilts in a considerably more fearsome direction - a trend which is furthered, naturally enough, on side # 4’s more conventionally lyrical ‘Trane in Mind’ - as knock-out a tribute to the big man as you’re likely to hear anywhere in the current musical firmament. 

 

 

Why, after all these years, does ‘The Devil Rides Out’, an insufferably boring novel written by arch-conservative imperialist blowhard Dennis Wheatley in 19…, retain such an irresistible aesthetic appeal, living on in the minds of horror/weird fiction aficionados like a rich bouquet of combined old book smell, empty church dust and ceremonial sulphur..?

Damned if I know, but Hammer’s ever-wonderful 1968 movie adaptation no doubt helps, as does this more recent ‘soundtrack’ to the novel offered up by Tom Mcdowell, aka Dream Division.

Of all the quote-unquote “dungeon synth” releases I sampled last year in fact, this one strikes me as by far the strongest. Not only does Mcdowell succeed in wringing exactly the right tones of comforting, TV/VHS-fogged dread and fascination from his wheezing, hissing analogue equipment, but he also brings a strong melodic sensibility to the material, filling the album with memorable, earworm-heavy numbers which would certainly not have disgraced the professional-yet-impoverished band of film composers who first minted this particular sound back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Combine this with a keen appreciation of the intangible / irresistible ‘feel’ of the material he is plundering for inspiration, and Mcdowell has really created an all-time, party rockin’ classic for the world’s second-hand bookshop haunting creeps.

 

 

Single-handedly making the concept of “stoner rock” suddenly seem like a good idea again, this Vienna-based group’s shamelessly indulgent assemblage of gargantuan / Sleep-worthy riffs and foot-on-monitor solos, served up with just a touch of bonged out weirdness, has rarely travelled far from my turntable in 2020. Seriously - super-massive rock fun with real longevity right here. Do yourself a favour today and check it out.

Here is some further blather from way back in the carefree days of Feb 2020: 

 “‘Raging Mammoth’! ‘Shaking Pyramid’! Yes, these are the kind of things pieces of music like this should be called, and I commend artist Sandra Havik for her valiant attempts to literally illustrate these concepts on the album’s front cover. Side 2’s ‘Monolith’ is dutifully depicted on the back cover meanwhile, whilst the accompanying track mixes things up somewhat, heading in a more trad metal direction, bringing in NWBHM-ish harmonic leads and moving from curious, almost jazzy/modal passages early on toward some positively Maiden-esque adventures in mid-tempo, dragon-slaying guitar heroism. Probably the all-round best cut here, it’s pretty damn immense.” 

 

 

Making her second collaborative appearance on this year’s list, Kryssi Battalene (Head Room/Mountain Movers) here lends her guitar and vocals talents to former Mininokoto / LSD March frontman Kawaguchi Masami’s New Rock Syndicate, and, if the shorter, more garage-inclined numbers which begin the resulting LP perhaps don’t come off quite as well as they could, tracks like sitar-enhanced slow-burn epic ‘Sunday Afternoon’, the shimmering, scorched earth drama of ‘Shadow of the Earth’ and the churning, bad vibes jamming of ‘The Beginning’ and ‘Pieces of You’ all remain absolutely sublime.

Even more-so than with his previous bands, Kawaguchi seems intent here on digging deep into the legacy of late ‘80s legends White Heaven, tacking close to that band’s gospel of lysergic songcraft and elegiac guitar heroics, seasoned with a touch of AMT’s show-boating exotica, whilst Battalene for her part brings a more Bardo/MBV-like sense of blissed out pedalboard oblivion to proceedings, birthing beautific, timeless, trans-pacific psychedelic rock of the very highest calibre; just a sky-scraping, spirit-nourishing triumph of beautific noise, miraculously still available on wax to U.S.-based readers for the price of a six pack plus postage. 

 

  

From July 2020:

“As ever, it’s difficult to really put into words the unique amalgam that comprises Obnox’s sound, but nonetheless, let’s take a deep breath and try again. Mixing up lo-fi cut-up noise, rust-belt garage-punk, mutant p-funk derivations, ghostly regional/outsider soul and aggro-laden, street level hip-hop, ‘Savage Raygun’ makes for an exhilarating tour through the treacherous back alleys of American music, all mixed down with a chopped n’ screwed, basement tape-splicin’ aesthetic that makes the album’s presence on shiny, newly pressed vinyl feel kind of incongruous.

That said though, this is still perhaps a slightly more – cough –‘accessible’ take on the Obnox ideal than we’ve been presented with before, dialling back on the hyper-aggressive saturation of earlier releases, even as Thomas remains an elusive presence within his own music, his vocals often remaining distant and translucent as he slyly works earworms and familiar phrases from semi-well known songs in his material, leaving us trying to source them in the fog of our own memories like some form of archaic, pre-industrial sampling. The exception of course is on the full-on hip-hop cuts, where he’s upfront and in our grill, spitting as angry and unhinged as our stupid white asses could wish for, milling down decades of uncouth working class discontent for some implacably affirmative, ugly shit flow goodness.

All of the deep, strange threads Lamont Thomas is exploring and tearing through here seem to come together, just before the end of the record, on the supremely titled ‘Young Neezy’, looping an ancient tape of Neil’s ‘Southern Man’ riff and firing it straight off into the resentful depths of twisted r’n’b oblivion. It’s pretty inspired. A few years on from Obnox coining the phrase ‘America in a Blender’ on his mutant, malfunctioning non-“free jazz” LP [‘Templo dol Solido’, 2018], he’s still busy making supremely bitter-sweet lemonade from that terrifying concept.”

 

Makaya McCraven’s ‘Universal Beings’ double LP from 2018 is one of the records I’ve played most over the past few years, and undoubtedly the one which has had the biggest impact on my listening… so of course it's a no brainer that a further disc culled from the same trans-coastal / transatlantic sessions was going to find itself sitting pretty high up on this 2020 list.

Unlike the earlier LPs, tracks recorded in different cities with different line-ups are mixed up willy-nilly here, arguably resulting in a somewhat more bracing and unpredictable listen, but McCraven’s intense, skittering electronica-influenced drum style remains consistent throughout, lending the music a unified pulse even as the textures and atmospheres change on a dime.

Most of the pieces here are quite brief, with some sounding like repetitive / water-treading segments excised from longer jams, which perhaps explains why they didn’t quite make the cut on the first two LPs, but even in its more quotidian moments, this music retains a floating, blissful sense of infectious positivity, and highlights, of course, remain plentiful.

Several cuts from the hallowed (by me at least) New York session appear to be pieces of the same tight, rhythmic workout, foregrounding Joel Ross’s vibraphone alongside backing from the aforementioned Dezron Douglas and Brandee Younger, whilst ‘Half Steppin’, recorded in London with Soweto Kinch (sax) and Kamaal Williams (keys) is an altogether more hair-raising piece of work, with what sounds like a heavily processed and/or electronically-generated beat bringing a frantic, almost jungle-like feel emphasised by distant, juddering bass frequencies and strange, droning chords picked out by Williams.

Two further London cuts featuring a more trad sax/keys/bass line up (courtesy of Nubya Garcia, Ashley Henry and Daniel Casimir respectively) find McCraven's polyphonous beatdowns sometimes threatening to drown out his collaborators, but a louche slide toward the ol ‘smoky groove’ pocket eventually wins the day, with some lovely work in particular from Henry on Fender Rhodes.

Meanwhile, the Chicago material here is excellent too, with Tomeka Reid’s cello adding a baleful quality to proceedings, as Shabaka Hutchings’ rich, Trane-esque tone alternately locks into and drowsily pulls away from McCraven's meticulously detailed, double-time beat - but my pick for the absolute best stuff this time around comes from Los Angeles.

As the distinctive creepy-crawl of Jeff Parker’s guitar signals a shift to the West Coast, the combo of ‘Universal Being pt2’ and ‘Butterss Fly’ (named for bassist Anna Butterss) proves absolutely stunning, perhaps a peak moment of this entire project in fact, with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s violin cooing some some bird of paradise as Josh Johnson's alto rides the tightly-wound rhythm set by McCraven and Parker, eventually folding out into a beautiful cat’s cradle of interlocking, ‘Bitches Brew’-esque textures… oh man, it’s a shame they couldn’t have kept this one going for hours.

But, we’re reaching the end of the final side by this point, so needs must, and, back to London, Soweto Kinch shows us ‘The Way Home’ - a big, bold South African style melodic theme, played in a duo with McCraven, cheerfully waving us off into the sunrise of the perilously uncertain future we all now find ourselves stuck in. 

 

 

Year on year, I find myself feeling ever more distraught when the moment comes for me to vainly try, yet again, to find a way to convey the kind of magic routinely bottled by Chris Abrahams, Lloyd Swanton and Tony Buck whenever and wherever they convene to take care of Necks business.

These days at least, I can merely point to the bandcamp embed above and let more patient readers discover a way in for themselves, but, for those unwilling or unable to do so, I can at least suggest that, exhibiting a characteristically zen-like sense of internal symmetry (three tracks of equal length, three musicians), CD-only album ‘Three’ represents some of the band’s strongest work in years (which is going some).

Mixing restrained, ruminative piano and bass excursions with a chaotic, rotor-blade like clamour of disembodied percussion, ‘Bloom’ and ‘Further’ are both - and it makes my soul wither just to say this, but no alternatives immediately present themselves - classic Necks. The former leaves strange, distorted, guitar-like overdubs churning deep in the background, cymbal hits ringing through infinite space and fizzing, climactic organ chords occasionally rising up like fragments of Chicago house overheard from the wrong side of thick concrete wall. The latter meanwhile is a particularly special aural tranquilizer dart, tidal organ and string textures drifting against the frantic rattle of Buck’s bells and chimes as Swanson locks into an exquisite example of the kind of slow, cyclical groove which defined the band’s early work back in the ‘90s/‘00s.

By contrast, middle track ‘Lovelock’, named in tribute to recently deceased Celibate Rifles frontman Damien Lovelock, proves harrowing stuff - a dry gulch twenty minutes of exhausted, nocturnal dream-atmos which I’d characterise as ‘bereft’, but for the fact that that would imply a level of emotional manipulation mercifully alien to The Necks pointedly abstract/subjective methodology. 

---

To be concluded…

Labels: best of 2020, Dezron Douglas & Brandee Younger, Dream Division, Kahil El’Zabar’s Spirit Groove, Kawaguchi Masami, Kryssi Battalene, Makaya McCraven, Naujawanan Baidar, Obnox, Ozo, Ryte, The Necks

Before we get going here, I should take some time to address the fact that a number of records on this list actually came out in 2018. I know - ancient, right? A couple of them I even picked up when they were repressed by the label after a period of unavailability, which I suppose technically makes them reissues, even. At the end of the day though, WHO F-ING CARES? When the gap between recording and release dates can stretch into years, does it really matter? This is a list of reasonably contemporary music that I discovered and played a lot in 2019, the existence of which made me happy and in some sense… reassured?

Reassured about what, I’m not really sure, but I’ll leave the the-end-is-nigh drum beating for another day (it’s getting pretty mainstream now anyway, so perhaps my work on that score is done). Suffice to say, if you and yours are lucky enough to inhabit lands not currently on fire, under water or under heavy bombardment – happy new year! In previous years, I’d have added something about not being under the yoke of some pea-brained tyrant, but we can’t expect miracles, I suppose.

And, finally, I’d like to close things off with a reminder that last year saw the death of a number a people whose work meant a great deal to me, both in the realm of music and beyond. Roky Erickson, David Berman, Dick Dale, Larry Cohen – gone but not forgotten. Please take a few minutes to click on those links and remember them at their best.

Now let’s get on with it.

1. Grey Hairs – Health & Social Care LP
(Gringo)





Essential rock music for dark times. Back in October, I said:

“At the risk of repeating myself from past reviews, Grey Hairs make proper modern rock music, reclaiming that horribly loaded phrase from a place of the map which finds it bracketed between moustache-twiddling sub-genre re-enactment societies and shit that sounds like The Foo Fighters. In doing so, they stare down cold the expected bandwagon of influences, they address the world in which we live with honesty and insight, they conduct their band business with integrity, and, they rock, in a manner both profound and disconcertingly literal.

If you find yourself sick of a life full of dodgy cabling and dented speaker cabs, crowded dark rooms full of pints and germs, please listen to ‘Health & Social Care’, and remind yourself what the point is.”


2. Psychedelic Speed Freaks – s/t LP
(Black Editions)




Whisper it please, but you know what - on reflection, I think I might actually enjoy this even more than the old High Rise records, if you can believe that. Back in June, I ventured to characterise it as;

“..one of the most exhilaratingly extreme rock albums of the modern era, sitting comfortably next to the MC5-meets-AMT carnage of Feral Ohms debut from a couple of years back, even as tracks like ‘Night Seer’ – my personal favourite here - dial things back to a sleek, pulsing urban beauty that nigh on defies description, recalling the exquisitely nuanced blare of Martin Weaver’s work in Wicked Lady, whilst closing track ‘Immaterialized’ finds Narita grinding the gears of a shining, ectoplasmic hog for an eternal run down the post-earth highway, ol’ Jasso’s voice breaking into a Lemmy-like croak as space-rock oblivion beckons. It’s a monster.

Fuzz guitar fanatics who value raw sound, inventive playing and sonic extremity over expensive, brightly coloured boxes and multi-tracked compression - or indeed, unrehabilitated rock fans who just want an excuse to grind their drunken heads into the ground like some kind of human corkscrew - both need to get on this immediately.”


3. Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society – Mandatory Reality 2xLP 
(Eremite)




The very nicest sounds that the nicer half of our world has to offer. From November:

“Central to this music’s appeal is the fact that, rather than drifting off into abstraction, the tracks remain anchored around simple, almost child-like melodies – endlessly appealing harmonic phrases picked out on some string bass and glockenspiel-type things (practically none of the instruments my ears tell me are present on this record are actually listed on the credits), lending the music a feeling of warmth and accessibility that any open-eared, human listener should be able to appreciate.

If this can indeed be deemed a ‘drone’ record (and the proposition is questionable, though ‘In Memory’s Prism’ has tended to get played in the time and place I normally reserve for drone records), then it’s certainly not a “cold depths of interstellar space” type proposition – more of a “come on in, make yourself at home, would you like a cup of tea?” kind of deal, like walking into a stranger’s living room for the first time and immediately feeling so much at home that you feel you could spend your entire life there.”


4. Makaya McCraven – Universal Beings 2xLP
(International Anthem)




A good few dozen varieties of raw musical talent, thrown together by Mr McCraven like some mad cake mix, taking that ‘boom-bap’ nouveau-jazz sound to stereotype-defying heights of senseless beauty.

From July:

“Like many musicians within this milieu, McCraven plays as if he is as much influenced by hip-hop and electronica as ‘classic’ jazz, but his smoked-out, head-nodding 4/4 style, occasionally diverging into patterns of skittering, Ninja Tune-y rim-shots and weird double-time experiments, remains well-judged, never degenerating into cheese, and always serving to enhance, rather than detract from, the fine work of his collaborators. And make no mistake, accessibility should not be confused with any lack of depth or legitimacy in the performances showcased herein, which, I would contend, often hit a level that even the most hardline free improv/extended technique partisans would find difficult to dismiss. […] a compelling and – dare I say – inspiring listen; an album I can easily imagine be fetishised in years to come as the sound of a very particular, and I’d venture, very positive, set of cultural time & place circumstances crystalising – temporarily, at least - into something really special.”


5. The Bevis Frond – We’re Your Friends, Man 2xLP
(Fire)




You’ve gotta love someone who sticks to their story, and god knows, The Bevis Frond’s Nick Saloman has certainly done that – ‘We’re Your Friends Man’ could have come out immediately after fan favourites like 1990’s ‘Any Gas Faster’ or 1991’s ‘New River Head’ and no one would have batted an eyelid. The same mixture of elements that has sent me on a heavy duty trawl through the Frond back catalogue in recent years – disarmingly direct, pretention-free song-writing, sturdy DIY rock arrangements spiked with trace elements of folk and psychedelia and gargantuan quantities of unashamed, Hendrix-via-Mascis lead guitar heroism – can be found here in spades, the formula unchanged and undimmed by the passage of time.

Like most Frond releases, this is a pretty mammoth venture – twenty full length songs stretching over eighty plus minutes – and whilst there are, as always, some iffy moments here and there, it’s a tribute to the strength of Saloman’s writing that at least two thirds of these numbers demand repeat listens, his capacity for twisting his own experiences and insecurities into compelling new shapes lending the material a great deal more mileage than this kind of relentless introspection would normally achieve.

The playing from the currently full band line-up meanwhile is, needless to say, exceptional, keeping energy levels high throughout, and the fact that a group who’ve been doggedly plugging away across the decades can still hide Greatest Hits-worthy nuggets like Theft, And Relax… or the title track deep within the double digits of their umpteenth album’s track-list is nothing short of remarkable.


6. Aggressive Perfector – Havoc at the Midnight Hour LP
(Dying Victims)




I’m not sure I if I can put this much more clearly than I did in my brief write-up at the start of December, but – HEAVY FUCKING METAL. If you like it, you’ll like this.


7. Kamaal Williams – The Return LP
(Black Focus)




From that same December post:

“Williams likewise seems to be daring us to start pulling comparisons to Herbie and Stevie out of the hat at some points here, but unlike the old masters, he seems deeply concerned with texture more-so than technique, seemingly ripping his organ and synth through a chain of effects that would make a guitar shop employee blush, building up deep, tidal washes of wah, tremolo and delay which keep the music sensuous, multi-layered and engrossing, bringing a disorientating psychedelic swirl to proceedings, whilst his tightly wound, hand-brake-turn interplay with Brown and McKenzie adds a sense of swaggering danger, undercutting any accusations of mere dinner-jazz noodling; you can almost feel the cold eyes of Miles overseeing this shit when things get way out there on the second half of stunning opening cut ‘Salaam’.”


8. Sarah Davachi - Let Night Come On Bells End The Day LP
(Recital)




And yet again, from December:

“The feel here is nuanced, timeless, eternally resonant – like mainlining the form and contents of a small yet beautiful Alpine chapel through your ears. Emotionally speaking, we run the gamut here from ‘Buhrstone’, which flirts with indulgent, melodic melancholia, to the twelve austere minutes of ‘Hours in the Evening’, as cold and affectless as the ancient, clammy stone wall of that aforementioned chapel.

At this point in my life, music like this performs an important function, keeping me calm and grounded, and creating an appropriate atmosphere in my quarters during that all-important lead up to bed time. It’s therapeutic in a sense, I suppose. As such, I’m always thrilled to discover a great new practitioner whose work I can keep close to the turntable, so thanks for this one Sarah – it’s out here in the world, doing great work.”


9. Comet Gain - Fireraisers Forever! LP
(Tapete)





This wouldn’t be a 2010s Stereo Sanctity best-of list without the great Mike Vest getting his oar in, and, following the less than amicable demise of Blown Out (about which we remain VERY SAD), Mike’s best shot at deep space nirvana in 2019 came via this postal collaboration with Australia-based drummer Andrew Panagopoulos.

Expanding on the template laid down by earlier releases under the Dodge Meteor name, this must stand as Vest’s most unashamedly Rockist project to date, as he brings chunky, full-on stoner-rock tone to the party, leaning heavily into the riffs as if waiting for some Dave Wyndorf type dude to step up to the mic – but, thankfully, that never happens, allowing Vest & Panagopoulos to instead stretch out and get gnarly.

The eight minute ‘Alien Shit’ in particular is a magnificent cut, a synapse-melting showcase of ultra-fried soloing that finds Vest embodying the album’s title about as completely as is humanly possible, revealing the influence of both Hendrix and Munehiro Narita upon his playing, in yet another absolutely flattening display of unashamed rock n’ roll extremity. In a happier world, they’d hand out sporting-style statuettes for this kind of achievement, and poor old Mike would need to invest in a sturdier set of shelves to keep them all on, in rare moments when he kills the volume and glides back to terra firma.


11. Venom Prison – Samsara LP
(Prosthetic)




From July:

“Hold the presses folks! Here’s our new lead: Welsh metal band fronted by Russo-German antifa / feminist activist play unbelievably intense tech-grind / battle-ready death metal addressing frightening, taboo-skirting subjects of real life concern. As you might imagine, the results are impossible to fuck with, but more surprisingly, they are also super fun to listen to and don’t give me a headache! Whole world rejoices! Story at eleven.”


12. Taras Bulba – One LP
(Riot Season)




Though I was initially sad to hear that Fred Laird had disbanded his long-running outfit Earthling Society earlier this year, after sampling this initial collection of recordings from Laird’s new project with Earthling Society drummer Jon Blacow, the decision begins to make a lot of sense. To some extent I think, Taras Bulba follows on directly from the foundations laid by last year’s fairly astounding MO: The Demon album, vis-à-vis Laird’s apparent desire to move away from the more traditionally rooted British heavy psych/space rock of Earthling Soc’s prior releases, and to instead throw his stylistic net wide, embracing weird and exotic new sonic climes in a predominantly instrumental context.

And, sure enough, this ‘One’ goes all over the place, with otherly tuned and/or otherly constructed string tones predominating on the early tracks, alongside chimes, tabla-like percussion, eerie, looped samples and tape fragments whose mantra-like Middle Eastern atmos recalls Sun City Girls’ “ethno-forgery” approach, before paranoid, sawing strings, sinister/whimsical Czech movie soundtrack chimes and florid late night sax guide us through the spy-haunted neon midnight of, uh, ‘Neon Midnight’, ‘The YO-YO Man’ inaugurates a gleaming, chrome-bumpered ‘Ege Bamyasi’-ish nightmare funk jam, and ‘Rising Lazarus Blues’, the record’s sole vocal cut, returns us briefly to the more (relatively) familiar terrain of a particularly discombobulated under-the-apple-tree psych-folk phantasia, hitting a very particular sweet spot that I think was last tickled way back when by Dead Meadow’s ‘Feathers’ album, or the work of nutty Italian Barrett-devotees Jennifer Gentle.

For a fairly modest and low key initial release under a new band name, this LP covers one hell of a lot of ground, displaying a vivid and powerful sonic imagination and no small amount of skill and ingenuity, suggesting that the sky’s the limit for Laird and Blacow now that they’ve (for the most part) put aside the fuzzboxes and left the trad rock band format far behind.


13. Lower Slaughter – Some Things Take Work LP 
(Box)




I’ll confess, when I first picked up Lower Slaughter’s second LP upon its release early in 2019, it struck me as a pretty grizzly exemplar of Difficult Second Album Syndrome… not that there’s anything ‘wrong’ with it as such, you understand, but by nixing the easy Rock Pleasure Principle wins of their earlier work in order to undertake some brittle and punishing explorations of break-ups, bad relationships and self-esteem struggles, the band delivered a record which initially felt forbidding and unrewarding – the opening dirge of ‘Gas’ in particular is, appropriately enough, hard work - particularly for those of us who are (happily) unable to relate directly to its lyrical themes at this point in our lives.

Returning to it for a few weeks prolonged exposure later in the year however, expectations duly adjusted, it’s really grown on me. Aside from anything else, the band’s unique, rhythmically engaged riffage still whips, snaps and churns the way it should (the title track is very much what we in the biz are obliged to call a ‘total banger’), the recording/mixing (courtesy of Wayne Adams of Big Lad/Pet Brick/Melting Hand etc) is top notch, and Sinead Young’s voice remains an absolute force of nature.

During the album’s closing stretch on side # 2 meanwhile, the band hit a real purple patch, pushing their sound in some pretty powerful new directions. First, the agreeably energised ‘The Measure of a Man’ wrong-foots us with its startling talk of attacking airships and wolves in the forest (dunno what all that’s about, but it’s, uh, kind of awesome?), before ‘A Portrait of the Father’ hits hard – a pitch black outpouring a familial angst whose brooding, down tempo musical backing cuts straight to the bone, abetted by judicious use of some dubbed out vocal effects - and closer ‘The Body’ delivers a KO with one of the most stunning tracks the band have recorded to date, it’s colossal, neck-sliding riff and doom-heavy rhythmic heft combining with Young’s fearsome delivery for some real force-the-air-from-yr-lungs catharsis; exhilarating stuff.

Still not sure this one will ever get as much play from me as ‘What Big Eyes’ a few years back, but it’s a brave and strong step forward for the band – a convincing dead-eyed stare at an uncertain future, and those last few songs; man, that’s some good shit.


14. Headroom – New Heaven 12” 
(EverNever)



Wherein the rarefied spirit of 90s/’00s Proper Psyche settles over the town of New Haven, CT like a lime green cloud, and sleepy, patchouli-scented ectoplasm pulses through the myriad cables of Kryssi Battalene’s guitar set-up.

From February:

“For all the excess inherent in this kind of guitar-playing, there’s an admirable avoidance of bombast here, a sort of laidback, accidental feel, and a warm, analogue distance to the recordings, which feels very appealing to me, coming as it does at a point in time when all forms of heavy music seem to be constantly upping the ante in terms of volume, compression and general mind-buggering immensitude. As with the Mountain Movers albums, it feels a bit old fashioned in that regard. In a good way, I mean. It’s just a nice record to hang with, if you like psychedelic guitar music. No expectation, no pretence. Just enjoy the sounds, cos they’re pretty sweet.” 


15. Pye Corner Audio – Hollow Earth LP 
(Ghost Box)




Also from February:

“In a sense, Pye Corner Audio strikes me as the hauntological electronica equivalent of, say, a mid-table thrash metal band, or a jazz group who play at local pubs on a Sunday afternoon, or something like that. By which I mean, this music doesn’t send me off on ecstatic reveries or leave me slack-jawed with instant revelation or anything, but it’s solid. It’s there when you need it, it ticks the boxes and does what it does. It’s reliable, like that super-strong wood glue from B&Q.

Listening to the woozy, out-of-sync synth line that opens this LP, you might be inclined to think, well, we already have one Boards of Canada, how badly do we need another? But, as things crack on and Jenkins gets stuck into his trademark MO – essentially stripping the BoC idiom back to its strongest core elements, replacing their somewhat dated breaks-based drum programming with some throbbing 4/4 mutant techno and adding a heavy dose of John Carpenter style dystopian sci-fi dread – I think you’ll be hard-pressed not to give him the nod.”

Labels: Aggressive Perfector, best of 2019, Grey Hairs, Headroom, Joshua Abrams, Kamaal Williams, Lower Slaughter, Makaya McCraven, Oblivion Reptilian, PSF, Sarah Davachi, Taras Bulba, The Bevis Frond, Venom Prison

By and large, the past three months of my music listening have been characterised by a wealth of glimmering, phantastical discoveries slouching their way down the Bandcamp / second hand LP highway -- combined with a chronic lack of the time, space and technology necessary to fully engage with them.

Nonetheless, these things, so many things, all demand at least a brief shout-out here, if I’m to hold my head high vis-à-vis dragging out this dinosaur blog’s lifespan. Trying to compress stuff that’s basically beyond words into a reader-friendly para when you’ve basically only had a chance to stick it on once or twice whilst dojng admin is never much fun, so hold on to yr hats, but bandcamp links are easy, so they at least should help to clarify what I’m haphazardly going on about.

As luck would have it, many of the ‘new’ discoveries highlighted below aren’t really all that new, in terms of release date, but god knows, if the idea of listening to a record from 2017 beings you out in a rash, I can’t help.


Les Filles De Illighadad.



I discovered Les Filles De Illighadad via a recommendation link on the bandcamp page of much-lauded Tuareg guitar hero Mdou Moctar, whose work I had decided to investigate after reading that he had starred in the first ever Tuareg language feature film(!), a Saharan version of ‘Purple Rain’ (!!) [it’s for real – DVD and soundtrack are both available here].

Moctar’s music is perfectly good – indeed, it seems to have been blowing minds left, right and centre - but it didn’t really do it for me. I found it a bit too… bombastic and ego-driven I suppose? Maybe a bit too heavy on the cliché Western pop-rock moves? (I know, I know – what did I expect.) Clicking straight through to the calming, communal exuberance of Les Filles De Illighadad though proved the perfect corrective to these (wholly subjective) deficiencies, very much providing a ‘yin’ to Moctar’s ‘yang’ when it comes to the strategies which proponents of North African electric guitar music may find themselves employing as their music gains ever more traction amongst moneyed first world rubes such as myself.

Rather than awkwardly hacking it up into in my own words, it will probably be best if I simply cut and paste a few paragraphs from the notes accompanying Les Filles most recent album, ‘Eghass Malan’ (2017), which I think gives us the gist here pretty well:

“In the past years, certain genres of Tuareg music have become popular in the West. International acts of “desert blues” like Tinariwen, Bombino, and Mdou Moctar have become synonymous with the name “Tuareg.” But guitar music is a recent creation. In the 1970s young Tuareg men living in exile in Libya and Algeria discovered the guitar. Lacking any female vocalists to perform tende, they began to play the guitar to mimic this sound, replacing water drums with plastic jerrycans and substituting a guitar drone for the vocal call and response. The exiled eventually traveled home and brought the guitar music with them. In time, this new guitar sound came to eclipse the tende, especially in the urban centers. If tende is a music that has always been sung by woman, the Tuareg guitar was its gendered counterpart, and Tuareg guitar music is a male dominated scene.

Fatou Seidi Ghali, lead vocalist and performer of Les Filles is one of the only Tuareg female guitarists in Niger. Sneaking away with her older brother's guitar, she taught herself to play. While Fatou's role as the first female Tuareg guitarist is groundbreaking, it is just as interesting for her musical direction. In a place where gender norms have created two divergent musics, Fatou and Les Filles are reasserting the role of tende in Tuareg guitar. In lieu of the djembe or the drum kit, so popular in contemporary Tuareg rock bands, Les Filles de Illighadad incorporate the traditional drum and the pounding calabash, half buried in water. The forgotten inspiration of Tuareg guitar, they are reclaiming its importance in the genre and reclaiming the music of tende.”

Got all that? Good. In practice, those of us tuning into Les Filles De Illighadad whilst lacking the necessary background to appreciate the finer subtleties of their place within Tuareg musical culture can expect to hear the following: complex, intuitive circular melodies, elegantly picked out on the buzz-free strings of a Fender Stratocaster (or off-brand equivalent); gentle acoustic strumming supported by the propulsive, rhythmic web of hand clapping and the unique forms of percussion outlined above; unison female voices delivering happy-yet-world weary call and response type tunes that could be as old as the dawn of time for all I know, interspersed with joyous, animalistic cries that make it sound as if some big, brightly plumed flightless birds have rocked up to join the party. It’s absolutely brilliant!

The second song, ‘Inssegh Inssegh’, with guitar-work that almost recalls Junior Kimbrough, stands out as a particular favourite. If you don’t like this… well, I don’t know what to say.


Woven Skull.



A trio hailing from somewhere in the vicinity of County Leitrim and/or Cork, Woven Skull seem to be keeping the spirit of the early ’00s kneelcore/proper psyche/new-weird-whatever CD-R scene alive, wringing out a sound that sometimes resembles a more slightly more rock-orientated take on the hive mind cacophony of Vibracathedral Orchestra… but, equally, sometimes doesn’t. To say I approve would be something of an understatement.

‘Exile of Warren Street’, the opening cut on their self-titled record from last year, mixes buzzing, insectoid fuzz guitar strum-drone with shrieking bowed strings and clamorous, collapsed kit drumming, suggesting an alternative history in which the EPI-era Velvets had kept Angus Maclise on board and swung behind Cale’s avant/minimalist impulses rather than Reed’s songwriting, but then further complicates matters by bringing in a hulking great, quasi-Arabic doom riff. Crazy, man!

On subsequent tracks, the group push the furthest reaches of the sound available to them within their guitar / mandola / drums trio set-up, sometimes delivering ecstatic webs of picked string-drone that wouldn’t sound out of place on a James Blackshaw record, whilst delving elsewhere into full-on Sun City Girls ethno-forgery territory, like a ritual wedding dance devised by a tribe of post-apocalyptic cyborgs.

Much of the time, the band emphasise dense, knotty and rather punishing textures, full of stabbing high-end and seething, granular chaos hoovered straight off the forest floor – and speaking of which, I myself am basically floored by the extent to which Woven Skull have managed to conjure up such a unique and powerful sound for themselves; out of time, out of place, and touching gossamer-light on their (presumably voluminous) sphere of influence as much by accident-of-coincidental-greatness as by design.

Given how many of my personal sonic fetishes Woven Skull touch upon, I’m horrified to discover that they’ve actually been playing together since 2008. I’m not sure how I’ve managed to ignore their existence for so long (I fear I may have been confusing their name with that of garage-pop also-rans Woven Bones), but if for some reason, they feel inclined to cross the water to our exhausted br*xit netherworld at some point in the near future, they are liable to find me glowering in the front row, making up for lost time.


Makaya McCraven.



I confess it’s taken me a while to get my head around the recent explosion of interest in smooth/soulful jazz. I mean, it’s just been so… unexpected, y’know? Well, actually, perhaps not. I mean, all these young people with their music schools scholarships, their inclusive politics, good manners and vast quantities of marijuana…. I guess we should all have seen this one coming, right?

Anyway, the weather’s getting warmer, summer solstice has come and gone, and I’m finally feeling it; finally managing to overcome that instinctive distrust borne of a lifetime of being told that legitimate music must be aggressively idiosyncratic and disdainful of formal technique, and that anything ‘new’ that won’t upset attendees at a hypothetical dinner party should treated with extreme suspicion. And, I’m happy to report that this remarkable double album bearing the name of Chicago-based drummer Makaya McCraven has proved a great help in this regard. (Another thing that has helped: this video.)

A uniquely ambitious venture, ‘Universal Beings’ feels almost like a kind of a primer for this ascendant scene. Each of its four LP sides was recorded in a different city (New York, Chicago, London, Los Angeles), and each features a different group of players, with McCraven the sole constant.

Like many musicians within this mileau, McCraven plays as if he is as much influenced by hip-hop and electronica as ‘classic’ jazz, but his smoked-out, head-nodding 4/4 style, occasionally diverging into patterns of skittering, Ninja Tune-y rim-shots and weird double-time experiments, remains well-judged, never degenerating into cheese, and always serving to enhance, rather than detract from, the fine work of his collaborators. And, make no mistake, accessibility should not be confused here with any lack of depth or legitimacy in the performances showcased herein, which, I would contend, often hit a level that even the most hardline free improv/extended technique partisans will find difficult to dismiss.

The New York side, in particular, is absolutely sublime, recalling the blissed out vistas of the kind of early ‘70s session that Don Cherry or Alice Coltrane might have slipped right into, with Brandee Younger (harp), Tomeka Reid (cello) and Dezron Douglas (bass) all delivering contributions which deserve to be (very melodiously) hymned from the rooftops. Elsewhere, the Chicago side a little more fiery, with tenor player Shabaka Hutchins (appearing courtesy of Verve Records, I’ll have you know) blurting out the kind of proudly dissonant, clustered chords that will forever put me in mind of late-period Coltrane (John, that is). [I grasp at these old timey comparisons simply because it’s my natural instinct as an old timey guy, you understand, not because the players here necessarily stand up and demand them.]

The London side meanwhile dives straight into deep Gilles Peterson territory, with McCraven knocking out a rhythm that seems to be drawing on some kinda local grime/trap influence, but the session soon settles down into a hypnotic, sizzling kinda headspace, with Ashley Henry (electric piano) really clicking into place. Recorded at the home of that hot young hipster, Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, meanwhile, the L.A. side features a slightly larger ensemble, with Parker himself contributing some fragmented – but not overbearing – shards of disembodied fuzz guitar to proceedings, but it’s still just as much of a compelling and – dare I say – inspiring listen as the rest of this monumental document; an album I can easily imagine be fetishized in years to come as the sound of a very particular, and I’d venture, very positive, set of cultural time & place circumstances crystalising – temporarily, at least - into something really special.

Word to the wise: if any of this appeals to you, get on this soon, because vinyl copies are now sold out from most UK retailers, and this one of those albums that *really* benefits from the format, so pay what you have to, and happy hunting. I apologise for the fact that I was too dumb-headed to tell you about back when stock was fresh and new about nine months ago.


Venom Prison.



And, at completely the other end of the musical spectrum meanwhile – hold the presses folks! Here’s our new lead: Welsh metal band fronted by Russo-German antifa / feminist activist play unbelievably intense tech-grind / battle-ready DM addressing frightening, taboo-skirting subjects of real life concern. As you might imagine, the results are impossible to fuck with, but more surprisingly, they are also super fun to listen to and don’t give me a headache! Whole world rejoices! Story at eleven.

That’s all the info I have to report at present, but this interview should help fill in some of the gaps. For now, I’ll merely say that, whilst I usually find the more technical side of contemporary metal a huge turn off, the members of Venom Prison channel their post-human level virtuosity into such a raw, cathartic head-rush of sound that my usual gripes about muscle-nerd precision and faceless production find themselves righteously flattened.

Crucially, there is a tasty core of real Rock Pleasure Principle stuff retained here. Those riff break-downs and soaring lead lines are totally “sick”, as I believe the kids are saying - as much Arch Enemy as Meshuggah - and, combined with the flesh-shredding rage Larissa Stupar is putting across here (channelling pure Lee Dorrian era Napalm Death, in spirit if not in actual sonic resemblance)… well, this is just too much awesome for me to get my head around right now. My vision’s blurring – send help!


Tropical Nightmare.



There are, I would suggest, few people in the quote-unquote “civilised” world who currently have as much reason to be irked as Brazilians living in the UK. The three members of Tropical Nightmare do indeed seem to fall within this category, but it would be misleading to tie current geo-political anguish onto the four songs which comprise their ‘III’ EP, given that it was recorded in the summer of 2016, before the situation over here became quite so tragi-comically dire, and before their home country turned around and delivered an election result that the world needs like a shotgun wound to the thigh.

Nonetheless, it is this sort of thing which came to mind when I eventually hit ‘play’ on their bandcamp after seeing them performing live a few times, and being very impressed by the experience. Given that this is ominous, pedal-damaged mid-tempo punk with a heavy, distorted bass in the forefront, I suppose a Killing Joke comparison is probably warranted, but I enjoy these guys a lot more than that grisly lot; theirs is a serrated, nuanced and fiercely unpredictable take on noise-punk – a welcome touch of Big Black/Shellac in the mix maybe? - bolstered by the kind of vein-popping, impassioned delivery which adds further weight to the argument that, for some strange, indefinable reason, contemporary Portuguese and Spanish language punk tends to knock seven shades out of the Anglophone competition.

It doesn’t look as if Tropical Nightmare have released anything since this tape came out in January ‘18, but they’re still active (as of a few months back anyway), still gigging occasionally in London – so please, click the link above and show ‘em some love, and perhaps they’ll get back in the studio / dig out the old eight track [delete as applicable] before long.

Labels: I like, Les Filles de Illighadad, Makaya McCraven, Tropical Nightmare, Venom Prison, Woven Skull