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

Is it just me, or is there something GOOD actually happening at the moment? Purely in terms of recorded music, I mean. In spite of the fact that live performance and collective playing is literally DEAD for the time being, the list of fantastic records I’ve discovered in the past six months is just ridiculous.

Has it simply been because I’m now sitting on my ass at home all day long, following links, clicking play and/or dropping the needle and keeping the speakers ticking over 9 to 5? Or, are we ACTUALLY hitting some variation on that irreducible splurge of accelerated creativity which seems to hit like clockwork about once per decade..?

I don’t know. You tell me.

All I can say for sure is, whereas in past few years I would have had difficulty in scraping together a top ten of new records I’ve really loved come the end of June, here we are in 2020, and I could probably give you a top thirty right off the bat.

I should of course temper this enthusiasm by flagging up the heinous prospect that, a few months down the line (maybe mid/late 2021 or thereabouts), we’re inevitably going to hit a dead zone, reflecting a still-ominously-lengthening window in which the majority of bands and musical ensembles have effectively CEASED TO EXIST, at least in terms of their capacity for actual in-the-same-room playing/recording (which I would still contend is generally the best kind).

I mean… wow. Let’s stop and think about that for a minute. I realise we’re lucky(?) enough to live in an era when solo electronic/producer types and songwriters can sit in their bedrooms and kick it out indefinitely, but… has there EVER been a period, since the dawn of recorded popular music in the early 20th century, when the collective creation of music in the western world has actually STOPPED - dead in its tracks?

It occurs to me that there are already plenty of folks over in Iran, Afghanistan, Mali, Cambodia and elsewhere who can tell us exactly how that feels. So hey, let’s look on the bright side - at least a pandemic-related music shutdown seems unlikely to lead to anyone getting their tapes forcibly wiped or their instruments el-kabonged. Or, more pertinently, to anyone being forced to live under imminent threat of violence, imprisonment and systematic murder as a result of their art (or, not anymore so than they were previously, at any rate – peace & love to the vast majority out there currently living under some form of tyranny or idiocracy).

So, let’s just reflect on that for a bit in six months or whenever, when our favourite record labels start sending out “sorry folks, the cupboard is bare” type emails.

But anyway – enough rambling. Tomorrow (FRIDAY) is another Bandcamp revenue-free day, so I’ll be buying these. I believe they’re all pretty mighty. Let’s get stuck in.


Obnox.



A few weeks back, when my wife’s social media feeds [I don’t have any] seemed to be overflowing with indie-rock / punk listeners suddenly scrabbling around trying to acquire an intense and meaningful interest in contemporary black music, I couldn’t help but think, “what the world needs right now is some OBNOX” - and verily, right on cue, the man has come through, with a sprawling double LP that might well be the best thing Lamont Thomas has put out under the this name to date.

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.

Song titles like ‘Hawkwindian Summer’ meanwhile gain my eternal respect [I will steal that at some point, for something], and all of the deep, strange threads Thomas is exploring and tearing 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 gleefully 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, he’s still busy making supremely bitter-sweet lemonade from that terrifying concept.


Kahil El’Zabar’s Spirit Groove ft. David Murray.



Kind of a perfect palette-cleanser after the preceding, percussionist/vocalist and Chicago spitirual jazz OG Kahil El’Zabar (whose CV astonishingly includes work with such luminaries as Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley, Sonny Stitt and Rahsaan Roland Kirk) here teams up with his long-standing foil, tenor saxophonist David Murray, and proceeds to engage with the mindset of jazz’s 21st century new wave (represented here by bassist Emma Dayhuff and piano/keys player Justin Dillard) in what strikes me as the best possible manner.

Stretching out across the full eighty minutes allowed by two LPs, ‘Spirit Groove’s self-titled debut is a work of long-form, meditative bliss which, though rooted in jazz, often ends up sounding like some form of deconstructed psychedelic soul, with El’Zabor’s expressive, visceral and unbelievably sweet voice taking centre stage, riffing off a central phrase or ascending into pure rhythmic glossolalia as he, Dayhuff and Dillard lay down a suite of eminently relaxed, minimalist groves which, in their furtherest-reaching moments, almost touch upon the fourth world / melodic drone perfection of Joshua Abram’s Natural Information Society across which Murray soars Sanders-like and ego-free, even as El’Zabor’s vocals keep pulling the work back to a more earthy realm of physical exuberance, bodily movement and, I dunno… fun?

Early days listening to this one (as I say, I’m planning to lay down the not inconsiderable amount of scratch required for the vinyl tomorrow, all being well), but it is a supremely enjoyable listen which initially seems to bear all the hallmarks of a real timeless, endlessly comforting record. Highest possible rec at this point, needless to say.


Kawaguchi Masami New Rock Syndicate & Kryssi Battalene.



Yet another project for Headroom / Mountain Movers maximalist guitar wizardess Battalene, and as big fan of both her work and of the old school Japanese psychedelic rock from which she clearly takes so much inspiration, you’d better believe I’m ALL OVER this collaboration with Miminokoto / LSD March veteran Kawaguchi Masami’s New Rock Syndicate.

Time is short here, but let’s simply say that for those who share my frequently reiterated love for this-sort-of-thing, this is pretty damn spectacular stuff, raking the ghosts of High Rise and White Heaven over the coals with aplomb, even as it offers a few oddball diversions from the expected no-holds-barred guitar blitz along the way -the rinky-dink organ and Battalene’s verbed out, somewhat Stereolab-ish vocals which hold sway on the space-garage-y ‘Two Hearts’ being a case in point.

Clearly unafraid of a touch of such psych-cheese effects, Kawaguchi’s boys slather identikit sitar twang and chimes all over the epic ‘Sunday Afternoon’, but can do nothing to spoil its epically atmospheric SF ballroom-meets-Tokyo sunset immensitude. Magnificent stuff. With Kawaguchi’s songwriting easily hitting the heights previously scaled in his work with Miminokoto, whilst Battalene’s contributions hit the drifty, Bardo-ish bliss of her Headroom work from a decidedly different angle, this is full strength beautific psychedelic rock, cooked up just the way it should be, exactly as you’d expect from this hallowed intercontinental meeting of minds.


Edikanfo.



When my wife and I heard a track from Edikanfo’s ‘The Pace Setters’ on the radio the other week, we initially thought it sounded like music from a ‘70s cop show. It must be from the bit where they go around the streets, ding detective work and showing someone’s picture to people, Satori suggested. Yeah, I said, but I think it must be a show set in some tropical place – like, they’re driving along the beach front in Miami or Hawaii or somewhere, but can’t enjoy the sunshine cos there’s too much on their mind.

Then the vocals finally came in, and…. whoa! Completely off-base! This is actually a West African band. Wow.

Turns out, Edikanfo actually hail from Ghana, where they recorded this set of absolute stone-cold afro-funk bangers at the behest of none other than Brian Eno, who released it on his E.G. label back in 1981. Some elements of the recording have a touch of that indefinable “pro recording in the ‘80s” feel (kinda clean and dry? Gated drums? I dunno..), which is not necessarily to their best advantage, so maybe that’s where I was going with my misplaced Miami Vice type imaginings, but IT MATTERS NOT. The playing on this thing is so red hot, it rips through all that careful-careful dolbified mixing like a knife thru butter.

Heavy on the blasting horns, lurching fretless bass and octo-armed, polyrhythmic drumming, this is just one of the tightest, most consistently energised and imaginative African funk sets I’ve heard in living memory, with, as noted, a kind of cinematic scope to the arrangements which just slays.

Unfortunately however, a violent coup d’etat in Ghana on New Year’s Eve 1981 effectively put a nix on Edikanfo’s local gigging career, and with little in the way of an international touring circuit for ‘world’ artists existing at that point in time, the ensuing years of political instability effectively destroyed their ability to remain as a working unit [see themes alluded to in this post’s introduction].

Four decades down the line though, every right-thinking man, woman and child across the globe loves this kind of stuff, and it appears the group’s surviving members are back together to set the fucking pace once again….. just in time for covid. Shit man, talk about bad luck. Oh well, at least we have this superb (and admirably affordable) reissue on the Glitterbeat label to enjoy.


Ozo.



Last but not least, I’ve been remiss thus far when it comes to finding time to plug Ozo, Mike Vest’s new collaborative outfit with drummer Graham Thompson and saxophonist Karl D’Silva. If their debut ‘Saturn’ earlier this year represented an interesting stylistic development from Vest’s now-standard Blown Out/Reptilian Oblivion MO, their second LP ‘Pluto’ (I guess they skipped Uranus, as well as my personal choice for most underrated planet, Neptune) is where it REALLY comes together, with D’Silva’s sax sounding less relentlessly echoed/multi-tracked, and generally feeling more organically integrated into the boiling lava tides of Vest’s fuzz-bass and guitar layers and Thompson’s rolling rockslide ‘lead drumming’ (particularly on the uncharacteristically subdued expanse of the title track).

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. Great work all round on this one guys, it’s a monster.

Labels: Edikanfo, Kahil El’Zabar’s Spirit Groove ft. David Murray, Kawaguchi Masami New Rock Syndicate, Kryssi Battalene, Obnox, Ozo

In view of the top # 5 selections below, I would like to clarify that I did not actually spend 2018 listening exclusively to psychedelic / noise rock from the North of England. Sometimes I listened to psychedelic / noise rock from the Midlands or the West Country too!

But seriously folks, what can I say… with regard to the multifarious other musical itches I need to scratch, it’s been *old stuff* that’s been providing the goods in recent years (which is to say, *newly discovered by me* old stuff, rest assured I’ve not just been blubbing over my old CDs in the attic), and, this is a list of NEW RECORDS, so… what can I say? By and large, it has been the amplifier-abusing denizens of the North who have still been doing the business re: regularly producing music that’s caused me to sit up and take notice. I have no personal connections whatsoever with these musicians, I’ve never visited most of their home towns, and I’ve never even seen many of them perform live – but there it is, take it or leave it, they are the ones who are currently allowing me to maintain a slight toehold on post-2010 musical culture.

Note, 7/2/19: If you're reading this post, please also read this one. Obnox is now honorary number one. It's positive discrimination, motherfucker.


1. Obnox – Templo Del Sonido LP 
(Astral Spirits)

Lamont ‘Bim’ Thomas has been part of Ohio’s underground rock community since time immemorial, most notably playing in The Bassholes, Compulsive Gamblers and This Moment in Black History during the ‘90s, but as far as the 21st century is concerned, he’s been Obnox, and Obnox is not fucking around.

Much like his fellow garage-punk survivors in Midnight Mines, Thomas seems to have responded to the creative deterioration of the scene that supported him by embracing noise, deconstruction and torturous DIY experimentation of one kind or another – but with very different results, needless to say. As difficult to hang with as the band name implies, Obnox mixes torrents of unapproachable, pedal-borne industrial skree with a chopped n’ screwed gangsta rap sensibility, each cutting through the remaining bones of some kind of blown out, rust-belt blues-punk aggro. It is heavy, unsavoury shit, whichever way you want to cut it.

At some point in the recent past, some bright spark at the Astral Spirits label seemingly asked Thomas to record a “free jazz album”. Rounding up a motley bunch of local collaborators, he seems to have gone about this task with gusto, and, if the resulting recordings veer so far from what one might reasonably term a “free jazz album” as to miss the mark entirely, they nonetheless made a really fucking good album, which I'm sure we can all agree is the main thing.

‘America in a Blender’ sets the tone for what follows, with a solitary horn dropping a mangled field of skree deep in the mix beneath Thomas’s earth-shaking, digitally-fucked distortion and disjointed drum tracks, as his bad-phone-line vocal bristles with barely comprehensible fury as he exhorts his fellow citizens to “..wake your punk ass UP” – the perfect opening to a characteristically punishing LP that frequently sounds like a demented, apocalyptic gutter-punk counterpoint the recent up-tick in socially conscious black music repped in the mainstream by the likes of Kamasi Washington and Kendrick Lamar.

On several tracks here, a guy named Morgan Phelps is credited with playing “warr guitar”, which as I understand it is some kind of twelve string bass. Needless to say, he gets far more convincing results from it than the guy from Cheap Trick ever did. On the instrument’s seven minute showcase ‘War Guitar’, extreme low end frequencies roar and shake alarmingly against Thomas and Chuck Cieslik’s equally damaged, killer wasp treble fuzz and wolf howls of pure feedback, exploding dangerously against the top end of the frequency range, resulting in a track that sounds like some strung out, alcoholic Transformer with earth-quake pounding arms tearing down a liquor store, crushing the bricks to dust.

After this, it’s mighty relief when Thomas & co temporarily nix the noise for arguably the album’s stand-out track, ‘Names’, proving they’ve got the chops to knock out a convincingly muscular slice of shimmering, cosmic funk – an exquisite backing track for poet Kisha Nicole Foster and vocalist Ngina Payola to do their suitably furious thing as guest artistes, calling out for spirits of those left dead or crushed by the accelerating inner-city turmoil reflected in the head-against-wall anxiety attack of Obnox’s more aggressive material – a more reflective POV shared by the exhausted and fragmentary ‘Gotta Keep Fighting’, which sounds like the ghost of an early ‘70s Norman Whitfield production being received second hand through an EVP radio séance.

From there, ‘Templo del Sonido’s second half heads back to the grind, like the sound of a city tearing itself apart; lingering fragments of rationality or comprehension are blown to pieces by incendiary bombs of jagged, speaker-toppling mayhem, each instrument suffused with a hellish miasma of effects-box carnage, as Thomas’s voice rants and seethes almost subliminally, like some hi-jacked police radio band spewing abuse on the last day before everything goes up in smoke. As an aural reflection of the kind of desperate shit that has presumably been going down on the ground level during the USA’s current cluster-fuck, Obnox feels right on the money.

Listen & buy via bandcamp.




2. Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – King of Cowards LP
(Rocket)

If you’d told me a couple of years back that a band incorporating two thirds of Blown Out’s line-up would be getting daytime radio airplay, plaudits in the broadsheets and sold out headline dates as far as the eye can see, I’d have…. oh, hell, I don’t know – bitten you or something. So, let me merely tell you something instead, it’s easier: speaking as the kind of grouch who hass more or less made a career out of abandoning bands as soon as they become popular or start contemplating a more ‘accessible’ sound, Pigs x 7 deserve the hell out of their success.

I’ve been lucky enough to see this band play live three times over the past few years – most recently a dangerously crammed sell-out at the Moth Club in Hackney – and on each occasion, they haven’t just been good, they’ve been verifiably awesome. Genuinely one of the most thrilling live rock bands around, they bring an exultantly positive spirit to the stage that, until recently, has perhaps been lost in the doomy murk of their recordings, scooping up the audience like so much rice from the metaphorical barrel. (And they play like absolute group-mind bastards too, needless to say.)

Seriously - sneer all you like, but catch these guys live and you will be floored. Likewise, if the recently acquired Radio 6/Guardian vibes put you off, I’ll simply ask you to play through ‘King of Cowards’ and point out the bits that do not legitimately rock.

Seemingly realising that it the brief Sweet Relief was the track that most connected with people in-between the two mammoth wig-outs on their previous album, the band’s decision to compress their sprawling jams into a series of more pointedly structured, battle-ready Sabbathian scorchers has proven an extremely wise one. Less an aesthetic sell-out (and let’s be honest, if you think the idea a rock band recording sub-ten minute songs constitutes some kind of betrayal, you probably need to check your head and/or weed intake), the move to shorter material feels more like a natural progression, allowing Pigs to lay down an album that more convincingly reflects the energy of their live performances.

None-more-classic influences are, as ever, easy to spot – Black Sabbath’s elemental riff henge, the pulsating, afterburner dirge of Hawkwind, and the increasingly frequent moments in which Matt Baty’s voice breaks and rasps as if he’s channelling Lemmy himself - but [sorry, cliché alert] the band are really growing into their own identity here too, establishing a cross-genre sound that’s purely their own and driving it as hard as it’ll go before the engine blows.

THAT particular groove that presumably succeeded in getting ‘em on the radio (cf: ‘GMT’ and ‘Cake of Light’)? I mean, I’m not quite sure how best to put this in relation to an ostensible doom/psyche/whatever group, but… it’s a bit, dare I say, glam? A bit Glitter Band / Slade? You know, that kind of platform-booted “stomping-down-the-street” feeling? Or am I going crazy? It sure seems to be getting them places anyway, so stomp on, boys. The way they ‘tease’ the riffs, building ‘em up and knocking ‘em down again, on ‘GMT’ and ‘Shockmaster’ is similarly inspired – a move perhaps inspired by playing to live audiences? - and when the full band proceeds to hit it full force… oh boy. We’re talking Panzer Divisions of Love, ploughing through the barricades, or whatever.

Keeping their recording process ‘in-house’ was, I’d venture, another great move, and guitarist Sam Grant’s production here is f-ing fantastic, mustering constant, edge-of-feedback bombast that sounds simultaneously crystal clear and brutally gnarly, ripped with muscular Oh Sees-ish contempo psyche signifiers and crushing, compressed-metal burn; heavy as a warehouse full of Relapse overstock, yet more fun than a B-52s tribute night.

Quite where Baty’s anguished lyrical reflections are supposed to fit into all this, who knows, but, like everything else about this band, it nonetheless just seems to gel so well, the longer tracks (‘A66’ in particular) cutting through the fun & games with a suffocating, Viking funeral intensity, the frontman howling through the maelstrom, driven to some kind of mad, impassioned excelsis. His climactic cries of “hold on” on closing track ‘Gloamer’ come on like Ahab rallying his crew as their harpoons pierce the hide of the white whale – and, for anyone still missing the fifteen minute numbers, let’s just say that if eight whole minutes of that shit doesn’t leave you satisfied, you should probably seek help.

Listen and buy via bandcamp.


3. David Terry – Sorrow tape
(Opal Tapes)

From April:

“Conjured up primarily from voice, keys, Fursaxa-esque accordion drones and a touch of distant, thumping percussion to keep time, there is a carefully wrought sense of slow mo melodicism to these pieces that set them apart from the vast majority of Terry’s lonesome tape droning contemporaries. The layers he builds come together with a more deliberate intent than the kind of accidental / circumstantial methodology that often governs such things, sometimes sounding like the moment of sublime tonal union when everything comes together in some grand classical piece, stretched out and extended across a 20+ minute duration. It’s pretty great.

Emotionally-speaking, ‘Sorrow’ belies the expectations of its title and cover art by neatly side-stepping the over-bearing affectations of woe and world-denying misanthropy that ensnare so many metal bands, instead evoking a more honest, more hopeful field of melancholic drift, suggestive of a deep immersion both in the contemplation of nature, and in the gleaming spires of the distinctly old school, capital ‘R’ Romanticism that so often accompanies it.

Far from the blackened deep space explorations of Bong’s earlier career, the feel Terry conveys here recalls the band’s inspired use of Turner’s ‘Thompson’s Aeolian Harp’ on the cover of their We Are, We Were and We Will Have Been LP from 2015, and – for me at least – it is a very good feel to find oneself on the receiving end of.”

---

Listen and buy download from Opal Tapes.


4. Bridget Hayden – 
Pure Touch Only From Now On, They Said So LP 
(Early Music)

Until this year, I was familiar with Bridget Hayden’s name only as a result of her on/off membership of Vibracathedral Orchestra, but the chance discovery of this solo LP, quietly released by Swedish label Early Music, has brought the nature of her talent home to me very strongly.

A set of home recordings united only by their raw, analogue fidelity and creative use of structure-dissolving distortions, ‘Pure Touch..’ finds Hayden working in a mode somewhat reminiscent of the early (and I would now consider, best) work of Charalambides, or the sublimated song forms of Grouper, but with a considerably harsher edge than either cutting through the reverb.

Led by a voice wraithed in a hill-smoke shroud of effects, ‘Don’t Knock on Your Door’ merges Hayden’s wordless lament with a tangled web of gnarled electric guitar, whilst the brief ‘On Your Way’ is senselessly beautiful, a time-stopping folk spirit ripped from the unlikely plastic guts of a four-track. Piano-led lamentation ‘Fires For Sorrow’ is nigh-on unbearable, touching on a graveside melancholy strong enough to ward off any hint of cliché or sentimentality; just devastating stuff. This leads straight into ‘Cold Steel Rain’, which largely follows suit, stretching this same feel into another extended string n’ voice meditation on weird, sub-lingual grief, its gently overdubbed choral reflections interrupted by disorientating, blown out bass frequencies that butt in rudely, like ghosts at a particularly lurid feast.

Elsewhere, malevolent, Vertical Slit-esque noise-rock rears its head, with the lengthy ‘There Was a Branch Breaking’ in particular standing out as a spirit-sapping downer, the light of glowing, witch fires only just creeping first toward the end of it’s nine minute moorland trudge. In fact, there is often a hostile, depressive kick to these recordings than scratches hard against their corresponding ethereal tendencies.

Reflecting Hayden’s apparent disdain for sullying her music with language, it is difficult to convey in words quite what a remarkable record this is. If anything I’ve written above strikes a chord with you, I would highly recommend spending some time with it.

Listen and download from bandcamp; vinyl available via Early Music.


5. Earthling Society – MO: The Demon LP
(Riot Season)

If you’re not familiar with director Chih-Hung Kuei’s fearlessly insane 1983 martial arts / horror film The Boxer’s Omen [known to Hong Kong audiences simply as ‘Mo’], there is probably not much I can say that will adequately prepare you for the experience of watching it. If you can find a copy, you’re probably best advised to just take a deep breath a dive in. It’s sink or swim territory, for sure.

If you’re unfamiliar with Fleetwood-based psychedelic rock band Earthling Society meanwhile, well… that’s a slightly easier one to get a grip on. A quick listen to their superb 2014 LP England Have My Bones should do the trick rather nicely.

To my great personal delight, 2018 saw these two unlikely cultural touchstones coming together, as the admirable Riot Season label [three separate entries on the this here Top 20 makes them Stereo Sanctity Label of the Year with a bullet – congrats!] presented the world with the vinylised results of a 2017 recording session that saw the aforementioned band blagging their way into a well-appointed studio at Leeds College of Music to record their own alternative soundtrack to the aforementioned movie. So… what more could the adventurous listener possibly need to know? Let’s dive in and try out our best astral front crawl within the psychotropic tide-pool of fire-gargling racket that must surely have resulted!

Well, I say that, but actually, whereas one would have imagined Fred Laird and his band-mates taking the opportunity to unleash a raging cacophony of molten, tentacle-slashing fuzz guitar chaos to match the hair-raisingly outré content of Kuei’s film (and to be honest, I’d probably have been fine with that), the band instead spin their interpretation of ‘Boxer’s Omen’ off in some entirely unexpected directions, perhaps riding some heroic contrarian impulse or other, perhaps taking inspiration from the film’s date of production, or perhaps simply taking advantage of the vintage gear lying around in the LCM studio.

Whatever the case, the LP is a real side-step of a third eye opener, mixing up familiar heavy psyche tropes with a lively smorgasbord of repurposed ‘70s art-rock / ‘80s mainstream tones, the prominence of which presumably led the band to throw shout-outs to stuff like Berlin-era Bowie and Magazine into the album’s press release.

And indeed, opener ‘Theme from MO – The Demon’ inaugurates a beautifully crystalline, clean-ish guitar tone, seemingly ripped through some kind of holy, Taoist chorus pedal, surfing atop Fairlight shimmers and strange, quasi-Asian riffs picked out on some synth bell thingy. Driven by a propulsive, upbeat groove from rhythm section, it sounds suspiciously like the kind of thing that theoretically COULD grace the opening titles of some neon-glazed, atmospheric ‘80s horror movie – if admittedly one that would have you leaping out of your seat to frantically try to google up details on who the hell composed this extraordinarily rockin’ music, especially once some slightly more contemporary, delay-wracked noise textures start creeping in toward the track’s end.

Both noise and groove continue to build across ‘King Boxer’, with E.S.’s highly rhythmic, multi-layered approach to instrumental psych creating a joyous, kaleidoscopic kung fu soundtrack of MDMA-addled dreams, summoning images of flipped out fighters flipping and kicking their way through a bottomless Shawscope vortex or mylar-textured deformities. As is only appropriate under the circumstances, I suppose.‘Inauguration of the Buddha Dome’ takes a darker turn, nixing much of the groove for an unanchored sinister noise exercise, more redolent I suppose of the film’s frequently foul and disturbing imagery, leading the way into the tangled, narcotic tendrils of ‘Mountains of Bliss’.

Soon enough though, the positive vibes are back in spades and the good guys are kicking ass again, ending Side A with the self-explanatory ‘Super Holy Monk Defeats Back Magic Motherfucker’. Here, gong-like synth washes drift back and forth across the stereo field as Laird dons the funny hat and goes full on Mr Vampire, coaxing a glowing morass of multi-layered eterno-riff ectoplasm from his axe. Thank you and good night, Black Magic Mofos - mission accomplished!

Given that the print of ‘Boxer’s Omen’ I watched does not conclude with a thirty-minute coda in which the surviving boxer chills out and gets high whilst recuperating at an Alpine ski lodge, I’m going to assume that this where the movie soundtrack stuff ends, because Side B here brings a different vibe entirely.

Initially, echoed spoken word fragments from actual Asian person Bomi Seo accompany passages of glacial, Eno-esque synth drift, leavened by some blissful, Philip Glass-esque slow mo melodies, like music for a particularly far-out documentary on movement of ice floes in the North China sea, before E.S.’s monolithic psych reasserts itself once more, the band sounding a little more relaxed and free-form than on the A, with Laird’s lead lines sounding particularly majestic, before the first of two lengthy tracks simmers down again for a quitter, more experimental conclusion, as unglued vocal fragments and meandering xylophone improvisations gradually fade away over a fairly long period of time.

Further surprises grace the final track, with an unexpected outburst of sitar-driven, Glastonbury fayre psych-pop, featuring the album’s only real singing, as Laird repurposes a chunk of Fred Neil’s ocean-skippin’ stonage for a brief, delightful bit of ‘Revolver’/Traffic bed-head reverie, before the full E.S. sound once again fades back in, fuzzed out SF ballroom stasis dancing us way out to the merry end of whatever the hell this thing is now the movie’s finished, to triumphant effect.

Listen and buy via bandcamp.


6. Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso UFO –
Reverse of Rebirth in Universe LP 
(Riot Season)

After twenty plus years and what seems like several thousand emissions of blurting cosmic hoo-hah from Makoto Kawabata’s Acid Mothership, even the most strident devotees of their captain’s particular aesthetic would be forgiven for feeling that we have reached a point where there have frankly been *enough* AMT records, and that Makoto & co might well be advised to cease foisting further extracts from their endless sea of blathering chaos upon rookie record label owners, before the collected weight of their vinyl legacy begins to assume the proportions of a global environmental catastrophe.

BUT - and you probably saw this one coming - I would urge those who feel themselves in sympathy with the viewpoint expressed above to give ‘Reverse of Rebirth in Universe’ a spin before getting to work on the AMT vinyl bonfire.

Having inaugurated a “new generation” line-up for the band in 2017 with the recruitment of a hot new rhythm section (AMT Juniors?), Kawabata and equally venerable founding member Higashi Hiroshi now seem to have been further energised by the addition of a full time vocalist – one Jyonson Tsu – and ‘Rebirth..’ sees the newly-minted five piece returning to some of AMT’s signature riffs with a spirit of spring cleaning freshness, resulting in a work that anyone who ever dug the band’s golden age recordings should be able to appreciate.

Eschewing the cyclopean heavy metal cacophony that tended to characterise many previous iterations of ‘Dark Star Blues’, the tune’s distinctive, Arabesque riff is here picked out on bouzouki as a kind of gentle, string-tanglin’ folk groove swings into effect, shaped and led by Tsu’s wordless(?), rhythmic vocalisations. It’s pretty much impossible to avoid comparing Tsu’s drifting, spaced out glossolalia to Damo Suzuki’s work with Can all those years ago, but regardless, he makes for an extremely appealing addition to the AMT sound, managing not to outstay his welcome even across 10+ minutes of churning, wigged out riffage. Of course, the expected torrents of strangulated feedback guitar and knob-twisting UFO synth abuse make an appearance later on in the track, but there’s a sense of purpose and a degree of subtlety at work here that’s great to hear from a band who have for so long dwelt at the furthest edges of self-indulgence.

An equally beautiful recording (Kawabata’s production here is especially superb), ‘Black Velvet Blues’ drags AMT back to some extent to ‘90s PSF territory, establishing a rarefied, shadowy atmosphere that perhaps even Keiji Haino wouldn’t turn his nose up at in one of his mellower moments. Slow, brooding tremolo chords crash headfirst into knotty clusters of strung out noise before the rhythm section manages to establish a mournful, head-nodding groove upon which Tsu makes his entrance, his vocals lending an eerie, oneiric feel to proceedings that really sends me. Where exactly, I’m not sure (a deserted, autumnal island if some kind, perhaps?), but so long as it’s SOMEWHERE, I’m happy.

On the flip meanwhile, ‘Black Summer Song’ takes a more experimental path, opening with string-chiming temple vibes and gnarly fragments of amp detritus, before Tsu’s ‘Future Days’-esque muttering rise alongside a swathe of beatific synth and drone textures. Drummer Nani Satoshima’s busy, burbling chops soon help initiate us into the realm of pure tape-choppin’, radio dial-spinnin’ Candemonium, with Kawabata riding the waves as is his want, dropping fried solos hither and yon – but, crucially, this session finds him feeling considerate enough toward his new bandmates to bow out before he goes completely overboard, leaving us to enjoy lengthy, guitar-free segments of weirdly blissful, perma-stoned Cologne-via-Osaka ambience.

In short then - if you can ditch the baggage and get with it on its own terms, ‘Rebirth..’ proves to be an intensely rewarding slice of long-form psychedelic rock; largely devoid of goofery or excess, it is arguably the best AMT record in years.

(And, it has absolutely fantastic artwork too, as any fool can plainly see. Mine has a different coloured background to the jpg reproduced above, and I like it more, but whatev.)

Listen and buy via Riot Season.


7. Greg Ashley – Fiction is Non-Fiction d/l 
(self-released)

In view of the caustic cynicism and accusatory anger that helped make Greg Ashley’s ‘Pictures of Saint Paul Street’ the most bracing excursion into trad singer-songwriter territory this writer has heard in living memory, one shudders to imagine the extremes of despair that the slow motion global car crash of the Tr**p epoch might have wrung from the poor guy.

For better or for worse, ‘Fiction is Non-Fiction’, an album length grab-bag of recordings quietly dropped onto his Bandcamp page in November, certainly doesn’t pull any punches in this regard, with Ashley taking his lyrical hatchet to such matters as the U.S. / North Korean nuclear stand-off (‘Thick Red Line’) and the moral bankruptcy of the “post-truth” era (“if fiction is the truth, let fiction try”, sneers the title track).

As well as expanding the range of his subject matter though, this collection finds Ashley stretching his legs a bit musically too. ‘Dissociative Pills’ marks a striking return to the kind of haunted, baroque garage-psych that he used to proffer in his bands Gris Gris and The Mirrors. A doomed lament for the love of a lady who seems to be a French school teacher, the song mixes some lyrics that border on brilliance with others so wantonly egregious they might have had a late period Serge Gainsbourg reaching for the tippex (I’ll leave it to the reader’s discretion to determine which is which). But, the fuzz-enhanced arrangement barrels along so persuasively, and Ashley spits out his verse with such depth of feeling, it’s difficult not to surrender and let yourself get drawn in to the unsavoury drama of the whole affair.

Elsewhere, the musical approach regresses further, arriving at the level of pure, snot-nosed drunken punk for the self-explanatory ‘Fuck The Army’ (a definite highlight), and then there’s ‘Blondes & Cyanide’ - a PC-baiting, POTUS-threatening outburst, positively writhing with disgust (both inward and outward-looking), that unexpectedly succeeds in delivering the best bad taste punk rock chorus of the decade. (Seriously, check it out.)

In between all this impotent rage meanwhile, things get pleasantly weird. ‘Indian Summer’ briefly recalls the shimmering, psychedelic reveries of 2007’s ‘Painted Garden’ album, ‘Karen and Catalina are Drinkin’ in Heaven’ is a doggedly repetitive waltz commemorating a pair of suicide victims (it’s one of this album’s surprisingly rare returns to the “drug addiction as pathetic abdication of human responsibility” themes that dominated ‘..Saint Paul Street’ too), and an acoustic cover of Sonic Youth’s ‘Schizophrenia’ makes one wonder at the uncanny extent to which the song’s opening verses sound like the kind of thing Greg Ashley would probably write.

Doubtless many listeners will be apt to deem some of the stuff Ashley sings about here tasteless, poorly thought out or just plain unappealing. There are moments when I’d agree with them, but hey, at least he’s never boring (which by my count puts him one up on every other human being who still persists in singing whilst holding an acoustic guitar), and there is an unfiltered grit and mad beauty to his music that is all too rare in these dark days, and that keeps me coming back for more. Somewhere in The Great Beyond, Warren Zevon and Laughin’ Len raise a glass to his efforts.

Listen and buy via bandcamp.


8. Melting Hand – Faces of Earth LP
(Hominid Sounds)

Having substantially rejigged both their MO and line-up since the drug-huffing guitar shoot-out of 2016’s ‘High Collider’[Terminal Cheesecake frontman Russell Smith is OUT, Marion Andrau (The Wharves - guitar) and Wayne Adams (Hominid Sounds boss - synth) are IN], Melting Hand’s core trio of Mike Vest, Gordon Watson and Tom Fug are back with a splendidly expansive, approachable motherlode of what I would normally tend to classify as cosmic, galaxy-rim space-rock, were it not for the fact that (perhaps with a glimpse of the same wry, genre police-baiting humour that inspired the title of Bong’s ‘Stoner Rock’ back in 2014), they pointedly limit the scope of their contemplation here to Planet Earth.

Hitting a pretty much perfect middle ground between all the instrumental heavy psyche stuff that has tended to dominate my ‘best of…’ lists on this blog in recent years, ‘Faces of Earth’ is a whole ton of fun. Opener ‘Dust’ spins out on a great, propulsive groove from Mr Fug, a sweet silver surfin’ guitar riff gradually leading the band to an exhilarating, free form white-out, wrenching acres of sweet fuzz from the miniature city of flashing lights arrayed at their collective feet.

The decision to cover ‘Earth’ from the Joe Henderson / Alice Coltrane album I reviewed here meanwhile also proves an inspired one, sitting alongside Earthling Society’s epic reimagining of ‘Journey in Satchidananda’ in the extremely rarefied sub-genre of contemporary British heavy psych bands getting to grips with cosmic jazz classics. Hearing Vest force Henderson’s central sax riff through his everything-on-all-the-time guitar set up is a joy, and if the track’s subdued middle section, featuring a spoken word intervention from Lower Slaughter’s Sinead Young (reworking Kenneth Nash’s stoned incantations on the original) initially feels a bit awkward, repeat plays see it settling in nicely, preparing the ground for a thunderous full band return to the riff; both Andrau and Adams make their presence felt here beneath Vest and Watson’s characteristic maelstrom, sending skittering, neck-scraping noise and electronic echo trails ricocheting through the mix.

Back down to “earth” (ha), side B opens up with some seriously punkoid, uptempo riff rock on ‘Terra’. Recalling the maximalist stoner-fuzz moves of Vest’s recent work with Blown Out and Dodge Meteor, the track even accelerates to the point where it begins to sound like some weird, mutant cousin of ‘Jesus Built My Hotrod’ for a few bars. Wowza. ‘Giaia’ is more laidback, relatively speaking, functioning as a great work out for the rhythm section, with the pedals and amps of the noise-makers growling and hissing behind them, before the closing ‘Dirt’ kicks in with a monolithic, doom tempo trudge, its simplistic, two-part riff pushed to the edge of oblivion, lumbering under the weight of what sounds like about a hundred delay-addled, feedbackin’ guitar overdubs. It was this one, I think, that really blew my mind when the band drove into total oblivion during the Desertfest set I wrote up here. Much like Vest’s Haikai No Ku project, it’ll prove an endurance test for some, but a city-crushed-to-dust bliss for devotees such as myself. After thirteen minutes of that, well – job done, needless to say.

Listen & buy via Hominid Sounds.



9. Mountain Movers – Pink Skies LP 
(Trouble in Mind)

If Mountain Movers self-titled LP from 2017 sounded like a heavy psyche lead guitarist carrying out a hostile takeover of an unsuspecting slowcore indie band, ‘Pink Skies’ finds Kryssi Battalene’s maximalist, PSF-styled fuzz warfare fusing rather more organically with the sound made by her band-mates, as the group settle into a more cohesive sound. Rhythm sectioners Rick Omonte and Ross Menze in particular can be heard upping their game here, playing dense, knotty grooves reminiscent of early ‘00s Oneida for Battalene’s amp ectoplasm and delay goblins to play around in, building tracks like the opening ‘Freeway’ into muscular, low key eterno-jams, whilst drifting off elsewhere into strung out, Spaceman 3-esque repetition.

Admittedly, this approach does lead to the impression of second guitarist / vocalist Dan Greene being rather side-lined here, especially given that much of ‘Pink Skies’ remains instrumental, but his presence as an oft-silent partner still proves important, lending structure to what otherwise feel like a fairly directionless bunch of rehearsal jams, particularly on album highlight ‘Snow Drift’, in which his spoken word tale of trying to make it home during a blizzard allows the song to really take flight, with Battalene’s feedback whiteout crashing in to ecstatic effect after a trudging, slushy build-up.

Though of a considerably rougher hue, the song reminds me of simple pleasures I used to experience in simpler times, zoning out to Galaxie 500 or Yo La Tengo’s noisier moments as if they were the first, last and only music on the planet to touch such heights. I thank them for the memories.

For a band vaguely located somewhere on the indie-rock spectrum to still push quite so much electrifying racket into the atmosphere circa 2018 seems little short of miraculous. Perhaps the relative isolation of Newhaven, CT helps? I dunno. Anyway, it’s spiriting to know that bands like this can still attain escape velocity without having to front like they’re anarcho-punks or folkies or psychedelic warlords or metalheads or jangle-pop fundamentalists or whatever. Just playin’, man, that’s all it is. It can get results.

(Really not sure about that cover art though, I’ve got to say.)

Listen & buy via bandcamp.






XXX. Skullflower – 
Werecat Powers of the Crossroads at Midnight LP
(Nashazphone)

Whilst the multitude of home-recorded demos and sessions regularly uploaded to Skullflower’s bandcamp page are not without their charm, for my money the series of LPs the duo of Matthew Bower and Samantha Davies have produced for Cairo-based Nashazphone label (this is the second, following last year’s The Black Iron That Fell From The Sky, To Dwell Within) are working on a whole other level, presenting some of the very best material that has ever emerged from beneath the auspices of this storied band name.

‘Werecat Powers..’ may cut down somewhat on the aggression generally expected of a Skullflower release, but it loses nothing of the project’s traditionally overwhelming scale. The A side’s ‘We Move On Points of Shattered Mirrors’ verily crow-bars open the third eye, with vast-immensity-of-the-universe-opening-up-before-you stomach-trembling synth walls reminiscent of Alice C’s ashram recordings echoing off ancient stone tomb walls; a bead curtain made of motherf-kin planets swinging hither and yon, leaving milky way trails of star debris. Benign oceans of horizontal laser arcs spreading across a grid-like sky of angelic, treble overload, as if Bower’s Sunroof! project calmed down and had a nice cup of some ancient Tibetan tea, whilst his amps shrieked on with an impossible immensity of cosmic light. But, the desert winds still howl and shrill their assault upon a much-abused prayer bowl lost somewhere in the mix, bringing shadows of shambling, parchment-gangling sharp toothed mummies much like the one glimpsed in Ahmed Nosseir’s cover illustration. They of course are the ones who are gradually gonna take this cut over, as knobs are twisted right and overtones accumulate; sand swinging in a hurricane, downing choppers as the ghouls feast on dead soldiers in exultant, dictator-crushing slo-mo, their voices all the while singing mightily from dust-choked, formless spectral throats.

And that’s just the bloody A side! The B (comprising ‘Charnel Ground’ and ‘Departure Lounge’) has more of a glass n’ chrome frippertronics kind of feel to it, but is equally blissful. Mirrored airport glide sucked down a wormhole of cult ritual and black static; obscene UAE air terminals collapsing in upon themselves as ancient giants rise.

That abrupt shut-off when each of the album’s three pieces ends, volume dropping to zero without warning, is a killer. Wherever you’ve been whilst the transistors were squalling and the amps pulsing, the crash back down to The Real is unbearable.

There are a lot of people around offering “psychedelia” these days. Eh – some of them are alright. If you can still find a copy of this LP though, plug in the headphones, get loose and enjoy a dose of the real thing.

Labels: Acid Mothers Temple, best of 2018, Bridget Hayden, David Terry, Earthling Society, Greg Ashley, Melting Hand, Mountain Movers, Obnox, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, Skullflower