From a blog and a writer that once fully endorsed Silencer’s
Death – Pierce Me and listed Bardo Pond, Thorns and 8 Foot Sativa in his fave
bands list, this statement will come as a real surprise: Jake Bugg’s debut
album, go buy it. Now. It’s a loving proto-Dylan exploration backlit in grouchy
back-porch guitar interludes and youthful gravel-voiced ballads caught in the
crossfire between Dylan worship and pop-folk marketing bullshit. It’s far from
perfect, it’s definitely frozen in the iTunes headlights and stops short of
dredging up Rob Zimmerman’s whisky-soaked carcass to sway gently on stage while
we all blow him kisses. At its worst it abandons the guitar whizzkiddery and
becomes mournful and self-absorbed, but at its frequent best, it sets the deck
aflame with hyperenergetic folk rock wizardry drenched in sweaty infectious
organic real thrills a-la Neil Young
on a full-on England binge or Cadaverous Condition without the Cookie Monster.
Solo Live at Gaya, Volume One - Kaoru Abe - LICK MY DECALS OFF, BABY! #72
There
are individuals across the history of time that have continued to fascinate for
generations after their demise on account of one thing: enigma. These people,
perhaps revelatory in their time, may survive only by word of mouth, fragments
of unfinished works, their weatherworn marble bust adorning the walls of a
European museum. Consider Socrates: father of modern Western Philosophy, whose
original works are lost and who we only know about via the writings of his
contemporary playwrights, historians and his student Plato. Or Franz Kafka, the
German writer, barely published or recognized in his lifetime, his three
posthumously published (but unfinished) novels are now recognized as Modernist
masterpieces. Perhaps it is their enigma that makes us attracted to these
people; after all, we like a little mystery, a little speculation, and perhaps
the little information we possess on these enigmatic individuals can help us
form our own opinion about the character of these people: how they felt, what
they enjoyed, if they suffered for their work and so on. Perhaps the fragments
they have left behind only scratch the surface of the true genius they once
possessed. I’ve recently discovered someone who I believe to be a true enigma,
a ghost, a shadow of a person, leaving behind a body of work as mysterious as
his life was known to be: the saxophonist Kaoru Abe.
New Wave Punk Blues - IN SEARCH OF SPACE #128

About as Adam Black Savage as you get without being Adam Black Savage: Workin' Man Noise Unit transmit serious vibes - IN SEARCH OF SPACE #127
“My body and mind are both still a
wreck too. Normally one of the two is okay by now. The British Library Sound
Archive got in touch with us today and said they'd like copies of our tapes. My
nervous system is not sufficiently recovered to process this weird information.
I told them that they should really be destroying our music not preserving it.”
Transmission of unidentified origin from the WMNU bunker
Today I saw a large, weary, nervous faced working class
woman in a cream coat get off the bus, turn, look at all the passengers and
draw her finger across her throat with pure curdled hatred burning in her eyes.
I saw that today. Several years ago I was walking in the Highlands and came
across a stream, bleeding into which was a magnificent seven-pointer stag, face
down in the stream bleeding out what was left of his face, the majority of it
smashed away by a hunter’s bullet. His single remaining eye black and cold like
a doll’s eye. I recalled the stag as I looked into the eyes of that woman
today. I had plans to write about Jake Bugg, but I just couldn’t, not after
that profound atavistic jiving this morning. As Workin’ Man Noise Unit would
say, keep sleepwalking. The lager-swilling Reading yawp merchants are fans of feedback loops that mimic their palindromic
titles and generally maintain that we are living out the last days of this
technological nightmare we’ve constructed and the only way to exercise the
demons and fall back into some semblance of humanity is to debase our sweaty
selves in the dank and darkened basements of our oil-soaked industrial cities,
debase ourselves to the basal noise freerock of MC5 clashing with High Rise in
the same realm as that utterly wonderful Vincent Black Shadow workout that
crossed Iggy with more Iggy. This is about as Adam Black Savage as you get without
actually being Adam Black Savage.
Solace for the Lonely - Robinella - LICK MY DECALS OFF, BABY! #71
The
phrase “going pop” seems to be synonymous with negativity; that moving your
artistic goals to a popular direction is always going to be a bad thing. You’re
always going to be a sellout, compromising your musical quality for a few
dollars more, being a lapdog of the big faceless record labels and forgetting
your humble origins. This isn’t a totally unjust statement, as it sadly does
happen, but to assume this statement as a generalization is extremely
misguided. Y’see, sometimes you need to take a little whitewash and smooth over
the cracks, polishing and refining something that has potential but isn’t quite
there yet. Sometimes moving in the popular direction isn’t just a good move financially;
it’s also better artistically. For
Robinella, this little push, inspiration or decision, whatever it was, worked
out brilliantly.
Dylan Carlson is back! - IN SEARCH OF SPACE #126
Drcarlsonalbion sells his luddite membership. |
Sabbath Assembly, ye are not gods any longer - IN SEARCH OF SPACE #125
No no no no no no no. No. It’s the new Sabbath Assembly
album and on top of all the unrighteous shite I’m about to rake up, it has a
cover of the far-superior We Give Our Lives to be found on the debut, Restored
to One. This highlights two things, one, that this album isn’t fit to be the
beer coaster holding Jex Thoth’s bottle o’ Jack, and two, that they have
absolutely no respect or understanding for the debut album. I bought this
miserable dead-eyed knock-off by a band falsely called Sabbath Assembly (Jex
Thoth has departed the two-peep project making it more accurately titled ‘Dave
Nuss gets someone who isn’t Jex Thoth to make an arse of the hymns of the
Process Church’) because I was virtually certain I would hate it and would use
it as a big hate sponge for all the bad things in my life, but it is so
dribblingly awful, so face-spitting in the face of the resplendent debut that
it doesn’t even anger me. It just makes me quite sad about the whole of the
world.
Pick your taboo, Gareeda are out for blood - IN SEARCH OF SPACE #124
NOTE – Some of you disassociated fucks might read me prose
and not be able to read ‘tween the lines on this one and dig that I dig Gareeda, urban as fuck, heathen as
cunt – a fuel injected suicide machine.
A recent article in the Journal noted Edinburgh is ‘dull’
because of its beauty. Certainly, while in Glasgow all manner of fine-fingered
freaks are likely to jump you, ‘specially staggering outta one of the less
reputable venues; in the ‘Burgh you’re much more likely to be set about by
cuntfaced generously proportioned American tourists hunting their ancestry and
asking you where the Royal Mile is while
standing on the fucking Royal Mile than by twitchy blood-junkies from the
sub-basement; but the Athens of the North has a sub-basement all of its own. A
vile and venomous tract, a sewer and cow run through the bowels of the city and
racing out it’s open sphincter like the eye of a beer can, and up your
daughter’s leg grinning and crying with a knife in its teeth. Here dwell the
hairy-handed mountain men and illustrated long-time dope fiends strung out on
Orange Goblin riffs to so long they delude themselves into thinking those same
riffs are original, and copyright free. I doubt Orange Goblin are the sort to drop
any legal action on these heads, or that these heads are in any way interested
or able to deal with any such legal challenge. From this dank cavernous pit come four more bastards leering and
stumbling up into the semi-respectable parts of the city scratching at their
trousers and sucking the last of the smoke out of a Marlboro Red and waiting
for optimum pupil dilation before growling at a pastel-shirted family of
sightseers and ambling on into the night, looking for trouble, looking for a
fix, looking for it.
Seadrum/House of Sun - Boredoms - LICK MY DECALS OFF, BABY! #70
I’ve
had a long, boring and particularly busy week, and frankly my thoughts about
new music were kind of left by the wayside. Y’know whenever you’re feeling a
bit pathetic and all you want to do is eat junk food, comfort food? That taste
that you’re so familiar and happy with and you know it’s going to provide for
you exactly what you need at the time: comfort. Well, you can do that with
music too. Oh my brothers I was comfort listening, retreating back to the
solace of classics I’ve known for years and years, craving the sounds I know
inside and out, front and back, just because they were familiar: a pat on the
shoulder, a way to switch off my mind and not to think. Well, it’d been a few
days and nothing was inspiring me to write: in fact I had absolutely no qualms
about not even attempting to write this week. That is, until, my feeble little consoling
wall of protection was battered and broken down by such a ferocious and
transcendental piece of music that my perspective on the week changed. Comfort:
no way! It’s time to get up and take action, be inspired, build bridges and
overthrow dictators and write an epic poem. Such a breath of fresh air this
album was! And the thing is, I’ve had it for years and years: its brilliance
only being revealed to me now is either a colossal cosmic joke or else an
example of timing at its most impeccable.
Scottish chitlin new wave vaudeville punk blues - IN SEARCH OF SPACE #123
(Or:- Let’s all sing along with Homesick Aldo, it’s the
cognitive dissonance blues)
“Played a gig with Aldo on the bill a few months back…
interesting fellow.” Jeff Duffy – Shock and Awe.
Starting with, and sustaining for its duration, the sorta
hundred carat harmonica boogie backed up in its tribal drum thump and all the
more amazing when you hear it’s a one-man band. I listened to Homesick Aldo’s
Talkin’ Innocent Outlaw Blues with a smile of old-time affection bolted to my
face with rivets of joy because throughout his orgy of country bluesisms and
boot-tappin’ rhythms he invites us to spend 35 minute stints in a world without
knowing irony; without post-everything refusenik balderdash where a man can
genuinely sing a song about an alligator and a wolf and you ain’t gonna laugh
at him. Here’s how good it is, I listened to it and spent the next few days
re-spinning it and caught myself drinking moonshine and standing with my hips
cocked and thumbs in my belt leaning against the bar. Homesick Aldo is at best
a hopeless eccentric and at his most tragic a man terribly out of time and
space who should have rocked the East Village folk movement just before the
whole ‘Nam business. It’s powerfully nostalgic stuff. Word has it Aldo was once
the frontman of a group called the Soul City Shakers (wait… what?) and by
accounts of that group (they tore up every gig they played), he hasn’t changed
in the slightest. Still wearing the leather jacket and sunglasses like a
throwback throwback to a lost age. By all accounts his solo album (Talkin’
Innocent Outlaw Blues… I mean seriously!) rings exactly the same bell of utter
stupidity and inanity simultaneously with the white-hot light of flawless
genius. ‘Course Aldo went from the Soul City Shakers to solo, ‘cause there
can’t be that many heads in Fife of all places that’ll want to partake in
reflexive short-lived experimental test-flight throwback bands; there can’t be
anyone with the total absence of self-awareness to belt out these lyrics and
rock this look, nor anyone with the total devotion to the cause to actually
pull the thing off and make it work.
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