La Feline – Triomphe. It’s a great feeling to hear something and straight away know that, not only are you going to really like it, but that it’s objectively great too ie. it’s not just ticking the boxes of your own personal peccadilloes. So, La Feline is a lady called Agnes Gayraud and she’s just a fantastically evocative and compelling songwriter. Musically she’s in indie/folky/post-punk territory (and definitely a bit Radiohead-ish in places), but to simply try and tie this down to genre kind of defeats the object. Have a listen, she’s fab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0G0IO_do8o
Cobra Family Picnic – Magnetic Anomaly. This, on the other hand, is the definition of generic. Which isn’t to say it’s bad, but its moves are so familiar, it could wash over you without really making any impact. But if psychedelic space rock is your thing, it’s worth a listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRDBy8cMkHg
Erlend Apneseth Trio – Ara. One of the seemingly endless avant/jazz/folk releases from Hubro. Fine, some nice fiddle, but can’t imagine wanting to sit through it again
Electric Wizard – Wizard Bloody Wizard. You like EW, or indeed Uncle Acid, then you’ll want this. Great vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX1530GNc6U
Atomic Rooster – s/t. There’s a box set upcoming in Dec that features all of their 70s stuff. One of the first early heavy bands I got into, it seems they never got the kudos they deserved, and mostly remembered these days as Carl Palmer’s first band. But Vincent Crane, who had been the driving musical force behind the Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, was a fantastic keys player, and they were pretty big for a while, even having a couple of hit singles. I guess their problem was that they fell between a variety of stools – proto-prog, muscular R&B, hard rock – though this is also what makes them quite often rather brilliant. Anyway, this first album is the one that features CP, but doesn’t feature a guitarist, and in places it definitely sounds like a test-run for ELP. But don’t let that put you off. One other thing to mention though – Crane suffered from serious depression throughout his life and ultimately killed himself in 1989, and lyrically just about every song on this album reflects that, sometimes to quite a painful degree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ll_ievJrd0
Listen With Father:
Siouxsie & The Banshees – Once Upon A Time. Practically an old standby now. The girls immediately loved the likes of ‘Hong Kong Garden’ and ‘Christine’, but I get the sense they’re really digging into some of the harsher/weirder stuff now. And blimey, the lyrics to tracks like ‘Playground Twist’ are really quite disturbing… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJAx5BOWPM8
T is for…
Finding a lot of intriguing stuff in the archive under ‘T’
Tarantula Hawk – s/t. A great re-discovery, though I suspect I probably just didn’t listen to it enough when I first got it – it’s heavy, sludgy instrumental psych-prog from the turn of the century that’s pleasingly visceral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HovbaZAALu8
Two Lone Swordsmen – The Fifth Mission (Return To The Flightpath Estate). Again, I think I picked this up cheap years ago without really giving it a proper listen. Obviously follows on from the Sabres Of Paradise stuff, but it’s a bit more diffuse/diverse. It’s very long (2 CDs worth), and quite a bit of it sounds like two stoned blokes in a studio at 2am entertaining themselves with random loops and noises, but there’s some excellent dark psychedelic techno here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKZACLxQJv8
VA – Torque. Oof, this one I remembered much better, played it lot at the time during my brief techstep/drum & bass phase. Still sounds brilliant in places – the fact the guys making this stuff were working with a (deliberately) restricted sound palette and often just reusing the same breaks/drum patterns gives it a hypnotic consistency (when it could have been just really dull). It still feels like the perfect soundtrack to some grungy but mind-blowing sci-fi movie, like if David Cronenberg had made Blade Runner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLV0OSGIiqU
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