Thirty-plus years later, the last two albums by the original Pixies lineup, Bossanova and Trompe le Monde, occupy a strange place in the band’s canon, more highly regarded than their later releases but rarely seen as the equal of their earlier work. These new remasters are available on CD and in a limited-edition vinyl with a bonus 7” of previously unreleased songs and offer an ideal opportunity to reevaluate the albums on their own merits; short version, they stand up pretty well.
Back in 1990, it seemed like the Pixies were on the verge of a commercial breakthrough, but that never really happened. Instead, Bossanova offered a softer, glossier and more conventional take on the Pixies sound at just the point when bass player Kim Deal’s other band the Breeders had…
Category: alternative rock
Some Velvet Sidewalk was first active between 1987 and 1997 as a band in Olympia, Washington, that worked with K Records. Because of this, they were sometimes wrongly associated with the twee sounds of some of the K roster, when their albums were in fact louder, more unruly, and more experimental, while still being connected to the openhearted excitement and embrace of possibility that was emblematic of so many Olympia bands of that era. Critters Encore is the first new album from Some Velvet Sidewalk in 29 years, and it conveys the same energetic and oddly angled take on rock & roll as when the band last left off. Created by founding member Al Larsen on guitar and vocals, longstanding drummer Don Blair, and a rotating cast of different bass players,…
Barely a month after Brooklyn noise-rockers Parts & Labor made their triumphant return with Set of All Sets, their first album in 15 years, Dan Friel‘s other band, power trio Upper Wilds, continued their planetary series with Mercury. For a group whose music has always been inspired by space and the cosmos since the beginning, this is easily their most human work to date, with lyrics focusing on death and mortality. Skin cancer began to develop on Friel’s face as the group started working on the album, and though the cancer’s removal was easy and painless, the mere presence of something potentially life-threatening had a major impact on him and put a lot of things in perspective, from issues like climate change and capitalism to cemeteries and the afterlife.
When J Mascis set up his home studio in preparation for Dinosaur Jr’s sixth album since their 2005 reunion, he decided to use a ’70s Mesa Boogie MK 1 amp for the first time since their 1985 debut Dinosaur. Independently but simultaneously, Lou Barlow was making his own nod to the past, incorporating on one song the distorted sound of a shortwave radio that he’d taped during the band’s first European tour and originally used on 1987’s You’re Living All Over Me. These two decisions say a lot about Dinosaur Jr in 2026, as Barlow and Mascis concurrently but separately reference their past, in a way so subtle and classy that nobody except them would even know they’re doing it. It’s a way of creating a bond to your history without disorientating the listener with…
Gathered here are the cardigan-clad teens’s near-complete recordings. Channeling spoken word, loud-quiet dynamics, the K aesthetic, and questionably-tuned guitars into an emo cacophony all their own, this hand-screened edition includes the 1995 four-song 7” and five-song demo tape, two previously unreleased songs from their Tim Green-produced session, and a pair of unhinged live cuts, all housed in a glorious hand screened chipboard sleeve, with squeal-along lyric insert. It perfectly captures their jangly, emotionally open sound that would later become known as “tweemo.” Shaped by Calvin Johnson’s orbit and the influence of bands like Lync, Evergreen, and Nuzzle, tweemo was exactly what the name implied. As Kalin put it: “Vulnerability is part of the style, I guess.”
Many bands have written songs about surviving, whether that’s dissecting the circumstances of life events or analysing pain, but very few make survival sound so exhilarating. On their debut album, Hoping As a Coping Mechanism, Bristol trio MOULD manage to tap into and bottle the nervous energy of being human in the world today, then they shake it until it fizzes over the edges. “Misanthrope” immediately launches the listener into a paradox of simultaneously combustible and life-affirming noise.
Building on the ferocious promise of their previous EPs the band allows themselves more time and space to broaden their sonic vocabulary here. Lead singles “Float” and “Falling Posture” hinted at this evolution and within the context…
Discover is the breakthrough third album by Gene Loves Jezebel. Originally released in 1986, Discover captures Gene Loves Jezebel at a watershed moment, propelling the band to an international audience. This 40th Anniversary expanded edition has been remastered at Abbey Road and expanded across a double LP with updated artwork. The second LP contains Glad To Be Alive, a live recording from a 1986 Nottingham show, pressed to vinyl here for the first time since it’s original release.
Recorded live at Nottingham’s Rock City on March 17, 1986, Glad To Be Alive was originally issued as a limited edition 8-song bonus album with initial UK vinyl and cassette copies of Gene Loves Jezebel’s 1986 album, Discover.
At first glance the sleeve’s photo shows an overhead shot of a manhole cover, with a pair of lace-up boots next to it. Closer inspection shows the pattern on the sewer grate could come from a Vasarely painting: a grid of raised metal circles of carefully ordered sizes form a globe-like image in its centre, seeming to pulsate or spin. This manhole cover was photographed by EarthBall in Geneva. Maybe they felt the primeval force that its image suggested was coming up to meet them at the gig. Do EarthBall make music that mirrors Vasarely’s idea of the “plastic alphabet” where geometrics make a visual language that “communicates, across cultures”, a language that can be assembled in any form, anywhere?
Their new album, Actual Earth Music Vol. 3 & 4,…
The volumes of music referenced in the title of Gnod’s latest dispatch are slated to total three, all of them drawn from just shy of a week in the studio. In many ways, this Salford-originated experimental group are different – in personnel, setup, lifestyle – from their beginnings, two decades ago this year, but by no means comprehensively so, and this sort of nose-to-tail approach to serving up their recording sessions is reminiscent of when there’d be a new Gnod release practically every other month.
Moreover, on the evidence of Chronicles of Gnowt Vol.1 there’s no reason to think they’re offering us offcuts. With vocals featuring only sporadically, it lacks the polemical feel of some of their releases, but insularity can be very fruitful…
Though vaguely considered along the lines of noise, space rock, dream pop and psychedelic, The Telescopes have consistently expanded boundaries, colouring outside the lines with possibility. This house has many rooms, embraced across genres, influential to many, all embracing, in an orbit of its own. Static Charge is The Telescopes’ 19th studio album since the group’s inception in 1988 – and their 7th release on Tapete Records.
After a three-month tour of the UK and Europe, the all embracing sounds of The Telescopes return with a lean blitz of seditionary hits. Take a jolt of Static Charge and step beyond the realm of natural vision. Stone age beats, outsider sounds, low end disturbance unite in resistance to the new weirdness of existence.
…’Complete B-Sides: 1988-97′ has been remastered from the original analogue tapes and includes an additional six live tracks. The first two – ‘Planet of Sound’ and ‘Tame’ were originally released on the 1991 ‘Alec Empire’ single and were recorded at the band’s 26 July 1991 Brixton Academy gig. The remaining four bonus live tracks – ‘Debaser’, ‘The Holiday Song’. ‘Cactus’ and ‘Nimrod’s Son’ – were first released on the 1989 promo Pixies Live and were recorded on 10 August 1989 at Cabaret Metro, Chicago.
…Originally released on CD in 2001, while the band were almost a decade into a hiatus, Complete B-Sides contained 19 B-sides from the band’s classic 4AD era (1988-1991) and featured beloved Pixies tracks including “Wave of…
After their fluke hit “Pepper”, off 1996’s Electric Larryland, Butthole Surfers label, Capitol Records, wanted a follow-up. The band submitted After the Astronaut, but at the eleventh hour (with promotional copies already out), the label killed the album. Then, in 2001, on a new label, a revamped version titled Weird Revolution appeared. It went nowhere, and that was pretty much the end of the Butthole Surfers. Now the original record, shelved years ago, arrives.
While fans have had lo-fi copies for decades, this new release clearly displays what the Surfers were going for in 1998. Gone are the cataclysmic punk freakouts of their early years, and in their place are remedial drum loops and pedestrian synth-laden ambient space outs.
Our good-faith assumption that the slow placidity of part one of this ultimately 5-hour epic was a means of introduction turns out to have been wisely made. Year of the Monkey, the second part of Fucked Up‘s quintuple-album-length trilogy also comprising its second and third hours, takes the increased eventfulness of “Rivers and Lakes,” the closing track of Year of the Goat, and builds from there as the base. “Looking for Heaven and Not Finding It,” opens with the striking of a temple bowl, a common preface to Buddhist prayer, as all of the tracks of this cycle have thus far. The following half-hour is spent in the land of light charted by Yes, with major-key joy and brimming golden dewdrops sprinkled everywhere. This is fitting: the story at this point…
Listening to Magazine feels like speedrunning a tour of the circles of hell. The band doesn’t even try to make these songs sum up to anything coherent: each song hits, fades, and the next introduces itself, just to fade again in record time. On each, synthesist Jack Tobias puts down ominous chords and motifs at the worst moments; guitarist-that-sounds-like-a-synthesist Saguiv Rosenstock plays what could very well be the transposed sheet music of a dying dog’s final whimpers; vocalist Zack Borzone moans against the beat in broken Revelations-inspired word association poetry; and drummer Sam Pickard works like the devil to hold the whole operation together. Right when you get accustomed to one song’s palate, it pauses, waits a few seconds,…
In the grand tradition of left-of-center rock bands, Neptune started as an art project. In the 1990s, Boston sculptor Jason Sanford began fashioning homemade guitars and basses out of scrap metal and repurposed detritus, and the band quickly followed (check out their first ever show in 1994). Over the ensuing years, Sanford (who also plays in E with Thalia Zedek) bolted Neptune into a tight and ferocious noise rock unit that brandished very heavy instruments adorned with blades, spikes, and jagged edges. When George Miller made Mad Max: Fury Road, he dropped the ball by not showcasing Neptune riding the Doof Wagon. (Sure, Coma-Doof Warrior was impressive but Neptune as the harbingers of the apocalypse would have killed.) Because of the construction of…
Non-sensical, un-user friendly, at times half finished. Camper Van Beethoven’s second album II & III saw the folk-punk of the band’s debut LP morphing into an even wider array of stylistic influences and (un)ironic contradictions, all rolled up into a coherently incoherent collection of some of the band’s most defining songs.
Originally released in 1986, the follow up to Telephone Free Landslide Victory did much to develop an already iconoclastic Camper Van Beethoven idiom. II & III ranges from alt-country ballads (“Sad Lovers’ Waltz”) to call-backs to the European folk instrumentals of their earlier work (“No Krugerrands For David”, “4 Year Plan”). Also featured is the band’s bluegrass-Americana take on Sonic Youth’s “I Love Her All the Time”…