On The Spotlight Kid, Captain Beefheart took over full production duties. Rather than returning to the artistic aggro of Trout Mask/Decals days, Spotlight takes things lower and looser, with a lot of typical Beefheart fun crawling around in weird, strange ways. Consider the ominous opening cut “I’m Gonna Booglarize You Baby” – it isn’t just the title and Beefheart’s breathy growl, but Rockette Morton’s purring bass, Zoot Horn Rollo’s snarling guitar, Ed Marimba’s brisk fade on the cymbals again and again, and more. The overall atmosphere is definitely relaxed and fun, maybe one step up from a jam. Marimba’s vibes and other percussion work – including, of course, the marimba itself – stand out quite a bit here as a result, perhaps, brought out from behind the drums…
Category: art rock
…collects material related to the group’s short-lived American Composers Series project, including remastered and expanded editions of the albums ‘George & James’ and ‘Stars & Hank Forever!’, with additional contemporary studio and live material, and thirteen previously unreleased tracks, including a suite of Sun Ra covers, interpretations of songs by Buddy Holly and Lou Christie, and a never-before-heard Residents original, “Burning with Desire”.
Produced with The Cryptic Corporation, and digging deep into the band’s archive, this set dives into the classic mid-1980s ‘American Composers Series’, featuring material originally recorded by James Brown, George Gershwin, Hank Williams, John Philip Sousa and…
Australian genre-benders and punk manipulators Tropical Fuck Storm have never been the band to pigeonhole, and it would be a fool’s errand to try. Even in its rawest form, their refreshing power ballads warp the mind and melt the face while maintaining a welcoming humbleness that makes their off-kilter rock music so accessible. Born out of the ashes of The Drones, TFS emerged in 2017 and has continually found nuanced ways to display their dense walls of sound. With three studio albums, a live LP, a string of EPs, including a collaborative project with fellow Australian rockers King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, and a cult-like fanbase to back it all up, TFS’s artsy rock has laid the groundwork for even more artistic freedom. Which begs the question, what does a band…
Fit for Consequences: Original Recordings, 1984–1987 is the first ever archival release from Repetition Repetition, the “two-man electric minimalist band” consisting of Ruben Garcia and Steve Caton hailing from Los Angeles in the mid 1980’s. Repetition Repetition’s unique blend of cosmic art-rock minimalism / maximalism was self-released across a series of cassettes produced in micro editions, and while garnering the attention and participation of luminaries such as Harold Budd, remained under the radar during the band’s existence. Fit for Consequences: Original Recordings, 1984–1987 collects select material from across the duo’s catalog.
It was over a plate of Mexican breakfast food when Ruben Garcia and Steve Caton first told…
Since its beginnings, Cheer-Accident has been one of the primary American exponents of jarring and difficult rock music. But what musicians create and what they love can be two very different things, and as it turns out, many of the members of the band have had a great fondness for some of the music often labeled as Easy Listening.
…essay from the band’s linchpin Thymme Jones explains that it had been the band’s ambition for some twenty-five years to make a Burt Bacharach-styled ‘easy listening’ record. Jones traced his own fondness for the music back to his parents’ Herb Alpert records, revealing what got the composer, singer and multi-instrumentalist Jones to become a trumpet player himself.
Vacate isn’t terribly long: thirty-five minutes of…
Six years is a long time between records, but These New Puritans – Essex-born brothers Jack and George Barnett – have always worked at their own pace, with a steely-eyed disregard for trends.
Their previous album, Inside the Rose, also resulted from a six-year gestation process. The band exists outside the current musical climate to a large degree, showing unwavering focus on the bigger artistic picture.
With Crooked Wing, their fifth and perhaps most audacious album to date, they return not with a bang, but with something stranger, subtler, and more unsettling: a deeply textured soundworld that shudders under the weight of machinery, memory, and melancholy.
Like its title suggests, Crooked Wing is…
Following a pandemic-era Zoom call in which several traditional British folk musicians attempted to play together but fell out of sync, Lost Crowns main man Richard Larcombe was supposedly inspired to pick up instruments he’d never played before – fiddle, harp, tin whistle, concertina and English border bagpipe. The resulting recording stakes a serious claim to being the most exciting, most advanced music of its kind. The caveat being that there are few other artists who have even attempted to sound like this – and some listeners might well consider the entire enterprise a kind of monstrous folly to begin with.
The eight songs contained within this album are not entirely without precedent. One might consider Lost Crowns to be akin to a wilder…
…Cheaper Than Cheep was recorded on June 21, 1974 at a rehearsal studio on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood, where Zappa was joined by a Mothers of Invention line-up including Chester Thompson (drums), George Duke (keyboards, vocals), Jeff Simmons (guitar, vocals), Napoleon Murphy Brock (tenor sax, flute, vocals), Ruth Underwood (percussion), and Tom Fowler (bass). Zappa enlisted a film crew with multiple cameras to capture the intimate performance, while Wally Heider’s mobile truck outside handled the audio with Zappa associate Kerry McNabb engineering. The title is derived from Zappa’s crack at the beginning of the show that it was “cheaper than cheap” – a nod to the fact that he self-funded the concert on a tight budget. Ever the taskmaster,…