music reviews

Artist: Various Artists
Album: Folk Against Fascism
Label: Folk Against Fascism

I got asked to join this Facebook group a few weeks back (it’s called, wait for it: ‘It’s funny how our flag offends you but our benefits don’t!’) I idly checked to see how many people were members (yeah ok, make with the Pete Townsend comments) and nearly threw up – more than 500,000. I checked back just now and it’s up around 630,000. I can’t decide if I’m missing some great sledgehammer of irony here. Are there really that many people willing to have their name and photograph associated with a group with such a sub-tabloid name, and with such awful Daily Express approach to such a complex subject? It struck me after seeing this and being asked to review the new Folk Against Fascism album that organisations such as these, whilst having honourable intentions in going after the snub-nosed stupidity of the BNP, – who have of course attempted to co-opt folk music into their confederation of ineptitude – have a far greater enemy in their midst. Namely those who remain politically demotivated – and would probably never vote for the BNP – but who are nevertheless caught in the broad pulse of that low-energy recourse to dull received opinion peddled by the mainstream press and media. Fascism might be a daft overstatement for it, but it is a dull, passive bigotry that seems to be becoming more pervasive all the time. I feel it like a chronic societal ache.

So what can an organisation like Folk Against Fascism do about such a situation? Not a whole lot is my guess. Despite all their success, it’s hard to work against passivity. Folk Against Fascism was originally set up as an awareness thing, to combat the co-opting of folk music by the BNP. Nick Griffin had been on record claiming various folk singers and groups as among his favourite artists. BNP activists were sent out to folk festivals, seeing them as hotbeds for nationalism and places to inculcate nationalist fervour against the ‘growing power of Islam’. The BNP in their nuanceless, monolithic manner, sought to exploit the sense of heritage and belonging implicit in the ancient chords of British folk music for bigoted means – culture and history as a form of insulation and protection. And there is a double bind at the centre of the continuing revival of folk music and folk traditions, or at least the potential for a double bind. When its meaning and importance are hyper-inflated – instead of considered as merely part of an ongoing history – then you witness the kind of thoughtless, belligerent frothing you see in all nationalist movements. FAF would argue that one celebrates it merely for what it is – a living example of our connection to a shared past. It needn’t be whipped or shaped into anything more.

So what of the music? They’ve assembled quite a collection of artists, old and new: Billy Bragg, James Yorkston, Damian Dempsey, The Unthanks, Christy Moore, Eliza Carthy, June Tabor, Juldeh Camara; there’s even a closing track from Shirley and Dolly Collins, a reworking of a traditional arrangement by The Copper Family. Naturally with any collection of this size and scope, it’s a bit hit and miss (which might be as much to do with my ignorance of some of the artists) and despite the nature of the project there isn’t really an overarching theme amongst the material – it’s more a collection of songs for a cause. But it is a very strong collection – and with material as good as that of the The Unthanks’ ‘Nobody Knew She Was There’, a keening soft pillow of a track, the mighty Lau with their spacious take on folk, the stentorian Damian Dempsey raging out ‘Colony’ and the traditionalists such as Blowzabella and the aforementioned Collins sisters this shouldn’t struggle to sell.

You have to acknowledge that this is a genuinely worthy cause, and a collective with this much publicity can only work for the good; and we know that given the backing and the manpower that its easy to puncture the imbecility of the BNP – witness what happened in Barking and Stoke at the general election. Hopefully it’ll sell by the bucketload. What of that insidious and latent bigotry though? That pall of ignorance that seems to have become something of the norm in this country – all that smug Clarkson Littlejohn halfwittedness that seeps into things, where everything seems to be the product of middle-aged men who TELL IT LIKE IT IS, people who remain free of nuance and misunderstand pretty much everything. Whether it’s intentional or otherwise is pretty much a moot point, if you act the part for long enough and you become that part. The question seems to be: how do you battle such an ominous creeping vapidity and apathy?

You can buy the double CD for a tenner from the FAF site, and listen to a bunch of tracks. Go do it.

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 20:08 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Natural Snow Buildings
Album: The Centauri Agent
Label: Vulpiano Records

The simple truth is that every home should own at least one Natural Snow Buildings album, at least one. The first thing I heard by them was The Dance of The Moon and the Sun a monstrous folly of a double album which came out in 2006 on a tiny French label (and reviewed on a former incarnation of this site). I remember thinking at the time that they I'd never come across a band so perfectly named - they sounded like spectral ice palaces. Since then they've released countless albums, CDRs and cassettes and I've kind of lost touch a little, only picking up stuff here and there. Then this year they made their new album (another double) available as a free download - The Centauri Agent. It's another dazzling release full of stunning witchy folk music and drones which is, if anything, slightly warmer sounding than stuff they've released in the past. In places it's almost bucolic. It also features more vocals than I remember, with Mehdi Ameziane's delicate whisper rising to what seems near sky-scraping countertenor at times.

My suspicion is that the duo have hacked into the gossammer-thin sound wall that backgrounds everything and merely act as penitent conduits. Here's hoping they keep their secret to themselves.

You can download The Centauri Agent at the Vulpiano site. You can also download a lovely live session from one member of Natural Snow Buildings, TwinSisterMoon, at the Victory Rose site.

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 22:07 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Nina Nastasia
Album: Outlaster
Label: FatCat

You could use Nina Nastasia’s back catalogue as some sort of modern day benchmark for singer/songwriters – a simple ‘this is how good you need to be, and for this long’. She’s a model for how to create something with gravity from simple means, and for making it all sound so damn effortless. She comes across, like all great narrators in song, as a kind of conduit for big ideas – both in a streetlife soap opera sense, and in a more universal existential sense. And you feel she’s driven to do all this – she keeps on coming on. Despite all that, she’s on record as saying that she was struggling in the build up to Outlaster, that she felt that maybe she’d come to some kind of logical conclusion with her style. Well, not a bit of it frankly – Outlaster is all of Nina and yet something more. It’s got all the usual dramatic interplay of the urban gothic she’s so adept in, but it has a voluptuous sheen, is fuller somehow.

You have to think that it must have something to do with the band Nastasia has behind her, which is stellar to say the least. There’s the unmistakable Albini production (all that space and gravity she has – it’s got the Albini stamp, has had since the beginning, he grants space with his productions style, space for her voice and the instruments to inhabit) but there’s a new face in Paul Bryan, an instrumentalist and arranger who has worked extensively with Grant Lee Phillips and Aimee Mann in the past. He’s added a lushness to the record, coming on at times like Nick Drake’s master arranger, Robert Kirby. Then there’s the band, comprising of long time collaborators Kennan Gudjonsson, and Jay Bellerose, plus the mighty Jeff Parker from Tortoise. They find that perfect pitch, somewhere between dramatic intervention and barely existing at all.

Lyrically, the record seems to very much fit with a sense of crisis, crisis of confidence, of relationships – and the ways in which we fight to stay afloat, alive. She’s never been one to avoid the larger issues, personal or otherwise (‘All Your Life’ from Dogs is about as powerful an anti-heroin song as I can think of) but this seems to be about an expression of some universal angst. It also seems to be a direct thematic response to her last record, 2006’s On Leaving. On ‘A Kind of Courage’ a bleak pastoral (the Nick Drake reference fits again here) she sings of how ‘no one is holding our hand/we are always alone’ (‘no it’s not fair’) and – referencing Dylan Thomas – how ‘that light coming in the door’, ‘don’t rage against it/best to ignore it’ but along with her usual sense of acceptance there is a gentle defiance – we shall endure. On ‘What’s Out There’ there is a similar sense of some larger force pressing at the walls, and as if inspired, she produces one of her strongest vocal performance to date. The track is windswept and dramatic, and she sings ‘oh window, window/I have to smash you out/And let in something mean’. It’s elemental stuff, filled with some pagan power – like some Flannery O’Connor miniature.

But that intensity of vision isn’t all-encompassing, or at least is merely a facet of her total commitment in which she isn’t afraid to pursue an idea to a conclusion, however disturbing. The pay-off is that her proclamations of strength and resolve are equally joyous and uplifting. So when she sings on ‘Wakes’ that she’s ‘got too much left in me/to never wonder if there could be something else’ that sense of endurance (outlasting) is immense. And be sure, despite the tough subject matter, the record as a whole doesn’t necessarily have a bleak feel. Even on the Blackened Air-referencing apocalyptic tango (are all tangos apocalyptic?) of ‘This Familiar Way’ there’s something to cling on to (‘and with each tear/another stitch’). And for the record, ‘You Can Take Your Time’ might be a Carpenter’s track…

So, all-comers, despite crises of confidence, and crises of possibility, Nina Nastasia has added another slab to her bulwark – she will endure, she will outlast; come listen to this before you try anything new.

Go track down everything she's done of course, but for now you can hear the whole of Outlaster on Spotify.

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 19:55 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: The Lowland Hundred
Album: Under Cambrian Sky
Label: Victory Garden

All symptoms are a kind of geography; they take a person in certain directions, to certain places and not to others
Adam Phillips

The Lowland Hundred are the duo of Tim Noble and Paul Newland, currently based in Aberystwyth. They’re named after an area of west Wales that was destroyed by floodwaters in the mythic past. Under Cambrian Sky is their first album, and is a response to the lie of the land (can it be that I’ve never thought about that phrase before?) – both material and immaterial. What the album seems to be performing is a kind of mythic dredging, re –populating the lost landscape and exploring the spectre of place, and the ways in which this absence works a melancholy into the surrounding existing landscape, namely the seaside towns of the area around Cardigan Bay. It makes for a spooked and oddly beautiful album, out of time, full of Romantic longing and placeless nostalgia.

The land destroyed by floodwater seems to be something of an ur-myth, one that is popular across all cultures and periods of history (how’s this for a list?). To add to that exhaustive list, I’ve personally heard it spoken in hushed tones about the land between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly and more recently there was the deliberate flooding of the Derbyshire villages of Derwent and Ashopton, to make way for the Ladybower reservoir, a situation mirrored in the Australian film, Jindabyne. There’s not really enough space here to worry at why such a collection of myths might have such a pull on our collective imaginations (aside from the idea of the displacement of populations and beliefs, is it a simple myth of cleansing? or given that so many of these myths feature the sounds of spectral church bells, something more figurative like the deluge of our unconscious minds working against the bonds of the super-ego in the guise of the strictures of the church?) suffice to say that the myth has a depth of resonance that speaks both to singularities and beyond site specificities.

There are several variations of the legend that surrounds the destruction of the lowland hundred or the Cantre’r Gwaelod in what is now Cardigan Bay in western Wales. The land was purportedly the most fertile and the most productive in the whole country, but due to its proximity to the sea, was under constant threat of flooding. One Seithennin, friend of the King and renowned heavy drinker, was in charge of the dyke that controlled the amount of water running into and out of the area and by all accounts he was in dereliction of duty on the fateful night, either because of booze intake or due to attending to the needs of some fair maiden. Whatever the reason, the dyke remained open and the sea came crashing through the dyke onto the land, drowning hundreds and devastating some 14 villages. An extraordinary passage by the Rev. G Edwards in an account of the events called The Lowland Hundred, written in the 1840s, tells of how ‘the flood gates were left open and the sea burst in upon the inhabitants many of whom were buried beneath its waves whilst revelling at their banquet and leading in the dance and their songs of joy were turned into a midnight cry’. Legend has it that if you’re in the area on a quiet day you can still hear the cries…

Sonically then, The Lowland Hundred deal very much in such a mode of quiescence – as if the album might be both a haunting and a kind of studied listening. The 7 tracks are constructed from very little – a series of simple piano figures and Tim Noble’s glassy Wyatt-esque voice tend to dominate, backgrounding occasional swells of feedback and the distant hum of wildlife and weather patterns. And thematically, aside from the over-arching subject of the deluge, the tracks tend towards the painterly, with ‘Camera Obscura’ particularly, detailing visual vignettes like ‘children paddling in the Irish Sea’ and ‘starlings roosting underneath the eaves’. ‘The Bruised Hill’ is lyric-less but follows a similarly painterly pattern using field recordings and gentle swells of guitar to great effect. When the moment of deluge arrives then, near the very heart of the album, in the track ‘Picot’ it comes with the requisite amount of shock – the inrush of water coming with a pounding of atonal bass piano notes. The word picot is a diminutive derived from the French verb piquer, meaning ‘to prick’, and like Roland Barthes’ punctum – a figurative wound or piercing caused by a work of art of piece of music – this is a central vortex that drags everything else towards it, a happening that grants the rest of the album meaning.

The odd track out is also the album’s longest. ‘The Air Loom’ is a 12-minute Musique concrète response to the story of James Tilly Matthews, an 18th century political provocateur who became convinced that the government were controlling his mind – and others around him – via the use of a mind-influencing machine, a huge loom that pumped ‘air’ into the ether directed towards specific people and was capable of all manner of tortuous influences, mental and physical: Kiteing, Bomb bursting, Lobster cracking, Thigh Talking, Fluid Locking and Lengthening the brain. Unsurprisingly, though his descriptions were meticulous and almost awe-inspiring in their invention, Matthews was sectioned and holed up in Bedlam, then a ramshackle place of gothic horror in Moorgate (Hogarth’s recreations of Bedlam for his Rakes Progess series for all their satiric intent contain a genuine sense of madness and horror). Here the work of the loom (and Matthews’ reputed madness) is mirrored with all manner of field recordings, whispered voices and manipulated machinery, to create a quietly unsettling piece of work.

That I’ve now crapped on for the best part of a 1000 words about this record is testament to the fact that a) I can’t help but run at the mouth with this stuff, stuff that tracks our melancholy obsession with place and displacement, our obsession with ghosts – historical, ahistorical – our obsession with a shared cultural heritage that’s both specific and universal, and b) that there’s so much to say. But I’ll shut up now and just ask that you track this down – it’s too intriguing and odd and too damn good to miss.

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 19:36 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Clogs
Album: The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton
Label: Asthmatic Kitty

Ischia is an island in the Bay of Naples in the Tyrrhenian Sea. It’s been inhabited by all sorts – Greeks, Syrausansa, Romans, Turks – mostly drawn by the impregnable geography, plus the hot springs, and the throb of the island’s tropical greenery. William Walton came to Ischia in 1946, pulled by the same magic, and bought the Villa La Mortella in the west of island and immediately set about planting a labyrinthine garden. When he died in 1983 his wife Susana took charge of the by now dense and burgeoning vegetation and opened it to the public. Padma Newsome, composer, violinist and, for now, Clogs’ de facto auteur, spent some time in the garden in 2005 – as part of a residence funded by the Fromm Foundation – and was enchanted/spooked enough by what he saw to put together The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton. It’s the first Clogs record for five years and whether there is some dark channelling afoot, or just a natural progression, it’s something of a departure for them, and something of triumph.

The most obvious change on the record is the presence of so much vocal interplay – from Shara Worden’s strange, piercing falsetto to Mat Berninger’s gravel tones. They’ve had whispered passages before now (‘Light me a lantern/ In your lighthouse, my keeper’), but nothing so obviously song-like. Indeed ‘Last Song’ is pretty much as conventional as they’ve ever sounded. It’s a gorgeous track though, given that extra power by Berninger’s Lowell-referencing gravity. The other major surprise is how baroque and, yes, pretty it sounds – there’s the typical Rechian minimalist rhythms, the meshed undertow of strings, various guitars and Rachel Elliot’s stately bassoon, but the surface flits and darts, with flourishes dragging the ear left and right. And even though the record explicitly references a meditation on the natural world, you still find yourself reaching for warm and flighty adjectives.

That the album has taken some five years to appear is due to the bands set-up: an array of talents built around the core four of Padma Newsome, Bryce Dessner, Thomas Kozumplik and Rachel Elliot, with the latter three resident in the States and Newsome in a remote corner of Victoria in Australia. They record where, and when they can; and when their collaborators can manage it. Which should make for something of a mess – but not a bit of it. Given that it was composed as a suite, and given the obvious and disgusting amount of talent on display, it’s a very complete record. It’s tempting to focus on the Berninger track just because it feels like a breakout track, but in truth the highlights are the single Newsome-sung track ‘Red Seas’ and those sung by the astonishing Worden: ‘On the Edge’ ‘Adages of Cleansing’ and ‘The Owl of Love’. The Padme song is a signature Clogs track with that tell-tale lilt provided by Kozumplik’s rolling rhythms, the latter two are chamber pieces flung heavenwards by Worden’s voice. ‘The Owl of Love’ would be ridiculous if it weren’t so breathtaking – ‘I am the owl/the owl of love/by night I suck it in/I suck it in/by the day/start with morn/I breathe it out again’. One wonders what happened in the garden…

As an evocation of a particular place it’s hard to be too critical as I’ve never been to the fabled garden, but The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton is a brilliantly realised and ambitious cycle of songs. One of the great things about this is the fact Clogs albums by rights probably get far more exposure than they would otherwise do – thanks to the presence of Dessner (and Berninger by extension). Christ knows what the unsuspecting might make of these at times bloodless exercises in minimalism and captured emotion, not to mention the vaulting cries of Marina Warner. You’d hope they’d be as transfixed as the rest of us.

Download/Listen: Clogs - Red Seas

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 23:14 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Nicholas Szczepanik
Album: Dear Dad
Label: Goat Eater Arts

Given that a) I reviewed Nicholas Szczepanik's The Chiasmus only recently, ii) that the subject matter inspires a level of exegesis that I probably shouldn't go anywhere near, or presume I have the right to explore and 3) in the spirit of David Toop I have decided for the moment not to take up too much space using silly adjectives, I will keep this one short.

Jacques Lacan ended his famous 'Seminar on The Purloined Letter' with the opaque aphorism that 'every letter reaches its destination' - which to me means something along the lines of that the meaning coded in our attempts at communication is often different than we suppose, or different than we intend. Dear Dad has led to me think quite about the notion of music as a kind of letter, or at least a distinct mode of communication; and clumsy attempts at psychoanalysis aside, isn't music always a kind of open letter? A un/coded message that does always reach its destination somewhere, with someone. And this led me to wonder at Szczepanik's use of the drone as a kind of open letter, which, personal or otherwise, seeks to convey something specific, something monumental? Certainly the ether-piercing quality of the opening track - the 37 minute 'When I'm No Longer Afraid of You - would hint at that. It's such a colossal piece of work, of rolling, broiling drones, and so eager to be free of itself, to go beyond the simple confines of the music/listener relationship, that you have to wonder at the proposed destination. Is it a singular message, or something broader? In the sleevenotes to The Sinking of the Titanic Gavin Bryars makes the following comments about Marconi: 'towards the end of his life, Marconi became convinced that sounds, once generated never die, they simply become fainter and fainter until we can no longer perceive them. Marconi’s hope was to develop sufficiently sensitive equipment, extraordinarily powerful and sensitive filters, I suppose, to pick and hear these past, faint sounds. Ultimately he hoped to be able to hear Christ delivering the Sermon On The Mount." Dear Dad is elemental enough, and vast enough to provoke these kinds of thoughts: that the intended listener - personal, universal, whatever - simply wont be able to miss it; that even if it becomes something akin to background radiation, it will be there, faintly audible; and it may be that Szczepanik has managed the feat of turning the personal into a message for all times, and all destinations.

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 14:28 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Broken Social Scene
Album: Forgiveness Rock Record
Label: City Slang

There is something inherently absurd in the rhetoric around rock and indie music (like that needed saying) that there is even talk of an album being a ‘statement’ or a band being ‘important’; but there’s no denying that there seems to be a certain aura around Broken Social Scene, something that steps slightly outside of this usual flappy discourse. I think it’s partly borne out of them, at least historically, undercutting all that scene bollocks by messing with the iconography, by capturing themselves in process – using improv and jazz modes, including take fuck-ups, having a rolling membership, being lyrically obtuse. However deliberate and calculated all that may be, they do seem to have become something apart. And people, the scene, whatever, do seem to expect a certain amount. All of which, aside from internal strife, probably accounts for the 5-year hiatus, and the near-diabolical sense of anticipation around the release of Forgiveness Rock Record. No pressure then.

You can sense all that bubbling behind the album title: Forgiveness Rock Record. It’s both pompous and playfully self-referential – musing on all that daft overblown rock rhetoric whilst acknowledging that this has probably been as hard an album to convene and record as any in the band’s history. It’s also a pointer to the content of what’s inside, as the band have made their most straightforwardly obvious rock record to date – it’s big and earnest and structurally at least, generally pretty gleeful. Lyrically, aside from the titles it’s not imposed itself on me yet, but generally speaking, it’s stuffed, lyrically. For a band that are known for lyrical patterns that tended towards either the spartan or the repetitious, Forgiveness… is positively garrulous. The other big change for me is getting John McEntire – Tortoise wizard and general production Ubermensch – on board. He’s got them sounding sleek and clinical, quite a change from that trademark cavernous warmth that has characterized the band’s sound to date.

The McEntire influence is particularly evident early on. ‘Chase Scene’ is so John McEntire – remove the vocals and the track could have been on Tortoise’s last album Beacons of Ancestorship. ‘Texico Bitches’ has a similar sheen to it, sounding at times like it might have been produced by Trevor Horn – add in some Dan Deacon keyboard squalls and you’ve got an atypical BSS track that somehow still sounds completely natural. ‘Forced To Love’ takes this template and legs it adding more of that Horn influence. If it had some fairlight synths it could be Field Music or The Week That Was. So far, so full, then. But as the album progresses, those tell tale moments of light and air steal in, revealing that the band haven’t lost that ability to pace and to pacify. This is particularly evident on tracks like ‘All to All’ (the first track to feature new vocalist Lisa Lobsinger, who has to fill Leslie Feist’s sizeable shoes) and ‘Ungrateful Little Father’, which builds from a typical rhythm and synth pattern coupled with a bitter Drew invective (‘ungrateful little motherfuck, built you a breakthrough device’) to a gorgeous ceiling-scraping drone. That said, my reaction to the record after living with it for a few weeks now, is that there aren’t enough of these of areas of shade. It feels too on and as such, it feels like too much of the album zips away unnoticed. The shade may well reveal itself over time.

It’s in a trio of songs towards the end of the record though, that BSS seem to completely hit their stride, and it’s during these three songs – the broad clattering tumult of ‘Meet Me in the Basement’, the Emily Haines sung wooze of ‘Sentimental X’s’ and ‘Sweetest Kill’ – that the realization comes that Forgiveness Rock Record is actually something of a disappointment, and another triumphant Broken Social Scene mess. And I use the word mess in the most complimentary sense here: it’s what made You Forgot it in People so refreshing, and so other, and a record, to these ears anyway that is still revealing itself. Forgiveness Rock Record isn’t YFIIP – it’s too late in the day for that in many respects, too much has happened to the band, never mind the way we consume and listen, for an album like to arrive fully formed – but it is evidence that even with the framework of what is a fairly standard rock record, they’re still buzzing with enough ideas and enough zeal, and simple doing more than most to be worth sticking with.

Download/Listen: Broken Social Scene - Sentimental X's

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 19:25 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Forest Swords
Album: Dagger Paths
Label: Olde English Spelling Bee

It's going to be impossible to write about Dagger Paths without mentioning hypnagogy, so I may as well get it in early. Dagger Paths, the first vinyl release from this elusive unit from coastal Merseyside, is an enervated, fogged remembrance of music and place. What it seems to do is, like Burial, use half remembered beats and tropes, and mould them into a sonic landscape, or in this case a dubscape. The hypnagogic effect comes from precisely that strange mid-land between sleep and waking, the combination of the slowly attuning ears picking out environmental sounds and the distant echo of recorded music. It’s no surprise then, that the Aaliyah/Timbaland track on display here is almost unrecognisable – the bassline a thuggish recreation of the original’s supple warmth, buried beneath a guitar line cribbed from Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s ‘Dead Flag Blues’ and a cavernous outer treated guitar. It comes on, at times, something like a dubbier Hood.

‘Holylake Mist’ is another signature track (remixed from a version that first appeared on the Miarches tape that came out last year). It’s built from very little: two entwined spidery guitar lines, a near non-existent buried vocal and a sparse tribal drum pattern; yet it manages to evoke the still of a near-dawn landscape. It’s got a devotional aspect to it as well, almost invocational – a hymn to formative place and memory.

For some reason, I’ve started to conflate this with the recent Demdike Stare record – Forest of Evil, which uses a different sound palette to explore similar ideas and the pull of collective memory and the English landscape. Both have a haunted and haunting quality. And both are well worth getting hold of. The other thing they have in common is both are a pain in the arse to get on vinyl! The former is available from Olde English Spelling Bee, the latter is on download from Boomkat.

You can also download Forest Sword's Fjree Feather EP free at Last.fm, and find an ace Demdike Stare mix over the Modern Love site.

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 17:20 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)