Mountain*7 - for the person with nothing better to do

I was re-reading a copy of the Wire from earlier this year, and came across this ace grumpy review by David Toop of the recent Fenn O'Berg record In Stereo. Inspiring stuff, huh?

Aside from that, Toop has a new book on the way - Sinister Resonance - which sounds brilliant:

As if reading a map of hitherto unexplored territory, Sinister Resonance deciphers sounds and silences buried within the ghostly horrors of Arthur Machen, Shirley Jackson, Charles Dickens, M.R. James and Edgar Allen Poe, Dutch genre painting from Rembrandt to Vermeer, artists as diverse as Francis Bacon and Juan Munoz, and the writing of many modernist authors including Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce.

Posted by poacher in music articles at 09:19 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Pontiak
Album: Maker
Label: Thrill Jockey

If it was possible to boil down stoner rock down to some turbid essence you might end up with something roughly equivalent to a stew of Sabbath, Melvins and Kyuss. Which if you think about it is one hell of Godhead, and one which doesn't allow for a whole lot of manoeuvring. That Virginia 3 piece Pontiak have elbowed their way in and don't sound over-awed or limp is quite something.

Pontiak's signature could be the title song from their last record, Sun on Sun - an eight-minute deconstruction of 'War Pigs' based around the most rudimentary bass and organ line. The track builds to a harmony-laden southern rock epic that's simultaneously filthy and howling, light and airy - a sound which owes a good deal to their writing and recording method, namely: a big barn, jam around a central basic idea and record the first take. Maker is both cleaner and more ambitious than Sun on Sun, yet somehow even more deconstructed, and in places a fine mess.

The opening trio of tracks - 'Laywayed', 'Blood Pride' and 'Wax Worship' - are a miniature suite and they contain everything that's great and slightly maddening about the record as a whole: fat grooves, flame-thrower guitars and a great wall of Brant Bjork like drums. Yet (and this is going to sound like cursing them for everything that makes them great), 'Wax Worship' for all its fire is oddly directionless (see also the Headless Conference fragment). And I can't decide if that's a function of their style, lazy listening on my part or something deeper.

The title track here dominates proceedings too. 'Maker' is a vast thing, over 13 minutes long, again built around a grungy, filthy riff that recalls 'Molten Universe' from Blues for the Red Sun. The track collapses in on itself around the nine minute mark and the blues skeleton that gives structure to their sound is revealed. It's a telling moment. 'Aestival' is probably the best thing here though, a brooding lumbering thing of embers and menace - and its power comes from the sense of restraint the band place it under: it doesn't break out but it doesn't need too. Instead, they sound like they could sink through the surface of the earth and keep going...

So despite some churlish reservations about some of the more hit and miss moments on Maker it is, ultimately, a fine slab of dirty, stoned rock grooves, the likes of which I haven't heard for many a long year.

Download: Pontiak - Honey

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 17:30 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Nadja
Album: When I See The Sun It Always Shines On TV
Label: The End

Over at TLOBF...

Looking at the Nadja discography can induce a sense of vertigo in even the most committed of sludge and drone fans - there is a chasm of stuff out there (that’s without Aidan Baker’s solo material as well). So when an album of esoterically chosen covers turns up, it’s hard not to think, ah well, why not - something else will be along soon, right?

Which is to say I didn’t really hold out much hope for this. The very notion of a band of Nadja’s magma-heavy pedigree covering A-Ha and The Cure - pop songs, ostensibly, however obtuse - seemed a dud move, an empty gesture. But (isn’t there always a but?) there more I’ve lived with it, the more it has made sense; and the song choices more obvious with each successive listen.

So what of the choices? Well, now I look at them there is an obvious pattern, a kind of tectonic underpinning of the whole Nadja sound: MBV, Swans, Codeine (I’m amazed there’s no Godflesh, incidentally - but maybe that would have been an homage to far)… Even The Cure track is obvious on closer listening, as the drum sound is all Nadja in its sparseness, its relentlessness. The Elliot Smith cover is a bit of an anomaly, and yet the mood of the original is relevant here, and the dark romance at the centre of it, similarly with the cover of Slayer’s ‘Dead Skin Mask’ - it’s about an exploration of mood and tone. The A-Ha cover is the real odd one, and in honesty is the track that works least well in the context of the album. Indeed at times it sounds like Jesu on a stoner-rock trip, which isn’t a sentence I ever imagined writing…

What I’m reminded of most here is the Belong EP from last year, Colorloss Record - another covers collection, but one that entirely bent the originals to fit into a particular aesthetic framework. In Belong’s case, they totally scoured out and gutted the originals, leaving a brittle shell or a husk; Nadja have done the opposite so that the originals here are flattened out and inflated, filled with dense swells of sound. A good example is the Swans track ‘No Cure For The Lonely’ - the original’s creaking intimacy has been totally fleshed out, given a billowing grandeur, Gira’s baritone replaced with Baker’s skittering surface whispers. It’s very affecting.

And that pretty much sums up the album - it’s deep, dense and affecting, but in a different way to past Nadja albums. So if Thaumogenesis was a seminal seething epic of mountainous riffs and drones, and last years Desire in Uneasiness a lurching thing of bowel-quaking heaviness then When I See The Sun is comparatively bright in comparison, which is which I guess is partly the point, and an interesting departure for Baker and Leah Buckareff. It works.

Download: Nadja - No Cure For The Lonely

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 09:47 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The Cairngorm Massif

Cracking edition of the Guardian Review yesterday:

A beautiful piece on Nan Shepherd - the keeper of the Cairngorms - by the, at present, untouchable Robert Macfarlane. Shame the cheapest copy of the book I can find is for £30... (Edit: make that £60 - the power of a good review...)

Iain Sinclair moves a step closer to ubiquity with this great piece on Robert Camberton, an obscure writer about the denizens of London...

And, finally a companion piece by Robert Hughes to the huge Bacon show that is imminent at the Tate Modern. See also Peter Conrad's revealing biographical melange on Bacon from a couple of weeks back.

Posted by poacher in books articles at 13:53 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)