Reviews
Recorded live on a boat in 2008, this CD documents the first performance of Comus in over 30 years. Evidently whatever pact they made to make First Utterance had a retirement clause in it as the band sounds remarkably potent here. Had this been an archive recording from their creative zenith, I would have been impressed but bearing in mind this is the first time they had taken a stage together in over 30 years, this is phenomenal.
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These two albums mark the beginning of Analog Africa's new "Limited Dance Edition" series, veering away from compilations into reissues of long-deleted full albums by artists that played an integral role in shaping founder Samy Ben Redjeb's aesthetic. The endeavor is off to an excellent start, adding some strong rarities to the available oeuvre of one of the milieu's best-known bands and unearthing an absolutely killer effort from the amazing but seldom heard Rob.
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Akron's one-man debut nods to influences such as Delia Derbyshire and Joe Meek but cannot begin to approach the originality or spirit of experiment of those legends. Yet the best of these pieces are odd exotic bleeping echoes which did transport me to other worlds, just perhaps not the ones intended.
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The large majority of Brooklyn based Zs' output consists of their work as a sextet—a varied body of work focused around rhythmic intensity and textures based on duality. To reexamine the group's early recordings is to make a sonic map of the changing attitudes of New York new music and how the talent in the area learned to hybridize their surroundings and their musical skills. In that sense, Zs are the New York avant-garde personified; their role as a bridge between loft bands and chamber musicians, lo-fi and "high art" represents a lot of the essential artistic ideologies in 21st century New York.
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After a terrific debut EP in 2010, Bell Gardens finally return with a full album of mostly new music. As usual, the musical arrangements are lush and saturated with beauty as Brian McBride and Kenneth James Gibson try to recreate the moods and sounds of the golden era of pop studio recordings without using the typical computer-based short cuts and technological workarounds that have become de rigour for modern studio work. The end result is a triumph of song writing, musicianship and integrity, highlighting just how good humble songs can be without the need for following trends or to be striving to be the next big thing.
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