KOOL KEITH – “Rockets on the Battlefield”;”Livin’ Astro”;”I Don’t Play” (from the CD Black Elvis / Lost In Space) Tom was right – Kool Keith is one of the great refusers of pop, the sort of […]
BLACK BOX RECORDER – Brutality (from CD single The Facts of Life, Nude Records) Chris Morris references are, I admit, unhealthily recurrent in my contributions here. But the calm, polite, cut-glass tones of Sarah Nixey intoning such calm, gent[…]
HUNDRED STRONG feat ASPECTS – Paranoia HUNDRED STRONG feat GRANDMASTER GARNER & BEANZ OBE – Prayer HUNDRED STRONG feat OBSCURE DISORDER & A-TRAK – Superior Raps HUNDRED STRONG feat ASPECTS – Transcontinental (all fro[…]
38 years after the fact, and 33 years after Joe Meek’s final self-destruction, those involved with my favourite single of all time, The Tornados’ “Telstar”, seem destined to forever intrude on my life. I read in the current ed[…]
BUTTERFLY CHILD – Drunk on Beauty (MP3) This is the very essence of luxuriant. I vaguely remember Joe Cassidy being hailed (especially by David Hemingway, one of the great lost Melody Maker writers) as one of those epic, expansive lush pop gen[…]
SUPER HUMAN POWERS – Intellectual Extra Terrestrials (MP3) I know I’ve talked at length about their “West Evil Rhymes” (and rightly so, a mutation of Geography and Time even Momus might have dismissed as absurd, incongrous an[…]
YOROKU SAKI – Tech-Scientific (Alpha Version) / Goodtimes (Demo Version) (MP3s) Maybe it was the reference to the predictions in George Orwell’s 1984, and their historical presience, that attracted me first (but then it almost inevitably […]
LAURENZ – Forever Comes (MP3) This is a strange one. From Cologne, referencing Momus, Smog and Gastr del Sol. Deliberately tinny drum machine, slightly cheesy arrangement, vocals trying not to sound mainstream-romantic beneath a sensitive-ind[…]
SUPER HUMAN POWERS – West Evil Rhymes (MP3) This is just about the most brutalist pop extant. The beat hunches and thrusts forward, the squeals (like the Bomb Squad sampling the sound of tyres on ice) lurch around, the emceeing hits you, aggr[…]
LEWIS PARKER – “The Variations” (from the album “Word Lab”) Is Lewis Parker the most interesting hip-hop artist ever brought forward in the UK? He’s certainly the least predictable and the least stereotypical in h[…]