Reviewed by Eric Saeger A pioneer of laptop-bedroom DIY, Emil Amos has been water-against-stoning at this project for 2 decades now, when not busy drumming for the experimental bands Om and Grails. Actually the songwriting count for this project is at the 4-digit mark, meaning many, many ideas died so that this could exist, a […]
Jérôme Sabbagh: I Will Follow You (Bee Jazz)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger It’s easy to see – once you suspend all disbelief that improvised jazz can be anything more useful than the noise of 2-year-olds bashing away at Yo Gabba Gabba toys – how this Brooklyn-based French saxman has a few big awards swinging from his pelt. Most of the genre’s output is […]
Danbert Nobacon & The Bad Things: Woebegone (Verbal Burlesque)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger If I recall correctly, I took one look at the the turn-of-the-century flying-machine on the cover of Nobacon’s 2007 album Library Book of the World and labeled the stuff steampunk. He did keyboards for accordion-anarcho-poppers Chumbawamba, which is one big curveball in itself, and his musical (and sometimes real-life) agitprop could, […]
Echo Revolution: Counterfeit Sunshine (Open Arms)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger Another Cali-alt-rock thingamajig that’s done famous things of which you’re blissfully unaware (snippets of their stuff have appeared on Jersey Shore and Real World). The synopsis is that San Diego band Echo Revolution are pretty much a next-gen Smiths, unafraid to throw in xylophone and all the modernity such ‘curveballs’ bring […]
Sarah Sample: Someday, Someday (Groundloop)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger Nice Americana collection from the Utah-by-way-of-California transplant. In the main her voice is a Jewel clone, but this album’s no mawkish mess, particularly when her small battalion of plugged guitarists takes over and threaten to go completely Allman Brothers on the stuff (Staying Behind, I’m Ready). Calling Your Name is a […]
Sameer Gupta: Namaskar (Motema Music)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger It’s not for me to judge how difficult Indian tabla drums are to play, or if any given John Bonham wannabe could blow Sameer Gupta away on the things. The setup is 2 bongo-looking drums, each played with a separate hand. They don’t look too difficult to me, but I thought […]
Boom Boom Satellites: Over and Over (Sony)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger To Westerners, Japan is sugar-rush spazz central, bursting with frenetic android babes like 5678s and all sorts of metal. DJ duo Boom Boom Satellites fall into this pack by myna-birding Prodigy; with the pair’s crashy guitars and cybernetic predelictions they’re to hard post-punk what Pendulum is to metal: an improvement. This […]
Goose: Synrise (K7)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger Being that this Belgian electro-rock quartet’s 2006 debut album Bring It On had plenty-enough comparisons to Depeche Mode, it’s a mystery why they decided to force-feed themselves Speak & Spell every morning on the commute to the sessions for this album. But then again, like everything else from everyone else over […]
Philosophy in Rags: Rigour for a Dying World: Houellebecq and Gnosticism
In the first of three parts, Hugh Graham looks through the prism of Houellebecq’s novels and finds a Gnostic theme for our times. Deserts creep and sea-levels rise. Populations expand and resources are depleted amid poverty, wealth, and intractable war. Under these lowering skies it seems astonishing that we live in a world void of […]
Brian Eno: Small Craft on a Milk Sea (Warp)
Reviewed by Jason Weaver Brian Eno has nothing to prove. For all the complaints against his work with Coldplay, it’s likely that he sees it as viable territory for connecting disparate points on the cultural grid. Much of his work has been about inhabiting different environments and exploring the conditions of what might seem like […]
Andrzej Stasiuk – Tales of Galicia
Jason Weaver Tales of Galicia is set in the south-east corner of Poland a few years after the fall of Communism. A time of upheaval certainly but, as the name of the volume implies, this part of the world is no stranger to social change. A mountainous region, once called Galicia, it rolled down into […]
Alain Mabanckou – Broken Glass
Jason Weaver Broken Glass is a derelict who drinks at a bar called Credit Gone West in the Trois-Cents district of the DR Congo. As a disgraced school teacher and unrepentant drunk, he is an unconventional narrator, the kind we might find in Camus novels. The words you are reading, he explains, are jottings made […]
W.G. Sebald: Looking And Looking Away
Stephen Mitchelmore on the novels of W.G. Sebald Why are W.G. Sebald’s novels so flat? Why – when the books refer to events of utmost horror and disaster, sometimes dwelling on pain and death with a fascination and regularity verging on schadenfreude – are the events themselves always placed at a distance, always prior to […]
