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 […]
Everything That Follows Is Based On Recent, Real-Life Experience That Has Been Proven To Work – James Shepherd-Baron
“Everything that follows is based on recent, real-life experience that has been proven to work” — James Shepherd-Baron First off — the title. Shepherd-Baron was clearly aiming for the hard-bitten no nonsense “Dettol-does-what-it-says-on—the-tin” approach when naming this comprehensive world survival guide, but has ended up producing the clumsiest and most ungainly titled book of the […]
Mark Fisher – Capitalist Realism
The only game in town, and a rigged one at that. In what is swiftly becoming ‘living memory’, capitalism is now the only economic, social and political system deemed possible, the logic of its late incarnation invading every aspect of life, culture, even inner thought. So absolute is its mental grip that when international finance […]
Wyndham Lewis’ Blast: An Explosive Journal
Ben Granger First published in 1914, Wyndham Lewis’ Blast has just been republished by Thames And Hudson. For centuries, when the Great British reading public scanned the covers of their journals, from Blackwoods through to the Edinburgh Review , the only words they saw were in Roman typeface, crowded and tiny. Imagine their thoughts on […]
Jessica Anthony – The Convalescent
Dan Coxon You have to give Jessica Anthony credit: in this current climate of MFA-educated clones it’s unusual to come across a truly unique narrator. We’ve all read plenty of Holden Caulfield rip-offs, or various takes on the Kerouac drifter-philosopher, the William Burroughs educated-junky, or the Paul Bowles traveller-adventurer. There haven’t been too many Hungarian […]
Michael Foot: The Uncollected Michael Foot – Essays Old and New
Ben Granger Mention the name Michael Foot and listen out for the automatic sneer. A rolling of eyes at a “disastrous leader”, accompanied no doubt with devilishly cutting asides about donkey jackets, walking sticks or Worzel Gummidge, delete as appropriate. Gerald Kaufman’s deathless Wildeanism chiding Foot’s 1983 Labour Manifesto as “the longest suicide note in […]
Patrick McGrath – Trauma
Dan Coxon There’s something to be said for the contemporary novelist having a background in psychology. While the mass-market thrillers and romance novels that pack the supermarket shelves are happy to remain plot-driven page-turners, the modern literary novel prides itself on its ability to unravel the thoughts and emotions of its characters rather than relying […]
Jorge Luis Borges – The Book of Imaginary Beings
Ben Granger Borges is that rare writer, one who can truly change your outlook forever. To read Labyrinths or Ficciones is to experience the universe anew, to find a poetry in mathematics, a mysticism in reason. In tales like “Funes the Memorious”, “The Library of Babel” and “The Garden of Forking Paths”, Borges explores the […]
Chuck Palahniuk – Snuff
Dan Coxon Over the last few years Chuck Palahniuk has revelled in the sordid, the grotesque, and the downright dirty like a particularly literate pig in shit, and for many readers his decision to set a novel within the pornography industry must have seemed like a marriage made in Heaven, or at least the more […]
Ben Stevens – From Lee to Li: An A-Z Guide of Martial Arts
Ian Hocking Some books change your life and From Lee to Li: An A-Z Guide of Martial Arts will not be one of them. But it is fun and straightforward. I won’t add that it’s unlikely to trouble the Trade Descriptions people because Lee and Li both begin with L – but Adams to Yuksa […]
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 […]
Joe Dunthorne – Submarine
Ben Granger The “coming-of-age” teenage novel is now a well-weathered archetype, every bit as established in the literary pantheon as the state of the nation diorama, or the star-crossed romantic tragedy. A teenage narrator has the potential to reflect the world in a purer and starker state. At the same time, the self-righteous certainty and […]
Justified Anger: Belinda Webb Interview
“…Tony Blair’s ridiculous lie that we’re all middle-class now – he’s clearly never visited Moss Side. That’s a message I wanted to come over clear…”
Belinda Webb – A Clockwork Apple
Ben Granger As you may guess from the title of this first novel by Belinda Webb, she isn’t shy in acknowledging its chief influence. This iApple/i shares with Burgess’ iOrange/i more than merely its title. Once again we have a teenage gang leader by the name of Alex, indulging in artful thuggery and vicious wordplay […]
Daniel Wallace – Mr. Sebastian And The Negro Magician
…Given his subject matter it’s natural that Daniel Wallace should attempt some authorly tricks, and his multiple points of view allow him to play with the concepts of truth and illusion. By the end you’ll be uncertain whether Mr. Sebastian was the devil, whether he was actually several different people – or even if he existed at all…
On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan
…It’s hard to imagine any debut writer having a story this short published as a stand-alone novel, yet because McEwan is one of the literary world’s big earners the public are expected to pay more than twice as much for his work…
Jim Crace – The Pesthouse
“…While Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance looked at the near future, however, and predicted where we might end up if the current political climate continues, Jim Crace takes us several centuries further into this brave new world. Except it’s not so brave, and not even so new. In fact, it’s positively medieval….”
The Literary and Political Catholicism of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh
“…Whenever there was a chance to have a shot at Catholicism in his writing, George Orwell could always be relied on to take aim and discharge both barrels. With the grim vision of Vatican support for Franco fresh in his mind, he was hardly without justification…”
Saving Abel – Saving Abel
Eric Saeger Saving Abel are part of the messed-up new generation of post-Molly Hatchet southern-rockers, struggling to get porno chicks and find their way in a world where it’s not copacetic for bands to come right out and say they’re mostly in it for porno chicks and pinching out totally awesome guitar solos. There has […]
Air Traffic – Fractured Life
Eric Saeger You know what’s funny these days, you take a band like this, strip off one guitar layer and all the hooky stuff and it’d be Instant Bowery Ballroom Indie-rock with no chance in hell of ever getting mainstream love. We begin with the run-around-the-city-holding-hands makeout-rock of “Come On,” half Libertines and half Rod […]
