psychedelia
Kieron Tyler
Despite the fact that this month marks the 50th anniversary of the release of The Beatles’ first single, the focus on the Fabs right now is as much on their 1967 psychedelic folly Magical Mystery Tour. The arrival of Tame Impala’s second album seems appropriate as it’s a modern psychedelia which knows all about the detachment brought by mind expansion – the distant vocals on opening cut “Be Above it” echo John Lennon’s on “Strawberry Fields Forever”.Not that Tame Impala are specifically Beatles-influenced. For their first album, 2010’s fabulous Innerspeaker, they were pretty much a one-man Read more ...
theartsdesk
R.E.M.: Document 25th Anniversary EditionKieron TylerAlthough the band themselves have not lasted out the 25 years since the release of their fifth album Document, R.E.M. haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. The memory will live, fed by reissues. Document built on the more straightforward approach of its predecessor, Lifes Rich Pageant, and was issued in the wake of their breakthrough hit “The One I Love”. A re-promoted “It’s the End of the World as we Know it (and I Feel Fine)” gave them another hit in early 1988. Both singles were included on the album. At this point R.E.M. were Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Shields leaves standing everything Grizzly Bear have done previously. Four albums in, the Brooklyn quartet move forward with their most focused, most cohesive album yet. The folk influence remains, as do traces of their love of The Beach Boys, but Shields is – mostly – so confident it could be a debut album. It’s also the first time all the songwriting has been credited to the entire band.It opens with “Sleeping Ute”, a swirling psychedelic vortex evoking longing and endings: “those countless empty days made me dizzy when I woke… I know no other way than straight on out the door”. It’s a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nine albums and almost 10 years in, Animal Collective show no signs of smoothing the edges from their herky-jerk, ADHD psyche-pop. Vocals carry a melody, but everything else in the mix counters that – pinging sounds, Afro-inspired percussion, bloops, stabs of synth. Beyond Animal Collective, only a bear with a sore head could make psychedelia this twitchy.Obviously, Animal Collective are doing something right and I’ve tried and tried to get my head around their output. Seeing them live was confusing. I just wished they would stick to the song they had started and take it to its conclusion, Read more ...
theartsdesk
Welcome to another show, in which Joe guides us around some of the weirder, smokier corners of the broad church of hip hop, and discussion returns to how far genre can stretch and where originality can reside in a multi-channel, everything-available-at-once world. We also take a listen to more and less authentic sounds of South America courtesy of a Brit-in-Colombia, a Colombian Brit, and a legend of British underground sounds turning Colombian sounds into house music. There's some neo-psychedelia and neo-folk thrown into the mix for good measure.The Colombian Brit is one José Hernando Read more ...
theartsdesk
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Nocturama, Abattoir Blues, The Lyre of Orpheus, DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!!Howard MaleThere’s something just not right about having to reassess a bunch of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds albums in August, just as the sun is finally making a concerted effort to do its job. Cave is generally either icily cold or autumnally melancholic with the only heat being issued from the fiery hell awaiting some of his vividly conjured protagonists.The first three of these rather swiftly re-released albums - Nocturama, Abattoir Blues, and The Lyre of Orpheus (2003, 2004, 2004 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The sacred word 'om' is spoken in different ways according to its context. Elongated, it can be stretched over multiple syllables. As a musical unit, OM work with building blocks that are similarly minimal, yet drawn out for maximum effect. And like the origins of their name, their heady, psychedelic music is heavily indebted to cultures which lie to the east.California’s OM were originally vocalist/bassist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius. Both used to be in drone/metal outfit Sleep. After a late-2007 five-hour live set in Jerusalem, Hakius left and was replaced with Emil Aros. Although Read more ...
theartsdesk
Various Artists: Sound System - The Story of Jamaican MusicThomas H Green This is lovely, a box-set celebration of Jamaican music, marking 50 years of the country’s independence. In a brooks-no-argument fashion, it reminds the forgetful that the Caribbean island punches so, so far above its geographical weight that gobs remain fully smacked over 30 years after the death of the man who gave reggae a global profile in the first place, Bob Marley (who is, incidentally, absent). Aside from the music, though, Sound System’s eight CDs arrive in a chunky 12 x 12in box that contains a coffee table Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Naturally it couldn't be anything as straightforward as a mere album. Rather, Smashing Pumpkins supremo Billy Corgan would have it that Oceania is "an album within an album", and that its 13 songs form a subset of the ongoing Teargarden by Kaleidyscope project, part of which appeared in digital download format in 2009. But prune away all the baggage and Oceania stands up as a very plausible specimen of Pumpkinness. It also marks the arrival of a brand new line-up, namely drummer Mike Byrne, guitarist Jeff Schroeder and the band's latest female bassist/vocalist Nicole Florentino, but as ever Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The end had long been nigh for The Cult, when it first came in 1995. It wasn’t just the booze and the arrival of grunge. It was as much that smart-arse Brit Pop was never going to have much truck with a man who called himself Wolf Child and wrote lyrics like, “Cool operator with a rattlesnake kiss”. More fool them. But yet, for all the brilliance of Love, Electric and Sonic Temple there was no denying things went seriously downhill after the fourth album. Still, fans have long believed in one last Memphis hip shake from the old peace dogs. And finally, on their second comeback, we now have Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For a Brit navigating Denmark’s annual showcase of home-grown music, it’s impossible to eradicate thoughts of the Danish TV seen in the UK recently. Obviously, detecting Borgen-style intrigue while wandering around is unfeasible. But something else might be more obvious. However bright the sun, the wind is cold and warmish clothing is essential. Yet no one sports a Sarah Lund jumper. It’s a reminder that TV drama isn’t a guidebook. SPOT’s cutting-edge crowd has no idea about foreign notions of what might constitute Danish. Over the head-spinning three days of the festival, the 121 separate Read more ...
theartsdesk
Small Faces: The Decca Album (Deluxe Edition), From The Beginning (Deluxe Edition), The Immediate Album (Deluxe Edition), Ogden's Nut Gone Flake (Deluxe Edition)Kieron Tylertheartsdesk’s reissues round-up is usually dedicated to three unrelated CDs, but these spiffy Deluxe Editions of the first four Small Faces’s albums derail that for a week. This quartet – preceding the posthumous Autumn Stone – are testament to a band developing at lightning speed during the headlong rush towards their inevitable fragmentation. One of Britain’s greatest, they created accessible, zeitgeist-infused hit Read more ...