• Dress Forms ‘We Don’t Dig Guitars’

    Post-punk’s electro cousin is rearing its head once again, the fizzy synthpunk pioneered by bands like The Screamers and Nervous Gender channelled in a new crop of mutants from the glam infused POW! to Aussie misfits U-Bahn and Set-Top Box. Joining the weirdo renaissance is art-punk trio Dress Forms. One of many projects featuring Portland…

  • Holy Serpent ‘Endless’

    Black Sabbath. Electric Wizard. Acid King. How is it that stoner rock can flirt so perilously close to prog-rock fantasy both musically and in visual identity, yet avoid its silly pitfalls. Two naked children of the earth gazing out across a scorched desert toward a bellowing volcano, holding each other as if awaiting some monstrous…

  • Robedoor ‘Negative Legacy’

    Deep within the gruelling industrial working conditions of 19th century London, Dracula stalked the factories and workhouses in his thirst for blood like capital sucking the life from the proletariat, according to a Marxist interpretation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. For all the sweeping social change and technological advancement brought about by the industrial revolution, the…

  • Lightning Bolt ‘Sonic Citadel’

    It shouldn’t work. White hot, Raw Power punk urgency shouldn’t be able to be sustained across 25 years and seven albums, yet Providence noise duo Lightning Bolt‘s latest album Sonic Citadel is another explosion of a record which delivers their signature thrash beat down but also shows new dimensions for the band behind the chaos.…

  • Rue Oberkampf ‘Christophe-Philippe’

    Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf was an 18th-century industrialist, born in Germany but eventually becoming a naturalised citizen of France. His pioneering production of printed cotton won him the mayoralty of the Parisian commune Jouy-en-Josas, and his legacy is celebrated in the many commemorative place names within the capital’s 11th arrondissement, including the street Rue Oberkampf. ‘Franco-German industrialists’…

  • Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds ‘Ghosteen’

    ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.’ C. S. Lewis The terrible wrench of grief grips us all at some point in our lives, and…

An eye on the uncharted, offbeat, and bawdy in new music since 2018!