Stick Men – Tentacles EP Review
Tentacles lives up to its name with a riff that wraps around you without ever really resolving. This keeps you invested until the final soundscape coda gives you the blessed relief the preceding has denied you.
Ringtone lock steps you into a new sensation with bold power chords and an insistent note pattern not unlike eighties-era Crim. Pat Mastelotto’s percussive output is stellar and grounds the groove.
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Company Of Ghosts starts with a purposive funk groove ...
Anchor and Burden – Kosmonautik Pilgrimage Album Review
After the privacy of a decent bout of silence was over, an injection of art was needed. Something that forms a challenge and benefit scenario, something like Kosmonautik Pilgrimage by those provocateurs Anchor and Burden. This is music that has a logic all its own and dares one to find a place for it in their analogue. It presents an application that band members Markus Reuter, Alexander Paul Dowerk, Bernhard Wöstheinrich and Asaf Sirkis are more than happy to provide.
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Brunod, Li Calzi, Savoldelli – Nostalgia Progressiva Music Review
To this listeners delight, Messers Giorgio Li Calzi, Boris Savoldelli and Maurizio Brunod have both impeccable taste in song choices and musical chops. The don’t just cover the tunes but reinvent them. This is done through clever arrangements and instrumentation. An early example of this is the reinvention of the early eighties era King Crimson track Matte Kudasai that replaces the interlocked and floating electric guitars of the original with acoustic guitar and a haunting trumpet. It ...
Machine Mass – Plays Hendrix Album Review
Seen through a musician's eyes, Jimi also represents something that is increasingly rare today, a pure source of inspiration. Not as a single source either, not just a guitarist or performer but the creator of a blueprint. The basis for a level of exploration. Stepping into this mind set is Machine Mass. This trio of musicians (Michel Delville, Tony Bianco and Antoine Guenet) have the chops of course but also the vision to do something in line with the true spirit of the man. Not reinterp...
Dewa Budjana – Zentuary Album Review
It also highlights how effective a band leader Budjana is as he coaxes some amazing performances from his fellow contributors. Takes the guitar work from guest ax man Guthrie Govan. Govan steps way outside his pyrotechnical Aristocrats wrangling and delivers a rubbery tone poem so drenched in selective emotions it’s remarkable. Elsewhere Danny Markovich breathes life into his woodwind with some unison playing that lock steps on the road to nirvana.
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The backing ...
Erik Sondhy – Recorded At Abbey Road Studios Vol: 1 – Album Review
Following the opening number is a great reductionist version of Lennon and McCartney’s I Will. It pays homage and respect to both the people and place of the album’s title. It also lulls one in the most seductive way, saying so much with so few notes.
Opening up a world of possibilities with just two hands, two feet and an open mind, Sondhy touches on so many points of reverent beauty and more than a few stops on the piano’s historical past. Humor is also injected at the most ...
Marbin – Aggressive Hippies Album Review
Aggressive Hippies (great album title by the way) rocks like a room full of well, aggressive hippies hopped up on famer’s finest gramercy green and does it ever pin the lobes back. Six string situationist Dani Rabin does his best to herd all the audio elephants in the room together and comes up trumpets.
Danny Markovitch fills the saxtoon with lashings of drool inducing freakuencies that stitch together the aural tapestry while Greg Essig (skins) and John W. Lauter (low notes) do their ...
Sirkis/Bialas International Quartet – Come To Me Album Review
When a lyric is sung in a language foreign to the ear, it becomes more of a melodic statement than one of message and as such is easier to just let wash over you. Bialas is sublime in her native tongue and the sparse and thoughtful supportive piano notes of Harrison are divine in their simplicity and accessibility. There is no barrier here.
The rhythm section of Sirkis and Bettison are also a marvel of unison thought process and give the music just the right nudge when needed. The songs ...
Steven Wilson – Hand. Cannot. Erase. Music Review
In the way that watching an effective non-fiction film makes you want to follow the viewing with a liberal amount of internet investigation, Wilson’s ode to the life and times of Joyce Carol Vincent has the same effect. It’s an emotional album about a story that underlines the fact that even with all the social media and Internet connections in today’s society, people fall between the cracks, intentional or otherwise.
Vincent was by all accounts, a vibrant and popular young lady ...
Mark Wingfield – Proof Of Light Album Review
His superb phrasing is just the start. It’s his choices in tone and the way his notes spill into unusual areas that make the biggest impression. They just coat your ear holes with gooey goodness.
Mark’s liquid tone is matched by his introduction of notes in a fashion that is most luxurious; they seep out of your speakers in a surprisingly organic way, especially considering how processed they actually are. This is technology used to paint a most vivid picture of something naturalis...
