Record Review - Elephant9

ELEPHANT9 WITH REINE FISKE

Atlantis

Rune Grammofon CD/2-LP

Atlantis sees Scandinavian trio Elephant9 tackling their fourth album with the aid of Swedish guitarist Reine Fiske. And it’s a beauty – a steaming full-throttle mash-up of rock and jazz that could strip paint.

Imagine Soft Machine or King Crimson at their dizzily inspired free-form best, with a shot of ’70s Miles Davis thrown in for good measure.

Opening track, 'Black Hole', sounds like it’s about to collapse under the weight of its own momentum, its layers of analogue keyboards sounding deliciously fuzzy and distorted over furious drumming - genuinely exciting stuff.

'A Foot In Both' is gently bucolic, spidery guitar skittering over glasslike keyboard shimmers before 'Psychedelic Backfire' kicks up the dust again with an almost Sabbath-like riff of pile-driving heaviness built over a two-note bass hook. Despite the furious technical chops on display, things never get too cerebral or too clever. This is music which aims for the gut, rather than the head.

Neil Hussey

Record Review - The Lemon Clocks

THE LEMON CLOCKS

Now Is The Time

Jam Records CD

The Lemon Clocks wedge themselves firmly in the lineage of illustrious Liverpudlian psych-pop bands. They’re a trio of multi-instrumentalists who sport their ’60s influences proudly, melding them with a ’90s indie aesthetic so seamlessly that 'Life Is Like A Dream', for example, sounds rather like Teenage Fanclub covering The Beatles.

If that kind of thing appeals, then you’ll like this album a lot. 'The Bright Side' and the title track both have a pleasing Byrdsian jangle, and it’s only the odd squelchy synth sound and the polished production values that locate this record in the present.

'Rainbow Bridge' breaks the spell – its trippily repetitive riffs and rhythms and thickly applied smears and smudges of heavily reverbed guitar recalling ’80s/’90s riff-heavy psychonauts Loop. 'Better World Beyond' has the requisite backwards bits and phasing effects, but the overall quality of the material marks them out as more than clueless pasticheurs.

         

Neil Hussey

Record Review - The Luck Of Eden Hall

THE LUCK OF EDEN HALL

Alligators Eat Gumdrops

Self-released CD

What strikes me about this, the fourth LP from The Luck Of Eden Hall, is how English much of it sounds, despite the band’s roots in deepest Michigan.

Admittedly, the title track combines garage band riffing and self-consciously trippy lyrics into its brief lifespan, and Bangalore mixes up heavy ’70s drums and guitars with spidery sitar embellishments, (“Batgirl does Bollywood” is how the band themselves describe it). 'Ten Meters Over The Ground' though, has a catchy, sax-driven Bowie/Mott style chorus, and 'Amoreena Had Enough Yesterday', with its swathes of cosseting Mellotron, evokes nostalgic reveries of a fabled Englishness that possibly never even existed.

The band have a winning way with a melody: 'A Carney’s Delerium' layers guitars and mellotron in a lovely, evocative soundscape; and 'Summertime Girl' is a pleasingly warm and fuzzy mix of acoustic guitars and organ which generates enough warmth to ease the winter chills outside.

Neil Hussey

Record Review - Lord Fowl

LORD FOWL

Moon Queen

Small Stone CD/LP

Connecticut four-piece Lord Fowl are a stoner-rock act with classic rock leanings and a real eye and ear for quality riffs and melodic songwriting. What I didn’t really get from this album, however, was a sense of anything particularly original or groundbreaking.

The band has clearly mastered the formula on tracks like ‘Woman King’, where the riffs, vocals, powerful rhythm section and mood coalesce into something genuinely incredible. All too often however, the band just seem super-competent and self-assured rather than utterly transcendent.

Perhaps I’m being overly critical here. Chiding a stoner-rock band for unoriginality is like complaining your plate of fish and chips isn’t a bowl of snail porridge. While I would unreservedly recommend this album to any fans of stoner-rock, if you only occasionally dip your toes into the genre then you might want to wait for the next bus to come along.

Austin Matthews

Record Review - The Condors

THE CONDORS

3 Item Combo

Vital Gesture CD

Imagine you and your mates are holidaying in LA and stumble across their equivalent of the Dog & Duck, advertising ‘Live Music Tonite’. After a few sharpeners, you hear the familiar crackle of buzzing amps being switched on and mics being tapped.

“Pretty f***ing good”, you all agree as local boys The Condors race through a set of tight, gruff-ish, powerpop originals. A couple of sherbets further down the line you reckon you’ve discovered the new Fountains Of Wayne and snap up a copy of their new album 3 Item Combo (which sits alongside the first two on the tiny merch stall by the bog – “all complete classics”, according to beefy chap running it).

Next morning, you can’t wait to stick it on, which is when your fuzzy head suddenly realises The Condors remind you of that bloke Derek from Southend and his bluesy, new wave outfit, The ’Triffics, back in the ’80s.

There’s no doubt The Condors can kick ass, it’s just that they sound too uncomfortably close to yet another Feelgood-inspired British pub rock outfit – even with those jen-you-wine American accents.

Chris Twomey

RIP Down In The Grooves

It fills us with great sadness to announce that BBC Radio Leeds' fab Down In The Grooves is grinding to a halt due to further BBC cuts. Grrr. The man behind the show and its presenter James Addyman has his say.

I’m sad to be writing this because the radio programme has been part of my life for more than eight years,  Down In The Grooves, the show I do for BBC Radio Leeds is to finish at the end of December, along with dozens of other disparate shows across the BBC local radio network, as part of the DQF savings. DQF (Delivering Quality First) is a typical management confection that was basically cooked up as another phrase for cuts, once ex-Director General Mark Thompson had decided that he didn’t want to stick up for the BBC and froze the licence fee for six years – a decision that has had consequences right across the BBC ever since.

For the uninitiated, Down In The Grooves played a mix of garage-punk, psychedelia, R&B, soul, funk, ska/rocksteady, music library, soundtracks – taken mainly from the years 1955-75 but featuring modern acts echoing those eras and their music. When I started the programme in September 2004, I invited all sorts of DJs, producers, artists to come on the show such as Ady Croasdell (Kent Records), John Schroeder, Gary Walker (Walker Bros), Preston Ritter (Electric Prunes), Andy Votel & Dom Thomas (Finders Keepers) and it was great to hear all their tales. All this helped pass the word around about the show.

I got emails from all round the world saying how glad they were to have found a show that played northern soul next to Hungarian psych next to ’50s rockabilly next to German garage beat. These emails arrived from glamorous and not-so-glamorous locations all over the world including a geologist working in the deserts of Yemen who was blasting my show out to some bewildered goats and their herdsmen!! Now, it’s not uncommon for internet radio shows to have playlists as esoteric as mine but I suppose what people appreciated was that there was a BBC show willing to go beyond the bland playlist. That’s what people told me anyway.

I guess I should have known the writing was on the wall when Mark Lamarr was considered persona non grata at Radio 2. The reasons I was given by my manager was money and apparently 6Music cover the same sort of territory (not the last time I looked) but I guess the same manager knows what she’s doing in keeping two hours of Brass Band music on air and a Big Band Show presented by someone who wasn’t invited to be part of a Radio Leeds Big Band event!!

All I can say is that it saddens me that in the current climate, anything a bit unusual is not going to cut the mustard but hopefully there are outlets for the weird and wonderful sounds of the ’50s/60s/70s out there somewhere. Luckily the show enabled me to DJ in places like Barcelona and Berlin, which were unforgettable nights but I’m just wondering who’s gonna turn the next generation of kids onto the wonders of a Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich B-side!!  

Record Reviews - Surf-Age Nuggets

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Surf-Age Nuggets: Trash & Twang Instrumentals 1959-66

Rock Beat 4-CD Box Set

100-odd selections of beachy twangdom are on offer here. There’s enough drum rolls, coiled guitar runs, and doses of maximum treble to fill up both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. I was delighted to hear so many gems that were new to my ears (the emphasis being on relative unknowns of the genre, thus the “Nuggets” in the title), in addition to old favorites like The Vistas’ ‘Moon Relay’ and The Cherokees’ ‘Uprisin’’.

The 60-page booklet is a treasure that contains images of record covers, gig posters, comic strips, magazine ads, etc. all of a nature in keeping with the sounds on the discs. It’s odd to be listening to a box set of surf music here in November, so for now I’ll suffice with the couple of much-enjoyed spins I’ve given the set, and in the meantime I’ve informed my friends that I’ve got first dibs on the stereo when we meet up for our annual beach vacation next summer.

Brian Greene