Record Review - Blues Control

BLUES CONTROL
Valley Tangents

Drag City LP/CD/cassette

Since their third album, 2009’s Local Flavor, New Yorkers Russ Waterhouse and Lea Cho have upped-sticks and re-located in leafy east Pennsylvania, where they wrote and recorded this latest batch of avant-garde instrumentals. Has the move affected Blues Control’s muse? 

Hard to tell because they’ve stayed true to their original blueprint of fusing established music genres with avant-garde textures, although this time you can detect the occasional humourous nod towards their gentler way of life, such as an electronic insect buzzing from speaker to speaker. 

Blues Control's weakness is also their strength – no album is ever stylistically consistent (try coming up with an umbrella phrase for music that touches on modern jazz, psychedelia, industrial and Harold Budd-esque piano noodlings). I'd hate to be the person asked to market this kind of clever eclecticism. Although, having said that, the Tate Modern should buy a few hundred copies and flog them in their shops… the music would perfectly complement their schizophrenic visuals.

Chris Twomey

Record Review – Mellow Bravo

MELLOW BRAVO

S/T

Mad Oak CD

This is Mellow Bravo’s self-titled second album of passionate hard-rock, choc-ful of raw bluesy numbers and hook-laden songwriting. Perhaps the greatest asset of the Boston band is Jess Collins on keyboards whose occasional vocal interjections prove interesting diversity from lead singer Keith Pierce’s impassioned, though sometimes wearing, central performance.

By far the best track here is ‘Ridin’ where Jess Collins’ vocal is to the fore and the band hit the right blend of sledgehammer riffing and soaring melodies. I found myself wishing all the songs were in that same vein rather than some of the country-blues slop that weighs down the album such as ‘When I’m In Pain’ or ‘Senorita’. However, the band certainly don’t disgrace themselves throughout and, though I’m probably not the exact target market for this release, I’m sure many out there will love their tough, ragged, take on classic rock.

In truth this is one of those albums that’s probably destined to be damned with faint praise – though filled with numerous hooks and performed well enough, I couldn’t quite dig the band’s overall sound and was left feeling slightly unfulfilled by the end. Occasionally it just sounds like just a super-competent bar band rather than real contenders.

Austin Matthews

Record Review – Sylvester Anfang II

SYLVESTER ANFANG II

Untitiled

Latitudes CD/LP

If you saw a picture of Flemish freaks Sylvester Anfang II from their 2006 album Satanische Vrede dressed in white cowls and bearing primitive weapons as they crowd round a goat, you would suspect them to be a schlocky black metal group – though nothing could quite be further from the truth. The band’s music is slightly uncategorisable – they play what has been described as "funeral folk" – swathed in eastern guitar lines, trance-like structures, minimal percussion and sub-sonic bass riffs. There’s not many directly comparable bands out there but let’s try: early Popol Vuh, Comus, Sam Gopal or early Can feature some comparable elements, though they don’t sound particularly similar to any of those.

This release is on the Southern Records Latitudes imprint, which has seen several esoteric and experimental artists record something spontaneous in Southern Studios itself. Also notable are the beautifully packaged die-cut cardboard sleeves the CDs and LPs come ensconced within. Sylvester Anfang II have recorded five untitled instrumental pieces, which were culled from three hours of jamming and edited into half an hour of primo material on which the band create a slow-building dark psychic trip into unsettling folk emisis.

Under the black lights the band mesh their mental-hive mind into a summonation of the dark spirits that lay across the isthmus between waking reality and deep narcotic-laced hypnotic inner-space. Close your eyelids and focus out of the everyday and into the sounds from beyond – dark enveloping music, creeping evil, mystery crackling from the speakers, going back deep into the pre-Christian conjuration rituals performed out on the steppes, into the wild. Maybe that earlier album cover wasn’t so far away from the truth as first thought.

Austin Matthews

Record Review - Anthony Greentree

ANTHONY GREENTREE

Rebirth

Download

Hey, you, metal head. I’m talking to you. You’ll get tired of all this clanging and clattering one day. You’ll seek peace. You’ll crave the quiet. You’ll want to hear something like ‘Rebirth’. A beautiful, sparsely populated album of moods and melodies that will soothe your poor overtaxed brain, after all that bawling and shouting.

If it’s guitars you’re after, there are plenty of them here, nylon strung and gently plucked, with flute and recorder and some subtle percussion to augment the beautifully measured arpeggios. Give your poor frazzled eardrums a rest and let them gently vibrate to these songs of lost love, the hidden forces of nature and the incongruity of being a product of an age you’re just not meant for, but are nevertheless living in.

It’s working, isn’t it? You’re beginning to appreciate the pure note, the natural sound of the plucked string, and the stirring voice expressing fine, honest emotions. You’re leaving the dolorous, discordant, idiot grandchild of the blues to the next generation of undiscriminating dullards and beginning to move with the universal ebb and flow.  The quiet, pastoral world of Anthony Greentree is as very pleasant place to visit, and you may even want to stay a while.

Scenester

Loveland on tour

Lana Loveland and her band are on a short tour starting this week, taking in their native Germany as well as Italy. They will be playing tracks from and promoting their debut album Order To Love (Groovie/Bellaphon).


Dates
07.6.12 - Kiel - Schazbude (Germany)
08.6.12 - Berlin - White Trash
09.6.12 - Frankfurt - Ponyhof
13.6.12 - Piacenza - Spazio 4 (Italy)
14.6.12 - Torino - United Club
15.6.12 - Mantova - Rocca'NRoll Festival
16.6.12 - Treviso - Altro Quando Club
17.11.12 - Berlin - Bassy Club (Germany)

Loveland website

Record Review - The Dreaming Spires

THE DREAMING SPIRES

Brothers In Brooklyn

Clubhouse CD

"Listening to The Byrds and Teenage Fanclub" sing The Dreaming Spires' Joe and Robin Bennett against a backdrop of ringing 12-strings, muted lap steel and clattering drums. "Singing 'Sin City' in sweet, ragged harmony". If opener 'Singing Sin City' doesn't set out these guys' manifesto then last year’s debut single 'Everything All The Time' should clarify matters with its nods to Radio City-era Big Star and Wilco’s medicated pop thrills . Still not convinced? Then try 'Not Every Song From The Sixties Is A Classic', a breathlessly ecstatic paean to leaving home that quotes from ‘California Dreamin’’ before proclaiming, “for every hit, there must be some shit”. You're not wrong there, brother.

This isn’t to say that Brothers In Brooklyn, the Oxford (that’s Oxford, Oxon, not Oxford, NJ) band’s first long-player, is all warm, knowing nods to rock’s golden age played out by plaid-shirted fanboys with California fixations – ‘Strength Of Strings’ swims in the kind of ambient Americana patented by Mercury Rev and ‘Woman That You Are’ is pure Ben Folds balladry – but if you’re partial to that lineage of American guitar music that touches on The Byrds, Neil Young, Tom Petty and The Jayhawks, this may well be your album of the year.

Andy Morten

 

Record Review – Greenleaf

GREENLEAF  
Nest of Vipers  
Small Stone 

The riff! Isn’t that what rock is all about at the end of the day? You can have Jagger or Plant poncing round like big girlies centre stage but deep down it's Richards or Page who mare really moving the audience.  Hitting them deep in the gut with those primal few notes stitched together with the skill of a Bayeux artisan into the Corinthian structures of the songs we know and love. Your arms flail and the riptide eats into your fundament as you respond to the hyper-flagellation of the guitar god in front of you, controlling your flux an flow with a simple flick of his dissolute digits.

Greenleaf know this. They are slaves to the riff also – the fabled creation of which is toiled over in bedrooms and studios in every corner of the globe. To create that simple elixir of notes that they do on ‘Dream Catcher’ and ‘The Timeline’s History’ is the holy grail of musician-hood. Better still is the
Ozzy-era Sabbath trick they pull on the former track with the vocal mirroring the riff – a simple but effective way to crush all listeners’ brainbox.

My favourite release from Small Stone for a while. And by the way what else would you call a stoner supergroup other than Greenleaf? Serendipitous noise. Hail the
riff!

Austin Matthews