ALBUM REVIEW – HILARY WOODS: NIGHT CRIU

Following two densely atmospheric instrumental albums, her latest record sees Hilary Woods making a welcome return to a song-based structure and giving primacy to her voice. ‘Night CRIÚ’ takes as its stated influences Czech and early Italian cinema, processions and parades, early music, indigenous language, the joy in dance, the immediacy of sound and the […]
Four years after the release of The Turning Wheel (2021), Tia Cabral dares to fiddle with the work of God in Portrait of My Heart (2025, Sacred Bones Records); creating a unique record in her catalogue that takes distance with their predecessors without losing identity. Cabral is cautious in Portrait of my Heart: the tracks […]

ALBUM REVIEW – SPELLLING: PORTRAIT OF MY HEART

ALBUM REVIEW – PHARMAKON: MAGGOT MASS

Maggot Mass is the first new piece of music by Pharmakon to burrow its way out into the world in five years. 2019’s Devour was 36 minutes of unrelenting power electronics and noise, but on this new record she produces songs that have been consumed and reconstituted by caustic noise, their structure only partly eaten […]
Belarus’ biggest post-punk trio, Molchat Doma, are back striking again with their new early ‘80’s Joy Division/ The Cure inspired Atmospheric fourth album, Beyala Polosa, or ‘White Stripe’. This is the band’s first studio album since the release of 2020’s fantastically moody and gloomy Monument. The trio’s best project coming into this album, in my […]

ALBUM REVIEW – MOLCHAT DOMA: BELAYA POLOSA

ALBUM REVIEW – XMAL DEUTSCHLAND: EARLY SINGLES (1981-1982_

Jarring synths, war march drums and German vocals about god knows what, it’s not hard to see why I like this release. Of course, different from a studio album in nature, there’s no overriding theme or story here. It’s just a collection of early singles which, to be fair, sound like they belong together. That’s […]
SPELLLING’s ‘The Turning Wheel’ was one of 2021’s happiest musical surprises. A record that was astonishing in its scope, a cosmic soul, alt-pop delight brimming with melodrama and personnel (31 collaborating musicians). It represented a huge leap from Chrystia Cabral’s (who performs under the orthographically challenged name of SPELLLING) previous two smaller scale albums, 2017’s […]

ALBUM REVIEW: SPELLLING: SPELLLING & THE MYSTERY SCHOOL

ALBUM: THE MEN – DRIFT

Formed in 2008, The Men are one of those New York bands who just keep up their hard working ethic with every release, gradually gaining more admirers each time around, yet without necessarily having any massive singles. That’s not to say they don’t have amazingly catchy songs in their back catalogue as they’ve got them […]
Nika Roza Danilova, better known as Zola Jesus, returned to her native woods of Wisconsin, built a house mere steps away from her semi-dilapidated childhood tree-fort and watched it slowly give itself back to the earth while raising her sixth offering in ‘Okovi’. Over the course of what she describes as “a profound meditation on […]

ALBUM REVIEW: ZOLA JESUS – OKOVI

FÖLLAKZOID BACK IN MANCHESTER THIS MAY 2017 AT SOUP KITCHEN

Grey Lantern and The Beauty Witch present FÖLLAKZOID (Sacred Bones Records) Soup Kitchen, Manchester Thursday May 18th 2017 Doors 7:30pm Tickets £12 Adv. (EXCL FEES) Föllakzoid Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
– NIGHT & DAY CAFE, MANCHESTER – The smothering pill of harpist Mary Lattimore’s semi-improvised, semi-digital dialogue dissolves in the pool of Manchester’s Night & Day Café – forming clouds of glittering movement and swallowing, memory-landscape. As Lattimore’s moon-music pushes and pulls, red velvet swims up behind the audience – leading a band of cowboy-coloured […]

LIVE: MARISSA NADLER – 08/12/2016