The Latest 5 Albums Passing My Way

One More Grain : Isle Of Grain



You walk into a party and everyone in the room has a herring on their heads, except you. You feel out of place for a while, but because everyone is friendly and having a good time, the lack of fishy headwear is soon forgotten. That is a bit what listening to this album is like. It just doesn't sound right to begin with, the musical part of your brain is confused listening to this Krautrock-like music played by a jazz fusion band lead by a Mark E Smith-esque Lancastrian. However by the time the second track is under way, you are busy searching the web for piscean milliners.

Mmmmh, nice.

In some ways this album just shouldn't work and in one way it doesn't. It doesn't throw up catchy tunes or amazing slabs of sound and there isn't that much variation within any one track, so it could be said to be somewhat ignorable. Which doesn't explain why it is rather stuck in my CD player at the moment. Each track becomes its own little world in handy capsule form. The lyrics, delivered more as monologues rather than songs, are somewhat oddball with an interesting use of words and seem to float on the rich musical backing. The music is rather hard to place. I've already mentioned Krautrock and jazz, but folk and funk come to mind as well. If you want something along the lines of The Fall in ambient free-fall jazzy swirly joy then it does the trick.


Espers : Espers II



There is a problem with albums that start so well. The first two tracks on this album (Dead Queen, Widow's Weed) make the following ones seem rather under par, even though those tracks considered on their own are perfectly decent songs. There are a couple of tracks towards the end of the album (Mansfield And Cyclops, Dead King) that lift you back up to the same heights again, but the overall effect is still a dip in the middle. Shame, as it is a rather splendid album, if you like early 70s goth-folk-rock with nice female vocals (a bit Sandy Denny) with a bit of modern post-rock thrown in (like I do). Loads of different instruments create a dense sound, though some may find it too dirge-like to enjoy. The track titles are enough to get you down! But it is often the gloomiest music that makes you feel human and alive.

HTRK : Nostalgia



If you lurk around eBay or Amazon, you can snap up CDs cheaply. So having stuck this on my Amazon wish-list over a year ago, I was pleased to see it pop up cheaply on eBay. Plop! Snaffled it. I had no idea why I stuck it on the wish-list, I must have read something that made me go "wanna wanna". Anyway, this is apparently not an album, but a 7 track "let's release something to show we exist while we get around to releasing a album" type thingy. But hey, 7 tracks and over 36 minutes makes it pretty much an album by vinyl standards. Recorded live and crudely it sounds very raw and somewhat akin My Bloody Valentine or Garland era Cocteau Twins. Now if you want your vocals to sound like they are being sung by a female who has just been dragged out of bed with a mother of all hangovers and dumped in a cave then this is definitely for you.
Forget about any lyrics, the vocals are just another noise in the mix, along with the thump and grind of parent/neighbour/granny/partner/dog annoying music. It is almost unpleasant at times, but just about sneaks the right side of that knife-edge of fascination that makes you want to plunge deeper into the grime. I did find the relentless gloom rather hard to swallow the first time I heard it, and the sound pallette rather limited, but further listens have revealed an inventiveness making each track stand on its own. Whether they can expand on this on their first album proper remains to be heard.

Ashra : New Age Of Earth



After Ash Ra Temple collapsed, guitarist Manuel Gottsching tried his hand at Berlin School electronics, probably inspired by former band member Klaus Schulze. This album released in 1977 under a solo name of Ashra has warm synthesizers and occasional guitar creating the typical hypnotic grooves and ambient soundscapes that you'd expect from this era. It is a more tuneful and relaxing affair compared to similar releases by Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze, however I don't find it as interesting a listen as either of those two artists at their peak. If you find 70s Schulze too dark or slow and 70s T.Dream too experimental, then this may be the synth album for you. The two shorter but bouncier tracks Sunrain and Deep Distance sound to me like the sort of music that dolphins would happily dance to and Ocean of Tenderness could be the sort of thing that dolphins would listen to having knackered themselves dancing. The lengthy final track Nightdust starts out exploring similar territory to Klaus Schulze, i.e. a lengthy slow unfurling 10 minute intro, before ticking over into that knackered dolphin sound again.

Susan Matthews : Hope-Bound



It is always nice to have a little bit of connection with the artist when you purchase one of their albums. Whether buying a Jane Siberry album and finding in the package that she's written a postcard thanking you for supporting her, or buying a Julian Cope album and getting his wife calling you because that CD is out of stock, it all kind of makes the whole experience a bit more personal. Susan Matthews cuts her own CD-Rs, prints out her own artwork and then goes to the post office to send it to you herself, and that's enough to make me feel happy about it. (Yes I am quite easily pleased.) And it is only £3.98, including postage, so being cashless as I am, this seemed like a good buy. Oh, and the fact that musically it sounded like my cup of tea did come into the equation somewhere.

The more experimental type of music can often disappoint: for every album that sounds amazing, there is usually another that is tedious or annoyingly inpenitrable. Thankfully Susan stays the right side of the big sign saying "Failed - please try again". On the odd occasion during this album when I think that the stretchy monster is off to visit Mr. Point, the track ends and another begins. Horrah! Overall the music sort of lurks between Laurie Anderson and Nurse With Wound without actually treading on either of their toes. It is an odd mixture of the uplifting and harsh. Take A Decoy Performance with a dialogue suggesting domestic violence juxtaposed with audience cheering and what sounds like a conversation between grandfather clocks. Or the rather lovely near ambient Missing with a gloopy blobby backdrop of noise trying to bring chaos into beauty. The whole album remains fascinating right up to the lengthy Suffusion with its Nurse With Wound like sound loops collapsing into deep internal organ threatening drones, somewhat akin to Sunn o))). Susan's almost wordless vocals compliment most of the tracks like sweet kisses from that slightly weird Aunt that most of the family shun.

This is definately my favourite album of the moment, so I'm off to spend another £3.98, and so should you.