Alternative / Punk Browse All

Liberteer, Better To Die On Your Feet Than Live On Your Knees

2012 | Label: Relapse Records

01.31.12 Grindcore is not typically a restrained genre. The drums blast, the guitars and bass are a downtuned roar from the gutter, and vocals are hoarse, half-mad and choking with rage, whether politically motivated or just pissed off in some ill-defined way. Liberteer, a one-man project from Matthew Widener of Cretin, aims to up grind’s revolutionary quotient while also broadening its musical palette, and it succeeds admirably. With track titles like “Class War Never Meant More Than It Does Now,” “We Are Not Afraid of Ruins,” and particularly the unsubtle “99 to 1,” Widener’s politics are crystal clear, even when his lyrics are a harsh incomprehensible bark. But it’s the music that separates Liberteer from the pack. Widener has made a… more »

The Doozer, Keep It Together

2012 | Label: Woodsist / Revolver

01.31.12 With his previous records, The Doozer made erratic psych songs by himself. Considering both his Syd Barrett baritone and his big beard, it’s easy to cast the Fenlands singer/songwriter as the latest in a long line of hermetic bedroom artists. But on Keep It Together, his first album on Woodsist, he sets up shop in his local village hall with 11 other musicians. The result is a much warmer album than his previous work, with the first acoustic major chord strums of “Burning Bright” leading into some rococo string arrangements. His lyrics only perpetuate the pastoral feel of the album — “There’s a beautiful girl in a fold-up chair/ Sitting around without a care.” And every song on Keep It… more »

Wire, The Black Session – Paris, 10 May 2011

2012 | Label: pinkflag / state51

01.31.12 Thirty-five years on from 1977′s post-punk benchmark, Pink Flag, Wire have hit another indisputable purple patch. 2003′s gnarly Send album ended a decade-long silence in a squall of gleefully streamlined feedback, but the subsequent departure of guitarist Bruce Gilbert from the original quartet resulted in a brief wobble (to wit: ’08′s patchy Object 47). Luckily, the ship was steadied and re-fuelled for last year’s Red Barked Tree, an all-cylinders-firing triumph to rank easily alongside those late-’70s masterpieces.

In its wake, Wire toured throughout 2011 in an extra-confident mood, with Gilbert replaced by Matt Simms. By the time they rolled into Radio France’s theatre for one of Bernard Lenoir’s legendary Black Sessions, they were audibly, as this resultant live document proves, in… more »

Errors, Have Some Faith In Magic

Label: Rock Action / IODA

01.27.12  

Electronic music tends to be the fiefdom of the boffin or the wizard. It is generally practiced by people animated either by a love for the pristine exactitude offered by the minimizing of human input, or by hunger for the limitless sonic vistas machines enable.Glasgowoperation Errors embrace both traditions — as if their lab coats are shrouded by capes.

Have Some Faith In Magic, Errors’ third album, is an almost exclusively instrumental affair; when human vocals appear, as on “Earthscore” and “Holus-Bolus,” they’re spectral and translucent, ghosts in the machine. For the most part, Errors deal in vast, ornate sculptures of electronic sound. “The Knock” builds into something which, in its climactic movement, is reminiscent of Slovenian situationists Laibach, which is… more »