Review: All Seeing Dolls make the best case for cross-pollination we've had in a while. Their sound is psychedelic tinged, garage-y leaning rock with plenty of breathy bits and opportunities to look at the sky in hope or despair, invoking the shoegaze 'thing'. In other moments, they sound like they've been hiding away in the back room of a 1960s acid party, while there are also times when vocals soar to such harmonious heights you could be forgiven for using made up terms like 'choral indie'. The sum of all those parts is a genuinely powerful and unique record that moves and insists, ebbs and flows throughout a real odyssey of a listen. But the ingredients also warrant a mention. The legendary Dot Allison is here, hence the beauty and subtle power of the vocals. The Brian Jonestown Massacre's Anton Newcombe is also present and correct, as are a piano, ukulele, guitar and auto-harp.
Review: Anton Newcombe's prolific Brian Jonestown Massacre notch up their 19th studio album with Fire Doesn't Grow On Trees. It's headed up by lead single 'The Real', which shows the psych-rock lifer hasn't lost any of his inspiration this far into his career. He worked in the studio with Ricky Maymi, Ryan Calrson Van Kriedt, Hakon Adalsteinsson, Hallberg Daoi Hallbergsson, Uri Rennert and Sara Neidorf in a whirlwind 70 days of tracking new music, and this album, whittled down to 10 incendiary tracks, is the result. It's everything you want from a BJM record - a perfect addition to their monumental oeuvre.
Review: This third release thus far this year to issue forth from Anton Newcombe's Berlin base will be as manna from thrift-shop heaven for anyone who's hooked on the heavy-lidded, hallucinogenic and cheekily retro-aligned stylings by which they've accidentally defined a sizeable proportion of the current 'psych' scene. Drifting from a Thirteenth Floor Elevators cover that features The Black Angels' Alex Maas on jug to the Slovakian 'Prsi Prsi', this collection of excursions and altered states is a good deal more compelling that its title would suggest, rater testimony to the BJM's continued prominence over all the classicist realms they survey.
Review: Brian Jonestown Massacre's brand new album establishes a kind of sonic-Nietzschean theme from the outset. For while music's Eternal Return is debatable, the concept certainly holds weight for Anton Newcombe and co., whose controversial wiles and second-coming-of-Christ confidence have seen him lead the band to much stardom over the decades - it's almost as if this has happened before. With influences from space rock to shoegaze, the album deals specifically with themes of fatherhood and survival; grappling with the existential weight of parenthood, it is much, much sadder than their prior albums.
Like Describing Colors To A Blind Man On Acid (3:01)
Lunar Surf Graveyard (3:34)
The Sun Ship (3:57)
Review: No longer simply the nearly-man egomaniac chronicled in the movie Dig, Anton Newcombe is now viewed with the kind of reverence he probably always felt he deserved, a modern master of classic psychedelia with a glint in his eye, having carved out a trademark sound that transcends retro trappings by its constantly questing and adventurous nature. The Spacemen 3-referencing sleeve of this new effort - his third work in the last two years and 15th BJM album in total - somewhat belies a sound that could come from no other maverick, its widescreen sweep locking horns with synapse-shredding experimentation.
Review: Brian Jonestown Massacre have a barely tarnished legacy of work, and don't look to stop adding high quality to their back catalogue any time soon. Their twentieth full-length 'Don't Get Lost' opens with 'Open Minds Now Close' a blistering kraut jam and wavering harmonics, with Anton Newcombe's sparse lo-fi vocals delivering mantras through the wall of sonics. It's darker in tone than their recent previous work, and this sound continues throughout the record, gradually augmented by guitar riffs that hark back to early BJTM work, and pared back by interlude-style tracks of ambient electronic warmth. For a band to have been around as long as Brian Jonestown Massacre have, and still be releasing records of this calibre, is no mean feat.
Review: Created as an accompaniment to a sixteen-minute film about a water park in Edmonton, Canadian drone artist Dirty Beaches has seen fit to issue his ethereal soundtrack on 10" through Anton Newcombe's A Records imprint. Taking the gentler, melodic approach to noise, Alex Zhang Hungtai employs guitar, piano and lots of reverb amongst other synthesized sounds and squashes it all through a crust of analogue degradation for a truly dreamlike end result. There are brief moments of abrasive sound design, as on "Floating Underwater Watching Waves", but any such fiery sonics are bookended by prolonged, meditative excursions into repeated harmonic phrases.
Review: FXHE return with the master of the mysterious OB Ignitt! Arriving roughly a year on from the last slab of Ignitt goodness, Mysterious finds OB on imperious form, once more showing off his penchant for excellent track titles and singular slant on bumping Detroit business. The title track is a veritable epic of unquantifiable emotive stakes, emerging from a heat treated fog and easing into a subtle yet beguiling rhythmic framework which coaxes you into a spell that grows stronger as the track charges electrically forth. Face down, "Celestial Salacious" has that same rough edged bass line growl to it, but the skipping percussion and building layers of instrumentation give the track real energy, whilst you can almost feel the funk dripping off final track "Chocolate City" which sounds like DJ Nature hocked up on MDMA.
B-STOCK: record has light surface marks/scratches but otherwise in excellent condition
Une Lune Etrange
Lou
Dreams
La Brigade Des Malefices
On Dansait Avec Elle
Ghost Rider
Grande
Springfield 61
Un Rituel Inhabituel
Last Picture Show
Une Lune Etrange
Lou
Dreams
La Brigade Des Malefices
On Dansait Avec Elle
Ghost Rider
Grande
Springfield 61
Un Rituel Inhabituel
Last Picture Show
Review: ***B-STOCK: record has light surface marks/scratches but otherwise in excellent condition ***
There has been plenty said about debutants L'Epee since their single "Dreams" turned heads back in spring. Combining the talents of Anton Newcombe (The Brian Jonestown Massacre), French artist Emmanuelle Seigner, and polished-to-a-sheen pop outfit The Liminanas, it's one of the most refreshing (and French) things you're likely to hear all year. That's more of a reference to the cinematic feeling that defines the album, owing much to the femme fatale vocal delivery, rather than the language each line is sung in. At once evoking the smoky cool of Serge Gainsbourg and the opiate moods of The Velvet Underground, "Diabolique" feels born in a time when psychedelic experimentation and chart topping music weren't mutually exclusive. At once sophisticated and hedonistic, it's a sexy, sensual and overwhelmingly seductive effort everyone should turn themselves on to.
Review: There has been plenty said about debutants L'Epee since their single "Dreams" turned heads back in spring. Combining the talents of Anton Newcombe (The Brian Jonestown Massacre), French artist Emmanuelle Seigner, and polished-to-a-sheen pop outfit The Liminanas, it's one of the most refreshing (and French) things you're likely to hear all year. That's more of a reference to the cinematic feeling that defines the album, owing much to the femme fatale vocal delivery, rather than the language each line is sung in. At once evoking the smoky cool of Serge Gainsbourg and the opiate moods of The Velvet Underground, "Diabolique" feels born in a time when psychedelic experimentation and chart topping music weren't mutually exclusive. At once sophisticated and hedonistic, it's a sexy, sensual and overwhelmingly seductive effort everyone should turn themselves on to.
Review: It comes as little surprise that Anton Newcombe - an iconic figure to a new generation of psychedelic wayfarers if ever there was one - has already taken Magic Castles under his wing, and on tour with Brian Jonestown Massacre - 'Starflower' is replete with exactly the kind of '60s-derived, garage-birthed sonics that Newcombe used to create something akin to a modern-day cult for thrift-store drop-outs. Yet amidst the two-chord guitar drones, Farfisa Organ textures, stoned harmonies and folk-rock tinges, 'Starflower' is possessed of a sharp finesse and kaleidoscopic dynamic that renders it a cut above the average cowboy-shirted and lank-haired fare the modern freak has become accustomed to.
Review: Nothing if not reliable in terms of both the prolific nature of his output and its quality, maverick Berlin-based satyr Anton Newcombe has mapped out a back catalogue of gloriously lackadaisical '60s-fixated psychedelic pop that transcends his original genius-or-madman mythos. Yet this new collaboration with London-dwelling Canadian songwriter Tess Parks marries his trademark heavy-lidded atmosphere and outlaw cool with fresh inspiration and potent delivery from his new foil. Parks' acidic drawl elevates these late-night serenades to new heights of decadence and intrigue, arriving at a sound somewhat akin to a vision of Mazzy Star in Hell. A welcome curveball from a master of the psych-rock art and a compelling new talent.
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