June 2024

Raggett on the Nuggets Legacy, Freeman on D-beat, de Fazio on Italian Library Music and Catchpole on Cosmic Scousers, plus 15 new recommendations

Ned Raggett on The Nuggets Legacy

In combination with both music press attention and, notably, a wide variety of underground bands worldwide finding their own ways into garage and psychedelia in the 1980s, soon a veritable cottage industry of such compilations sprang up over the years; indeed, by the end of the decade late 70s punk itself, part of the original wave that Nuggets had been a touchstone for, began to see its own arcane recordings get treated similarly.

Collections

Phil Freeman on D-beat

D-beat records are the cheeseburgers of punk rock; almost impossible to do wrong, but when done right, will give you a dose of raw animal pleasure that very little else can match.

Megan Iacobini de Fazio on Italian Library Music

…behind this seemingly mundane tag is a whole world of experimental music, wild synths, avant-garde jazz, and psychedelic workouts, many of which remained buried in dusty film studio warehouses for decades. One of the most fertile “scenes” was in Italy, and especially in Rome, which had become a major hub for both Italian and international film production in the 1960s and 1970s. 

Chris Catchpole on Cosmic Scousers

Factory Records boss Tony Wilson once said that the difference between bands from Liverpool and bands from Manchester was the size of their record collections. That while you could find anything from Stockhausen and Jacques Brel to Frankie Knuckles and Kraftwerk on the stereos of musicians from Manchester, their counterparts down the M62 motorway only listened to Love, Captain Beefheart and The Beatles’ White Album.

Reviews

Harold Heath

Mildlife - Chorus

Chorus is full of elongated vamps and solo sections, tracks that have an ebb and flow to their arrangements, that build, release, and switch gears with apparent ease, the band’s supa-high quality musicianship making the whole thing seem deceptively easy.

Nubiyan Twist - Find Your Flame

Whether building up to big-energy crescendos or locking into super-tight grooves, Find Your Flame feels organic, thick, juicy even, packed with musical ideas, overflowing with fat brass riffs, joyful vocals, and with expert playing lying in every corner of the mix.

Felipe Gordon - Psychedelic Melancholia

The awkward shape and size of some of the sample loops and the deliberate, ever-so-slightly wandering pitch of some of the sounds lend the album an edgy, stoned feel, while many of the sampled instrumental sounds have that nostalgic, seventies library music feel to them, that slight oddness that comes from repurposing old sonic ideas of what the future might sound like.

Joshua Levine

Playboi Carti - Playboi Carti

What ties these songs and this release together is a use of negative space and silence in between the staccato melodies, and it allows the music to breathe in a way that is rare for Carti.

Ken Carson - A Great Chaos

A Great Chaos is the first major release by Ken Carson that doesn’t use the letter X prominently in its title. Appropriately, this is where Carson finds his niche and settles into it. That’s not to say A Great Chaos is either a staid retread or a bold new path. It’s where his noisy rage-beats hip hop jams finally break free of the increasingly stifling influence his mentor, Playboi Carti, had on Carson’s music.

William Onyeabor - Tomorrow

Onyeabor’s music is spacious and psychedelic, riding endless grooves on beds of homemade electronic instruments and treated guitars he mostly overdubbed himself.

Megan Iacobini de Fazio

Blick Bassy - Mádibá Ni Mbondi

On his previous albums with their delicate guitar, layered rhythms, and melodic horns, Bassy drew more explicitly on the hongo and assiko traditions from Cameroon, as well as other global styles like bossa nova. But on Mádibá Ni Mbondi he abandons the more folksy elements for a more electronic, stripped back sound, which allows his hauntingly beautiful voice to resonate even more.

Les Groupes d’Animation Féminins du Gabon

In Gabon President Omar Bongo, who had been in power since 1967, understood the immense power of a catchy song, and decided to make soukous part of his propaganda toolbox by creating large female choirs and dance troops dedicated to singing the praises of the regime all over TV and radio.

Chris Catchpole

The Lemon Twigs - A Dream Is All We Know

Not a note here betrays the influence of anything recorded after the release of Big Star’s first album (“The Eyes Of The Girl” essentially a cover of The Beach Boys’ “In My Room,” “Ember Days” a deftly executed Simon & Garfunkel pastiche), but their reanimation of 60s rock and pop is so sumptuous, so melodically rich and so guileless that it’s impossible not to fall for its charms.

Arab Strap - I'm totally fine with it 👍 don't give a fuck anymore 👍

As he and Malcolm Middleton journey into their fifties, the Falkirk duo are still reassuringly full of piss, vinegar and ire at the world around them. Moffat turns his unforgivingly caustic eye to a litany of modern-day ills (growing old alone, social media and the “crippling fucking FOMO” of post-Covid life among them), while Middleton creates one of his most diverse sets of musical backdrops yet, shifting from techno, folk and even a bit of thrash metal.

Broadcast - Spell Blanket: Collected Demos 2006-2009

Even without any knowledge of their origins, there is something unquestionably haunting about the recordings which make up Spell Blanket, as if one is listening to transmissions from another time or dimension.

Beth Gibbons - Lives Outgrown

Gibbons has said that these songs were inspired by loss, grief, climate change and her experience of menopause and one only need to look at some of the song titles — “Lost Changes” (“all I want is for you to love me the way you used to”), “Burden Of Life” (“the burden of life just won’t leave us alone”) — for an indication of the mood herein.

Joe Muggs

Phat Phil Cooper Presents NuNorthern Soul Winter Warmers

Thus this compilation, one of the label’s best: as the title suggests, it leaves behind the usual sunny signifiers for something with a little more chill and melancholy – but even in that it manages to be blissful.

Haruomi Hosono, Jonah Sharp, Mixmaster Morris - Quiet Logic

Whether it was the luxury of Hosono’s well-appointed studio, the sense of global connection, or just a meeting of very eccentric minds making something greater than the sum of its parts, this is one of the great documents of mid-90s psychedelic electronics.

Jon Dale

MX-80 Sound - Better Than Life

Plenty of great guitarists emerged from the underground in the seventies – particularly that weird space that was pre-punk, prog-adjacent, articulate but not smarmy about it – but Bruce Anderson had the leap on just about all of them.

Pumice - Miserable Poison

People might call the early music of Pumice lo-fi, or something similarly dismissive or reductive. It’s never felt that way to me; like other great artists from New Zealand, Neville’s simply working with material to hand, the sound of the music reflecting both his creative interests and his mode of everyday living.