Authors: Ryan Hall
Review: Dalhous – The Composite Moods Collection Vol. 1: House...
Dalhous = Vatican Shadow + Ron Morelli + Gates … read more
Review: Dale Cooper Quartet & the Dictaphones – Quatorze Pièces...
Quatorze Pièces de Menace starts with near perfect treatise explaining a term like “dark jazz” to the masses. This 20-plus minute opus tracks a slow-build progression from dark ambience to slow industrial clang, to Birth of the Cool–era Miles Davis cool jazz, to swells of post-rock guitars and swathes of noise. … read more
Review: Clay Rendering – Snowthorn
Clay Rendering = Natural Snow Buildings + Blessure Grave + Vatican Shadow … read more
Review: Collapse Under The Empire – Sacrifice & Isolation
Collapse Under The Empire = Sleepmakeswaves + 65daysofstatic + Aerogramme … read more
Review: CAVE – Threace
CAVE hits all the stops on their interstellar cruise, from bruising motorik groove, to loose-limbed jazz, punchy horn sections, ’70s Latin psychedelia and full-bodied aural guitar assaults. … read more
Review: Carla dal Forno – You Know What It’s Like
Seeming preposterous that this is Carla dal Forno’s debut album, “You Know What It’s Like” is an album deeply rooted in stark minimalism with a sound palate of shadowy greys and blues. … read more
Review: Bremen – Eclipsed
Bremen = Hawkwind + The Oscillation + Wooden Shjips … read more
Review: Black Books – Self-Titled
Black Books write big songs confined to small places. There is an epic and anthemic quality to Black Book’s cloistered little pop songs: a driving, pulsing urge to express something too huge for words written in broad brush strokes of soaring choruses and the diffused light of atmospheric passages oozing out of guitars and synths that blend ambient colorings into vital, crunchy power chords. … read more
Review: Black Hearted Brother – Stars Are Our Home
After fronting the legendary shoegaze band Slowdive, and then moving on to the delicate folk on Mojave 3 and his own solo output, Neil Halstead has returned to the free-floating psychedelia of heavily affected guitars and synthesizers with his new band, Black Hearted Brother. … read more
Review: Birds of Passage – This Kindly Slumber
On her latest album for Denovali, Merz steps in front of the microphone and behind the thousand blinking lights of pedals and sequencers to create an album full of elegiac drones and deconstructed neofolk tunes that form out of the ether like a heavy mist across a bog or clouds quietly forming on the horizon. … read more