James Yorkston And The Athletes – Moving Up Country (10th Anniversary Edition)

James Yorkston And The Athletes - Moving Up Country (10th Anniversary Edition)

By Tom Bolton

The ten years since James Yorkston and the Athletes released their debut album, Moving Up Country may have raced past, but it has certainly been long enough to forgot what life before Yorkston was like.  Combining success with a profile just low enough to allow him to get on with what he wants, he is a confident enough musician to have created his own mini-genre, a sort of Scottish country folk.  Associates and admirers come from many musical backgrounds though, including the Waterson dynasty, Alex Neilson, Kieran Hebden and Yorkston’s Fence Collective mates.  Oh, and he used to be a punk. … Continue Reading

Jack White – Blunderbuss

Jack White - Blunderbuss

By Tom Bolton

Jack White is officially adrift, unmoored from his marriage (divorced last year from Karen Elsom) and his original band (the White Stripes, probably gone for good), and now he’s floating into new, solo territory for the first time.  Of course, nothing is as straightforward as it seems with a man who has made a career from disinformation and carefully cultivated mystique.  However, this time there’s just a suspicion that he might mean some of what he says literally. … Continue Reading

Alexander Tucker – Third Mouth

Alexander Tucker - Third Mouth

By Tom Bolton

Third Mouth has arrived, and not a moment too soon.  When Alexander Tucker released Dorwytch last year to unanimous approval, there was a sense of excitement that his considerable talents had crystallised into a music that made peculiar sense.  Only Tucker could have made Dorwytch, a collision of layered, drone sound and psych-folk that was rich, deep and strange.  Third Mouth, then, is the next dispatch from an expedition into unexplored territories.  What new lands has Tucker mapped? … Continue Reading

Grinderman – Grinderman 2 RMX

Grinderman - Grinderman 2 RMX

By Tom Bolton

It is entirely appropriate that the last recording from Nick Cave and his Bad Seed colleagues in their Grinderman alter egos should be a remix album, usually the final refuge of the artistically bankrupt.

With typical ingenuity, Cave created Grinderman as a parody band that still manage to work in ways it has absolutely no right to.  Not since Spinal Tap has rock been so deftly mocked.  Cave, with in close cahoots with Martyn Casey, Jim Sclavunos and Warren Ellis, used Grinderman to indulge deep seated desires to grow ludicrous facial hair and make dubious rawwk.  They aped the Stones, but Cave has more self awareness in his handlebar moustache than Keith Richards has gathered through an entire lifetime of living down to expectations.  Grinderman were equal parts hardcore idiocy, unleashed pent up energy, and song-writing genius.   And who except a hardcore idiot releases a remix of their album?  Such a desperate way to buy credibility!  Such a fad, so past its sell-by date!  What was that, Thom Yorke? … Continue Reading

Richard Youngs – Amaranthine

Richard Youngs - Amaranthine

By Tom Bolton

If anyone’s channelling England’s dreaming, it’s Richard Youngs with his baffling, absorbing fragments that seem simultaneously alien and a fundamental part of us. The debate about Youngs always seems to get hung up on trying to describe and categorise: “Is this album more ‘avant-garde’ than the last?” or “Is he still experimental, or has he sold out?” This is definitely missing the point. His music is highly original, and seems to exist to defy and destroy categories. Nor do definitions help to understand what you’re hearing. He experiments, for sure, but the significance of his work is in its ability to help the listener value sounds and musical experiences they might otherwise dismiss. … Continue Reading

Karen Dalton – 1966

Karen Dalton - 1966

By Tom Bolton

In the hyper-documented, post-digital world can there really be any unknown great music?  The back catalogues of the 1960s in particular have been trawled on an industrial scale, and the scrapings from the ocean bottom packaged and re-released to fading acclaim.  In the context of rapidly diminishing returns, the low-key arrival of Karen Dalton’s 1966 is positively seismic.  This is the closest we are likely to get to songs that we’ve never heard before, that deserve to be considered with the best. … Continue Reading

H. Hawkline – The Strange Uses Of Ox Gall

H. Hawkline - The Strange Uses Of Ox Gall

By Tom Bolton

The Strange Uses of Ox Gall opens with a call to “cut the ballast loose”, but you might want to think twice before joining in.  Things soon get alarming: “Cut your arms off! Cut your toes off!” chants a ragged chorus, backed by a toy organ riff.  When the first full length track, ‘Funny Bones’, kicks in it is tunefully pastoral but also strangely obsessed with body parts.  This unsettling, distorted, acid-soaked perspective washes over the whole album, taking up where Syd Barrett left off with Piper at the Gates of Dawn. … Continue Reading

Tom Waits – Bad As Me

Tom Waits - Bad As Me

By Tom Bolton

Until Bad As Me rattled along a few weeks ago, Tom Waits seemed to have settled comfortably into a well-earned musical godfather status, revered by anyone with an ounce of taste but with his best years gradually retreating behind him.  Since his last proper album, Real Gone in 2004, we’ve had only leftovers.  Reviewing and pigeon-holing your career, as he did on Orphans – three CDs of unreleased tracks labelled as Brawlers, Bawlers or Bastards – is the kind of job best left to the obituarists. … Continue Reading

Roy Harper – Sophisticated Beggar / Flat Baroque and Beserk / Stormcock / Bullinamingvase

Roy Harper

By Tom Bolton

To celebrate Roy Harper’s 70^th birthday, which will also be marked by a Bonfire Night concert at the Festival Hall, the Believe Digital label is re-releasing his entire back catalogue – 18 albums, 1966 to 2000.  Taking no chances with the first batch of four, they have chosen arguably his four strongest records.

This is very timely recognition for an artist who never became as famous as he deserved. Harper shared similarities with the recently deceased Bert Jansch.  Both were guitar gurus, influencing a generation of musicians with their effortless technique and unmistakable styles. As a result they are both musicians’ musicians, better known to the wider public for their influence than for their own material.  Both also dropped out of the sight for many years, Jansch because of drinking and health problems, Harper through fragile mental health. The two shared musical similarities, developing intricate finger-picking acoustic styles during the mid-60s. However, their paths diverged and while Harper used the ‘70s to discover his inner axeman, Jansch most definitely did not.  These four albums are a great way to hear just how much Harper has to offer. … Continue Reading

Wooden Shjips – West

Wooden Shjips - West

By Tom Bolton

Pressing play on West is a reassuring experience.  From the first chords of ‘Black Smoke Rise’ you are, beyond doubt, in Wooden Shjips world, pretty much where they left it in 2010 on Dos.  The lead guitar lays down an absurdly heavy, frazzled riff that buzzes like a swarm of bees. African killer bees. Vocals are of the stoner variety – minimum effort, maximum headrush. The final third of the song collapses fractured, multi-faceted shapes as Wooden Shjips meticulously dismantle it with a typically trippy guitar solo. And this is just the start. … Continue Reading