It's my birthday today, so what better way to remember younger, more innocent days than to take a trip back to the 1980s courtesy of Class Actress.
The Brooklyn based act have released new record Rapprocher, out on Carpark Records, and is very much the sound of Madonna, Human League and Depeche Mode, but with a modern quality that avoids empty revivalism.
Over at The Line Of Best Fit you're able to read my review of the album, complete with a ropey extended metaphor about high school proms. If you'd care to do so, you can make the jump here.
Idaho have been making beautifully slow and sad music for close to twenty years, and the main man in all that period has been one Jeff Martin. The band/solo project/duo were always seen as pioneers of the sadcore/slowcore scene of the mid-1990s, along with bands like Low, Codeine and Red House Painters.
Over the years Jeff Martin has ventured down other avenues such as music for soundtracks, and even short film making, but has returned to music making with new album You Were a Dick. Under the guise of The Line Of Best FitI caught up with Jeff, a resident of California's famous Laurel Canyon to find out what's been happening over the last ten years or so.
New York duo Exitmusic exist in their own gloomy, gothic world of electronic music, trip-hop and Radiohead (well, where did you think the name came from?). New EP From Silence, out on Secretly Canadian of all labels, is a stylised and insular release, and it's a very curious record.
It's reviewed over at The Line Of Best Fit by me, and although I try to find the positives in most releases, sometimes the artist makes it very hard......
Anyway, find out more about what I think the band should do next by clicking here.
Being a firmly Californian band, San Francisco's Wooden Shjips embody everything about the mythical "West" and west coast. Infusing their music with psychedelia, jazz, garage rock and Cosmic American Music, Ripley Johnson's band of travellers haven't always been easy listening. Bowing before the altar of the groove, the eponymous debut and then Dos were jammy, headcrushing epics, marrying balls-out Stooges rock with spacey Hawkwind segments, culminating in the likes of the 11-minute 'Down By the Sea' from that second record.
Third album West - the first recorded in a proper studio space - comes hot on the heels of Johnson's record as Moon Duo, and finds the band in a more compact and accessible frame of mind. It'd be a stretch to call West pop or commercial, but it does find the band in a slightly different frame of mind, yet still exploring the outer limits of rock music.
Opener 'Black Smoke Rise' begins by kicking out the jams MC5 style, with the fuzzy guitars married to a wonderful organ drone. What Johnson seems to do is to find that one effects pedal and stamp on it til he decides it's time to end the song. Next track 'Crossing' is a martial and hypnotic track, almost brought to a crashing end by a crackling and echoey Crazy Horse solo, adding a further feeling of dread to the track, which already touches on inescapable death.
The more compact side of Wooden Shjips is shown on the 3-minute boogie of 'Lazy Bones', it being a track that wouldn't be out of place on The Doors' LA Woman. This is further added to by the straight-ahead rock and roll of 'Home'. It's the track that most reflects Johnson's statement that the record might be influenced by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, and it very much sounds like a lost track from Rust Never Sleeps (the band of course covered 'Vampire Blues' on Vol.2) or a cut from Dirty-era Sonic Youth.
'Flight' coats metallic riffs in organ swirls for 5 minutes, and 'Looking Out' verges on Nuggets pastiche, but ends up being great ramalama fun. Closing track 'Rising' is recorded entirely backwards, and in hands other than Wooden Shjips' it might sound preposterous but within the context of the album it works completely.
West continues the Wooden Shjips journey along the coast of California, and if you're looking for an entry into their psych space-rock world, you'll not find a better place to start.
It's my birthday today, so what better way to remember younger, more innocent days than to take a trip back to the 1980s courtesy of Class Actress.
