Boards of Canada
In the early 1990s, when I was living and playing in New York City, indie bands across the country, such as Polvo, Rodan, The Lapse, Codeine and many more, shared a sound that, drawing on predecessors like Slint, Sonic Youth and Fugazi, was almost fundamentalistically guitar-based. In the last couple of years I’ve been struck […]
Three Incendiary Boys
Deeper is a band from Chicago, Illinois. On their debut album Deeper (2018), this compact-sounding then-quartet took tightness to an extreme, achieving an almost digital feel. Intricate showers of guitar notes and metallic, razor-thin chords created a kind of aural pointillism brimming with melodies. At the time they reminded me of Bloc Party, in their […]
Repetition
A couple of weeks ago I saw Prolapse play live in London. I went on a hunch, having seen them play and bought their classic debut album Pointless Walks to Dismal Places around the time it came out, but having not listened to it in many years. The show was fantastic, and gave me an […]
Trying to Reach You
Protomartyr’s stunning new album is the perfect antidote to our age of brands and corporations, built on the wisdom of crowds, the narrowing of variation, the killing of privacy and the flattening of experience. It opens up an amazingly rich scope of textures and depths, layers and surfaces, patterns and flow, all channelled through a […]
Soon: Fotoform and The Homesick
Seattle’s Fotoform released their eponymous debut LP in April. The band is an incarnation of a previous act called C’est La Mort, in which several of the band members did their apprenticeship recording a promising album and a couple of fairly faithful covers of Pale Saints and Smiths songs. The new record is still firmly […]
How We Stayed Individuated
An associative journey into the world of the heavy, hooky, hypnotising guitar riff. Protomartyr, “Uncle Mother’s”, from Agent Intellect, 2015 This intricate song marks the point where the Detroit band’s album metamorphoses into a weird and truly wonderful creature. Fittingly, the riff itself undergoes various transmutations, as if intent on presenting the plentiful array of […]