Kibou Records: “This is the debut release by BOTCHED TOE. The catchy, pummelling riffs Flanagan serves up provide the perfect backdrop to a bleak vocal narrative from Domestic
of a country in decay. Government corruption at an all-time high, those in power displaying ever-increasing contempt for the public; the ravages of unbridled capitalism and a poorly handled pandemic carving ever deeper scars into our individual and collective mental health; simple dreams now out of reach, and a populace so on edge and exhausted by it all that any significant, organised dissent seems less enticing that just retreating into one’s shell and hoping for the best (even when it’s clear that this is the most flawed tactic of all”.
Turn Up The Volume wrote: This 18-minute apocalyptic hardcore album
is 10 minutes shorter than the Ramones‘ debut LP. But loudmouthed frontman James Domestic doesn’t need more time to make clear what a mess England
has become over the years. He spits and sneers, howls and growls, all the way.
No brakes, no breaks.
Botched Toe is a mean riff machine, a blustering beast with a powerhouse
of a debut album under their belt. Get together, all you mosh-pit fanatics, and
let’s stop the devastating rat race – and fucking Putin – while going berserk.
TUTV: Greg Dulli‘s pipes reach for the sky throughout this new standout LP. His unique rock voice is the unwearying motor of this heart-and-soul opus. And when the songs are of supreme quality, as all 10 terrific tunes here are, and your bustling band are on a raucous roll with the vitality of young wolves you end up with the undeniable best album of 2022.
2. ‘Cave World’ by VIAGRA BOYS (Stockholm, Sweden)
Turn Up The Volume: The more our world gets fucked-up the more inspiration Viagra Boys have to write absurd, hilarious, sarcastic, crazy, monkey-ish songs about
all the related mess, embedded in their by now familiar filthy punk and roll grooves.
Never a dull moment with punk rock loser Sebastian Murphy in the middle. And they
played the best gig to my ears/eyes a couple of weeks ago in Antwerp, Belgium.
Turn Up The Volume: After playing opener Clocks to the max, with its Blitzkrieg grinta, it feels like the band and I are already out of breath as you can hear on the post-explosion outro. I felt wrong, as several KO Killers (Ded Würst / The Warden / I Am Kate Moss and the JAWDROPPING missile closer No Thanks, I’m Full) follow and do your head in. Ditz is a mean manic post-punk machine. The first minutes of the slower pieces (Three / Instinct / Teeth) are misleading, halfway they explode like grenades. No rest for the wicked, no rest for Ditz, no rest for your ears.
Turn Up The Volume: Back in 2016 Crows blew my mind when they played a small club
gig in my hometown of Ghent, Belgium. A memorable one cemented in the aural side of my
brain. The immense intensity and their frenetic furiosity were no less than jaw-dropping. On Beware Believers, their high-powered passion is still intact and its sizzling sound evolved further into a mean Herculean rock machine.
Blistering hammer blows like Garden Of England, Slowly Separate, and Room 156 are already noted in my end-of-the-year list of best 2022 knockouts. And reflective reality checks like the Joy Division-esqueHealing, Moderation, Wild Eyed & and Loathsome, and the fucktastic Meanwhile have the sonic vehemence to burn holes in your stereo.
TUTV: Musically and lyrically, this 3rd LP is moony, mellow and pensive with frontman Grian Chatten becoming a modern-day crooner who touches sensitive hearts, especially Irish ones as this album is about their Irish past/present/future identity in and outside of their beloved country.
TUTV: Weirdly exciting and capriciously inventive. This new LP resonates like a Zappa-esque rock circus. A sundry potpourri of symphonic jazz-prog-rock twists and turns, building up/breaking down constructions, forth/back and vertical/horizontal saltations with head-spinning orchestrations. Welcome to Black Midi‘s hell.
. Turn Up The Volume wrote: Prepare your ears for brawny industrial bombast (No Yes More less / Veni Vidi Vici / Feed The Wound / Taranatula), nightmares in slow-motion (Limbo / Sugar My Pill / The Judas Chair), wham-bam-glam drones (Glitz Krieg / The Dark Room) and the fantastic slow-burning gospel chant of the title track. It’s all there to have yourself a merciless head-banging pig trip. File next to Rammstein’s new opus Zeit.
TUTV: The result of the collaboration of wordsmith and poetry lover Peter Doherty and French composer Frédéric Lo who wrote the music, is a sparkling thing of beauty. This is the record to play when you’re feeling lazy, and in the mood for doing just nothing but daydreaming while lying in a green field enjoying the sun. Expect romantic lullabies with violins, piano and smooth horns, sweet little pop ditties, and sepia-colored tunes that transfer you to a place far away from our cruel reality.
9. ‘All Of Us Flames’ by EZRA FURMAN (Chicago, US)
TUTV: Definitely her most complete accomplishment to date. Majestic songwriting quality. Top-level tunes in orchestration, arrangement and vocal emotiveness. Here and there songs’ structures and Furman‘s fragile voice (Train Comes Trough / Throne / Poor Girl A Long Way From Home) bring, yes, Tom Petty to mind. Un-Americana Americana splendor with an artist who’s slowly but surely finds her way as a human being on this frightful planet.
TUTV: Disco fuel for 24-Hour misfit parties in obscure nightclubs for SM fans, physically unsatisfied individuals looking for sexual healing, gangbang addicts, nudists, lost sex workers, manic David Lynch characters, neurotic Brexit victims, acid-house junks, erotic lovers, lobotomized politicians, trashmouth artists, Andy Weatherall junks and all other messed-up souls who hate reality and want to dance/party/fuck/hallucinate to stripped-down techno beats. E-tastic.
Turn Up The Volume: Check in on a Saturday Warmduscher Fever Night, ladies and gents, at the club called The Hotspot. Feel the sultry ambiance, have a couple of cocktails at the bar, dance to some banging boosters and some funky Sly Stone vibes, and go twitchin’ in the kitchen now and then.
Turn Up The Volume: JO-JO is the flamboyant Amazon in the middle. She sings the
blues with the vigorous vitality of eternal legend Janis Joplin (We’re Just Animals / Moon Child), she rocks her multi-colored tail off with the gusto of Grace Slick on a roll (My Babe / No More Good News / Don’t Get Too Heavy), she has the groovy guts and the glamorous looks of eccentric punkette Nina Hagen and to close the show she affects with a gripping candlelight reverie for the midnight hours (Oh Brother).
Mind you, she’s not alone. Her bang-on band The Teeth know all the 60s/80s/80s
rock ‘n’ blues ‘n’ glam ‘n’ punk ‘n’ roll classics. They back Jo-Jo with a mood-and-cadence fitting firework of Jimmy Page riffs, John Lee Hooker hooks and Slash licks. Retro injected electricity.
Turn Up The Volume: As I said several times before, Samara and Animal are
adventurous architects in sound and vision (watch the singles’ spectacular videos
below / also the artwork for their releases is always a reflection of vivid visual inventiveness).
On this new, bone-and-mind chilling, longplayer both high-tech DIY artists keep
on challenging sonic and thematic boundaries. It’s also the first time we hear poetry fanatic Samara sing instead of reciting her poetic chimeras, as on psychoanalytic
discharge Shaman and on doom-punk sledgehammer Human Sacrifice.
There are so many layers, so many different directions, so many pendulum movements and so many unexpected turns at play here that you need several spins to get a grip of their poetallica world fully. This record as well as their debut are voyages of discovery.
Turn Up The Volume said: Damon Albarn was the first name that popped up in my head when The Early Years impressed my ears on first hearing. At times I thought he was a guest singer on Vanwymeersch‘s debut longplayer, with his pondering voice and his musing songs . Check Drama I, Who Can Tell, I’m Wide Awake and you’ll find out why.
Vanwymeersh also, like Albarn, is a song architect. All lullabies, reveries, and tunes at
play here stick quickly. But with every listen you discover how rich and subtly layered the musical arrangements and feel-good orchestrations (hear that playful banjo sound on Part Of Me ) are. Then again he invites you into his sonic labyrinth where he goes left, right, and back in one and the same song (When You’re Old And Grey And Full Of Sleep / Fall From Grace).
15. ‘Carrion Repeating’ by JAMES DOMESTIC (Essex/Suffolk, UK)
TUTV: Domestic is a story-telling Cockney wordsmith, tackling politics, daily life shit, gobbling business sharks, and other related mess.
Musically anything is possible. Screechy guitars and 60s sounding Hammond organs to inflame tirades such as Itchy Itchy, Faze Out, Bean Counter and Push on Trough. Saxophone and steel drums straight from Trinidad on Mañana. Soulful female voices and Le Freak C’est Chic riffs on Never Enough. A reggae vibe with xylophone touches on Is Thay You?. Dub Jah Wobble bas on Weekend Carbs and Giblets. He just does what his ears like.
Turn Up The Volume:Dim Gray float in a universe where the poignancy and
starry-eyed melodrama of Sigur Rós and the spiritual vocality of day-and-night
dreamers Fleet Foxes become one. This heart-and-soul stirring trio reverberates
like a full orchestra. They’re cinematic pop architects working with a drone flying
up high like an eagle and showing us where the ocean meets the sky.
Symphonic pop splendour. Firmament is a shiny diamond of a record.
I really can’t say more about this multi-faceted record and its from lost soul to ‘fuck it, you only live once’ author does herself.
Koan: “This record sounds like I’m schizophrenic in a way coz there are so many mad emotions in the songs. They are all very real, which took some guts to vocalize but I’m proud that we managed to bring it all across in a raw and real way. It’s not as sexually charged as my first album.
This new album COCOON was written during the lockdown, so many emotions that were pent up inside had time and space to surface and they sure came out with a vengeance. Anger, procrastination, questions about the way we C/O-exist in this society, and some new relationship issues like jealousy, infidelity, breakups. So it’s a more grown up album with more grown up topics.”
Turn Up the Volume: A striking work of top-notch tunes, written by mastermind Scott Marsden, that get under your skin slowly but surely until you see/hear the whole picture and realize that this is one of the most gripping albums of 2022 in my book. And lots to learn about Wales’ history.
Turn Up The Volume: Liam says that he is happy with his rock formula. So nothing new? No, just a bunch of new songs from good to very good. As much as I love our kid I enjoy him the most when he’s a rock ‘n’ roll star on stage. That’s his habitat. That’s what he does best. Entertaining a crowd/choir of 50.000 in a green field. See you in Belgium in August, Liam, on a green field of course.
The greatest Belgian singer-songwriter ever past away this year. A passionate chansonnier, a blues man, a rocker, a goosebumps crooner, a charismatic personality, and a one-of-a-kind live performer. I saw him about a 100 times, mostly solo, but also with his fantastic band TC Matic and one-time side projects.
Opex is his final longplayer. Vocally you hear him suffer from that deadly
disease that killed him shortly after recording the LP. I miss him, really hard.
Released: 7 July 2003 Score: #3 in the UK, #4 in Scotland, #133 in the US
TUTV: Their first, their unquestionable best. Americana rock ‘n roll with sharp hooks and nasty riffage. Afterward KOL became slowly but surely a soft, commericial money machine.
Not my kinda list. Too many computer fabrications. Glam and glitter, glossy images,
and expensive videos come in first, and music second. On the other hand, if the whole
wide world would listen to the same music, it would be pretty boring and, of course,
I can do my thing on my own list (coming next week).
Rolling Stone: “The album finds her unabashedly celebrating Black pleasure
in all its multitudes and illustrates that theme with dozens of sampled voices and
sounds, esteemed guests (Grace Jones), and echoes to global club styles past and
present.”
Single:Break My Soul
Stream RENAISSANCE on SPOTIFY
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Rolling Stone: “Bad Bunny’s sunlit ode to Puerto Rican summers is the superstar’s
most carefree project yet, but there’s a weightiness to the way it’s broken record after
record: The LP became the most-streamed album on Spotify when it first came out. It
spent more time at Number One on the Billboard 200 than any other album this year.”
Single: Moscow Mule
Stream Un Verano Sin Ti on SPOTIFY
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3. ‘Midnights’ by TAYLOR SWIFT (West Reading, Pennsylvania)
Rolling Stone: “It’s a record that sounds best from start to finish. But if you’re short on time, just focus on the three-song run of “Vigilante Shit,” “Bejeweled,” and “Labyrinth” that makes for a euphoric streak higher than nearly anything released this year. Checkmate, you couldn’t lose.”
Single: Anti-Hero
Stream MIDNIGHTS on SPOTIFY
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Rolling Stone:“The Catalonian shapeshifter has been triggering arguments about genre, race, and culture in Spanish-language music for years now. But with the polyglot Motomami, she went all-in as a proud pop globalist, flaunting her devotion to Kate Bush, M.I.A., and Camarón de la Isla in equal parts.”
Single: Saoko
Stream MOTOMAMI on SPOTIFY
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5. ‘Harry’s House’ by HARRY STYLES (Redditch, England)
Rolling Stone:“With Harry’s House, he decides to rip it up and start again. It’s a vibrant, playful, vividly emotional song cycle about finding different kinds of home on the run.
Single: As It Was
Stream HARRY’S HOUSE on SPOTIFY
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Rolling Stone: “For more than a decade, he’s been navigating his post-Clipse career with projects steeped in his winning formula: dope talk over dope beats. It’s Almost Dry may be
his finest offering yet.”
Single: Diet Coke
Stream IT’S ALMOST DRY on SPOTIFY
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Rolling Stone: “Hold on Baby, a 40-minute odyssey of emotional breakdowns, introspective lyrics, and anthemic choruses that sound like a magical combination of Savage Garden and Audioslave.”
Single: For My Friends
Stream HOLD ON BABY on SPOTIFY
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8. ‘Caprisongs’ by FKA TWIGS (Cheltenham, England)
Rolling Stone: “Caprisongs is revelatory simply because
it sees FKA Twigs, known perfectionist, finally letting loose.”
Single: Oh My Love
Stream CAPRISONGS on SPOTIFY
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Rolling Stone: “The first BTS member to release a solo album, J-Hope set the bar
high with Jack in the Box, a 10-track concept album. After a debut like this, J-Hope’s
fans (new and old) can be pretty sure they won’t be disappointed with his future
offerings.”
Stream JACK IN THE BOX on SPOTIFY
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Rolling Stone: “One of the best new rock bands to come around in the past five years, this duo from the Isle of Wight garnered buckets of well-deserved hype. Wet Leg bristles with sharp tunes and even sharper jokes, offering a 2020s update on deadpan Nineties legends like Pavement and Elastica.”
20 years ago STEREOGUM was born. The American music website was named after
a lyric from the song Radio #1 by the French electronic duo Air. They call themselves
the ‘best music blog in the world’ and I (almost) agree. Now straight to their best albums
of 2022 selection.
Stereogum:“MOTOMAMI sounds like nothing else from this present moment, but it also sounds distinctly like the present: rapidly scrolling through bite-sized earworms, embodying masculine aggression simultaneously and without contradiction to high femininity, and repurposing old traditions from the last 50 years to envision the future.”
TUTV: For 24-hour flamenco party people.
A mix of hot stuff and chill-out moments.
Single: Saoko
Stream on MOTOMAMI on SPOTIFY
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Stereogum: “She’s one of one. She’s number one. She’s the only one. Beyoncé Knowles
has done a lot of amazing things in a pop career that’s stretched back a quarter-century,
but she’s never attempted anything quite like this.”
TUTV: Back to the 80s with Donna Summer tunes.
Single:Break My Soul
Stream RENAISSANCE on SPOTIFY
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4. ‘Sometimes, Forever’ by SOCCER MOMMY (Nashville, TN)
Stereogum: “She’s still making the same achingly vulnerable, heartrendingly pretty pop-rock we’ve come to expect from Soccer Mommy, but with weird, inspired twists around every corner.”
TUTV: A bit too smooth for my liking.
Single:Shotgun
Stream SOMETIMES, FOREVER on SPOTIFY
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Stereogum: “There may not be a rapper on Earth who captures — or even attempts to capture — feelings of stasis so successfully as billy woods. Aethiopes, his first of two albums this year, is not only an extraordinary meditation on cannibalism and colonialism but a futureless, borderless, mapless breadth of stillness.”
No singles released.
Stream AETHIOPLES on SPOTIFY
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6. ‘God Save The Animals’ by ALEX G (Philadelphia, PA)
Stereogum: “The entire LP is layered with magical moments.
Every second breathes life, especially the twangy, hopeful closer,
“Forgive,” a perfect conclusion.”
TUTV: Unknown to my aural radar.
Single: Blessing
Stream SAVE THE ANIMALS on SPOTIFY
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7. ‘Expert In A Dying Field‘ by THE BETHS (New Zealand)
Stereogum: “Across ‘Expert In A Dying Field’, which wraps existential angst in wry lyricism and fuzzy guitar-pop hooks, the New Zealand quartet unpacks the inherent unfairness in simply being alive in 2022, when — whether due to a pandemic, technology, or the ever-worsening economy — it can feel like the goal posts are constantly moving, but you’re not.”
TUTV: Amplified and jangly dream pop vitality.
Stream EXPERT IN A DYING FIELD b on SPOTIFY
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8. ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’ by BIG THIEF (Brooklyn, NY)
Stereogum:“This is the release where Big Thief went big: a 20-track double album recorded across four studios in four different states. Big Thief’s philosophy is simple and down-to-earth; you find the answers when you’re chopping onions, stirring tea, driving at night.”
TUTV:
Single: Change – magical!
Stream DRAGON NEW WARM MOUNTAIN / I BELIEVE IN YOU on SPOTIFY
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9. ‘Diaspora Problems’ by SOUL GLO (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Stereogum: “Over the course of a dozen electrifying tracks clocking in at just under
40 minutes, Philadelphia’s Soul Glo capture the experience of being Black in America.
This is the kind of rage and resistance hardcore was meant for.”
Stereogum: “The Weeknd has flirted with mortality across his catalog of noir-pop, but he really commits to the bit on his immaculately stylized fifth studio album. The notoriously hedonistic singer looks back on a presumed life of regrets alongside famous friends — from Quincy Jones recounting the lasting effects of childhood trauma to Tyler, The Creator promoting prenups.”
End-of-2022 lists are popping up on music websites and in magazines everywhere.
NME (New Musical Express) is, unquestionably, one of the best music media ever. Their legendary weekly mag was THE bible for many artists/music fans (like me). Unfortunately, slowly but surely the Internet made circulation go drastically down. The last print issue appeared in March 2018.
Their website was launched in 1996 and became
one of the most renowned over the years.
Now back to 2022.
These are the 5 BEST ALBUMS according to NME.
(Full list link below.)
NME: “The band’s spectacular seventh album summarises their story so far:
sharp songwriting, relentless innovation and unbreakable teamwork.”
TUTV: NME is a devoted AM fan from day one. That’s the only reason I can think
of why the staff named this LP the best, while in my book it’s the most boring one of the past 12 months If I want to listen to masterly crooners I’ll pick Nick cave, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Father John Misty and ,yes, Frank Sinatra but definitely not Alex Turner and his. But hey this is not my list. It’s NME’s choice. Have fun with the Monkees.
SINGLE:Body Paint
ALBUM:Stream THE CAR here via SPOTIFY
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NME:“Their debut album feels like a giddy race around a funfair, those pesky
lows batted away with wit and wisecracks like a game of verbal whack-a-mole.”
TUTV: Guitar pop at its catchy, sprightly and funny best.
NME: “On ‘Renaissance’, Beyoncé has added another remarkable record
to her repertoire: this time one to continue leading the charge to bring Black
culture back to the forefront of house music and dance scenes.”
TUTV: Well, eh, to be honest, I only heard the magical single (below)
but not the longplayer. I’m just not an avid R é B fan.
SINGLEBreak My Soul
ALBUM: Stream RENAISSANCE here via SPOTIFY
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NME: “The fight for a better Ireland deserves songs that mirror the depth of
the crisis, and in its endlessly captivating glory, ‘Skinty Fia’ rises triumphantly
to the task.”
TUTV: Rad record. Rad band, on and off stage.
SINGLEI Love You
ALBUM:Stream SKINTY FIA via SPOTIFY
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5. ‘Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers’ by KENDRICK LAMAR (USA)
NME:“In laying his soul bare, Lamar hopes we realise how
we too can set ourselves free from generational curses.”
British long-running music website LOUDER THAN WAR is, without a shadow of a doubt, my favorite one on the Internet. They support/challenge alt-rock, post-punk, guitar-pop and all related genres by as well, small indie artists as the big ones (old and new). My kinda stuff.
As we near the end of the year, best-of lists are coming in. LTW just published their, yes,Top 100of best 2022 LPs.
9th LP of the British glam heroes (1989–2003, 2010–present)
led by charismatic maestro Brett Anderson
Key single: 15 Again
Louder Than War: “An album to treasure for life. It really does contain all the bombast, swells and drama of the orchestral classical music so beloved by Brett’s father, but also an intimacy wrapped up in the intensity.”
TUTV: As much as I am a fan, this is too many Suede
by numbers. Except for one of the best singles of
the year with15 Again the LP doesn’t work for me.
Singer-songwriter from Chicago
with a vulnerable heart and soul.
His/her 6th full length.
Key single: Forever In Sunset
Louder Than War: “All Of Us Flames focuses on the resistance, the struggle, and the community of the threatened. Furman says the album is, “a queer album for the stage
of life when you start to understand that you are not a lone wolf, but depend on finding
your family, your people, how you work as part of a larger whole.”
DIY post-punks from Cheshire, UK with their 2nd longplayer.
Key single: Harmonia
Louder Than War: “This absolute scorcher of an album set alight the start of 2022
with a sonic bang of pure power that screams along at breakneck speed throughout,
one which burns but never crashes.
TUTV: To be honest I never heard of this band until now. Thank you Louder Than War. These guys are amazing. No brakes, no breaks. Bingo!
The hardest working band in the world. 23 albums in 12 years. Hallelujah.
Key single: The Tripping Tap (18-minute riff-manic psych jam)
Louder Than War: “Omnium Gatherum, a miscellaneous collection; eclecticism order of the day as they pull on every one of their strengths to create what just may be their least defined yet most defining record to date.”
Released: CD/digital on 4 March 2022, vinyl
on 29th July, all via Alcopop! Records Order facilities: here
Cal (frontman): “Themes of insecurity and gender pop up a lot over the course of the album,
as well as lots of references to the human body breaking and being harmed in unnatural ways, although there’s no one overarching concept, simply because the songs have come together over such a long period of time. The title is not so much a reference to society going backwards, but more the band’s penchant for childish jokes. “Sitting in a van all day can get silly.”
Joe Talbot (Idles): “DITZ are the best band in Brighton, if not the world”.
TUTV said: After playing opener Clocks to the max, with its Blitzkrieg grinta, it felt
like the band and I were already out of breath. Wrong, as several KO Killers follow (Ded Würst / The Warden / I Am Kate Moss and the JAWDROPPING missile closer). Ditz are a mean manic post-punk machine. The first minutes of the slower pieces (Three / Instinct / Teeth) are misleading, halfway they explode like grenades.
No rest for the wicked, no rest for Ditz, no rest for your ears.
Pitchfork said: “The Irish post-punk band’s most demanding and musically adventurous album is also its most open-hearted, striking a perfect balance between tough and tender.”
TUTV wrote: Musically and lyrically, this 3rd LP is moony, mellow and pensive with frontman Grian Chatten becoming a modern-day crooner who touches sensitive hearts, especially Irish ones as this album is about their Irish past/present/future identity in and outside of their beloved country.
James Cox (frontman): “The majority of the themes on the album came from what was going on in the world around in summer 2019, Covid wasn’t in our lives and the biggest impact was Brexit and the madness our government were putting us through. I was reading a lot of J.G. Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut whilst all this craziness was going on around us and it was a weird headspace to get into.”
TUTV said: “Blistering hammer blows like Garden Of England, Slowly Separate, and Room 156 are already noted in my end-of-the-year list of best 2022 knockouts. And reflective reality checks like the Joy Division-esqueHealing, Moderation, Wild Eyed & and Loathsome, and the fucktastic Meanwhile have the sonic vehemence to burn holes in your stereo.
Raging ad roaring all the way. Big tunes, big emotions, big scores.
NME wrote: “Breezy and charming baroque indie. The Libertines and Babyshambles man’s first collaborative album with French musician, composer and producer Frédéric Lo, is testament to that: written and recorded in Pete’s new home of France, there’s a sense of place throughout.” Full review: here.
Turn Up The Volume: The result of the collaboration of wordsmith and poetry fanatic Peter Doherty and French composer Frédéric Lo who wrote the music, is a sparkling thing
of beauty. This is the record to play when you’re feeling lazy, and in the mood for doing jus nothing but daydreaming while lying in a green field enjoying the sun. Expect romantic lullabies with violins, piano and smooth horns, sweet little pop ditties, and sepia-colored tunes that transfer you to a place far away from our cruel reality.
Wolf:“It has become a retrospective record with songs that muse about childhood,
love or life or songs that were effectively written in my youth. In terms of sound, it is a combination of acoustic, electric and electronic sounds.”
Turn Up The Volume said: Vanwymeersh is a song architect. All lullabies, reveries, and tunes at play here stick quickly. But with every listen you discover how rich and subtly layered the musical arrangements and feel-good orchestrations. Then again he invites
you into his sonic labyrinth where he goes left, right, and back in one and the same song (When You’re Old And Grey And Full Of Sleep / Fall From Grace).
The easy-listing construction of his classy compositions transfers you to
a place where reality fades away and makes room for mellow memories.
TUTV said: Primarily Unik Ubik are prog rock fanatics with emphasis on rock who – I’m quite sure – have all Zappa and King Crimson, in their record collection. Mind you they’re
no copyists whatsoever and as prog rock has never been away (if you know young British gunslingers Black Country, New Road you’ll definitely understand what I mean) they don’t sound dated at all.
And UU have their own Van Der Graaf Generator‘s legendary saxophonist David Jacksonnamed Jean-Baptiste Rubin. The man has four lungs and blows as if his life depends on it. Top!
Artist: JAMES DOMESTIC (Essex/Suffolk, UK) Who: Member of former hardcore gangs The Domestics), plus Pi$$er,
Tokyo Lungs and half a dozen more. He’s a punk poet, DJ, singer/songwriter,
doctorate owner, producer, and inspirator of young punk bands. An artistic
centipede.
TUTV impressions: Domestic raps, rants, rips and rages through all of the 11 tracks of this solo debut LP with grit and guts. He’s a story-telling Cockney wordsmith, tackling politics, daily life shit, gobbling business sharks, and other related mess.
Musically anything is possible. Screechy guitars and 60s sounding Hammond organs to inflame tirades such as Itchy Itchy, Faze Out, Bean Counter and Push on Trough. Saxophone and steel drums straight from Trinidad on Mañana. Soulful female voices and Le Freak C’est Chic riffs on Never Enough. A reggae vibe with xylophone touches on Is Thay You?. Dub Jah Wobble bas on Weekend Carbs and Giblets. He just does what his ears like.
Turn Up the Volume: Oftenly, hard times can be an artistic inspiration for
musicians (for all sorts of artists, actually). It can work or not for the psyche
of the listener. Here it works magnificently.
Spleen constructed 10 sonic paintings about his struggle for life, about
soul-destroying and physical pain, and doubts about the present and
the future. His warm and vulnerable voice fits his heartfelt, tender and
very intimate ballads beautifully.
At times distressing, at times mournful, but in
the end there’s hope, redemption and lust for life.
TUTV‘s verdict: This 18-minute hardcore Apocalypse album is 10 minutes shorter
than the Ramones‘ debut LP. Clamorous frontman James Domestic spits and sneers with frenzied force. Botched Toe is a nasty riff beast for mosh-pit fanatics and Mötorhead freaks.
Stream ‘A False Glimmer Of Hope’ here
(but alert your neighbors first)…
Band: THE BARBITURATES Who: A one-man- act producing “a grungy psychedelic occult postpunk
Dadaist Guerrilla D.I.Y ontology discordian skizophonic rock band
from Derry city Ireland“.
New album: SELECTION BOX #1 What: A collection of B-sides, C-sides & soundscapes.
We hope you enjoy this hour-long album crammed full of
grungy psychedelic punk bliss & re’programming symbolism
this album is dedicated to the late great astrophysicist Carl Sagan.
What to expect: A 60-minute mishmash of retro blues, prog-rock mania, paranoid psychedelia, radio transmissions, a David Lynch film score played by Pink Floyd, big bang Kraftwerk disco, psych-o-billy cramps, garage havoc, symphonic synth surprises, amplified ambient ambiance, sonic hallucinations and everything that boggles your mind during this 60 minutes marathon. MENTAL!
SPIN (American webzine): “Maybe 2022 was just front-loaded and the final six months will be less eventful. (Judging by the release calendar, that’s probably a bad prediction.) Either way, we had trouble even narrowing this down to 30. Let’s meet back here at year’s end and see how things shake out.”
1. A Light for Attracting Attention by THE SMILE (with Thom Yorke)
“Mangled riffs and odd time signatures abound, and Yorke’s lifelong dread has never sounded more in tune with the outside world. A Light for Attracting Attention is so good, it almost makes you want to send Radiohead’s other three members a sympathy card.”
“A lockdown album billed as a mixtape, Caprisongs showed a less guarded and precise side of FKA Twigs. Perhaps that conceit served a deeper purpose, helping spur on some of her most playful and satisfying material.”
“It’s hard to imagine Black Country, New Road without singer-guitarist Isaac Wood, who quit the band for mental health reasons. It’s especially hard to imagine after Ants From Up There. While their 2020 debut positioned the seven-piece as their era’s elite revivalists of talky post-punk, the second album took a gentle turn toward melody. BCNR created a romantic, pastoral landscape out of their jazz-flavored noise rock, even hinting at folk and chamber music while drawing on just a bit of Revolution Summer fire.”
Influential and highly-praised American website Stereogum celebrates its 20th birthday this year. A lot of festive stuff the world’s best music blog as they claim themselves waits in the pipeline.
But first their multi-musical-genre list of the 50 best albums of 2022 so far.
Chris DeVille (Editor): “Perhaps as a result of artists sitting on new music during the pandemic’s early phases and dumping it all on us at the same time, it was unusually difficult
to pare down the list to just 50 albums this time around. Both in terms of widely acclaimed consensus favorites and personally beloved sleeper picks, there have just been so many albums to love. At the moment, the following are the ones the Stereogum staff loves the most… any album scheduled to be released by June 30 was eligible for this list, so some of these records are from the future.”
“Lamar is operating like only a few artists in pop history — a superstar at the height
of his powers confounding everyone’s expectations while trying to transcend his own.”
“Other albums of theirs might be more concise, but none is as impactful as this staggering showcase of the mystical energy that Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have channeled since
the start of their career.”
“There are underground rap titans all over Aethiopes — El-P, Boldy James, Quelle Chris — but the real meat is in hearing woods and Preservation dig deep into a culture that’s hostile to humanity in general and to Blackness in particular.”
“MOTOMAMI represents a gear switch from arms-length storytelling to something more personal. It goes hardest when Rosalía plays with contradiction: in music, in gender, in
simply being a living human being. Metamorphosis never sounded so exciting.”
1. ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’ by BIG THIEF
“After their phenomenal pair of 2019 albums, it was hard to believe Big Thief had anywhere to go but down, both creatively and in terms of the frothing hype surrounding them. And yet here they are with both their most acclaimed and accomplished collection of music yet. Big Thief don’t just prove they’re actually that good. They sound like they can do anything.”
TURN UP THE VOLUME 