Oriole is the new album by The One Ensemble. Bolder and more dynamic than previous albums, it showcases The One Ensemble‘s ability to combine thrilling live playing with compositional elegance, shifting between hard-nosed rhythmic workouts and string miniatures, between wayward waltzes and open-throated song. Oriole features the core quartet of Shane Connolly (drums and percussion), Peter Nicholson (cello), Daniel Padden (guitar) and Aby Vulliamy (viola and accordion). Click here for details.
Other Recent Releases:
A Basque singer, a Welsh violinist, a bass player from Bolton and a drummer who is also a puppeteer - it could only be Tattie Toes. Meet one of Glasgow's most interesting bands... Tattie Toes play a kind of made-up (isn’t everything?) basque balkan jazz folk strammash, with a dash of avant garde violin screech, ceilidh stomp and shanty wooze thrown in for (un)measure. Dense, yet brittle; a rhythmic fucking delight; big ballsy gutsy singing from small Basque lady; a clattering Ron Johnson-esque kinetic rattle [to paraphrase Marxbeard]. Click here for details.
Selected from a backlog of practice tapes that span Chandeliers' four-year history, Dirty Moves not only charts the band’s evolution, but also displays their stunning artistic flexibility. Over the course of 33 tracks, we hear Chandeliers digging deep into groove mode, all the while engaging in the sort of open-eared improvisational interplay that fuels the band’s music, as melodic motifs get bounced around and the beat gets taken in unexpected and delightful directions. Over the course of 33 tracks, the group snakes all over the musical map and brilliantly runs through a diverse array of styles. From middle eastern synth-pop to Congotronic clatter, electro and 21st century techno-funk, plus a few slips in cinematic mode and a couple of brief sojourns into celestial realms. Click here for details.
Within the bright lights of Cambridge, The Doozer makes his home. The city informs the music. The music informs the city. 'Great Explorers' is the culmination of 2 weeks of intense recording, and a good few months of refining and mixing. You’ll find global sounds for homeland pleasures, touching upon our savage civilisation, streetwalkers and wavers, and the oldest carvers. With the tone being of paramount importance, the record was recorded to tape with analogue reverb all the way, assisted by the adhoc creation of spring and reverb chambers. It’s a three-dimensional world with coloured pictorial sound spaces. Look out for the aluminium dome. Click here for details.
‘Warm Room’ is the fourth album from The Big Eyes Family Players , after ‘Do The Musiking’ (Pickled Egg 2006), Donkeysongs (Rusted Rail 2008) and ‘Folk Songs’ - by James Yorkston & The Big Eyes Family Players (Domino 2009). The album was conceived initially as an ‘ode’ to folk music. Those perhaps expecting an album of string-led polkas and klezmer-styled pieces may be a little surprised. Rather than necessarily being an album of folk material, ‘Warm Room’ is an attempt to dissect the genre, albeit through the Big Eyes filter and focuses in on those individual elements. 'The Warm Room' is available now from Pickled Egg. Click here for details.
Three years in the making and clocking in at a more-ishly bite-sized 23 minutes, the title of ‘Animation’ fits in more ways than one. Early impressions suggest an almost cartoon energy to Freeze Puppy's world and the hyper real, often poignantly flawed characters who inhabit it through Tom’s smart and concise wordplay (guest narrators include lovelorn drink drivers, imaginary friends, abject loners and serial gamblers amongst other skewed societal misshapes...). Yet listen on, and it goes further: as songwriter, producer and lyricist, Wilson works like the consummate stop-frame animator - hunched over his songs like they were tiny audio figurines, chiselling out their strange, fleeting little lifetimes over a series of acutely poised movements, drawing breath from them through colours, textures and melodies that, given half a chance, will pitch camp in your subconscious for what may prove to be decades. At once audaciously complex and eminently digestible, ‘Animation’ is pop created within limits, existing in joyous disregard of them. The very best kind. 'Animation' is available now from Pickled Egg. Click here for details.
Now, are a London-based ensemble, who fuse elements of krautrock, free jazz, lo-fi, synth pop and music from various ethnic sources, to create their own unique, highly inventive sound. 'Ooodipoomn' is the band’s fifth album, - their second on Pickled Egg - as they continue to refine their special blend of experimental sounds and pop. The group have collaborated with a host of visionary underground musicians, including Damo Suzuki (a joint album, ‘The London Evening News’ was released on TRI recordings in 2007), Charles Hayward (This Heat), Mike Watt (The Stooges/The Minutemen/Firehose/Ciccone Youth), Norways' Metronomicon collective and Salvatore, Kaori Tsuchida (The Go! Team). 'Oodipoomn' is available now. Click here for details.
'The Stumbling Block' is Zukanican's, second album and third release on Pickled Egg. Recorded in 2007-8 at The Kif in Liverpool the 8 track album mirrors the band’s live performances perhaps more than their other releases. The album was recorded and mixed by Zukanican and studio trickery has been kept to a minimum; what you hear 'is was'. Here's what Rockerilla said of their last album: "Among the many influences declared by the last generation of rock musicians, no one is quoted as preposterously as Sun Ra, who inherited a record that was Stockhausen's own in the 70’s. This preamble is to say that the joyful Zukanican commune is conversely the legitimate daughter of the bandleader from Saturn, with their rhythmic exuberance, the tone colours of the woodwind, the spacey and ancestral essence of their music. Add to this a little subterranean Can-school kraut pulse, a tip of jazz-rock with early '70s Miles Davis' harmonies and the enthusiasm of some bantering psyche-heads, and you'll get a hint of the lifeblood flowing through the grooves". 'The Stumbling Block' is available now. Click here for details.
Last updated: 27th May 2012 by Nigel Turner.
