Articles by Jared Dix
This one then, is a history lesson, part of a continuing examination of an extraordinary cultural contribution. It awaits your curiosity.
Collapsing thirty odd years of underground rock weirdness into something powerful and sticky.
Angry and absurd, sharply constructed. It’s pretty much everything you want from a fourth mclusky album.
Is Lancashire’s history as blood soaked as Midsomer? In the meantime this is, ahem, killer stuff.
Death Hilarious finds Pigs firing on all cylinders, cranking out the huge riffs and pile driver rhythms in a haze of noise and distortion. Still seriously fun.
On their fourth album Snapped Ankles are more themselves than ever, doubling down on their core idea of dance as a powerful therapy against harsh reality
The thing is, Alabama 3 are true believers, in their radical politics and loose outsider stance but most of all in the healing and transcendent power of music. Cynicism just doesn’t get you this far down the road, they’re just not earnest, or solemn. Because acid house and country music aren’t either.
The results are pretty much exactly what you expect, an abrasive industrial hellscape with screaming.
Yaang are fully carbonated and unnecessarily caffeinated, they have a short attention span, a drum machine and at least one dubious moustache.
Essentially Rattle is all rhythm and chant and yet it is totally unlike that shaking hoodoo mania thing, completely different to all the spooky drones and incense types.
As always with Hecker it’s emotional but rich and complex, allowing for multiple possibilities.
End Of The Middle is another extraordinary achievement for Dawson (or Rich), it’s compassionate, smart and unfailingly human.
Great from top to bottom, front to back. Honestly, while it joins an impressive discography it’s up there with his very best.
At times the whole album feels suspended between deep breaths at the edge of sleep.
Their ‘parole jazz’ party is a wild affair of drum rumble, filthy bass and squalling sax. Overpowered by skronk.
Heart-thumping skronk punk belters descending into manic twisted noise. It’s tremendously good fun.
Not the sort of band to play the hits exactly but also undoubtedly, and perhaps essentially, an incredible live experience.
Drones and samples, bass distortion, jazz drums and industrial grind. They don’t really do repeating phrases or loose improvisation. It changes and surrounds.
Stripped back instrumentation paired to punchy structural minimalism for a sound that is both urgent and intimate.
