Sounding like a band crossing the energy of American garage surf gods The Lords Of Altamont, French punks Les Thugs with the legendary Motörhead, Frau Blücher combine a poppy, but aggressive garage-punk with hints of metal. The band name comes from a running gag from the movie Young Frankenstein, and you can read about the history of the name here. Gags and comedy aside, Frau Blucher make great power pop.
Dead Can Dance singer and multi-instrumentalist Brendan Perry is absolutely enamored with Greek culture, and it’s obvious because a lot of DCD’s work has an affinity towards it. Perry is especially appreciative of rebetiko, the local variant of the blues in Greek culture. This album is his paean to his adoration of rebetiko, and is perhaps the first time some of these ballads have been recorded in English. This disc is a labor of love.
Tommy Guerrero’s music came to me via a recommendation of a friend online. I had heard his name bandied about years ago because of friends of mine who were into skateboarding, but I had no idea he was making music. And such good music, I must say. The album is full of instrumental psychedelic tracks. According to Tommy, influences such as Ethio-Jazz, Afrobeat and spiritual jazz inflect the album, and you can hear this from the first few notes. This is one I’ll be coming back to frequently.
There’s not a lot more to say about the legendary Curve that I could add to, save for most of the 1990s, they were among the best shoegaze bands, and it could be said that maybe only My Bloody Valentine were more highly esteemed, yet the members never seemed to stop working. Dean Garcia maintained a great career as a session musician and even playing in a band with his daughter called SPC ECO (Space Echo), while lead singer Toni Halliday started two other projects called Scylla and Chatelaine, as well as appearing on a track with the American band…
This has to be one of the most charmingly weird, frankly unclassifiable discs I’ve heard in a while. Andrew Paine & Richard Youngs manage to pull together a collection that should sound like a mess, yet it’s a rather enjoyable one. The music goes from lo-fi disco tracks (which for some reason, remind me heavily of the ur-supergroup Big In Japan) to outtakes from a later-era David Bowie session. This is a gritty gem of a disc. The only shame is that it took me six years to come across it.
This one-track release was in my queue while I was doing some work, and when it came on, I assumed it was a track of Spanish cold wave from the early 1980s. Toronja, as it turns out, is a Chilean project from this year, and they manage to do a good job making a sound that is at once fresh and vintage.
Record label and magazine La Souterraine offer the best indie music coming out of France these days. Their latest release by Suzanne Belaubre is bound to be a cold wave masterpiece. The tracks are short and the production is excellent, if sparse. That sparseness works well with the music, and it gives the music an odd, very French, electro-pop vibe to the tunes. It’s a quirky album, but well worth hearing a few times.
From the bio: Allan J. Kimmel (aka Departure Street) is an American/French solo electric guitarist based in Paris France. He plays alternative ambient and neo-folk music with shoegaze & American blues underpinnings. I could not have said it more succinctly. This is not my first time reviewing Allan’s wonderful guitar work. I featured his previous release, Two Islands In The Heart, in March of 2020. This album is one filled with clouds of guitar ambiance which relaxes and doesn’t get too much in the way of one’s thoughts. There continues to be a shoegaze or very minimalistic indie rock-flavored guitar…
Tom Carter was the guitarist of improvisers Charalambides, one of the heirs of fine Texas psychedelia. His new album, Beautiful Savior, comes as a pleasant, hopeful respite after being inundated by moronic ‘devil’-related titles. Is this an acid-Christian album? Who knows? The tones from this album speak for themselves. The music is beautiful, sparse and has a hazy, relaxed feel to it. It clocks in at around 30 minutes, which is far too short for enjoying such a blissfully folky album which reminds me so much of John Fahey.
I would never have come across Lorelle Meets The Obsolete, a Guadalajara, Mexico-based band without the help of my new friend, Ali, whose taste in music is absolutely impeccable. There is something wonderfully retro about the band, who reference a lot of bands like the Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, and even Joy Division in the track Unificado. A worth release.