Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
Rod the Mod finds his solo footing, headed for stardom, with the Faces in his wake.
6:00 AM GMT 22/06/2011
Features Disc of the day
Reigns
We Lowered A Microphone Into The Ground
(Jonson Family, 2005)
Pseudo-Victorian experiment in audiospeleology accesses beauty of inner earth.
In this current age of electronic downloads and free stuff, where kids listen to autotuned R&B through tinfoil speakers secreted in the back of their megapixel phones, and many upstanding music fans seem happy with the middle-aged club-bathroom mitherings of this man and his band you have to admire any modern artist who can still make the full-length CD album a thing of beauty, mystery and carefully-crafted wonder. Refusing to give their proper names and purporting to hail from the Kingdom of Wessex, brothers ‘Tim and Roo Farthing’, aka “operatives A & B”, have, since 2004, been recording haunted pastoral soundtracks born of fabricated, fantastical narratives, enthralling sound symphonies that realign our understanding of the strange, shuttered world beyond the everyday. Their forthcoming release, The House On The Causeway, was purportedly recorded in a permanently fog-shrouded house at the end of a man-made granite promontory off the Dorset coastline (between Black Ven and Golden Cap, walking fans), while its Lovecraftian predecessor, 2006’s Styne Vallis, told of the legend of a Wessex town flooded in 1970 to make way for a reservoir, a reservoir that only ever served the surrounding area with grey, stagnant water. This is where it all started, a disarmingly delicate arrangement of glockenspiel, electronica, acoustic guitar, harmonium, glass harmonica, found sounds and strange ice-hung vocals that gradually shift, change and darken as the ‘microphone’ is cast down into the earth, coming upon everything from Buried Chandelier (416 metres) to A Layer Of Clay (897 metres) and, finally, the Glassworks (1 mile). Sure, if all you ask of non-mainstream music is that it smells a bit and does this then Reigns might all sound a bit, well, fancy, but they are currently making modern ‘underground’ music with a Janus-like awareness of the past and the future, tiny little CDs rich with ambition, invention and a novelistic imagination. I’ll still have them long after I’ve got rid of all that turgid guitar rock rebellion.
Andrew Male
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 19/02/2009
Further Listening
Reigns – Styne Vallis (Jonson Family, 2006)
Xela – The Dead Sea (Type, 2006)
The Unnameable: Four Tales Of Horror By H.P. Lovecraft – Read by David Cade (Tales of Orpheus, 2002)
Previous Disc of the day
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Earl Brutus - Larky
Last salvo of Ginsters Pasty-Warholism from Britpop ramraiders.
12:04 PM GMT 08/06/2011
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Loudon Wainwright - T-Shirt
An overlooked small wonder from an unpredictable career.
6:00 AM GMT 03/06/2011
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Landscape - From The Tea-rooms Of Mars… To The Hell-holes Of Uranus
Dry computer club Futurists, upon hitting implausible chart paydirt.
6:00 AM GMT 17/05/2011
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Causa Sui - Summer Sessions Vol 1-3
Epic Danish jams, for when the neighbours get you down.
6:00 AM GMT 12/05/2011
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r they gonna play on top of the pops any time soon?
Posted by horrendous harry tamponhead at 12:08 PM GMT 07/03/2009 Report Abuse
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