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
Kieran Hebden Steve Reid
NYC
(Domino, 2008)
May/September romance is endorphine rush of jazztronic thrills.
Occasionally, you just get sick of an artist. Probably you surfeited at some point and the next dish they offer, however toothsome it might appear, will just get pushed aside. This is exactly how I felt about Kieran Hebden after Four Tet's 2005 album Everything Ecstatic, a brilliant glitchadelic collage that seemed to draw a line under the genre and say, move on. So I did, and afforded Hebden's subsequent immersion in an improvisational relationship with jazz drummer Steve Reid (Ornette, Miles, Sun Ra, all the tough guys) little more than a sideways glance.
More fool me, as I was to discover upon spinning NYC - somewhat after the fact - and finding myself impelled into an alternate universe of rich and bubbling sound. The duo's fourth full-length liaison is a rhythmic dystopia, pitched rattlingly ever-forward, a recurring theme being a steady, pitch-lifting wail that makes you feel like you're strapped to a Saturn 5 rocket as it rips through the fabric of space, or - more likely, perhaps - the space of Fabric. Hebden steers clear of melody as such and concentrates on rhythm and weirdness, while Reid keeps a trashy, rocking groove going that never lapses into clever-cleverness. It's like an old-skool drum battle, except kit vs computers, and minus the solos.
Most astonishing is fourth track Arrival, which couches Reid's super-dry, super-nasty snare sound in a bed of echoing sound-blooms. Imagine a stop-motion film of a city reclaimed by nature as Jaki Liebezeit and The Cocteau Twins jam in the pit. Reid says that after a lifetime trading licks with the pioneers of jazz, he has found in Hebden a "musical soul mate". Everything about NYC says he's right.
Danny Eccleston
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 12/08/2009
Further Listening
Four Tet – Everything Ecstatic (Domino, 2005)
Steve Reid – Rhythmatism (Mustevic, 1975; reissue on SoulJazz)
Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics – Inspiration Information 3 (Strut, 2009)
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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