Nick_Neyland has written the following articles:
This is a luxury purchase — it’s far from essential to anyone outside of hardy collectors - but the material is often imbued with a vitality that is both compulsive and enduring. »
It wasn’t exactly ATP: Jersey Shore, but it’s about as close as we’ll ever get to that concept, with a series of bands delivering the most anti-Springsteen racket the good citizens of Asbury have ever heard. »
The sound of a band completely at ease with themselves despite hostile surroundings, where music becomes both a document of life and a means to ease away from its greatest challenges for a little while. »
A band that’s far more in love with acting on strange ideas to make odd-sounding pop songs function than it is with any notion of technical perfection.»
Like most Faust work, there’s no particular pattern that Something Dirty clings to, almost as though the band hit a reset button on the completion of each song and tried to un-learn everything that came before.»
A little more variety, even if it’s just a return to the noisier interludes of those past recordings, would be welcome next time. »
The Shove! label has issued a set of the Jon Spencer Blue Explosion’s earliest works over the space of six CDs, which are packed with extra tracks, lavish packing, extensive liner notes, and all the Jon Spencer ephemera you could ever want in your life. »
An unexpected and welcome return.»
For the most part, Small Craft on a Milk Sea slots Brian Eno back into a forward thinking mindset, creating further realms of possibility for him to operate in. »
Coverage by Amanda Farah and Nick Neyland. The 30th anniversary of the annual CMJ Music Marathon brought plenty of surprises. Daft Punk and Phoenix jammed on a Close Encounters of the Third Kind riff at Madison Square Garden, Pitchfork set up its rival»
Each band member talks individually about the experience of bringing this singular work into the world.»
A guide to Brooklyn venues by Nick Neyland and Amanda Farah. Coco 66 66 Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11222 Website This new-ish former wood shop turned venue was put firmly on the map earlier this year when M.I.A. joined Sleigh Bells on its stag»
The first thing that struck me when I moved to Brooklyn in 2002 was how many anglophiles there were everywhere. I’d been to New York a few times prior to actually making the city my home, and on those trips I’d often connected with blowhard music fans who»
It ultimately feels like a slower turn of the wheel compared to the great leaps and bounds made on I Am a Bird Now and The Crying Light.»
While this set is expensive and excessive - appropriately so considering the indulgence that birthed it - this meticulously assembled incarnation of Station To Station is an object lesson on why some parts of rock history need to remain an enigma. »
It’s difficult not to love an album that segues from a track called ‘Evil’ into one named ‘Kitchenette’, but Grinderman 2 is less of an instant thrill than its predecessor.»
The New York incarnation of ATP may only come around once a year, but few folks who have braved the charmingly decrepit surroundings of Kutshers Country Club can resist its lure. Most of the lineup this time around is made up of 40-something musicians who are lifers at this game, working every shitty day job imaginable to support themselves, playing notorious flea pits all over the globe, and finding a home of sorts in the shape of multiple ATP festivals. Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch is on board as a curator, porn star Ron Jeremy is stalking the corridors, Bill Murray is rumoured to be in attendance (false, sadly), and Thurston Moore is talking about hummus at a Q&A. Just another vintage weekend in the Catskills for what is hopefully now an annual trans-Atlantic jaunt for the ATP organisation.»
As part of our 10-week "DiS is 10!" celebration, we have asked 50 of our favourite people to tell us about one of their favourite albums of the past 10 years. In our fourth "favourite 50" installment, DiS contributor Nick Neyland, shares his choice... »
Lost Where I Belong needs more than a few plays for listeners to really get comfortable being around Triana’s malaise, but once that work is put in, few other albums this year are capable of siphoning such stark and sorrowful emotions into song. »
In lesser hands, this would sound like a hodge podge of ideas loosely thrown together in an attempt to assimilate wildly disparate components pulled from the band’s admirably eclectic record collections. But Kaukolampi keeps his hand firmly on the tiller throughout, making sure there are enough common threads to sculpt a basic K-X-P aesthetic that gives the group a singular identity but also allows them to turn it inside out whenever they want. »
This is a series of demos, perhaps released to show how the band got from A-Z and shed the obvious hallmarks of those influences in the process. »
Holden is capable of spotting missing links and tying them up, but he’s also able to prevent the end result from sounding like a mesh of cacophonous ideas that don’t gel together. »
Once your needle has dropped to the end of side one, it’s only going back to the beginning again. »
Before Today burns brightest in the beautifully nostalgic pang of ‘Round and Round’. It’s such a multifarious and densely layered track that it could be dissected over a ream of pages, but here are a few highlights: the ghostly hush of the first verse, which perfectly mimics the atmosphere of Godley and Crème’s ‘Cry’; the pinging back and forth between Pink’s heliumised falsetto and his lower range in the first third of the song; that phone ring giving way to one of the most wonderfully awkward bridges between verse and chorus that you’ll ever hear; and the bittersweet drenched-in-pathos sing-along that the song descends into, which positions it as one of the most perfect summer songs of recent times. It won’t please the lo-fi purists, but ‘Round and Round’ gnarled by recorder grot just wouldn’t work—this is a song that really needed to scorch out of the orange Los Angeles perma-haze.»
With Christina Aguilera recruiting various indie luminaries for her next album and Gaga releasing nine-minute long videos and strapping cigarettes to her face, this should be the perfect time for Kelis to snatch back a chunk of the limelight, to demonstrate to these whippersnappers how to rip pop apart and put it back together with just the right amount of crackpot ideas and outlandish presentation. Instead, Kelis has headed in the other direction and gone for some relatively straightforward mainstream glory at a time when 'straightforward' is looking like a creaky, outmoded concept in the pop world. »
Langford and van Buskirk roughly fit into the kitchen sink sampling lineage that includes work by Steinski, Coldcut and the Avalanches. But Javelin’s aesthetic is less of a full-blown clarion call to party and more of a slow-build mid-tempo segue into something else. It could either work as perfect going out music or as a pre-comedown cipher into the twilight hours. »
It’s not clear whether Sweet Apple is a going concern or whether the folks involved simply high-fived one another and headed back to their day jobs at the close of Love & Desperation, but it’s unlikely there will be a clamour for much more of this stuff. »
Future generations will look back with considerable envy that we got to be around when an album that could so effectively eviscerate our expectations of what music is and can be was released by a band entering its fifth decade of existence. »
Their origins may be in the still-thriving DIY scene in Brooklyn, but Mary Pearson and Rob Barber of High Places have always had a glassy pop edge to their music.»
Los Angeles suits them just fine, but the question that greets any band with such a desire and talent for amelioration is: where next? »
