Honest, in-depth album reviews by KLOF Mag – championing and curating intelligent, uncompromising voices in contemporary and experimental music since 2004.
Albums
Jazz-rock quartet Get The Blessing is a heterogenous beast at the best of times. Bassist and leader Jim Barr hails from Portishead while trumpeter Pete Judge and saxophonist Jake McMurchie are both National Youth Orchestra alumni. Tonight, with Goldfrapp’s Daisy Palmer replacing Clive Deamer on drums, they were more chimerical than ever. But the band take an almost schizophrenic joy in opposites and, slinking onto stage in identical evening wear, …
by Selina Ream
[rating=3] American singer songwriter Will Stratton says that his albums are ‘most comprehensible in fall or early winter’. Perhaps it’s because we’re across the pond, but Post Empire feels entirely suited for Summer. It has the sound of the mid-west, with adept and agile fingerstyle guitar that places itself in the middle of a dusty desert sunset, bouncing off rocks and into the ether. ‘You Divers’ begins with swooning filmic …
[rating=3] Two narratives will dominate discussion of Hannah Cohen’s Child Bride. The first situates her within a lineage of female singer-songwriters. The second recounts Cohen’s past life as a model before explaining the album’s emergence from a dizzyingly fashionable New York scene comprising artists like Ryan McGinley and Terry Richardson as well as a stable of the city’s finest musicians. But both approaches, straying too far from her music, fail …
by David Price
[rating=4] Thirteen Lost & Found is the second album by ex El Hombre Trajeado guitarist RM Hubbert (also known as ‘Hubby’). It’s produced by Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos and features collaborations with a baker’s dozen of friends and assorted Scottish musical royalty, including Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat and The Delgados’ Emma Pollock; Kapranos himself guests on a couple of tracks. It certainly gives the impression that Hubby and his Chemikal …
‘IS’ opens with an epic eighteen-minute six string slide piece entitled ‘When The Plains are Singing’. You can imagine flying over a wide open landscape with cold blue mountains, sweeping down over wild fields of long grass dancing around in the wind, until finally coming back to the imposing natural towers of the mountains. Steffen Basho-Junghans’s work has the uncanny ability to take the listener into almost lucid visual realms …
by KLOF
[rating=4] Laish have released their Obituaries EP which also signals a new development in the band’s direction. Whilst the title track ‘Obituaries‘ is a contemplative song dealing with a coomon theme throughout of obsession with death and legacy it showcases a much bigger and dynamic sound. Songwriter for Laish, Daniel Green: “I have begun to loosen my grip on my songs. What started life as a song-writing and bedroom recording …
by KLOF
[rating=4] Luke Roberts sophomore album The Iron Gates at Throop and Newport offers a departure from the sparse sound found on his debut Big Bells and Dime Songs. He continues to portray the fragility of human nature but things have changed in Luke’s life since his last release and those changes have naturally influenced his music. He now lives in Nashville, TN where he was raised I was born into …
by KLOF
The Big Eyes Family Players newest album, Family Favourites, is a collection of reworked old songs alongside new material, a “best-of,” if you will, or perhaps a retrospective…