Spectorbullets – Spectorbullets (Mayakovsky Produkts)

4 stars
The brainchild of New York-dwelling Swedish singer/songwriter Gustaf Heden and former Fire Engines/Win/Piefinger drummer/sonic magician Russell Burn, Spectorbullets mix of stripped-down anti-folk and strung-out rock n roll euphoria is on a restless mission to condense the spirit of Jonathan Richman into a loose-knit and gloriously messy street-smart confection of post-punk skiffle. Such wide-eyed and snarly felicitations are poignantly offset by after-hours opener, ‘He Needs It,’ a sad-eyed and unrequited piano-tinkling lament that features on vocals the final recording of Edinburgh’s lost genius poet Paul Reekie. For that alone this is an album to treasure.

The List, November 2010

ends

Comments

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES - Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3 - Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART - Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS - Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY - Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW! - Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS - I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS - In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES - Everso 10. THE SEERS - Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND - You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS - We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE - Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS - Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND - In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES - Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS - Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES Don’t Stop ( Silvertone ORE 1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h

Coffee-Table Notes

Search This Blog