Coffee-Table Notes

Kevin Rowland has never been shy of exposing himself emotionally in song. From his early incarnations of Dexys Midnight Runners almost half a century ago, Rowland has driven a restless musical potpourri of Celtic white Soul that has veered between euphoric and mournful in its mercurial brilliance. Now here he is with the latest edition of his newly rechristened group after a decade as just Dexys with what is hinted as being the grand finale to Rowland’s musical quest.   What we get in this David Holmes produced affair is a Proustian trawl through Rowland’s personal back pages awash with purging and redemption. This forms a companion piece of sorts to Rowland’s candid memoir, Bless Me Father (2025) and accompanying in conversation shows.   From the opening remembrance of the dead end kids he ran with as a Wolverhampton tearaway in ‘My Life in England Pt.1’, Rowland casts himself as an old sage reflecting on his lot by way of well-worn shaggy dog stories of times past. Inbetween...

As the Creeping Bent Organisation winds down operations after thirty years on the frontline of art/pop interface, it is only fitting that one of its swan song releases gets back to its roots. As one of the label’s mainstays from the start, The Secret Goldfish do this on their fourth opus through a collection of cover versions guest-starring a posse of fellow travellers. As a work in progress on the go since 1996, the result is a delirious pop mash-up of influence and homage that joins several generations of assorted rock family tree type dots while still sounding every inch The Secret Goldfish.   Much of this is down to vocalist Katy Lironi, who takes songs by Vic Godard, ex Orange Juice guitarist James Kirk and Fire Engine turned Sexual Object Davy Henderson and makes them her own. There is something Proustian too hearing Lironi sing the Shop Assistants’ mournful Somewhere in China, Godard’s Stop That Girl and Henderson’s Nectarine No 9 era 22 Blue with a cast list that includes G...

Five stars Like a pulp fiction auteur, Barry Adamson has been laying bare his soundtrack inspired brand of after-hours sleazy listening for more than three decades now. With a back-story that saw him come crawling out of punky, funky Manchester as bassist with divine fabulists Magazine before taking things to extremes with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Adamson has long left those old gangs behind. Stepping out of the shadows, he has become a maverick loner and one-man nouveau rat pack with ever-expanding widescreen ambitions as he continues to remake and remodel classic soul-funk big band bump and grind in his own retro cool image.   So it goes with Cut to Black, Adamson’s tenth solo affair, and his first since the publication of the first part of his memoir, Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars. It is his first outing too since his soundtrack to the documentary, Scala, which tells the story of London’s ultimate outsider cinema. In a parallel universe, such a long lost emporium...

Four stars   Niki King sports flowing white robes offset against a starlit sky in publicity shots for the Edinburgh sired singer’s sixth album. If this image suggests some kind of celestial awakening, the record’s title too hints of personal and spiritual transcendence across a self produced set of songs of strength and heartbreak.   Set to a lush backdrop provided by a band with roots in Edinburgh’s criminally unsung after-hours jazz-soul scenes that King emerged from in the 1990s, the album’s twelve cuts show off the light and shade of love, life and everything that goes with it. This makes for an eminently grown up collection that is by turns reflective, mournful and redemptive.   The opening ‘Soul Route’ is a horn-led statement of intent featuring a core of keyboardist Steven Christie, guitarist Aki Remally, double bassist Paul Gilbody and drummer Stuart Brown. ‘Dreamer’ charts the travails of attempting to navigate around a fickle music business in a song that become...

4 stars   Opening an album with a track called ‘Hell’ is something of a gauntlet-slapping giveaway of things to come on Sleater-Kinney’s eleventh album, their fourth studio outing since Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker and drummer Janet Weiss reunited in 2014. With Weiss departing in 2019, Brownstein and Tucker may no longer be the punky upstarts of yore, but their confessional meditations on loss, grief, confusion and crisis are  born from hard lived experience.   This is certainly the case on ‘Little Rope’, recorded in the shadow of the deaths of Brownstein’s parents in a car crash. While much of the album was written before the accident, it nevertheless gives the record its emotional heart. Like Tucker sings on ‘Hunt You Down’, ‘the thing you fear the most will hunt you down’.   Despite this, ‘Little Rope’ isn’t the unfettered howl one might expect. Rather, the pain has been channelled into a well-crafted and eminently grown-up collection tinged with depth and...

In 2015, The Sexual Objects released the greatest album that no-one ever heard. Marshmallow was a swoonsome collection of garage band glam and crunchy instrumental homages to left-field guitar icons of yore. By rights, the record's rifftastic technicolour compendium should have set the world alight and scooped every award in town. Except, this was a concept dreamt up by Sexual Object in chief and former Fire Engine Davy Henderson, who, along with fellow SOBS Simon Smeeton, Graham Wann, Douglas MacIntyre and Ian Holford, opted to release Marshmallow in a limited edition of one. Auctioned on ebay, the highest bidder for the band's second full length opus also gained full exclusive rights to any re-release until the twelfth of never (which, as any Donny Osmond fan knows, that's a long long time). After fifty-three bids, Marshmallow was sold for a cool £4,213. All was quiet until last month, when the successful bidder was revealed to be the elusive team behind Triassic Tusk Re...

Music and art are hardly strange bed-fellows, and indeed the liaison has been an ever-fertile breeding ground for cross-artform collaborations. As releasing records has become a more bespoke affair, editionising what’s effectively several works of art in one has made for creations of rare beauty. So it goes with the Glasgow/Berlin-based Infinite Greyscale label. This new release ticks all the above boxes as part of their exquisitely realised 10” singles club, which has previously hosted work by German electronic duo Mouse on Mars and composer Holly Herndon. This latest opus from Glasgow's Sound of Yell compounds and emboldens the label's aesthetic at every level. Released in a numbered edition of 300 on single sided aqua-blue vinyl with a screen-printed B-side visualised by Ulrich Schmidt-Novak, and with handmade artwork by label bosses/ curators Paul McDevitt and Cornelius Quabeck. Sound of Yell is the chameleon-like project of Stevie Jones, whose peripatetic musical ad...

Somewhere in the midst of the 1980s/1990s indie-pop goldrush, amongst the Baggy casualties and shoegaze superstars, there were a million others of equal merit who fell by the wayside, plagued by bad luck, bad timing or both. Come on down Hugh Duggie and Ian White, who, as Sons of the Descent, are the waggish brains behind this low-key smorgasbord of quietly crafted off-kilter pop gems. Given their respective backgrounds, it was inevitable that Duggie and White would eventually find each other. Duggie served time in late period Lowlife, the band formed by ex Cocteau Twins bassist Will Heggie, before going on to front Mute Records-connected noiseniks, Foil. White, meanwhile, played guitar with Edinburgh band The Wendys, who were signed to Factory Records not long before the late Tony Wilson's musical plaything/utopian folly crashed and burned into financial ignominy, a glorious victim of its own largesse. The result of the pair's collective pedigree is a suitably wacked-out coll...

Dundee, as everyone knows, is on the up. With much of central Dundee having been flattened and turned into a series of building sites over the last couple of years, and with developments such as the forthcoming V&A design museum looming at the dock-side, Tayside's would be European Capital of Culture 2023 is in the throes of reinvention. In response, Dundee-born Andrew Wasylyk takes a wander around his home town in the form of eight impressionistic instrumentals that create a wistful psycho-graphic portrait of a time and place caught somewhere between past, present and future. Such a line of inquiry is a far cry from Mitchell's tenure as front-person of country-tinged alt-pop outfit the Hazey Janes. His stint as bassist with a rejuvenated Idlewild too is not obvious grounding for such a leap. Mitchell has previous form with atmospheric ambience, however, by way of the dreamy electro space pop of Art of Memory Palace, the duo he formed with Raz Ullah to record the ...

Over thirty-odd years, Sean Dickson's musical journey has been a wonder to behold. From fronting Buzzcocks inspired Glasgow shamblers turned Baggy love-gods t he Soup Dragons, Dickson's sideways move to psych-pop troupe The High Fidelity was nothing compared to the full-blown damascene dance-floor conversion that eventually followed. Since then, Dickson's euphoric adventures as a DJ and producer under the Hifi Sean moniker have sounded as far away from the Bellshill scene he came out of as can be. 2016's Ft. album capitalised on Dickson's eclectic connections with a hands-in-the-air grab-bag of beat-heavy confections featuring an all-star cast of guest vocalists and artistes. These range d from Yoko Ono and Bootsy Collins to B52 Fred Schneider singing about trucks and Suicide's Alan Vega 's last recording . As if such an array of synthesised soul, poppers-friendly floor-fillers and banging techno- abstractions wasn't out there enough, there wa ...

Teen Canteen first swaggered into view a few years back like a Glasgow girl gang weaned on C86 indie-pop and 1960s’ bubblegum. The sound the all-female quartet aspired to was a consciously constructed sugar-rush led by lead vocalist, synth-ist and chief song-writer Carla Easton. As their canon matured, while heart-on-sleeve harmonies remained key, a meatier, beatier post indie fabulism emerged that was writ large across their 2016 debut album, Say it All With A Kiss. A restless Easton went on to all but upstage herself with the soul-glam euphoria of side-project Ette on the Homemade Lemonade album. Barely pausing for breath, Easton is back in the Teen Canteen fold with guitarist Chloe Philip, bass player Sita Pieraccini and drummer Debs Smith for this shiny new four-track EP. Released on 10” transparent blue and red vinyl with white splatter, studio sparkle seems to have been sprinkled liberally across all four songs. Any pre-conceptions of tweeness are blown away from the sta...

It's kind of appropriate that it's taken the Secret Goldfish sixteen years to record a new album. For a band whose effusive garage-band punk pop has roots in post-Postcard C86 outfit Fizzbombs as much as 1960s girl-band bubblegum, this long-awaited follow-up to their Aqua-Pet and Mink Riots albums, with B-side and out-takes collection Jet Streams inbetween, is a coming of age of sorts. Not that there's anything remotely sulky or world-weary in this fresh-as-a-daisy ten-song set from a band tellingly named after an imaginary tome name-checked in The Catcher in the Rye , J.D. Salinger's iconic novel of adolescent angst. Penned in the main by singer Katy McCullars and guitarist John Morose, with bass player Steven McSeveney and drummer Paul Turnbull providing ballast, roots are acknowledged by way of covers of Vic Godard and Edwyn Collins and an opening track written with Sexual Objects main-stays Davy Henderson and Simon Smeeton. The end result heralds the warmest r...

For almost two decades now, Steven Severin's solo instrumental work has largely kept its own counsel in the shadows. The output of the former co-founder and bass player of Siouxsie and the Banshees has been prodigious, with a dozen albums of dark ambient soundscapes released thus far. This began in 1998 with Visions , an extended reworking of his soundtrack to Nigel Wingrove's short film, Visions of Ecstasy , almost a decade before. Unreleased until 2012, Wingrove's sensual fantasia inspired by the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila is the only film to have been refused a certificate by the British Board of Film Censors on the grounds of blasphemy. Since then, Severin has released scores for theatre and film, including the soundtrack for supernatural thriller London Voodoo and Richard Jobson's film, The Purifiers , as well as for one-time Edinburgh Festival Fringe dance performer/director, Shakti. Since Severin himself moved to Edinburgh twelve years ago, he has ...

When Martin Bramah left The Fall in 1979 to form Blue Orchids, it set in motion a musical lineage that has run parallel with fellow Fall co-founder Mark E Smith's bloody-minded forty-year assault on culture. History will decide whether the latter is either a masterpiece of social engineering or else the extended public self-destruction of a terminal drunk. While ex Fall guitarist Marc Riley and now Brix Smith-Start have come to renewed prominence playing records on the radio, the off-shoot acts spawned by Smith's army have received less attention than they deserve. Now that Smith-Start has attempted to reclaim her past with early eighties Fall rhythm section Steve and Paul Hanley and push it towards a future with less baggage as Brix and The Extricated, all that might be about to change. This is good news for Bramah, whose current incarnation of Blue Orchids is having something of a renaissance, as this new four-track EP confirms. Partly recorded at the same time as 2016...

The spirit of nightclubs past, present and future hangs joyously over these two releases by different permutations of a Glasgow underground supergroup steeped in the city's DIY art/music interface. Both are limited edition 12” vinyl releases packaged in sleeves that resemble old-school DJ-friendly platters as flash as they are cheesy. Both too are as myth-makingly conceptual as you can get. The first finds electronicist and Turner Prize-nominated artist Luke Fowler, Franz Ferdinand drummer Paul Thomson and vocalist/composer Richard Youngs joining forces for six slices of insular techno. These pieces are seemingly inspired by allegedly long-lost Italian synthesiser factory worker turned composer/performer, Emmanuel Maggi. The second finds the trio augmenting the line-up with bassist Michael Francis Duch as they morph into AMOR to produce a more organic stew of post-punk avant-disco that could have been excavated from circa 1979 Ladbroke Grove. Key to both records is Richard Young...

If ever there was an artist you'd least expect to burst into a massed chorus of sha-la-las, it’s Alasdair Roberts. Here, after all, is a singer, song-writer and musician steeped in a Scottish folk tradition forged by his Callendar roots even as he found a kindred spirit in Will Oldham's similarly doleful backwoods laments. Under the name of Appendix Out, Roberts played the indie circuit with an ever changing line-up, and proved himself way ahead of the curve in terms of the embrace of traditional music which has since permeated more mainstream culture. As the eight albums and other sundry releases under his own name have proved, however, Roberts is no tweed-sporting faux-folk flunky. Rather, his explorations and reconstructions of the arcane have sounded thrillingly contemporary, even as they looked to a more spectral past. Roberts' Oldham-produced 2005 No Earthly Man album may have been a collection of ancient murder ballads, but at times it seemed to channel the Velvet ...

In the jungle, the mighty jungle, something is stirring. Or at least it is in the world of Usurper, the Edinburgh-based duo of Malcy Duff and Ali Robertson, whose sonic missives over the last decade have become increasingly-expansive exercises in performance that go beyond notions of sound art. Through a series of sketches, routines and goof-offs, all punctuated by noises off made by a bucket-load of acquired junk, Usurper's modus operandi falls somewhere between Samuel Beckett, The Goons and Tex Avery by way of John Hurt's experimental sound designer in Jerzy Skolimowski's neglected 1978 film, The Shout. Following a busy year of monthly CDr releases on their own Giant Tank label, Usurper's cup runneth over, even more on this forty-five minute cassette released on the Sheffield-based Singing Knives label. A sequel of sorts to their 2012 Cdr, The Big Four , which referenced assorted quartets of personality traits, thrash metal bands and coincidence, this follow-up p...

The labels of this vinyl only 45RPM 12” are a giveaway of sorts of what’s in store on this latest eight track opus from these Glasgow-sired purveyors of garage guitar rumble. On the A side is a close-up mug-shot of 7ft 4 inch French wrestler and long-time scourge of Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant. On the flip, a drawing of a ghost-like masked Lucha Libre style figure peers out. Such images act as the perfect trailer for a set of furious lo-fi growlers recorded in one afternoon by a larger than life and potentially dangerous crew of cartoon superheroes. The hyped-up quartet's onstage image of wrestling masks and German army helmets resurrect the sort of pantomime outrage of 1960s schlock-meister Screaming Lord Sutch and trash-psych merchants The Mummies. Bassist Kyle Thunder, guitar man Handsome Al, drum beater extraordinaire Shug and plinky-plonky keyboardist Pete – just Pete – keep their secret identities close to their chests. So it goes for more than a decade of WWE inspire...

The title of this cassette collaboration between two of the most prolific exponents of minimalist drone has the playful feel of an old-school dub soundclash plate a la King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown . Such implications may be of good-humoured competition, but the cover's funereal monochrome collages beg to differ. The titles of the seven pieces which the images illustrate point to something darker. It's as if the force behind the music has surrendered control, and is now being held hostage in sense-deranged captivity. The result is filtered through a lysergic fug that moulds it into something amorphous and harder to pin down. This is sort of what happened when Gateshead-based Lee Stokoe went willingly after sending seven then works-in-progress to Fraser Burnett, the Edinburgh-based sonic auteur who records as Fordell Research Unit, or F.R.U. As Culver, Stokoe has released a slew of material over two decades. With his own Matching Head imprint, he has released more than 200 ...

In 2015, Ted Milton's skronk-punk power trio Blurt released their Beneath Discordant Skies album on Salamander Records . After almost forty years on the margins, Milton had grown nostalgic for the days of recording in the cramped four-track studio run by his brother and former Blurt drummer Jake not long after the band had been formed in Stroud, Gloucestershire. This followed Milton's peripatetic career as a book-binder, a poet whose work appeared in the definitive 1960s UK underground anthology, Children of Albion , and an avant-garde puppeteer who had been seen both in Terry Gilliam's film, Jabberwocky , and on Tony Wilson's pioneering arts magazine show, So it Goes. Some of Blurt's early material appeared on Wilson's Factory record label, since when Milton and various line-ups of his trio have released a plethora of wilfully off-kilter material, with no recognisable indulgences in multi-track overdubs apparent. For their sixteenth album, Milton and co deca...