What little I know about 'drill music' could be written on the back of a pamphlet about drill music. However, if I were to pick a hill to die on, it would be that daring to survive , the debut album from picromenis  is the finest record released this year. Especially if it's a hill where you die because you listened to too much drill music. When I say it's the finest record released this year, I haven't actually listened to any others, but is that really the point?  Look, I don't even know if it's music. Much less, drill. Much less, music.  But it's a new release, it sounds like stuff, and the young duo of P-dox and Gonkst4rs  certainly know how to rap about their native West Norwood. Indeed, by the third track, one starts to wish they'd stop banging on about it. There's only so many different ways to describe the 468 bus route. The album encroaches upon more poignant territory in the second half, with the track Weeping Leroy  - telling the ta...

When is a comeback too far not a comeback too far? When it's not a comeback too far, obviously!  For some artists, the 1980s was a nonstop farewell tour. And by 'some artists', one can only mean Mildred Pilf.  Released for the lucrative Christmas market in 1989, Demented Power Ballads saw one of the most controversial performers of the century returning to the stage for the latest final time at the age of 80.  Born in the Lancashire sootmining town of Blackworth in 1909, Mildred Pilf became one of Britain's best-loved entertainers during the War, but her career fizzled out in the 1960s when news of an affair with Rudolph Hess became public knowledge.  Former fans destroyed their elderly 78-inch records, and Pilf was officially 'finished'. But after years of lying low, the elderly diva eventually resurfaced and became a surprising counter-cultural heroine, though her drug of choice was typically nothing stronger than expired Lemsip.  Recorded over two nights at ...

  Who, what, or indeed who is Mononym? Is Mononym more than just a mononym? Is he, she, or it somehow actually less ? These were all questions we were asking in 2017 when Shades of pain was on everyone's playlist, whether we wanted it there or not. How many times could we lie fallow, basking in the breezy opening track Invert Sugars before we felt very, very annoyed that we had done so? How long would it take before we realised that Angeleek consisted of no lyrics and only one chord, and even that was a simple C Major? The mononymously-titled one later revealed himself to be former Nub keyboard warrior Douglas Hemp, but by then, of course, the musical damage had already been done. And still there were more questions that remained seriously unasked. We had to wait until last year for a second Mononym album. Was it as good? No! Was it better? Again, no, and that should be implicit in the fact that it wasn't as good! But Mononym has a decent record when it comes to defying logi...

  "If I've learned one thing from 27 years in the music business it's that you can't just go around biting people on the leg" - the words of Plinth Drummer Nobby Cobworth, shortly before his death from Psoriasis last year. It would be easy to dismiss such characteristic outbursts as mere attention-seeking, but if anything Plinth were a band that should've sought more attention, and such much-sought-after attention would've been richly deserved. Cobworth first met guitarist Ron Broth and bass player Andy Whelks in the mid-1990s when the duo were working in the Dragon, Wagon and Flagon pub in Droylsden, and performing as Chocolate Sikh every other Friday with singer Hattie Latimer. He convinced them that success was imminent, so long as they changed their name and let him join the band. And had a flexible definition of the word 'imminent'. Also, Hattie wouldn't be allowed to sing, but had to provide sexual services. A demanding set of request...

Released only last year, the third album by Austrian vox-pop pioneers Twolips has already become something of a modern classic. Maybe even a classic classic, but of the modern kind, obviously. 375 builds seamlessly upon the selflessly egotistical ramblings of their previous efforts, 324 and 326, to deliver another bout of what can only be described as 'incurable sonic thrush'. Bursting onto the scene in 2020, the duo cared little for convention, politeness or indeed personal hygiene, and it was perhaps this mono-mindedness that allowed them to come up with three albums in as many years. If 'as many' is actually four. Gunter Cunt and Shabric Shamanson were no strangers to the business, of course, having previously played vertical synthesizers in Samovar and dogSodomy respectively, but the latest album takes things to a new level. Quite literally. Though not, of course, literally. The standout track is probably 'Crab Scandal', which packs more oscillatory ...

  The name Lemuel Strongtrout may not mean a lot to you, but it means even less to Strongtrout himself, who has spent much of the past 50 years trying to escape it. A member of Toronto psych-prog outfit Mit Avec in his late teens, he recorded one album with them as lead singer, before all his bandmates tragically died in a series of murders that he himself definitely didn't commit, and for which he had a series of watertight alibis. Strongtrout left his native Canada - with his head held high and reputation unsullied - to lie low for a while, and, in time, to record the seminal 'Galapagos' album, released under the pseudonym Chester Forfeit , which made him an international star and indeed an unlikely sex symbol. With its capricious licks and plunging fuck-funk basslines, it was a record that literally everybody owned in the late 1970s, and under some jurisdictions non-ownership was actually punishable by imprisonment. Forfeit had the world at his feet - at his foref...

  6a Froob Glebe. If that address means nothing to you then you have to ask yourself some pretty searching questions, for it was in this modest flat in Llandudno that Barry Gluto and Tag Jaggings first experimented, both musically and sexually, as a pair of harpsichord-obsessed teenagers. Simple, catchy tunes and relatable lyrics about Orthodontics and Barry's mothers recipe for Chicken Rigmarole - indeed this was their original band name before they settled on Modicum - saw the pair become the darlings of the burgeoning 'Welshpop' scene. Their self-titled debut from 1999 may not have been up to much, but then people had Millenniums'n'shit to be worried about. The release of 'Autoslave' in 2001, however saw Modicum become a household name. By the time they released their third album in 2004, they had long since moved out of Froob Glebe and into a series of mansions. They embarked on a worldwide tour, supported by Rictus Thumb, and the sky seemed to have no...

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  Obviously Forest Fire Citation are best known for their epic 1970s albums P. Bryan Twyne and the Pype of Wine and, of course, The Squirrels of Blame . One would have to be a completely idiotic retarded mindfuck not to know this really basic fact. However, like many of their folk-rock ilk, the band continued to record, release and perform new music long after their star had faded, and indeed are still active today, albeit with none of the original members on board, though drummer Reg Pegson continues to act as a sort of 'percussion consultant' to the group, even at the brisk old age of 104! Amongst their later catologue, 1988's Chickadee is perhaps the highlight. Their ninth album overall, it saw FFC reinventing themselves through the abandonment of traditional folk instrumentation, each member adopting instead a selection of home-made instruments, fashioned from household objects, kitchenware, car parts, cheesewire and so on. While this undoubtedly gives the record an ...

  Everybody loves prog rock, right? I mean, even those who don't loves prog rock loves prog rock. Right? That was certainly the view in 1977 and indeed in most of the Western World became the law for a short period of time. Although their debut album sank without a trace - in many cases quite literally as 90% of the known copies were on board the ill-fated Girth Hound ocean liner when it tragically capsized in 1973 - Empty Stock Workings had been building momentum throughout the decade with their unique blend of vocals, instrumentation and songs. Arse Tea and its follow-up Poo Wine were both moderately successful records, before the arrival of Canadian guitarist David Carvery and keyboard player Jan Hospice allowed them to take their sound to new and experimental places. 'G on E', as it's affectionately known, opens with the 13 minute epic 'Temple of Messenger', composed largely by bassist Matthew Scrotum, while side two includes the band's biggest hit ...

  It seems impossible to believe that it's been almost 50 years since Gloryhole's debut album hit the charts, sending dancefloors everywhere into a priapic frenzy. That might be because it's only been 34 years, but even so, this Hi-NRG, ballsy beat-ridden bonanza feels forever lost; sucked into a timewarped gloryhole of its own, if you will. The pet project of New York producer Chase Brumby and electronics whizzkid Kizz 'The Whizz' Jizzworth, it's a full 12 inches of thick, hardcore, pulsating passion that penetrates deeply. Just five tracks fill the 72 minutes, and three of those are arguably extended remixes of the other two, but that's splitting stray pubic hairs. A seminal album in every sense, the opening epic Talk to the Glans pretty much defined the genre of 'Hard Bath House', such as it briefly was, while the sampled vocals on Too little, too late sparked a years-long debate on who the mystery singer might or might not be, or whether anyone ...

  1958 was a big year for Jazz albums. With the release of Go , the Hipton Hipnotes put themselves firmly on the musical atlas and set themselves up for a lifetime of confusion with their rivals, the Hipstone Hiptones. 1959 was arguably an even bigger year, except in the ways in which it wasn't, obviously, as Alton Sultan and the Returning Officers emerged from the woodwindy shadows to release their first four volumes. But it was this - their fifth and final release - that set their legacy in liquid stone. Ironically none of the original 'officers' actually returned to make this record, with bandleader Sultan forming a new ensemble consisting of members of the aforementioned Hiptones and Hipnotes, many of whom weren't themselves entirely sure which of the outfits they had previously been in. None of that was to bother Alton Sultan who bravely wielded whatever instruments he could get his hands on in front of anyone brazen enough to play along with him - and the results ...

  When Nub first collapsed onto the scene in 1995 with their self-titled debut album, they defied categorisation.  Even Professor Bertrand C. Treband, head of band categorisation at the University of Oxford Institute of Categorising famously failed to categorise the band, eventually reducing the options to 'post-post-punk' and 'pre-post-post-post punk', both of which were rejected by all four members of the power trio. By the time they released Pissinfectant , they had settled on a more defined sound that, while still essentially uncategorisable, could at least be categorised as 'not actually very good'. Not that this mattered to their legions of hardcore fans, most of whom were equally not very good at their jobs, lives or relationships. And it was to this sense of failure that Nub appealed - loudly. This second album was literally recorded in the hope that it would fare worse than the first. Tracks such as 'Mob-handed pipe jockey' and 'My invisible...

  It is perhaps the greatest irony ever to befall the much-misunderstood electro-proto-funk-o-lectro genre that Morecambe duo The Repeat Offenders failed to release a follow-up to their 2007 debut, Loon Bran. Some might argue that it's not just an irony but an outright tragedy that the three-and-a-half Moog synthesisers used on the album now lie abandoned and gathering moths; Richard Ralts and Colin McCrombie having long since turned their back on the music business and sworn to never lay down another beat for the rest of their lives. But this music was a product of its time. Strangulated, condensed, some might even say deeply unpleasant to listen to. The opening track 'Versatile Log' does away with any pretence of tonality, rhythm or other such trivial conventions, while the 13 minute epic 'Rupert done toilet' was described by McCrombie as "trivial noises, performed and recorded in a critically important way". Other artists - Elf Conversion Syndrome , Cam...

Spare Turkey are due to release their 4th album 'Going Flaccid' next month, 15 years after their 2007 debut, and more than 2000 years after the birth of Christ. This may or may not be relevant, but then isn't that the point? Really? A band that releases an album once every five years only needs to be relevant once every five years, ideally around the time when the album is released. But relevance has never mattered to Spare Turkey who continue to ply their effortless fusion of pub-rock, techno beats and Victorian cradle-songs with consummate quinquenniality.  Anyone expecting a live gig will be disappointed - they have performed live only once in all of history - but those unfamiliar with the band could do a lot worse than check out their 2012 effort 'A-Hole in a K-Hole' which broke new ground, refurbished the ground that had been broken, and then broke it again, in the words of guitarist Paul Flounce, 'for the shitting hell of it'. Bassist Len Kenson, now...

    It's very rare for me to review 'contemporary' music, what with me being old, dead, and made up, but sometimes a debut album comes along that literally shakes you back into life with its sheer debutness. One such relentless debut in 2021 was debuted by Mongolian songstress Pecky Yin and while this is technically her third release, it's the first release to be released outside of the street markets of Ulaanbaatar, where debut releases retail at prices well North of five shillings. And they don't even use shillings in Mongolia, except when buying Pecky Yin albums which may or not be debut releases, obviously. If that all sounds monumentally confusing, you probably shouldn't listen to Your conscience is gay . It makes a musical statement as bewildering as it is powerful, and as statementlike as it is musical. The question isn't whether or not you actually like Mongolian folk music - it's whether you even believe in it or not. And if you do not, why not?...

     Seattle-based Lesbian grunge outfit 'The Cunts' released vaginal quantities of music in the early 1990s, some of it actually quite listenable if you turned the volume down to -11.   Having acrimoniously fallen out in 1995 following a dispute about 'feminine products' and bassist Laurie Yell's involvement in the notorious dildogate scandal, the original lineup did manage to reform for one last Sapphic hurrah in late 1998 and split up for the last time while this, their final album was being recorded.   Indeed, several of the tracks were recorded with only one or two members present in the studio; drummer Courtney Gebärmutter had to play several lengthy solos just to remind other artists that The Cunts were still, technically, making an album.   Eventually, with none of the other members wanting to contribute anything further, a lineup of session musicians were brought in to finish the record, hence the name. To this day, Lead Guitarist Juli...

    There is much to admire about spoken word artist Jerome Dupont. His lyrical poetry, his unrepentant Frenchness, his determination to circumnavigate the globe travelling only on rail-replacement bus services. But most admirable of all is perhaps the way in which he relishes the societal scorn of his complete disregard for all forms of convention - including the convention of disregard, or to put it in his native language, la limace. To date, Monsieur Dupont has released 14 albums of his own and appeared as a guest artist on a further 37 - some achievement given how widely he is despised among those who admire him. The sixth of his solo recordings, known only as 'The Yellow Album' consists largely of abstract musings about croissants and urination, set against the backdrop of Ambient soundscapes in eccentric Gallic time signatures. That doesn't mean it isn't tres bon, of course, but it really isn't tres bon.  As the Yellow album celebrates it's 30st anni...

  It's that very special time of year, and so today's classic album is a festive treat from 1955 when Christmas was a simpler time, a nobler time, and indeed a simpler time. In Waldorf, Maryland that simplistic nobility took the form of Sousaphone music, and the Equine Sousaphone Quintet rode the quest of a very special Sousaphonetic wave for over six glorious months in the mid-1950s, before all four members tragically died in an incident of which nobody speaks. Their second visit to the studio saw this Christmas offering rush-released to a market that was ready, willing and able to listen to it. Bandleader and Sousaphonist Hubert Goossen is in fine form blasting out the bass notes on 'Santa's got the horn', while Sousaphonist Vincent Lowe and Sousaphonist Bill Hugo fill out the lower register parts.  The Festive Sousaphonic Medley Set, featuring Tubsworth 'Tubby' Dubbson on Sousaphone is another undoubted highlight and fans of the genre will no doubt recall...

  It's a little-known fact that the very first album released this millennium was Precum's Throwing Circles, the follow-up to their little-known better-known debut 'Flangetastic'.  The decision to release the record at one second past midnight on January 1, 2000 in Tonga could've been a great publicity stunt, were it not for the fact that their label, Shithouse Records failed to actually release it anywhere else in the world for a further 15 months due to 'suboptimal planning' by the label's management team.  Throwing Circles finally got a world-wide release the following year and 'Suboptimal planning' was chosen as the title for their third and final album before multi-instrumentalist Tristan Greft quit the band, effectively sealing their demise.  Precum were, perhaps ironically, late arrivals at the Britpop party, and their Art Rock sensibilities are arguably not sensible enough, with tracks such as 'If you really don't want to go to...