Reviews originally published in Issue 98 of Electronic Sound magazine, February 2023:

THE GO! TEAM
Get Up Sequences Part Two
(Memphis Industries)

Imagine The Go! Team as a slow climb up the property ladder. They started as a one-room bedsit, were knocked through to make a des-res semi-detached, had a huge extension built to accommodate a rapidly-growing family, and they’re now basically the Metropole Hilton Hotel. And hey, let’s assemble everyone in the foyer! From the West African Republic of Benin, there’s the youthful Star Feminine Band. From India comes Bollywood singer Neha Hatwar, and jetting in from the Japanese J-Pop scene is Lucie Too vocalist, Kokubo Chisato. Then there’s Brooklyn rapper Nitty Scott, ex-Apples In Stereo drummer Hilarie Bratset, and… oh, hang on. Somebody open the fire escape door, it’s getting mighty crowded in here. 

What began as the solo project of Brighton bedroom tinkerer Ian Parton has become an expansive global concern, but it’s testament to Parton’s pop chops that the international approach never feels contrived. From the Star Feminine Band’s magnificent mob-handed French chants on thunderous opener ‘Look Away, Look Away’ to Scott’s fluid rapping on the sugar-charged ‘Whammy-O’, it’s a seamless patchwork held together by tightly-knitted grooves. And there’s even a welcome return for the breakout star of 2021’s ‘Get Up Sequences Part One’, with teenage rapper Indigo Yaj adding Detroit grit to ‘Divebomb’. It’s an irresistible paean to pro-choice activism: “Taking notice, got focus, never slowing down / No permission, tuition, yeah, no supervision…”

But let’s not forget the nuclear Go! Team family, either. Longstanding frontwoman Ninja is a force of cosmic nature on ‘Gemini’, a mystical hip-hop homage to the band’s globe-trotting aesthetic. “From where I am, I can see the Nile, the Hoover Dam / From Zaire to Korea, over Tanzania, saw the cherry blossom in Japan”. And Niadzi Muzira is a vocalist of rare charm, turning the jaded romance of ‘Getting To Know (All The Ways We’re Wrong For Each Other)’ into a joyous cross between Imperial phase Sesame Street and peak-era Jackson Five.

Like all the best hotels, you know exactly what you’re going to get. Slick service with all the trimmings, and an air of indulgent luxury. But for sheer joie de vivre and the coolest beats in East Sussex, The Go! Team continue to justify their five star rating.

Album available here:
https://thegoteam.bandcamp.com/album/get-up-sequences-part-two

THOMAS TRUAX WITH BUDGIE AND MOTHER SUPERIOR
Dream Catching Songs
(Psychoteddy)

Lurking in the cobweb-strewn attic of some strange, David Lynch smalltown is a sharp-suited professor with pipecleaner limbs, who – by the pale light of a faded full moon – builds outlandish musical instruments from discarded bike wheels and TV aerials. Thomas Truax, everyone. For 20 years, Truax has constructed his own weird world of fragmented rockabilly and wild-eyed, lo-fi blues, all performed with Heath Robinson gusto on his ‘Stringaling’ and his ‘Hornicator’. 

And Budgie? Drummer of Banshees and Slits notoriety, here lending Truax’s noir stylings a spontaneous punk energy. “Maybe Elon Musk can spare a few measly pesos / For all us buskers overlooked by the likes of Jeff Bezos,” snarls Truax on the garage rock rumble of ‘Everything’s Going To Be Alright’. And while DIY drum machine Mother Superior certainly makes her presence felt, it’s hard not to detect a whiff of 1980s Budgie/Siouxsie outfit The Creatures in the jazzy clatter of ‘A Little More Time’. Tremolos twang, lips are curled and this unlikely threesome have built their own brand of barmy wonder. 

Album available here:
https://music.thomastruax.com/album/dream-catching-songs

POLYPORES
Praedormitium
(Castles In Space)

Out walking one Christmas Day, Lancashire producer Stephen James Buckley was overcome by the beauty of the rime-coated lichen he encountered, and immediately set to work on album opener ‘Frost And Moss’. He probably missed out on a second helping of sprouts, but the resulting track is the perfect encapsulation of those white-skied winter mornings, when village pavements sparkle and hot breath hangs silently in the air. Ever the modular maestro, Buckley even somehow coaxes mournful woodwind solos from the tangle of cables snaking around his Christmas tree.   

Praedormitium itself is the transitional state between wakefulness and sleeping, and Buckley positions this delightfully wintry opus firmly within the fuzzy hinterland of the half-asleep. ‘Growing Crystals’ is a dream of childhood music boxes, ‘Kaleidoscope’ a creaking bedroom door beneath the rhythmic breaths of a snoozing synth. If Buckley really needs to be nodding off to produce work of such fragile beauty, let’s hope he’s got a plentiful supply of Nytol and cocoa powder on his bedside table. 

Album available here:
https://polypores-cis.bandcamp.com/album/praedormitium

FLEXAGON
The Towers I: Inaccessible
(Disco Gecko)

With touching sensitivity, the enigmatic Flexagon pays homage to the forgotten places of his native Guernsey. 2020 album 7 Nocturnes East was an evocation of the coastline’s night-time noises, now here’s the first of a trilogy exploring the island’s assorted towers and tall buildings. “A brutalist wartime observation tower, a windmill, a clock tower, trees used as lookout posts by German soldiers during the occupation…”

It’s gorgeous. While ‘Ozanne Tower: The Folly’ combines Badalamenti strings and an exquisite, mournful Cor Anglais, ‘The Last Trees’ is a shimmering electronic hymnal. And ‘Loophole Tower No. 10’ – with words from local journalist Shaun Shackleton –  is a lament for the island’s Napoleonic sea defences, told partly from the perspective of a press-ganged 19th century watchman. “I curse those baiseurs, the bloody militia / Who drag me away from my hearthside, my table, my woman, my blanket / To this granite birdcage”. The fate of that historic tower in 2023? “Drunkless, dog-pissed and butterfly-kissed”. It’s the keystone of an album steeped in the loneliness of landscape.

Album available here:
https://flexagon.bandcamp.com/album/the-towers-i-inaccessible

EARSTONE
Habitation Incidents 74-84
(Static Fuss)

Struggling to sleep? For the love of God, don’t put this on. Traumatised by a Bristol childhood riddled with paranormal encounters, the intrepid Marcus H attempts closure with an record infused by the spirits of the 1970s Radiophonic Workshop. ‘Calls In The Night’ is an army of sinister synths marching up the stairs, the magnificently-titled ‘Beryl, I Heard Violins’ a detuned radio broadcasting David Cain-style bleeps. With, tellingly, no violins. And if the hissy entities captured on ‘Recorded Your Empty Room’ are authentic, it’s an alarming conclusion to an album of disturbing delights.
 
Album available here:
https://marcushmusic.bandcamp.com/album/habitation-incidents-74-84

BURIAL GRID
Music For No Tomorrow
(Werra Foxma)

Languishing in some strange corner of Massachusetts, Adam Michael Kozak surrounded himself with “tape machines, dictaphones, broken cell phones and countless acoustic instruments” to create this beautifully fractured collection. The sixth Burial Grid album, it’s perhaps the most optimistic: opener ‘Stop Thinking About Tomorrow’ is a splendid mish-mash of jerky rhythms and analogue bleeps that swells to become joyously anthemic. Elsewhere, ‘Asri’ sounds like some lost, late 1970s Eno experiment, and the charming ‘You’re Home, Arturo’ is clunky 8-bit heaven with 10cc harmonies. A delight.   

Album available here:
https://burialgrid.com/album/music-for-no-tomorrow

RYAN SHIRLOW
Ullstair University – Vol 1
(Woodford Halse)

“Ullstair University was a centre for esoteric further education, located above the basalt northern coast of a Parallel Ireland of 1987”. So begins the unlikely backstory to an album of sumptuously spooky folktronica. There are two seamless suites, both reputedly the reconstruction of occult-based recordings uncovered during asbestos removal. After the wistful mellotron of ‘Enter The Archive, Praise #1’, we’re swept along by mournful mandolins, lap fiddles and echoing footsteps to the anthemic synths of ‘Ascension / Fade Out’. Great stuff – think Mike Oldfield lurking on the Giant’s Causeway.

Album available here:
https://ryanshirlow.bandcamp.com/album/wf-68-ullstair-university-vol-1

Electronic Sound – “the house magazine for plugged in people everywhere” – is published monthly, and available here:
https://electronicsound.co.uk/

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