Tabla de contenidos para December 2022 en MOJO

1 DRY ICE CLEAR WHITE LIGHT A spectacular ultra-nugget to kick off Volume 6. Dry Ice only released one single in their short lifetime, in spite of supporting Heavy Nuggets mainstays like the Groundhogs as well as The Who and Pink Floyd, and recording with King Crimson’s Ian McDonald. This fuzzed-up ripper comes from their sole album, recorded in 1969 but mystifyingly unreleased until 2018. Written by Paul Gardner. Published by Maxwood Music Limited 1970/2006/2018 Morgan Music. &©1969 Morgan Music. From Dry Ice – Secret Records Limited 2 GROUNDHOGS SPLIT – PART TWO Few bands in the Heavy Nuggets universe have a discography as rich and deep as that of the Groundhogs, but newcomers are best advised to start with their fourth album, 1971’s Split. Here’s a good reason why:…

AS DUSK falls on an otherwise sedate Sunday evening in Oslo, a huge crowd of people are waiting for Bob Dylan’s first European performance in over three years. A few weeks before a run of UK dates, he is about to appear at the Norwegian capi-tal’s Spektrum arena, a vast black box that he seems to be fond of: he first played here in 1995, and has been back 10 times since. An hour of vox-popping brings forth such nouns as “genius”, “poet” and “legend”, and the sense of an audience that runs along a continuum of age and Dylan knowledge. At one end are a smattering of people under 25, a lot of whom seem to have come to see a kind of one-man Mount Rushmore, hoping that he…

IN HIS THIRTIES, Swiss native Bernhard Hotz decided it was time for an adventure. Visit-ing Peru to work in a friend’s factory, he was offered a job in Guayaquil, Ecuador. When he arrived, he was assigned a young woman, Ebita Gutiérrez as his secretary. He asked her for a cup of coffee. “I’m sorry Mr Hotz, I am here to work, not bring you coffee,” she said. That response sparked a mutual respect which grew into love and marriage. The offspring of the liaison, brothers eight years apart, Estevan and Alejandro are now a highly evocative instrumen-tal guitar duo named, in tribute to their forthright mother, Hermanos Gutiérrez. Raised on a cultural axis stretched between Zurich and Ecuador, they’ve developed a languid but emotional, pan-continental sound based around just two…

IT WAS ON A COLD WINTER’S NIGHT IN MID-December 1969 that Blossom Toes’ career came to an end. The group, which by then comprised guitar-ist and lead singer Brian Godding, guitarist and vocalist Jim Cregan, bassist Brian Belshaw and drummer Barry Reeves were driving down the M4 in Reeves’s VW Beetle, returning from a gig at Bristol University with Roger Chapman’s Family. A fixture on the late-’60s underground circuit alongside fellow travellers Fairport Convention, Car-avan, Mighty Baby and Soft Machine, with a recently completed second LP and a session for John Peel’s Top Gear under their belt, they were, in the words of Jim Cregan, “a band on the up” – their heavy, proto-prog sound perfectly in tune with the sounds of the darker coming decade. “We were on the…

“She’s built a monument to all those small, lonely, cold emotions, making sure they can be seen from space.” Weyes Blood ★★★★ And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow SUB POP. CD/DL/LP HAIR FLOWING, heart glowing, wrapped in an old white wedding dress once worn as a Halloween costume, Natalie Mering seems to be hitting the religious imagery hard on her latest album’s artwork. It initially makes sense – especially when the record opens with It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody, a blast of heavenly empathy that glides in on lustrous harps and pearly choral swells. “Has a time ever been more revealing/That the people are hurt-ing?” Mering sings, envisaging the pandemic as a giant global blacklight, illuminating all the hidden misery and grief humans carry with them. “Yes, we all…

Sarathy Korwar ★★★★ KALAK THE LEAF LABEL. CD/DL/LP AFTER SUBVERTING immigration prejudice on 2019’s More Arriving, a thought provok-ing fusion of jazz and vibrant Mumbai rap, Korwar retains its core instrumental personnel (Danalogue, Tamar Osborn, Al MacSween, Magnus Mehta) for his latest adventure. Where its predecessor was freighted with wordplay that refused to sugar-coat the reality of a migrant’s journey west (laid unsparingly bare on provocative closer Pravasis), the US-born, Indian-raised and London-based composer lets the music do the talking here (bar two spoken-word bookends and some pointed titles), deploying a circular rhythmic notation system, without strict starts or ends, to mirror South Asian notions of cyclicality. Recorded live in less than two days and reconstructed from those improvisations, KALAK is a distinctive place where acoustic beats and ragged textures join…

By Andrew Perry. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard ★★★★ Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava KGLW. CD/DL/LP IT’S REASSURING to know that 2022 is just like 2017 in one regard: another year where King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard will release five studio LPs, three of them dropping this month. This latest triplicate brings the LP tally from Stu Mackenzie’s crew 23 in 10 years, an aston- ishing productivity which has seen off faltering to peers like Osees and Ty Segall, and possibly even outstrips ’90s Guided By Voices. But herein lies a problem with KG&TLW: you can end up discussing the surfeit more than the substance. More significantly, of late there has been a major shift in their methodology. Driven lynchpin Mackenzie had settled into a pattern…

“Take 5 of Rain encapsulates The Beatles at their peak: never would they be harder, faster, or exuberantly higher.” The Beatles ★★★★★ Revolver PARLOPHONE/UMC. CD/DL/LP RELEASED M ERE weeks before The Beatles quit the stage, Revolver captures the group at terminal velocity: moving faster than everyone else, they had remained at the top for over three years, but the world (and human fatigue) was catching up. This album was the summary of that moment: the perfect end to their period as pop idols, live performers, kings of the scene. They had begun to conceive of life outside The Beatles – the four-headed monster on an insane schedule – and, going forward, they would reclaim their own time. Like many startling records in the second half of 1966, Revolver was the…

Laurie Spiegel The Expanding Universe PHILO, 1980 LAUNCHED IN 1977, NASA’s two Voyager probes are now billions of miles from Earth. On board both is a gold-plated 16 rpm 12-inch album featuring a selection of music, sounds and images for any alien civilisation which may one day encoun-ter it. On the ‘Sounds Of Earth’ portion is a short excerpt from Laurie Spiegel’s electronic “sonification” of Johannes Kepler’s 1619 astronomical work Harmonices Mundi, which saw planetary motion in musical terms. “It was a privilege, an honour to be chosen to have work on board,” Spiegel tells MOJO today. Yet when asked if this situation has strange effects on her psyche, she says, “life here on Earth, with what we humans are doing to the planet, other species and to each other…

Moonage Daydream ★★★ Dir: Brett Morgen UNIVERSAL. C/ST THE HECROWDS surging out of Earl’s Court station on the way to see David Bowie in 1978 exhibit a level of collec- tive excitement that doesn’t so much border on lust as invade it and take its royal family hostage. In the heady aftermath of Peter Jack-son’s Get Back and Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground – films which in different ways afforded us the magical illusion that we were sharing their fabled subjects’ personal space in real time – it’s not unreasonable for an archival film portrait of a canonical rock figure to prompt similarly heightened expectations. Brett Morgen’s Moon-age Daydream hurls itself fearlessly at this raised bar – ahigh jump that became a pole vault – and collapses onto the cinematic…

We just did a show in Berlin, and before, someone cue’d up The Pearl and played it with a bunch of smoke. It was fantastic, mesmerising. All these people were sprawled on the floor as if they were about to meditate to it. Maybe they were on drugs? Anyway, I was in the dressing room, and I thought, “Oh, that sounds so beautiful. Wait a minute – that’s the Harold Budd record” (which Brian Eno and Lanois produced). Harold, Eno, and myself had already done one record, called Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror. Eno was living in my house, Harold moved in as well, we were recording in my studio. I had my Yamaha grand piano and a nice sounding Fender Rhodes. I performed on a hand-held graphic EQ…

“We’re named after a boat that’s named after a sex worker.” “EVERYONE HAS their song, you know?” The Mary Wallopers’ Charles Hendy is musing on the durability of the Irish folk ballads, handed down through the generations, that fuel his band’s debut. “But then what do they do? They insist on fucking singing it!” Harnessing the energy and twinkle in the eye that made The Clancy Brothers household names on both sides of the Atlantic 60 years ago, the Wallopers comprise Charles, his younger brother Andrew and Seán McKenna, a friend from Dundalk’s febrile rap scene. “The city’s just big enough that it has to have stuff happening,” says Andrew, “but it’s far enough away from any other city that if you want to do something you have to put…

“Blue moon/You saw me standing alone/Without a dream in my heart/Without a love of my own…” THE VENERABLE STANDARD IS JOAN Armatrading’s only musical memory from her childhood. The house she shared with her carpenter father Amos, house-wife mother Beryl, her four brothers and one sister in Brookfields, Birmingham’s now-mostly-demolished inner city district, did not ring with music. There was no access to the Caribbean sounds Amos and Beryl had grown up with in Saint Christopher & Nevis. It being the mid-’60s, rock’n’roll and Carib-bean exiles tended not to cross paths. But Amos could strum a guitar. And his jazz-inflected Blue Moon left an impression. “He showed me how to tune the guitar,” she remem-bers, “but he wouldn’t let me touch it. We had a room at the side of…

Steve Harley: On the tour for The Psychomodo LP [June/July 1974] we were young and partying a lot. We were mostly happy, but tempers would sometimes fray. That summer Judy Teen had been a big hit and Mr Soft was on Radio 1, Top 10. To this day, I still don’t know what came over [original members] John Crocker [fiddle], Milton Reame-James [keys] and Paul Jeffreys [bass]. They came to me with various… ultimatums. Richard Ames: It was frenetic. One of the longest UK tours any band had done and completely sold-out. People went mad for Cockney Rebel and we had security dealing with stage invasions. Then it got more and more fractious between band members. It was an argument about publishing. Where there’s a hit there’s a writ. “I…

Tim Bernardes ★★★★ Mil Coisas Invisíveis PSYCHIC HOTLINE. CD/DL/LP A newish Brazilian voice, admired by Gal Costa and Fleet Foxes. Having achieved a fair bit of success with his group O Terno, and acclaim for his 2017 debut Recomeçar, Bernardes hit a stress-induced wall in 2020 – a convenient time, it turned out, for jumping off the treadmill and figuring out the meanings behind everything going on in his life. It appears to have worked: this gorgeous slice of 1970s-influenced acoustic Brazilian pop feels like the definitive statement by someone with his head screwed on tight (but loose). The title references “the million invisible things” that make our reality what it is, but what is obvious from first listen is that each of the 15 tracks already feel like standards…

Siouxsie And The Banshees ★★★★ All Souls UMC. DL/LP A BANSHEES album celebrating all things witchy, macabre, and other-worldly in the autumn months may not have required the keenest imagination to dream up. This is, after all, the group who made their live debut 46 years ago at the 100 Club Punk Festival defiling The Lord’s Prayer with a beat provided by Sid Vicious. Throughout the ’80s, dark gothic vibrations and Lewis Carroll weirdness was their default: eerie tendrils of chiming guitar, Siouxsie’s frosty yelp, Budgie’s tribal thump – every day could be Halloween in Banshees world, if you so wished. Yet All Souls – its name taken from the religious holiday marked in Latin America with Day Of The Dead celebrations – has the distinction of a tracklisting hand-picked…

THE LEGACY The Album:Karma (Impulse!, 1969) The Sound: As a 32-minute continuous piece of music, The Creator Has A Master Plan delivers peak Sanders: spine-tingling tenor sax opening, heavy percussive background, repetitive flute figures by James Spaulding, and Leon Thomas’s yodelling gymnastics throughout. It is spiritual by design, a marvel of musical persuasion. Still. Jazz’s spiritual heart: Pharoah Sanders, New York, 1996. MASTERFUL, DEEPLY influential tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders had an impact like few other performers in jazz. The unmistakable, piercing shriek of his horn was a profoundly unforgettable component of the many Impulse! recordings he made with John Coltrane and solo in the ’60s and early ’70s. Similarly unforgettable was its sonic flipside – those quiet, meditative pieces Sanders offered up that were mystic, almost trance-inducing, and like…

HELLO AUGUST 19, 1988 I was like, 18 and in a sort of locally known young band [Funky Stuff] and we were asked to be the support act for Prince [three nights at the Feyenoord Stadion, Rotterdam]. It was really exciting! Then two hours before the show, some guy said, “Oh, nobody told you? It’s not going to happen. Can you take your stuff?” It made me so mad. I had a photo card, and I just wrote, “Dear Prince, why don’t you let us play? You missed the chance to see a girl blow her ass off on the saxophone.” I went up to his manager and then I saw Sheila E, so I gave her the note, thinking never to hear from her again. My boyfriend somehow convinced…

“IS THAT TOO MOJO?” ASKS ALEX TURNER, talking about his hunt for a vintage David Axelrod interview. There is, of course, nothing that should be considered too MOJO, and most of us will recognise ourselves in such obsessive behaviour: that music fan’s hunger to go right back to the source. As Arctic Monkeys return with another impressively complex album, loaded with knowing historical signifiers, we find Alex Turner in thoughtful, self-effacing mode. He tells Keith Cameron about a new track that didn’t make the final tracklisting of The Car. “I guess we don’t need to spend too much time talking about the song that isn’t on the record,” he muses. “That would be perverse – although it is pretty MOJO.” We have some quotes for the box set retrospective, then.…

“I’M OF the belief that when you’re loud, it pushes people back,” says Eddie Chacon, on-screen from his LosAngeleshome. “And when you’re quiet, it pulls people in.” This he did with 2020’s intimate, cathar-tic Pleasure, Joy And Happiness. Ethereal R&B confessionals delivered in Chacon’s exquisitely pained voice, its from-nowhere word-of-mouth success was made sweeter by Chacon’s backstory as half of soul one-hit wonders Charles & Eddie, whose Would I Lie To You? hit big 30 years ago this month. Now, the singer and his well-travelled musical foil John Carroll Kirby have a new album in prospect. “We kind of started jamming at my home studio, probably early 2021,” says Kirby. “And then we went to Ibiza for about two weeks in the fall to write some stuff.” “In Ibiza, it…

1 BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN DO I LOVE YOU (INDEED I DO) Bruce churchifies Frank Wilson’s “rarest record ever” soul side from ’65 into a stomp-ing pledge of eternal devotion to do Wigan Casino-style high kicks to. From new soul covers set Only The Strong Survive. Find it: YouTube 2 STEVIE NICKS FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH Stevie lends Stephen Stills’ protest song a transformative female perspective. Reproductive oppression, that’s what’s going down. Find it: streaming services 3 JIM GHEDI WHAT WILL BECOME OF ENGLAND An old Alan Lomax-recorded folk lament for a country on a terminal slide finds new potency, as Ghedi brings out the dread. Topical! Find it: YouTube 4 BECK OLD MAN Beck doubles down on the poignancy in Neil Young’s pan-generation rumination while celebrating some NFL stars (apparently).…

IN THE EARLY SUMMER OF 2021, JAMIE COOK INVITED Alex Turner round to his place for an evening. Drink was taken. At some point, they did the thing that musicians always insist they never do: listen to their own music. Onto the stereo went the first Arctic Monkeys album, followed by the second Arctic Monkeys album, then the third… On it went, for several more hours and many more drinks, until Cook and Turner had listened to the entire Arctic Monkeys catalogue, in chronological order. Matt Helders, then en route from the US to England, remembers feeling a bit gut-ted that he missed out. “Happened before I got there,” the drummer nods ruefully. “I would have done it! If we’d listened to them all, together, we’d probably just laugh at…

Hugh Cornwell ★★★★ Moments Of Madness HIS. CD/DL/LP IF HUGH Cornwell’s solo career has some-times looked like the stuff of cold, hard prag-matism – “I’ve never listened to anything The Stranglers have done since I left them,” he said in 2019 – it’s worth remembering that he ceded his 25 per cent share in the band’s moniker vol-untarily. Live perfor-mance-wise, that’s undoubtedly meant fewer bums on seats for The Stranglers’ hit-writer in chief, but perhaps Cornwell was playing a longer, cannier game. Why quibble over brand-ing, after all, when your former band gives your jewel-encrusted back catalogue a nightly polish, thus bolstering its earnings and profile? On 2018’s Monster this wily old campaigner flagged starry touchstones including Evel Knievel and Hedy Lamarr, but here Cornwell’s focus is more earthbound. “I’m…

Horse Lords ★★★★ Comradely Objects RVNG INTL. CD/DL/LP IN HIS long and audacious career, the saxo-phonist Ornette Coleman talked a lot about a personal theory of music he called harmo-lodics, even though the actual meaning of harmolodics remained somewhat elusive. Most concluded that it signified a kind of jazz where there was no leader as such, where all the play-ers came together in unison while not being inhibited by traditional musical rules or hierarchies. A radical uprising in music; a truly democratic cultural revolution. But for all his evangelising on the subject, Coleman refused to be pinned down to specifics. Sound, he told the writer Philip Clark in 2007, “is as free as the gas that passes through your butt”. Listening to the thrilling collective racket that is the fourth…

WITH ITS CHILLY black and white sleeve bearing an enigmatic im-age and linernotes by folklorist supreme, A.L. Lloyd, wrapped around a suite of antique songs delivered without adorn-ment bar the fleeting thump of a drum on one track (“We have found that slightly worn styli [styluses] tend to be thrown out of the groove at this point,” warns the original sleeve), the 1965 debut album by The Watersons – previ-ously known briefly as The Mariners and The Folksons – was an unexpected shot of purity into the folk canon. Frost And Fire: A Calen-dar Of Ritual And Magical Songs ★★★★★ (Topic) had a measurable impact upon a moribund folk scene, in those days just before electricity was about to strike it. Said Anne Briggs in 2018, “First hearing The…

The Lives Of Brian ★★★★ Brian Johnson PENGUIN MICHAEL JOSEPH. £25 IN N2016, when Axl Rose replaced him on the final leg of AC/DC’s Rock Or Bust World Tour, Brian Johnson couldn’t watch. “It was like finding a stranger in your house, sitting in your favourite chair,” he writes. Acute hearing loss had left Johnson mortified when unable to locate the key of Highway To Hell on-stage one night, and later, near-total deafness ensuing, he felt increasingly isolated and vulnerable. “I didn’t want to die,” he says. “I just wouldn’t have minded that much.” Happily, prosthetic eardrum technology restored Johnson’s pitching and life-force. He rejoined DC and made 2020 comeback Power Up, the band’s first album in six years, and their first since the passing of talismanic rhythm guitar god,…