Month: February 2019

LCD Soundystem Electric Lady Sessions DFA/Columbia LCD Soundystem went on self-enforced hiatus in 2011 before re-surfacing with 2017’s brilliant american dream.  This album is meant as a live document, recorded on the floor of the venerable New York studio, built back in 1967 by Jimi Hendrix in Greenwich Village.  It was recorded at the end of the long tour behind american dream, and has the sound of a band well in tune and comfortable with each other.  It sounds tight, in other words. Sessions is bookended by covers, opening with Human League’s, ‘Seconds,’ and finishing with Heaven 17’s ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thing.’  ‘Seconds’ was originally written as a meditation on the assassination of JFK, but here, in LCD head honcho James Murphy’s monotonal voice, the chorus of ‘It took seconds of your time to take his life.’  Here, it is recast against the endless gun violence of the United States, which sees around 40,000 of us die per year.  As for ‘Fascist Groove Thing,’ The Guardian reminds us that it was once banned by the BBC. The album kind of stumbles with the second track, ‘american dream,’ which I have always found to be, well, boring and kind of flaccid.  But the Soundsystem recovers almost immediately with one of my all-time favourites of their oeuvre, ‘You Wanted a Hit’ from 2010’s most excellent ‘This Is Happening,’ which is one of my...

Cosey Fanni Tutti TUTTI Conspiracy International It is amazing to think that this is Fanni Tutti’s first solo album in 36 years, given how much music she has been produced in partner with others, from her pioneering work in Throbbing Gristle in the 70s, to working with her husband, Chris Carter, in Chris and Cosey in the 80s, through more recent albums, including a project with members of Factory Floor a few years back.  She is one of the most prolific artists I can think of, and central to the development of the music form we call ‘industrial.’  Industrial kind of hit the stratosphere in the early 90s with the massive success of Ministry and then Nine Inch Nails, but much of that seemed closer to metal than the original form of the music through artists from Throbbing Gristle through Skinny Puppy and Cabaret Voltaire, which was both insanely heavy with beats around 125bpm and menacing, growling vocals, when they existed at all. TUTTI is meant to serve as a form of companion piece to her memoir, Art Sex Music, which came out in 2017.  She has claimed this album expresses her full self, and is the only recording she has been involved in which does that.  It was also the soundtrack to a short biographical film, Hamonic Coumaction. The entire album is a rumbling of heavy industrial beats, and she does...