11 Nov 2013

Cherry Coloured Funk reviews 'Crystallized – Celebrating 15 Years of Rocket Recordings' compilation


First online review of our forthcoming compilation that comes out two week today (if the manufacturers pull their finger out that is):

"If you’re a fan of any of the weird, freaky or obtuse elements permeating the musical landscape these days you owe Rocket Recordings, and you owe them big. In June this year Goat, the Swedish band in their roster, played the (large) West Holts stage at Glastonbury, illustrating the accessibility and excitement of music born out of experimental impulses, collective weirdness or psychic diversity. This wasn’t allowed to happen over night or in a vacuum but with the courageous otherness and excellent taste of the Bristol/London label, which with this compilation of original compositions celebrate 15 years of their ‘unlikely survival’ as a record label. The material here ranges from empty quirkiness to explorative profundity, but the result is always unique.

Teeth of the Sea get things off to a bleak start, their offering ‘Run Red’ coming on like what Julian Cope describes as ‘blackest ambient metal’, a cinematic tone poem of electronic drones, guitar squall and disembodied screams that can only be likened to something off of Sunn O)))’s Black One, or an alternative soundtrack to 80’s nuclear apocalypse flick Threads. The brittle, afrobeat-indebted post-punk of Blood Sport follows this contrastingly, their offering mixing nasal Lydon-esque vocals with complex rhythms, suggesting a modern take on This Heat.

Elsewhere Mancunian free-formers Gnod carry on their progression away from the blisteringly heavy repeater-rock of their album Chaudelande towards a sort of industrial kosmiche, with spacey VCS3-sounding synths swooping over primitive programmed beats. The sexy Swedes assert a strong presence here also, with the batshit motorik race of newcomers Uran seguing into countrymen Hills, whose tambura-heavy drone hymn looks to their national heritage of poncho-sporting forest folk like Parson Sound, International Harvester and Trad, Gras och Stenar. The studio jam by Goat has less of the wild vitality of the steaming cuts from their 2012 album World Music but introduces a sense of insistent subtle repetition similar to that of Can post-Tago Mago.

Rocket Recordings don’t want to make friends and they’re not going to hold your hand once you’ve been thrown into the psychedelic maelstrom..."

Read the rest of the review here: Cherry Coloured Funk

We still have some presale copies left to buy from our shop, and once they are gone, they will be gone. This isn't getting repressed: Rocket Shop

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