PRESS
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Windsor for the Derby - Review
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Mike HeadleyWindsor for the Derby has recorded their most minimal and sparse album to date, but also their most engagingResurfacing after the demise of their label Trance Syndicate, this Austin Texas-based, studio-only band has recorded their most minimal and sparse album to date, but also their most engaging. Finding a new home on the Swans' label, the band has lost its Slint tendencies and techno beats stripping the music down to moods minus attitudes. Languid soundscapes filled with xylophones, tambourines, and vibes broaden their scope while still presenting their character mysterious aura. Tension is built while never letting loose, vocals never rise higher than a whisper, and rhythm sways like a boat on a windless day. The highlight of this record is Nico, a seven and a half minute opus filled with gorgeous reverb laded guitars and keyboards depicting a desert background, rich and arid with faint rumblings in the distance - perhaps a hopeful thunderstorm. Again, the tension and suspense act to lock in the listener to the magnetic, hypnotic beauty. Sometimes you get so caught up in it all, you have to blink hard to regain your composure and true surroundings....
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David Coulter - Review
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The Wire...a thrilling acoustic intimacy reminiscent of Japan's Cinorama…" The highlight of this month's column is the debut solo release from ex-Pogues and Test Dept multi-instrumentalist David Coulter...It has a thrilling acoustic intimacy reminiscent of Japan's Cinorama, and a similar exacting concern with coaxing evocative new textures out of instruments familiar and strange... Loosely receptive and inventive playing, uncluttered spaciousness, and the lack of rhetorical baggage makes this release a masterpiece of miniaturised beauty."...
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Calla - Review
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Side-lineI am in awe of the romantic, desolate ambience…… of the familiar instrumentation as embraced by the electronic cadences that coarse underneath the surface. Calla bask in the sound of the day after tomorrow: it's hot and weary and there is nothing left to do but listen to the world as it disintegrates?and give in to the inevitable....
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Calla - Review
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Gil Gershman - Motion"David Lynch Sound System."With its uneasiest currents often just subjacent to the surface of the music, Calla beautifully captures the secret subversions and warped normality that inform every frame of the cult director's filmography?Something for the closet romantics who have already been swept away with Godspeed You Black Emperor! and are eager to board another emotional roller coaster....
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Calla - Review
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Tom Ridge - The Wirestartling collection of low-end Industrial blues fed through a grainy veil of electronics.Combining brittle rockabilly guitar, wheezing machine noise, bursts of static and heavy bass programming, Calla compress different musical elements together, rub them up abrasively against one another and force them into new, unfamiliar shapes....