CliffordAllen

Recent Actions

• Posted Blues Control at Mohawk Tuesday to Austinist
  It takes some serious effort (and pocket change) to sift through all the handmade CD-Rs, cassettes and seven-inches that fill up the annals of scum-rock and "New Weird American" music. Certainly a fair amount of these groups veer towards noise and semi-ambient clatter and drift, but the line from No Neck Blues Band and Talibam! to an outfit like Blues Control ends up quite squiggly.
• Posted Interview with Bobby Hackney of Death to Austinist
  It might not be a total surprise that one of the underground debut records of the year is a volatile stew of insistent, young and charged vocals, driving guitar and churning, turn-on-a-dime rhythms. It's the stuff that garage, punk and hard-rock legends are made of. But it might be unprecedented that it's a recently-uncovered and nearly 35-year-old recording made by a band that disappeared from the radar screen almost as soon as it popped up.
• Posted Talibam! - Boogie in the Breeze Blocks and The New Nixon Tapes to Austinist
  You'd be forgiven for interpreting Brooklyn, New York's Talibam! as another art project gone wrong from a look at the photos adorning their latest full-length disc, Boogie in the Breeze Blocks (ESP-Disk). Striking poses in a fuchsia t-shirt and white Eurotrash glasses, keyboardist Matt Mottel and drummer Kevin Shea appear to be pulled from Last Night's Party.
• Posted Jakob Olausson and Sus&Jakob [Salvage Vanguard 7/19] to Austinist
  As part of a rare stateside tour that hits the Salvage Vanguard on Sunday, Olausson will be playing solo as well as in Sus & Jakob, the girl-boy duo that's more Brother Ah/Sun Ra's Strange Strings than She & Him. Sus & Jakob will release their debut LP out on De Stijl later in the summer, and it promises to have no small impact on the international freaky mess that we call "modern music." That said it's hard to imagine Olausson's various projects being blueprints, so original and well-executed they are. The whole thing kicks off at 9:30, so it won't likely impinge on your Monday morning blues.
• Posted Tortoise Contemplate Ancestorship at the Mohawk Wednesday to Austinist
  The genre-defying instrumental band Tortoise arrives in Austin on the 15th in support of their seventh proper full-length LP, the aptly-titled Beacons of Ancestorship (Thrill Jockey). It's their first new disc in five years, though its cast of five has been quite busy in other projects. They formed in 1992, a Chicago/Louisville conglomeration of rhythm players/sections brought from Bastro, Eleventh Dream Day, Precious Wax Drippings and Tar Babies. Their arsenal of instruments was always impressive - vibraphones and analog synthesizers weren't exactly on the radar of most indie bands in 1994. The fact that really, nobody has ever known what to do with Tortoise (the infamous "post-rock" tag still follows them wherever they go) has probably in part contributed to the band's longevity.