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3 weeks ago | 
thequietus.com | JR Moores |Bobby Barry |Jon Buckland
Five albums in for the five-pronged psych rockers and that, by my maths, has them crying “Wee! Wee! Wee!” all the way home. But they haven’t done that. If anything they’ve pushed further afield than ever before, enlisting legendary producer, rapper, and one half of Run The Jewels (El-P) for an eviscerating verse on Death Hilarious’s centre-piece ‘Glib Tongued’.
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3 weeks ago | 
thequietus.com | Bobby Barry |Jon Buckland
Karl O’Connor seems to be enjoying getting his old bands back together. Last year he reunited with Surgeon for the long-awaited British Murder Boys debut and now he’s linked up with David Sumner (Function) for Sandwell District’s second full-length after a casual fifteen-year hiatus. I won’t say silence as, over the past year or so, they’ve treated us to a box set reissue of their masterful, scene-defining debut, and dropped an archival collection titled Where Next? late last year.
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1 month ago | 
thequietus.com | David Keenan |Bobby Barry |Jon Buckland
“I like art where the blood is streaming and the flowers are blooming like hell.” – Peter BrötzmannPitiful royalties. Chronic ticket gouging. Shuttered venues. Charts clogged with nepo babies. Generative AI. Slashed arts funding. Brexit red tape. If you’re looking for signs that music is struggling, you hardly need 20/20 vision. Fortunately, that’s not the whole story. For music to survive all you need are two things: someone to make it and someone to take it seriously.
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1 month ago | 
thequietus.com | Kez Whelan |Bobby Barry |Jon Buckland
1929, New York City. six months before the crash. Edward Bernays, inspired by the work of his double uncle Sigmund Freud, paid women to smoke cigarettes whilst marching in the Easter Sunday Parade. He called them ‘Torches of Freedom’, as if every puff were a hammer blow to the shackles of patriarchal oppression.The idea was to both break a social taboo and to increase the number of female smokers with a casual flick of a lighter’s flint.
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2 months ago | 
thequietus.com | Bobby Barry |Jon Buckland
“He watched the pale, speed-driven teenagers shiver around the dance floor. Droplets of light sprayed onto their faces and T-shirts. In alcoves, couples were frozen in the trance of foreplay. The beat was too quick to dance to, almost too deep to hear.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
thequietus.com | Bobby Barry |Jon Buckland
Wrong Speed Certain music lends itself particularly well to specific physical media. For instance: Black Sabbath on vinyl, Autechre on CD, Aaron Dilloway’s tape manipulations on cassette. I don’t know if it’s due to the rugged, physical performances or the nagging sense that this is a fly-on-the-wall recording of a live jam session, but something rooted in Deep Cabaret’s Matchless demands the innate tangibility of analogue formats. It’s fitting then that this jazzy desert blues album,...
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Dec 9, 2024 | 
thequietus.com | Noel Gardner |Bobby Barry |Jon Buckland
Recently, a friend generously shared a fairly rank video in a group chat. It featured an open manhole cover with a length of blue piping descending into an underground tunnel system. After a moment or two of faint gurgles and twitching hosing, a huge stinking brick of toilet waste sludged its way through the narrow duct like a giant faecal slug. It clogged up the entire opening, causing mud-coloured discharge to rise to the brim and threaten to spill out into the road.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
thequietus.com | Bobby Barry |Jon Buckland
Amongst dangling chains and pink-lit tiling, a man appears. He’s bare-chested save for a leather waistcoat which, combined with the latex gimp mask he’s sporting, gives him the same air of nocturnal menace as ‘Machine’, the bloodthirsty on-screen killer in Nic Cage’s snuff film whodunnit, 8mm. This man is Richie Culver AKA Quiet Husband. Culver’s work is brutish. It gets in your face.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
thequietus.com | Bobby Barry |Jon Buckland
Back in the winter of ’06 a piece of music crawled under my skin and has remained there ever since. It was on the Mary Anne Hobbs-hosted Breezeblock: a weekly late-night slot on Radio 1 where she blended avant-garde electronics with fresh cuts of grime and early dubstep. Around twelve minutes into the episode Hobbs introduced the Multipara Remix of ‘Removed (Vacuous Movement)’, by No Movement No Sound No Memories, as “proper white-knuckle stuff” and she was not wrong.
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Oct 22, 2024 | 
thequietus.com | Noel Gardner |Bobby Barry |Jon Buckland
Sometimes music can perfectly capture the sensation of something beyond words. A feeling or emotion that writers futilely dance around, never successfully skewering. Jabu’s A Soft and Gatherable Star is one of those records. Previously known for crafting spectral R&B boosted with dub heaviness, Jabu’s third album proper emerges from the same woozy school of medicated sound as HTRK, Carla Dal Forno, Tirzah, Rat Heart Ensemble and Dean Blunt.
