SPEW

"I guess you could trace it all the way back to growing up in the South: developing a structural critique of racism, and then looking back into history and understanding where that came from. I think what we wanted to reflect in our music — not even necessarily through the lyrics, but through the music itself — is this idea of time and memory collapsing upon one another. That's why the music extends in different directions, because our thoughts on history and society and violence and racism and capitalism extend in so many different directions.” - Ryan Mahan, Algiers It’s a commonplace that because of the complexities and vagaries of modern production and processing the typical consumer doesn’t know much about how the products they buy got to the shelf.   The same is as true of music as it is meat.   For Charlie Parker, Pablo Casals or Jerry Lee Lewis it was pretty simple. They rehearsed the material they intended to record, they and their fellow musicians ...

The Idles are from Bristol. The one in England, not Connecticut. They’ve been plunkin’ about since 2012, but their first album was released this year. It’s called Brutalism.   The cover features a photo of singer Joe Talbot’s mother, whom Talbot cared for in the last years of a long illness, mounted above a stark shrine constructed by Talbot and his father. These are placed in the corner of a bare room with brick floors and white painted brick and stone walls. It has the barren, but emotionally loaded austerity of Joseph Beuys work. It’s an eerily   perfect image for an album entitled and themed around the notion of brutalism.   Ever seen this movie called My Architect? It’s about the architect Louis Kahn, revealed through the eyes of his sometimes estranged son, Nathaniel Kahn. It’s heartrending, as a dad and lad tale, in its austere, sadly masculine way. The younger Kahn, as a budding filmmaker, with a heavy, still hurting heart find the beauty in his father...