Following on their impressive debut album [*Ex]tradition*, the Curious Bards—an early-music ensemble founded by violinist Alix Boivert in 2015—continue to explore material from the Scottish and Irish folk traditions preserved in 18th-century publications. This new collection of airs and dances is a chance to discover more of this fascinating repertoire, in which the distinctions between serious music and popular inspiration need no longer apply.
The Modey Lemon's Phil Boyd (guitars, Moogs, vocals) and Paul Quattrone (drums) invited Jason Kirker to join the band on bass and keys after he produced Thunder + Lightning. But that's not the only change on 2005's Curious City. In the band's earlier work, Boyd sang in a slithering rasp that matched Modey's blues-punk skuzz ably, if only satisfactorily. But on City his suddenly clearer vocals are the key hinge to mounting blasts of hellacious Moog noise and weird melodies that slink from under the belly of classic rock & roll. (On Curious they're weird even when quiet, as the downcast Animals redux "Countries" proves.) The background of "Fingers, Drains" warbles in heat and melting instrument noises, and Boyd's vocal on it is downright sultry. Meanwhile "Sleep Walkers" is some of the most efficient music Modey Lemon's ever made; it sounds like a lost Golden Earring B-side with its throbbing bass and insistent drum clap.
A Curious Feeling is the début solo album from Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks. Recorded at ABBA's Polar Music Studios during a brief Genesis hiatus, it was released in 1979 on Charisma Records and is one of only two of Banks' solo albums to have entered the UK Albums Chart, reaching 21 and staying on the chart for five weeks. According to Banks himself, the album "got some extremely scathing reviews, I don't think they were fair" but he conceded "this was post-punk and this was really not the album that people wanted to hear". Classic Rock reviewer Jerry Ewing agrees with Banks, writing that the album is made of "lush pastoral English prog rock that deserved better at the time" and is probably the musician's best solo effort.
As the second Millennium AD drew to a close, The Residents began to take stock on a couple of thousand years of reasonably fruitful human endeavour. One text, they felt, had inescapably set the tone and dominated the narrative throughout the Western world for most of that period, often clouding the view as they looked back. Sure enough, The Bible, Testaments Old and New, seemed like fertile ground for a confused, anonymous band approaching their fourth decade. Throughout 1998 and 1999, The Residents set about writing, recording and extensively touring a set of songs based around some of the more curious, unsettling and downright messed up stories they found upon revisiting their old Sunday School Bibles, and present here the results of those industrious years. Complete with demos and sketches, two full live recordings, a live-in-the-studio reworking and the usual assorted ephemera plus later live recordings, 'The Wormwood Box' showcases a project the band still think of very fondly, and have often revisited. Join us and marvel as the Eyeball Oddballs somehow cram murder, rape, incest, vengeance, slaughter and, erm, circumcision into a radio friendly pop format!