Devastating live set from the electric guitar duo of Stuart Crutchfield and Kevin McCarvel, raising the roof of the Halt bar in Glasgow on the same bill as Richard Youngs. Recorded in December 2008, this is the most persuasive document yet from a duo that look to be the best avant/energy/free/noise group to come out of Scotland since, uh…. The sound is assembled around tortuously bent feedback and dizzyingly dense overtone attacks in a way that references contemporary Skullflower while factoring in the kind of bombastic end-of-the-world feel of Fushitsusha circa Pathetique as well as totemic out-guitar sources like The Blue Humans, Ascension, Ramleh et al. The destructo levels barely let up for a second, with impassible machine noise flatlined into huge monolithic instants occasionally exploded by post-Dead C drums and slow, bowed notes that sound like dooms of bells. Just perfect. Hand-numbered edition of only 39 copies on the group’s own label. Highly recommended.

New release on the Glasgow-based label run by Kevin McCarvel and Stuart Crutchfield of Smoke Jaguar. A great set of massively cranked textural improvisations from the duo of Ben Hall (Graveyards/Bill Dixon/Joe Morris et al) and guitarist/inventor Chris Riggs, confusing process and form across a series of tracks that move in tectonic percussive waves. Hand-numbered edition of 79 copies in art paper sleeves with paste-on covers. 

Brand new limited CD-R from the best new group in Scotland, Glasgow’s Smoke Jaguar. Smoke Jaguar tore it up when they opened Subcurrent 2010 and this new album, limited to 77 hand-numbered copies, is their most fully realized set to date. The duo have a remarkable dynamic, with Kevin McCarvel playing slow-motion puffs of sad single notes with all of the blasted weight of Suishou No Fune or Miminikoto while Stuart Crutchfield drops zagging bombs of barbed wire electricity all over the top. If you like twin guitars that sound like beams of white light wrestled into submission by two guys with an intuitive understanding of instant form, then you might wanna weld this one to your head. Massively heavy jams for fans of Skullflower, Universal Indians, Fushitsusha et al. Recommended. 

Dunno how Nyali Recordings do it but as anyone who picked up their phenomenal Masami Kawaguchi New Rock Syndicate CD-R will tell you, they consistently succeed in scoring the best material from whoever it is they’re working with. This time round it’s Stefan Neville aka Pumice, with a collection of unreleased radio sessions from around the world that is so perfectly balanced between classic NZ/Flying Nun singer-songwriter-isms and blasted Dead C/Fushitsusha style black hole rock that it’ll have you lining up your King Loser wax before you’re even halfway done. Neville is one of only a handful of performers on the planet – Wooden Wand, Jeremy Earl, Alastair Galbraith – that is capable of combing classic songwriting moves and a feel for higher-minded melody with the aesthetics of scorch, invigorating the singer/songwriter blueprint with a ton of outside junk, with warped fidelity, Dictaphone hymns and mangled feedback instants co-habiting with great, great songs just like they used to ‘back in the day’. Worldwide Gullet draws on tracks from Neville’s last bunch of recordings – Pebbles and Quo - and also includes a buncha covers, two Gfrenzy tracks and one by CJA, both unreleased in Pumice form. Also included are a string of tracks labeled “etc” which Neville describes as “traditional extended live Pumice variations for endless cassette and intercom. Super fans might notice loops from albums being reused and buried in amongst those.” Some of the songs are so blasted that the only real comparison is early This Kind Of Punishment or even Galbraith’s Morse LP. Cross that with instrument destruction that’s as nod-out beautiful as any Dead C fade-out and you’ve got the go-to Pumice album of choice. Hand-numbered edition of 107 copies. Highly recommended.  

Brand new album from the world-beating free music duo of Heather Leigh on pedal steel and vocals and Chris Corsano on drums, following on in style from their Family Vineyard LP. Once more recorded and mixed by Andreas Jonsson the sound is as dazzling as their debut, with three tracks that move from ferocious post-Sharrock power blues through new zones of smoky, spectral tone. The opener comes straight out of The Rocker, with Heather’s bad motor scooter guitar burning asphalt while Corsano plays in four directions at a time, ducking air raid warnings with an amphetamine dexterity. Second track, “White Spider” is a whole new bomb, with the duo navigating a kind of psychedelic giallo atmosphere with Corsano making like an orchestra of Max Roachs while Heather plays spectral strings and floating tones that are straight out of the Nicolai/Morricone songbook. The closing “Freezing Shark” might be the most radical recording they’ve nailed to the floor, with an unaccompanied vocal from Heather driven straight through the wall by Corsano before the guitar explodes like a heavy metal Masayuki Takayanagi playing future blues. This is such a great, invigorating shot from the source and it confirms a whole buncha things that are important in underground music: energy, passion, actual playing, speed-of-thought improvisation. Who else comes close? Hand-numbered edition of 297 copies. Highest possible recommendation!

Fully upgraded reissue of the debut release from this Glasgow-based guitar/blood/drums duo featuring Kevin McCarvel on bass and guitar and Stuart Crutchfield (who has already had a few poetry books published by Bill Shute’s Kendra Steiner Editions) on guitar and drums. They play the kind of supremely wasted rock demolition jags that would see guitars torn to shreds of fuzz and static ala The Dead C’s Russell/Morley tag-team balanced with the kind of primitive prog/psych disembowelment of Bryan Ramirez’s Ex-Cocaine, Dead White, Skullflower, Ashtray Navigations et al. If you like your guitars running on translucent electricity and plugged into huge fangs of fuzz then here’s your mainline. So jack the fuck up. Edition of 50 hand-numbered copies on their own label in hard card sleeves and hi-quality plastic slips with substantially remastered sound. Recommended.

Unbelievable two-fer from the best band in Scotland, Glasgow’s phenomenal Smoke Jaguar, following up their recent cassette on Sonic Oyster with two live recordings, one from Glasgow’s Halt Bar in June 2010 and one from their appearance at VT’s own Subcurrent fest in August of 2010. The Halt show is totally explosive with twin guitars set to stun, Crutchfield’s just dissolving in walls of pure electricity while McCarvel picks out elegiac single notes with all of the anti-gravity appeal of your favourite Japanese head. The Subcurrent set, where they played on the same bill as Richard Youngs, Heather Leigh, Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides and MV/EE/Flower, is a little more hi-fi with epic peaks of feedback shot to ribbons with sky-scraping lead guitar. Hard to believe there’s a band this good outside of Tokyo never mind active in Glasgow right now. Hand-numbered edition of 77 copies.