WAX FANG – The Astronaut

astronautFollowing a release of a handful of digital onIy singles released throughout 2013, Wax Fang pull out all the stops on this full-length offering – five tracks, forty-plus minutes and the disastrous tale of “an astronaut separated from his craft and swallowed by a black hole”.  In the hands of some, a concept album can be fabulous, in others, it’s the worst kind of self-indulgence not far from career suicide.  Thankfully, for Wax Fang, ‘The Astronaut’ and its grand scale works well, the directness of parts of their music overshadowing most of the potential for grandiose meandering. This sprawling opus has one main aim: to grab the listener and sonically melt them with the push and pull between hard rock grooves and sonic  textres.   Various influences drift in and out – from Hawkwind, Muse, tiny nods to Mars Volta, ambient, Krautrock and touches of stoner – though none ever quite take a dominant hold, meaning Wax Fang’s odd menagerie of noise-making isn’t always too predictable.

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SKELETONS IN THE PIANO – Please Don’t Die

skeletons in the pianoSkeletons In The Piano are the stuff of your technicolour dreams and your darkest nightmares.  Billing themselves as falling somewhere between The Doors and Black Sabbath, this New York septet’s sound constantly pulls between extremes, often favouring moods lodged inside the dustiest corner of the imagination.

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KEVIN AYERS: 16th August 1944 – 18th February 2013

Born in in the 1940s in Herne Bay, Kent, Kevin Ayers had become a cult figure on the UK music scene by his twenties when, via a Canterbury based band called The Wylde Flowers, he founded (The) Soft Machine.  While never as commercially successful as Pink Floyd’s ‘Piper At The Gates of Dawn’, their self-titled debut album is now considered a cornerstone of psychedelic music.

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