Maquina – Prata (Fuzz Club) – It went like this today, paint was being thrown at canvas, I was almost in the zone, nowhere near the edge of the desert, there were no red sharks or bats, the new Maquina album had been thrown on without reading the press release and without knowing a thing about the Portuguese band and their second album that landed here this morning. There I was listening to the album, battling with red and blue paint, ear feeling better than eye about the art that was happening, thought to myself they’re got a great sound going on on here, than angle grinding buzz saw sound is really working with a the forward movement, the production is great, fees like that grinding is coming from way left field underneath it all, love it! Turns out someone was outside angle grinding but hey, it sounded damn good with Prata up way way loud and Maquina almost drowning the buzzsaw out as the paint went wrong and… Let’s start the review again (whatever did happen to Bingo anyway? Bingo would turn up at gigs with his angle grinder and no one would ever dare t otry and stop him)
Start the review again, they are relentless, perpetual (I bet they keep the country clean), locked on motorik Kraut flavoured club-tinged post punk. It isn’t minimal, it is full bodied, meaty, committed, the repetition is positive, pounding, throbbing an adrenaline-fuelled sound that feels like it would be killer in some dark Falcon-like minimally lit back room. Six tracks that basically offer slight variations on the same locked-on theme. There are vocals low down in the menace of it all, a kind of primal vocal outburst as the gears slightly change, they’ve got a touch of Godflesh in there, the menace of Pulkas, that global noise attack, they’d make for a good desert-racing Max Max soundtrack. Hang on, what am I on about? We’ve covered Maquina before, too much music I tell yer! Seems we told you this album was coming and posted a preview track a couple of months back. The whole album sounds spontaneous, it sounds urgent, it sounds goooooooood, you don’t need our words, reviews are redundant, just listen for yourselves, they need that angle grinding buzz saw though, Bingo, if he’s still out there, would love this band…
Beans – Boots N Cats (Fuzz Club) – Kookaburra, three tracks in is the song that really catches passing ears, a kind of acid flavoured old school almost-but-not-quite prog rock thing, an instrumental thing that has you waiting a minute or two to see where it goes. Not really paid much attention to Australian band Beans before, they make far more sense over the flight of a whole album. A kind of Sixties/Seventies flavoured mildly progressive acid rock thing, Most of the time they’re kind of politely sunny, breeze psych-pop rock laced with mostly instrumental funk flavoured groove, there are vocals, it does mostly feel instrumental, got a bit of a 70’s film sound track thing flowing through their songs, they’re kind of nice most of the time but now and again they do something that really does catch an ear and Kookaburra makes the whole album well worth checking out…
Fuzz Club is a now long-standing London-based underground label – here’s their Bandcamp page
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