Posts Tagged ‘Tom waits’

Six of the Best with Emmaleen Tangleweed

Posted: 8 June 2026 in Interviews, Previews and Editorial
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Ahead of new album The Weaving, out via Cruel Nature at the end of July, dark-folk singer/songwriter Emmaleen Tangleweed takes us through five influential albums and one curveball – in other words their ‘Six of the Best’!

Engine of Hell by Emma Ruth Rundle. The emotional vulnerability and sense of catharsis on this live record breathes in a way that really gets me in the guts. It’s inspired me to embrace having an unusual voice and to go deeper lyrically.

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Black Pudding by Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood. Hypnotic, long–distance driving music. There’s an archetypal timelessness feel in this record I really love.

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Mule Variations by Tom Waits. The songs on this record have lived and grown with me for a very long time. Waits offers such a sense of atmosphere and place with universal themes that take you on an inner journey. “Movies for the ears,” as he describes it. My songwriting style is very much a product of my parents playing Tom Waits to me as a young child.

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The Lady and Mr Johnson, a tribute to Robert Johnson by Rory Block. Block’s slide playing is so raw and immediate, I’m reminded how much can be done with a single instrument and a voice that tells the truth.

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The Mysterious Tale of how I Shouted Wrong-eyed Jesus! by Jim White. This record goes down its own weird path of Appalachian outlaw country blues. It’s another record that’s tattooed itself under my skin.

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The Road by DakhaBrakha. Ukrainian quartet featuring tribal rhythms with chant like vocals calling straight from the heart of their motherland. I love the unique choice of instrumentation and simple yet unexpected arrangements. One of my favourite records, even though I don’t understand the lyrics it’s definitely influenced how I approach vocalizing and treating instruments in new ways.

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Find The Weaving here and follow Emmaleen on Insta here.

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World Sanguine Report – Skeleton Blush

Posted: 30 June 2020 in Albums
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limitedNOISE – 10th July 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Eleven whole years on from Third One Rises, World Sanguine Report crawl bloodied and bruised from a dark, dingy back alley to stagger into the light and toss down onto the rain-soaked, blood-spattered concrete their new album, Skeleton Blush. It’s a haggard, battered beast, a collection of songs that wheeze and puff pain from every pore. Whether it’s whisky-soaked introspection of staggering, brawling bleariness, it’s grainy, gritty, and often bleak, dredging emotions from the pits of the city’s sewers.

The various members have been keeping busy in the meantime, with various projects, notably with vocalist / guitarist Andrew Plummer having detoured for a few years with the grizzled no-wave racket of Snack Family. The various projects are clearly different, but at the same time their creative roots are abundantly clear.

Across the spread of the album, the band swing psychotically, schizophrenically, between dirty jazz-tinged blues that draws together The Doors and Tom Waits in a deliriously drunken swagger of swinging rhythms (you could never call it an elevated or euphoric mood – more an upswing in a maniacally volatile moodset) and boozy, brawling horns, and seedy, low-down lugubriosity.

The title track is as close as thing get to flamboyant, with a flamboyant jazz cacophony delivered with a Beefheartian mania and taste for dissonance, and ‘Drip Driven’ is similarly crazed in his riot of jolting, discordant horns that spirt every whichway over a low-slung stop-start funk groove, while ‘Aou’ trudges through dark, soup waters of brass-tinged gloom, sounding like Gallon Drunk on Ketamine.

Skeleton Blush brings derangement to a big band setting: it’s absolutely wild, and also low-down and seedy – and absolutely fucking ace.

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Tensheds – Deathrow Disco

Posted: 17 January 2020 in Albums
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Tensheds Music – 6th December 2019

Christopher Nosnibor

Having caught Tensheds live back in 2018 and been impressed by their gritty yet flamboyant sound, the arrival of an album in the form of Deathrow Disco promised to be good news. And it really is.

No guitars. No synths. No bass. Just a Rhodes organ. And some drums. Written in three days and recorded in three more, Deathrow Disco packs an immediacy without being lo-fi in a way that’s detrimental. However, everything is upfront and direct and cranked up, delivering maximum impact with a sense of urgency.

Everything fits together perfectly, and it all serves to showcase Matt Millership’s distinctive voice. The guy’s got more gravel than Jewson’s. And while that sand-blasted larynx is used to growl out mangled blued-based songs, he’s no predictable Tom Waits rip-off like so any others. Lead single and opening track ‘Youngbloods’ packs some flamboyant keys of a grandeur worthy of Muse or Yes, but pins the trilling tones go a stomping rhythm.

Second single cut ‘Gold Tooth’ is a grainy glammy blues boogie, but sonically, it’s a collision of The Doors at their swaggering badass baddest with Suicide, mining a relentless groove with a swirling Hammond that’s been mangled and

Then again, ‘Slag’ is more like a synth Mötörhead, only with some piano thrown into the mix. ‘Deathrow Disco’ combines immense theatricality with full-blooded rock ‘n’ roll, and elsewhere, ‘Black Blood’ goes prog and at the same times reveals a softer, more sensitive side, and ‘Troubleshooter’ inches toward lighter-waving anthem territory, or maybe would without the bitter heartbreak lyrics.

Deathrow Disco is varied, and largely uptempo and big on boppable grooves, but make no mistake, Tensheds have a highly distinctive style that works well, and makes optimal use of minimal kit.

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Tensheds - Deathrow Disco