Chris Harms - 1980 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

10 tracks from the Houston-based, Cream/Jefferson Airplane-style band that started out as United Gas in 1968 - this is the only authorized recording made from guitarist Richard Avitts' & bassist Doug Walden's original master tapes.

Been making his mark on countless Berlin musical affairs since long before the fall of the Wall, with The Golden Showers, Peaches, Oum Shatt, Driver &Driver, Die Türen, Jens Friebe, to name but a few. He has also been perfoming across Europe as a solo artist for the past decade. In InchOperation SchönheitInch (German for InchOperation BeautyInch), he has recorded his most, well, beautiful album to date. But Benedikt Frey's warm production subverts it's own beauty with a multitude of clanking and ingling synth sounds, making the work very much about the cosmetic surgery it performs on itself. It's all in the tradition of the more experimental and electronic side of post-punk in which Imler and his unique groove are rooted. It doesn't take insider knowledge of Berlin's post-punk underground to realise that that Imler groove consists of rhythm that sings, vocals that dance and a look that fits, as illustrated by InchDisappoint MeInch, his latest video

Chris Cohen's songs initially sound easy. They're each tiny jewels that unfurl at a leisurely pace, but dig a little deeper and you'll reach a melancholy core. His previous two albums - 2012's Overgrown Path, and 2016's As If Apart - were built from rich, blurry tracks that embedded themselves in your subconscious, like they'd always been there. Chris Cohen, his third solo album, is a thoughtful, accomplished meditation on life and family, backed by dusky instrumentation influenced by the late evening beauty of Pat Metheny's Falcon and the Snowman soundtrack, and Thomas Dolby's Golden Age of Wireless. It's beautiful, but it's also unflinching in it's depiction of emotional turmoil. Mastered by Bernie Grundman and written and recorded in his Lincoln Heights studio and at Tropico Beauties in Glendale, California over the course of the last two years with the help of Katy Davidson (Dear Nora), Luke Csehak (Happy Jawbone Family Band), Zach Phillips, and saxophonist Kasey Knudsen, it is his most straightforward album yet, but it is also the conclusion of an unofficial cycle that began with Overgrown Path.