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Kenneth McMurtrie

Kenneth McMurtrie

The Parkinsons - On The Road In The UK In December

Those primal princes of Portuguese punk rock The Parkinsons are back in the UK for three dates in the week before Xmas. you know a ticket's the best gift you could buy yourself.

With their BBC recordings (which pre-date debut album Long Way To Nowhere) released earlier this year as the Rare Sessions 12" and 2013's Back To Life album in need of a further live outing the quartet are set to play London, Edinburgh & Glasgow on their UK Festive Takeover.

Since getting back together in 2011 the band have tirelessly toured and are particularly pleased to be getting back to London, where it all took off for them back at the start of the 2000s, as well experiencing the usual frenzy exhibited for them by Scottish audiences.

Tickets for the London date can be obtained here, Edinburgh here and further information on the Glasgow date is here.

tētēma - Geocidal

Already in 2014 the ever-prolific Mike Patton has been heard as the voices of infected humans in video game The Last Of Us, collaborated with Got A Girl and John Zorn's Moonchild Trio & of course once again been involved with Faith No More. Capping off a year that for him probably still just counts as business as usual comes Geocidal, a collaboration with pianist/composer Anthony Pateras and a cast of supporting musicians picked by the latter and begun by him in rural France over 18 months ago.

The duo's name tētēma is (possibly) Swahili for 'quiver'. What the album could very well do though is make you quake, at least during the louder passages of songs such as 'Pure War' or 'The Hell Of Now'. This is avant-garde music akin to the likes of Einstürzende Neubauten, thereby offering a challenge to the listening capacities of many.

It's not all screams, shouts, throat singing and cacophony though. Amidst the extreme musical representations of the damage being wrought across the planet there are calmer tracks, such as 'Irundi', and interludes that speak of a positive outcome being still possible. The fact of all the instrumentation being analogue & utilising only human players with no sampling or sequencing infuses the record with a naturalness that perfectly evokes the need for people to be more hands-on in their dealings with their surroundings. Whilst the album's message isn't exactly "take your bottles to be recycled" there is a clear oneness with the planet and its various populations being rightfully promoted.

Faith No More's recent 'Motherfucker' single is pretty clearly targeting the same entities that are behind Earth's ongoing geocide, albeit in a more accessible style and with a title that a great deal of people won't see past. With tētēma Patton & Pateras have potentially given themselves a platform with a greater scope for contributing to far more than just the climate change debate.  

Geocidal is available from amazon & iTunes.

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