One of the more tranquil moments from his mad-as-fuck second full-length album, 'Remotely' shows a more reflective side to the music of SJ Esau, the Bristol-based maverick whose real name is Sam Wisternoff. As I said a few weeks ago when I featured 'Stubborn Step' as Track Of the Day, "it's fair to say that the gracefully tranquil hum of the gorgeous 'Remotely' is a world away from the utter insanity found elsewhere on the joyfully polylithic 'Exploding Views', an album that skips around genres, bringing its musical vision to life with bizarre instrumentation and many unusual ways to twist melodic yet skewed pop melodies into the sort of stuff that could seriously mess with one's head..."Monolith Cocktail also reviewed the album recently, in a report where editor Dominic Valvona writes: "Esau returns with a cyclonic ‘explosion’ of brash barracking drums, algebra rock and skittish mind-melting dial trickery: the stars look very different indeed where we’re heading. Fluctuating – in a promising, madcap manner- through a musical landscape that evokes (in my tiny ill-adjusted mind) visions of an English comprehensive school version of The Flaming Lips, or the Klaxons covering XTC’s calico wall shenanigans (The Dukes Of The Stratosphere)…or even, a hallucinogenic neo-geo Adam and the Ants. Questioning song titles (‘’Who Isn’t?, ‘Why Angry’, ‘What Is It Now?’) give a faint and obscure guidance to this peregrination, which shoots off like a rocket into some imaginable kaleidoscopic, but often ominous and seething with dark matter, expanse of space." Read the rest of that piece HERE. Appropriately, yesterday marked my debut contribution to Monolith Cocktail where I reviewed the new album from Minibus Pimps, the rather challenging experimental project from Helge Sten and Led Zeppelin legend John Paul Jones... That review can be found HERE.
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