Cal Cashin

UK-based music critic and historian, exploring weird and beautiful guitar music.

Selected Transient Works

The Quietus

tQ Subscriber Release: Ex Agent

At the forefront of an underground British guitar scene that's thriving against all odds, Ex Agent have delivered an idiosyncratic, ever-shifting, and excellent new EP exclusively to tQ subscribersNever did we think it could get this bad. Alongside the frankly evil cost of living, prohibitively expensive rehearsal spaces, and the fact that even finding a grassroots venue in which to make strange noise can be an arduous task, it is a very bleak time to be a young band in the UK. And yet, against...
Loud And Quiet

The Drift #2 - Huremic, Hekla, and more

And so we have, quite possibly, arrived out the other end of the longest of winters. For weeks, nay months, it felt like the sun would never shine again. But, dear reader, the gloom is lifting, the dafs are growing, we are so back.Having survived the Ides of March for another year, it is with great pleasure that I can share with you the second edition of The Drift, Loud and Quiet’s number one spot for everything weird, wonderful and avant-garde.If you know where to look (here, here is where you...
The Quietus

The Evil That Men Do: Cowards by Squid | The Quietus

At the tail-end of the 2010s, Squid emerged alongside Black Midi and Black Country, New Road as part of a golden trifecta for the iconoclastic South London singles label Speedy Wunderground. A real revitalising moment for British guitar music, this trio of spookily young groups combined virtuous musicality with a diverse and incongruous canon of influences to make some of the most exciting and experimental rock music seen on these shores for generations.


Helmed by singing drummer Ollie Judge,...
The Quietus

Reissue of the Week: Violent Femmes’ Hallowed Ground

Violent Femmes’ self-titled debut is one of the most essential American indie rock records of the early 80s, but it’s not the only album by the band you must have in your collection, argues Cal Cashin, as he re-examines its unfairly overlooked follow-up Hallowed Ground 40 years onViolent Femmes self-titled debut album remains a core text of the teenage angst curriculum. It is a perfect document of that very particular feeling of experiencing love, lust and loss for the first time, and it’s still...
The Quietus

Post-Whatever: You Never End by Moin is our Album of the Week | The Quietus

Joined by a slew of collaborators, from Coby Sey to Sophia Al-Maria, the London trio have made one of the most forward-looking guitar albums of the yearThere is something deeply rotten throughout the island of Britain at the moment, and even more miserably so in London, its moribund capital. Everyone I know is depressed; everyone you know is depressed. And every time you venture to a major population centre, it looks like Disco Elysium: everyone there is also depressed. A shared misery, a univer...
Loud and Quiet

Mabe Fratti – Sentir que no sabes - Loud And Quiet

Frighteningly prolific, Guatemala-born Mexico-based avant-garde cellist, composer and dabbler Mabe Fratti has charted so much ground in so little time. Since her 2019 debut album, Fratti has carved out a niche as a genuine one-off, a first-rate explorer and experimenter of bold and blazing sounds.Perhaps that of a Central American Arthur Russell is a lazy comparison, given the difference in the sound of their records, but given their hunger for exploration, prolific peaks and their virtuosity on...
Clash Magazine

Steve Albini Remembered | Features | Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews

This one really hurt. The thing about Steve Albini, a man befitting a place on the Mount Rushmore of underground and alternative rock, is that he was a master of many trades. Ingenious producer, demonic rockstar, poker impresario, ran a wonderful cookery blog, and a principled and iconoclastic voice in a world losing its principles and iconoclasts. His name is on the back of over 1,000 albums, and his brazen voice and mechanical guitar tones are all over dozens; Albini is one of the greatest of...
Loud and Quiet

Geordie Greep – The New Sound - Loud And Quiet

To fervent followers of outlier rock trio Black Midi, a breakup courtesy of drifting musical interests might not have come entirely out of the blue. The brilliance of the group’s triptych of studio albums, from 2019 to 2022, seemingly came from the ancient alchemy of three (well, formerly four) highly proficient and creative individuals pulling in different directions – and there’s only so long that the luminous sparks of such chemical reactions can burn. When a collaborative process burns so br...
The Quietus

Reissue Of The Week: Les Rallizes Denudes' CITTA 93 | The Quietus

A narrative is forming around Les Rallizes Denudes that perhaps some of their haunting strength has sprung from the lo-fi quality of their bootlegs. Cal Cashin spends time with the new crystal clear official release of CITTA '93 and finds their sublime avalanche of sound just as addictive as everThe late 1960s was a time of profound counter cultural upheaval in Japan. Much like the West, the first generation of post-War students blew their minds with art, drugs and rock & roll. Amidst this whirl...
Loud and Quiet

O: "Most drummers would be able to pick up juggling" | Loud And Quiet

O golly, O gosh, O boy, O wonder. O can perhaps be compared to contemporaries like Sons of Kemet, who mix their jazz training with thunderous songcraft to create music that is more about momentum and motion than melody and harmony. Indeed, despite connections in London’s fertile jazz scene, O have more in common with dozens of other genres than they do with jazz.  “I did a lot of stuff that I’d say was more in the jazz world,” Keary says, having cut her teeth as part of the Tomorrow’s Warriors i...
Loud and Quiet

Wu-Lu: community spirit, post-genre creativity, and rose-ringed parakeets - Loud And Quiet

Wu-Lu is Miles Romans-Hopcraft, producer, multi-instrumentalist, tamperer, but he doesn’t make all the music on his own. He’s the head chef, with a cast of chefs de partie in the wings. “Sometimes,” he says of his compositional style, “it will be me, in my bedroom, with the MPC, getting all close. That might transpire into something I’ll show to the band – they might play on top of it, or incorporate it into our set.“Or,” he continues, “I’ll get together with the guys, hang out, chilling and jam...
The Quietus

Thirteen Convulsions: Geordie Greep's Favourite Albums | The Quietus

Black Midi frontman Geordie Greep takes Cal Cashin through the thirteen albums that have gripped him the most, from the majesty of Bach to the mania of Léo Ferré Geordie Greep, frontman of precocious noise-rock combo Black Midi, has always been a somewhat elusive and mysterious character. He gives little of himself away in interviews, and his Twitter account is largely dedicated to boxing. This distance often comes across in his lyrics, as he masks himself behind absurdist narratives and cryptic...
The Quietus

If You Know, You Know: An Interview With Iphgenia Baal & Ben Graville | The Quietus

Compliances: A New Fear, from Toothgrinder Press, combines the apocalyptic imagery of photographer Ben Graville and the caustic prose of Iphgenia Baal. Cal Cashin talks to the pair about working together and the depressing state of publishinglife was like that already… now it’s the same only worse

That is the proclamation of London novelist Iphgenia Baal at the start of her latest book Compliances: A New Fear. Part faux-psychology textbook, part fictionalised journal (much like 2017’s Merced Es...
Loud and Quiet

“We pied the Oliver Cromwell Museum” – you have to have fun as a new band, say Lunch Money Life - Loud And Quiet

Apocalypse music. That’s what they called it. When Lunch Money Life released their lurching debut album Immersion Chamber in 2020, they were all too happy to label their bastard inversion of jazz as music for armageddon. But things are a bit more nuanced now.“It feels crass now, in hindsight,” electronics maven Jack Martin would later tell me, about what Lunch Money Life used to brand their work. “I believe in it to the extent that the world is fucked up, and we make fucked up music – not the mo...
The Quietus

Edge Of Tomorrow: Black to the Future By Sons of Kemet | The Quietus

Photo by Udoma Janssen

It has become increasingly clear over the past year that Britain is a nation of bootlickers. It is a country wherein a very terrible status quo is upheld at all costs, and there is very little reason to hope for a better future.

I think back to last Summer – Black Lives Matter protests – and the backlash that followed from the UK’s press and media. “Tearing down statues of slave owners is erasing history,” someone with a Blue Tick that definitely didn’t stand in the way...
The Quietus

Plague Island's Youth Division: For The First Time By Black Country, New Road | The Quietus

Black Country, New Road are one of the most exciting bands in a standout London music scene, and this album is a candid portrait of where the band are at a few years into their existence, finds Cal CashinFirst impressions are seldom wrong. And when I saw Black Country, New Road for the first time, it was one such occasion. Autumn 2018, they towered over me from atop the 100 Club stage; equal parts bombast, terror and ecstasy. A eureka moment in real time. The demonic ensemble melded all the best...
The Quietus

Brassed Off: Emma-Jean Thackray’s Journey From Village Band To The Cutting Edge Of Jazz | The Quietus

Portraits by Matthew Benson

Emma-Jean Thackray’s singular brand of jazz is a heady and unique cocktail. Yorkshire-born, the musical polymath leads her band with virtuoso trumpet performances, mixing genres as though they’re fresh ingredients making up a potent solution.

Thackray’s own studies of jazz trumpet at the Royal Welsh College Of Music And Drama bring a tangible hard-bop element to them, whilst a love of Madlib and J Dilla colours her joyous approach to production. Thackray’s also spo...
Clash Magazine

Another Affair: Piercing Jockstrap's Harmonic Core | Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews

London outfit Jockstrap are one of the most exciting propositions in British music today.
On 2018’s stellar ‘Love is the Key to the City’ EP, they established themselves as electronic enfants terribles, juxtaposing several seemingly disparate elements in perfect harmony. This month, the band release their second EP, ‘Wicked CIty’, through Warp. 
At the core of Jockstrap is the duo of Georgia Ellery, who is also in Black Country, New Road, and Taylor Skye, who is an acclaimed young producer in hi...
The Quietus

Tame Impala — The Slow Rush | The Quietus

It took Kevin Parker five years of reclusive writing before The Slow Rush was ready for human consumption. His group Tame Impala started off at the dawn of the 2010s as a charming psych-revival curiosity, but second and third albums Lonerism and Currents saw the group slowly mutate into something far bigger; an escapist pop act capable of headlining festivals.

Notoriously, Parker is one of these musicians that spends literal years labouring over fine details to ensure everything is the best it...
The Quietus

Musical Fluidity: Locean Interviewed | The Quietus

Ahead of their performance at Raw Power this weekend, Cal Cashin talks Paradox, poetry and the pleasures of improvisation with Lauren Bolger and David McLean of Locean“Most the experimental musicians in Manchester have been in either Gnod or Locean”, the bassist, David McLean, of the latter tells me. Locean are a psychedelic collective that, since 2012, have existed with a revolving cast. They tap into a singular, powerful sound. The group are a truly elemental force – and whilst their tenure as...
Crack Magazine

In an increasingly bland world, Mark E Smith remained a stubborn, true original

Mark E Smith is the kind of hero who, if you ‘got’, you were inspired by. Always different, always the same, over the course of four decades, The Fall carved out a legacy in the vision of their singular frontman. A true original, yesterday British music lost one of its greatest and most pervasive performers.
This July, I was asked to write about The Fall’s set at the 100 Club for Fred Perry. Mark perf...