9 Mar 2017

The Quietus makes Gnoomes album 'Tschak!' it's Release of the Week


It reads:

In the pharmacologically sober follow-up to Ngan!, JR Moores finds that being forbidden from ingesting mind-altering substances hasn't neutered Gnoomes' ability to create joyful and inspiring Russian psych.

Once a successful chick-lit author, briefly a Tory MP and perhaps best known for her incessant pestering of the internet, Louise Mensch says a lot of daft things on Twitter. Last year, one of her daftest tweets exploited Leonard Cohen's death as an opportunity to contend that American culture is enduringly superior to that of "joyless" Russia. As everybody knows, Cohen was of course Canadian while at the same time Mensch managed to overlook a fair few Russian cultural big-hitters. Tolstoy for example, Dostoyevsky or Gogol, to name just three. Naturally, their achievements pale in comparison to Mensch-née-Bagshawe's own literary works, one of which was shortlisted for the prestigious Romantic Novel Of The Year Award in 2010 and includes the sentence "Her name was Lola Montoya, and God, she was a cold bitch." Eat that, Chekhov, you forgotten tubercular hack.

If we're talking strictly music, we could start with Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky. Not one to apologise for such wilful ignorance, Mensch might assert that those composers' undeniable accomplishments occurred way back in the olden days whereas she views modern Russia as having, to quote one of her own garbled follow-up tweets, "no rock 'n' roll."...

Read the rest here: The Quietus

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