Press for Jonathan Kane's ‘February’:
 


"Paradise between the back porch, the urban jungle and the heavens above ... The album’s down-home grooves shine with an orchestral, massed-guitar luster that's often associated with Glenn Branca and Kane’s frequent collaborator Rhys Chatham. Layered electric and acoustic sounds create overtones that trick the listener into hearing nonexistent organs and harmonicas. In place of the mind-boggling beats for which he's known, Kane underpins these drones with a deceptively simple, forcefully executed shuffle. His swinging opuses exude bright, earthy euphony instead of dark, cerebral dissonance: Witness the rollicking “Sis” or the luminous version of the traditional "Motherless Child." Rarely does the avant-garde rock this hard."
Time Out New York


“Jonathan Kane delivers his solo debut February with high decibel self-assurance. His music's intrinsic swagger is crucial to the album's success, marshaling his minimalist riffs to their trance-inducing limits, deftly sparking a synaptic link between Neu!-style repetition and the hypnotic electric blues of Junior Kimbrough. On these five instrumental pieces he's stripped away all of the music's inessentials, paring these blues-based excursions down to a streamlined, locomotive core. Kicking immediately into an unapologetic foursquare blues riff, the 12-minute opener "Curl" begins to build a tenacious momentum through a series of almost imperceptable directional shifts, and soon the massed overtones of the guitars course against Kane's powerhouse drumming to assemble into a singularly captivating propulsive drone. Likewise, the set's version of the traditional "Motherless Child" elongates the old spiritual's structure nearly beyond the point of recognition, with each melodic detail considered in isolation beneath distant ascending distortion and the rolling boulders of Kane's unyielding rhythms. Spacious tracks like "Pops" and "Sis" incorporate subtle traces of parched earth Americana, supplied with a certain sawtooth grit and a cold-blooded rattlesnake resolve. Kane adds and removes sonic elements with the single-minded endurance of a wide, muddy river carving itself a canyon, and with the unwavering confidence of an already-veteran solo performer secure in his vision.”
Pitchfork

 
“Drummer Jonathan Kane knows from Heavy: He was the beat-of-doom in Swans and has kept taut time for minimalists Rhys Chatham and La Monte Young. Kane also plays guitar and bass here, wedding the brutal severity of Delta country boogie and Seventies German pulse rock – all dead-ahead motion and mounting detail, peaking with epic stasis in the cover of Chatham’s ‘Guitar Trio’.
Rolling Stone
 
 
“Intensely propulsive motorik blues, its muscularity and greased relentlessness is never less than exhilarating”
Uncut


"Circulating blood that's more delta than downtown ... a down-home stomper stretched on minimalism's rack until it becomes a hypnotic skeleton suitable for a night's totentanz on the town.  Deep, dense, and dangerously entrancing, it will take some damn impressive releases
in the next few months for February to not be high on my year's top ten.  Stellar work all around."
Dusted
 
 
"February is a blasting artifact of blues-drone dirge that bares the marks of a man who's spent a lifetime balancing these disparate influences. Kane's journey from the malevolent Swans to drummer behind the cerebral swells of Rhys Chatham's 100 electric guitar orchestra culminates here with blustery instrumental bliss. The randy riffs of the 12-minute opener "Curl" and the circular rhythms of "Pops" burst and bloom into rambunctious preambles loaded with subtly changing parts shrouded in voluptuous, groove-driven nods. The staccato strings in "Sis" rock the house down to the foundation with the cadence of drunken power tools. Traditional number "Motherless Child" unfolds with Morricone-esque majesty, and a rendition of Chatham's "Guitar Trio" injects a tried-and-true approach to blue-collar Americana with a progressive and exploratory splendor. In extracting the "awe shucks" sensibilities of the working man's music, February revives the dead language of the blues and transforms it into a shimmering, avant-garde barrel down Highway 61 with nothing but the riff behind the wheel."
Creative Loafing, Atlanta

 
“Jonathan Kane has co-founded the Swans, backed Rhys Chatham, and kept the beat for La Monte Young’s Forever Bad Blues Band; you can be sure that he knows a thing or three about hitting his drums hard, real hard, and holding a beat for a long, long time. That’s not all he does on February, but it’s certainly an essential ingredient. The construction of his three originals is simplicity incarnate; pick a familiar blues riff and hold it for a while, then change things one note at a time. Easy to imagine, hard to execute successfully, but Kane has the dynamic control to pull it off. Featured on guitar and bass as well as drums (engineer Igor Cubrilovic adds more guitar on three tracks), Kane demonstrates a rare command of orchestration; every instrument comes in right when it need to, says its part, then inches aside for another to make itself known. This skill is even more evident on a cover of ‘Motherless Child’ where the gradual introduction of distorted electric guitars on top of briskly strummed acoustics wrings new drama from that hoary old classic. The other cover, of Rhys Chatham’s ‘Guitar Trio’, is a grand summation of Kane’s aspirations. He’s slowed it down and replaced the originals Neu!-like groove with an unabashedly swaggering roadhouse beat, then woven acoustic slide licks into the baker’s dozen notes that cycle endlessly through the tune. The personal politics of American minimalism have long cried out for a barroom with sawdust on the floor where differences could be settled man to man; this record would be on the jukebox.”
Signal to Noise
 
 
“There’s a hallucinatory drone at the bottom of classic blues songs—Howlin’ Wolf’s “Moanin’ at Midnight” for instance—that’s not too far removed from the mind-changing repetition of contemporary experimental music. Jonathan Kane brings these threads together in his first solo album. February links the psychotropic repetition of blues to the intellectual rigor of avant-garde classical, playing simple riffs over and over again until minor shifts in pattern and tone take on reality-warping significance. It’s clear from the beginning that Kane’s drumming sensibility permeates the album. On 'Sis', bent guitar notes flitting in amongst a monster four-four beat feel celebratory. The drums are freer here, periodically exploding, briefly slipping the bonds of song structure then stepping back into pattern, and you realize that this is what you’ve been waiting for all along. For those willing to enter into these minimalist, blues-leaning landscapes, there’s a continual interplay between theme and variation, and a hallucinatory reward for active listening.”
Pop Matters
 
 
"Jonathan Kane was the driving force behind La Monte Young's Forever Bad Blues Band and a founding member of Swans, so he's well placed to tear down the fences that some people (mostly journalists) have been trying to rebuild between Art and Rock. But anyone listening for the
first time to "Curl", the opening track on February would have little problem filing it away in the Rock section. Unlike the motorik instrumental rock of Neu!, which is in consistently hard driving binary simple time, "Curl" is in compound quadruple --  it swings, and swings hard. In homage to (Rhys) Chatham, Kane covers his 1977 "Guitar Trio", but slows the tempo and switches from simple to compound, a quantum leap that reconfigures Chatham's sleek binary sports car into a heaving R&B juggernaut. "Sis" shifts cunningly from simple to compound about two third of the way through, by using what Elliott Carter would call "metric modulation" Meanwhile,it doesn't matter which shelf you put February on, because it really belongs in the CAR as the soundtrack to that long awaited road trip. Who cares what kind of music it is? It rocks."
Paris Transatlantic
 
 
"February is a drone-inspired record in a big way; massive walls of chugging Chatham/Branca-leaning dissonant single guitar chords lead the way through long, and at times bluesy workouts. ...There's a modern melding of blues tradition with Terry Riley-esque flights of lengthy
repetition, something that in fact even predates Riley by decades in classic fife-and-drum Mississippi hill music. That music is clearly a big inspiration to Kane, who channeled his mighty wallop birthed with the Swans into true grit snaredrum workouts in the Kropotkins, a group that actively visited spiritual Mississippi kin like the late great Otha Turner (and also featured ex-Velvets Moe Tucker, who knows a thing or two about repetition in percussion) ... Within minutes you're totally hypnotized. Highly recommended."
WFMU
 
 
"Raising blood from skin and metal... Tying simple blues motifs to the orchestrated guitar minimalism of Glenn Branca and [Rhys] Chatham, Kane manages to create pieces that are simultaneously meditative, but unashamedly rock. The closest reference points are Henry Flynt, whose hillbilly ragas conjure the same sense of the mystic from the earthly, and the late Mark Sandman’s Morphine, who shared with Kane a penchant for getting into the groove. “February” ends with a wondrous workout of Chatham’s “Guitar Trio”, adding an assured swagger to the original
piece, before slowly coming to the boil."
Foxy Digitalis
 

 
"A loud & proud collision of artilliary drumming and bluesy rock instrumentation. Opening with 'Curl', Kane has an adherence to strict rhythms and serialistic intent that borders on the Neu! for repetative cohesion, with a grand bass heavy stomp pummeled by all manner of swampy guitars and low-slung bass. At times veering close to contemporary post-rock (see 'Motherless Child'), Kane is an old-school type through and through; a stance which lends 'February' an urgent energy which is terribly infectious."
Boomkat
 

"What if the Velvet Underground were blues cowboys from hell? What if Stereolab drove motorcycles and pick-ups and played shady bars on the Texas border? ...Propulsive urban dirges for modern ghost towns."
Just for a Day

“Jonathan Kane is one wicked drummer. He has technique and shuffles are a plenty. What he does on February is simply jaw-dropping. Imagine a rockabilly twang, bluesy influenced wall of guitars (four guitars, one bass) playing the same riff over and over again with slight changes all along. Like an organic drone, it makes you wonder if one of the guitarists will shred some solo after 3 minutes but no, here lies the quality and perfection of this album. It is at the same time unpretentious and so well executed and unique that it stands on its on. It is on the edge of being Avant-Garde but still has so many roots in traditional twang rock that you wonder were to put it on you record shelf. Instrumental bliss.”
Sonicosity



“February, Kane’s debut for the prestigious Table of the Elements label, finds him channeling drawn-out minimalist styles into a hypnotic blues swagger. Imagine a time-weathered blues band getting downright arty without losing the down-home feel of their cherished Americana swagger. Kane’s drumming holds the intricately amassing patterns locked rigidly in line, supporting his bass and guitar work but never leading it or taking centre stage before it. February is a detailed and deliberate minimalist work that swings as well as it encircles itself.”
Exclaim
 
"A massively subtle psychedelic system... Here, even the slightest flux in rhythmic/melodic detail seems almost tectonic ... Ferocious."
The Wire
 
"Rollicking, hypnotic and majestic.  Once again, Table of the Elements defies gravity to bring out another fantastic release."
Slug
 
"ROCKS!  Great Southern-fried looped blues rock.  Like Steve Reich if all he listened to was Muddy Waters and Zeppelin. Enormously promising and eminently satisfying"
Dusted


“Kane takes minimalism to the crossroads, building a massive document to the continuing power of the blues.”
MusicWorks
 
 
“Longform tribal blues love”
!Earshot

 
"Blows of Genius... Splendid."
Ondarock
 

"Infinite blues."
Village Voice
 



'February' - BEST OF 2005
WFMU
CJSF – Vancouver BC
Gapers Block
Norman Records - UK
JazzCorner
Svenska Dagbladet – Sweden
Borderline – Germany
Comes With A Smile – London, UK
(K-RAA-K)3 – Belgium
Columbus Alive
!Earshot-Vancouver BC  
Hinah – Germany
Zulu Records – Vancouver BC

Jonathan Kane’s February – Live Reviews

Jon Crider – Guitar
David Bicknell – Guitar
Peg Simone - Guitar
Adam Wills – Bass
Jonathan Kane - Drums

 
“Blistering the stars...Jonathan Kane's February was a show to remember. Kane and his four guitar assault launched the blues into the stratosphere. This is glorious guitar music where everthing riffs, crashs and rolls in synch, the blues stretched to the infinity...it shouldn't work but by god it does. Many try it and many fail but Jonathan Kane and band deliver BIG time. The Dream Synidicate has got a new forger of harmonic maximalism”
Qu Junktions - Bristol, UK

 
“Jonathan Kane’s February were an obvious festival highlight. With Kane punishing the drums, four guitarists and Ernie Brooks on bass, they played the blues like I’d never seen before. Transforming minimalist, repetitive riffs into a full-on attack, every song scorched. Maybe the best thing I saw while in Texas”
Dusted at SxSW 2006


“The cap of the night was a great way to end the evening. Watching a rock concert in a church. Jonathan Kane's February was amazing. It was 4 guitarists, a bassist and drummer Jonathan Kane, playing the hardest blues/pop guitar music I've heard in a while. All of the band members were dressed in suits and played some fierce melodic guitar. Even the rock critics rocked out”
Chicago Public Radio at SXSW 2006
 

“New York drummer Jonathan Kane corrals four searing leftfield guitarists and a bassist for some clanging, relentless motorik chugs that make avant-garde capital out of roots music. In Austin, it seems even avant-gardists get the blues”
Uncut at SxSW
 
 
“John Lee Hooker meets La Monte Young in the droning, bluesy incantations of Jonathan Kane, a mainstay in the downtown avant-garde scene, interested in the crossroads of new-music iconoclasm and experimental rock. He has a drummers sense of steady dynamic development and an unapologetic love of noise. Virtuosic”
New York Times


“A triple bill of Tony Conrad, Rhys Chatham and Jonathan Kane is to the stark, hypnotic music known as American minimalism what a lineup consisting of Mother Maybelle Carter, June Carter and Rosanne Cash would have been to country music—a gathering of three generations of the idiom’s leading lights. Jonathan Kane, a member of the next generation of American minimalists and a veteran of Swans and LaMonte Young’s Forever Bad Blues Band, released a solo album on the Table of the Elements label called February. Taking in both a version of Chatham’s “Guitar Trio” and “Motherless Child,” it focused on that other American minimalist musical form, the blues. And so the circle goes unbroken”
Nashville Scene
 
 
“A thunderous rock admiral”
Spitz - London


Jonathan Kane's purifed blues is a powerful experience...
“One can say that blues is minimalism in itself. That the form is so simple and repetition is so essential, that blues is already reduced to it's own common denominator. And then one can listen to Jonathan Kane. He is a veteran of minimalism with impeccable pedigree. Now he has taken his experience and returned to his first musical love, the blues, in a purified uncompromising instrumental form which in principle contains only one simple riff and a driving rhythm. These are re-worked in lengths of 10  - 12 minutes at a time.  The effect is powerful. On stage in Goteborg, he had 4 guitars and a brutally upfront bass in front of himself, all of them gripped by the collosal groove. At the beginning, in unison, but soon one notices each doing slightly different things. More and more with the passage of time. Still there is always somebody who sticks to the main figure, which gives others that pardoxical freedom in the middle of static repetition. Not least of all is that obvious with Jonathan Kane himself, when at the the end of his songs he plays so freely and expansively that one couldn't explain if their life depended on it, how can that go together with music that starts with one small figure spinning over and over again.
But so it is with minimalism. First it seems like it's just repeating itself, then one realizes that it's changing all the time. At the end one finds themself   someplace completely different from where they started. And so it is with Jonathan Kane's February. There is a principle held within heavy electric blues. Primitive on the surface, deep and sophisticated on the inside”
Dagens Nyheters – Sweden


“Anyone who even casually listens to WFMU knows that we're incredibly fortunate to have such an amazing barrage of talent blowing through out halls on a regular basis. One such artist who recently graced Brian Turner's show with his presence is Jonathan Kane, whose powerhouse avant-drumming résumé includes collaborations with heavyweights such as the Swans, Rhys Chatham, La Monte Young, and Dave Soldier's Kropotkins. Kane, four guitarists and a bassist cut a wide path down the middle of the WFMU studio, Channeling a decade's worth of downtown sonic tradition and seamlessly marrying it to seemingly disparate rockabilly vibes. Some of Kane's latest work is poised to both envision and summate what can only be called Avant-Roadhouse. This was a set of total electric power. Want more proof? Check out Kane's new Table of the Elements label release, suitably entitled February”
WFMU

 
“Jonathan Kane’s February gives the blues a modern makeover”
Lexington Herald-Leader

 
“It’s difficult to describe in so many words a living legend the caliber of Jonathan Kane. He plays blues that’s at the same time classic and progressive. Classic because the themes he plays respect the roots of this music, but original because he plays blues like Neu! Or Stereolab might do it, with repetition and a hypnotic effect. Kane has a style of drumming that one would have to include among the heaviest of No-Wave. Attention – Event”
Sonic - Lyon

 
“One of the hardest hitting drummers on the planet, Jonathan Kane of Swans fame mines the root drone of the blues for maximum impact.”
Next @Wex – Columbus, Ohio


“Drummer Jonathan Kane explores the drone filled tribal roots of the blues.”
The Other paper – Columbus, Ohio


Openers Jonathan Kane's February, a sextet helmed by drummer and Swans cofounder Kane, featured a four-guitar front line in addition to bass and drums. The outfit's all-instrumental, kinetic 45-minute set was powered by sinewy precision, sculpted riffs, and the coiled stealth of a cobra: Pell Mell covering Junior Kimbrough, or Booker T. and the MG's without the organ.
Boston Globe


"Avant-rock heads know downtown NYC drummer Jonathan Kane for founding Swans with Michael Gira and for his collaborations with Rhys Chatham and La Monte Young. Those of us who were at either if Mission of Burma’s ICA gigs back in September know him at the guy who just about stole the show from the home-town-hero headlners with his band, Jonathan Kane’s February.  JKF – Kane, flanked by a small army of guitarists and a bassist – somehow make the blues sound like krautrock, repeating simple but thick-as-brick riffs until your head feels as if it were going to explode."
Boston Phoenix


Just got back from seeing Jonathan Kane’s February over at Tonic. Kane was a co-founder of Swans, and played with the likes of La Monte Young and Rhys Chatham. His band February — Kane on drums, with four guitarists and a bassist up front — is nothing short of stunning live. Musically, it’s rooted in the blues, but uses it as a starting point for a complex, layered sound that never loses its forward momentum. I’ve never seen anything like it live — though if you’ve ever been knocked on your arse by the likes of Oneida or Turing Machine, I daresay February will have a similar effect. (I realize that this may be an odd comparison, as Kane very well may have been an influence on the aforementioned two bands’ prodigiously talented drummers. On the other hand, why not? All three groups prove that you can make music intelligently that still hits you in your gut, that virtuosity and raw power are not mutually exclusive….so, yeah.)
The Scowl
 

February is an opus of five instrumental pieces, which deploys the musical possibilities that blues offers in a original way. Imagine Terry Riley copping a Muddy Waters riff and obstinately repeating, deconstructing and recomposing it as an explosive kaleidoscope of sound, with the support of a voluble bass and ardent drums. If you can imagine this, you won't be far from imagining what Jonathan Kane's music is like.
Fragil – France
 
 
"Motorik Desert Boogie King Jonathan Kane"
Other Music

 
He’s Full of Surprises. Somewhere between Sonic Youth and Steve Reich is the drummer Jonathan Kane. In the 1980s and ’90s he was a co-founder of the Swans, “a cornerstone of New York’s downtown no-wave art scene,” then moved on to even more experimental music with collaborators like the composer LaMonte Young. His latest instrumental album, “February,” is “unexpectedly, a collection of blues-inspired boogies.”
New York Times
 
 
JONATHAN KANE, a co-founder of Swans — a fiercely discordant outfit that became a cornerstone of New York’s downtown no-wave art scene — Jonathan Kane is a frequent collaborator of the experimental guitarist Rhys Chatham and the composer LaMonte Young. His most recent release, the instrumental “February” (Table of the Elements) is, unexpectedly, a collection of blues-inspired boogies.
New York Times


Jonathan Kane’s February, a quintet led by the downtown fixture Kane, on drums, and rounded out by three guitars and a bass. The group’s drone-heavy and occasionally explosive sound reflects the bandleader’s background with the noise pioneers Swans and the composers La Monte Young and Rhys Chatham. In 1981, following several years in a local blues band opening for such legends as Muddy Waters, Kane was asked to join the nascent band Swans by their founder, Michael Gira. Taking Howlin’ Wolf as an unlikely musical role model, the group pushed Wolf’s repetition, pared-down harmony, and sometimes slow tempos to unbelievable extremes. Kane’s latest group, which combines elements of early Swans with Chatham’s monumental guitar pieces, features long minimalist songs that build slowly over his precise and motoric drumming.
The New Yorker

 
Downtown New York city legend Jonathan Kane and his band February followed. These guys were stunning. Riffing traditional blues grooves that grew steadily into a beautiful explosion of sound. Vintage guitars and amps, and about the most amazing drummer I've seen since Buddy Rich. Hints of Velvet Underground too.
MajorWhoMedia
 

Apparently having decided the lines aren't long enough at Warm Up, P.S. 1 has beefed up the party's  lineup this weekend with four heroes from divergent hipster-beloved genres. In one corner, there's drummer and Swans co-founder Jonathan Kane playing with blues-drone act February. Kane's tag-team partner is fellow no-waver James Chance, who'll bring his reunited Contortions and their skronky, punked funk. 
New York magazine

Press for  ‘I Looked at the Sun’:

“I Looked At The Sun is as remorseless in its momentum as a wheat thresher with a well filled tool box on the gas pedal. It’s white line fever transmuted into sound that’ll take the wheel and drive your car across Kansas without ever hitting the shoulder”
Dusted


“The Music that Makes me Proud to be Human: Jonathan Kane's ‘I Looked at the Sun’.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: Few things in life warrant a 60 megabyte download. The video of Jonathan Kane's February performing live in WFMU's Love Room is a glaring exception. This subsequent EP said more with two songs than most bands can say in a lifetime. Funny that, as both tracks are instrumentals”
WFMU


“Jonathan Kane’s music is like a blessing, an epiphany for all those who dreamed to see crossing the metronomic fury of krautrock with the dense roughness of American blues. This American musician marries these two worlds with wonder, and even adds an amount of Velvets inherited dirtiness. This is a music of apocalypse that roasts the brain very much like the sun fries the eyes that are fixed on it too quickly or too long.”
Les Inrocks


“Jonathan Kane returns after his truly excellent album ‘February’ from last year with a new mini album. Featuring a cover of the Mississippi Fred McDowell classic ‘I Looked at the Sun’, Kane has managed to merge old style blues with modern post rock to deliver another fine instrumental album, adding in some lovely pedal steel this time. The rhythm section is still deeply repetitive with Kane’s sublime guitar playing providing all the gentle changes. If you thought February was good then this just takes it to a whole new level, totally original and totally superb.”
Road Records

 
“One riff beat to a glorious death. I spent days listening to this on repeat”
CJSF

 
“Kane's latest EP ‘I Looked at the Sun’ picks up where "February" left off. The album continues to travel the same road of repetition, abandonment and a smell of a lonely bayou, populated by few and dozens of hungry alligators. You'd think you were right in the heart of the delta when you listen to these sounds. Kane lays on thick layers of guitar parts, while David Daniell provides intricately enjoyable guitar lines along with scorching hot pedal steel sections. A stellar follow up, though the length of the EP makes me crave a full length next time around.”
Gaz-eta


“Just so we can get it out of the way, Jonathan Kane co-founded seminal NY art terrorists Swans with Michael Gira in the early-'80s. Cool. Since then, Kane's been involved in various projects with such luminaries as La Monte Young, Gary Lucas, and Rhys Chatham (as the sole drummer of Chatham's 100 guitar orchestra), but it wasn't until last year that Kane put out his first proper solo record, February. Improving on that album's formula, he takes his minimal blues all the way on I Looked at the Sun, the two-song, 19-minute follow up. Kane, a drummer by trade, has added guitar and bass to his résumé as a solo artist, creating a repetitive, swirling mass of sound (with the help of David Daniell on extra guitar) which invokes moods comparable to those created by Henry Flynt, Velvet Underground, and bluesmen of the Delta. "BQE" sets the tone with a lonesome desert plain swagger, magnified by the addition of Daniell's pedal steel, and motorik groove, but it's the 13-plus minutes of "I Looked at the Sun," a Mississippi Fred McDowell reinterpretation ("cover" seems inappropriate here,) that truly brings it all home. Initially, it bothered me that I couldn't pin down what it reminded me of, or that it reminded me of too many things at once: sunbaked blues, a rock 'n' roll version of Neu!, Son House jamming with Spacemen 3. After more than 20 listens, I realize that it sounds like all of the above, and therefore like neither. The massive walls of guitar and seemingly looped leads induce a trance mostly only achieved by Steve Reich and the aforementioned La Monte Young, yet Kane's workouts feel like proper "songs." I'm gonna go and listen to it a 27th time. Mandatory.”
Other Music


' I Looked At The Sun' – BEST OF  2006
WFMU – Mike Lupica
WFMU – Evan “Funk” Davis
Other Music
The Big Takeover
CJSF – Vancouver BC
 

JONATHAN KANE
The Little Drummer Boy

A most unexpected holiday release, THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY EP by Jonathan Kane shocks for a few reasons. One, it's a genuinely touching holiday number from the former drummer of the Swans, the legendary downtown band whose m.o. seemed to be the evaporation of eardrums everywhere; two, Kane foregoes vocals and plays all the instruments (drums, bass, and guitar) himself; and three, the rendition clocks in at 14:38 and finds more commonality with the propulsive insistence of Junior Kimbrough on the one hand and Krautrock on the other than with traditional Christmas carols. All these elements combine to form a wondrous take on the classic song by one of the most gifted thumpers in experimental music.
CD Universe



'Tis the season and Jonathan Kane is in quite a giving mood this year. The ex-Swans man re-imagines this holiday classic, turning "Little Drummer Boy" into an epic, 14-plus-minute long journey, layering Phil Spector walls of guitar over a marching cadence that is guaranteed to leave you hypnotized in a Christmas trance before song's end.
Other Music Digital – #2 top selling download – December 2007


Christmas music. I have mixed feelings about the season as well as the
soundtrack, but I do actually love a nice holiday song done right. And
Jonathan Kane...he does it right! A fifteen-minute version of the
holiday classic "Little Drummer Boy" might sound daunting, but when
it's done you just want to start it all over again. It's a typical Kane
production, blending minimalism and melody, repetition and movement,
and with a sweet simple riff like this, what you get is a truly great
performance. The track starts with tight military snare drumming, and
adds layers of guitar and "snow-drift deep" bass, warm and inviting but
I promise it is anything but cloying... this record is as good as
Kane's wonderful I Looked at the Sun, and I think even your mom might
like it. It provides the aural equivalent of staring into a blizzard
from the warmth of your front window, cup of hot buttered rum in hand;
hazy, hallucinogenic, disorienting, but embracing and warm.
Other Music


When the insane bustle of the holiday gift grab wears out your synapses with Santa-strobing frequency and the crippling effect of option paralysis, turn to no-wave legend Jonathan Kane and his take on “The Little Drummer Boy” for an almost 15-minute-long opportunity to reflect on the real meaning of the season. Appropriately, the Swans co-founder opts for a Glenn Branca–style guitar drone over the trademark marching pattern, slowly introducing additional rhythms and, eventually, the melody. Things don’t really get interesting until Kane drops a Mike
Watt–sized bassline into the mix, as well as an inevitable third drum kit — all of which he plays himself
Eye Weekly
 

Awesome arrangement. The song had me listening over and over again. And some people would wonder on that score, because the song's so repetative. Or so it seems. It repeats and repeats (help), but only to multitaskers. This is
a piece that must be listened to as you would in a concert hall (which
is where I'd love some day to hear it), with the treble nice and high,
because the bass is heavy. What seems to repeat is not repetition. This
one's rich with filled with, nuance. I don't like jammin', but this is
not jammin'. This was very thought through with a mind for subtlety and
an appreciation for a great chord progressions and great anticipation,
natural to the classic X-mas song it is. And the drumming, and what else
Eye Weekly reader comment



The thin line between Genius and irksome cunt Just got way thinner
VueWeekly


A Yuletide curio from the Table Of The Elements camp, this fifteen-minute festive emission from multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Kane has predictably little in common with the Bing Cosby version. Eventually, wafts of the song's conventional form appear, its melody announcing itself amongst a militaristic tangle of chord-strumming regimentation, pounding snares and strolling basslines, but for the most part this sounds like a post-rock joint that threatens to kick off at any moment,
though never does. That in itself establishes a kind of highly
economical krautrock-derived sense of potential energy, which over the
quarter-hour duration reinforces itself as a kind of mantra. Some of
the song's seasonal resonance gets somewhat lost in translation, but
what did you expect from Table Of The Elements? Sleigh bells? Yeah, me
too actually.
Boomkat



Ex Swans drummer Jonathan Kane has gone all festive on my ass covering The Little Drummer Boy. Oh yes! Table of The Elements have brought this festive feast to your ears and it's a a long percussive 14 minute thing which is reasonably
faithful to the original... allbeit more driving and ever so slightly
pummeling. Amazingly it's rather sweet sounding as well and now I want
to eat mince (meat) pies.
Norman Records



I actually thought this one-track EP by Jonathan Kane (best known as the founding drummer of post-punk stalwarts Swans) was pretty intriguing, but I decided to give it the gonch for purely pragmatic reasons. As much as this 14-minute instrumental version of "The Little Drummer Boy" will please any Mogwai or Do Make Say Think fans gathered around your Christmas dinner table, its repetitive drones will probably provoke your cranky Uncle Ernie to kick the shit out of the stereo.
Straight.com



If any Christmas song allows for a percussive-lengthened exploration, the marching beat of “Little Drummer Boy” certainly would be the first to
stand at attention. Former Swans drummer and downtown New York
avant-garde musical player, Jonathan Kane, handles all the duties on
his 15-minute version of this single holiday standard. Recorded for the
ultra-experimental (or pretentiously high brow, depending on your
artistic discern) recording label, Table Of The Elements, you’d expect
a thunderous, unapologetic cutting edge performance. Instead, he
slow-burns out a Mississippi electric blues instrumental scorcher.
Outfitted with a Civil War marching drum cadence, a thick,
reverberating bass line, and squalling guitar riffs, you may wonder
what Southern juke joint this was recorded in. Intensity starts to
build at the eight minute mark, with the muscling of the drums and a
few wilder slashes on the electric axe, but everything is reigned in by
its 12-bar finish.
Your Sonic Youth t-shirt wearing cousin will love it.
Mikovision


 

Solo album from the former drummer with the legendary outfit swans.
imagine a military style drum led post rock version of the classic
track little drummer boy. now you dont have to as kane has done all the
hard work for you. with a drumming style that amazingly falls between
snare drum led military sounds and the hypnotic sounds of early
krautrock kane then adds the barest of post rock like guitar strumming
over the top. its almost like the most primal krautrock you are likely
to hear with just the hints of the classic bing crosby track fading in
and out of the mix. 15 minutes of pure rhythmic bliss. december 2007
Road Records – Dublin