8th September 2023 – Cruel Nature Records
Christopher Nosnibor
One of the things that really makes Cruel Nature stand out as a label is that you never know what they’re going to put out next. Many labels – and music fans – claim to be eclectic in their tastes, but such claims rarely hold up to scrutiny. Anything that involves a permutation of guitar, bass, drums and vocals isn’t ‘eclectic’. Cruel Nature are eclectic in the John Peel sense, spanning the full gamut of experimental rick and electronica with a fair amount of jazz on offer too.
As the bio sets out, ‘Dragged Up are an off-kilter psych-garage proto-punk band. Formed in Glasgow in late 2018 by Eva Gnatiuk (Las Mitras), with Simon Shaw (Trembling Bells) & the writer Lisa Jones. In 2019, Chas Lalli (Vom/Bad Aura) & Julian Dicken (The Cosmic Dead) joined. In 2022 Stephan Mors (The Owsley Sunshine) replaced Dicken on drum duty… Their debut mini-album "D/U" was released in 2020, show-casing their seamless cross-pollination of doom, psych, proto-punk, garage, and spoken word.’
They give a track-by-track summary of their latest offering, Hex Domestic (which does have connotations to my intertextual brain of a collision of The Fall and Pavement), and the track-by-track summary maintains this vibe:
‘Hex Domestic’, is their new E.P. consisting of:
Juvenile bone-throwing at the shut-in occultist (Hex Domestic)
Posthumous Pac-Mania (Fairytale in the Super Arcadia)
A lungful of mud, a hail of toads (Hurricane)
Peering out from the eiderdown, crawling back in again (Blaming the Weather)
So now you know what the songs are about… And you’ve seen the cover art, which is a black metal parody, the horned goat almost butting at Bathory… but how do they sound?
The title tracks comes on like The Fall circa 83, jangling guitars nearly in tune, merged with Sonic Youth. It’s slackedrist, it’s proto-grunge, it’s indie with edge and at the same time it’s loose and harks back to simpler times when bands could spend a day or two in a ‘studio’ which was no more than an 8-track in someone’s garage, cut a record, and get it played by John Peel.
‘Fairytale in the Super Arcadia’ is almost seven minutes long, and it sticks to the band formula and froths with budget distortion, plugging away at the same riff for it’s almost seven-minute duration without a moment’s respite.
The three-minute ‘Hurricane’ is necessarily explosive and blows everything away, and ‘Blaming the Weather’ maintains the meteorological theme as it guides the EP to a close.
Hex Domestic is wonky, lo-fi, the clean but ramshackle guitars and overlapping vocals defining the sound, its sound very much replicating that of the late 70s and early 80s. It’s budget and it’s boss.
AA
Aural Aggravation 