Archive for June, 2017

The Veldt – The Shocking Fuzz of Your Electric Fur: The Drake Equation

Posted: 5 June 2017 in Singles and EPs
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Schoolkids Records – 2nd June 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

The blurb tells me that ‘On the trail of their successful Record Store Day 7” single ‘Symmetry / Slow Grind’, Raleigh-based Schoolkids Records have announced the coming release of ‘The Shocking Fuzz of Your Electric Fur: The Drake Equation Mixtape EP’ by alternative soul and shoegaze pioneers The Veldt.’

The Veldt have been around for a very long time, now – always on the peripheries, but wholly ingrained in the same milieu as The Cocteau Twins, The Jesus and Mary Chain, et al, as well as sharing stags with an impressive roll-call of acts spanning The Pixies to Echo and the Bunnymen via The Manic Street Preachers.

The EP’s title is (in part) lifted from a poem by e.e.cummings, while ‘The Drake Equation’ is a sort of punning gag that’s both intellectual and spectacularly . Cumbersome as it is, it’s quite a tidy literary allusion, and one which illustrates both the band’s overtly arty leanings the and the immense breadth of their spheres of reference: this is, after all, a band whose name derives from a story by Ray Bradbury. If the idea of high modernism coming together with slick 21st century r‘n’b seems like an improbable and unlikely recipe for success, then it’s all down to the execution.

The five tracks on this EP may or may not ‘rage’ with ‘a sound influenced equally by emotional soul of Marvin Gaye, free jazz warriors Sun Ra and Pharaoh Sanders, various Drake hip-hop tracks, long-term musical kin Cocteau Twins, and their own fertile electric imagination.’ But what they do achieve is a compelling hybrid of styles.

Stuttering beats, somewhere between hip-hop, jazz and drum ‘n’ bass jitter and twitch beneath draping, rifting layers of sonic mist define the multifaceted ‘Sanctified’, which glides he EP into a smooth yet detailed launch. It’s the progressive soul element of their expansive shoegaze-orientated sound which renders The Veldt most distinctive:

‘In A Quiet Room’ simmers and chimes, a laid-back rhythm contrasting against the swirl and eddy of layered, FX-drenched blankets of guitars. The tom-orientated drumming on the dreamy ‘One Day Out of Life’ has echoes of early New Order about it, before a rising swell of a drifting sonic cloud.

The EP ends on a super-mellow soul trip in the shape of ‘And It’s You’: with a melody that evokes Bread’s ‘Make it With You’. Perverse as it may sound, it not only works well, but seems entirely fitting, the smooth soul vibes entwine with a slick hip-hop beat to forge a loved-up groove that’s sort of slanted, but at the same time, kinda natural. Nice.

 

Veldt EP

Søndag – Bright Things

Posted: 4 June 2017 in Albums
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Overdub Recordings

Christopher Nosnibor

There aren’t many bands whose instrumentation features an 8-string guitar. Italian quartet Søndag, however, feature two eight-strong guitar players. Not that you should ever judge a band by its strings to guitars ratio. The band I saw to feature a quantity of guitars with additional strings were proggy muso posers who delivered a whole lot of tedious fretwanking but no real tunes – or riffs, for that matter.

On Bright Things, Søndag bring the riffs – and tunes. The vocals may be clean, but the guitars are plenty dirty.

According to the band’s biography, ‘the inspirations come from the need to mix very “low modern rock metal tunings” with something more dated, to form a blend of classical and contemporary rock sounds.’ It actually seems like a fair summary: Bright Things is a rock album, but the metal influences are clearly apparent, woven as they are deftly into the layered sonic cloth of each of the nine songs. The album was recorded and mixed by Riccardo Demarosi, and mastered by Alan Douches, who’s formerly engineered for bands including Converge, Mastodon, Swans, and Dillinger Escape Plan, and their input has been sympathetic to the band’s chunky dynamics.

Opening track ‘Sweet’ begins with an atmospheric build before the guitars drive in. Yes, there’s a technically complex interloping lead guitar that’s heavily processed, but it’s pitched against a dense, gritty riff.

There are hints of Oceansize in the arrangements on ‘Back in Town,’ but there’s nothing proggy about their concise and overtly rock-orientated songs, and the grungy ‘Polite Rebel’ brings a stomping beat to an unrepentantly unreconstituted slab of hard rock. I can’t help but think of Alice in Chains when listening to ‘Wax’. It’s in the harmonies. For the most part, though, Soundgarden and Baroness are perhaps more obvious comparisons.

‘Spitfire’ boasts some sinewy guitars with a searing afterburn, sparking across a tense and low-slung snaking bassline that spits and snarls and registers somewhere around the pelvis.

Expansive and ambitious in sound, but focused and striking an appealing balance between sonic density and melody, Bright Things is far from lightweight or flimsy, but at the same time, it’s accessible and has hooks by the shedload. While they’re yet to make an impression UK, given the touring schedule which has seen them make inroads into mainland Europe, it’s surely a matter of when, rather than if.

 

Søndag – Bright Things

MIR 8 – Perihelion

Posted: 3 June 2017 in Albums
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Shhpuma – SS028LP

Christopher Nosnibor

Perihelion may be MIR 8’s debut, but the collective consists of respected veterans of the musical underground, with a lineup consisting of Andrea Belfi (drums, percussion), Tim Wright (computer, electronics), Werner Dafeldecker (function generators, bass) and Hilary Jeffery (trombone).

For those unfamiliar with the term, and / or too lazy to look it up, perihelion is ‘the point in the orbit of a planet, asteroid, or comet at which it is closest to the sun’. If the notion of translating the experience of such a journey into sound seems more than a challenge, then MIR 8’s approach is very much non-literal, with the album’s four expansive movements formed from spectral abstraction, leading the listener on a journey which is cerebral rather than physical.

Sparse notes chime, ringing out in the near emptiness. A mournful trombone note stretches out and elongates to near unrecognizability. This is a work of minimalism in terms of volume and spatial exploration, but in terms of things going on, a lot happens, just at distant intervals. Eerie, otherworldly notes ripple and ring into one another against indeterminate hums and drones. These are not linear compositions, the structures vague and informal and without regularity or definite shape. Everything exists within the incidentals, and everything is incidental.

The pace is sedate, but on ‘Scarborough Sky’ the various sounds rub together at an increased pace and affect a creeping tension with subtle dissonances and frequencies which touch – delicately but definitely – on the more sensitive ranges of the human ear, to discomfiting effect.

An interminably elongated note hangs through the first moments of ‘De Orbit’; subtle yet busy percussion begins to patter in the background, distant cymbal crash and as the depth of the sound builds, the effect is like listening to something very loud from a long way away. Heavy, single notes sound out like a ship’s horn from miles out to sea. At some point, the rhythm stops. Detonations rupture still air before bleeding into ‘Event Horizon’. The final track contains the most overtly conventional elements of rock and jazz, with a bas / snare beat underpinning some roaming, spaced-out freeform brass honks. But these elements by no means make for a conventional composition, as the elements exist with the sense of doing so independently of one another, before gradually being swallowed in reverb and muffling.

As a whole, Perihelion is a subtle, nuanced work. It’s distinguished by the attention to detail to the way in which the individual sounds relate to one another, and how their shifting places of divergence and convergence, create different sensations.

 

MIR 8 – Perihelion

Golden Oriole – Golden Oriole

Posted: 1 June 2017 in Albums
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Drid Machine – DRM27 – 21st March 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

Having looked over all of the tabs I had open on my computer I had to pause the disc three minutes into the first track. I was confused, I was convinced there were two songs playing at once – one woozy ambient piece, drifting and warping, and a whacky jazz-grunge effort. My head was beginning to spin. Jungle drumming and scrawking bass undulations collide with tearing guitars, weird synth incidentals and all kinds of other extraneous sound effects to create a sonic experience that’s quite bewildering on ‘The Approaching of the Disco Void’. It’s ten minutes of musical mayhem.

The golden oriole is a type of bird, binomially known as oriolus oriolus (which is considerably more pleasant-sounding than the ‘turdus’ genus of the thrush species). According to the go-to source for all information about everything, the call of this extremely common migratory bird ‘is a screech like a jay, but the song is a beautiful fluting weela-wee-ooo or or-iii-ole, unmistakable once heard.’ There’s nothing beautiful or fluting about this freeform chaotic din. This is not a criticism: freeform chaotic din is better than good with me.

The album’s shortest track, ‘The Chrysopoeia of the Trilithon Ass’ is also it’s wildest, a Beefheartian frenzy of discord and multiplicity (I’m recalling the traumatic experience of hearing ‘Trout Mask Replica’ for the first (and only) time, a record that sounds like standing in a hallway listening to seven people, all drunk, playing different tunes in seven different rooms which all open onto said hall.

The hectic percussion drives through a wall of feedback and a grinding, deliriously unpredictable, stabbing bass on the third and final track, ‘The Pyrite Wink’. It’s a nine-minute exercise in working a wonky groove with relentless and increasingly wayward energy, until it collapses in a crackle of overdrive and howling trails of feedback.

As freeform chaotic din goes, Golden Oriole stands as a cacophony of quality, but likely best absorbed in small doses.

 

golden-oriole-golden-oriole

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