Archive for November, 2018

Hardcore Duo Parasitic Twins Hit The Road With Boycott The Baptist

Posted: 30 November 2018 in Previews and Editorial
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Hull Pair Head Out For Debut European Tour

Hull hardcore duo Parasitic Twins are set to hit the road later this month with the monstrous Boycott The Baptist! The band, who released their visceral debut EP, “All That’s Left To Do Now Is Sleep With Each Other”, on October 26th, are set to appear in Germany and Holland with BTB! Remaining dates see support from Clunge Destroyer. Full dates for the tour below:

November 30th – Thav – Hildesheim, Germany (w/ Parasitic Twins)

December 1st – The Morgue – Leeuwarden, Belgium (w/ Parasitic Twins)

December 2nd – Crowley’s – Hastings (w/ Clunge Destroyer)

December 4th – Birds Nest – London (w/ Clunge Destroyer)

December 5th – North Bar – Rhyl, Wales (w/ Clunge Destroyer)

December 6th– Paradiddles Music Café – Worcester (w/ Clunge Destroyer)

December 7th – Lounge 41 – Workington (w/ Clunge Destroyer)

December 8th – The Westgarth Social Club – Middlesbrough (w/ Clunge Destroyer)

Ripping a page from the Killing Joke school of lo-fi noise, then setting it on fire via the way of Today Is The Day and Godflesh, Hull’s scariest kids, Parasitic Twins are riding high following the release of their debut EP. Recorded live and raw, at Melrose Yard Studios in York, the hardcore duo, made up by guitarist/vocalist Max Watt (Rotting Monarchs) and drummer Dom Smith (Mary and The Ram), have performed together previously as part of Seep Away was born of a desire to create the most abrasive sound they could.

Discussing their debut single, “Massive”, Watt had this to say: “It’s about that mental sense of abandon that comes once in a while and turns our lives into ash. Temporarily, of course. Everyone’s been in that place where long term plans and prospects just become irrelevant and all you can focus on is immediate day to day shit, and one day you wake up and think “Goddamn, what was all that noise about?” At the time it’s huge but with time just becomes a notch in your past, then you gotta make the reparations, and push all that negative shit to the back.”

Hammered into the raw aggression like a nail into splintered wood is a youthful rage desperate to be heard. Taking comfortable influence from the late 90s sludge scene, the track “Flipswitch” borrows from the Raging Speedhorn school of duel vocal ferocity while “End” wraps a chain around the Biohazard-esque bouncy hardcore and throws it on the heap. Making “ATLTDNISWEO” a white-hot blast of crusty oblivion, perfect for fans of low end, aggro-punk. Listen to at wielding volume.

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Boycott

Noemie Nours – As a Beare Doth Her Whelps

Posted: 30 November 2018 in Albums
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10th September 2018

James Wells

Sweden’s Noemie Nours promises ‘All-ages slo-fi lullabies, supporting a non ideological, vegan and drug-free lifestyle,’ and all of the proceeds from digital sales this, her third LP, will be donated to the charity Orphaned Wildlife. Such selfless acts are increasingly rare in a (rapidly changing) climate dominated by Brexit and right-wing, hardline capitalist ideology, while we still feel the repercussions of the last economic downturn which followed the sub-prime housing crisis of 2008-2009. For an artist to make art for the greater good rather than for gain is admirable, and Noemie Nours has made it her mission to do whatever she can to save the bears. Bears are her thing. As is slightly off-kilter folk music. And I’m not going to mock.

Following on from debut single ‘The Life of Bears’ and album Bear Meditations, her love of bears remains undiminished with As a Beare Doth Her Whelps.

The album’s seven songs are primarily constructed around picked acoustic guitar and vocals, and if the titles betray the thematic leanings of the lyrics or musical intent (‘Bearsplaining’, ‘Den’, ‘Brought into a Wilderness’, ‘Ursa Minor Forest’), there’s also something of a sparse primitivism about the songs, too. There’s an innocence and openness about Noemie Nours’ music that’s refreshing and utterly charming, while occasional passages of jagged fretwork and melodies which wander off the path of conventional key and notation are very much part of the appeal.

With its sparse arrangements, slow tempos, and overt lack of complication, you might say that it’s an album that’s very much about the ‘bear’ necessities.

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Noemie Nours – As a Bear Doth Her Whelps

Drooping Finger & Möbius – Drooping Finger & Möbius

Posted: 29 November 2018 in Albums
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Panurus Productions – 19th November 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

What have we got there, then? It would appear to be a collaborative release from Drooping Finger and Möbius, utilising the former’s lo-fi minimal electronic drone as a setting for the latter’s looped wordless vocal textures.

I must admit that I’m unfamiliar with ‘Newcastle gloomlord’ Drooping Finger, but ‘melancholic vocal duo’ Möbius I am aware of. Their first collaborative work, imaginatively titled Drooping Finger & Möbius is pitched as combining their talents, and consists of their set at The Gosforth Hotel’s Sumner Suite and material recorded during a session at First Avenue Studios in Heaton.

And what does is give us? The BandCamp write-up tells us that ‘Guttural gurgles are embedded in glacial electronics whilst siren songs tumble overhead. The tones hover above the murk at times whilst disappearing into its eddies at others as the collaborative trio draw you into their bleak atmospherics’. And all of it’s true. Although mostly it’s the murk that dominates, with sounds and tonal ranges all but buried beneath a sonic smog.

The live side, (at least corresponding with the cassette release) containing one track simply entitled ‘Sumer Suite’ is first, and is 26 minutes of dark ambient rumblings and janglings and mid-range drones, punctuated at first by stuttering, echoic beats, a shifting soundscape of disquiet. Ominous hums and swells of distant thunder provide the backdrop to disembodied, angelic voices low in the mix and veering between euphoric grace and the anguish of entrapment. Sonorous low-end booms out like a warning signal and cuts through the rising cacophony. But this is not a linear composition, there is no obvious trajectory: instead, the objective is the creation of atmosphere, and while it does naturally ebb and flow, peak and trough, the sustenance of tension is the priority here. Amidst slow crashes and waves of darkness emerge… nothing but nerve-tingling tensions, and even as the piece faded to silence, its hard to settle completely.

The studio side – again, consisting of a single track called ‘Stung’ which spans a full half an hour – provides more of the same, and with similar sonic fidelity at least on my speakers. Heaving drones like distant passing motorcycles drift in and out of range. Ghostly voices drift around nerve-chewing mid-range drones that shimmer and churn like foam on sand. On and on. Again, it doesn’t go anywhere, but that it’s the intention: it funnels and eddies to immersive effect. The tension builds not by any increments within the music, but by accumulation.

It’s a lights off, candle lit, eyes closed type of album, whereby there are no dominant features, and barely any features at all. In context, features are surplus to requirement: Drooping Finger & Möbius makes its presence known subtly, indirectly, creeping under the skin and weaving its dark magic subliminally.

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Drooping Finger Mobius

Reinier Van Houdt – Igitur Carbon Copies

Posted: 28 November 2018 in Albums
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Hallow Ground – 16th November 2018

Reinier Van Houdt’s 2016 solo album Paths of the Errant Gaze was a collage of quiet, dark ambience, and Igitur Carbon Copies continues in a similar vein. The inspiration for this work is the unfinished gothic tale Igitur, a collection of texts ultimately abandoned by the author, the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé in 1869.

Considering the fragmentary nature of the incomplete work, not to mention Mallarmé’s tendency to incorporate theoretical aspects within his practise, the appeal to an artist like Van Houdt isn’t hard to see: a classically-trained pianist who’s collaborated with artists ranging from John Cage to Charlemagne Palestine and has been a member of Current 93 since 2012, he’s long been fascinated with ‘all matters that defy notation: sound, timing, space, physicality, memory, nose, environment’. This is one of those works that could very easily inspire a full-blown essay instead of a review, and there’s a temptation to write it – but does anyone actually want that? Does anyone have the time to read it, even if I had the time to write it – and I mean properly?

To reduce the experience and reflection to something manageable, with Igitur Carbon Copies, Reinier Van Houdt presents a work of immense theoretical depth in an accessible form, although obviously these things are relative. That is to say, it’s a challenging album, but one’s appreciation doesn’t require a priori knowledge of the theoretical concepts around authorship and originality, around chance and destiny, around temporality, and the myriad contexts behind it. On the surface – a deep, dark, rippling surface as it may be – it’s a dark ambient work littered with muttered speech. Beneath that surface, there’s a lot going on. And so what Van Houdt presents is in no way a carbon copy, but a corrupted, adapted interpretation of Igitur. And so begins the journey through the stages of copying and alteration, a question which lies at the heart of postmodern textual interrogation, and William Burroughs’ novel Cities of the Red Night. Text mutates. Even a carbon copy is a copy: it is not an original and therefore different.

The eerie and the uncanny reverberate around every shadowy corner of the album’s ten compositions, some of which are but the briefest, most fleeting sonic experiences, starting with the 40-second opener, ‘Annunciation’, which begins with dank and distant rumblings which expand into turning ambient tones, before segueing into ‘An Empty Set’ in a blast of static that lasts but a fraction of a second but completely fractures the flow.

Drawing source material from Mallarmé – revised by Van Houdt, and read by David Tibet in his best monotone – there is a distinct sense of narrative about Igitur Carbon Copies, however disjointed. The vocals are treated, albeit subtly, to render them with a certain trembling reverb that adds a disquieting edge. And there are extended passages that rumble and undulate, a simmering sonic soup. It doesn’t really go anywhere, and nor does it need to: it creeps around on the peripheries of the senses and pokes at the psyche almost subliminally. The effect, then, is difficult to define, but it’s nevertheless something that happens. One traverses Igitur Carbon Copies in a certain state of somnambulance and bewilderment. But one definitely traverses it, and its effects are definite.

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Reinier Van Houdt – Igitur Carbon Copies

Chlorine – Velvet Teeth

Posted: 27 November 2018 in Albums
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1st October 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

Velvet Teeth was originally released as a 200 only limited-edition CD through the October issue of TQ Magazine, which is the kind of publication that gives coverage to the likes of Ceramic Hobs and Drooping Finger – not so much competition for Aural Aggravation, but a channel with a shared goal of giving coverage to the kind of acts most won’t, assuming they’ve even heard of any of the artists. The funny thing about niche music is that it has a fairly hardcore set of devotees, and there’s a kind of disparate, disconnected community that’s less of a scene and more of a rhizome-like underground network. And while a lot of fairly niche stuff may still only have a potential market of around 200, it’s often amazing just how many oddballs there are hiding in the cracks demanding the work of some bands that on the surface seem so obscure that even their mates haven’t heard of them. Chlorine – the musical vehicle of Graeme Hopper – certainly has that wider appeal, and moreover, most certainly deserves wider exposure and the opportunity of a larger audience.

Velvet Teeth is experimental in the most explicit sense, a sequence of fragmentary sonic collages. The longer pieces roam around murky depths with ominous fear chords obscured by laced shrouds of sonic fog. ‘Manlines’, with its down-tuned, sinister vocals and groaning, droning dissonance, and ‘The Scenic Route’ exploit dimetric tonalities and the prominent separation of frequency ranges, with rumbling, almost subliminal low-end providing a base for niggling treble. The six-minute ‘Low Hauxley Tide’ pushes further on the resonant low-end pulsations, a low, tidal throb providing the main body of the piece. It’s kinda mellow, but kinda shiversome, too. There’s a creeping fog of darkness that pervades both the piece, and the work as a whole, which creates a certain sense of separation. It’s simultaneously immersive and engaging, but there’s a feeling that you’re not quite in the same room and there’s a force-field preventing entry.

‘Who Pays for This’ is a spine-tingling mess of scrapes and jangles, muffled, slowed speech that’s just on the cusp of indecipherability, and elsewhere, ‘Bubbewraps’ is woozy, wibbly, vaguely disorientating. The album as a whole is built on a loose, drifting fluidity, with compositions that aren’t so much compositions as sonic coalescences which occur as much by chance as design.

Uncomfortable, awkward, unsettling… these are the positive qualities of the oddity that is Velvet Teeth.

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Chlorine - Velvet

Ulver – Sic Transit Gloria Mundi EP

Posted: 27 November 2018 in Albums
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House Of Mythology – 7th December 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

Having unveiled the Sic Transit Gloria Mundi EP via their Bandcamp page last November – and subsequently on all of the usual digital platforms, Ulver are finally giving the EP a physical release. The initial release was somewhat hurried as the band were about to embark on a lengthy tour to support the album The Assassination of Julius Caesar – so now, in addition to the three studio tracks (two originals which had lain dormant, incomplete for a time, and a cover of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘The Power of Love’) – they’re giving fans four live tracks recoded on the aforementioned tour as an added bonus.

The studio material – offcuts from The Assassination of Julius Caesar – continue the band’s pop-orientated evolution, and as with the material from album which spawned them, there’s a very mid-80s synth-rock style in evidence. Now, some aspects of 80s revivalism make sense: the dark times in which we find ourselves seems to demand bleak post-punk inspired sounds. But is there anything that can truly justify the revisitation and recreation of radio-friendly pop-rock, the overproduced sound of mullets, hair gel and rolled jacket sleeves? Ulver have fully made the transition into purveyors of sleek, slick and ultimately overtly commercial. I’ve no objection to pop per se, but let’s not pretend that sonically or lyrically, Ulver 2018 are any more challenging than Bastille. Then again, there are shades of darkness in a lot of 80s chart music that are often overlooked, and Ulver still brood, with hints of Depeche Mode and Disintegration-era Cure in the many-layered mix. And the cover – a song that feels somewhat underrated in the FGTH discography – is done justice with an extremely faithful rendition.

The live tracks are, as one would expect, pristine in both performance and production. It’s perhaps easier to marvel at the fidelity and the quality than it is the dynamics and the passion, and there’s nothing that connects the silent scream of pain of Francis Bacon’s ‘Study After Velasquez’ used on the cover art, but music where synths are dominant tends to sound a lot cleaner and more polished live anyway.

The Assassination of Julius Caesar opener, ‘Nemoralia’, is presented here in extended form, its dreamy disco on sedatives groove stretching past the six-minute mark, and ‘Rolling Stone’ is allowed to breathe in all its epic glory. ‘Southern Gothic’ (which does bring some atmosphere and emotion to the partly) ‘Transverberation’, both recorded at Labirinto Della Masone, Fontanellato showcase the band’s stadium-filling, reverb-soaked sound to optimal effect. And the fact of the matter is, I can’t fault it. I’m just not really feeling it, either.

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Ulver – Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Mr Vast – Touch & Go

Posted: 24 November 2018 in Albums
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Cack Records – 7th December 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

I rarely review the same album twice. I mean, really, what’s the point? Admittedly there are occasions when I’ll revise my opinion of a record or a band – I absolutely hated The Fall the first time I heard them on Hip Priest and Kamerads, but came around a couple or three years later. And yes, it’s inevitable that people go off bands or records after a period of time: some of the stuff you listened to in your youth is just embarrassing 15, 20 years later.

But the arrival of a picture-disc vinyl pressing of Touch & Go, the last album by Mr Vast does inevitably demand a revisitation of sorts. Unlike many albums I bang reviews out for, I have actually listened to Touch & Go since, because for all its zaniness, the endless procession of quirky oddball moments, and oddly 80s electrofunk vibe, it has some undeniably great songs on it, which are more than pure novelty.

Mr Vast released Touch & Go almost exactly three years ago, to an off-tune synth-disco fanfare of parping trumpets and the pitch that ‘he’s lost the fucking plot’. And so it was that Vast’s second compendium of cack pop crash landed on the planet. And I dug it. Writing for Whisperin’ and Hollerin’ I draw comparisons to Har Mar Superstar and made some reference to 80s electroclash in an attempt to grapple with the whappy, tone-bending synths and bouncing basslines which are a dominant feature of a dizzyingly eclectic album, commenting that ‘if you think theatrical oompah and a self-help relaxation track with a twist shouldn’t feature on the same album, the perhaps this isn’t the album for you. But if you thrive on incongruity that goes far beyond postmodern hybridity, then Mr Vast is your man…Half smart-arse, half plain weird, wholly unpredictable, Touch & Go is as whappy as hell, for sure, but the execution is far from cack-handed’.

And I stand by that, although I’d certainly throw in certain similarities to the Bonzo Dog Band when considering Vast’s quirky, irreverent and exceedingly British eccentricity. Split into two halves across the ‘brekkie’ and ‘supper’ sides, the sequencing of the tracks is perhaps more noticeable in rendering an album of two distinct halves, with the second (‘supper’) side being more trippy folksy and less frenetic than the first (brekkie).

But what the vinyl release brings to the party is… groove. Naturally – it’s vinyl after all. Chances are, those who buy it will have already heard at least some of the music on-line, which again limits the need for further critical analysis of the music contained here. But as an artefact, as an experience… This brings new dimensions. Visually, it’s striking, to say the least, taking the concept of the original cover art to a new level. The rendering of something being something that it is not places it in the domain of the vaguely surreal, while the vibrancy of the shades is eye-popping. It’s a nice, thick chunk of wax and nicely mastered. And it comes with a doyley slipmat. It’s the first record I’ve ever seen with a doyley – and this one is gold and shiny! Of course, the track-listing has to go somewhere. Flippancy aside, in a world oversaturated with product and pointless tat, and a world of conformity and uniformity, Mr Vast is a glowing beacon of individuality and a maverick icon representing art, delivered with a demeanour of not giving a toss abut criticism or commerciality. This in itself makes Vast a hero; the fact the album’s a left-field corker only adds to his heroism.

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And there’s more here…

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Mr Vast Vinyl

Watch: ‘Breathe’ by MONO

Posted: 22 November 2018 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Mono have released a new the video for ‘Breathe’ taken from their new album, Nowhere Now Here, which is set for release on 25th January (Pelagic Records). Filmed and directed by French film director Julien Levy, this is the first ever Mono track to feature vocals from bassist Tamaki. You can watch the video for ‘Breathe’ here:

I’m no Chessman – Amateurs (EP)

Posted: 20 November 2018 in Singles and EPs
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26th October 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

‘Dramatic and bold’… ‘driven and experiential’… songs which deliver ‘a perfectly executed sense of tension and release’… I’m No Chessman promise a lot with this, their second release. Do they deliver all of it? Well, it’s a matter of taste as much as opinion.

When I relaunched my reviewing ‘career’ such as it is a decade ago this month, I thought it would be neat to make providing objective reviews my signature. Over time, I’ve come to revise this ambition, having realised that the way one responds to music has precisely nothing to objective matters like technical competence. Granted, poor production can ruin a great set of songs, but the best production in the world won’t transform songs that are technically proficient in terms of musicianship but otherwise predictable and lacking in emotional resonance exhilarating.

Music is intensely personal, and how an individual responds to a composition isn’t purely about the recipient or their tastes, but their headspace and the precise context in which they first hear it.

All of which is to say that this EP is well executed, and despite what the title may suggest, is decidedly not the work of amateurs (just as it has nothing to do with John Niven’s debut novel, which is about golf. And wanking. Well, maybe it’s about wanking. Some of it is a bit Fall Out Boy). It’s that combination of poppy, up-tempo guitar-driven punk with spitting angst that will enthuse or antagonise dependent on your politic.

But yes, throwing in bouncy pianos and widdly guitar breaks in between big, hooky choruses, it’s impossible to deny that they do bring elements of ‘riven and experimental’ and ‘(melo)dramatic and bold’ with their expansive theatricality. All of which is t say that objectively, the band’s appeal is clear. Subjectively… I’m probably not the right demographic.

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Im No Chessman

Watch: ‘Malcontents’ by UNDER

Posted: 20 November 2018 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Uneasy listening trio Under have unveiled their new video for latest single ‘Malcontent’.

When asked on the theme behind the song, the band stated: “Andy (Preece – drums, vocals) came up with this suitably grinding, droning riff while bored out of his mind waiting outside a changing room. As we arranged the overall tine, adding Mayo’s signature noise and our usual uneasy rhythmic approach, we tried to accentuate that feeling of anxious horror and discomfort as much as we could. To reflect this feeling I wrote the lyrics to invoke that sickly desperation apparent in anybody hungry for power.

Their new album, Stop Being Naïve, is available now from APF Records.

Under are a trio from Stockport, Greater Manchester. Formed in 2016. Though rooted in the blueprints of Sludge and Doom Metal, their sound is harder to pin down with elements of Prog, Noise and Avant Garde creeping in. Under play with jagged, slow, off kilter riffs that tease the listener into a false sense of security with dark and abstract lyricism evoking a trippy and sinister unease. The trio cite the likes of Swans, Mr. Bungle, The Melvins and Radiohead as prime influences.

Watch the video for ‘Malcontent’ here:

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Under Oct 2018

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