CATTLE and Territorial Gobbing are joined at CHUNK in Leeds by Modern Technology (London), Lump Hammer (Newcastle) and …(something) ruined for a night of noise in aid of Mind and Shelter.
We’re proud to be involved in promoting the event.
Door at at 7pm. It’s £6 OTD and BYOB. Be there: it’s going to be a belter.
Event details here.
31st January 2020
Christopher Nosnibor
Salvation Jayne have been regular features here for a while, and it’s been an enjoyable journey seeing them evolve. ‘Coney Island, Baby!’ is overtly rock, and continues the trajectory of its predecessors, but the verse nods at a post-punk vintage with its chorused guitar line.
Similarly, while it may lack both the hook-heavy immediacy of ‘Burn in Down’, ‘Coney Island, Baby!’ presents a different aspect of the band, and also showcases what some may call a more ‘mature’ approach to songwriting.
More of than not, ‘mature’ translates as middle-aged and dull, and it may lack the grunge-drive fire of ‘Cortez’, but in the context of ‘Coney Island, Baby!’ I’m talking restraint that precedes explosions, and nicely, because nuance and the measured slow-build intro give an even bigger impact. And let’s be clear here, the chorus still crashes in with some chunky riffage. It’s just more refined. It’s also a fist-pumping song of self-affirmation.
Is now a good time to sit down and discuss punctuation? Probably not, but it matters, and Salvation Jayne’s latest instalment inspires that conversation, however brief. ‘Coney Island, Baby!’ is a comma (and an exclamation mark) away from Lou Reid, and I’m going to assume it’s intentional given that its placement works in context. And for that, I like them even more, because nuance and detail matter, and besides, it’s a cracking single.
AA
After 3 albums Antwerp’s noisiest outfit The Hickey Underworld evaporated. They never announced a break up, they just ceased to be… but the genie’s back out of the bottle. Well sorta… Frontman and main songwriter Younes Faltakh is the sole survivor and teamed up with ex Das Pop member Niek Meul. The pair set up camp in Niek’s studio in Oslo and recorded 10 eccentric, mysterious and groovy tracks. Guitars do a lapdance wrapping their tormented strings around a worked up rhythm section while Younes’ hoarse growl sounds as familiar as it does threatening.
Birthed in post-punk, heavily infused by Eastern psychedelica, and described by their record label [PIAS] as alternative world music, most refer to Arabnormal as ‘a manically zonked-out flying carpet ride’.
Read the above and listen to Arabnormal’s new single ‘Digital Veil’ and you’ll know that doesn’t make any sense at all… ‘Digital Veil’ is a sweet, sophisticated and too cute to cuddle soft rock gem. To honour the late Hickey Underworld tradition of psycho-facemelting video’s, Arabnormal’s visual companion for their latest single is quite something. Does your mouth get wet thinking of a make-up sandwich? Well, here’s the recipe!
Constellation Records – 21st February 2020
Christopher Nosnibor
The moon has possessed a mystical power as long as it has a physical one, the pull of the tides and the regularity of the lunar months forces mankind has never and will never assert control over. The waxing moon, when the moon is growing larger in the sky, is considered by some to be a phase of new beginnings. But new beginnings are equally the reverse aspect of endings: if the moon shows us anything, it’s that everything is cyclical. Time is not linear, and linearity is but a construct that facilitates an accessible narrative.
Rebecca Foon’s Waxing Moon is an album that shimmers and glows an ethereal hue: enigmatic, mysterious, and conjuring a sense of otherness, it’s possessed of a magic that’s difficult to pinpoint.
Rebecca Foon is the composer and musician behind Saltland and Esmerine, as well as having enjoyed a lengthy spell with Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra. She’s best known for her cello work, but it’s her skills as a pianist and singer that are placed to the fore on Waxing Moon. For Waxing Moon, she’s joined by an impressive array of contributors, including Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire) and Mishka Stein (Patrick Watson) on acoustic and electric basses, Sophie Trudeau (Godspeed You Black Emperor) on violin, Jace Lasek (The Besnard Lakes) on electric guitar, and Patrick Watson as co-vocalist on ‘Vessels’.
But understatement is the key here, and the composition very much favour the sparse, low-key and minimal, demonstrating with aplomb the truth of the adage ‘less is more’. Instead of pushing the sound outward, she focuses in and goes deep into the heart of the feelings of each song.
The instrumental ‘New World’ get the album off to an affecting start, and sometimes in a world full of ceaseless noise and endless words babbled without thought, it’s easy to forget just how strongly simple notes played softly can be so richly imbued with emotion that they cam be more moving than any lyrical articulations.
When Foon sings, it’s in breathy, low tones, a sultry croon, as on ‘Pour’, which, with its brooding piano, subtly layered harmonies and haunting guitar, or the ominous, string-led ‘Another Realm’, it calls to mind some of Jarboe’s most evocative work. There’s something vaguely Leonard Cohen that goes beyond vague evocations of ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ in the deep melancholy splendour of ‘Ocean Song’, while there’s something of a folksy feel to ‘Dreams to be Born.’ It’s semi-sad, entirely captivating.
The instrumentation and mood are focused on low-key, low tempo, for the most part exploring subtle shifts and microcosmic variations, although landing around the middle of the album, ‘Wide Open Eyes’ steps up both tempo and key to venture into folk-infused indie territory driven by an insistent rhythm and repetitive motif to hypnotic effect.
Waxing Moon is subtle, and has a slow pull that’s almost subliminal. It’s this soft-focus partial abstraction that renders the album so powerful: it’s by no means direct, but nevertheless conveys a deep underlying strength.
AA
Pure Reason Revolution recently announced the release of Eupnea, their first new studio album in nearly 10 years, for the 3rd of April 2020. They’ve just revealed the first piece of new music taken from the record, in the form of the epic 10-minute ‘Silent Genesis’, a track which Jon Courtney co-wrote alongside original PRR member Greg Jong.
The band comments: “With some tracks it’s blood sweat & tears to get them nailed, but “Silent Genesis” came together really quickly. While Greg & I worked on the music, Chloe was blasting out vocals in London. We had a lot of fun making this track; mangling synths, riffing & unexpectedly outroing with funk!”
Listen to the track here:
Adult Swim Singles – 30th January 2020
Christopher Nosnbor
This one’s crashed in seemingly from nowhere, and because it’s Uniform, it crashes in hard. Promising ‘the first taste of a new song cycle that doubles down on the most immediate aspects of the band’s sound’, with shouter Michael Berdan drawing attention to the more dance-orientated sound.
And indeed, the groove is built around a steady, monotonous dance beat, but it’s a pounding industrial beat that’s reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails. The opening segment is sparse, with just drum and vocal and some rumbling extranea forging a claustrophobic tension before everything goes classic Uniform with a pulverizing blast of noise that packs all the abrasion, and again, it’s Broken era NIN that comes to mind as they meld devastating guitars to live drums hammering out mechanoid rhythms.
The guitar overdrives to the point of overload, and Berdan’s anguished holler channels the anger and anxiety of the song’s focus: “‘Awakening’ is about the daily frustrations of a complacent existence in late capitalism. Some might take it as a protest song. However, it’s to be implied that waking up with a deep seeded anger is something that happens every day. We know they are mad, but we don’t know if anything will ever change.”
If any band articulates the suffering that living in the present can create: the relentless sense of pounding your head against a wall, screaming into a void, unheard, in the face of endless idiocy and sheer brutality at the hands of a capitalism so hard that it’s beyond dehumanising. Compassion and care are out of the window as everyone is too busy climbing over everyone else just to survive, while the upper echelons crow and don’t even bother to pretend to cast down their crumbs as the pretence of any trickle-down is erased in the face of sheer greed. The power elites hold all of the power, and the rest of us are powerless to effect change.
And so many of the oppressed are oblivious to all of this, enabling the oppressors in supporting the Trumps and the Johnsons, feeding the instruments of their own oppression while failing to see the cycle they’re perpetuating, blind to the fact that ‘foreigners’ aren’t ‘stealing’ their jobs and sapping the welfare coffers, but propping up a fragile boom and bust economy by doing the minimum wage, zero-hours, per-delivery drudge jobs no-one else will take.
You wake up, burning with incendiary rage that these people, who’ve swallowed the propaganda wholesale wont; fucking wake up, and you veer wildly between wanting to kill ‘em all and killing yourself, but in the end you do neither because you’ve got bills to pay and mouths to feed so you do nothing but work and hate yourself for it until you crash out to suffer nightmares and then rinse and repeat the next day and the next.
That sense of confinement, of futility, and endless fury, that is what Uniform distil into four minutes of pounding anger.
AA
Uniform US Live Dates (all w/ The Body):
March 01: Portland, OR – Doug Fir Lounge
March 02: Vancouver, BC – Biltmore Cabaret
March 03: Seattle, WA – Laser Dome at the Pacific Science Center
March 05: San Francisco, CA – Rickshaw Stop
March 06: Los Angeles, CA – Zebulon
March 07: Las Vegas, NV – Bunkhouse Saloon
March 08: Phoenix, AZ – The Rebel Lounge
March 10: San Antonio, TX – Paper Tiger
March 11: Dallas, TX – Three Links Deep Ellum
March 12: New Orleans – Gasa Gasa
March 13: Atlanta, GA – Food Court
March 14: Durham, NC – The Pinhook
March 15: Washington, DC – Black Cat
March 16: Philadelphia, PA – Boot & Saddle
March 18: Brooklyn, NY – Market Hotel
March 19: Somerville, MA – Once Ballroom
March 20: Providence, RI – Columbus Theatre
March 21: Montreal, QC – La Vitrola
March 22: Toronto, ON – The Garrison
March 24: Chicago, IL – Empty Bottle
March 25: Minneapolis, MN – Turf Club
June 05 – 07: Austin, TX – Oblivion Access
Drag City – 21st February 2020
Christopher Nosnibor
One thing you can never criticise Ben Chasny for is a lack of ideas, and over the course of twenty-two years, he’s pursued a line of technical and theoretical experimentation that’s yielded some remarkable results, perhaps most keenly exemplified by the recent Hexadic trilogy which spanned three years of deep and intensely focused and highly structured theory/practice-based work. The sequence was punctuated by Burning the Threshold in 2017, and is now finally broken with Companion Rises, which the single release of ‘Haunted and Known’ hinted at the form of.
According to the blurbage, ‘methodologically, Companion Rises sometimes recalls the early-mid lo-fi Six Organs records, with digital processes substituting for the analog techniques of yore and, instead of Ben Chasny’s hand percussion overdubs, algorithmic programs generating rhythms’. We also learn that Chasny ‘created all sounds and programs, all the recording and mixed the entire record, also like some earlier ones’, but the emphasis is less on revisiting the past than it is expanding on those early principles and practises to forge something altogether new and quite different.
From the surging synth organ swell of the intro, ‘Pacific’, it’s immediately apparent that Companion Rises is a different kind of beast: too ruptured, fractured and dissonant to be ambient, too vague in form to be conventionally categorizable as a ‘song’ even as an instrumental, it twists and squirms around and creates a certain sense of disturbance, and while it sits apart from the rest of the album in almost every sense, it also reflects the spirit of experimentalism.
Stylistically, it’s a curious hybrid of wonky folk and indie, played rough and loose and recorded cheap. ‘Two Forms Moving’ is a hypnotic, looping affair, that builds layers, and the zany lead guitar work is magnificently at odds with the hypnotically repetitive strum that forms the song’s basis, and it’s as if the two forms are moving in different directions yet somehow collide perfectly.
This is a large part of what makes Six Organs such an enduringly interesting proposition: as much driven by theory and experimentation conducted within set parameters, Chasny makes music that doesn’t quite sound like anyone else’s. Those defined parameters or specific methodologies, often a feature of John Cage’s compositions, are more commonly the domain of electronic or electroacoustic artists, and are more usually found in the domain of the avant-garde, while ‘rock’ music is – broadly speaking – more concerned with concepts than technical executions where compositions are concerned. Companion Rises chucks it all in the blender and whirls up something novel, but without it being novelty: songs are still very much the focus.
Those songs are diverse and tend not to place too much priority on conventions of verse and chorus, but there are hooks, nagging motifs, dainty, dreamy folky atmospherics and lilting melodies, and wrapped up in a lo-fi buzz that’s definitely not Dolby and all the more immediate because of it.
AA
Aural Aggravation 