Archive for June, 2020

World Sanguine Report – Skeleton Blush

Posted: 30 June 2020 in Albums
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limitedNOISE – 10th July 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Eleven whole years on from Third One Rises, World Sanguine Report crawl bloodied and bruised from a dark, dingy back alley to stagger into the light and toss down onto the rain-soaked, blood-spattered concrete their new album, Skeleton Blush. It’s a haggard, battered beast, a collection of songs that wheeze and puff pain from every pore. Whether it’s whisky-soaked introspection of staggering, brawling bleariness, it’s grainy, gritty, and often bleak, dredging emotions from the pits of the city’s sewers.

The various members have been keeping busy in the meantime, with various projects, notably with vocalist / guitarist Andrew Plummer having detoured for a few years with the grizzled no-wave racket of Snack Family. The various projects are clearly different, but at the same time their creative roots are abundantly clear.

Across the spread of the album, the band swing psychotically, schizophrenically, between dirty jazz-tinged blues that draws together The Doors and Tom Waits in a deliriously drunken swagger of swinging rhythms (you could never call it an elevated or euphoric mood – more an upswing in a maniacally volatile moodset) and boozy, brawling horns, and seedy, low-down lugubriosity.

The title track is as close as thing get to flamboyant, with a flamboyant jazz cacophony delivered with a Beefheartian mania and taste for dissonance, and ‘Drip Driven’ is similarly crazed in his riot of jolting, discordant horns that spirt every whichway over a low-slung stop-start funk groove, while ‘Aou’ trudges through dark, soup waters of brass-tinged gloom, sounding like Gallon Drunk on Ketamine.

Skeleton Blush brings derangement to a big band setting: it’s absolutely wild, and also low-down and seedy – and absolutely fucking ace.

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A-Sun Amissa – Black Rain (I)

Posted: 29 June 2020 in Albums
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Gizeh Records – 3rd July 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Presumably, Black Rain (I) is the first in a series, and contains three extended pieces – each of around a quarter of an hour – which were written and recorded by Richard Knox during the early months of 2020. Focusing on a more ambient and cinematic approach, Black Rain offers another texture to the A-Sun Amissa palette.

The blurb explains its relatively swift assembly, whereby ‘the record was written over a three month period where Knox had a self-imposed deadline of completing one piece of music per month to then be released digitally with immediate effect at the beginning of the following month. A deliberate move to be more impulsive and instinctive during the writing process and, for him, a new way of looking at releasing a record.’

For all that, nothing about the music here feels remotely rushed. The mood, meanwhile, is in some senses difficult to gauge: it’s not overtly melancholy, but there’s a wistful air to the delicately-arranged compositions.

The first of the three compositions, ‘The Sea’s Collapse’, isn’t a heavy, dramatic piece, but a deep, slow-turning ambient work that possesses a sense of grandeur in its gradual pulls back and forth, tapering down to a muted piano and the softest of washing drones that form a barely-present aural mist. It takes an eerier turn in the dying minutes, a combination of scrapes and extraneous wind-like howls whistling in the distance

The rhythmically-paced piano gives ‘Out Past the Dark’ a clearer sense of structure, as the trailing ambient notes hover in the background. While shifting and evolving over the course of the track, the cyclical chord motifs that surface and subsequently fade create a sense of movement.

‘Pulling Feathers from a Swan Song’ is sparser, and also darker in tone than the others. Long, brooding notes emerge from a slow-swirling murk, and while it’s graceful in its epically-proportioned brooding, there’s a sense of finality in the air that passes between the notes. And yet that finality does not intimate gloom or despair, but sad, weary acceptance of passing.

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Videostore – Roses in the Hospital

Posted: 28 June 2020 in Singles and EPs
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26th June 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Aural Aggro’s favourite DIY indie duo Videostore keep crankin’ ‘em out, and a week after the belter that is ‘Your Mind’, they take a step to the left to deliver a cover of Manic Street Preachers’ ‘Roses In the Hospital’, which in context of their their previous releases, comes as something of a surprise.

Their take brings a twist – they definitely ‘make it their own’ as judges are so keen on saying on ‘The Voice’ and shit. That is to say, it sounds way more like Videostore than The Manics, and that’s a positive: so many acts are overly cautious and reverential in their approach to covers, especially when it comes to bands who are ‘canon’ and have acquired a status of being largely untouchable.

Lorna takes the vocal lead here, and Nathan gives a gargled backing vocal: the drum machine is whacked up in the mix and the guitar is stripped to a choppy, Metal Urbain fizz, and it’s a buzz.

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The Moms – Kalipedia

Posted: 27 June 2020 in Albums
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5th June 2020

James Wells

So The Moms is not a bunch of women who meet for coffee or a WhatsApp group about homework, but actually three dudes from Copenhagen who trade in textural noise/free improv, manipulating conventional instruments in self-invented unorthodox ways. On this, their self-released debut which contains a single track of 39 minutes and 34 seconds in duration, they promise ‘no soothing melodies or calming new-age harmonies, yet it can be a meditative experience if you accept the push and let your mind slip through the void.’

It sort of sounds like jazz in its origins, as some kind of brass struggles for breath, honking and parping in a strangled tone. Low-end grumbles and high-end fizzing duel for dominance as the jostle around mid-range drones. The ratio of droniness and rasping horniness and warped jazz dissonance vary as the elements interweave, shifting and mutating.

At times sparse, minimal, subdued and strained toots expectedly from within extended sections of restrained low-level noise, punctuated by thuds and thumps: strains of feedback and scraping are recurring sonic elements as the ever-shifting piece drips from swirling murk to squealing torture, with distortion and discord dominating.

The final minutes build to a climax of shrill, shrieking cacophonous noise before slowly dissipating to draw the curtain on an album that’s restless and difficult, an album that doesn’t allow the listener to settle into a single frame of mind for more than a couple of minutes, as it twists and turns, honks and churns.

It’s by no means commercial, but nor does it have any will to be, and in its field of jazz-orientated experimentalism, Kalipedia is a solid debut.

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Sly & The Family Drone – Walk it Dry

Posted: 26 June 2020 in Albums
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Love Love Records

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s no secret I’m quite a fan of Matt Cargill and Co’s oddball, off-kilter approach to freeform experimental weird noisy shit that stubbornly defies genre categorisation – largely on account of the fact that it is weird noisy shit that stubbornly defies genre categorisation (although the blurbage that accompanies Walk it Dry, the follow-up to 2019’s Gentle Persuaders describes them as ‘London’s neo-jazz wrecking crew’.

Sly have trod themselves a unique path, and find themselves in the curious position of being one of the most obtuse bands beloved by almost everyone I know in underground musical circles. I’d like to think it’s a combination of their uniqueness and the fact that they are unequivocally

On this outing, they promise ‘the familiar sound palette of skronked electronics, bulging noise blasts, wailing sax & Kalashnikov drums that was found on ‘Gentle Persuaders’’ but at the same time say that this ‘is a very different beast. The tracks here are shorter and punchier as the band digs deeper than ever to find increasingly potent sonic pockets.’

Mad horns and a crushing, slow-paced jazz beat explode from the speakers the second the ‘play’ button his hit, and with ‘A Black Uniformed Strutting Animal’ they plunge into a collision of heavy rhythms and divergent notes that counteract one another in a battle between order and chaos, where there is no clear winner.

‘Dead Cat Chaos Magician’ is frivolous, glooping electronics, with a fast-paced jitter of tension and some ragged blasts of drums that are nothing to do with rhythm and everything to do with dramatic punctuation, sudden explosions that disrupt any semblance of an emerging flow.

The compositions on Walk it Dry are difficult, dissonant, and while they are indeed more succinct than the bult of the pieces on previous outings, they condense those dank, disrupted soundscapes into dense chunks of ‘Bulgarian Steel’ brings the kind of swampy mess of nose that’s quintessentially Sly, dominated as it is by booming beats and murky mid-range, before ‘Shrieking Grief’ steps the torturous din up a notch, with more thunderous rhythms bashing frantically into a void of grinding greyness while horns flash and flail

The lack of pun-based titles is compensated to an extent by ‘Sunken Disorderly’, while ‘My Torso is a Shotgun’ is a cranium-crushing morass of tension, a bludgeoning battery of hammering and noise.

This all stacks up to an album that’s classic Sly: the same dark industrial clanking, doomy undercurrent and warped jazz overtones, but in much shorter segments. It’s still dark, dingy, difficult, jazzy, otherly, and there’s no other band who quit straddle so many boundaries. Walk it Dry may mark a certain evolution, but more than anything, it’s the work of a band who simply don’t do compromise. And that’s why we love them.

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I Like Trains – Dig In

Posted: 25 June 2020 in Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

I Like Trains’ emergence from hibernation may be coinciding with that of the nation, and while it’s perhaps to an extent coincidental, one feels that perhaps it largely isn’t. Their latest reinvention has seemingly come out of nowhere, and if their shift from genre-leading purveyors of songs based on historical events, formed as slabs of tremulous post-rock with shattering crescendos, to something rather less dramatic and more direct came by a certain sense of transition, this is a true bolt from the blue.

Crashing in from nowhere with the stark, synth-heavy and highly-political ‘Truth’ to announce the imminence of new album, Kompromat after a hiatus that had looked dangerously like becoming permanent, it was immediately apparent that I Like Trains haven’t so much evolved as metamorphosised.

The band describe ‘Dig In’ as being ‘probably as lean and direct as we’ve ever been’ and continue: ‘There’s plenty to be angry about at the moment, and this is a pure distillation of that. It’s aimed mostly at the campaign managers and ‘special advisors’ who manoeuvre their people into positions of power with little or no regard for the rules. Never back down. Never apologise. Show no signs of weakness.’

‘Dig In’ has a real attack to it, an urgency that’s new. Over a choppy guitar that’s more Gang of Four than anything even vaguely post-rock, and which is welded to an elastic rhythm section with a driving bass, David Martin growls political agitation. No longer jumbling through his beard, there’s even a hint of Richard Butler in the early years of the Psychedelic Furs in the delivery, and perhaps even hints of Post war Glamour Girls, he casts an elevated eye over the world as is, and it’s sharp incisive.

Old ILiKETRAiNS were formidable. Middle I Like Trains were ace. New I Like Trains, with their newfound edge, right now, feel re-energised and essential.

Starless – Lezo

Posted: 25 June 2020 in Albums
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5th May 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Starless is a new musical project from Yurii Samson of Ukranian industrial noisemakers Kadaitcha. It’s pitched as being ‘less industrial and noisy than Kadaitcha, but more acoustic and lyrical’, although this very much depends on the strain of industrial you’re angling towards.

Admittedly, my first thought is less ‘more acoustic and lyrical’ than Kadaitcha, but ‘fuck me, this is spaced-out experimental jazz!’ ‘Entro’ piles in haphazard and chaotic, as a riot of parping horns hoot and honk seemingly at random though a twittering electronic oscillation with bleeps and quirts, and wandering notes that are difficult to assimilate, stylistically or psychologically. There’s a lot going on at once.

But the title track goes much more industrial / dark ambient, a restless thrumming providing the backdrop to a distanced, echo-heavy vocal and squalls of extraneous noise, swells of feedback and layers of serrated electronica, whole distorted impenetrable vocals ring out with a bold authority. It’s the sound of Big Brother’s dictation, monotone, cold, flat, and impervious, while metallic noise spirals and swirls.

Next up, ‘Chudovys’ka’ begins all aclatter and aflutter, a clicking flicker or delicate beats, before a warped vocal begins to nag away in the background. And then, before long, it goes full Throbbing Gristle with churning electronic rhythms and hard-edged noise butting up against them. And this is a sustained sonic attack, the best part of ten minutes of difficult noise that simultaneously rumbles and screes, a low-end wash that rolls and throbs while clattering percussion ricochets off in all directions.

‘Kiviten’’ goes all-out with the heavy-duty percussion, calling to mind the thunderous battery of Test Dept. It also brings droning church organ and shrieking feedback that hurts the ears and bends the brain, as well as heralding introduction of epic choral voices on the scale of Carl Orff’s ‘Carmina Burana’, only distant and dissonant. It’s big on drama, and also disquiet.

Closer, ‘Saga’ is also impressive in its depth, and equally the depth of the discomfort it discharges as wheezing monotone vocals drone out over a shifting soundscape of hesitant beats, creeping jazz horns and scrapes and bubbling synths. It’s sparse, low, slow, and trepidatious, making for an unexpectedly Low-key conclusion that also happens to leave the listener hanging on the edge of a swamp hidden by fog, wondering what lies beyond.

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Uniform – Delco

Posted: 24 June 2020 in Singles and EPs
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Sacred Bones

Christopher Nosnibor

Fucking yes: the news of a new Uniform album is welcome news. Not that a new Uniform album is ever going to be an uplifting experience, but a soundtrack to the torment of modern life. Few bands – not only now, but ever – have so perfectly articulated that noise in your head, the pain of being alive and completely fucking trapped on this planet with so many examples of a species who seem hellbent on bringing about their own extinction, and what’s more, completely deserve it.

Many fans will be devastated to hear, then, that they’ve gone pop on the lead single for their upcoming fourth album, Shame.

Of course I’m kidding. ‘Delco’ is less gnarly than previous outings, with actual chords distinguishable among the churn, and overall the sound is more balanced, less abrasive. But these things are relative. ‘Less abrasive’ means something approximating Filth Pig era Ministry, only with a shade less treble. It’s still a heavy grind, a relentless trudge of repetitive chord cycles and petulant, pissed-off vocals channelling all the angst. Still keeping it brutal.

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Listen: ‘Suicide / The World is Fucked’ by Razor Sharp Death Blizzard

Posted: 23 June 2020 in Singles and EPs
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Following on from their 2016 record “You Will Burn”, Scottish hardcore quartet Razor Sharp Death Blizzard have returned with their new album “The World Is Fucked” which is set for release on July 17th. Ahead of this the band have released a video for their new single “Suicide”.

Frontman Jamie Clark had this to say on the track:

“When we write our songs, we almost always write in the practice room. “Suicide” took me by surprise by the intensity of the music. I like to stand in the room with Daz, Liam and Ross going for it so I can feel the song. The music brought out a lot of emotion in me be it anger, be it tearful. The emotion that came was the feelings for suicide I’d had off and on for a number of years and this song really helped me bring things out. I tried to put into word some of the feelings and thoughts I had.

From the crushing self-defeat to the feeling of wanting to through myself from the Newcastle to Amsterdam ferry on my way to and from holiday with my wife and kids. From not knowing what I was feeling, the utter confusion, wondering if someone would help me now that ‘I’ needed help. All things came to a head when we were a couple of weeks away from a European tour and I ended up doing one show and the rest of the guys played as a three piece for the remaining shows. It coming to a head was the best thing to happen. I was able to talk to those closest to me and turn a lot round.

The end of the song says it all and is a mantra I kind of abide by and its was Daz that said it ‘ no matter how dark the night may seem, tomorrow may be brighter’. What advice I try to give is please talk to someone, that first step will take so much weight from your shoulders. It won’t cure you but will give you courage to talk. It really is okay to not be okay. The hardest step is talking to someone but trust me it’s the best step you can take.”

Both tracks can be streamed here:

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Watch: ‘Spectres of the Blood Moon Sabbath’ lyric video by Hellripper

Posted: 22 June 2020 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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There’s something inherently naff, and often vaguely comical, about the current vogue for lyric videos, although right now, they do actually make sense, and this effort from lords of gnarly thrash Hellripper is a belter.

“Spectres of the Blood Moon Sabbath” sets the scene for the new album as its themes primarily revolve around the dark & insidious underworld witchcraft and the occult, with some tracks being based on historical events. The single unfurls in an infernal storm of heavy blackened thrash. James McBain, Hellripper mainman comments “this was one of the first tracks written for the album and has a definite “rock ‘n’ roll” feel to it with its bouncy rhythm & a Motörhead or TANK vibe, and it is one of two songs on the album where Joseph (live guitarist) performed lead guitar”.

Watch the video here:

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