Archive for November, 2020

Watch: ‘Maximum Bastardry’ by Corrupt Moral Altar

Posted: 4 November 2020 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Corrupt Moral Altar who feature Napalm Death live guitarist John Cooke have shared the video for the nicely titled track Maximum Bastardry’ which you can watch now.

After years of being associated with that one band from the 60s you might have heard of, Liverpool has done its level best in the past decade to be a hotbed for filthy, nasty riffs, rapid, crushing blast-beats and fuck-you vocals; and Corrupt Moral Altar are one of the leading names in that movement, merging the abrasive sensibilities of  the heavy spectrum into a head-pounding cacophony of pure aural hurt.  

Gliding effortlessly between the jarring aggression of the heaviest of grind and sludge to those infectiously punky hooks, their two full lengths, 2014’s ‘Mechanical Tides’ on Season of Mist and 2017’s self-released ‘Eunoia’, barb their way into your brain stem and don’t leave your head no matter how hard you pull. You’ll be lucky if your neck stays in one piece when Corrupt Moral Altar are assaulting your eardrums.   

With new EP ‘Patiently Waiting For Wonderful Things’ set for release on 27th November (APF Records), the remaining months of 2020 are going to get a bit more brutal round these parts as Corrupt Moral Altar look to cave your skull in.

Vocalist Chris Reese comments on the video for new single ‘Maximum Bastardry’,

"Here it is, the contingency plan to what was originally going to be a 4k, 3D, multihundred pound production with more explosions and celebrity cameos than you could be bothered to say "hey, that wasn’t Kenneth Choi" at.

Instead you get this grotty DIY effort as Liverpool was recently banned from having any fun. It’s more fitting really, as this track is about the unsustainable lifestyle of someone getting wrecked every night. There can be a romanticism about drinking and drug culture, but this track explores the fact they know they are a terrible bastard, that people get them fucked up to gain amusement from the resulting behaviour and they are aware that ultimately, they’re fucking up their own life.

Live in the moment, seize the day… I say Maximum Bastardry.”

Watch the video now:

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Watch: ‘Pandemic’ by Fortíð

Posted: 3 November 2020 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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FORTÍÐ have unleashed a video for a hard hitting track with the prophetic title ‘Pandemic’, which is taken as the second single from the Icelandic pagan metal duo’s forthcoming sixth full-length, World Serpent, which has been slated for release on December 11th.

Einar Eldur Thorberg comments: "The lyrics of ‘Pandemic’ were sparked by the news of a virus outbreak in China last winter", writes the Icelander. "In those early days of the epidemic, I did not foresee that this would develop into a global crisis. Therefore ‘Pandemic’ was never meant as a commentary on the current situation. It just hits the mark somewhat accidentally. My lyrics rather revolve around diseases, plagues, and viruses as a universal threat. Tiny microbes, bacteria, and other germs that are invisible to the eye can bring down the biggest and strongest among us humans. This song serves as a reminder that no matter how much we alter this planet to suit our lifestyle, nature can always strike back without mercy and much harder than we care to consider. The supposed anthropocene might just be brutally ended by an age of microbes."

Watch the video for ‘Pandemic’ here:

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PIG – Pain Is God

Posted: 3 November 2020 in Albums
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Metropolis Records – 20th November 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Despite their associations with both KMFDM and Foetus (Raymond Watts has been a touring member of both, and En Esch has returned the favour by contributing to PIG), and playing as the main support to Nine Inch Nails on the European leg of the Downward Spiral tour and releasing albums on Interscope around the turn of the millennium, PIG remain something of an obscurity, a band revered by those in the know. I can’t help but think that it’s because, for all their adoption of the aggrotech / technoindustrial stylings of KMFDM, and the grandiose extravagance of Foetus, they don’t really sit comfortably anywhere.

Their recent releases, which have been coming thick and fast in the past few years, while adhering to the fundamentals of their earlier blueprints, with thumping beats and grating, heavily processed guitars, have taken a poppier, and also more glam leaning. It’s a style that suits the flamboyant Watts, who’s always revelled in the theatrical and the performance aspects of rock ‘n’ roll. Pain is God continues to incorporate the glammy elements that first came to the fore on 2016’s The Gospel, particularly on stomping single cut ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Refugee’ – but then, this is being a PIG album, it incorporates so many elements, spanning eurodisco, industrial, and aggrotech, all tessellated together to form a perfect assembly. The ‘Militant Mix’ of ‘Mobocracy’ (the original version of which was the lead track on a limited tour-only EP released last year) melds grating slabs of industrial guitar to a thumping dancefloor beat, breaking down to piano and grand strings.

‘Badland’ brings a bold funk strut and a barrel load of brash brass. Orchestral details lace the slow grinding greasy girth of ‘The Wages of Sin’, while ‘Kickin Ass’ does just that, with a thick bass groove and a guitar line that’s more hair rock than glam rock, but still manages to avoid being remotely corny. The lighter-waving anthemic ‘Suffer no More’ which draws the curtain on the album does teeter perilously close, but gets a pass by virtue of its incongruity and sheer audacity.

If the album and song titles are thin on porcine puns, the themes and tropes are the same as they’ve been since the very start of Watts’ career under the PIG moniker – sex, death, pain, evil – with a generous scattering of religious references, predominantly around Catholicism (the cover art is a reasonable starting point), and a superabundant splattering of sleaze. And with the sultry seduction of ‘Drugged Dangerous & Damned’ Watts manages to shoehorn in one of his signature triple alliterations. For some reason, it never gets tired. I suspect this is, at least in part, because Pig balance all the self-knowing parody, the supersaturation of cliché and repetition with a flair for invention, stylistic range and, above all, decent tunes.

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GHXST – Dark Days EP

Posted: 2 November 2020 in Singles and EPs
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16 November 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

The latest six-tracker from GHXT goes for the slow-building intro with the low, slow ‘Shimmer’, where the murky, distorted guitar drone and twang cascading out over a retro drum machine stutter that’s backed off in the mix but cuts through sharp as a whip. It’s the Sisters of Mercy’s Reptile House EP slithering into a stranglehold of The Black Angels on ketamine with a dash of Barbed Wire Kisses era Jesus and Mary Chain.

Two years on from the appropriately-titled Gloom EP, the New York duo return with another batch of weighty, dark material which demonstrates their continued evolution, and the fact the EP format is one which suits them particularly well.

While operating from a comparatively limited sonic palette – dense, overdriven guitar that’s got a big, thick valve sound, minimally-programmed drum machine, and reverb-swamped female vocal they manage to do a lot with it: ‘Come Home’ is Curve-y shoegaze, while ‘It Falls Apart,’ released as a single in October, is a big, bollock-swinging swagger of messy blues, boasting a monster lead solo that sprawls over the entire track. Gloom and blues and murk dominate, casting heavy shadows and a hint of goth over the mood, but there’s so much more besides: the rich timbre of the guitar as it spins a slow-unfurling picked riff on closer ‘Die High’ calls to mind recent works by Earth and Dylan Carlson.

As the nights draw in on the approach to winter and the world feels like an increasingly apocalyptic hellhole, there’s something comforting about GHXST’s brand of immersive darkness.

Bunny & the Invalid Singers – The Certainty Kids

Posted: 1 November 2020 in Singles and EPs
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Bearsuit Records – 31st October 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Because life had been getting a bit predictable – y’know, with nothing happening but the same old same old, work / life at home / going nowhere schtick – it was without time to mix things up. A second lockdown and a new release from Bearsuit certainly fits the bill there, since after another half-arsed, muzzy bag of mumbling waffle from that tousle-haired tosser who probably couldn’t even give a straight answer to the question of whether or not he knew what a straight answer was, no-one really knows what the fuck’s happening, least of all half the government, a bewildering array of discombobulating sonic collage courtesy of Bunny & the Invalid Singers feels positively coherent by comparison.

This single – featuring a remarkably conventional A-side and B-side – comes as a taster of an album, The Flight of the Certainty Kids, scheduled to land in January.

Delicate, picked acoustic guitar that combines elements of classical and folk paves the way for a mellow, easy-listening vibe, with a meandering horn weaving its way across a slow, slouchy beat, and it comes on like latter-day JG Thirlwell compositions melting into Groove Armada. If that sounds like a curious and not altogether complimentary combo, think again: it’s a coming together of aspects of cinematographic vision and a breeziness of a bygone era, that bright, skippy 60s pop style with a subtle psychedelic twist. It’s mellow, and it’s well-executed, and lifts the listener towards a tranquil space.

It’s probably the distortion of history as played through the filters of 21st century retrospect – you know, all those ersatz Kodachrome-filtered scenes of joyful skipping around, weaving daisy chains and carefree living in microdresses, flares, flowing locks, beards and sideburns… How we idealise the past. The swinging 60s bypassed most of those there at the time, just as punk wasn’t the revolution that’s endlessly eulogised for the majority grinding away at day jobs or otherwise blissfully unaware in the suburbs. Nevertheless, a semi-fabricated 60s lounge and ultra-chill vibe is the main flavour of flipside ‘None of this Happened’, and maybe the clue is in the title: maybe it’s a wilful misremembrance, a distortion. It’s pleasant enough, of course, and perhaps appropriately, it all goes off in every direction toward the end, and we’re left in a sonic whirlpool of weird.

It’s another creative success for Bunny and Co, and augers well for the album, at least if you’re on the market for a full set of psychedelic pop strangeness.

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