Archive for February, 2021

Watch: ‘All Futures’ by The Armed

Posted: 5 February 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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The Armed have announced a new album, ULTRAPOP, available April 16th via Sargent House – their first album with the label. Featuring work from Mark Lanegan and Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen this is the first album co-produced by the band’s own Dan Greene in collaboration with Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe). Kurt Ballou remains at the helm as executive producer. With the announcement comes a live video for the first track, "All Futures," explicitly revealing this album’s band member lineup for the first time. The video is a live take of the studio track, which can be heard here.

Ultrapop is the genre of music that said album features. It reaches the same extremities of sonic expression as the furthest depths of metal, noise, and otherwise "heavy" counterculture music subgenres but finds its foundation firmly in pop music and pop culture. As is always The Armed’s mission, it seeks only to create the most intense experience possible, a magnification of all culture, beauty, and things.

Dan Greene goes on to explain, "crafting vital art means presenting the audience with new and intriguing tensions—sonically, visually, conceptually. Over time and through use, those tensions become less novel and effective—and they become expectations. The concept of "subgenre" becomes almost the antithesis of vitality in art—itself a fetishization of expectation. ULTRAPOP seeks, in earnest, to create a truly new listener experience. It is an open rebellion against the culture of expectation in "heavy" music. It is a joyous, genderless, post-nihilist, anti-punk, razor-focused take on creating the most intense listener experience possible. It’s the harshest, most beautiful, most hideous thing we could make. "

Watch the video for ‘All Futures’ here:

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Credit Trevor Naud

Danielle De Picciotto – The Element of Love

Posted: 4 February 2021 in Albums
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Broken Clover Records – 19th February 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Danielle De Picciotto is a true polyartist, as an exhibiting artist, an author, and musician, who has sung with Crime & The City Solution and Space Cowboys. She co-initiated the Berlin Love Parade in 1989 and “The Ocean Club” together with Gudrun Gut, and has been producing music under the hackedepicciotto moniker with husband Alexander Hacke, founding member of Einstürzende Neubauten, for the last twenty years.

The Element of Love, her third solo album, is an intriguing affair, drawing on elements of experimentalism and spoken word and placing them to the fore. It’s a curious hybrid of sparse, droning instrumentation, and narrative pieces delivered quite dryly, with low-key orchestral instrumentation.

For the most part, the backing is subtle, spacious, and there is a palpable sense of distance and wonderment. ‘Is anybody out there?’ she asks, breathlessly, on opener, ‘Sea of Stars’, and the narrative pieces which occupy the album are an interesting blend of postmodernism and mysticism, referencing Harry Potter and more serious magic, as well as a host of cultural touchstones both obvious and oblique. Precisely what the lyrical bent of The Element of Love is, is unclear, but space, superheroes and, as the title suggests, elemental forces, appear to be central themes

Third track, ‘Solitude’ is a murky morass or extraneous noise, a distant grind and an ethereal vocal off in the distance: with its rhythmic industrial gratings it’s reminiscent of 90s Swans and Jarboe. In contrast, the title tracks is a sedate, string-led instrumental that simply exists in its own space and time, while ‘Who Am I’ is more overtly electronic, with dripping analogue notes and a simple beat reminiscent of Young Marble Giants’ primitivism. The majority of the album is simple, minimal, and in many ways the reconstructed sound installation of the record is all there is. On the surface, The Element of Love is very much a wandering around a certain sameness, and it’s not until one spends time and delves into the details that the depths and differences reveal themselves and reveal the range, which lies in the tone, texture, and mood.

For the most part, The Element of Love is swampy and murky and difficult to define in any sense, lyrically or musically – but especially musically, as it hangs in mid-air, undecided about its identity as so many of the common and popular tropes point toward the dimly-lit back of the auditorium. But don’t let that be a deterrent: there is much to discover here.

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Watch: ‘Never Enough’ by Low Hummer

Posted: 4 February 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Hull quintet Low Hummer have shared new single ‘Never Enough’ on Leeds’ label Dance To The Radio.

Offering a first glimpse at the debut album the band are currently working on, Low Hummer have shared ‘Never Enough’, a driving new single that highlight the bands gift for classic indie songwriting with loving nods to bands like The Cure and LCD Soundsystem. Truly coming together in the studio, while the band poured over Joy Division and Cocteau Twins songs, singer Aimee Duncan could deliver her vocals with the cool understatement she does best, free from the noise of the rehearsal room.

Continuing their work digging into themes of social isolation, disinformation and online manipulation, ‘Never Enough’ explores Culture-bound syndromes, ageing and whether we have the ability to truly reframe the situations we find ourselves in.

‘Never Enough’ is accompanied by a new video shot in -5 weather in nearby Flamborough. Following three failed shoots due to positive Covid results, track & trace calls and extreme weather, and with an imminent lockdown in England the band set out with film maker Luke Hallett and documented their assent up Mam Tor creating a beautiful and apt account of the band struggling up a very high hill together…

Dan Mawer: Guitars, vocals:

“I researched culture-bound syndrome’s for ‘Never Enough’ – These are a combination of psychiatric and somatic symptoms, recognised only within a specific society or culture. Transmission of the disease is determined by cultural reinforcement and person to person interaction, I felt like this was an interesting topic for a song. The subject helped me pull together lines along with my own notes on ageing, self-doubt and the idea of cultural isolation. It all sounds very depressing but I hope there’s still lots of light in the lines, such as when Aimee suggests the idea of reframing the situations you find yourself in when you’re struggling.”

Watch ‘Never Enough’ here:

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One Arm – Mysore Pak

Posted: 3 February 2021 in Albums
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Atypeek Muzik

Christopher Nosnibor

Apparently France’s One Arm is a ‘mythical’ band, although the newly unveiled existence of Mysore Pak, their first album which gathers a fill twenty years of work, suggests that’s not entirely true. There’s nothing like a bit of mythology and legend to bolster the status of an obscure cult act – and this particular cult act has managed to score a number of other cult performers to contribute to the recordings here, most notably Little Annie, who adds ‘kosmic vocals’ to ‘Space is the Place’.

Mysore Pak is, it would seem, a collection of recordings made over the last twenty years, but try to delve into the band’s history and details are nigh on impossible to locate or verify. Who said that it was impossible to hide in the age of the Internet? Anyway, Mysore Pak has a truly vintage sound, with touchstones going back far more than two decades, taking grabs from 60s psychedelic, post-punk, and early industrial.

The first song, the vaguely baggy ‘Real’ is dominated by the heavy clatter of two drummers and duelling basses and with its thumping motorik repetition, it calls to mind vintage Fall. ‘ESG’, meanwhile, locks into a slightly psychedelic groove – and with the airy female vocals, I;’m reminded more of the careening drift of Stereolab, as well as the more contemporary Modeerate Rebels who similarly spin classic indie with a Krautrock aesthetic. The slowed down, sedated ‘Space is the Place’ creeps and squirms stealthy around a primitive percussive clatter, and ‘City’ is a standout with it’s locked-in groove and discordant howls of wailing feedback.

Elsewhere, things get murkier and harder edge, as exemplified by the cutty, scrapy, hybrid trudge of jittery noise that is the eight-minute ‘Top Tone’. The guitars are sharp, there’s all the serpentine esotericism and eastern promise you could dream of, making this a dreamy, delirious meandered, and similarly, ‘Step 3’, which comes on like a head-on collision between Suicide and The Jesus and Marty Chain is a deeply compelling mess of noise. Closer ‘Virgule’, too, harks back to Psychocandy while plundering a seem much deeper and darker with its rippling flyaway synths and low-riding bass that meanders as it pleases while vintage snares crack in every whichway.

For the primitive production feel and the simplicity of basslines that just loop endlessly, Mysore Pak is so much more than a hipsterish replica of real life that skips along nicely. As accessible as this album is, it’s got more depth and more instant biteback than you would ever imagine. An album that steps out of time and spans infinite time and space, it’s got a lot going for it.

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Ghlow – Not Fit for This

Posted: 2 February 2021 in Singles and EPs
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PNKSLM Recordings – 2nd February 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

It seems like a long, long time ag now, when I’d listen to the top 40 singles chart on a Sunday evening and be enticed to buy an album on the strength of a single. I didn’t even realise it at the time, as a pre-teen, that this was exactly the point: singles sell albums, and in some respects are as much a promo tool as a video or a TV performance or an instore signing. Time was, of course, that album sales made money, or at least made the biggest dents in recouping advances, although a hit single was always, and remains, the route to royalties.

Despite the devaluation of both the album format and the single trailer in the digital age, the practise persists and sometimes is actually pays off, because you’ll hit on a single release that completely poleaxes you with its brilliance – a song that will grab you instantly and compel you to rush out and buy the album or otherwise leave you on the very edge of your seat for its release.

‘Not Fit For This’ is that single – released ahead of Ghlow’s debut album, ‘Slash and Burn’, due out in April – is a sharp, stabby new-wave attack that comes on full-throttle and packs some real adrenaline in its scratchy squall of trebly guitars that blister and buzz all over a drum machine that palpates frantically as it tries to make itself heard and keep up with the explosive sonic blast. It’s got that early 80s vibe absolutely down, and it’s not just about the songwriting, performance, or the hazy production that positively oozes that dank basement 8-track vibe – it’s about the attitude and the intangibles, too.

Emille de Blanche has all the dark energy of Siouxsie Soux, and she brings all the serrated edges in this gothy tour-de-force, and everything coalesces into a distillation of tension-filled gloom that’s pretty damn special.

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Watch: ‘Breakage’ by Gaffa Bandana

Posted: 1 February 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Having been extremely excited by the imminent arrival of Gaffa Bandana’s debut album, Fraught in Waves, just the other day, the excitement mounts with the landing of a video to accompany the album’s opening cut, ‘Breakage’, assembled by Gill Dread. Seems only right we should share that excitement, and some cracking visuals and a blistering racket of a tune:

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