The heavy multidimensional duo Divide and Dissolve share a remix of Gas Lit album track “Denial” by London born, U.S based artist BEARCAT.
“Denial (Bearcat remix)” appears on the Gas Lit remix EP release which is officially out today via Invada Records, and features the previously announced remixes from Chelsea Wolfe and Moor Mother – full details here.
DJ/producer and self-described “dancefloor therapist,” BEARCAT aims to permeate healing through music as she in turn heals herself throughout her practice, a lifelong mission as a survivor with complex trauma and ptsd. BEARCAT’s sound consists of uncompromising rhythm and bass blended with equal parts noise and chaos. For this remix of Divide and Dissolve’s “Denial” BEARCAT edited the original stems and built the rest of the song using kits from native instruments.
Back in the early 90s, when riot grrrl emerged as a thing, the UK inkies were all over it, just as they were all over anything that looked like being the next movement (who remembers The New Wave of New Wave, or The Scene that Celebrates Itself?) and sometimes, when there wasn’t anything, then they’d sometime just shoehorn some random bands into a bracket and give it a name and see if it would stick (Romo, anyone?). At that time, the music press proselytised hard, gushing about the way that hearing bands was like an epiphany – and every other band, apart from the shit ones, all of whom were call really fucking shit, were a complete revelation, as expressed by means of a smorgasbord of extravagant similes and extended metaphors.
Of course, what goes around comes around, and riot grrrl has been making a return for a while now. It’s fitting for the times when issues of gender identity and the difficulties women face every day in society are at the forefront of discussion. It’s the real grrrl power, it’s about liberation, and a reminder to those who need reminding – which is seemingly half the planet – that women can rock just as hard and kick just as much arse as guys, if not more so.
So it’s fair to say that in being transported some way back in time, Shooting Daggers’ debut release for New Heavy Sounds – a 7” flexi no less, that comes with a fold out insert, A4 poster, sticker and badge in a poly bag in a limited run of 250 – does yield a rush that’s tinged with nostalgia (although back in the 90s you’d be legging it round your local record shops to see if you could score a copy. According to their PR, ‘Sal, Bea and Raquel are a visceral amalgam of hardcore punk, riot grrrl and metalcore. They describe themselves as a feminist punk/queercore outfit who cite their influences as bands like Gouge Away, G.L.O.S.S, Turnstile and Gel.’
‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ is a minute and fifty-one seconds of guitar driven shouty punk fury ‘It’s all about you!!’ Salomé Pellegrin snarls over the fuzzed-out thrash. There’s no subtext here: this is as direct and angry as it gets.
As if the point needs making any more explicitly, they double down on the vitriol on the B-side. ‘You look so sexy tonight, you make me want to dismantle the patriarchy’ – so starts ‘Missandra’ before a thick, lumbering grunge riff grinds in. Is it right to respond to hate with more hate? Perhaps not but misandry at this point in history is understandable, and it’s beyond time that men need to collectively own the centuries of shit perpetrated against women. No buts, no excuses. And it’s a corking song, too. They pack a hell of a lot into a fraction over three minutes here, switching the tempo up to go full hardcore punk, and yes, it’s a no-messing and much-deserved knee in the balls, the likes of which deserves to dismantle the patriarchy, one by one.
Washington DC-based dark alternative band, AMULET has just unveiled the video to their song, ‘Last Ditch.’ The song appears on their latest album, House Of Black + White.
About the song: You can only take so much tragedy. There comes a point where you wonder if you’ll be able to go on. The ache of sorrow and loneliness feels eternal and all-consuming. You have a choice to make. You wonder if seeing crimson is the only way to really heal.
It’s been a while. Back in the mid/late-noughties, Maybeshewill (formed in 2006) carved their own furrow in the world of post-rock, balancing delicate ethereal explorations with some bruising riffs, and, every now and again, in the absence of vocals, incorporating samples int the mix.
They adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder certainly seems to have some currency when it comes to their comeback, seven years after their called time and bade their fans farewell.
‘Zarah’, the first cut from forthcoming album, the appropriately-titled No Feeling is Final, has already found a fan and champion in Labour MP for Coventry South, Zarah Sultana. There’s a reason for this, as Guitarist Robin Southby explains:
“The track is built around an extract of a speech by Zarah Sultana. Zarah’s words encapsulate the anger and frustration felt by younger generations, being denied a say in their own future by an older global elite who are staunchly opposed to taking action on the climate crisis in the name of wealth accumulation and upholding existing power structures. The speech decries the billionaire-led multinational corporations and nepotic career politicians who are desperately clinging on to the status quo of late-stage capitalism in the face of a world that is literally burning down around them.”
It’s easy to dismiss instrumental post-rock acts as pedalling mere atmosphere and wistfulness, but politics can be found beneath the surface of the works of so many artists: Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s music does little to reveal the band’s leftist / anarcho leanings, although there are clues in the titles and artwork and so on. But here, Maybeshewill render their position quite explicit, and it’s a strong thing to do.
It’s also a strong release: on the one hand, it’s classic Maybeshewill, a continuation of form that sees them marry unsettling undercurrents and a moody tension with incredible gracefulness, and, of course, epic building crescendos.
‘Zarah’ isn’t so much a crescendo-orientated composition, but is rich in texture, and packs all the elements of an epic into a succinct 3:45. Maybeshewill aren’t only back, but they’re better than ever.
After paying their dues pedalling their hefty wares in all the little venues the length and breadth of the country after relocating to London from Brazil, Your Mum are really starting to reap the rewards of some incredible sweat and toil for the release of their second album.
Having shared the stage with DIY stalwarts such as Maid Of Ace, Svetlanas, Healthy Junkies, Hands Off Gretel, I-Destroy & Dream Nails as well as well-established acts and legends such as New Model Army, The Adolescents, Vice Squad, Kirk Brandon, UK Subs, The Vibrators and TV Smith, they’ve scored prestigious deals with to Chapter 22 Records in the UK and M&O Music in France. For all that, their latest release is accompanied by a video which was shot entirely on a GoPro & edited by the duo, who are evidently staying true to their DIT ethos and their roots – no sellout here!
The title track of their new album, now released as a single, finds the duo weighing in hard and heavy with blistering overdriven bass that sounds like bass and guitar at the same time, propelled by thunderous drums: ‘Club Tropicana’ is ain’t and nor is it some mellow, languorous beach chillout with a cocktail: no, the only thong tropical about this is the raging heat, meaning it’s mostly about the fuzz, Anelise Kunz’ full-lunged vocals distorted by volume and it blasts away for a high-impact, high-octane three minutes of raw power.
If you’ve not yet met Yur Mum, let me introduce you – because you’ve been missing out, and this is a beast of a track.
For regular readers of Aural Aggravation, Videostore has been a band we’ve followed from its lockdown inception as something to do for Nathan and Lorna Argonaut while they were unable to operate normally with the rest of the band until the final release. We’ve loved their lo-fi drum-machine led indie rock tunes, and it’s felt like a journey.
The journey ends here. They celebrated their release from lockdown and the return of live music with a one-off live show with the duo expanded to a full band, and as they write, ‘to commemorate the Videostore gig we are releasing a live single of Your Mind and our cover of Suicide by Spacemen 3. Recorded by Joules on his trusty Zoom machine in the one and only rehearsal for our one and only show. Videostore live were Nathan, Lorna, Joules and Chris. We had a blast. Goodnight and thank you’.
Well, thank you, too, guys.
These are cracking versions, and you can hear them here:
Oslo-based Norwegian stoner / sludge metal trio Rongeur came together in 2012, drawing influence from the likes of Eyehategod, Seigmen, High on Fire, Neurosis, Darkthrone and Arthur Schoupenhauer, ‘with the intent of making raw, heavy and honest music’.
Ahead of their second album, Glacier Tongue – the follow-up to 2017 debut An Asphyxiating Embrace, they’re offering up a single cut in the form of ‘Gutter Marathon’.
So what is a gutter marathon? After hearing this savage roar of noise, I’m none the wiser, although it feels like crawling on your belly splashing through murk and dirt in a rush to swim to the drain: it seems fitting at a time when the entire world seems like it’s drowning in shit, a lot of it if our own making.
Marathons are usually long, endurance tests, and similarly, stoner / sludge metal is often on the slower side, so the visceral blast of ‘Gutter Marathon’ comes as something of a surprise, blasting in at breakneck speed and being over in a minute and twenty-three seconds making it more of a sprint. But it’s grimy and overloading, a ferocious blast of snarling guttural rage, and sounds like their dope’s been laced with amphetamines. So Rongeur it must be right!
Moses are clearly aiming for the stars. The band name alone, with its biblical allusions, connotes epic, a band with enough ambition to part a sea (although they’re actually named after their singer, Victor M. Moses. The four-piece act are gunning for arenas, and fair play, but what makes this release a win is that their primary focus is on the song, and on the guts, and on the meaty delivery and solid production.
It’s a chunky, psych-hued hypnotic, cyclical guitar riff that lumbers in and swaggers its way through the song’s three-and-a-half minutes. It’s got all the vintage crunch, the reverby haze, and all the fretwork. It nags away incessantly, and it’s got balls. It’s followed by a shaking, snaking bass, and the vocals are swathed in reverb to seal the retro vibe. There’s a lot of energy here, and some good vibes,
‘Mirror Magic’ has a lot going on – mostly some chunky guitars and solid drumming. It feels like a strong statement of intent, and a taste of things to come – so let’s see what happens next.
Yol is, unquestionably, a definitive presence of the self-professed ‘no-audience underground’. If you’re unfamiliar with this (and there’s no shame in that, because the clue’s in the name), it’s a term coined by Rob Hayler who blogs at radiofreemidwich, who says ‘there is no ‘audience’ for the scene because the scene is the audience’. If it sounds incestuous and self-involved, then maybe it is, but in a good way: that is to say, it’s more of a community than a scene, and one defined not by sound or style, but an ethos of mutual support, and it’s an incredibly broad church. Global domination isn’t on anyone’s agenda: this is art for art’s sake, free expression, experimentalism because. No-one is judged on technical competence – in fact, no-one is judged at all. Anything goes, and yol absolutely encapsulates that, with ‘music’ that’s utterly off the wall.
The blurb advises that viral dogs and cats offers ‘five tracks that revolve around the essential ‘found objects / mouth noise / mangled language’ core of yol’s practice, brimming with razor-sharp observations, absorbed and regurgitated to form absurd, looping, distending cantillations. Visceral, cathartic and piss-funny in equal measure!’
The first piece, ‘chunks of tongue’ (it’s not a song, by any stretch), is deranged, demented, with what sounds like some kind of contact mic slattering and random tweets providing the backdrop to some utterly dented shouting and yelping and gargling about expensive ice cream being sold as strawberry, but… well, he doesn’t believe it. The strawberry pieces are chucks of tongue! He splutters and spews like he’s choking on the offensive material, and as amusing and Dadaist as it is, it’s also quite disturbing. Context counts, of course: this is an album (albeit a short one that’s more of an EP), so it’s art, but if you found someone doing this in the street, they’d likely be sectioned.
There’s very little musical backing on here, apart from whistles and trills of feedback and random extranea, meaning that it’s almost a spoken word album of sorts. But it’s crazed, cracked spoken word – there’s no narrative, only crazed spluttering and yelping. More than anything, I’m reminded of Mike Patton’s Adult Themes for Voice album. The simplicity and sparseness is a major feature here: yol shows that you don’t really need anything to make an impact, and when we’ve become accustomed and conditioned to polished, produced song-orientated music , to be assailed by something so primitive as almost nothing but a human voice, contorting every way possible is an unusual experience, and one that will likely freak some people out. Good, I say.
‘eat out to help out’ isn’t only representative of the album as a whole, but a standout. He stammers and mumbles around, catching his breath, panting, while struggling to verbalise some deep, frenzied anguish about a plastic fork with a nugget on it. The repetition of a single phrase with varying emphasis is very much an extension of the permutational technique initiated by Brio Gysin in the late 1950s and early 1960s, only here, the sequence of the words remains unchanged, with the delivery and emphasis changing on each repetition instead. The effect of the repletion is quite challenging and ultimately disorientating.
‘Viral cats and dogs get bored… Get back to shitting everywhere!’ he screams on the title track. ‘Yes, but not in my backyard!’ I want to shout back after waking to frequent turds from neighbourhood cats on the sliver of AstroTurf at the end of my yard. Bastards. And immediately, I find myself foaming at the mouth with fury, and realise that this is it. Tapping that vein into raw emotion and unspeakable fury, I’m seconds away a fit of from inchoate screaming abdabs – which is precisely what yol serves up here.
viral dogs and cats isn’t an album to be judged on technical competency – in fact, it’s not an album to be judged on any scale of merit of whatever, beyond ‘does it have an impact?’ Of course it does. It leaves you feeling weird. Because it is weird. And that’s the fun of it.
“What does ‘regret’ mean?” “Well, son, a funny thing about regret is that better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven’t done.” I have no shortage of regrets, but one is that I saw Come and thought ‘meh’. It was 1993: they were supporting Dinosaur Jr, who’s just released Where You Been?, along with Bettie Serveert in Nottingham. I’d read reviews of, but was still yet to hear Eleven: Eleven at the time. They’d been all over the press with that debut album. And I just didn’t get gripped. Maybe it was because, at seventeen, I was just so revved for the headliners I wasn’t in a place to fully appreciate the supports.
I had no way of knowing that their second album would become one of my absolute favourites. Again, having picked up Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, I wasn’t immediately enamoured. I guess it took me awhile to appreciate the album’s subtlety and emotional depth – and it has so much depth – but investing in listening properly and not holding out for the big riffery of Nirvana or Dinosaur Jr or the general sound of the class of ’93-’94 unlocks Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Some of it’s about maturity, some of it’s about patience – I didn’t really dig The God Machine on the first few spins of Scenes from the Second Storey.
It was a long album, for a start. Only two of the songs are under four minutes long, and half are five or more. The structures aren’t obvious, there’s not a lot that’s straight verse / chorus / verse. It was also a bit slow, and quite country / blues. It really wasn’t the sound of the grunge zeitgeist of 1994. But one day, somehow, something clicket. Quite possibly it was by absently half-listening to it, that moment arrived in ‘String’. I have this thing, whereby a fleeting moment of a song -m a change of key, chord, a single sound, or something else otherwise minor, extraneous, will absolutely make it for me. By which I mean, I am completely obsessive about this. When a moment strikes me as ‘pivotal’ I simply have to hear it, over and over, and that will be a reason to play an entire song – on repeat. That first scrape of fingers on strings at the start of ‘My Black Ass’ on Shellac at Action Park? Yeah, that’s one such moment. That moment at 3:05 on ‘String’ in Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is another. It just hits an instant of musical perfection, and it’s absolute bliss.
The song is a standout – on the CD, it’s positioned after the slow, blooding ‘Let’s Get Lost’ and picks the tempo up. The fact it arrives after a false ending or sorts and a change in direction is key, and the guitar interplay is sublime… The trouble is, explaining it in words simply doesn’t convey the impact, the way it resonates. But there it is. And now, here it is again, remastered. And it sounds great, all over again, as well as giving reason to revisit what is a remarkable and courageous album, one that represents a band committed to making the music they want to make instead of succumbing to trends or record company or peer pressure. And revisiting it only further highlights the dynamics, the tempo changes and unexpected shifts, and the way those sonic twists can instantly alter the mood, and the way the band imbue every bar with emotion. It’s so, so powerful, and all the more so for the fact it isn’t immediate. In fact, all of the things that made it ‘difficult’, that I struggled with at first, are the reasons I love it now and are the reasons it’s such a remarkable and accomplished album, and one that proved without doubt that volume is not the sole driver of intensity. Thalia Zedek’s vocal with its rich patina has a deep rasp, and carries a greater emotional than tonal range, and it’s perfectly suited to the twisting, restlessness of the songs: these are songs to lose yourself in.
The remastering is nicely done – nothing too intrusive, it just feels that bit crisper, somehow, the details clearer, and that’s nice.
The bonus disc, Wrong Sides contains an entire album’s worth of additional material, and with the exception of the demo version of ‘German Song’ (with some magnificent spiralling guitar work and if anything, this slightly less polished take, with the notable addition of clarinet and piano packs only more aching beauty), it’s not a gathering of alternative takes, radio sessions, and rehearsals, but a truly worthy assembly of contemporaneous material – B—sides, stray compilation tracks, and unreleased material, and it’s fair to say that it’s all killer.
‘Angelhead’ – a ‘String’ 12” B-side was recorded on a stop-off on tour, and is one of the most directly riff-centric grungers of the band’s career. ‘Cimarron’ is up there with the best of Come, with some crunchy guitars augmented by sweeping violin. Their cover of Swell Maps’ ‘Loin of the Surf’ is a groove-led math-rock instrumental workout, while ‘Submerge’ is chunky, crunky, dense, lumbering. This is the version that actually predates the one that appears on Eleven: Eleven, and instead came out on the German Sub Pop 12” and CD of the menacing ‘Car’ (also featured here with its warping guitars alongside B-side ‘Last Mistake’. But what matters most is that every single bonus cut here would have been worthy of the album.
With the additions as strong as the album, what the expanded version of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell reveals is an insight into a great – if massively underrated – band at their absolute peak.
Aural Aggravation 