Archive for November, 2021

Vexillary – Full Frontal Lunacy

Posted: 21 November 2021 in Albums
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31st October 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

The liner notes for this new outing from Vexillary proffer a rhetorical question that sounds like the start of a semi-intellectual joke: ‘What do you get when you mix a long winter with a pandemic of a lifetime and a bunch of synths lying around? The cabin fever stemming from an endless lockdown and the resulting mental demise? According to Vexillary, the perfect backdrop for a sonic self-portrait documenting one’s brush with madness.’

It’s probably fair to say that many of us have lost the plot top varying extents and in differing ways over the last couple of years, and we’ve all struggled in various ways, be it from lockdown isolation, bereavement, monetary worries, the pressure of confinement, being physically vulnerable, or scared for the future, or returning to ‘normality’ – and while anything resembling the normality we knew back in 2019 feels like a lifetime away if ever, simply resuming social interaction brings with it for many a tidal wave of anxiety.

No doubt the cabin fever that prompted the evolution of Full Frontal Lunacy will be relatable for many, myself included. Despite the comparative luxury of a back yard bit enough so sit out in and even to accommodate a paddling pool for a family of three to manage working from home and home schooling, things felt a bit claustrophobic at times, and there were many living in inner city environments and high-rise accommodation with many more people and considerably less space.

But what of the title? Full frontal carries the connotations of exposure, more in a movie / porn context than anything. That is precisely where Vexillary is coming from, of course. Social media has provided the platform where everyone airs all their grievances and let it all hang out, for better or for worse, and for many, among the food porn and actual porn, misery porn and trauma porn has been a source of entertainment since the world lost the plot and spiralled into pandemic psychosis. Full Frontal Lunacy is effectively the musical equivalent of getting your cock out on a global platform, with all things mental health and more out there on display for all to see. Trouble is, for many, it’s probably less embarrassing to get your cock out than to discuss your feeling, and so it’s a bold move, but one that sets an example and sends a message that it’s not only ok to confront these things, but vital that we share them.

It’s perhaps no surprise that the album is dominated by themes of confinement, torture, and mania, manifesting in various forms, and compressed concisely into eight slabs of dense dark, industrial-strength disco. Driven by big beats and booming bass, this is a banger in the obvious sense, although those basslines snake and grind , and the vocals are submerged in reverb or otherwise heavily treated. The ‘Scorched Mix’ of ‘Burnt Leather’ is dark and stark, sleazy and tense. The title track sounds like an outtake from Ministry’s Twitch; agitated electro cranked up and gnarly, with pulverising percussion all the way.

‘The Descent’ is dark, deep, hypnotic and follows the signature styling of repetitive motifs; ‘Absinthe Minded’ speaks – albeit not entirely coherently, conveying a mood more than a message – of self-medication, addlement and struggling through, pushing onwards toward the spacey dance of closer ‘Exit the Void’, which brings hints of Depeche Mode to the dark dance party.

Full Frontal Lunacy has a coherence and stylistic unity, but also feel like a work that’s both exploratory and urgent. It’s not an easy album, but it’s a good one.

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Watch: ‘Your Problem’ by Swamp Coffin

Posted: 21 November 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Rotherham based three-piece, sludge band Swamp Coffin have shared the video for new single ‘Your Problem’, taken from their upcoming album Noose Almighty set for release on 26th November (APF Records). Vocalist/guitarist Jon Rhodes comments,

"We were close to finishing writing the album but knew that we needed something huge and pissed off to open the record with, to really set our stall out for what was coming. “Your Problem” was one of those songs that just came together really quickly. I went in to rehearsal with the verse and chorus riffs and by the end of the session we’d got what you hear on the album. Lyrically it’s about those people that have followers instead of friends who are never seen to do any wrong but are ultimately only out for themselves and will happily stab you in the back without ever letting the mask slip. It’s about revenge after a betrayal and we wanted to play off that with the video and make it as claustrophobic a viewing experience as possible.”

Watch the video now:

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Watch: ‘The Lake’ by Lindy-Fay Hella & Dei Farne

Posted: 20 November 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Dreams are one of the guiding inspirations on the new album from Norwegian collective Lindy-Fay Hella (Wardruna) & Dei Farne and today they share the imaginative new video/track ‘The Lake’ from their forthcoming album Hildring (By Norse, 26th November).

About the meaning of the song, Lindy-Fay comments, “The Lyrics for ‘The Lake’ are taken from one of my cousin Roy’s dreams. We have been discussing the dreamworld for many years already. So, to my big surprise, I discovered that [director] Gaui’s story for the video also was directly taken from a dream. When eating breakfast at his and Marita’s cozy home in Faroe Islands, I asked: "The story for the video is very beautiful, how did you come up with that?” Gaui replied: “ Oh well, I dreamt about it. It is just taken from a dream.”

This kind of charming synchronicity is very befitting to Lindy-Fay Hella & Dei Farne, who have created a record which celebrates the power of all of our senses and encourages listeners to seek the magic in our surroundings, awakening curiosity and our sense of wonder.

Check out the official video for ‘The Lake’ below:

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Lake

Photo Credit: Raina Vlaskovska

Rejection Ops – Rejection Ops vs. Rejection Ops

Posted: 19 November 2021 in Albums
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Nim Brut – 19th November 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

The hardest battles are those against yourself: they’re perpetually self-defeating and at the same time impossible to win. A duelling duality creates the core dynamic of Rejection Ops. The Leeds-based duo’s bio describes them as ‘a drummer and bass-and-electronics player who sound like each is trying to outdo the other at driving audiences from the room’, presenting a scene of duality and conflict, and this document of that internal tension was captured in its rawest form, namely self-recorded on a Zoom recorder during May 2021, so no engineering panache or highly-detailed production values here, no layering, multitracking, or overdubs. And it’s a mangled, gnarly mess of noise from beginning to end. It’ sets your teeth on edge, it makes your organs vibrate. It makes you feel tense, and grind your teeth. And these are the reasons to love it, because it has impact. It’s not some comfortable background work, and it’s not even songs that drift into your ears and lodge softly but with longevity. Rejection Ops vs. Rejection Ops is pre-emptive revenge for something you may do, and it’s going to punish you hard for it.

The first track, ‘Agendas Vary’ is a squall of feedback and overloading noise pitched against a tempest of thunderous drumming, and it does that free jazz thing of sounding like the climactic finale of an epic set without there having been the epic set preceding it. As such, it’s seven minutes of ear-bleeding, cranium-crushing chaos that doesn’t go anywhere, but then isn’t intending to.

‘Atomic Basketry’, the album’s longest track at almost eight minutes in duration, ratchets up the noise and almost buries the percussion beneath a blistering squall of screaming noise, a tidal wave of treble, a deluge of distortion. Blistering electronic noise, a bowel-shredding harsh noise wall splatters against arrhythmic clattering.

Thereafter, the form shifts away from expansive and exploratory towards brief blasts of mangled abrasion, every one faster and harder and wilder and more off the wall. Guitars thrashed hard splinter in a mesh of treble while the drums pop like bubblewrap. ‘Heeding Tartan’ is particularly abrasive, two-and-a-half minutes of metal-scraping, crunching, white hot molten noise, and ‘Raging Ninepin’ rages hard, so hard it blisters and peels and pulverises the grey matter to the point of near liquefication. The drums ricochet hard and fast like machine gun fire through ‘Rat Pie’, which snarls and crackles hard, but it’s all just a prep for the sonic blitzkrieg of the final cut, ‘Soon Learned’. Even sooner remember earplugs would be the advice, because this absolutely fucking hurts. Again, it’s three and a half minutes of everything all at once, only here, it’s the head-shredding crescendo climax it sounds like, rather than just some avant jazz end without a start.

By the time it’s over, you feel battered, bruised, drained, but also buzzed and exhilarated. The purpose of art is not to entertain, but to challenge, to arouse the senses. Rejection Ops certainly challenge – not only the listener, but themselves and one another, to create a stupendously intense experience.

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The Snobs – Blend The Horse!

Posted: 18 November 2021 in Albums
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Bisou Records – BIS-019-U-B – 2nd December 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Maybe it’s because I’m tired, and I’ve had quite a bewildering couple of weeks in terms of dayjob and quite simply life, but this is one of those band bios that leave me wondering quite simply ‘what the fuck?’ and more specifically ‘is this for real?’ Either I’m delirious, or this really is completely off-the-wall nutsness.

The facts, it seems are that The Snobs were ‘Formed by brothers Mad Rabbit (singer and producer) and Duck Feeling (multi-instrumentalist) near Paris’ and that Blend The Horse! was written and recorded between spring 2019 and autumn 2020.

Is this a real band? Then I read that the track ‘Long Winter Evenings’ follows a sonata form blending ethereal singing and a motorik groove’ and that ‘Over a minimalist rhythm section borrowing from Joy Division, Miles Davis and Kraftwerk, The Snobs restate their loyalty to rock music with Tropical Fuck Storm’s sharp guitars. Tropical Fuck Storm sounds like a character from Mark Manning’s warped rock-band novel Get Your Cock Out, and this is surely satire… right? Right?

Nope, it’s just whacky and irreverent, and it reminds me that not so long ago, humour and irony were commonplace, and art was whatever it wanted to be. And so since their formation at the turn of the millennium, The Snobs Have built quite a body of work, with a substantial number of releases recorded in collaboration with artists of various disciplines and styles. Blend The Horse! presents six compositions – bookended by songs that stretch beyond the ten-minute mark – that explore a massive range.

‘Long Winter Evenings’ is a minimalist protoindustrial effort, but then about three minutes in, there’s a kind of baggy / rappy break, before it spirals into some kind of psychedelic electro that’s a bit trippy, driven by a droning bass while squdgy bleeps and all kinds of going on go on. It’s an intense and eye-opening way to open an album. It feels cohesive, but it feels uncomfortable at the same time, and not just because it’s a genre-defying melting pot of hybridization.

There is a lot going on, even when there seemingly isn’t. ‘The Low Angle’ is sparse and minimal in its arrangement, with a thick, ambulating bassline dominating the arrangement. It’s low, slow, and dubby, and an exemplar of the ‘less is more’ adage.

What to make of this? It’s kinda trip-hop, kinda low-tempo hip hop with an experimental leaning, kinda… kinda what, exactly? There are expansive reverbs and echoes in the mix is, too, and it’s hard to know what to make of it.

Sonically it feels dislocated and difficult, with no real specific plan set: lo-fi, bedroomy wooziness lumbers and lurches as old-school drum machines provide crispy snare cracks around the reimagined Bowieness of ‘Plastic moon’, and as the thumping industrial drums of ‘Cable Call’ that combines the looping synths of KMFDM and the easy 90s popness of Jesus Jones and the like.

It’s a mish-mash of everything, and some of the elements work better than others, although there’s likely little benefit to dissecting which aspects of which track work or don’t, not least of all because there’s so much happening, and it sort of feels ‘outside’. Neoprog and post–rock melt into dreamy electro and shoegaze all mixed with a hefty dash of psychedelia, and no one of it makes sense, and yet, at the same time, it does. And it’s kinda nice, but kinda frustrating, too. It’s as though the range and exploratory nature of this project is prejudiced by an increasingly conservative market where genres and categories are core to marketing, and I’m aware I’m in some small way complicit in this process. But then, sometimes, an album simply doesn’t fit, and it’s not that Blend The Horse! doesn’t connect to any genres, so much as they’re all thrown in together to create a mind-bending stew.

‘The Sixth Dragonfly’ throws everything into the blender all at once, and it all happens, from mellow ambience to fill Nine Inch Nails guitar attack. It’s an eye-popping climax to an eye-popping set. It’s deranged, but a perfect summary of out times.

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Watch: ‘Let’s See Each Other’ by A Place To Bury Strangers

Posted: 17 November 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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A Place To Bury Strangers announce the release of their sixth album See Through You on 4th February 2022. It’s not just a return to form for the band, but also a return to their fiercely independent, DIY roots on their own label, Dedstrange.

Outpacing even their own firmly blazed path of audio annihilation, this 13-track album repeatedly delivers the massive walls of chaos and noise that A Place To Bury Strangers are renowned for. It’s an explosive journey that explores the listener’s limits of mind-bending madness, while simultaneously offering the catchiest batch of songs in the band’s discography. It’s a nod to the art school ethos of the band’s origins, while forging a new and clear direction forward.

The first single ‘Let’s See Each Other’ is an intimate and disarming love song from a forgotten future. Syncopated memories and deconstructed fantasies of lovers lost in a city that doesn’t know their names. The accompanying video, directed by David Pelletier, features the band destroying the song while imploring people to reunite.

Watch the video here:

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Photo by Ebru Yildiz

Watch: ‘Pyroclasts F’ (excerpt) by SUNN O))) with Anna Von Hausswolff

Posted: 17 November 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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In late October 2019, following a successful UK tour ending in a sold-out concert at the mythical Roundhouse in London, SUNN O))) entered studio 4 of the BBC Maida Vale on invitation to record a live session for Mary Anne Hobbs to be broadcast on Samhain via her excellent radio show on BBC6. To enter the legendary John Peel studios was to enter a temple of music and experimentation, liberty in ideas and sound.

The brilliant Anna Von Hausswolff and her band had accompanied SUNN O))) on the UK tour, and Anna joined SUNN O))) in the BBC studio on synths and with her tremendous voice on the Pyroclasts pieces.  Today, SUNN O))) premieres an excerpt from the remarkable “Pyroclasts F” track ahead of the November 26th CD/Digital release date.

Check the visuals that accompany the pre-release excerpt here:

 

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Artist photo by: Ronald K. Dick.

Maybeshewill – No Feeling is Final

Posted: 16 November 2021 in Albums
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19th November 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

For a time, Maybeshewill were one of the definitive acts during the golden age of post-rock – and here in 2021 it’s possible to reflect and appreciate that the mid-noughties really was a peak time for the genre. Certainly in the circles I moved, every gig was wall-to-wall post rock, or otherwise there was at least one instrumental act on the bull, brimming with chiming guitars and epic crescendos. They were good times, too, and however quickly it moved from fresh to formulaic, there was a sense of excitement about this music you could lose yourself in. It felt like a moment in time, it felt like a movement, and it was exciting, particularly in Leeds and particularly around The Brudenell, which felt like something of an epicentre with its growing profile. But then again, smaller venues like The Packhorse were also showcasing so many emerging acts all doing that Explosions in the Sky thing.

During this time, Maybeshewill were one of the bands that stood out: while exploiting the template, they also expanded it with the use of strings and samples – plus, they were simply bloody good. And they still are. The title is, perhaps, an allusion to the fact that having called it a day, spent, back in 2016 they have decided to return to both the live forum and recorded a new album.

This recent reanimation was unexpected, but perhaps the last thing we expected to open Maybeshewill’s long-awaited comeback album is a thumping sequenced drum and squelching synth bubble. But then it yields to a rippling piano and a wash of surging, soaring strings and immediately we’re transported to a space of expansive, emotionally-charged instrumental post rock. The three and a half minutes of ‘We’ve Arrived at the Burning Building’ is perfect Maybeshewill – dramatic, expansive, dynamic.

Lead single ‘Zarah’ is up next, with samples lifted from the premier speech from MP Zarah Sultana at its core. It first perfectly into the early arc of the album, and it’s a great track, and anyone who says music and politics shouldn’t mix is wrong. Musicians have a platform that is theirs to use as they see fit, and to see Maybeshewill using their platform in this way is encouraging.

The strings really dominate the arrangements on this album, but there’s a lot of texture and a lot of detail, and propulsive drumming shapes the structures of the songs. ‘Complicity’ is exemplary, as it transitions from a driving swell to a loping, contemplative mid-section that slows the pace before exploding into a fill battery of strings, a barrage of live and electronic percussion, looping piano and driving guitars. Yes, it takes you back at least, if you were there at the time – but it also feels perfectly contemporary and forward-facing.

‘Invincible Summer’ alludes to both Krautrock and 80s AOR with its motoric beat and looping synths and clean guitar that nags away crisply, while ‘The Weight of Light’ is one of those tunes that simply makes you sag with sadness. It possesses an aching beauty, and the surging crescendo is simultaneously uplifting and utterly crushing. There’s a lot going on: ‘Refuturing’ takes a twist into mellow jazz territory, while ‘Green Unpleasant land’ makes a further political statement without words, a gnarly tempest of guitar-driven disquiet.

If the chiming, rolling, mellow ripplings that build to a thunderous storm on the seven-minute-forty-five ‘Even Tide’ is classic post—rock to the point of cliché and bordering on historical with its use of soaring guitars and sustained crescendos, then the brass is very much a departure, and it paves the way for the final salvoes of the seven-minute ‘The Last Hours’ that spirals and soars into the truly epic territories, and the rolling, piano-led ‘Tomorrow’, that sweeps in a wave of optimism.

Together these two tacks draw the album to an exhilarating yet measured close. It’s everything that’s defined the band over the course of their career, making this a most welcome return and an outstanding addition to their catalogue.

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Watch: ‘It’s Only A Problem If It’s A Problem For Me’ by 72%

Posted: 16 November 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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HUMAN WORTH are proud to be teaming up with Squirrelled Away Records to reissue 72%’s stunning album How Is This Going To Make It Any Better? on vinyl for the first time.

Recorded and mixed by Wayne Adams at Bear Bites Horse Studio and originally released on cassette by London label Hominid Sounds, this album is a defining moment for the band, moving into new realms of disturbing darkness, creating “the most diverse, heavy, strange & wonderful music they have written yet.”

HUMAN WORTH have pressed up a super limited edition of only 150 gorgeous red vinyl, in a newly reworked package by Joe Brown with pro printed outer sleeves and black inners.

To coincide with the release, they’ve just unveiled a crackers new video for ‘It’s Only A Problem If It’s A Problem For Me’. Watch it here:

Watch: ‘The Company’ by Emma Ruth Rundle

Posted: 15 November 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Emma Ruth Rundle’s lauded new album Engine of Hell is stark, intimate, and unflinching. For anyone that’s endured trauma and grief, there’s a beautiful solace in hearing Rundle articulate and humanise that particular type of pain not only with her words, but with her particular mysterious language of melody and timbre. The album captures a moment where a masterful songwriter strips away all flourishes and embellishments in order to make every note and word hit with maximum impact, leaving little to hide behind.

Just off the heels of its release, Rundle has unveiled another stunning and self-directed video for Engine of Hell’s ‘The Company’. The visual was made on the Isle of Skye.

Rundle reveals, “I dreamed this visual poem about innocence of the spirit, sadness and the dark deceiver I spend my life trying to run from. Or is it a friendly entity? What does it mean? Upon waking – I acquired the equipment and made a plan to film it. I enlisted the help of my dear friend, Blake Armstrong, who helped shoot and plays part in the video as well. It was edited by Brandon Kahn. Written, directed and shot by me.”

Watch the video here:

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Photo Credit: Cintamani Calise

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