Basalt Shrine are the Filipino doom/post-metal super quartet of Bobby Legaspi (Surrogate Prey, Malicious Birth), Rallye Ibanez (Ex-Religious Nightmare, Surrogate Prey) and Ronaldo and Ronnel Vivo (Dagtum, The Insektlife Cycle, Abanglupa, Imperial Airwaves, Ex-Hateure).
‘From Fiery Tongues’ is their debut album. It’s heavy. Really heavy.
It’s so heavy, we all had to take a lie-down instead of writing the planned review. While we pick ourselves up, listen to this:
AA
15th July 2022
Christopher Nosnibor
Marking a thematic link to their lockdown project recording as Videostore, Nathan & Lorna continue to show their love of the retro, of the nostalgia, and specifically of the 80s with the second instalment of their ‘80s Actor’ series (released simultaneously with ‘Johnny’).
Shamefully, it took me a while to piece this one together, as I didn’t clock the concept, and simply because while I very much did my growing up in the 80s (being born in ‘75, I feel I lived through the best of the 80s at a good time, seeing the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies and Ghostbusters at the cinema, while Duran Duran and A-Ha were in the charts and on the radio (and yes, Kate Bush, too), I was simply ever drawn by anything featuring River Phoenix, and so wasn’t all that distraught in 93. But I’ve subsequently come to realise his iconic worth.
The song itself is something of a departure, the drum machine backed off and pumping away metronomically beneath a shoegazy drone. It’s heartmelting and melancholy, and as such, captures the feeling among fans, as well as conjuring a perfect pool of nostalgic sentiment that’s non-specific, corresponding with that fleeing ache, that momentary tug, where you find yourself yearning for… well, you don’t quite know what, or why, just that something lost in that time past. And all you can do is go with the flow…
AA
22nd July 2022
Christopher Nosnibor
If ever there was a song so steeped in idealisation and escapism, Miss Kill’s ‘Drive’ sets new heights. It isn’t that they’ve ditched their grungy alt-rock influences, but this new single sees the duo, consisting of Alannah and Felicity Jackson in a much more reflective mood.
As they pitch it, it’s more Chris Isaak and Tom Petty than their usual touchstones of Hole, Placebo, or Pearl Jam, and in context it makes sense. It’s certainly got the easy, breezy, radio-friendly airiness of that classic Americana, but it also balances grungy bite with pop tones in a way that’s reminiscent of ‘Malibu’.
‘Asked my babe if he’d come for a ride yeh. I really just wanna get in and drive Away / Through the sun with the music blaring / Driving past I got everyone staring / I don’t think we’re ever coming back’, they sing.
It’s that perfect image, that dream, of driving away, of cruising into the sunset, never to return, to something new and something better. It’s just like the movies, just like in the songs on the radio. Freedom! Liberation! Life!
Who doesn’t fantasise about this ever? Who doesn’t want to ditch their boring ordinary life and crap job and simply live life like a fairytale? Or, better still, a road trip? To jump in a car and simply drive is the absolute epitome of the fantasy of leaving everything behind.
Reflecting on the reality is depressing, but this offers hope and prospects, like it could happen. It’s not for me to say that it couldn’t, because well, know knows? Anyway, it’s three and a quarter minutes of uplifting, melodic time out of life where you can believe in the dream.
AA
27th July 2022
Christopher Nosnibor
The multi-talented, multi-discipline and perhaps, sometimes, not-so-disciplined Benjamin Heal returns in his Cowman guise, under which he’s been operating since 2005 with a new EP, his first in a decade, after previous creative detours with Coaxial and various other projects.
Over the course of a sporadic and low-key career, li-fi, slackerist Cowman has – impressively, whether by fluke or by design – appeared on bills with a slew of cred cult acts, including Ack Ack Ack, Gum Takes Tooth, Cove, Pifco, and John Parish. These notable highlights are well-deserved, but it’s a pleasure to witness cowman making a comeback, instead of simply revelling over former achievements.
Crunch is a magnificently loose knockabout and if Pavement comparisons may seem lazy shortcuts, they’re also entirely justified. But then… then… there’s a whole lot more. The first track, ‘Concrete Eyes # Turpentine’ , with its inexplicable punctuation, starts out a fairly straightforward, if angular indie kicker in the vein of Slanted era Pavement, with wonky, off-kilter guitars that sound vaguely out of key, but then spins off into an epic swirling expanse of psychedelic post-rock. The whole thing is almost ten minutes long, drifting into a long, sluggish drone in the final minutes.
There’s an easygoing picked guitar line that contrasts with jittery drums on ‘Concrete pink Dots’ before the distortion kicks in, and it does so hard, creating a dense whorl of noise that almost buries the drums, until they surrender to the barrage of din, and we find ourselves drifting in a cloud of hazy shoegaze guitar. It’s mellow, but it’s loud, and that’s where the hypnotic ‘Bloody Diffuser’ picks up as it embarks on another ten-minute sonic journey, a slow-smouldering soundscape heavy on delay and reverb. Switching through a succession of segments, where the transitions are jolting, flicking changes rather than seamless transitions, it’s by turns doom drone and psychedelic drone, but ultimately, it’s all the drone – and that’s a good thing.
Ordinarily, two versions of one song on the same release feels a bit lazy, but then again, I spent the 90s buying singles on three formats in order to obtain all the versions and B—sides, and I have a hunch that Benjamin is also well-versed in the maxi-single and the like, and it so happens that the cropped version of ‘Tobacco Eyes’ that rounds it off actually feels like a single that had it been released circa 92 would have been lauded in the press as being in the vein of Pavement and Truman’s Water. And in fairness, that’s just as true in 2022.
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Dead Cross, the four-headed Hydra featuring Mike Patton, Dave Lombardo, Justin Pearson and Michael Crain, return with the abrasive 9-song album, II, on Oct. 28th via Ipecac Recordings.
The album, while both a raucous hardcore collection, and at times, a politically-charged opus, has its roots in friendship, with the band rallying together after Crain received a surprise cancer diagnosis.
"Words can’t even begin to describe how much this album means to me. It’s birthed of pain and uncertainty,” explains Crain. “The slow, excruciatingly painful, and nauseating recovery from cancer treatments were the catalyst for every riff and note on this album. However, my will to live and be with my brothers Justin, Dave, Mike, and co-producer Ross Robinson, got me out of bed and running into the studio every day to get it all on tape.”
Watch ‘Reign Of Error’ here:
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Front & Follow and the Gated Canal Community – 5th August 2022
Christopher Nosnibor
There’s so much to love about Front & Follow and the Gated Canal Community, and I’m absolutely not mocking when I say that Front & Follow have called it a day as a label almost as many times as Status Quo have announced farewell tours, because I deeply admire the fact that label head Justin Watson simply cannot resist a good project, and always returns after every break with a new release beyond bursting with great new music. This leads me to the next reason to love the label: every project that brings the label out of mothballs is for a worthy cause, and to see a label channel its energy into raising funds for charitable causes (without being preachy or holly about it) is truly heart-warming and goes a long way to remining us that human nature is, by and large, giving, and that it’s just the current government and the selfish / stupid anuses who keep voting for them who don’t give a fuck about anyone else. And then there’s the fact that – as previously mentioned – each release contains great new music, and the fact is that Front & Follow’s commitment to providing an outlet to lesser-known acts, including many who’ve not been previously releases, is unstinting. Just as it’s hard to find venues who will give gigs to bands who have yet to play and establish a fanbase, so it’s hard for those same acts to find an outlet other than doing it themselves on Bandcamp and Spotify, with their work being completely buried and diving under all radars in the process.
And so, here we have the first instalment of Rental Yields, a ‘multi-release collaboration project raising money to tackle homelessness in Manchester’. As the press notes explain, ‘Inspired by our current housing system, the project encourages artists to steal (or borrow, nicely) from another artist to create their own new track – in the process producing HIGH RENTAL YIELDS… Over 100 artists are now involved (the spreadsheet is fun), each one tasked with creating a new track from the sounds created by someone else – we are then collating the tracks and releasing them over the course of the next year.’
This is Volume One, and contains twenty tracks, ‘featuring the likes of Polypores, Elizabeth Joan Kelly, The Leaf Library, yellow6, Spaceship and more’, and it’s a cracker. This is no surprise on the basis of the label’s track record, of course. Most of the artists are super-obscure: Solomon Tump, The Incidental Crack, and yol are about the limit of my a priori knowledge, and that’s good: it means the collection is about the music rather than the artists, and people should be interested because it’s good, not because it has some shitty remix of acoustic version of a mediocre name band. It’s good because it’s good. And weird.
And there is nothing mediocre about this. It is a big compilation that showcases the exploratory, the experimental, the oscillating, the avant-garde. Dig, it, and dig it deep.
AA
Christopher Nosnibor
Having just spent a depressing afternoon hearing the new Interpol album for the first time, I decided I needed cheering up. Scanning my immense backlog of releases for review – and, with new submissions landing faster than I can open emails, let alone download and listen to albums, I realise that Hanging Freud’s album has been lurking unplayed for far too long for an album I’d been excited to hear since ‘Antidote/Immune’, released as a taster of album number six, Persona Normal back in June last year, landed in my inbox.
The release / review cycle is in itself a pressure we would all do without, since albums by their nature have a slow diffusion. In an accelerated world, PR campaigns are over a month or so after release, and I suspect that under the current model of pre-release hype followed by a rapid burndown, most releases shift 90% of their units within the first months of release, before things taper off and pretty swiftly drop off a cliff. But I digress, as I’m prone to doing.
Persona Normal is not the kind of album you’d expect to provide joy, but, in context, it’s a welcome reminder that there are still bands who are at a more advanced stage in their career delivering albums that channel difficult emotions and explore them in real depth.
‘Cureseque’ is a term that’s passed into parlance to make a shorthand reference to anything that draws inspiration from The Cure, but it’s trouble some and rather inadequate given the band’s range. More often than not, it seems to translate as ‘lots of layered synths like Disintegration’. Not so Persona Normal, an album that condenses the style and atmosphere of the unparalleled trilogy of Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography into a single set. The atmosphere is bleak, and the production sparse, but there’s some monumental percussion that’s more akin to Pornography.
It opens with the droning, wheezing synth of ‘Too Human’. It’s pitched against a trudging, monotonous drum beat with a dominant snare, and this provides the backdrop to a gloomy yet elegant vocal that aches with resignation, before ‘We Don’t Want to Sleep’ pounds in on a rhythm reminiscent of ‘A Strange Day’, and this is around the level of the bleak, brooding atmosphere. It’s thick and heavy with angst.
But then, amidst the doomy, droning synths and metronomic, motorik drum machines, Paula comes on with the sass of Siouxsie, with her enunciation and her glacial cool post-punk intonations. And as such, while Persona Normal really is pretty fucking bleak, dense, and dark, it’s uplifting to hear an album that so perfectly captures the spirit of the bands from which it draws unashamed influence. Elsewhere, I’m reminded of Chelsea Wolfe and Pain Teens; ‘Is This Why?’ may be sparse in its arrangement, but the sound is full, expansive, epic, and there’s something graceful and plaintive in its inward searching. An in an album of wall-to-wall quality, ‘Immune’ stands out as a snarling post-punk beast with the sharpest of hooks – and it’s all in the delivery.
More often than not, the sounds and overall sound and delivery convey so much more than words alone – and the production only enhances the experience. It’s dense, dark, drum-heavy, and even in the middle of a heatwave, it’s an album that will chill you to the core.
AA
Blacklab are back. The self-proclaimed ‘Doom witch, duo from Osaka’ are set to drop their third album ‘In A Bizarre Dream’ this summer.
Their debut ‘Under the Strawberry Moon 2.0’ saw them taking Sabbath inspired doom, mashing it with a Japanese sensibility and a fuzzed-up groove. It certainly caused a stir, but only hinted at their potential.
Album two ‘Abyss’ added to the mix. A Stooges like squalor to the riffs, dollops of lo-fi hardcore punk and loose riffing, pointing the way towards a signature sound.
So what of the ‘difficult’ third album? Not so difficult at all it seems. ‘In A Bizarre Dream’ ups the ante considerably, to let rip and define what Blacklab are about.
The combined talents of Jun Morino on production and Wayne Adams (Big Lad, Green Lung, Pet Brick, John, Cold In Berlin) on the mix have conspired to produce a towering beast of a record. A real step forward for the ‘Doom Witch Duo’.
The drums have a humungous ‘Fugazi’ like welly, and the guitars are a boiling maelstrom of fuzz dense riffola and warped psychedelics, with added synth. Yuko’s throat shredding snarls are as mean as a pissed off Satan, and melodious, often within the same song.
This is doom meets hardcore punk, hooky melodies, and killer riffs, all cranked up to the max. Japan has always had a special take on ‘noise’ and ‘heavy’ and with ‘In A Bizarre Dream’ Blacklab add their own spin to that tradition.
Gone is the lo-fi approach, here is Blacklab in full effect.
‘Cold Rain’ and ‘Abyss Woods’ (debuted at their storming set at London’s Desert Fest and appearing here in its full version) are two nuggets of epic fuzz heavy doom with added screamo and a neat and canny grasp of melody at its core. Very much a Blacklab trademark.
‘Dark Clouds’ is D-beat fuelled hardcore, fierce and ferocious, with Chia’s rolling thunder drumming underpinning the distorted guitar. It’s pretty exhilarating stuff that shifts the mood perfectly.
‘Evil I’ is just that, a riff as evil as it gets, morphing into a chugging punk wig out. Then followed by ‘Evil II’ a breather, almost mellow, melancholy, with layers of dark overdrive threatening to explode beneath a sweet yet menacing vocal.
Then, the mid-point of the album drops a real surprise. Yuko has said before that the band’s name is a combination of her two favourite bands, Black Sabbath and Stereolab. Odd bedfellows to be sure, but if you want to know what that combination might sound like … here it is.
‘Crows, Sparrows and Cats’ actually features Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab, no less, providing the lead vocal, adding a layer of cool over Blacklab’s Hawkwind meets krautrock sludge. Listen now:
AA
Century Media – 22nd July 2022
Christopher Nosnibor
New York’s enigmatic Imperial Triumphant are described as ‘avant-garde metal’. They’re certainly that. I mean, they’re overtly metal, with guttural, growling vocals, barrelling riffs, thunderous drums and booming bass – but Spirit of Ecstasy is a brain-lowling, bewildering affair that lumbers, lurches, and leaps between other genres within those solid metal parameters.
The tracks are all past the six-minute mark, and pack in a lot of action and a lot of range, to the extent that six minutes in, it’ll feel like the first three minutes were another song entirely. At least, that’s my experience – of an album that’s so expansive and diverse that it completely takes over. You stop following, and find yourself simply being transported on a journey with no clear trajectory, thrown this way and that, tossed about as if by turbulence, or something more.
Following the blistering percussive battering and jolting, sliding sonic deluge of the album’s opener, ‘Chump Change’, ‘Metrovertigo’ is exemplary: it slides into angular industrial discord, and there’s a lot going on – mostly jazz-leaning, but then there’s the megalithic bombast of the song’s climax which is more neoclassical, and ‘Tower of Glory, City of Shame’ also incorporates bold neoclassical elements along with samples and jarring, skewed guitar along with the demonic snarling.
When they go all-out on the riffage, the density is eye-popping, rib-cracking, skull-crushing. When they go the other way, into orchestral territories, as in during the into on ‘Merkurius Gilded’, it’s sweet, sublime. Of course, those delicate segments are obliterated in the blink of an eye in swathes of immolating black metal. And then, there’s the all-out experimental jazz / noise no-wave racket of ‘In the Pleasure of their Company’ that really does drill And lurch, showcasing the duo’s capacity to explore different sound and textures.
It’s not exactly technical in its musicality – although there’s no shortage of technical ability on display here – but compositionally, Spirit Of Ecstasy is something else. Each song condenses so many ideas, so many segments into a single piece that it’s utterly bewildering at times.
The most remarkable achievement is that it doesn’t sound forced or false or corny, when by rights, none of this should work and it should be awful. But it isn’t. It is, however, intense, and draining so. You’re tossed this way and that, samples crackle in the distance, and quiet passages are disrupted by detonating drums and squalls of noise.
Everything spews from the satanic caverns of hell, and leaves you feeling worn out, battered, beaten. And buzzing.
AAA
Iggy Pop loves The Armed. We love The Armed, too. It’s fair to say there really is no other act around quite like them. Which makes this latest video, released as a taster for the upcoming live movie, all the more exciting.
Watch ‘Masunaga Vapors (Live)’ here, and be exhilarated by the frenzied energy:
The Armed have released the soundtrack for their narrative-driven, ground-breaking concert film, ULTRAPOP: Live At The Masonic Temple, available digitally and physically via Sargent House. A running combination of score elements from the film and live performances captured in Detroit’s sprawling Masonic Temple, the soundtrack features live renditions of songs from their highly lauded LP, ULTRAPOP and cult-favourite, ONLY LOVE, and also includes their CYBERPUNK 2077 contribution “NIGHT CITY ALIENS".
The movie, which was only available to live stream for a short period of time around its 15th October 2021 debut, will come to Blu-ray and video streaming services on September 29th.
Part Lemonade, part Live at Pompeii and fully infused with a sense of Lynchian dread – the movie is a stunningly-filmed cinematic document of live performances taking place within the opulent chapels, imposing asylum rooms, full-size indoor handball courts, halls (and more) of the mysterious Masonic Temple of Detroit; a 550,000 square foot fortress in the heart of the city. Live performance and story-driven narrative melt seamlessly into one another, as the film confronts themes of identity, information warfare, the commoditisation of artistic products and the commodification of the artist.
ULTRAPOP, released in April 2021, received acclaim across the board, gaining the highly coveted Pitchfork Best New Music and praise from The New Yorker Magazine, Vulture, Stereogum, Revolver, AV Club, Fader, Bandcamp, Entertainment Weekly, Interview Magazine and so much more. Reaching the same extremities of sonic expression as the furthest depths of metal, noise and otherwise "heavy" counterculture music subgenres, it finds its foundation firmly in pop music and pop culture. A joyous, genderless, post-nihilist, anti-punk, razor-focused take on creating the most intense listening experience possible.
Photo Credit: Trevor Naud
Aural Aggravation 