Tenchpress’ bio reads ‘6-string guitar, 12-string guitar, keys (for doors, not the instrument), keys (the instrument, not for doors), concertina, trumpet, a friend’s electric bass, sturm, und drang, 1x LA Galaxy-branded drum stick, free soft synths, A Very Old Snare Drum.’ Which ultimately translates as rather wonky weird shit, judging by their forthcoming album, Tombmagic, released through Cruel Nature in September 5th.
As a taster, they’ve released a video for the track ‘Quaternions’, which bears the distinctive emerging style of Jason Kester.
There are certain popular adages which are, frankly, and demonstrably, bollocks. The first is ‘if you can’t do, teach’. Admittedly, the state off education here in Britain means that academics at all levels are forced to teach outside their field with the scantest of time to prepare. I discovered this first-hand while working on a PhD thesis on William Burroughs and postmodernism and being tossed a semester’s teaching on Elizabethan literature. But moreover, most teachers wo get to teach in their specialist areas clearly can ‘do’ having attained a certain level of qualification. Can teachers of musical instruments also not ‘do’? Can diving instructors not drive?
And then there’s the popular notion that music reviewers are failed musicians. Perhaps the people who cast this aspersion should speak to Neil Tennant or more pertinently John Robb, Jim Irvin, and Sally Still. I might not point them in the direction of my own ongoing musical activities so much, but would highlight Oscar Quick, the man behind the ‘Needs More Cowbell’ site, where he posts considered reviews of new releases, who has recently turned in a handful of live shows and delivered the album Weaponised Soup.
In his bio, Quick explains how Weaponised Soup ‘features influences from disco, hip hop, rave and progressive rock, while remaining true to its core 80’s post punk sound. Dealing with Oscar’s experiences with insomnia, this record is a stream of consciousness during those many long nights, covering the extreme highs and destructive lows of staying awake for days at a time.’
As a lifelong insomniac, it’s relatable: the output happens because how else do you distract a fevered, restless brain that won’t let you rest? As you may guess, it’s not only a stylistic melting-pot, but also very much an album that jumps all over the place in a way which conveys the mania and erratic impulses that arise from protracted sleeplessness.
Opener ‘I Should Sleep’ sounds like The Pixies, only staggering weary with fatigue and mumbling, slurred, and fugue-like. But if you’re looking for reference points, look no further than the title of ‘Assorted Psycho Candy’, which is, unexpectedly, a remarkably atmospheric, downtempo trip-hop / post-rock crossover that finds Quick picking through a medley off musings. ‘Over the Garden Wall’ is a contemplative wash of Cure-esque synths and packs more than its necessary share of cowbell.
Some songs are more successful than others: ‘Chrysanthemums’ is a weird, almost baggy slice of dance that twitches with paranoia and tension and switches into frenetic territory around the mid-point, but the sub-Goldie Lookin’ Chain white rapping takes some absorption., and the New Order-esque ‘Respect for Dinner Ladies’ brings more Sprechgesang and even straight spoken vocals that likely sit in the Yard Act bracket, and in its simmering tension and up-front awkwardness, by accident or design, Weaponised Soup seems to capture the post-pandemic zeitgeist.
Something clearly changed during lockdown: artists are now talking openly about mental challenges and neurodiversity, and embracing these experiences creatively, and this is reflected in a new wave of music that refuses to be bound by genre, as Andre Rikichi’s wonderfully weird exploratory stylistic explosion on which I wrote only yesterday exemplifies.
As we continue to crawl from under the psychological rubble of the pandemic and successive lockdowns, into a new world that’s not brave, but fearful, tremulous, and ultimately fucked-up and swinging ever further to the right, these are truly terrible times – but as history shows, terrible times tend to spur the creation of great music. With Weaponised Soup, Oscar Quick forges a small but unique space in that fucked-up world, and it’s very much a good thing.
I may have mentioned it before, but I always get a buzz when I see a jiffy marked with an Edinburgh post stamp land on my doormat mat and I realise it’s the latest offering from Bearsuit records. Because while whatever music it contains is assured to be leftfield and at least a six on the weirdness spectrum, I never really know what to expect. That lack of predictability is genuinely exciting. Labels – especially micro labels which cater to a super-niche audience tend to very much know their market, and while that’s clearly true of Bearsuit, they’re willing to test their base’s boundaries in ways many others don’t dare.
Andrei Rikichi’s Caged Birds Think Flying is a Sickness is most definitely an album that belongs on Bearsuit. It doesn’t know what it is, because it’s everything all at once: glitchy beats, bubbling electronica, frothy screeds of analogue extranea, mangled samples and twisted loops and all kinds of noise. As the majority of the pieces – all instrumental – are less than a couple of minutes long, none of them has time to settle or present any sense of a structure: these are fragmentary experimental pieces that conjure fleeting images and flashbacks, real or imagined.
‘They Don’t See the Maelstrom’ is a blast of orchestral bombast and fucked-up fractured noise that calls to mind JG Thirlwell’s more cinematic works, and the same is true of the bombastic ‘This is Where it Started’, a riot of rumbling thunder and eye-poppingly audacious orchestral strikes. Its counterpart and companion piece, ‘This is Where it Ends’ which closes the album is expensive and cinematic, and also strange in its operatic leanings – whether or not it’s a human voice is simply a manipulation is immaterial at a time when AI—generated art is quite simply all over, and you begin to wonder just how possible is it to distinguish reality from that which has been generated, created artificially.
Meanwhile ‘At Home I Hammer Ceramic Golfing Dogs’ is overtly strange, a kind of proto-industrial collage piece. ‘What Happened to Whitey Wallace’ is a brief blast of churning cement-mixer noise that churns at both the gut and the cerebellum. Listening, you feel dazed, and disorientated, unsettled in the stomach and bewildered in the brain. There is simply so much going on, keeping up to speed with it all is difficult. That’s no criticism: the audience should never dictate the art, and it’s not for the artist to dumb things down to the listeners’ pace, but for the listener to catch up, absorb, and assimilate.
‘Player Name: The Syracuse Apostle’ slings together some ominous atmospherics, a swampy dance beat and some off-kilter eastern vibes for maximum bewilderment, and you wonder what this record will throw at you next.
In many respects, it feels like a contemporary take on the audio cut-up experiments conducted by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin in the late 50s and early 60s, and the titles only seem to further correspond with this apparent assimilation of thee random. I suppose in an extension of that embracing of extranea, the album also continues the work of those early adopters of sampling and tape looping from that incredibly fertile and exciting period from the late 70s to the mid-80s as exemplified by the work of Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Test Dept, Foetus. These artists broke boundaries with the realisation that all sound is material, and that music is in the ear of the beholder. This strain of postmodernism / avant-gardism also follows the thread of Surrealism, where we’re tasked with facing the strange and reconciling the outer strange with the far stranger within. Caged Birds Think Flying is a Sickness is an album of ideas, a pulsating riot of different concepts and, by design in its inspiration of different groups and ideas, it becomes something for the listener to unravel, to interpret, to project meaning upon.
Caged Birds Think Flying is a Sickness leaves you feeling addled and in a spin. It’s uncanny because it’s familiar, but it isn’t, as the different elements and layers intersect. It’s the sonic representation of the way in which life and perception differ as they collide.
KEN mode has released harrowing new single, ‘Unresponsive,’ from its upcoming eighth album, NULL, out on 23rd September.
A relentless dirge, ‘Unresponsive’ features frontman Jesse Matthewson unleashing a tormented soliloquy that hits like Henry Rollins at his most confessional. "Forgotten, erased, unresponsive, replaced, abandoned," he chants.
Matthewson recalls the origins of the song: "At this phase of the pandemic I had begun having dreams about my partner leaving me and my family dying, probably five nights a week, for several months. I sat there, writing the lyrics to this one while listening to a rolling storm come in, that never seemed to actually reach a crescendo. It all felt too apt for the way everything had been feeling for the last year at that point."
The track’s sparse, machine-like pulse, peppered by hints of cello and clanking percussion, points to early industrial and No Wave influences, beyond the metallic hardcore and noise-rock for which KEN mode is known. Matthewson credits the COVID-19 pandemic with pushing the band to take new chances and explore new ground: "We felt like there was really no reason to do anything at all unless we were trying to push this into something new," he states. Recorded and mixed by Andrew Schneider (Cave In, Unsane), NULL is the first KEN mode release to feature collaborator Kathryn Kerr (saxophone, synth, piano, percussion, backing vocals) as a full-fledged member of the band.
Check the video here:
Founded by Matthewson and his brother Shane, KEN mode has come to define intensity and dedication, via tours with Russian Circles, Torche, and Full of Hell, and releases produced by the likes of Steve Albini, Kurt Ballou, and Matt Bayles. Upcoming new album NULL sees this warhorse of a band emerge from the darkest of times with new energy, evolved and ready to carry on into its next chapter.
The band embarks on a US tour in October, with support from Frail Body (Deathwish Inc).
Oct 20 – St Paul, MN @ Turf Club
Oct 21 – Davenport, IA @ Raccoon Motel
Oct 22 – Chicago, IL @ Beat Kitchen
Oct 23 – Indianapolis, IN @ Black Circle Brewing Co.
It’s a sign of the times that this is being released only as a download: labels – especially niche labels like Room 40 – know their audience and know their budget. The time has now passed when a connection with a label with ensure a physical release, and there’s something sad about this. Still, better a virtual release with a label’s backing than no release and / or no label backing, and ROOM40 have some respect in their field.
Dark Over Light Earth is very much a release that highlights the intersection of different media, specifically visual art and music. As Steve Roden explains of the album’s origins, ‘dark over light earth was created for the final weekend of the exhibition moca’s mark rothko, which featured 8 rothko paintings from the museum of contemporary art los angeles’s permanent collection… i initially made a list of every color in each of the 8 paintings, to generate a score. i recorded myself playing the score on harmonium and glockenspiel – the notes and their order pre-determined by my color notations; and the tempo, duration, and overall feel, improvised. some of these recordings were then processed electronically with filters.’
It’s fair to say, then, that this is a quite specific, technical, and theory-based work, and it’s not immensely accessible either. Granted, it features violin and amorphous synth drone, both of which are fairly familiar aspects of contemporary experimental music, and there are moments which are genuinely magical, and musical, as they skip from here to there with a lightness and ease that’s magnificent.
But so much of the album – which consists of a single track with a running time of nearly thirty-five minutes – is discordant, difficult, atonal, and it’s hard to get a handle on. The individual elements are comparatively tuneful, but when placed together… Picked dissonance flits over dolorous droning synths and mournful strings – the violin so often sounds sad, but all the sadder when it scrapes sinuously, against the note, against the grain.
The sparser passages are minimal to the max; stuttering scrapes and picked notes forge tension against not drones, but tense scrapes and scratches while notes drape in fatigue across the rough and barren soundscapes.
Listening to Dark Over Light Earth prompts me to revisit not only Rothko’s catalogue, but his biography, which reminds me that he committed suicide at the age of 66. So much is made of the ‘27’ club, that the suicide rate among older people, particularly artists, tends to be overlooked. Hunter S. Thompson, age 67; Ernest Hemingway, age 61; Robin Williams, age 63; Tony Hancock, age 44: it’s all to easy to bracket the psychology of suicide as an affliction oof young males, but this masks the broader issue.
Just as there is nothing in Rothko’s work which indicated darker underlying issues, so Dark Over Light Earth isn’t anywhere near as dark as all that; it’s simply a work of quiet, but troubled, contemplation.
It is, unquestionably, a fitting soundtrack to accompany the viewing of Mark Rothko’s work abstract, overheated, yet austere, simple yet confrontational in their stark minimalism, and in that capacity, it’s magnificently realised.
7ebra are a new duo consisting of 25-year-old twin sisters from Malmö, who grew up playing music together. Inez plays electric guitar and sings, Ella plays a keyboard, organ and Mellotron – whilst manually playing drum samples with her feet – as they both sing haunting harmonies in a way that only twins can.
Beautiful but punk, minimalist but epic. The duo have already made their mark on the Swedish music scene with support slots for Bob Hund and The Dandy Warhols. ‘If I Ask Her’ is the addictive debut single and the first taste of their Tore Johansson (The Cardigans, Franz Ferdinand) produced debut album that will be out early 2023 on PNKSLM Recordings.
Listen here:
Live Aug 25 – Stockholm, Sweden – Hus 7 – w/ Ghost Woman Aug 27 – London, UK – The Shacklewell Arms Aug 28 – London, UK – TBA Oct 20-22 – Rotterdam, Netherlands – Left of the Dial Festival Dec 2-3 – Gothenburg – Viva Sounds Festival (more dates TBA)
Tacoma, Washington mathcore/metalcore greats Botch have released a new song and video, ‘One Twenty Two,’ their first song in twenty years.
The track will be included on the re-issue of their wildly influential second album, We Are the Romans, which was also announced today, available as a 2xLP and CD on November 4th via Sargent House.
AA
There was never any intention for the band to release anything else, but when guitarist David Knudson went to write his debut solo album, it made sense. He explains:
“During Covid, I was writing my debut solo LP, and mentally, I was sick of everything in quarantine. Lots of frustration had set in at home, and I figured the best way to deal with it was to write something heavy. I had no intention of writing anything for Botch, but when I was thinking of a singer to collaborate with, I thought, “Hey, I know the best hardcore singer ever to do it,” so I hit up Dave V. He was super excited and so it just kind of snowballed from there. There was never any intent or conversation about getting back together or writing. It just happened so naturally and was a great release for all of us to make it happen without any of the traditional pressure an “active” band faces.”
Bassist Brian Cook, guitarist David Knudson, drummer Tim Latona, and vocalist Dave Verellen formed Botch in 1993, becoming one of the most ground-breaking and influential bands during a pivotal shift in heavy music. Their final show was June 15, 2002, the same day as the release of their final EP, An Anthology of Dead Ends. The members would go on to play in These Arms Are Snakes, Minus the Bear, and Russian Circles, among others, with acclaim for the band coming mostly post-breakup. We Are the Romans went on to become one of the most influential albums for the genre garnering posthumous acclaim across the board.
This show was originally scheduled to take place back at the end of March, but then as has continued to be the plague of touring bands, a positive Covid test meant it was postponed, and co-ordinating schedules between bands and venues who are still playing catchup from the last two-and-a-bit years meant that we had to wait a while.
It’s a great advertisement for both the Brudenell and Leeds that the venue is hosting two sell-out (or near enough) shows on the same night, with Ezra Furman in the main room and the Sad in the newer one. The bars may have been packed – and I still can’t get used to the concept of forming an orderly queue at a bar – snice when? – but the vibe was a typically convivial one, with random strangers chatting about which gig they were off to and the like while they waited.
The Twilight Sad are frequent visitors to the Brudenell, which they recently posted on FaceBook is one of their ‘favourite venues in the world’, and they’re not alone. Like many others, I’ve been coming here for well over a decade now, and always feel like I’m at home, and it’s also fair to say that in all that time, I’ve never witnessed a bad gig or experienced poor sound – and I’ve never paid more than about £4 for a pint either. Their last visit was in 2019, but the time before that was also in this room, where they debuted material from the then-forthcoming album It Won’t Be Like This All the Time, back in June 2018. They had Michael Timmons in toe, then, and it’s a welcome return for him as he promises us a night of ‘depressing music’.
Michael Timmons
He seems more confident on this outing as he delivers a set of his quiet, reflective kitchen-sink contemplations on love, life, and death – mostly death – with some delicate picking and a dense Glaswegian accent, It’s lifted by some self-effacing humour, and it’s impossible not to warm to the young guy.
In context, depressing music can be the most uplifting, and the sense of community and collectivism is a joyous experience. It’s clear from the off that The Twilight Sad – James in particular – are pumped for this show. He and the drummer are sporting utilitarian dungarees that look like a cuddlier take on Jaz Coleman’s boiler suits, but they’re straight into the bleak stuff with a double-whammy of darkness from No-One Can Ever Know with ‘Kill it in the Morning’ and ‘Dead City’, during which the vocal cut out suddenly. Joking that it sounded fucking brilliant in his in-ear monitors and that it was the best he’d ever sung it, they restart once the hitch is fixed – pretty swiftly, credit to the sound engineer – and blast it hard.
The Twilight Sad
It’s not the last track from their third album, either, with a magnificently taut rendition of ‘Another Bed’ landing mid-set. Nobody Wants to be Here and Nobody wants to Leave is represented by perhaps the most obvious choices; ‘There’s a Girl in the Corner’ and ‘Last January’, both of which are achingly magnificent, and ‘It Never Was the Same’, which, when followed by ‘The Arbour’ makes for something of a lull two-thirds through. But you can’t exactly blame them for taking things down a notch when the pace and emotional intensity are at such a pitch for the majority of the set, especially when they pile back in with a quit unexpected outing for ‘The Wrong Car’.
James isn’t especially chatty, but is sharp and focused and on strong form, and when he does talk, he gushes about his appreciation of the venue and audience, and responds to a heckler with “This one’s for you. It’s about a cunt”, before they launch into ‘That Summer, at Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy’, and it’s a song that never gets tired.
The Twilight Sad
‘[10 Good Reasons for Modern Drugs]’ and ‘I/m Not Here [Missing Face]’ are both delivered with precision and passion, while the cover of Frightened Rabbit’s ‘Keep Yourself Warm’ which has become a solid set future brought the house down. Four years on from the death of Scott Hutchison, it may not be as raw, but it’s every bit as relevant, and they’re keeping the spirit alive, while at the same time providing an essential reminder of the importance of mental health awareness.
Rabbits remain a theme, and you know it’s the end of the set when the jangling feedback and loping drums that mark the intro of ‘And She Would Darken the Memory’ start. The attempt at optimism with the lyrical shift to ‘head up, dear, the rabbit won’t die’ does nothing to diminish the song’s impact: we all know it still might, as we’re transported to another plane in a swirling wall of sound that reminds us of where it all started: almost twenty years and five albums in, they’ve still got the passion and intensity that made them stand out as special, and the fact they never give less and one hundred percent to any performance – there are truly no half-measures – is precisely why they may be very much a cult act, but one with the most ardent and devoted fanbase going. They deserve it.
It’s sweltering, and we know there’s no encore: there is nowhere to go from here. It’s a clear pinnacle, and we’re all spent, band and audience alike. The catharsis is complete.
Dead Cross, the SoCal band featuring Michael Crain, Dave Lombardo, Mike Patton and Justin Pearson, share a second single from their forthcoming album II (Oct. 28, Ipecac Recordings) with the release of ‘Heart Reformer’ and its accompanying video.
“’Heart Reformer’ was as much fun to write as it is to listen to,” says Crain of the song. “It’s a classic Dead Cross song. It’s a pit stirrer and a fist pumper!”
The short-film like clip, which takes the track’s title literally, was directed and edited by Dark Details (a.k.a. Chris J. Cunningham). Watch it here:
The band broke the news of II’s impending arrival with the release of ‘Reign of Error.’ The one-minute and forty-five second wake-up call of a song is matched with a Displaced/Replaced-crafted clip that offers a scathing critique of the U.S. Supreme Court.
II, 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,” adds 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.”
The last time we encountered Slow Cooked Bears here was back in December 2020, on the release of their single ‘The Grand Scheme’, the follow up to the stark, tense-sounding ‘Space Odyssey’.
They’ve been hard at it back on the live circuit since then, and these things change bands, harden them, shape them, give them focus, and a reforged sense of identity. Well it can, or it can crush them. The London trio have followed the former path, and rather than becoming crushed by the wheels of industry, have been building themselves nicely.
Pitched as being for fans of The Smashing Pumpkins, Queens of the Stone Age, Placebo and Pixies, ‘We’ll Never Be Apart’ was produced with Michael Smith whose former clients include Wolf Alice and Anteros, and promises ‘a giant leap’ – and yes, it delivers.
With a rolling bass and chiming guitar by way of an intro, it breaks into a big bridge that becomes a surging chorus. You don’t get many songs where the hook is the guitar section after the vocals, but with ‘We’ll Never Be Apart’, they bring it. And, while in places it hints at the kind of early 00s arena indie, the songs packs in drive and edge that’s emotionally rich and owes more to the likes of The Twilight Sad than it does to Keane or Coldplay back in the day.
On other words, it really is a huge evolution that sees the band straddling boundaries. It’s got enough heft to not be a complete sell-out, but it’s certainly not as dark or edgy as ‘Space Oddysey’, being a whole lot less Joy Division / Editors / Interpol / Cinematics, and less Placebo in collision with Royal Blood and Black Keys than ‘The Grand Scheme’, and hinting at ambitions of broader horizons.
Objectively, it’s a great tune, and could well mark a turning point for the band. Is it too early for me to say I preferred their earlier stuff without sounding like a hipster cockend? Guess that depends on the next single, right?
Aural Aggravation 