New label Dead Music Club, which specialises in limited-edition cassettes, today announced its first three releases to showcase what they described as their ‘fledgling catalogue’.
The Stoke-based label, which is pushing the parameters not only of music, but of underground by shunning social media and making news of its releases available via mailing list subscription, is kicking off with a compilation of ‘Stoke weirdness’, which features Aural Aggravation faves Omnibadger, as well as the debut EP from ramshackle punks Dog Train on 10” vinyl, and an EP of mangled noise courtesy of one Christopher Nosnibor in his Noisenibor guise:
DMC-001 ‘DeadMusicClub’ cassette – a collection of Stoke weirdness £5 DMC-002 ‘Extractions EP’ cassette – Chris Nosnibor documents extractor fans £5 DMC-003 ‘Dog Train EP’ – Dog Train’s first EP on 10” vinyl £20
Otra is a duo of two sisters. Recorded at their home in foggy Pacifica, CA, their debut album I’m Not That Way (out digitally on Feb 10, 2023 via Thirty Something Records) documents their journey as they learn to see themselves more clearly and exist outside of expectations. As the band ruminates on their purpose and sense of self, the tracks search for their own sonic identities – weaving and wandering erratically through a fogfest of hypnagogic synths, chaotic clarinets, haunting vocal stacks, crunchy guitars, and polyrhythmic earth.
Of the first single ‘Repercussion Concussion,’ the band says: “It’s a love song we wrote in September 2019 inspired by Beirut and Sigur Ros! It’s about the weird little moments that make up a relationship, and the resounding joy of learning to move through challenges together.”
You’ll always find black metallers and pagan neofolkers in the woods. I don’t mean that whenever I go for a walk in woods near me that I happen upon people in cloaks and corpse paint lumbering around clutching instruments, but how often do you see a video where they’re exploring scenes of urban squalor or even indoors? Do you think any of them would last a winter out there – or even a night? Could they construct a shelter, do you think? Could they light a fire, or spear some wild creature to feed themselves, in those threads?
I’d wager not, but Canadian trio Hem Netjer seem more the type to venture into the woods to commune with nature than to live as part of it, and the video captures them meditative contemplative, cross-legged on a large rock.
The last single from their forthcoming debut album, The Song Of Trees, scheduled for release at the end of February 2023, ‘Elemental Cry’ is dark yet somehow celebratory, with dense synths swirling about a thumping tribal beat and overlaid with tense strings and a soaring vocal performance.
The atmosphere is thick and murky, the production favouring the lower and mid-ranged that give the track an earthy feel, and it’s bold and cinematic and it doesn’t really matter if some of it feels a shade cliché with its lyrics about death and trees and moths, because it’s a ‘big’ tune in every way, not just the fact it’s almost six minutes long, and RavenRissy’s vocals are more operatic than folk, and are outstanding and send a shiver down the spine.
A strong song with a strong message, ‘Elemental Cry’ is pretty powerful work that reaches the primal depths of the psyche and speaks to senses long lost in the name of ‘progress’.
Singer Liset Alea (known for her long collaboration with Nouvelle Vague) fuses with French darkwave producer Distance H to create ‘Reason To Rush’; an impelling dream pop evocation, navigating the realms of reason and impulsiveness, luminous euphoria and its dark plunge.
Liset Alea sings her ‘Reason To Rush’ in a driving immersive atmosphere where menacing guitars weave beneath the surface.
Distance H gives birth to a musical universe that sources its array of sounds within and beyond the margins of post-punk, dark wave, cold wave, ethereal, and shoegaze, sometimes borrowing some more electronic-driven beats. For his debut EP, Intimacy, he invites an assortment of collaborative singers to express themselves by escaping into and from the vast distances of themselves and their experiences
His second single "Waters Of Woe" featuring Marita Volodina from Stridulum / Burial Fields / Blood Tears After was released on the 30th of September 2022 and was appreciated as a ‘spectacularly intoxicating track, with a captivating melody, dark and enticing’.
If the pandemic gave us anything other than Acute paranoia, it’s a lot of new bands. Who’d have thunk it?
This of course highlights just how different the lockdown experience was for people, dispelling the idea that we shared a collective suffering during those months. Many suffered the lack of an income, but many revelled in the newfound time available to them. Some of us, for better or for worse, got to continue to work full-time remotely while also having to squeeze in home-schooling.
Captain Zero was another band who formed during lockdown, when the tones of ‘dirty fuzz bass batterer Steve James (Geisha, Steveless) were gently dripped into the earholes of David Edgar (The Get-Outs, Superseed) and beat basher Keith Hall (Big Joan, Flag Fen)’ And the tale goes that ‘It wasn’t long before they all got in a darkened room together, turned their amps up to 6.5 and began smelting demonic demos into a fistful of filthy rock n roll bangers.’
These are the realities of forming a band and actually making music, but Captain Zero do a great job of hiding that 6.5 amp level on ‘Bullseye’, an absolutely blistering rager of a track with thick, fiery riffs and gnarly as their beards.
‘Bullseye’ is a dense metal trudge and grit and heft that’s a blast of blistering hardcore punk that’s got hints of 90s Ministry and the entirety of the grunge scene compressed into a nutshell. It’s a belter.
Venomous Concept, the hardcore punk band formed by Kevin Sharp of Brutal Truth and Shane Embury of Napalm Death, return in 2023 with their 5th album ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’. Bonding over their love of punk heroes such as Black Flag, GBH and Poison Idea, the duo have been the core members of the band since 2004.
Now all these years later Venomous Concept are about to release their most unique album to date on 24th February. "When the pandemic hit we decided we needed to make an album that didn’t fit – we all loved so much other kind of punk and rock, so why not explore that which is in essence closer to our hearts?. To do the same album over and over again would be boring” Shane comments.
‘The Good Ship Lollipop’ sees Sharp and Embury joined by fellow Napalm Death member John Cooke alongside Carl Stokes, former drummer with UK death metal legends Cancer. ‘Having John Cooke of Napalm Death on guitar brought a new variety to the record, and Shane’s lifelong friend Carl Stokes formerly of the bands Cancer, Current 93 & The Groundhogs came in on drums to lay down some more solid rock grooves and old school power” Kevin adds.
New single ’Timeline’ showcases the quartet’s equally catchy and crunchy new direction paired with visuals as pulse-pounding as this new track. Watch the new video now:
Now this is a fine justification of why I don’t do end of year lists. This may or may not have made mi ne, because I simply haven’t had time to process or digest it, but it’s been out a month and a half and I’ve only just got my lugs around it, with only a week or so left of 2022 – and it’s one of those albums that slaps you around the skull and has that instant impact by virtue of its sheer force.
Their bio tells us that Athens-based ‘Mammock’s compositions stray from the typical rock forms, incorporating various elements from punk to jazz, post-hardcore and the nineties’ US noise rock scene. The quartet possesses the self-awareness and technical capabilities to carve their own sound and explore their character into finely tuned songs, which grab the listener from beginning to end.’
What it means is that they make a serious fucking racket and sound a lot like The Jesus Lizard, from the rib-rattling bass to the off-kilter, jarring guitars, and the crazed vocals. Some of the songs sound like they have some synths swirling around in the mix, but one suspects it’s just more guitar, run through a monster bank of effects. Overall, though, they seem to be more reliant on technique than trickery.
They formed in early 2018 by Giannis (guitar) and Klearhos (bass) with the addition of Vangelis (drums), they started out as an instrumental trio, before the addition of Andreas (vocals), and if it seems like a contradiction to remark that they feel like a coherent unit when cranking out so much jolting, angular discord, but that’s one of the key tricks or deceptions of music like this: it isn’t mere racket, and in fact requires real technical precision: those stuttering stops and starts, judders, jolts, changes of key and tempo require a great deal of skill, intuition, and of course, rehearsal.
They take many cues from Shelllac, too: the drums are way up in the mix – to the extent that they’re front and centre, something Shellac make a point of literally on stage, and replicate the sound on record, with the guitar providing more texture than tune, and the vocals half-buried beneath the cacophonic blur.
The last minute or so of ‘Dancing Song’ blasts away at a single chord that calls to mind Shellac’s ‘My Black Ass’ and ‘The Admiral’. The lumbering monster that is ‘Bats’ is a bit more metal, in the sludgy, stoner doom Melvins sense.
Stretching out to almost seven minutes, ‘Jasmine Skies’ blasts its way to the album’s mid-point, a wild, grunged-up metal beast with an extended atmospheric spoken-word mid-section which gives the lumbering black metal assault that emerges in the finale even greater impact.
If the semi-ambient ‘Interludio’ offers some brief respite, the ‘Boiling Frog’ brings choppy, driving grunge riffage and a real sense of agitation and anguish, and the album’s trajectory overall paves the way for an immense finish in the form of the seven-minute ‘Away from Them’ that roars away as it twists and turns at a hundred miles an hour.
Yes, Rust packs in a lot, and it packs it in tight and it packs it in hard.
The eponymous debut EP by South Carolina indie pop-rock duo The Yets is steeped in the tropes of quintessential vintage alternative pop, absorbing a range of influences, while keeping a clear eye on classic and ultimately accessible forms – embracing Fleetwood Mac and Cocteau Twins in equal measure, as the press release suggests with remarkable accuracy.
Robin Wilson has a superb voice, delicate, emotive, easy on the ear, and at the same time rich and gutsy. It’s key to the sound of The Yets, and the six songs on this debut EP really showcase both her versatility and that of their songwriting.
There’s a weird booming sound – not quite a beat, not quite a bass note – that cuts through the mellow drift of ‘Waterline’, and it’s one of those things that once you’re attuned to it, you can’t detune, like the duck in Whigfield’s ‘Saturday Night’ or the cowbell on ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’, but if you can ignore it, it’s a superbly-executed song with a clean guitar chug that keep it moving along nicely while the lead guitar chimes and washes melodically.
‘Remember’ is perfection, a layered, easy alt-rock tune that’s Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’ and it floats along in a dreamy drift that closes out with a delicate guitar solo.
They strip things right back for ‘Lesser Evil’, which swings between brooding indie and moody post-punk with hints of Siouxsie, before spinning into ethereal shoegaze territory on the dreamy ‘Letter to a Boy’, which really does find the band revelling in the misty ethereal shadows of Cocteau Twins.
‘Fades to Grey’ makes an obvious reference to Visage, and the band’s 80s leanings are on clear display, but that’s where the connection severs: this is a smooth, atmospheric rippling piece with chiming, echo-heavy guitar that owes much to Disintegration-era Cure, and ‘Happy Now’ builds on that thickly atmospheric sound with a loping rhythm and layers of vocals that really fill out the sound as the guitars and it’s the most overtly goth song of the set.
With a broad pallet of tuneful wistfulness and textured, layered instrumentation, coupled with some smart and sensitive production, The Yets have landed with a seriously accomplished debut: there’s a lot happening here, and there’s a significant range but at the same time a cohesive feel to it.
Darkwave band, Stariana has just unveiled their new single, ‘Paradise Is Lost On You’.
‘Paradise Is Lost On You’ is an anthemic rebuttal to the flawed notion that a person loving and living outside the traditional norms of society is somehow immoral or broken.
We will celebrate being alive and live as vibrantly as possible, regardless of what those who won’t understand might think or say. Paradise is lost on them. In other words, the song brings the message of not giving up in the face of adversity.
Check the single here:
Stariana is a post punk/darkwave trio based in Eugene, Oregon, heavily influenced by post punk mainstays such as Depeche Mode, New Order, Bauhaus, Jesus And Mary Chain and 90’s era Britpop; Elastica, Blur, The Stone Roses with just a little bit of Blondie and Joan Jett mixed in for flavor.
Stariana is: Nikki Brackett & Victor St. Petersburg (of Black Magdalene) and Tethys.
Nice… as you’d probably expect from this three-way collaboration, Time Sound Shape is a work of atmospheric instrumental experimentalism with some strong jazz leanings. That’s not smooth or mellow jazz, of course: more the weirdy, spaced-out non-musical kind of jazz. So not so much nice, as awkward, uncomfortable, challenging. This is not jazz of the cardigan and slippers variety, and you certainly wouldn’t play it at a dinner party, apart from perhaps at thee point when your remaining guests have overstayed their welcome and you want them to fuck off home.
Time Sound Shape is a single continuous piece with a running time of a full-length album, clocking in at precisely forty-nine minutes, and it’s a great example of intuitive improvisational collaborative work, and it sounds far better than the clunky text-based cover art suggests.
There are some dissonant, discordant, even outright difficult to digest crescendos, and moments of queasy chamber orchestral meanderings, as they tweet and toot together in a sort of droning solidarity. It begins gently enough, with some trilling woodwind courtesy of Frode Gjerstad who brings flute, and clarinet to the party as well as sax, but it doesn’t take long before things shift in numerous different directions.
There are moments that almost feel ‘continental’ in vibe, perhaps not least of all on account of Kalle Moberg’s accordion work. And all the while, Paal Nilssen-Love brings texture and atmosphere with his application of a wide selection of Paiste gongs, bringing doomy dolorous chimes and rolling thunder. At times, the crashing gongs are strong enough to vibrate the internal organs within the ribcage.
In many respects, Time Sound Shape delivers precisely what you would expect from these three musicians coming together, and yet at the same time, it brings more. It’s a richly textured work, that evolves as it progresses, and it never stays stull, and yet the changes are often subtle. Time drifts and bends as the sounds transition, changing shape. Let yourself be carried.
Aural Aggravation 