Alaska’s premier goth rock band, Cliff And Ivy recently unveiled their new single, ‘Die Tonight’ on their label, House of Extreme Darkness.
‘Die Tonight’ is a dark punk song for those who love like vampires – legendary, eternal and full of fire. Almost an eternity in the making, it was inspired by the undying flame of love that exists between immortal lovers and in the natural world.
Death and life are always linked together, as it takes the clearest dark night to be able to see the aurora in the northern sky. ‘Die Tonight’ was recorded in Alaska while the northern lights exploded above.
‘Die Tonight’ is available on all streaming services including Bandcamp.
After unveiling two singles of ‘Bortgang’ and ‘Tilbake Til Opprinnelsen’, Norwegian black-metal band MORK deliver a stunning video for ‘Forført Av Kulden’ to celebrate the release of their new album Dypet which is out now on Peaceville.
You can check out the video here:
Thematically, ‘Forført Av Kulden’ deals with the beguiling force of the cold, often portrayed as an omnipresent character within the world of Black Metal and a look into the natural beauty in death. On the single our protagonist enters a trance-like state to wander the forest and eventually freeze.
The song is also accompanied by a striking video, directed by Trond-Atle Bokerød, which echoes the primordial allure of nature, synonymous with the Black Metal subgenre, whilst exploring the unforgiving winter that is the song’s subject. After a veil of synthesizers are lifted MORK’s signature Black Metal tonalities are revealed for a mid paced rhythm that eventually gives way to Eriksen’s signature vocals and lachrymose lead lines.
Regarding the track Thomas Eriksen had the following to say:
“Forført Av Kulden’About being seduced into the cold hard weather outside by an unknown force. Wandering into the snowstorm at night and ending up freezing to death. It depicts a somewhat glorified theme of death as a beautiful and unavoidable thing.”
believe anything, believe everything, the follow-up to LEARN THE HARD WAY, released in August 2022, is the second album from the eternally-prolific Godflesh founder Justin Broadrick aka JK Flesh under EXIT ELECTRONICS, and it is a monster. Predominantly percussion and otherwise beat-free, it’s an example of the most primitive electronic industrial noise and pounds hard at every part of your being in the most punishing and relentless of fashions. That isn’t to say it’s arrhythmic: the tracks are built around the rhythms that emerge from repetition and the way noise surges together to create form.
The capitalisation of the titles is jarring enough for a sensitive pedant like me, but the presentation is perfect for the content. believe anything, believe everything is very much an album that SHOUTS IN YOUR FACE in all capitals, with everything cranked up to overload. It’s described as ‘INDUSTRIAL MUSIC’ and it seriously is.
There’s nothing about believe anything, believe everything that’s overtly or specifically political – there are not words, and the titles, capitalised as they are, are suitably abstract in their intent. And yet believe anything, believe everything does feel political, and it feels like a discourse about being hoodwinked, about being controlled, manipulated. About differences of opinion, about division, and about everything being fucked up. Sure, I may be projecting and seeing solace in that projection, but as of an in itself, the mangled racket of believe anything, believe everything offers no solace superficially, because, quite frankly, it hurts. And this is why believe anything, believe everything feels like the soundtrack to the soundtrack to the now: we’re persistently lied to, taken for fools, subject to increasingly draconian laws and heightened surveillance while living standards drop by the day and inflation soars exponentially.
believe anything, believe everything articulates something beyond words about the bleak times we find ourselves in And still, STILL, while the fucking cunts still treat us like pricks, and rob us blind while milking the taxpayers (not the millionaire tax avoiders) to fund private interests), people back these fuckers, the Tories here in the UK and fucking Trump in the US.
Christ: we need music like this to fill our heads and wipe away the pain, albeit briefly.
Each track locks into a groove and gouges away at it with minimal variation for a relentless four or five minutes. Its power lies in its focus on force, and the impact isn’t due to dynamic range or structure, but nonstop bludgeoning.
Grinding out a repetitive pulsation, ‘YOUR LOT’ is so dense and distorted it’s both nausea and headache-inducing. The sound gets murkier and nastier and more degraded as the track’s five and a half minutes progresses. The bass blasts hard as deep on ‘HOW YOU SEE IT, IS NOT HOW I SEE IT’, before the speaker-tearing boom of ‘PISSTAKE’. It may be an illusion, but the experience is that it simply gets darker, denser, nastier and more overloafing as it progresses.
‘ACT FIRST, THINK LAST’ offers some slight variety, with a crashing, crushing rhythm and gouging synth sounds that sound like your soul being sicked down a sinkhole the size of a continent. ‘KNEE JERKS’ does go big on the beats, and they kick you in the midriff and knock the air from your body, leaving you gasping and weak. It’s a mangled churn, a thudding chud like when a laundry load had lumped together and is banging from side to side in the spin cycle, only if you’ve hearing it with your ear pressed to the washing machine door and it’s vibrating a clog of earwax you just can’t shift.
‘WHO’S YOUR GOD’ is a massive ear-blasting burst of pulsating distortion, and things really do get nasty and gnarly again, and at the abrupt halt of the last track, ‘HOW WE LOVE TO MOCK’, you’re left feeling drained, battered.
There is no response to an album like this: you just feel fortunate to have made it to the end. You’re left feeling drained and exhausted as you stare at the ceiling.
‘Move Fast’ is from the open-ended Argonaut album Songs from the Black Hat.
It is Gen X Silicon Valley slogans, 80’s pop synths and 90’s noise.
The video follows the adventures of some hapless microserfs in an office pod near you.
We’re reminded of Douglas Coupland, and also a time pre-pandemic when offices 9-5, 5 days a week were the usual. It’s a fizzy li-fi indie tune: check it here:
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but the title of Eric Angelo Bessel’s new single reminded me of the Jack Black ‘buddy comedy-drama’ (as Wikipedia would have it) from 2008, which reminds us that nostalgia for VHS and film rentals hit pretty swiftly after their demise, in real terms. In fact, here in the UK, Blockbuster creaked on with DVD rentals and secondhand sales into 2013. But as an article in The Independent in January 2013 reported, ‘While the North Finchley store had a poor selection of DVDs, the big surprise was that it was charging £5 to £8 for second-hand films to buy, so I bought brand new ones at HMV instead.’ As such, it was clear that times had changed and the world had moved on long before the last rental stores closed their doors.
But the idea of rewinding – something intrinsically connected to the age of the cassette, be it audio or video – is one which is an instant cut to nostalgia, and one which reminds us that thee one thing you can’t rewind is life: there is no rewind on time, and the past is past.
‘Kindly Rewind’ is a slow-swelling deep ambient piece that isn’t about nostalgia for the 80s or 90s, but instead drills deeper, venturing back to prehistoric oceans as its backward surges evoking images of slow evolution and microcosmic growth beneath the oceans. Sedate and supple, this is delicate and spacious and slightly disorientating. It’s also measured, musically articulate, and resonates unexpectedly. It’s a work of quality.
‘A Classic Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue’ is the first video from Now That We Are All Ghosts, the second album from Milwaukee’s Resurrectionists.
The project was self-engineered, recorded and produced; it was mastered by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service. The album features nine songs of Doom Chamber-Americana, all powerfully cinematic and ripe for video treatments, leading the group to take the unusual and ambitious step of commissioning videos for every one of them. Now That We Are All Ghosts, will be released on Seismic Wave Entertainment on 12” vinyl LP, CD and Digital formats.
Watch here:
AA
The new album sees a marked change in the band’s direction and stylistic range. Resurrectionists were originally formed by lyricist, guitarist and banjo picker Joe Cannon and bassist Jeff Brueggeman from the locally revered trio WORK with drummer Josh Barto and pedal steel player Gavin Hardy. On the group’s 2019 debut album What Comes In — a collection of everyman trouble tales delivered with dark wit and piquant Midwestern tang — Gavin’s mournful, swelling steel work helped steer songs into Gothic-country territory.
On Now That We Are All Ghosts, Hardy has been replaced by multi-instrumentalist Gian Pogliano. Gian’s penchant for more adventurous, wider-ranging sonic discourse inspires Resurrectionists to branch out into unexpected stylistic experimentation. The material here is informed equally by the meticulous melodic abstractions of pre-punk icons Television as the Old Weird American sounds of Dock Boggs and Bascom Lamar Lunsford. The album’s opener ‘A Classic Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,’ for instance begins as a mournful, banjo-driven meditation but ends as an apocalyptic howl, filled with shrieking banjo feedback – ideal support for Cannon’s writing and singing.
Joe’s lyrics on Now That We Are All Ghosts are both primal and poetic and he sings the hell out of them with a tent preacher’s conviction and a working-class punk’s urgency. Lines that seem to squarely address experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic were actually influenced by reading Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain pre-2020, married to strange ruminations concerning Walt Whitman’s death mask.
It all adds up to a collection of life-or-death songs that are incredibly haunting, daunting and visceral.
There’s some debate as to whether or not they really ‘get’ ‘goth’ Stateside, favouring more vampire / horror cliché stylings to anything that defined the disparate ‘movement’ as it emerged from the bleak urban sprawls of England in the early 80s as a darker strand of post-punk. Admittedly, the fans were always the ones with the greater shared affinity rather than the first wave of bands, none of whom recognised the ‘goth’ tag and the ones still going still don’t to this day, but still, quite how or when it morphed into genre let alone a stereotype is unclear.
The Martyr’s sound is certainly rooted more in the UK post-punk sound than anything else – brittle guitars and a thudding drum machine call to mind Alien Sex Fiend, and all crunched into just two minutes and thirty-eight seconds – but at the same draws on dark electropop and dance elements – a dash of Depeche Mode, a hint of dark disco – to create something that’s both spiky and danceable.
Lyrically, it’s serious but at the same time isn’t too serious, and it’s certainly not corny or cliché, and if ‘My Friends Look Funny’ employs a number of common stylistic trappings of the hi—NRG dance end of contemporary goth, it’s different enough to be worth a listen.
SWANS have announced details of their sixteenth studio album, The Beggar, due for release on Mute / Young God Records (N America) on 23 June 2023. In addition, Swans have announced further dates for a tour across the UK, Europe and North America – full details below. The Beggar will be released on double vinyl in a brown chipboard sleeve with a download card for accessing an additional 44 minutes of music (also included on the album’s CD version), as a double CD in a brown chipboard digi-pack, as well as digitally.
Listen to the first track from the album, ‘Paradise is Mine’:
SWANS LIVE DATES – 2023
20 May – Leipzig DE, UT Connewitz – SOLD OUT
21 May – Poznan PL, CK Zamek – SOLD OUT
23 May – Katowice PL, Kino Teatr Rialto – SOLD OUT
25 May – Zilina SK, New Synagogue
26 May – Ljubljana SL, Kino Siska
27 May – Innsbruck, AT, Heart of Noise Festival, Treibhaus
29 May – Bologna IT, Teatro Duse
31 May – Lyon FR, Transbordeur
2 June – Barcelona ES, Primavera Sound Festival
4 June – Lisbon PT, Culturgest – SOLD OUT
5 June – Lisbon PT, Culturgest
6 June – Faro PT, Teatro Das Figuras
9 June – Madrid ES, Primavera Sound Festival
11 June – Athens GR, Vraxon Theatre
13 June – Thessaloniki GR, Moni Lazariston
15 June – Antwerp BE, Bourlaschouwburg
16 June – Utrecht NL, Hertz Theatre – SOLD OUT
11 Aug – Brighton UK, St George’s
12 Aug – Manchester UK, Albert Hall
15 Aug – Newcastle UK, Boiler Shop
16 Aug – Glasgow UK, St Luke’s
18 Aug – Bristol UK, Arc Tangent Festival
19 Aug – Leeds UK, Belgrave Music Hall
21 Aug – Dublin IE, The Academy
23 Aug – Norwich UK, Waterfront
24 Aug – London UK, Troxy
26 Aug – La Tour-De-Peilz CH, Nox Orae Festival
2 Sep – Dallas TX, Granada Theater
3 Sep – Austin TX, Paramount Theatre
7 Sep – Phoenix AZ, Crescent Ballroom
8 Sep – Los Angeles CA, Lodge Room
9 Sep – Los Angeles CA, Lodge Room
12 Sep – San Francisco CA, Great American Music Hall
13 Sep – San Francisco CA, Great American Music Hall
Wikipedia, and most other sources for that matter, will tell you that ‘Liturgy is an American black metal band from Brooklyn, New York’. The band’s own bio, which explains how their brand of ‘“transcendental black metal” exists in the space between metal, experimental, classical music and sacred ritual’ and that ‘The band is simultaneously a platform for fine art and theology’ is rather more illuminating in explaining how they have vastly expanded their horizons and those of the genre to create a form which is truly unique.
93696 is very much a concept-based work, which is best explained by quoting: ‘93696 is a number derived from the religions of Christianity and Thelema, a numerological representation of heaven, or a new eon for civilization. Hunt-Hendrix composed the album as an exploration of eschatological possibility divided by the four “laws” that govern her own interpretation of heaven, “Haelegen”: Sovereignty, Hierarchy, Emancipation, and Individuation. These laws constitute the four movements of 93696 which act as dramas all their own within the framework of the record.’
And what a record. ‘Epic’ barely touches it. It’s immense in every way, not least of all duration, with fifteen tracks spanning the best part of an hour and a half, this is expansive on a scale akin to SWANS (who they’ve previously supported). It’s also every bit as dynamically charged as latter-day SWANS albums, with tracks anything up to a quarter of an hour in length powering though a succession of crescendos, via sweeping choral soundscapes.
‘Djeennaration’ packs everything in early, presenting eight-and-a-half minutes of frenetic fretwork and thunderous percussion, over which vocals switch from angelic to demonic and back in the blast of a beat. It’s powerful, and quite bewildering in both its force and cinematic scope.
Done differently, this could feel overlong and pretentious, but the execution is so precise and the great ambition so focused on realisation that everything feels remarkably organic and despite making gigantic leaps between passages, changing tempo and tone here, there, an everywhere, it flows. Shuddering slabs of power chords that crunch like quartz while blasts off pure noise tear the air, but as ‘Haelegen II’ shows, with the incorporation of piano, there’s so much more texture and detail than plan fast-as-fuck fret attacks – then, from out of nowhere, things take a turn into folksy post-rock.
The savage squall of ‘Before I Knew the Truth’, released as a single a few weeks ago distils the potent force of the entire album into four and a half flooring minutes. There are some brief – and strange – moments of respite, such as the quavering woodwind tones of the brief interlude that is ‘Red Crown II’ and the delicate keys of ‘Angel of Emancipation’, and they’re most necessary, as the majority of 93696 is a force beyond nature.
The fifteen-minute title track is nothing short of an absolute monster, and as much as it’s n obliterative squally, it’s also a dynamic and wide-ranging sonic and cerebral experience, culminating in a vast orchestral sweep that’s nothing short of stunning.
This does feel very much like an absolute pinnacle and a definitive and exhaustive – and, it has to be said, exhausting – statement. Transcendental indeed.
Released at the end of 2022, the latest set from for all the emptiness is only now getting a major push. As the title suggests, this five-tracker is thematically centred around themes of use, abuse, pain and pleasure.
for all the emptiness describe themselves as exponents of ‘futurepop’, which is filtered with a range of other genres like 90s industrial rock to glitchcore, ebm, and more.
Musically, the title tracks is very much in the vein of early Nine Inch Nails – which in turn took cues from Depeche Mode when they started to explore fetishism circa 86 – but the songwriting style is more akin to PIG, and mines the catchy slogan-style hook favoured by Raymond Watts. But for all of the sweat and sleaze, there’s something curiously proper about this – specifically the enunciation of the lyrics. It’s particularly curious because Jonathan Kaplan – who records as for all the emptiness – hails from Ontario, but sings with preppy received pronunciation English. And so – my brain being prone to presenting images in response to sounds – envisages a Victorian gentleman with a handlebar moustache in a wrestling leotard as he sings of being ‘restrained and dominated’. Well, it’s well-known that for all of their straight-laced appearances, the Victorians were kinky buggers, and equally, it’s the public school types who are more likely to be into ‘alternative’ sexual proclivities in modern society.
It’s by far the most immediate track of the set, as the EP veers sharply in a more industrial dance / cybergoth direction.
‘dead inside’ is overtly dance-orientated, exploiting all of the classic breakdowns and drops, and goes all-out for the euphoric anthem, which contrasts with the hook ‘please forgive me as I die, I’ve always been dead inside’. ‘sell the sins’ is a proper bass-led technoindustrial stomper, while the last track, ‘at the brink’ is more 80s electropop and reveals a more sensitive aspect: it’s the most nuanced and probably the strongest of the collection.
While it does exist very much within the domain of the genres from which it draws inspiration, there’s some interesting stuff happening here, and not just Victorian wrestling.
Aural Aggravation 