Archive for May, 2023

Boris & Uniform – Bright New Disease

Posted: 24 May 2023 in Albums
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Sacred Bones – 16th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

They’re the first to admit that this pairing may seem like an unusual one, having first teamed up for a US tour in 2019: as the bio notes, ‘Sure, both bands harness the power of big, blown-out riffs, but Boris’s rock heroics, lysergic sprawl, and monolithic sludge summon a different energy than Uniform’s mechanized bombardments and frenzied assaults.’ But often the most exciting and unexpected results emerge when pairing contrasts rather than sameness. Put two drone bands together, you can predict the outcome will be amplified drone; sludge with sludge equals more sludge, and industrial matched with industrial is unlikely to yield any great surprises. Yes, pairing like with like makes sense, it’s safe, there’s an intuition and interplay that comes from familiarity with the territory and the form, and fans will likely be happy being served a double helping of what they like.

But neither Boris nor Uniform are acts who are overly concerned with appeasement: that isn’t to say they don’t care about their fans, but more that they both trust their fan bases to be broad-minded and accommodating of the idea that creative fulfilment is integral to their existence. Even those more casually acquainted with their respective catalogues will recognise that both Boris and Uniform are driven, not by the desire to entertain, but to follow their creative instincts. The way these manifest musically are very different, but in this context, the parallels become more apparent, and it also becomes easier to understand their mutual appreciation for one another. And neither act is new to the spirit of collaboration, with Boris having have collaborated with the likes of Sunn O))), Merzbow, and Keiji Haino, and Uniform having previously released a blistering collision with The Body back in 2018, as well as remixes with Zombi more recently.

It will be news to no-one that this is big on riffs, that it’s loud and heavy, but this is a collaboration like no other: ordinarily, artists will bring their ‘thing’ to the table, and the songs will represent the meeting in the middle ground. This isn’t so much the case on Bright New Disease: the two acts are given equal billing and play evenly to their strengths and stylistic methodologies: but don’t necessarily play ‘together’ in the conventional sense. But when did either Boris or Uniform do ‘conventional’?

The album’s first track, ‘You are the Beginning’, aired online a few weeks ago, is the perfect combination of the two bands’ individual sounds: hard, heavy, the blistering harsh industrial intensity of Uniform, angular, antagonistic, crackling with the punk-tinged rage of Michael Berden, suddenly melts into a wild blitz of fretwork which paves the way for a monster thrash workout. Even the tone and texture shifts from harsh treble to murky mid-range, and it feels like a song of two halves. Quite unexpectedly, it works. When you weight up the value of any collaboration the question is always ‘is it different from or better than their independent works?’ Bright New Disease throws a curveball in that it’s a yes and a no at the same time, and that’s the genius of it.

The explosive ‘Weaponized Grief’ is a sub-two-minute blast of feedback and fury, and another thing which is notable about Bright New Disease is just how short the songs are. While there are a couple over four minutes and the finale, ‘Not Surprised’ does just creep over five minutes, the majority are significantly shorter, and condense a lot into those brief times, too.

‘No’ goes all-out grindcore / thrash in a two-and-a-half- minute flurry of churning guitars, but at the same time there’s something vaguely Spinal Tap – or Melvins –about its overblown excesses, and this may be a short album, but it’s high impact, and that’s true of much of the album: they slam down riff after riff with relish. ‘Endless Death Agony’ brings together the boldest excess of Boris with the most brutal attacks of Uniform, with a shrieking guitar solo fading out ahead of a most punishing riff with more solo mania blistering and melting on top, before the megalithic slow grind of ‘Not Surprised’ drags its way through the pits of hell.

Apart from the gloomy atmospheric suspense of the intro to ‘The Look is a Flame’ there really isn’t much respite on Bright New Disease. It’s harsh, heavy, relentless, by turns sludgy and slow, or otherwise frantic, frenetic, explosive – and packed with surprises, from the murky ambience of ‘The Sinners of Hell’ to the bubbling electronica of ‘Narcotic Shadow’ that sounds more like DAF collaborating with A-Ha and the straight-up glam pop of ‘A Man from the Earth’. Never could I have anticipated describing anything involving Uniform as ‘glam pop’. But then they kill it hard with ‘Endless Death Agony’, which is some brutal shit. Bright New Disease is everything all at once: it’s often punishing, sometimes spectacularly theatrical, and (almost) always heavy, but it’s smartly realised and expounds the importance of identity as both bands showcase and celebrate theirs in triumphant tandem.

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Listen: ‘A Future to Fear II’ by Xasthur

Posted: 24 May 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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XASTHUR unveil the next sinister single, ‘A Future to Fear II’, taken from the forthcoming double-album Inevitably Dark, which is set up for release on June 23, 2023.
The stylistically highly diverse American outfit instigated by multi-instrumentalist Scott Conner has created a kaleidoscopic double-album that is ranging from acid folk to black metal.

A visualizer of the eerie track ‘A Future to Fear II’ is available here:

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There is hardly a more fitting title for the new XASTHUR compositions than "Inevitably Dark". Darkness is the element that holds all the tracks together despite the fact that they are expressed in a multitude of genres, which even includes black metal. This time. Be warned: this album is neither meant as a return to black metal of mastermind Scott Conner, even though he does this time, nor a guarantee that it will happen again next time – although, he might. Maybe.

This monolith of musical darkness that is balefully towering in the shape of a monumental XASTHUR double album has been made from sonic granite. Like the intrusive igneous type of rock, it is coarse-grained, composed from different minerals that have formed from magma erupting to the surface from infernal depths, and has a high content of metal oxides that do not always show at a superficial glance.

Instead of quartz, alkali feldspar, and other types of rock, Conner has used black metal, dark ambient, acid folk, doomgrass, and other genres to express what he has seen and felt, as well as a way to find his own sound or style at a point in time – for example when he was without a steady home and often living in hotels or cars. His insights into the underbelly of the American dream are reflected in the lyrics of "Inevitably Dark", which are there even though there is no singing on the album. Conner is taking a look into the minds of the mentally ill. The puzzle of people that he encountered on the road and that might be homeless because they are ill, or whose minds shattered when they lost their homes.

Documenting what he has heard and seen, Conner recorded all the tracks of "Inevitably Dark" live and by himself, which might make it sound coarse to modern ears, but it is just the grit and stain of unfiltered reality. His way is the old hard way of a live sound and not the fake glitter of a perfectly polished product. XASTHUR are sounding exactly as the mastermind has envisioned his album to be: real.

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Xasthur by Lukasz Jaszak

Listen: ‘Fractured’ by Feral Family

Posted: 23 May 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Their debut extended-play release, the ‘PLAYTEST’ EP finds the Yorkshire noiseniks delivering 5 tracks of ferocious, Doomsday-baiting post-punk ripe for our times. From the cataclysmic Dune-inspired ‘Spice King’, to the slithering gothic-rock stylings of ‘Wee Van Bee’, or the intense industrial clamour of ‘Smother’; the band make their mark with a dark, brooding collection of songs that meld the gothic and euphoric with invigorating results.

Opening this Pandora’s box is the pulse-quickening ‘Fractured’, which is also out now. A song about dual-identities and the dawning realisation of deception when it’s been staring you in the face, lead vocalist Jamie explains of the track: “’Fractured’ channels the complicated relationship of having a double-life paraded right in front of your eyes, understanding its insidiousness but ultimately fearing the fire of confrontation.”

Listen here:

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Swans – The Beggar

Posted: 22 May 2023 in Albums
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Young God Records – 23rd June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Swans are back – again. This is no surprise: they released – as has become standard form – a limited edition demos CD, Is There Really A Mind? through the website as a fundraiser to pay for the album’s recording and release. All ten of the songs which appeared there have made it to the finished album, but, more often than not, in aa rather different form. Unusually, though, the bare-bones demos didn’t all start life as brief acoustic sketches which expanded to twenty-minute sprawlers exploding with extended crescendos: the shapes of the songs were realised early on, and in several cases, the final versions are actually shorter than the drafts. And while Gira hinted at a seismic shift following the gargantuan blow-out of The Glowing Man, heralding the arrival of a new era with Leaving Meaning – and it’s true that the shape of the band has been very different, not least of all with mainstay Norman Westberg and Thor Harris both stepping back to being contributors rather than a core members, Kristof Hahn remains – Swans remains very much ultimately Gira’s vehicle. And so it is that for all of the changes, The Beggar is clearly very much a Swans album, and sits comfortably in the domain of their body of work.

There does very much seem to be an arc when it comes to Swans releases, rather than any rapid shifts, particularly since their 2010 comeback, My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, whereby the songs grew incrementally longer and more sprawling and the crescendos more drawn out, fewer, and further apart. And so it is that The Beggar follows the more minimal sound of Leaving Meaning, and, like its predecessor, it’s a comparatively succinct statement, at least by Swans standards in the last decade – at least, discounting ‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’, an album-length track which is absent from the album, and occupies the majority of disc two on the CD. This track is, in some ways, contentious: does it even belong on the album, or should it have been released as a standalone work? The album minus ‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’ is still an expansive work, but has a certain flow and sense of existing as a cohesive document. And so it feels like there are almost two different albums here:

As the album’s ‘taster’ tune, the twitchy, trippy, eternally-undulating ‘Paradise is Mine’ indicated, Gira’s compositions on The Beggar are constructed around heavy repetition. This is to be expected: it’s been Gira’s style since day one. The first song, ‘The Parasite’, strips right back to nothing around the mid-point to find Gira acappella, imploring ‘come to me, feed on me’ in a menacing low-throated rasp. And as Gira questions ‘is there really a mind?’ in the psychedelic droning loops of ‘Paradise is Mine’ the tension increases and you start to feel dizzy. and perhaps a little nauseous. This pit-of-the-stomach churn is something that Swans have long been masters of, although quite how it manifests has changed over time: back in the days of Filth, Cop, and Greed, it was sheer force. More recently, it was woozy, nagging repetitions that lurch like a boat on a bobbing tide.

‘Los Angeles: City of Death’ returns to the style and form of The Great Annihilator – a three-minutes hard-punching gloom folk song. After the previous incarnation’s ever-longer workouts, it’s an absolute revelation, and a joy to be reminded that despite the work of the last decade or so, Gira can still write tight songs that you can actually get a grip on and really get into. ‘Unforming’ is a soft country drone, which finds Gira crooning cavernously over slide guitar, and it’s reminiscent of some of the more tranquil moments of Children of God.

‘I’m a shithead unforgiven… I’m an insect in your bedclothes…’ Gira drones on the ten-minute title track. For all of the artistic progress and evolution over the decades, Gira is still chained to the tropes of self-loathing and the darkest, most self-destructive introspection, and this is dolorous, doomy, and bleak …and then about four minutes in, the drums crash in and the sound thickens and they plug into one of those nagging grooves that simply immerses you and carries you upwards on a surge of sound. ‘My love for you will never end’, Gira moans, ever the subjugate, before the vocals conclude with an anguished, wordless strangled gargle as the riff kicks back in and swells to a monumental scale seemingly from nowhere.

‘No More of This’ is mellow and almost uplifting, both sonically and in its message – at least until near the end, when Gira reels off a list of farewells, and as much as ‘Ebbing’ seems to be about drowning, it’s a sliver of sunny-sounding psychedelic folk. And then ‘The Memorious’ hits that dizzying swirl of repetition that feels like a kind of torture. It’s hard to really articulate just how there can be music that makes you want to puke because it’s so woozy, wibbly. It’s the sonic equivalent of watching Performance. You don’t need to take a trip to take a trip.

‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’ represents a massive detour that does and doesn’t sit within the flow of the album. It’s either the penultimate track, or an appendix, depending the format of your choice. However you approach it, this is drone on an epic scale. Five minutes into ‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’, which starts out a trickle, with a robotic female spoken word narrative, everything just goes off – mostly drums, but also noise. When this tapers away, we’re left with the sound of sirens, ominous drones, and then after some hypnotic droning, there’s another monster surge, a nagging guitar motif riding atop a thumping beat and heavy swell of drone. It soon crackles into a grand wheeze of electronica, And a detonating wall of noise, and at the end, it all collapses. Around the eighteen-minute mark it really hits a heavy groove and blows you away.

The Beggar is certainly not the kind of heavy of Swans early releases, but it’s still heavy. It may not possess the sledgehammer force of the original. It’s beyond strong.

Once again, Swans have produced an album that’s more than an album, more than anything.

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Watch: ‘Fearmonger’ by Darkplace

Posted: 21 May 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Darkplace is a mysterious new Swedish dark dream pop/post-punk group who created a conceptual debut album inspired by the bleak landscape of the Stockholm suburbs that birthed them.

Centred around an alternative reality – or just the grim present and future? – and entitled About The End Of The World, the album is being unveiled gradually over the coming months via a series of imaginative visuals based on animated digital paintings for each of its eleven tracks.

Having recently released ‘Arken över Hesselby’ (The Ark Over Hesselby), the video for which presented the outskirts of a city haunted by an unknown aerial presence, the clip for brand new single ’Fearmonger’ takes us into the heart of that city, presenting an apocalyptic scenario as ominous sirens wail and a lone soldier flees the prying ‘eye in the sky’ of an airship.

The Swedish national alarm system is still tested on a quarterly basis by the army. A familiar sound to all Swedes, the sound of the siren has the nickname ‘Hesa Fredrik’. Darkplace state: “After trying to improve Hesa Fredrik, the government learned that the new horns scared the shit out of people.”

Although rooted in late 80s/early 90s indie styles, Darkplace incorporate a variety of other genres into their sound. However, for the members of this highly secretive group, it is not just about the music. They perceive themselves as more an art project that happens to be exploring and commenting on the state of the world through their chosen mediums of music and video.

Most of the short instrumental pieces on the forthcoming album were written with specific storyboards in mind, with the band revealing that “we started creating the art before we had the music for both singles to date, so the tracks were written as soundtracks to the animation.”

The art itself is a multi-layered process that involves photography, sculpting, oil painting, digital editing and animation. Using apps like Nomad Sculpt to create it before exporting scene specific angles and imported into Procreate to be painted, they add: “we use oil paintbrushes and paint over the photo. It is layers upon layers and it gets messy. Exporting gets even messier since we want depth in the scenes and need to export them in layered depths. A few scenes in this project have been animated frame by frame and it has taken almost two years to complete.”

Watch ‘Fearmonger’ here:

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Girls Under Glass – Backdraft

Posted: 21 May 2023 in Albums
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Dependent Records – 2nd June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Now in their twenty-seventh year, Girls Under Glass return after an extended break – of some seventeen years – with a new album that wasn’t wholly planned. As the bio notes, explain, when they started composing some new tracks for an EP to round off a planned boxset of their complete works, ‘The fire reignited and songs kept coming… [they] understood that their batteries had recharged to bursting point after a 17-year break and the projected EP turned into a full-length.

The trouble with being forerunners and progenitors is that time catches up. What was innovative at one time becomes assimilated, absorbed: ‘influential’ becomes commonplace, however much you keep moving. And while Backdraft shows that Girls Under Glass have progressed, it also shows how external elements have, too – even within the spheres of post-punk and goth, which on the face of things, haven’t evolved all that much. Emerging bands are still emulating The Cure and The Sisters of mercy circa 1985, and oftentimes if feels as if these are genres locked in time – but then, the same is also true of punk, and contemporary grunge acts.

At least Girls Under Glass can lay justified claim to being there at the time and laying the foundation stones for the sound that endures over thirty years on, and they’re fully accepting that this new outing draws on the sound and sensations of their previously active years in the 80s and 90s. ‘Night Kiss’ brings all the synth-goth vibes where early New Order and third-wave goth acts like Suspiria meet, but there’s much to chew on across the ten songs on Backdraft. ‘Tainted’ – which features Mortiis on guest vocals – has a more industrial feel – but that’s industrial in the way that Rosetta Stone drew on Nine Inch Nails for Tyranny of Inaction than Ministry. It’s got grit and magnetic bubbling synths and some hard grooves, but the aggression is fairly restrained.

Single cut ‘We Feel Alright’ has a vintage vibe and sits in the bracket of ‘uplifting goth’ – it may not bee recognised as a thing, but it sure is, and propelled by a pumping disco beat, it’s one of those songs that brims with an energy that makes you want to raise your arms and your face to the sky as you’re carried away on the driving rhythm and expansive synths and guitars.

The six-minute ‘No Hope No Fear’ blissfully ventures into Disintegration-era Cure stylings, with a bold, cinematic approach, while ‘Everything Will Die’ is a quintessential slab of Numanesque electrogoth It’s uptempo, even poppy, but it’s dark, and if the Hi-NRG pumping of ‘Endless Nights’ is a shade cliché, but they redeem the dip with the sparse six-minute ‘Heart on Fire’ with its sepulchral synths, before erupting into an epic climax that’s like a shoegaze / synthwave take of Fields of the Nephilim.

Ultimately, Backdraft is a solid album: its roots are deeply retro, and it’s not one hundred percent hit, but it’s a solid addition to the catalogue of a band whose longevity speaks for itself.

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Khanate – To Be Cruel

Posted: 20 May 2023 in Albums
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Sacred Bones – 19th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been fourteen years since there was new music from Khanate, the experimental doom outfit featuring members of Sunn O))), OLD, and Blind Idiot God. It’s perhaps not surprising that my social media feeds have been bursting with the news of the surprise arrival of their fifth album on digital platforms ahead of a physical release next month– and because it landed from nowhere overnight, you couldn’t say it was eagerly anticipated, but it’s got a lot of people excited.

As you would expect, given the members’ main projects, and the previous Khanate releases, To Be Cruel is an absolute monster, with just three tracks spanning a full hour. You don’t tune in to Khanate for snappy pop tunes.

The first chord hits like an atomic bomb, blasting from the speakers with such force it’s almost enough to floor you, and rising from the sustain, crackling synth notes, then another sonic detonation that’s so hard and loud it hurts. Many of the tones and tropes of To Be Cruel are heavily redolent of the crushing doom drone of Sunn O))), but as the first piece, ‘Like a Poisoned Dog’ abundantly evidences, Khanate are different. This difference may be less apparent to the casual listener, but the stop/start power chords and skewed, sinewy shards of feedback are cut from a different sonic cloth, and if Sunn O))) are renowned for their indebtedness to Earth, there are elements woven in here which seem to owe more to early Swans, and while I wouldn’t necessarily want to speculate on whether the album’s title is some kind of response to Swans’ 2014 album To Be Kind, there is some kind of contextual interface here, in that both acts are pushing parameters within a longform song format.

And then there are the vocals: it’s a good seven minutes before Alan Dubin makes his first contribution: the song takes another swerve, the blistering blast simmers down and as he howls and roars, the feel is a cross between the darkest of mangled metal and brutal hardcore. And his manic screams are powerful and affecting. He sounds troubled, but in a way that conveys the kind of tortured mental suffering that’s common to many: it’s a primal howl of rage ad anguish that we struggle to unleash, and so to hear this is to feel emotions channelled by proxy, and as much as it hurts, it’s a release.

‘It Wants to Fly’ takes it to the next level, presenting almost twenty-two minutes of pain. The guitar is slow, crushing, punishing. What can you say? It hurts. It’s also minimal in arrangement but maximal in volume: this is first-gear BPM, with decimating feedback between the crushing chords. At the same time, it’s doomy and ominous as well as raging, making for a powerful cocktail of weight and raw emotion. There is no question that Khanate bring both.

And so it is that the album’s third and final track, the twenty-minute title track, is twenty minutes of low drone and tortured screaming that sounds like a breakdown captured on tape as Dubin yelps and screams about spiders against a sparse backing of a distant rumble and clanging guitar. ‘Look! In the closet!’ he shrieks in what sounds like abject terror. You dare not look. You don’t even want to hide under the bed: you just want to leave the house. The composition takes its time, it hums and drones, and in time, it hits and it hurts, and in some way you wish you could be Dublin, you want this release to have a channel into the unhinged. But you’re stuck on the outside, an observer to what sounds like either the ultimate catharsis or mental disintegration.

Ground down to nothing beyond and anguished screams and squalling feedback, this is bare bones, the sound of desperation. It isn’t pleasant, and there is simply no room to breathe: this is dark, dense torturous, and it’s exactly what fans have been waiting fourteen years for.

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Listen: ‘Matters Like’ by Parliamo

Posted: 19 May 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Scottish six-piece – Parliamo – are back with the new single ‘Matters Like’, out today.

Arriving as the band’s grittiest, stickiest offering to-date, it sees Parliamo’s usual bright rhythms and funky basslines, traded-in for howling Suede-esque electric guitars, low-slung hooks and unconventional choruses.

Like a migraine growing under the noon-day sun, ‘Matters Like’ has a burbling, off-kilter intensity quite at odds with the brilliant sunshine that baked the Summer of 2022 in which it was written. Finding nuanced inspiration during those mind-melting times in the Fontaines D.C. track ‘Roman Holiday’ and the spring reverb bass of The Last Shadow Puppets’ second record, the band’s Jack Dailly and Finn Freeburn Morrison began assimilating both into a new track that would mark a moody left-turn for the band.

A song about finding confidence in a new relationship and the overcast feelings that can come hand-in-hand with it, vocalist Jack Dailly explains: “’Matters Like’ has a moodier sound than most of our previous output, with its screaming guitars and echoing hi-hats. This mood fits well with the lyrics, as the song touches on feelings of uncertainty and internal conflict. It’s a song about insecurity in a fledgling relationship and the plethora of emotions which come with getting to know more about someone than you might have bargained for.”

Weaving their straight-up songwriting and babbling instrumentals niftily through a heatwave-warped collision of influences, ‘Matters Like’ finds a band pushing the Parliamo sound and enjoying getting a little experimental.

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Photo credit: Lauren Kellie

A Place To Bury Strangers – See Through You: Rerealized

Posted: 18 May 2023 in Albums
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Dedestrange Records – 2nd June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Initially released on vinyl for record store day, for the rest of the world who don’t own a record player or otherwise have spare cash to splash on records that cost as much as a week’s groceries, See Through You: Rerealized – containing twenty-one remixes of the songs from last year’s See Through You – is now getting a digital release.

Given just how twisted and fucked-up A Place to Bury Strangers’ records have got over the last few releases (Pinned notwithstanding), the prospect of the mangled messes that make up See Through You being remixed was a source of both curiosity and trepidation. Curious, because exactly what can you do with material this brain-bendingly off the wall, with so much noise and unconventional structures and production? And trepidation because just how fucked up is this going to be? After all, if you’ve ever witnessed A Place to Bury Strangers live, the chances are probably still haven’t recovered, and you know that things can get pretty insane without external help or interference.

There’s also the eternal question of just how many reworkings of any given song you want or need. There are no more than four versions off any one song on here, and the diversity of the remixers’ approaches means there doesn’t really feel like there’s significant duplication.

Trentmøller’s remix of ‘I’m Hurt’, which opens the album brings a glammy swagger to the song, and it feels cleaner, quite different from the original, and while the album version of ‘Love Reaches Out’ sounds like a demo version of a reimagined take on New Order’s ‘Ceremony’, in the hands of GIFT it becomes a winsome indie tune, at least to begin with, and the theme overall seems to be, contra to what normally happens with remixes, is that many of the remixers have straightened out and unfucked the songs to render them crisper, cleaner, more overtly ‘songy’. There are always exceptions, of course: Data Animal twists ‘Broken’ into a twisted dark synth effort, and as for Xiu Xiu and their take on ‘Love Reaches Out’, well. You’d expect nothing less, mind you. Ceremony East Coast revel in the racket with their murky electronic post-punk mangling of ‘So Low’, and it works well as a celebration of reverb and sonic fog.

Also notable and noteworthy are the reworkings by bdrmm and Sonic Boom: the former’s contribution, a ‘I Don’t Know How You Do It’ is a work with a sparse, minimal skeleton and misty layers overlaid to conjure a dreamy yet energetic cut that fades into rippling piano, while the latter’s immense ten-and-a-half-minute megalith is, well, a lot. It preserves the New Order vibe and polishes it up a bit, and seems to simply loop it forever. Indulgent? Well, yes, but then, it’s fitting.

It’s not until Lunacy’s ‘My Head Is Lunacy’ that were plunged into swampy hypnotic semi-ambient terrain, and it immediately precedes a reworking of ‘I’m Hurt’ this time by Ride’s Andy Bell under the Glok moniker, which is – rather unexpectedly – a work of dark, stark trance, with a thudding beat and a chunked-up bass.

‘Rerealized’ is the key to understanding this album, really. The songs find themselves not so much remixed or reimaged, but restore, to a state before all of the mess and noise and twisting and screwing and scrunching and all the rest. Despite its length, it works well. Does it improve on the original songs? No, but it definitely places them in an array of different lights.

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A Place to Bury Strangers will bring their legendary live shows – a shamanistic experience that bathes listeners in glorious sound, crazed left turns, transcendent vibrations, real-time experiments, and brilliant breakthroughs – to the UK and Europe in May and June 2023 for the second leg of their Destroy Into The Future Tour. See full dates below:

DESTROY INTO THE FUTURE TOUR – TICKETS

19 May – Foul Weather Festival – Le Havre, France

20 May – Patterns – Brighton, UK *

21 May – The Lanes – Bristol, UK *

22 May – Furure Yard – Birkenhead, UK *

23 May – The White Hotel – Manchester, UK *

24 May – Belgrave Music Hall – Leeds, UK *

25 May – Broadcast – Glasgow, UK *

26 May – The Star and Shadow – Newcastle, UK *

27 May – Wide Awake Festival – London, UK

29 May – Wave Gotik Treffen – Leipzig, Germany

30 May – Futurum Music Bar – Prague, Czech #

31 May – Fluc – Wien, Austria #

01 Jun – Storm – Munich, Germany #

02 Jun – Vinile – Bassano del Grappa, Italy #

03 Jun – Freakout – Bologna, Italy #

04 Jun – Grabenhalle – St. Gallen, Switzerland *

05 Jun – L’Usine – Geneva, Switzerland *#

06 Jun – La Marché Gare – Lyon, France *#

07 Jun – Rockschool Barbey – Bourdeaux, France #

08 Jun – Festival Aucard De Tours – Tours, France

09 Jun – La Laiterie – Strasbourg, France #

10 Jun – Reklektor – Liege, Belgium #

* with Camilla Sparksss

# with Lunacy

Watch: ‘Prison Planet’ by eMolecule

Posted: 18 May 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Former Sound of Contact members Simon Collins and Kelly Nordstrom returned this year with their new band eMolecule and their debut album The Architect which was released in February (InsideOutMusic).

Today the band have shared the video for ‘Prison Planet’ which you can watch here:

The Architect, the debut album from new progressive rock outfit eMolecule (former Sound of Contact members Simon Collins and Kelly Nordstrom) is out now! Their newest visual offering ‘Prison Planet’ is a rebellious anthem that speaks to the struggle of being confined to a system that doesn’t allow for growth. It’s a call to action for those seeking autonomy and true freedom, even within the confines of our current world.

The two long-time collaborators met in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 2005 and have been working together ever since. Originally brought together to work on Simon’s solo career, the spark of creativity between Simon and Kelly was undeniable. They soon began writing original material together, much of which would end up on Dimensionaut.

With a successful progressive rock album under their belts, Simon and Kelly were determined to continue the work they started with Sound of Contact. During the UK production of Simon’s 4th solo album Becoming Human, Kelly recorded a demo of the song ‘eMolecule’ in a flurry of inspiration. With this new offering, Simon and Kelly decided their way forward was as a duo and they would pool their best material under the name eMolecule.

In the summer of 2020, eMolecule decided it was time to begin work on their debut album and that it was to be a concept album. Meeting in person at Simon’s studio in Ireland, the duo spent a solid month writing the concept and music start to finish. Over the following months, they completed writing, producing and performing The Architect both remotely and together in Ireland.

The Architect features intense, heavy guitar and drum performances as well as deep, atmospheric and emotionally driven arrangements. From start to finish, eMolecule’s first offering captivates the listener with infectious vocals, dynamic guitars and ultra-modern production from the epic opening track ‘eMolecule’ to the powerful climax of the closing track ‘Moment of Truth’. This band and album are set to take the listener to another dimension.

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Photo: Nick Elliot

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