Archive for July, 2023

Warren Records – 31st July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

There are few things quite as gratifying as seeing one of your own quotes as the lead on a press release. And so it is that Hull noise punks Bug Facer, who I declared were my new favourite band on the release of their debut single, ‘Horsefly’ in Nov ember, praising them for their ‘claustrophobic, pulverising heaviness that leaves you aching’, rage hard on their debut EP.

What are they angry about? Everything and anything: modern life in general. Triple Death may only contain three tracks and have a running time of less than fourteen minutes, but they pack in the fury with a critical mass. The first cut, ‘Eggshell’ sets the tone, and, they say, ‘explores the idea of cycles with no end and how on an existential level we try to apply meaning to struggle.’ This isn’t just noisy shit: it’s noisy shit with some deep thought involved, and ‘Eggshells’ is low and slow, with a hesitant bassline and swirling guitar that swishes around in a gush of treble, and instrumentally it lands somewhere between The Fall and ‘Budd’ by Rapeman, and it’s completed with howling vocals that sound like every syllable is being torn from James Cooper’s lungs. It’s harsh and harrowing and truly the sound of pain leaving the body.

Theirs is an usual setup, with the drummer and bassist contributing vocals alongside co-founder Cooper who plays guitar. I say play: he and second guitarist Josh Burdette torture their instruments, channelling their angst through mangled chords at high volume. Sonically, their approach is unusual, too: they’re not big on riffs or distortion or driving percussion, the popular cornerstones of angry music of many genres: the sound on Triple Death is steely, grey, murky, creating the kind of oppressive sensation I feel listening to Unsane and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry. It makes you feel tense, twisted up and knotted inside.

Picking up the pace with ‘Prod’, which, with the addition of some gurgling synths, steps into a Krautrock groove, before the guitars lunge in and things get messy, the deranged, raw-throated vocals and serpentine guitar lines interweaving in a thicket of discord flay the nerves without mercy. ‘We are all the cattle… We are all the cattle, is the refrain’. And we feel it.

It’s a reworked version of ‘Horsefly’ that closes the EP off, and it’s a cleaner sound that marks the primary difference from the original release of this six-and-a-half-minute trudger of a tune that has the kind of earthy weight of Neurosis. The guitars chime dolorous doom as the bass and drums hammer hard, heavy, relentlessly thudding, so low and slow as to drag your heart down towards your knees.

The clue, I suppose, is in the name. This isn’t just death: it’s triple death, and Triple Death is grim, gloomy, the soundtrack to battling against the tide of shit on shit, when a trip to the seaside is a game of dodge the turds and a tub of butter costs seven fucking quid. When they tell you that inflation is a global issue but the fuel providers and supermarket chains record bumper profits and immense payouts to execs and shareholders while nurses are querying at food banks… fuck this shit. Triple Death is the soundtrack to telling the world, ‘fuck this shit’. One more time: fuck this shit.

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28th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Funny how time goes. Precisely two weeks short of a year ago today, I reviewed Bedroom Tax’s debut single ‘Kin’, against a backdrop of a heatwave and wild fires in the UK, and increasing level of panic over fuel costs ahead of the winter in prospect. And we thought things looked bleak then. No heatwave in the UK this year: instead, we’ve spent the last three months swinging between regular summer weather and days that more closely resemble October while the rest of the world burns, and we long for the days when it was only the cost of energy and Lurpak that were heading into the stratosphere.

Bedroom Tax are one of many bands with sociopolitical leanings who have adopted names which set their stance out in the simplest of terms. I’m thinking BDRMM, Bedsit, Benefits, bands born in many ways out of frustration and necessity, and their very existence is a statement about the crushing economic climate we live in – at least if you’re a regular person and not in the executive echelon, or otherwise comfortably off thanks to inherited wealth, a backhander from a mate in government, or an MP.

The so-called ‘bedroom tax’, introduced in 2012 is one of many examples of the tory government shafting the poor and the disabled, and as Michael Rosen pointed out in an article for The Guardian in 2014, the bereaved, was found in 2019 to be discriminatory by the European Court of Human Rights. No wonder the government are keen to ditch the ECHR: they keep ruling that their inhumane policies are illegal.

Since releasing ‘Kin’, Bedroom Tax have spent their time reflecting and refining their sound. It’s been time well spent.

‘Bad Behaviour’ is a magnificent melding of post-punk and post-rock with ‘urban’ elements, and possesses both beauty and bleakness simultaneously. Chiming guitars and programmed beats provide the backdrop to the incisive yet flowing rap of the lyrics, poetically dissecting social division and the hand we’re dealt due to privilege or lack of. It’s got bounce and groove, and even a certain noodly indie jangle that’s seen the sound of The Smiths cast through a more current prism that’s still more 2006 than 2023, but there’s a joy in witnessing the bounds of genre time being dismantled, and knowing that Morrissey would fucking hate it.

It’s a progression from the kitchen-sink reflections of ‘Kin’, but at the same time, there’s still that gritty realism, with echoes of The Streets, and the reason Bedroom Tax are so appealing is because there’s no pretence, no artifice: they’re telling it like it is.

And just as punk and post-punk emerged from the desolation of Thatcher’s Britain, so the current wave of acts who hark back to that but with the addition of more contemporary twists are coming from parallel circumstances. Austerity may not be the buzzword of the present, but we never left it: cuts upon cuts by cunts upon cunts are why we are where we are. And acts like Bedroom Tax articulate the everyday realities of life right now. We need these guys.

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London-based thrash-metal quintet LOKUST today reveal a music for a brand new song tiled ‘War Of Opposites’, which is taken from the band’s first full-length album "Infidel" also out o n28th July on CD/Digital Download.

Watch it here:

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Formed in 2017 by guitarists Alexy Khoury and Jeremy Pringsheim, London’s LOKUST initially released a pair of instrumental demo videos to advertise their search for a full lineup, including ‘Guiltless’ featuring drummer Krimh Lechner (ex-Decapitated, Septicflesh), which was very well received and attained more than two million views on Youtube.

The duo spent the next few years searching for the right vocalist, and in the meantime recruited Euler Morais on drums and Patryk Kopo on bass. The newly established four-piece then started the recordings of their debut album which was fully written by that point. Drums were tracked in Germany with Sky Van Hoff (Rammstein/Aborted) and all the guitar and bass tracks were recorded by the band themselves.

The four-piece eventually found the singer they were looking for in Alex da Costa, whose venomously expressive vocals and menacing presence finally completed the monstrous and muscular sonic attack of LOKUST. They soon recorded the newly composed vocals with Justin Hill of SikTh engineering, and to fully realise the intensity and ferocity of their new songs, recruited Mark Lewis (Whitechapel/DevilDriver) to mix and master their long awaited debut album Infidel. 

Featuring eleven tracks, Infidel is a creatively complex and thunderous dose of modern metal, brimming with pummelling drums and bass, shredding guitar riffs and blood-curdling vocals – although simultaneously featuring moments of dynamic introspection and poignancy throughout the album.

”We always meant for LOKUST to exist on the border between old-school and contemporary – we use a lot of layering in our songwriting as well as aiming to integrate the full array of what a metal band can do these days, technically and production-wise – but our loyalty to imperfections, raw expression and humanity remains paramount,” Says the band about this new record. We’ve always aspired to follow in the footsteps of the bands we first fell in love with, who seemed to have a more transparent, expressive way of executing their music, rather than what we perceive as the more careful and polished approach of a lot of bands these days,” they add.

Set to be released on July 28, Infidel is packed with furious riffs and massive groove-laden hooks that will surely position LOKUST as one of the most promising and talented metal bands in the current UK metal scene.

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Swedish melodic death-metal newcomers After Earth recently revealed a music video for a brand new song of the band’s forthcoming debut album The Rarity of Reason, which is set to be released on August 18th.

Titled ‘Prometheus’, this video was produced by After Earth and J. Nyman Photography. Watch it here:

The Rarity of Reason was produced, recorded and mixed by Robert Kukla at Obsidian Recording Studios, drums were recorded at Nordic Sound Lab, and it was later mastered by renowned producer Fredrik Nordström at Studio Fredman, and will available just in time for the band’s European tour supporting Swedish death metal band Mara.

After Earth was created in the fall of 2017 in Skövde, Västra Götaland, Sweden, but it was only in mid-2019 that the band found a stable line-up and crafted enough material to start playing live shows.

Then, the global pandemic forced them to cancel a few shows so they opted to record new songs instead,and in 2020 After Earth self-released their debut EP ‘Before It Awakes’, which was met with great critical acclaim.

The following two years were a bit turbulent for the band as they suffered some line-up changes, yet the Swedes still managed to release a single ‘From Age to Aeon’ in 2022, which was a heavier track clearly showing where After Earth was heading musically.

In early 2023, just a few weeks before the recordings of their debut album The Rarity of Reason started, After Earth suffered another setback when both guitarists decided to leave for various reasons. The remainder of the band (Marcus Rydstedt: vocals, Anton Vehkaperä: drums and guitars, Olof Öman: Bass and acoustic guitars) then spent two weeks together with producer and studio engineer Robert Kukla at Obsidian Recording Studios to work on the album. Anton Vehkaperä recorded the majority of electric guitars on the album (bar solos which were outsourced to Christoffer Nilsson) while Olof Öman recorded the acoustic parts as well as chords.

Drums were recorded at a later date by Anton Vehkaperä in Nordic Sound Lab. The album was mixed by Rob Kukla and then mastered by death metal studio legend Fredrik Nordström at Studio Fredman.

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illereye / Eyeless Records – 28th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Lee Riley’s works include only minimal information about their inspiration or methodology, often coming only with the advice of ‘loudspeakers or headphones’. This is sound advice – if you’ll pardon the pun – not least of all because try as I might, I have never yet succeeded in listening to anything telepathically. This no doubt sounds incredibly facetious, but I’m only partly joking. With my inbox bursting with more new music than I could ever listen to in ten lifetimes, and that’s assuming a lifetime is a couple of centuries, I often find myself lamenting my inability to simply absorb all of the music by some kind of cerebral osmosis. I have sat and visualised a method whereby I place electrodes to my temples and the files simply transfer, or even a large syringe by which the music could be injected into me. I have similar visualisations about writing. Speech to text dictation programmes simply aren’t enough, it’s not practical for the most part. Since I compose most of what I write in my mind while walking along or doing other things, what I need is thought to text, by which the ideas simply appear on the screen. Way more useful than the AI shit that’s supposedly taking over.

With no detail to contextualise the title, or the sound contained therein, From Here We are Nowhere leaves us to interpret for ourselves, and before I hit play, I feel a sense of pessimism descend upon me from the inference of the phrase. The future is bleak… we are nowhere… lost, adrift, or worse, the connotations are there of ceasing to exist. Perhaps it’s my habit of having news channels on in the background while I go about my day, while I work my dayjob, while I cook on an evening, on mute but with subtitles, and the last week or two have elicited a sense of impending apocalypse. And I ask myself, why has it taken till now, when half the world is either melting or on fire to take climate change seriously. So where do we go from here? Probably nowhere.

The six pieces on this album take the form of dense, suffocating drones: the title track thrums and throbs like a thick, acrid smoke that engulfs your entire being, five-and-a-half minutes of muffled tones that grow in tension. Shards start to scrape and funnel near the end, but then it’s gone, just beyond reach. There is something illusive about this album. It feels as though there are forms to be found, but they’re submerged. ‘Lifting Undertow’ is ominous, and the scrunching scrapes and rattles are menacing, reminiscent of a sensation I experienced in a recurring dream as a child, perhaps most easily described as the visual disturbance of a migraine manifesting in an aural form. It’s all very quiet and low-key, making you feel quite detached from the plane on which the sound is playing out, and this is true of the album as a whole. ‘Undoing These Knotted Times’ is a long, low, sonorous undulating buzz that’s sedative and soporific, but also uncomfortable and queasy, as bleary and blurry as the cover art suggests. As that final note hovers and fades, a desolation grips harder: is there really any scope to undo these knotted times? Or is this simply a painful paradox?

The idea of ‘Staring Through Lit Skies’ feels optimistic, evoking perhaps a sunrise, but the reality is that the serrated drone and scrapes of feedback are more like looking at the searing sun through the smoke of a wildfire. It’s painful, and damaging, and it saps your strength as the only dawning is the realisation that we are all doomed.

I feel in my limbs and in my lungs and in my heart as the final trails of ‘No One Knows What’s Inside’ dissipate into the thick, claggy atmosphere following a crackling hum of distortion and grumbling, and then, there is nothing. And here we are, as we find ourselves… nowhere.

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TAR POND have just unveiled the fierce video clip ‘SLAVE’ as the next single taken from the Swiss doom visionaries’ forthcoming new album PETROL, which is scheduled for release on September 15, 2023.

TAR POND explain: “Although the video for ‘SLAVE’ was produced simultaneously with the clip for ‘BLIND’’, we approached the visuals in a quite different way”, vocalist Thomas Ott elaborates. “This dark and heavy song rather evokes simple and slow images. I had some interesting shots of jellyfish floating in dark water. So we decided to shoot some additional material of the band performing in the rehearsal room, filled with a maximum of smoke. That quickly turned out to be a bad idea due to the fire alarms installed in the building. Well, with the kind help of some good old friends, Marky managed to procure a much better location in no time. Initially, the video for ‘SLAVE’ was planned with more varied footage, but Fabrizio Merico’s sublime camera work, shot in only one night at the Zukunft Club in Zurich, and the absolute professional editing by Coroner’s Daniel Stoessel made us decide to just let it all go up in smoke! Sometimes less is more!”

Watch the video here:

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Solo experimental electro-industrial outfit, Nebulae Complex has just unveiled their new EP, Bryozoan Operator.

Inspired by peculiar plant and deep sea life amongst other themes, Bryozoan Operator paints an almost alien, yet familiar planetary landscape as viewed through remote sensing instrumentation. While Bryozoan Operator is not a concept EP, each track tells both its own story and also belongs in a loosely-tied and loosely-defined aesthetic universe of the entire EP.

The EP opens a new musical era for Nebulae Complex. It signifies a shift to harder-hitting electro-industrial beats with layered vocals while continuing with an intricate sound design. The sound and music morph organically and sometimes unexpectedly, albeit with solid precision and intention.

As a taster, they’ve produced a video for the track ‘Bleachburn’. Watch it here:

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SILVERBURN, the new solo project by James ‘Jimbob’ Isaac (Hark & Taint) will release its debut album Self Induced Transcendental Annihilation via MSH Group Music on August 11.

Welsh metal visionary Jimbob Isaac, known from his previous bands Taint and Hark, recorded the new album during lockdown in 2020. He handled all vocals, guitar, bass and drums himself. With this album, Jimbob has meticulously crafted a wholly uncompromising solo offering in the truest sense. It has been said that extreme conditions demand extreme responses, and Self Induced Transcendental Annihilation (‘SITA’) began as an elemental response to the almighty global gut-punch that surrounded it’s creation.

James ‘Jimbob’ Isaac about ‘Formless’: “This one’s for the metaphysics nerds! ‘ormless..’’ is an ode to solitude, meditation and cosmic implosions! The video is an extension of my real-life solo mission, in making this album and the art and video work ongoing. I mean, of course I made myself into cyborgs to play all the instruments.”

From the world-ending double-kick maelstrom of opening track ‘Annihilation’ to the cinematic, discordant chug and release of ‘Etheric Crush’ this album draws from Isaac’s beloved eras of 90’s metal and 00’s metallic hardcore, noisecore, space and sludge metal and bands like Botch, Mastodon, Knut, Converge, Keelhaul, Crowbar, Sepultura, Neurosis and Helmet.

Today Silverburn share second track ‘Formless Atomization Of Omniscient Particulate’. Check it here:

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Pic: Chris Treseder

Silverburn live are a three piece now, first confirmed dates:

Aug 12 – The Bunkhouse Swansea

Aug 18th – Arctangent Festival

Sept 8th – Oslo London w/ Mutoid Man

Sept 13th – The Exchange Bristol w/ Mutoid Man