Archive for November, 2023

Watch: ‘Palliare’ by †The Lord† & Daniel Kubinski

Posted: 5 November 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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†The Lord† (Greg Anderson) and Daniel Kubinski (Die Kreuzen, The Crosses) have released their haunting collaborative track, ‘Palliare.’ Long circling each other with reverence, Anderson and Kubinski teamed up to track guitars and vocals for the song late last year; the former recorded with Brad Wood at Sea Grass and the latter at Howl Street Studios.  The end result is nothing short of venomous, with caustic, corrosive vocals and massive, monolithic guitar. The ‘Palliare’ composition itself was inspired by “an empathetic attempt to interpret the despair of someone in palliative care,” comments †the Lord†.

Daniel Kubinski comments on the track: “The lyrics for ‘Pallaire’ were actually written in 2016 when the first line up of The Crosses were writing songs for an original LP. The lyrics were for a song entitled ‘Goner’ which was kind of a noisy, lightning speed, crazy song that sounded somewhat like the Birthday Party if they had written a hardcore song. I had always liked the lyrics so when the Crosses split up in 2017 (the first inception of the group) I held on to the lyrics hoping to use them for something else down the road.” He continues, “In 2022 Sunn O))) guitarist and Southern Lord founder Greg Anderson approached me and invited me to sing on one of his songs for his project, The Lord. The first time I heard the song Greg sent me, I immediately remembered the Goner lyrics and thought they might work for the song, they were a perfect fit! I am so proud to be part of The Lord family and that Greg and Southern Lord believed in me to come up with the goods.” †The Lord† adds: “I’ve been a massive fan of Daniel Kubinski ever since I heard his caustic vocals in Die Kreuzen circa 1985. While the musical direction of Die Kreuzen changed drastically over the years, it was always anchored by Daniel’s unique, innovative vocal style. Massive respect to him for simultaneously blazing a unique path and breaking new ground. I finally got to meet Daniel when Sunn O))) played with his current band, The Crosses, in Milwaukee at the Turner Ballroom. I was equally blown away by his performance that evening as well as his humility and kindness.”

Watch the video here:

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Beige Palace – Making Sounds for Andy

Posted: 4 November 2023 in Albums
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Human Worth – 10th November 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

I know it’s not really cool to make that you’re cool because you’re in the know or whatever. A few years ago, it was the way of the hipster, but after what felt like forever, they seems to have disappeared, probably because everyone grew beards during lockdown, so the hipsters had to shave and resort to telling people they were wearing a beard before the pandemic or something. Nevertheless, I can’t help but take some satisfaction from having observed Beige Palace from their very dawn, at their first show in the now-lost CHUNK rehearsal space-cum-gig venue way back in the spring of 2016. The place was a bugger to get to from the train station, being practically in the middle of nowhere you’d actually want to go, and to describe it as basic would be polite. But what CHUNK provided was a place where anything went. It was BYOB, pay what you can, and it was a hub of creativity which lay at the heart of the DIY scene in Leeds. And so it was that Beige Palace – perhaps not quite a supergroup at the time, but simply people in other bands (Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe (Thank), Kelly Bishop (Gloomy Planets) and Ant Bedford (Cattle)) doing something different together – came to be.

They’ve come a way since then, notably with slots at The Brudenell supporting Mclusky and also Shellac, with a personal thumbs-up from god himself, Steve Albini. There’s likely a number of reasons for this, apart from the simple fact that Beige palace are bloody good, a major one being that they make angular noise without being overly abrasive, preferring instead to push sounds that are slated, skewed, imbalanced, jarring, jolting. This is right up front at the start of this, their second long-player, with ‘Not Waving’, a scuzzy collision of Shellac, The Fall, early Pavement, and Truman’s Water. The bass is right up in the mix, the vocals down low, and everything about it is absolutely wrong in terms of conventional sound. You can imagine sound engineers all around the country shaking their heads and saying “but that bass is just booming… it’s drowning out the vocals… and the guitar, maybe you should take the treble down a bit?” But Beige palace’s sound isn’t conventional, and they’re not going for radio-friendly pop tunes.

The album’s title appears to make a nod to XTC, and calls to mind the band’s hit ‘Making Plans for Nigel’ (surely one of the greatest snappy tunes of the New wave era) and the fact that Andy Partridge was co-frontman of XTC. Coincidence? Am I joining dots and identifying references which simply don’t exist? Possibly, but then again, for all the wrongness, the off-key and the off-kilter, there are some neat hooks to be found leaping out from the rumbling basslines and loping drums. ‘Local Sandwich’ is representative: the rhythm section strolls along kicking a loose groove where the bass and drums are seemingly playing alternate to one another, the discordant sprechgesang vocals of the verses overlap one another, making for a tense combination – and then out of nowhere, pow! Hook! And then a squalling climax.

The genius of the songwriting lies in its unpredictability: for as much as the compositions are largely built around repetitive motifs, hammering away at the same nagging loop for minutes at a time, adding and subtracting elements such as keyboard or guitar, they’re prone to veer off somewhere else or otherwise change tempo or burst into a scratchy blast of noise at precisely the moment you least expect – and just when you expect something unexpected, a song like ‘My Brother Bagagwaa’ doesn’t do it. They’re as keen to explore the space in between the notes as the notes themselves, and there are numerous passages on Making Sounds for Andy where they pull things back to stark minimalism. This makes the crackling bursts of distortion and clattering drums all the more impactful.

Leeds has a habit of birthing weird bands who are nosy but not noise, with the legendary Bilge Pump and the should-have-been-legendary Bearfoot Beware providing a brace of examples – but Beige Palace are very much their own band. Making Sounds for Andy is a bold celebration of ramshackle lo-fi, delivered in such a way as to hit hard. It’s got ‘underground classic’ all over it.

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Various Artists – Human Worth III

Posted: 3 November 2023 in Albums
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Human Worth – 3rd November 2023

Christropher Niasnibor

For all of our astounding advances over the last three millennia, as a species, man is not only a bad animal, but the worst. We have the capacity to achieve truly great things, but instead expend immeasurable amounts of time and effort – and that most ruinous of human constructs, money – on destroying one another and the planet we inhabit. The world is eternally at war, but recently, tensions have escalated to levels which are difficult to comprehend: as the war in Ukraine continues to rage, with almost universal condemnation of Russia, events in the last few weeks in the Middle East have provoked rather different reactions. Division, it seems, begets division, and it seems that the frame has frozen while people bicker over sides, the need to condemn Hamas and to support the mantra that Israel has the right to defend itself.

Perhaps some of this is war-fatigue, perhaps it’s the influence of the media, perhaps some of it’s simply pure shock at the horror of the scale of the bloodshed, but it feels as if the world has paused while all of this plays out with gruesome inevitability. Social media is a minefield, and it feels like any kind of comment could prove inflammatory. But the fact is, political allegiances need to be set aside in the face of the fact that thousands upon thousands of civilians are dying – with women and children disproportionately affected.

The notes which accompany this release set out the situation plainly and directly: there is no need to employ emotive language here, as the stark facts hit far harder.

‘Children in Gaza are living through a nightmare – one that gets more distressing by the hour. So far since the war broke out nearly 4,000 children have been killed – that’s 800 more than yesterday! This horrifying a number surpasses the annual number of children killed in conflict zones since 2019. With a further 1000 children reported missing in Gaza, assumed buried under the rubble, the death toll is likely much higher. All the funds raised through this charity release will be donated to help Save the Children and their network of charities to provide direct lifesaving and mental health support, distribute essential supplies, as well as education facilities and safe spaces for children.’

We know that Human Worth are good guys: the label’s very name is an advertisement for their operating model which involves the donation of a portion of sales proceeds from each release to charity, and they’ve put out a couple of charity compilations already in their relatively brief existence. And while governments sit and watch on, or otherwise give their unreserved backing to Israel, Human Worth have galvanised themselves and their impressive network of artists to pull together a new compilation from which all funds raised will be donated to support Save the Children’s Gaza Emergency Appeal.

This is reason enough to buy it anyway. But this is a stunning release in its own right, featuring twenty-eight tracks from the Human Worth roster and beyond, with a slew of exclusive cuts which make this a quality compilation of music from the noisier end of the spectrum.

It’s got some big hitters, too: Steve Von Till is up first with ‘Indifferent Eyes’ and Enablers are also up early with ‘In McCullin’s Photograph’, and kudos to both the label and the artists for coming together for this.

Sort of supergroup Cower, featuring among others, members of Blacklisters and USA Nails and who released their album BOYS through Human Worth in 2020 offer an exclusive in the shape of the jarring ‘False Flag’, as do Thee Alcoholics with the jolting ‘Catch the Flare’.

Elsewhere, we get representative selections showcasing the best of the label’s recent releases, not least of all ‘Wasted on Purpose’ by Remote Viewing’ and the astringent nine-minute behemoth that is ‘As Shadow Follows Body’ by Torpor from their devastating debut Abscission. Newcastle noisemongers Friend give us eight minutes of carefully-considered transitions and some really quite nice melodies as they build the emerging riff-monster that is ‘Uncle Tommy’. The buzzy, lo-fi gothy synth-punk of The Eurosuite’s exclusive cover of Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Zero’ is quite a contrast – and sounds like one of Dr Mix and the Remix’s brutal smash-ups – and on the subject of brutal, the sub-two-minute grindcore assault that comes courtesy or FAxFO is utterly furious. HUWWTD’s Late Cormorant Fishing makes for an unexpected standout. Think Shellac with metal vocals and you’re on the way.

Despite the rushed – by necessity – nature off the release, the sequencing shows real consideration as the songs shift between different atmospheres and moods. Human Worth III displays the consistency of quality we’ve come to expect from the label, and the artists’ rapid willingness to contribute speaks volumes about all of them. As a result, Human Worth III is a bloody good album. Go buy it – and pay as much as you can.

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Listen: ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’ by Ex Everything

Posted: 3 November 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Oakland, California-based post-hardcore quartet Ex Everything – formed by current and former members of Kowloon Walled City, Early Graves, Mercy Ties, Blowupnihilist, Less Art, and more – present ‘Exiting The Vampire Castle’. The song is the third single from the band’s debut album, Slow Change Will Pull Us Apart, which will be released 10th November via Neurot Recordings.

About the track, vocalist Andre Sanabria says, “The song, ‘Exiting The Vampire Castle’ is named after an essay by political and cultural theorist Mark Fisher. In that essay, Fisher argues that people on the political left will reinforce organizational solidarity by orienting around economic class, rather than identify and culture.

Andre continues… “As the 3rd single off Slow Change Will Pull Us Apart, the song’s lyrics ruminate on the essay’s themes. The band invites listeners to not only come along on a sonic adventure but to act as a spark for progress long after the album is over.”

Listen to ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’ here:

Ex Everything have hope for the future. The caveat? “Hope without action is meaningless”. For this band, action comes in the form of creation, and creation comes in the form of frenetic, raw music, full of rage but driving for change in the system and in our lives.

Despite the pedigree of players, Ex-Everything will be the first to admit that this band is very much its own thing. Jon Howell says, “It addresses the part of us that wants to write fast, chaotic, knotty, messy, pissed off music.”

The music is a fusion of Dischord-influenced math rock and noisecore, a nuanced rage that refuses to accommodate the passive listener. Jon Howell’s percussive, angular playing is as impressive as it is baffling, with malformed chords and abstract melodies that still burrow effortlessly into your brain. Dan Sneddon’s drumming is a stampede of frenetic time signatures, deceptively understated patterns and anthemic bashing, while Ben Thorne’s bass roils underneath like a ship’s hull scraping the ocean floor.

The band’s true skill, though, lies in how their instruments interlock, the structuring of movements that grow songs from rotted dirges to triumphant war cries, rhythmic tension building until a riff explodes it into something unexpected and completely satisfying. Notably, the band welcomes Andre Sanabria to take over vocal duties, “Andre has been a musical force in all his previous bands. His vocal intensity is compelling,” Howell says. Sanabria screams like he’s trying to tear the songs apart, though he manages to find moments of almost zen-like contemplation. It’s a deft and mesmerising performance, aided by his deeply thoughtful lyrics about, as Howell says, the steady dismembering of the things that bind us.

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Listen: ‘Schmuck’ by ZAHN

Posted: 2 November 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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German post–modern noise rock ensemble ZAHN will release their second full–length album Adria on 24th November. Adria offers a bold escape from your daily life through technicolor transmissions of post–rock, krautrock, dark jazz, noise–rock, post–punk and electronic music. Influenced by the likes of TRANS AM, THE JESUS LIZARD, METZ, THE MELVINS and TORTOISE. Adria is a compelling soundtrack to a 1980’s anti–utopian road movie!

Adria was mixed and mastered by Magnus Lindberg (RUSSIAN CIRCLES, CULT OF LUNA) at his Stockholm studio. The cover artwork, based around photographs by Lupus Lindemann(KADAVAR), was designed by Fabian Bremer (RADARE, AUA).

The album is a testament to the incredible power of this trio and its ability to effortlessly ensnare your attention for the duration of a ten minute–song of purely instrumental music. Over the course of the album’s 11 tracks ZAHN emerge as a form of PINK FLOYD of noise rock, relentlessly pushing the envelope on what’s already accomplished while remaining tasteful and tasty at every corner.

Listen to ‘Schmuck’ here:

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Gintas K – Catacombs & Stalactites

Posted: 2 November 2023 in Albums
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Antenna Non Grata – 8th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Bloody hell, he’s at it again: Lithuanan soundmachine Gintas K has yet another album out – and this one is different again. While Catacombs & Stalactites does, almost inevitably, feature rapid, bubbling, bibbling, watery electronic skitters, which sound like flurrying insects, bubbling water racing around a drain., and R2-D2 fizzing in malfunction, the dominant sonic feature here is not the microtonal bleeps which have been the focus of many of his albums, but heavy, grating synth sounds which buzz, scrape, and distort.

Things begin comparatively gently, but by the third track, ‘Into deepness’, we’re into pretty heavy territory. There are hints of tune to be found in places – dark, gothic synth motifs briefly emerge from the thick haze. It feels loud, and the listening experience is oppressive, like pressure being applied to either side of your skull, and the track really tests your mettle over its six minute duration, because there’s simply no let up, and the thick buzz presses at your brain relentlessly. It’s the same thick, hazy sounds which blare forth on the next piece, ‘Somewhere’ – only rent with tearing laser blasts and distortion which scratches and scrapes at the speaker cones, threatening damage, before it culminates in a crackling blast.

‘Wandering Joy’ wanders through dissonance and discord, warping and scraping through tearing walls of noise and aberrant glitches, spiralling around and spinning through territory shared with power electronics and the more experimental end of industrial (in the Throbbing Gristle sense, not the latter-day Industrial metal of Ministry et al). For all of its wandering, whether or not it brings joy is a matter for discussion, I suppose.

The bold, buzzing, abrasive synths sounds are broad and bassy, and the grinding lower-end oscillations are evocative of Suicide, only amped up to eleven. ‘Atmosphere / Voices’ crashes in on a wall of feedback and overloading distortion. At this point, things reach a new intensity, and the crackling, fizzing buzz at the edges of this enveloping blanket of noise simply adds to the tension which rips from the speakers.

There are lighter moments, which are more quintessential K: then flickering flutters, clicks and pops of ‘Mystery’ are almost playful, sounding somewhat like the pouring of carbonated mortar with twangs and deadened thwaps creating a muggy texture, and ‘Local Beings’ brimming with zaps and squelches which fly every which way before trickling down to a dribble resembling a fast leak.

This is very much Gintas K’s way: his approach to ‘composition’ is very loose and geared toward improvisation.

The album’s title derives from the ninth and tenth tracks, ‘Catacombs’ and ‘Stalactites’ which both in their way evoke the subterranean, darkness, tunnels, claustrophobia. ‘Stalactites’ shutters and reverberates, grates and gyrates, the frequencies registering around the navel amidst another squall of fragmented, glass-like shattering, and ‘Stalactites’ hangs heavy amidst blasts of noise. ‘Catacombs’ fractures and disintegrates as it leads the listener down, down, down. In my mind’s eye, I’m drawn towards recollections of the Paris catacombs – endless miles of tunnels lined with bones, neatly stacked, row upon row of old skulls, fibulas and tibias piled high and all around to forge cavities of death. Few things hold a mirror to mortality more powerfully than infinite piles of dank bones, and K leads – or moreover drags – us through these gloomy tunnels, while still electronic sparks skip and flash like damaged lighting or split cables before explosions of sparking white noise collapse into nothingness.

We’re grateful for a few light splashes and bubbles near the end, but the chances are the trauma has already taken hold.

Catacombs & Stalactites is a harsh and heavy album, and one that isn’t easy to lay to rest, to move on from.

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Watch: ‘On The Bridge of Dreams’ by Kinit Her

Posted: 2 November 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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KINIT HER release an image-rich nocturnal flight of fancy that becomes manifest in their second video clip ‘On the Bridge of Dreams’ taken from the American symbolist post-folk collective’s forthcoming new album The Nature Out There, which is slated for release on December 15, 2023.

Watch the video here:

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KINIT HER comment: “The words at the end of ‘On the Bridge of Dreams’ are a sampled quote from the Perennialist philosopher Frithjof Schuon”, vocalist and electronic sound-designer Nathaniel Ritter explains. “He states: ‘It’s not enough to think about metaphysics, one wants to also to see and to hear metaphysics in visible forms… and this is symbolism, and symbolism coincides with beauty. Symbolism, yes?’. ‘On the Bridge of Dreams’ is a heartfelt affirmative response to this question. Call forth your mirror, draw the spark, and begin again.”

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Eamon the Destroyer – We’ll be Piranhas

Posted: 1 November 2023 in Albums
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Bearsuit Records – 31st October 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Just a little over two years since the idiosyncratically-monikered Eamon the Destroyer arrived with his debut single ‘My Drive’, he’s gone from strength to strength – to the extent that his output has erupted, Godzilla-like, expanding and flexing immense musical muscles. Sort of. Because Eamon the Destroyer’s work is, despite the connotations of a raging beast laying waste to entire civilizations with a single roar, incredibly intimate, with tension building from the introspective minimalism of the songs. With the release of the debut album A Small Blue Car and a remix / reworking of said album landing in quick succession, the arrival of We’ll be Piranhas seems swift.

We’ll be Piranhas finds Eamon the Destroyer (any truncation of the name feels wrong: Eamon too casual and to cuddly; the Destroyer simply unrepresentative) pushing the parameters of experimentalism, conjuring the sonic equivalent of the surreal oddness of the album’s cover, which looks like a three-way split-screen of medievalism, Anglo-Saxon fable, and a deranged reimagining of some of Captain Cook’s sketches of newly-discovered species with what appears to be a polar bear resting its chin on a narwhal, while gulls look on and rabbits look away. Or something.

‘The Choirmaster’ is both droney and playful, quirky, and mellow, until it spins off its axis and into a whole other world of spiralling prog and doodling daftness. It certainly packs a lot into five strange and disorientating minutes. Single ‘Rope’ is glitchy, awkward, and feels like it doesn’t belong to anything, and suddenly, it lurches too life with a loping rhythm and fuzzy synths which provide a backdrop to tense, almost strangled vocals, hushed, strained, and gravelly. Not for the first time, I long for a lyric sheet as the scratchy vocals render the words difficult to decipher, but this is perhaps his most vitriolic piece to date; more often than not, Eamon the Destroyer croaks melancholy: here, there’s a fire, and it carried through into the wheezing clatter of ‘Sonny Said’. There’s a moment around the mid-point I get a pang of Seventeen Seconds-era Cure. But it’s fleeting, and nothing is pinpointable, particularly in this swirling maelstrom of a piece.

When it comes to Bearsuit releases, I often find myself using and reusing the word ‘weird’ as a descriptor – mostly because it’s the thing that really defines the label. While the likes of Harrold Nono spin Eastern hues into spirals and spin drifts of experimentalism, We’ll be Piranhas finds ETD really going all-out to try stuff. And the result is brain-bending.

‘Underscoring the Blues’ somehow manages to melt fairground oddness with The Doors and prog and, well, all sorts, to blur into a curious cocktail.

It’s difficult – if not impossible –to listen to this album and feel ‘normal’. It feels like the soundtrack to a dream: one of those weird dreams where familiar places aren’t quite right – the walls of familiar rooms are different, doors and windows are in the wrong place, and continually moving, and you look to make your way out and suddenly the door has vanished. The floor is moving and familiar faces warp and acquire new, alien aspects. You don’t know who you are or what’s going on, but you know that this isn’t what you expected as the sights and sounds of the familiar melt into one another. You feel your sense of time and space begin to crumble. Where am I? What even is this?

It feels like isolation. It feels like… like… like numbness, confusion. You feel your body tense, the backs of the legs growing taut. The title tracks sends everything spinning and whirling every whichway, and there is no easy way to assimilate this, and the same is true of the woozy glitchings of the desolate ‘A Call is Coming’. Ignore the call; decline it. Look inwards. Woah, something isn’t quite right.

We’ll be Piranhas leaves you feeling detached, askance, apart, removed, not quite right. It’s an introspective work delivered from on the cusp. On the cusp of what? It’s hard to say. Perhaps it’s best not to.

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