Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Emma Ruth Rundle – These Killing Times

Posted: 28 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Errant Child – 18th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

These Killing Times is Emma Ruth Rundle’s sixth studio album. It’s released on her own Errant Child label, and it’s a bold work.

As we learn from the accompanying notes, it weas ‘written as she watched from afar the devastating effects of yet another climate disaster unfold in early 2025, Emma reflected on the roots of the systemic issues that filter directly into so many catastrophic global events, and made a conscious choice to reach towards making a hopeful record. Where outside forces tempted her to turn inwards, towards isolation and hopelessness, she instead reached outwards to create a record that acknowledges pain, but offers both community and resilience in response.’

I keep thinking, and saying this – as much as anything in an attempt to process the information: the word is on fire. The world is at war. Just because World War 3 has not been declared doesn’t change the fact that with Russia vs Ukraine, The US vs Iran and the spread around the Middle East, not to mention the fringe involvement of the UK and other NATO allies in supposedly ‘defensive’ moves, and civil wars in Sudan and Myanmar, the globe is pretty hot right now. I omit Israel’s assault on Gaza and the West Bank from this list because the disproportionate imbalance disqualifies this as a war, and I shall move on from there because this is ultimately an album review, but the points and distinctions need to be made, and are fitting in context of the album’s title and inspiration. Also, when I say that the world is on fire… this is no exaggeration.

There is a sense that doing your recycling and so in is but pissing in the wind, but you have to play your part, right?

On These Killing Times, Emma Ruth Rundle takes her time in exploring her themes: all bar two f the album’s tracks extend beyond the five-minute mark, and the lilting piano of the first song, ‘Powerless’ makes for a song which is more uplifting than the title suggests. But powerless is how I’ve felt these last few months. Weak, defeated, drained, as if there was nothing I could do. But I digress: from behind the rippling notes and layered vocals blast powerful riffs which are quintessential grunge. And the way she chews her words… is glorious. It speaks of a social awkwardness, a self-conscious contradiction that balances the desire to be heard with an embarrassment of being heard too clearly. This was, of course, the dichotomy which lay at the heart of grunge, and was a particular contradiction which lay at the heart of Nirvana: the words mattered, but it was too much to sing the words with clarity.

‘God’s Picture’ is a slow-builder, whereby layers build as does the song’s power. By the end, It’s simply enormous. ‘Anvil’ is, meanwhile, subtle in its approach but, in the chorus, as heavy as the title suggests. Her vocals venture skywards with an almost folky quality towards the end of the song, but it’s the turbulence of the build which has the most impact. ‘Catherine Wheel’ spins with a rare energy, her vocal soaring and spiralling skyward.

Stripping things back, which she does – albeit infrequently – for ‘Don’t Delay Heven’ Rundle becomes most open in revealing her vulnerable side, and ‘Enough’, too is both sparse but heavy, and the intensity of the final two minutes is phenomenal, a brain—melting swirl.

These Killing Times is almost schizophrenic in the way it flicks between ponderous folk and mega riffs, but that’s it’s success, ultimately. What an album.

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Sly & The Family Drone – With Love

Posted: 25 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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28th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Time has a habit of evaporating, and life has a tendency to obstruct plans, and so it is that the latest offering from twisted jazz weirdos, with the slightly slushy, smushy loved-up Clintons Cards connotations of its title was intended to land on Valentine’s Day. Oh well, it’s perhaps for the best. I’m picturing a scene where a couple are enjoying a romantic evening in, a candlelit dinner with some nice food, a glass of wine, and after maybe a Rom-Com they’re getting in the mood, but instead of Barry White or something smooth and sultry, one of them says “I know just the thing. There’s this new album by Sly and the Family Drone…” Fuck knows how the scene ends, but it’s certainly not with the blissful soft-focus union of an 80s romance – more likely indescribably carnage, likely unspeakable gore, probably even at least one death.

As ever, most of the titles are random or otherwise inexplicable, although I’m sure they have their reasons, but unusually, the crazy puns and wordplay are largely absent, suggesting perhaps a newfound seriousness – although that seems unlikely. And what of ‘Cloth Control’, the album’s final piece? There’s probably something wrong with me that I’d leap to ‘touching cloth’, but from a band with songs with titles like ‘Handed Cack’ and ‘Sunken Disorderly’

‘Psychic Surgery’ begins innocuously enough, although, being Sly and the Family Drone, it’s more dark atmospheric sax and swampy drone with a reverb-soaked abb and flow, than it is smooth, seductive sax: there’s a noirish hint to the opening minutes, before supernatural skitters begin to creep in at a low level, and the percussion begins to clatter with unsettling irregularity – but increasing urgency – a couple of minutes in. It conveys the sense of a gathering storm, and noise begins to swell… but it passes without breaking. However, any sense of relief is but brief, as things get weirder and more tense with the more electronic ‘The Guts of Albion’. It starts with a murky, muffled-sounding pulsation, and a metallic clatter that calls to mind Neubauten or Test Dept. It’s against this tense backdrop, with heavy hints of another growing tempest, that the sax arrives – and this time, it is actually pretty smooth. I mean, it’s hardly 80s Tina Turner, or Dave Brubeck for that matter, but it’s by no means disagreeable. But as the beats build, and the sonorous drone sustains, so sax becomes more fragmented and the tension grows, and around halfway through the track’s seven and a half minutes, a plateau is attained, and you feel a shift as static and distortion creep in… and finally, it hits like a tidal wave. It’s the perfect release.

As a title, ‘Over the Rainbow’ instantly calls to mind the song from The Wizard of Oz. A ballad, but one flavoured with hope and optimism for another place, a brighter future. But while that motif is actually present, it’s distorted and stretched and played against a backdrop of three and a half minutes of crackling distortion: it’s more like hearing a lullaby or the tinkling of a child’s music box when it appears on the soundtrack to a horror movie. The context shifts, and something light and innocent becomes something dark and ominous. And here, we feel that disconnect, that discomforting disjointedness. Here, it’s quite subtle, but in some respects, that renders it all the more unsettling.

‘In The Oils’ goes for the low, heavy drone – and you feel it in our gut, a slow churn. There are some vocals swimming low in the mix, and there are moments where if feels like listening to Throbbing Gristle where the speaker’s submerged in a domestic aquarium. Plus, the final three minutes bring more drumwork than anyone would ever need in a lifetime. It’s not beats, it’s an explosion. But it feels good, because yes, finally, we get it: a climactic, pummelling blast of tribal drums and a rising drone that feels more like a jet engine warming up for take-off. It’s a climax which is a mind-bending crescendo that feels like the end of days.

The last track, ‘Cloth Control’ is built on a slow, rolling drone and reverberating, echo-swamped sax hum and grinding electronics which lead the listener into an otherworldly space of abstraction and strangeness. And what’s strangest of all is that feels like a different album with every play, and different layers, different aspects, reveal themselves.

Overall, the percussion is much less prominent on With Love than on many previous releases, but the abstract jazz meanderings and overall sense of musical exploration is significantly greater than ever. The only thing that’s really predictable about Sly and the Family Drone is their unpredictability, and With Love ventures into new realms of weirdness.

AA

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Bombstrap – Big Enemy

Posted: 24 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Tartarus Records – 2nd October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometimes, and album comes crashing in and you feel its impact hard. It’s not so much an album as a massive detonation. A work that redefines its genre. An album that blows the top off our head.

Big Enemy by Bombstrap is that album. It’s s throbbing, gnarly, primitive punk album. So what’ s special about that? Bombstrap are special, in presenting a skin-peeling, furious rage what hurts. It’s not in any way refined or pretty, it’s raw and gritty and it’s real.

According to their bio, they were ‘born inside Rotterdam’s anarchist Poortgebouw community in 2025’and ‘have quickly established themselves as one of the most uncompromising new names in underground hardcore. Split between Manchester and Rotterdam, the four piece channels nihilism, black alchemy, and ultraviolence into a feral sound that owes as much to No Trend and Total Abuse as it does to a complete rejection of authority and conformity’.

They describe Big Enemy as ‘a blast of caustic, explosive hardcore delivered with ruthless precision’, and add that ‘Fueled by nihilism and anarchic conviction, the album is a sonic bullet aimed squarely at the heart of a corrupt society, uncompromising, abrasive, and impossible to ignore’. It’s hard to argue.

On the album’s second track, ‘Master Alchemist’, they step up and turn everything up to the max, and there’s no letup from hereon in. This is an album that grazes and cuts hard. Some of the bruising, raging noise belongs to the spirit of the early 90s – not just grunge, but riot grrl – but equally, Bombstrap belong the domain of hardcore punk and noise rock, and Big Enemy s a rabid and positively feral scream. This is an angry, explosive work. Every track is killer – and a pure distillation of nihilistic punk rage. ‘Machhiavellianism’ is, like half of the tracks on Big Enemy, well short of two minutes long – in fact, it’s only a second over one minute – and in that time they bring punk energy and a hundred miles an hour. There’s more than a dash of The Dead Kennedys to ‘Bakhmut’, and the final track, ‘Poppy Seeds’ is manic and packs a swaggering rock ‘n’ roll riff.

Big Enemy isn’t just a metaphorical ‘fuck you’ to the big enemy in all its forms – big government, corporations, billionaires, and all the rest, but a literal one, with a raging, exasperated ‘fuck you’ being a common refrain across the album’s ten tracks. And too right: sometimes, there are no other words that do the job, and all there is, is to scream out the most primal of invective. Big Enemy is Bombstrap telling it like it is. No bullshit, no pretence, Bombstrap are the real deal.

AA

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Static Abyss – The Dying Hunt

Posted: 21 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Peaceville  – 28th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The Dying Hunt is the third album by Static Abyss, who feature Autopsy’s Chris Reifert and Greg Wilkinson. They describe themselves as ‘a monstrous hybrid of twisted, doom-laden brutal death’. And brutal it is.

On this outing, they note the addition of Chad Gailey of fellow death merchants Necrot on drums, and promise an album that ‘plummets the listener again into the festering, psychedelic swamps of lunacy, with the spiralling melodies texturing the relentless savage riffs for an effective nightmare-inducing trip through the sonic abyss. Continuously and relentlessly flitting between brutal passages and hypnotic otherworldly craziness, The Dying Hunt reflects the ailing world and the unravelling of the psyche of its inhabitants in this darkly dystopian landscape, for a masterful descent into sick Death Metal combined with Crust and Doom elements.’

Yeah. That ‘darkly dystopian’ thing… it’s the world we live in now. There’ no escaping it. It’s no longer a fringe thing. environmental disaster isn’t a conspiracy theory. Rogue AI and WW3 are no longer the domain of sci-fi and speculative fiction: governments across Europe are recommending people take peremptory action and are preparing for war. And this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. The bottom line is – and I’ve doubtless said this before – is that we’re fucked. I don’t mean this dramatically, or in any way hyperbolically.

On The Dying Hunt, Static Abyss articulate the anxiety over the sense of impending doom through the most rabid, raging, nihilistic blasts of hellish metal imaginable. The first track, ‘Skull Blasted’, is a sub-two-minute blast of scorching, soul-ripping fury. You don’t need the words, you just need to feel the force, and it tears its way through your very being like a wildfire. You feel your inner being scourged away in a mere moment.

And hell, do these mofos bring the riffs – but they also bring some psychedelic weirdness. ‘Lobotomized at Last’ swerves from relentless grind to a rather pleasant passage. It’s one of only a few. ‘Wall of Delusion’ is nothing short of overloading riff-mania, the band launching headlong into a relentless, brutal sonic assault. ‘Bleeding in the Fog’ starts out a bit mor melodic, a bit more liker it’s a lean to the raw, spitting depths. ‘Sinew Leech’ is it’s harsh and it’s brutal and the force and depth of the gut-churning grind only grows as the song and the album progresses. And it’s hellish, harsh, face-melting fury from the get-go. The face-melting ‘Bleeding in the Fog’ is exemplary. The Dying Hunt is relentless is its riffery. It’s one of those albums that is so heavy it slowly saps the life out of you.

AA

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30,000 Monkies – Super Rebound

Posted: 15 September 2026 in Reviews, Albums
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FKN KVLT REKORDS – 18th September 2026

The band describe their latest album, Super Rebound, as ‘is an action packed record with an unsound hero at the wheel. Wildly navigating through a landscape filled with leaden riffs, open harmonies, foghorns, and a dose of unadulterated joy and radiant bliss. Deranged, but sweet. Fuming with feels.’

This is only their third full-length album in their fifteen-year career, although they’ve maintained a steady flow of EPs, some of which have been on the longer side (their last release, HONESTY INTEGRITY FRIENDSHIP PASSION contained only four tracks, but due to the last one having a run time of twelve and a half minutes long, it spanned a full thirty minutes) – and they reckon this could be their definitive document, their magnum opus, the apogee of their riff-centric intent rendered concrete.

It’s certainly a big old guitar-driven racket, and it’s not without detail or humour, either. The first bars of the first song, ‘The Gums’, are kinda nicey-nicey, picked, melodic, a bit indie, a bit emo even, then all hell breaks loose with a thunderous slab of a riff and rabid vocals and I’ve no idea what the fuck they’re yelling about, but waaaauughh! It’s all good. Then there’s a rather Shellac-like mid-section where they persecute a single note for what feels like an eternity before going black metal in a blanket of fretwork and explosive percussion. It’s a lot to cram in to five minutes, but in keeping with the band’s name and general ethos, it’s chaotic and wildly unpredictable.

The punningly-titled ‘Prism Break’ melds driving repetition and the dingy riffery of early Melvins with something more fiery as they fire up all cylinders for a brutal sonic assault.

The three pieces with (quite self-explanatory) parenthetical titles are instrumental interludes where they lay down the guitars and explore very different territories. Consequently, after the meandering instrumental of [Horns Wailing], the sledgehammer sound of ‘Mountainesque 4’ his even harder by virtue of contrast. It’s six and a half minutes of unbridled raging racket, which hammers away relentlessly. The guitars are as dirty as they come and blur into the bass in a mess of overloading distortion, the barking vocals low in the mix… the midsection is, once again, a complete shift, venturing into almost neoprog territories, with swirling synths and pomp-filled bass runs. It borders on muso, but feels somewhat tongue-in-cheek – not quite parody prog, but the lilting, picked notes which play to the fade certainly mark a contrast. And then there’s the recent single, ‘Unsound Hero’, which tests the patience with the most protracted, strung-out intro, consisting initially of nothing but a crashing snare for the longest fifteen seconds imaginable, and then a clean guitar pulse enters the mix and… are they in time with one another? Something doesn’t seem quite right… Yes, of course it’s intentional. I’m momentarily reminded of The Melvins’ track ‘Mine is No Disgrace’ from The Crybaby, with JG Thirlwell – a sprawling eight-and-a-half minute behemoth that pushed the quite-loud dynamic thing to its absolute limit – because here, 30,000 Monkies drag that intro out, and out, teasing at when the levee will break and the riff will hit, exploring a melodic, proggy, Oceansize-like melodic drift… at two minutes and seven, there’s a pause. Silence. Nothing. Suspense. Two seconds is a long time when you’re teetering on the brink, when you’re hanging, waiting… But at two minutes and nine, BLAM! And that riff is low, grinding, and raw. The slow grinding notes ring long and resonate as they trudge into the domain of rib-crushing weight. Stripping it all away leaves the sound of a soul being torn apart and offers no solace – quite the opposite, in fact – before the devastating onslaught of the final minute.

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You might think these guys are fucking with you, and in a way, they probably are. The title track is nothing short of pure riffmania, nearly seven minutes of punishing, pulverising power that’s absolutely relentless, crushing, and again holding a single chord for what feels like an eternity in the final minute.

This is noise rock with the emphasis on the noise, the filthy overdrive and feedback cranked to the max, and any moments of respite are simply lulls and lures designed to amplify the impact of the most brutal, rib-cracking riffs when they land. The formula isn’t genius, or even new, but 30,000 Monkies know precisely how to utilise it for optimal impact. And ‘Swerver’ hits hard, alright.

The ringing layers of ambience which shape [Bells Ringing, Tale Melting] are a world apart from the rest of the album, and while the warping sounds which drag and drift aren’t entirely soothing, they’re on another plane from the fiery wall of guitars which dominate Super Rebound… until the final three minutes, when they pull out the most devastatingly crushing doom of the entire album. It feels like a trick, an ambush, and one we should have seen coming, because 30,000 Monkies just can’t help themselves. There has to be a bone-splintering, skull smashing riff at some point in every song. It’s just a question of when it lands.

Super Rebound is a work of genius, with 30,000 Monkies really delving into suspense and detail – but more than anything, it’s a riff-laden rager of an album.

AA

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Push For Night – That Porous Line

Posted: 13 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 7th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Three years on from Lasped Gasps, their collaboration with Jon Mueller, experimental duo Push For Night, consisting of Oliver Chapoy and James Elliott, decided they needed to take a slightly different approach and pull back on the intensity a tad and allow some hints of light into the darkness for the follow-up.

They write in the accompanying notes – as if offering reassurance to anyone who may be concerned that this means that their new album is some kind of breezy pop fun – that That Porous Line ‘is absolutely a collaged, flickering, chaotic, electro-acoustic record. The project is the project after all. Although our tomb-room isn’t fully hermetic (what is?), I think it is a place PFN will always reside. A total escape outside into harshly lit reality without mystery is fairly unappealing, for us anyway. Inside is personal, guarded from too much light; a dark terrarium of weird ghosts and peculiar shadows ripe for conjuring and harnessing in order to make them kick and howl in a way pleasing to us. Or at least be near enough to them to try and hear what they sing. That’s the motive. We decorate the cave, invite the specters to reveal a message, and try to capture something. Inside, cocooned in the semi-dark of our uncommon space, we bang our heads against the act of interpreting these shifty, chimeric, hidden sonic shadows. How big is it in here? How much further down can we go? Did something move in that corner over there? Can it touch us? Can we catch it? That’s where the fear is. That’s where the fun happens. That’s why we listen. That’s why we play.’

Compared to Lasped Gasps, pretty much anything would be lighter and less tense. But the first composition, the nine-and-three quarter-minute ‘A Good Hosing Down’ immediately makes clear the difference, opening with some scratchy strings and chiming notes which ring through a soft static and ambient mist. There’s no real sense of danger or threat here, and you don’t immediately feel as if you’re suffocating. But around seven minutes in, the atmosphere does change, and shit does get weird. Warped, spongy electronics rub against one another as they twist and turn in unpredictable directions.

The underlying structure of ‘Fang Vendor’ is a low, slow beat and swampy bass that’s almost a desert rock reimagining of Suicide, but over these are strains of retro-futurist space-age synths and random glitches and all kinds of sonic incursions that disrupt the flow.

At the centre of the album stand a brace of monolithic works: ‘It’s Sure To Be Dark If You Shut Your Eyes’ and ‘Idler’s Reward’ both pass the eight-minute mark, and place the collage nature of their approach to the fore. On the former, fragments of processed, glitched-out vocal samples and random snippets intersect with a piano motif which fades in and out while flickering beats flit around subtly in the distance, by no means driving or propelling the piece forward, instead adding further distraction to a palette already overloaded and blending to indistinction. Heavy drones, elongated organ sounds, ominous rumbles, and electronic explosions fizz and spark all over. Cymbals crash and tension builds. The latter provides some respite, with a slow, gradual glimmering change of hue accompanied by a sparse pulsation. I start to envisage the deep sea, the gentle, fluid movements of jellyfish… but then there’s a corrupted proggy synth break that utilises an awful farting synth sax sound or something, and further on, there’s some trilling jazz-infused woodwind. No two ways about it: That Porous Line explores experimentalism to the max. Asserting that the duo apply the collaging of materials indiscriminately may sound like a harsh criticism, but I make the observation more in the context of William S. Burroughs’ cut-ups, which brought collage to the page, and, shortly after, audio works, with the intention of creating art which was closer to life, and the way we experience an array of sensory inputs simultaneously. That Porous Line may be a fair bit smoother in its application of the methodological principles than early adopters of sound collaging – from John Cage to Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, but ultimately, this is about applying a technique established a long time ago in art to other media, specifically sound. And the aim is to be disorientating, to overlay fragments to achieve a certain effect.

‘Bait is Lowered’ is a dark, rippling wash of unsettling layers of sound, creeping, thrumming, before sputtering beats burst amidst a wail of siren-like sounds and everything dissolves into a panic-infused morass of sound. In many ways, it’s low-key: there are no brain-shredding walls of white noise here, but nothing about it is right, nothing about it is easy, comfortable.

That Porous Line isn’t one of those albums where you find yourself praying for it to finish, and it doesn’t suck the life out of you – but it’s no party, either. Culminating in the wall of static wash that is the final minute of ‘Turned Slowly and Slowly Turned’, and the somewhat proggy, somewhat Krautrock, somewhat ambient title track which draws the curtain remarkably gently. It’s a journey, and no mistake.

AA

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KiKu – Suzhou / It’s All The Rage (feat. Blixa Bargeld & Black Cracker)

Posted: 12 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Everest Records – 25th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

What we effectively have here is a pair of EPs from Swiss avant-garde act KiKu, led by trumpeter and composer Yannick Barman and drummer and percussionist Cyril Regamey, each one a collaboration – but rather than rendering them separate works, what we get is an album of two distinct halves, conceived, we’re told, as a diptych: ‘two distinct bodies of work held together by a shared musical architecture’, where, ‘on one side, Blixa Bargeld moves through language with precision, restraint and abrasion. On the other, Black Cracker turns language into rhythm, pressure and momentum. Between them, KiKu constructs a dense, unstable framework of trumpet, drums, sampler and electronics’. The result is something akin to a split album, on which the two sides of KiKu are as much a defining feature as their collaborators.

The first of the four works with Bargeld, ‘Orlando’s Victory,’ slides in with some retro-vibing electropop which isn’t a million miles away from late-career Leonard Cohen. Simmering synths strike some dramatic shapes and brooding tones atop a slightly shuffling, trip-hop infused beat. ‘The Number of the Millibeast’ is a slice of dark storytelling, a minimal, almost folky instrumental provides the backing for a half-sung, half spoken narrative, delivered with a theatrical flourish, before ‘Suzhou XX XY YX YY’ continues in the same sonic vein, while the lyrics become more abstract. The instrumentation becomes ever sparser and the lyrical cohesion crumbles with each successive piece, culminating in the flickering pulse and gasping weirdness of ‘Nonsense Rock ‘n’ Roll’, which seems to be a moan about some people playing music in the street in the night which rapidly escalates in divergent directions. The atmosphere is that of late-night, downtown, smoke and rough liquor, Bargeld adopting a persona that’s a bit Tom Waits, a bit Charles Bukowski, but which comes across with a hint of grizzled old man, chewed up and ground down by life, veering erratically between raconteur and curmudgeonly malcontent. ‘Do I like the music? No! Nonsense!”

While it’s Regamey’s percussion which sits to the fore on the Bargeld cuts, it’s Barman’s brass which takes the lead on ‘Bull Whip’, the first of four ‘bull’- themed tracks with Black Cracker. ‘So much road rage / so much road kill’, Black Cracker reflects. His delivery here is soulful yet sad, and the trip-hop vibe of ‘Suzhou’ makes a subtle but distinct switch to hip-hop on ‘It’s All The Rage’. ‘Leaping Bull (Chicago)’ is different again, and something deep within the song – the way the mournful trumpet which echoes out over stuttering beats, and Black Cracker’s grizzled, world-weary vocal, vaguely reminiscent in its patina to Mark Lanegan – tugs at half-forgotten emotions and a sense of memories of the past, hazed by time. And then, halfway through, it switches to a dense, droning slab of dark hip-hop, tense and twitching with angst. Coming out of nowhere, it hits hard, but paves the way for ‘The Running of the Bulls’, where bleak instrumentation and soulful but anguished vocals combine to convey a sense of conflict between the interior and the exterior. ‘Sleeping Bull’ notably is subtitled ‘Woke’ in parenthesis, and its lyrical and sonic latticework makes for a compelling combination while reminding us where the term ‘woke’ actually came from. It’s absurd to think that it’s been adopted as a pejorative term, predominantly by white, right-wing wanksacks. It’s high time to reclaim it, and to not only be woke, but woke and proud.

Decidedly more downtempo and downbeat than ‘Suzhou’, ‘It’s All The Rage’ feels less driven by anger or rage than it conveys an aching sadness, the kind that permeates the body to the core, and makes the limbs and the very heart weigh heavy. As a whole, Suzhou / It’s All The Rage is very much an album of two halves, precisely as intended. And as contrasting as the two sides are, they do, most definitely compliment one another, and, perhaps more importantly, they tap different triggers for response. It’s a multifaceted work, and most certainly an album to chew on.

AA

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Everything Decays – Requiem II: We Will Slaughter the Lambs

Posted: 10 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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11th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Numbering a debut album ‘II’ might seem rather odd, but it’s by no means a first: Throbbing Gristle’s debut was The Second Annual Report, after their first two cassette-only releases were entitled The Best of Throbbing Gristle (Vol I and II respectively). However, with Everything Decays, it follows their first EP, Requiem 1: The Serial Killer’s Symphony of Liberation, Deliverance and Relief, and the album, written as a story, continues an ongoing narrative in which each song is a chapter. So far, so conceptual. When it comes to plot, there are certainly no spoilers in the nots which accompany the album, which they describe as ‘A descent into the darkest corners of the human mind, where oppression breeds trauma, trauma ignites rage, and rage demands retribution. The album follows the journey of those who have been stripped of their humanity, rising against their oppressors only to discover that revenge comes at the cost of their own souls. It is a story of pain, resistance, justice, and the thin line between liberation and becoming the very evil they swore to destroy.’

The Dutch deathcore / hardcore quartet threaten ‘crushing riffs, filthy grooves, savage vocals and bone-shattering breakdowns, dragging hardcore aggression into one hostile wall of sound. They describe their music as an overload of quick and loud noise.’

Opener, ‘Miserere mei, Deus’ arrives with an unexpectedly folksy ring and a thick but elastic bass sound which sounds almost synthy, and the whispered vocal is soft but menacing… and over the course of two and a half minutes it builds… and it builds. But then faceripping guitar chords and thunderous drums crash in and the vocals turn rabid, driving into a complex but hard-hitting slab of metalcore rage, which dovetails directly into lead single ‘Crowd Control’ where shit really goes off. We’ve all seen how police and governments implement crowd control – and, at times, somewhat selectively at that – and Everything Decays approach the topic with a suitably extreme suite of imagery, with tendrils, bones, peeled flesh and spilling guts in a frenetic, kinetic, and frankly devastating metal explosion. The final section is a slow trudge that draws as much on the pulverising weight of Swans and Godflesh as anything from the death / hardcore end of the spectrum, but dropping the BPM to that of ‘barely alive’ means that ‘Broken Vessels’, which powers in at a hundred miles an hour has even more impact. And this is something that does stand out about Requiem II: We Will Slaughter the Lambs – the pacing, the switches. Unravelling the narrative may not be an easy task, or one most listeners are even willing to undertake, but the way in which the individual songs move between one segment to the next, and how the songs, in turn, slot together to build the album as a whole… it’s clear there’s been a great deal of thought and technical application gone into this. It certainly isn’t just a bunch of songs cobbled together in a fortuitous sequence.

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It is, however, a crafted sequence of compositions planned and pieced together for maximum impact, and Requiem II: We Will Slaughter the Lambs is both relentless and brutal. The album’s centrepiece – and the longest of the seven tracks – ‘Adrenaline – A Lifetime Filled With Rage’ rips the doors off their hinges as it enters the set. A spindly, serpentine intro tinged with esoteric Eastern flavours swiftly melts into a wall of annihilate anguish which goes straight-up Nu-Metal a couple of minutes in, lumbering low and heavy.

‘Guillotine’ is a rush of snarling, gnarly fury, although the contrasting dual vocals, which pitch a clean delivery sits alongside all the swirling chaos. Hints of accessibility eddy on the peripheries, until finally, we arrive at the exit and ‘Rejoice the Butcher’ with an unexpected but well-timed glimpse at an approximation of pop, or at least melodic metal. Ordinarily, I’d say that a song like this breaks the mood but here, now, the prospect of escape, and time time just to breathe has appeal. Because Requiem II: We Will Slaughter the Lambs is nothing short of breathtaking. Soak it in, and enjoy, while you can.

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Pic: Dave van Hout

Isn’tses – Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole

Posted: 9 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 14th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Working under the Isn’tses moniker, London duo Lisa McKendrick and Tim Drage have spent more than a decade sculpting noise with their own unique slant, evolving not only their own methods and methodologies, but their own circuitry, perhaps most famously the ‘Chernobylizer’, a compact yet devastatingly powerful noise-generating device.

The notes which accompany this, their latest release in a prodigious and ever-expanding body of work, describe Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole as ‘raw and chaotic’, departing from noise alone to deliver a work where ‘a mix of complex beats, textures, unpredictable sounds and frenetic rhythms enter the music, at times with melody and screamy vocals as they push the boundaries of electronic music,’ and finally summarising it as ‘an intense mind-bending spacey journey of wild explosive emotion and sonic textures.’

It contains ten compositions – songs would be a hell of a stretch – the titles of which either seem purposefully incomplete and therefore impenetrable, or otherwise oblique, apart from those which include references to ‘rave’. There is certainly an abundance of heavy-duty pulsating electronic beats and whoops and cheers and yelps crop up with a certain frequency. But if this is to be considered in any way a ‘dance’ album, it’s in the context of late 70s and early 80s electronica – the warped groves and unsettling, detached vocals of Throbbing Gristle circa 20 Jazz Funk Greats, and Chris and Cosey’s Trance. The beats are industrial strength, but shudder and stutter, pulsing through fuzzed-out, distorted synth waves and an endless array of extraneous interjections. Demented shrieks and wailings rise though the thick atmosphere towards the end of the first track, ‘Sol Receiver’, and ‘I Spit on Your Rave’ only amplifies their commitment to melding propulsive beats and throbbing synths and melting them together with a sonic haze and disconcerting sense of psychopathy.

The majority of the pieces evoke a kind of derangement of the senses, repetition and disconcerting discord conjuring a trance-like evocation – but it’s dark and murky, and there’s a thick, squelchy analogue feel which contributes to a sound that feels more like the drug-induced hellish nightmare of a cult than spiritual transcendence. The thumping, clumping stomp or ‘Freekfall’ is nothing short of purgatorial, and you want to escape, but you find your limbs are leaden and limp, and you can’t move as you find yourself staring into a swirling vortex, even when you close your eyes. There is no escape.

‘Undo Fear Biases’ is an unadulterated seething miasma of heavy noise propelled by a palpating myocardial spasm of a beat, while ‘Free The Party’ is centred around an interview or some other monologue about the days of rave culture. In contrast, ‘I’m Not The’ is the soundtrack to the rave where the trip is bad, man. It’s like hearing The Prodigy and some shit shoegaze indie at the same time while your brain is exploding one lobe at a time and the fragments form small vortices as they cascade from your ears. Pleasant, it is not, and the same is true of ‘Do Or Die’, with its sonic allusions to ‘Discipline’ and ‘Whorl of Sound’, and which escalates to something akin to the detonation scenes in Threads. Total sonic annihilation, absolute obliteration. Sitting here with only a beer, my head is beginning to spin and my stomach is slowly starting to churn. This isn’t accidental: Isn’tses understand the impact of frequencies, and the way sounds interact.

Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole is by no means especially harsh as noise goes, but it is relentlessly, unyieldingly hellish in its conception and execution. It’s no criticism when I comment that this is hard work and a difficult album: it’s supposed to be. But why is the churning, shifting, reverberating discord of Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole more challenging than a screeding blast of continuous harsh noise? Everyone’s brain processes things differently, so I can only speak for myself when debating this, but it’s more often than not possible to allow waves of noise to wash over and flow across the mind, to go with the flow, as it were. Dance music is different in many ways, but by the same token, it’s easy to process a steady four-four beat, particularly when it’s the constant, consistent bass thump which defines the majority of dance music – it’s that beat, and that consistent tempo, which makes it music for dancing. You zone out the extranea, and focus on that core element. And that’s the common ground shared by dance and noise when it comes to how we process it – by zooming out and focusing on something within it. This isn’t possible with Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole. Everything about how each piece is assembled is built on continual disruption. There’s nothing to latch on to, there’s nothing consistent. Yes, there are rhythms, but they’re jarring, riven with irregularities, or what the brain will likely perceive as irregularities, and there’s so much else going on, disconnected and disjointed sounds flying in all directions, that any attempt to filter them out and focus is impossible.

Back in the late 70s, much of what Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire were doing was inspired by the tape experiments of William S. Burroughs, and the proposed methods for psychic warfare using sonic weaponry as detailed in Electronic Revolution and The Revised Boy Scout Manual. There’s a palpable sense that with Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole, Isn’tses are returning to the origins of industrial music. And what’s remarkable is that even now, it’s absolutely devastating. Complete sensory overload. A derangement of the senses.

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Cor de Lux – Year of the Horse

Posted: 8 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Ipecac Recordings – 18th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Their bio tells us that ‘Cor de Lux didn’t come out of a content pipeline, a shared folder, or an algorithmic moment. They came out of a rehearsal room,’ and their Bandcamp page describes them as ‘4 friends in a Post Punk-Noise Rock band. Melodic hints and synth tones that trickle into a garage angst progressive fury.’ These two snippets give an insight into what kind of band they are, and how they operate, but don’t really give the measure of Year of the Horse, an album which goes beyond both post-punk and noise-rock or any permutational crossover of the two to render something that’s varied, embraces experimentalism, and at times is quite off the wall.

Single cut ‘The Cringe’ is exemplary, crashing in on a lolloping rhythm and blistering squall of guitar by way of a backing to a dispassionate but nevertheless urgent-sounding dual vocals from Tim Lusk and Dawn Moraga, before suddenly pulling up and following a short but meandering moment of ponderous desert rock, swerves off in a vaguely trippy prog direction, with a swirling synth and strolling synth. In contrast, ‘Ping Pong’ – not a cover of the Stereolab classic – is a slice – and at six minutes long, a very generous one – of quintessential dream-pop. A laid-back, balmy indie song with a hint of C86 whimsy, gently melodic and evocative of dappled sunlight in woodlands in early summer, it’s neither post-punk nor noise-rock, but it’s easy on the ear – until the switch that lands around the four-minute mark when it unexpectedly takes off like a rocket. And it’s here that it becomes apparent why Ipecac would be interested in them. They’re a band unconstrained by genre boundaries: not necessarily weird, but different.

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‘Cannibal’ takes the chiming guitar and driving bass of the UK goth sound circa 1984 and spin them with slightly spiky vocals and a mid-80s indie twist – nothing that’s immediately specific to a band, but then not entirely generic either.

‘The Western’ whips up a choppy frenzy and is perhaps one of the most overtly post-punk-meets-noise-rock songs on the album, and it drives pretty hard, before ‘Bread Bag’ serves up a slice of mathy post-rock… but that’s not quite it. But I can’t think long enough to capture my thread because there’s a sudden explosion over overdrive, and then it’s off somewhere else again. As the album progresses, the harder it becomes to situate it in a way that feels in any way meaningful – but that doesn’t mean that Year of the Horse is in any way incoherent. The more wide-ranging and eclectic the songs are, the more the sound of Cor de Lux is defined.

‘The Deli’ is simultaneously motorik and noodly: Pavement might be an obvious touchstone, but it’s more obscure acts like Moderate Rebels that come to mind, and Rosa Mota, too, and as fast as can process and much faster than I can type, we’re into another post-rock noise burst and then some more breezy, jaunty indie rock. One thing that does stand out is just how un-American they sound, at least to my ear. Year of the Horse is quirky. It’s not a common American trait. It’s nuanced, and wile it’s by no means a flippant, inconsequential work – it’s anything but – it’s threaded with a kind of knowingness, a twinkle in the eye which hints at a certain humour. But more than anything, Year of the Horse is a work of genius, in that it brings together myriad incongruous elements and doesn’t just make them gel, but amalgamates them in a way which feels entirely natural. How do they do it? Magic, alchemy, or something, I guess.

So many acts strive to make hybridity work, and so many fail, because it feels forced, self-conscious, the segments don’t flow or connect up, and it sounds awkward, jarring. Not so with Cor de Lux, and Year of the Horse keeps it succinct with just nine songs and a run time of thirty-eight minutes, the majority of the songs sitting in the three-and-a-bit-minute bracket. It’s a rare beast, this: an album that will blow your mind, but subtly. It’s crazy, but it’s packed with tunes. Truly inspired.

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Photo_credit-_Jordan_Olivia_Howell_387686

Photo: Olivia Howe

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