Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Black Groove – Work Yourself to the Bone

Posted: 4 November 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 13th November 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

HR and managers will often say that work/life balance is important, and harp on about how they, and the company, value their ‘colleagues’, their most important commodity. They’ll say it, but their actions will demonstrate that it’s a massive lie. They don’t give a shit. Employees are expendable, and if you don’t like the conditions, there’s always another sucker desperate enough to put up with them in order to keep a roof over their head. It’s not simply that they as individuals, or as a company, don’t give a shit: capitalism doesn’t give a shit. In fact, the system is purely one of exploitation, where those at the top – not just CEOs, but major shareholders, which include pension funds – seek to extract maximum profit at any cost. This is why the majority of benefits claimants in the UK are actually in employment, and why so many professionals in full-time jobs are dependent on food-banks just to survive. Capitalism actually demands that the workers do work themselves to the bone: as a consequence, they’re too busy – and too exhausted – just staying alive to push back, to seek change.

On Work Yourself to the Bone, Black Groove capture the soul-crushing experience of the daily grind, where there is no hope of a better life, because simply existing saps every ounce of strength. From the opening track – lead single cut, ‘Mutton’, they plough into a deep trough of sludgy dirges, and going in slow and heavy with a six-and-a-half-minute punisher makes for a strong start which sets the tone – and tempo – for the album. The vocals are shared between bassist Gareth Hellings and guitarist Jake Packham, and each possesses a truly purgatorial scream, conveying the existential anguish of a living hell. It’s a full-on, gut-wrenchingly heavy doomfest, a veritable endurance test of a tune, and the reward for making your way through it is more of the same.

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What do you call a man with a penis in the middle of his face? Fuck nose. Boom boom. It’s also the title of the album’s second song, which brings a big-bollocked swaggering riff, played with a proper sense of groove. Then the pace slows… and slows… until it’s a crawl. It recreates the experience of the working week. How is it only Tuesday? How is it only 10:30am? Fuck nose… The weight increases as the riffing gets slower, and the extended solo is simply wild, and strangely fitting.

Things only get slower and heavier and more oppressive with the arrival of ‘Robert’s Johnson’, a sonic experience which is like being kicked in the ribs repeatedly with steel-toed boots. Only very slowly, at fifteen-second intervals. Of course, after six minutes of this punishment, you’re fucked.

At just a minute and a half, and sitting bang in the middle of the album, you could be forgiven for expecting ‘Little Jimmy’ would provide some respite from the heavy slog, but no: it’s every bit as much of a slow slugger, only shorter, before the piledriving ‘Sloggers’ lurches in. it’s pacier, landing between Mötörhead and Napalm Death and dominated by a bowel-loosening bass. In my twenty-eight years of corporate drudgery, my bowels became my friend, as I would on occasion sit, basking in a few moments away from the noise of the open-plan office floor, and entertain myself by calculating how much I was being paid to take a shit on company time, and considering the use of as much bog roll as I wished a minor act of rebellion. Yeah! Sticking it to the man! I might have liberated some stationery, too.

‘Looking Thin’ hits a new earth-shattering level of doomy droney gnarliness, but it’s merely a prelude to the album’s ten-minute finale, and the title – ‘Dave the Double Shift Slave’ speaks for itself. This is an absolute monster. And in its bludgeoning away for what feels like an eternity as that thick, slow, sludgy riff, over which the vocals scream in perpetual, torturous pain, it creates perfectly, through the medium of sound, the hell of long hours performing repetitious tasks.

We are all slaves to the grind, hamsters on the wheel of the capitalist machine, and with Work Yourself to the Bone, Black Groove deliver the purest aural articulation of the agony of dragging your sorry carcass through endless drudgery, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until you fucking die, just to eat, and just to make money for millionaires. It’s brutal, and unflinching, and expresses the deepest, most existential pain with a rare precision.

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COH – IRON (Remastered)

Posted: 3 November 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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We Are Busy Bodies – 30th October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Released in 2011, IIRON by COH was one of my relatively early reviews. At the time, I was unlike anything I had heard before. It still is, if truth be told. If nothing else, this album was a major event in the way it opened my eyes (and ears) to music I never even could have imagined, or been exposed to previously. It was metal, but not as I’d ever heard it before. And it was a whole lot more. But for some reason, I never delved back to the album’s precursive counterpart, IRON, originally released way back in 2000. The arrival of this remastered edition provides the necessary prompt.

Russian-born Ivan Palvov had been working under the COH moniker for some time already: having relocated to Sweden in 1995. He debuted with the experimental BEFORE that same year, and delivered the appropriately-titled Enter Tinnitus in 1998 – a work which sits (un)comfortably alongside the likes of Throbbing Gristle and early Cabaret Voltaire. But IRON did something different, and according to the accompanying bio, ‘grew out of Pavlov’s teenage fascination with heavy metal and the underground record-exchanging community of the late Soviet era. At fourteen, inspired by Iron Maiden’s ‘Running Free,’ he picked up a six-string guitar brought to him by his grandmother and decided that he and his friends could also play that kind of music. Before long, they were rehearsing in a Soviet youth club with whatever equipment was available, looking for the sound they heard in early heavy metal records.’

Funnily – or perhaps not – Iron Maiden put me off metal for a very long time. I began to suffer with insomnia when I was around five years old, and I would lie awake watching the clock tick… my parents usually went to bed around eleven, and being awake after that time was something I found quite scary. Come 1984, aged 8, I heard Iron Maiden’s ‘Two Minutes to Midnight’, and it would torment me as an earworm as the clock ticked on and I lay alone in the dark in the 300-year-old house we lived in, which I was convinced was haunted. But also, as I came into my teens, I would come to the conclusion that hair metal and the likes of Iron Maiden were actually a bit lame, and it wouldn’t be until some time later, when I was introduced to Godflesh and grindcore that I would find my kind of metal.

And then we have IRON, a different kind of metal altogether. There are no guitars here. There sure as hell aren’t any gratuitous solos. Nor are there any drums. Or vocals, histrionic, operatic, guttural, or otherwise. Ivan Palvov explains how ‘The album preserves traces of those early experiences through its titles and references. ‘Rubbing Free’ nods directly to the song that inspired Pavlov to form his first band, while titles like ‘For Whom the Dell Falls’ and ‘Love Mites’ reference Metallica and Judas Priest. They also reference the atmosphere surrounding Western music in the Soviet Union, when exchanging records often meant running from the police, having records confiscated, and facing disciplinary consequences. It was a time when Pavlov, as a DJ, would make up a list of fake song titles for the principal to sign off on for a dance event at this school.” But IRON dissects these elements and ideas and pulls them apart to forge a fractured, flickering electronic exploration of an atmosphere, a feeling, rather than the sound of metal itself.

There is, then, an element of nostalgia woven into the heavy construct of this album, which is anything but representative of the metal scene at the time, sonically. Instrumentally, it’s a world away. And IRON is heavy. It opens with the harsh, yawning drone of ‘Annum Per Anum (Pärt 2)’. The extreme stereo panning is nothing short of mind-frothing, and with its stutters and breaks, it makes for a challenging first six minutes. But then, this is a challenging album. ‘East.er.Okay.Hell’ is fabricated around some stop / start heavy synth drones which squelch and stutter, with abrupt halts and lurches, and ‘Love Mites’ evolves from a crackle of static to a cranium-compressing electrical storm. ‘Now [4’19” into 2000]’combines the sound of later Throbbing Gristle with what feels like a panic attack. It’s intense, and not entirely pleasant, but articulates in sound something words simply cannot.

And the way the album is mixed is positively scary. The frequencies pop in a way that is like experiencing something heavy live and at high volume: you can actually feel your nostrils quiver, and your skin crawl and treble while listening to this. feedback and crackling electronica froths and fizzles, and ‘For Whom the Dell Falls’ is built around a sonorous mid-range drone and stuttering beats which flicker and glitch in a furious spilling of flange, and ‘Rubbing Free’ is a surging, sloshing, swampfest whereby the stereo extremes reach a new peak in derangement. It’s little short of mind-melting, and the bass-loaded close, ‘Spiegel I’m Spiegel’ is anything but a gentle wind-down, instead cranking up the dense bass oscillations and piling on the panic.

IRON is an album that make you feel. It makes you feel uncomfortable, tense, panicky, claustrophobic, suffocated. But that’s its success. It hits heavy, and hits hard.

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Pic: Quentin le Joly

Earth Mother Fucker – Do Not Resuscitate

Posted: 31 October 2026 in Albums, Recommended Streams and Videos
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Antigen Records – 30th October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Old bastards make confrontational noise album nearly forty years in the making. That’s the headline, or the boiled-down version of the biography which accompanies the debut album from Suffolk noise-rock merchants Earth Mother Fucker. Formed in 1988 – long before the EMF who stormed the charts with their hook-laden dance-tinged indie songs – they’ve gigged hard and frequently, but worked on recording at a pace that would make a snail look like Usain fucking Bolt, with the sum total of their output standing as one EP, a live album and ‘a couple of collections of demos recorded in a barn in Holbrook in the late eighties’. As if they could care less. If they were even remotely fussed about being a commercial proposition in any way shape, or form, they wouldn’t have stuck with calling themselves Earth Motherfucker all this time. Even if they had a catalogue stacked with slick pop tunes and smooth r’n’b, they were never going to find themselves dominating the playlists of Radio 1. Even when the station had Mark and Lard in the breakfast slot – can you imagine that happening now? – spinning Radiohead, Placebo, and Depeche Mode babbling about Crispy Ambulance, there’s no way a band called Earth Mother Fucker would be making the airwaves.

Six years ago, their eternal traversing of grassroots venues saw them come to the attention of UK Independent Venue Week, who selected their no-cock rock anthem, ‘I Fuck Therefore I Am, as one of their top nine live performances of 2020, including it on the Independent Venue Week Live 2020 album with Self Esteem, Sleaford Mods and Anna Calvi. You couldn’t make this shit up, but this event prompted them to finally get it together to complete their first full-length studio album, Do Not Resuscitate. As there seems little likelihood of resuscitation by the time they get to that ‘difficult second album’, we should probably celebrate the fact that it’s happened at all.

It’s ‘I Fuck Therefore I Am’ which raises the metaphorical curtain on this eleven-track magnum opus, which has a run time of almost an hour. It starts with some zany slide guitar, but swiftly latches into a filthy groove and comes on like The Stooges. It’s wild, and builds to a frenetic climax which leaves you feeling dazed after just four and a half minutes.

They describe themselves as pioneers of ‘a mash-up micro-genre of one, delivering death country murder ballads and bleached-out retina-detaching noise rock’ – and it’s all here, in spectacular, ear-bleeding glory. ‘Crooked Path’ sounds like the best song The Gun Club should have written, while ‘A Good Man’ introduces Fall-esque vibes with its clanging guitars – although the distorted spoken word narrative takes it somewhere else entirely.

There isn’t a duff track on here. Nor should there be, they’ve had bloody long enough to figure out the tracklisting. But the magnificence of Do Not Resuscitate lies in its rawness, which encapsulates the band’s uncompromising nature. ‘Uncompromising’ is a word which has come to be chronically overused, and we know that nearly every band, every artist in every medium, makes compromises. Sign with a label or publisher, engage a PR… essentially, anything that could potentially further the career and increase audience reach involves a degree of compromise, unless you’ve already sold out before embarking on a path of placing creative works in the public domain. Not these guys.

In a parallel universe, Earth Mother Fucker would be massive. Because there have been other, similarly ‘difficult’ and ‘challenging’ bands who’ve broken through, ranging from the Jesus Lizard to Sleaford Mods – although I’d contend that the latter sold out and bought their own hype, and while the Jesus Lizard’s first UK tour in an eternity saw them playing venues like the 450-capacity Brudenell in Leeds, Sleaford Mods have taken their one-trick gimmick to arena-level, playing to 10,000+ people. Fuck that. And fuck them.

‘Cobalt Blue Climax’ is a disorientating, discordant slice of psychotic gospel country noise rock, and after that, we’re into the frenzied ‘Roadfucker’, where The Stooges and The Cramps and The Screaming Blue Messiahs crash headlong in a crossroads collision, before ‘Happy Shopper’ goes Sonic Youth on dirty speed.

There are no specific standout tracks on Do Not Resuscitate – but that’s because it’s simply relentless and the standard is consistent throughout, despite the stylistic variety. ‘Topper’ is a bot jangly, a bit pub-rock even, and lands with something of a swagger and – but equally, it calls to mind ‘Container Drivers’ by The Fall, before it collapses into chaos. ‘Ips’ is perhaps the album’s most accessible track, straying into post-punk/ indie crossover territory, and hinting at a certain level of songwriting nouse with a solid chorus – which, naturally, they obscure with the scuzzy, lo-fi production. Some would likely charge them of self-sabotage, but this is the very essence of Earth Mother Fucker – a band who refuse to play the industry game on any level.

When bands say they make music for themselves, and if anyone else like it, it’s a bonus, they’re lying. It’s false modesty and pre-emptively providing cover should they fail commercially. But not these guys. It’s impossible to fail commercially when you have absolutely no regard for commercial endeavours or the industry as an entity. Do Not Resuscitate is here as a document of a career spent crossing the road and taking every detour possible to avoid industry shit, and not to win them new fans or any of that shit. But it’s undeniably a fantastic album – and the last track, the six-minute ‘Junkie Faghag’ is something else.

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Eva X – TURBOPINK

Posted: 30 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Distortion Productions – 6th November 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s a backstory I’ve recounted numerous times. I was goth from the age of about 14. My entry to the genre – being born in ‘75 – was ‘This Corrosion’, released in September ‘87, followed by ‘Dominion; and The Mission’s ‘Tower of Strength’, both of which landed in in February ’88. Despite my youth – and my late arrival to the scene compared to many at that point, I still made my entry at the point when goth was simply goth – none of this second wave, etc. ‘Trad’ goth wasn’t even a thing then, because, well, it was goth. As long as we sidestep the fact that most bands – and their fans – denied the tag, as the whole thing was, in reality, a press concoction which served solely to pigeonhole a certain strain of quite disparate post-punk acts in a way that would potentially help shift copies of magazines and papers. Did it? I neither know nor care.

Revisionist history has changed the linage of the genre, and while there is a clear difference – or calculated similarity – between the originating bands of the late 70s and early 80s – Bauhaus, Siouxsie, The Sisters, The March Violets, even Salvation in their early days – by 84/85, there were many more middle-of-the road, jangling indie-goth acts in existence, and 90s saw a new weave which aped the early 80s sound only with more synths, and by and large, they were fucking awful, with the exception perhaps of Susperia and a handful of others.

My sister, five years my junior, got into cybergoth club nights in the 90s and I had absolutely no fucking what it was all about. I still don’t. It seemed to me as if goth had jumped the shark, or something. Like, how did we get from black velvet and leather, to neon and latex? But 1995 was 31 years ago now (you should see the state of the forums where Sisters fans continually relive the Black October tour of ‘84 and so on), and the dancier end of the goth spectrum has become well-established. Enter Eva X.

TURBOPINK is the follow up to 2022 debut I Dream of a Reality, and from her first appearance in 2019, she had built a style based on being ‘a robot girl singing about human things’. But something changed. As her bio explains, ‘somewhere out on the road touring, Eva found that she didn’t really feel like a robot girl anymore. But then, what kind of artist was she? What kind of person? The album that was to become TURBOPINK grew with her, through travelling all over North America and growing the band to a four-piece. When she got home, she hit the studio, took her time, determined to create the colorful industrial metal album of her dreams.

From the album’s very title, to song titles and the cover art, it’s clear up-front what this album is about, and from the off, TURBOPINK offers a blast of Hi-NRG electro – but also something more evolved. Her vocal performance is commanding, balancing pop and electronic folk, and the same is true of the musical compositions, which find thumping beats and rumbling bass paired with some dynamic lead guitar work. But those synths… sometimes they’re solid. Other times… there are portions of TURBOPINK which sound uncomfortably like rejected Eurovision entries. ‘Dopamine Blind’ is dominated by a relentless industrial stomp of a beat, but it’s as much straight-up dance which seeks a higher level – of consciousness, perhaps, but does nothing to expand on its position, and ‘Cross My Heart’ is pure pop, bordering on Stock Aitken Waterman production, only with a darker synth bass pulsing beneath its glittery skin.

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But at its best, TURBOPINK is a powerful hybrid work, creating a cocktail of dance, pop, techno, and industrial. ‘Fiction’ is exemplary, landing somewhere between Evanescence and KMFDM. ‘I Remember Me’, too, is a more overtly rock-leaning slice of aural alchemy, with bold guitars driving things forward for its duration. Eva’s vocals are strong and melodic, and she delivers the hook – of which there is an abundance – with a natural panache. ‘Dance in Shadows’ goes all-out for the anthemic, with chugging guitar paired with a pumping beat and a stadium-sized chorus, and the final track, ‘Twisted Transistor’ nails that 90s electroindustrial vibe, and again boasts an earworm-worthy chorus.

As a whole, TURBOPINK marks a clear evolution for Eva X, and with some punchy tunes and strong choruses, it’s undeniably fun.

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Little Window – Red Ant

Posted: 29 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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27th October 2027

Christopher Nosnibor

The name Little Window conveys almost childlike, playschool connotation. Or, certainly something vaguely idyllic, a sense of the safe, the cozy. Meanwhile the band describe their debut album as ‘a cure for societal heartburn’. Who hasn’t been suffering from that of late? It’s been absolutely relentless for six years now. It seems as if the world was biding its time during lockdown – which was nuts – to go full-blown crazy, and none of it has been pleasant.

And, indeed, it so happens that Red Ant emerged from some pretty dark places, as the band’s bio outlines: ‘Written through cycles of insomnia, grief and self-destruction, Red Ant embraces the horror and chaos of death and transmutation. “Explorations of the fracture and intensity of death’s confrontation had given way to a sort of expansiveness”, explains Eli. “I had not had that kind of levity in a long time, and it triggered a childhood memory of climbing up a steep rock face with my siblings barefoot. We climbed to the highest ledge, feigning the courage to jump into the lake below from the extreme height. Crowded on the small ledge together, we all looked down with sudden shock. Dozens of red ants were stinging our bare feet, having disturbed their nest under the moss. Our eyes locked for a millisecond in midair. A euphoric moment of synchronized recklessness, all having made the same ridiculous decision to immediately jump.’

It’s a common scenario. Traumatic and challenging experiences inspire the best art. For some, creativity is the best therapy – or perhaps, for some, the only way of dealing with such things. On a personal level, it’s relatable, too. I only specifically recall wearing shorts other than for PE on three occasions. On one of them, in school, I received a major telling off because the teacher didn’t like the way I had completed a design project. On another, my legs got so badly sunburned, the skin peeled for weeks. And on the other, I stood on a manhole cover by the front lawn. I’d have been about four. And suddenly, red ants were crawling all up my legs, like a scene in a horror movie.

Working through trauma by focusing and interrogating it by means of creative processes can be immensely beneficial. And Red Ant deals with those real-life experiences head-on, in that Little Window make some crunchy, riff-driven noise. And make no mistake, while some of the titles may on the surface seem twee, there’s nothing twee about anything on this album.

The album’s first track, ‘Dirty Bookshelf’ starts low and grungy with a dash of wonky math-rock and a vaguely jazz slant. It’s largely innocuous in real terms, but then Eli Howey’s tremulous vocals arrive, and suddenly, he’s an undeniable force of nature everything changes, and the result is something like a heavy psychedelic Melvins-inspired outtake from Bleach. This is very much the angle that pervades the album as a whole – raw, urgent, and driving, and with production to match the low-budget values of the early days of grunge before it got co-opted by major labels.

It’s by far the album’s longest song, meaning that following the slow-burn, the floodgates open for a succession of sub-three-minute riff-heavy cuts. But that isn’t to say they’re lacking in emotional depth or any sense of softer feelings: moreover, Red Ant is an exploration of contrasts and juxtapositions: the breakdown moments in ‘Weeks’ are poignant and emotionally resonant, Howey confiding ‘I can’t go to sleep / ‘cause sleep makes me weak / I can’t go to bed / ‘cause bed makes me sad’. And instead of the throaty roar which is commonplace in this kind of context, he swoops and soars. But nor it his style really emo, although it is disarming in its unpolished immediacy, its quavering tones almost folky in places – something perhaps most apparent on the haunted-sounding ‘Get You Good’, a tense, acoustic-led sliver of a song.

‘Goldenrod’ is a decorative yellow plant, and the title again connotes something delicate and wistful, contrasting significantly with the sonic manifestation of this full-throttle guitar blast. It’s all leading toward the bass-booming, blown-out fuzzfest of the title track, which rips through like a forest fire in under two and a half minutes, crashing straight into the wild and desperate ‘So Many Times’.

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I suspect that for some, Howey’s voice may be an obstacle for some, simply because it’s not the conventional style for this kind of big guitar noise. But then I remember as a teen struggling with Dinosaur Jr at first, because J. Mascis’ voice seemed so weak and reedy against the backdrop of so much loud guitar. It was only when I tuned into the way this almost piteous whine, coupled with such expressive solos, carried so much more emotional weight than the more overtly masculine rage of other guitar bands that it all made sense. And while Little Window sound nothing like Dinosaur Jr, it’s this rare quality, the emotional openness and fragility, which gives Red Ant its unique impact.

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Pic: Starlyn Lu

The Pixel Rain – A Sense of Danger

Posted: 24 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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29th October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Hungarian-born vocalist, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Áron Siegler has been busy of late. Hot on the heels of the Glitching Sky EP – and I mean HOT, with a mere three weeks’ gap – The Pixel Rain drop their debut album, A Sense of Danger.

It seems that for him, like many of a creative bent, the current state of affairs, globally and domestically has not only instilled a sense of danger, but a sense of urgency. At the time of writing, the UK government has just taken down a number of its sites online due to a cyber security threat, but has added a new ‘survival’ page with a list of essential items it recommends every household has in stock in the event of war, a more extensive cyber attack, or extreme weather disrupting supply chains – including water and electricity. If we learned one thing from the pandemic, it’s that telling an entire population not to panic while giving guidance such as this is pretty much guaranteed to create just that.

This climate of fear and suspense, the sense that we’re perpetually on the cusp of something seismic provides a large part of the drive behind A Sense of Danger, of which Siegler says,

“The main theme was the anxiety about how our society is edging closer to its collapse through politics, social media or climate catastrophes, but there were more personal topics as well simultaneously about toxic relationships, jealousy and a haunting past. Both ‘storylines’ ended up connecting with each other and found their inevitable end by the end of the album, which became surprisingly bittersweet even to myself.”

The musical inspiration for the album is the two-part structure of New Order’s Brotherhood, and he approached the writing process with the idea of giving the record two complementary halves, using the distinction between darker and more uplifting electronic sounds as a loose creative framework rather than a rigid stylistic division. The result, we’re told ‘is a cohesive collection of eight songs that moves through varying shades of tension, urgency, melancholy and melodic warmth’.

Four of the album’s eight songs featured on the Glitching Sky EP, although interestingly, while three of the EP tracks appear in the first half, ‘The Glitching Sky’ is placed as the album’s penultimate track.

This means that EP track ‘Sacrifice’, which raises the curtain on the album, sweeps in with a mix of grandeur and tension. When covering the EP, I described it as an ‘anthem’, and placing it up front makes for a bold, attention-grabbing opening, and the expansive, cinematic ‘Last’ follows, pitching bleak imagery against a thumping dance beat and widescreen guitars and sweeping synths. The production is immense.

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The first of the previously unreleased tracks, ‘All the Lovers’ drives in hard and fast, with some cybergoth / techno drum machine and bubbling bass action. At this point, industrial-tinged goth that takes cues from early NIN and later Depeche Mode has been done and done and done, meaning the field is crowded, and while it might not be the most gripping of the album’s tracks, the quality of the songwriting and the production once again stand out here. The title track closes the first half in grand and ambitious style, with expansive layers of synth once again going wide over a rumbling bass. Here, Siegler’s vocal sounds at it most tense, capturing that anxiety and paranoia which defines the album’s focus – and at the same time, coming closest to a delivery reminiscent of Dave Gahan’s soulful baritone.

The second half certainly feels lighter, more poppy: the rolling tom sweeps which pan through ‘Danse Macabre’ are evocative of arena rock, and the song breaks out into a buoyant Europop bopalong. It sets the tone, and while it certainly fulfils the rubric of the album of two halves, the second, in its more dance-orientated vibes, feels like something of a let-down. Tension and release in itself is often a good thing, but this is feels more like jetting off on a beach holiday in Spain and forgetting all the shit back home. And yes, ‘Pieces of Love’ goes full New Order in the break toward the end.

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I always found New Order disappointing – not simply in the wake of their flight as Joy Division, but for the trajectory they took after their dark and tentative debut, Movement. I feel rather the same way about this album. Hearing ‘Glitching Sky’ in this context, it does sound like a euphoric dance reimagining of New Order’s ‘Temptation’. Thankfully, – I suppose – the last song, ‘All Night Long’ isn’t a cover of the Lionel Ritchie song. But it is a mid-tempo electro-ballad, and anticlimactic in comparison to the promise of the where we started. It is certainly an album of two halves.

The Pixel Rain (Áron Siegler) by Evelina Klimova (Landscape 03) web

Photo: Evalina Klimva

Ministry – Hate to Go (Take Out Or Delivery)

Posted: 23 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Cleopatra Records – 30th October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s hard to process the fact that at this moment in time, we are as far from 1985 and 1985 as from the end of the second world war. Similarly, it’s true that what might be considered ‘late-era’ Ministry has been in existence for longer than what one could call their main career. It’s been an interesting journey, from a largely forgettable synth-pop debut in ‘83, through a hardening sound as showcased on Twitch three years later, before things got really interesting and properly ugly with third album, The Land of Rape and Honey in 1988. Psalm 69 blasted them from being a cult act to a global force, arguably the definitive industrial metal act. They were on MTV with videos featuring William S. Burroughs. Although Filth Pig charted higher in many territories, and was a particularly, dark, heavy, and bleak affair, it was not a big seller, and everything since has been a case of diminishing returns, and not just in commercial terms. Not that they’ve ever been a particularly commercial band, despite major-label backing for some twenty years.

And while it’s true that Al Jourgensen has become increasingly fixated on blasting successive US presidents and their governments – particularly the Republican ones – one has to give credit where it’s due. It’s a worthy mission, and there’s a fair chance that he’d have called it a day sooner if he’d not had so much to rage about. He called it a day in 2013, only to return five years later with Donald Trump firmly in his sights in place of George W. Bush. The Bush years felt like an all-time low in US politics at the time…

And now we find the world at war, half the world on fire and the other half flooded, and wake up each morning wondering if it’s actually still here or if AI has ended it while we’ve been asleep. Small wonder Jourgensen had to have one last word on the state of everything. Sadly, it seems they’ve gone down the AI route for the videos, which is disappointing, particularly given the political context.

Singles ‘We Hate’ and ‘Singularity’ were promising enough: on the one hand, fairly standard fare for later-era Ministry in sonic and stylistic terms, but solid in terms of quality, and the album goes straight in heavy with ‘Crickets’. The guitars border on nu-metal, hitting like slabs of concrete, but the distorted vocals, samples, and driving percussion, all represent the Ministry hallmarks that go all the way back to songs like ‘Thieves’ – only here, there’s stab at a huge anthemic chorus. ‘Voices of Hate’ in many ways reprises ‘Hero’ from Psalm 69, with the speed metal thrash of Mötörhead, and while it’s solid enough, it feels rather predictable. This could serve as a summary for much of the album. It sounds like a Ministry album. Sludgy, metallic guitars grind away against relentless percussion, and there are samples galore. In fact, the samples take precedence over the vocals for the most part, and much of the supposed ‘commentary’ is represented by soundbite snippets of newscasts and the like.

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While sampling exploded in the early 80s with the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire being early adopters of emerging technologies which facilitated (affordable) tape loops and the like, and hop-hop acts quickly took up and ran with it, it wasn’t until the late 80s and early 90s that samples became commonplace in a rock or metal context, and Ministry were at the forefront there. Thirty years (and more) on, it feels formulaic. ‘Delete’ starts out sounding like it might take a more experimental direction, but ultimately reprises parts of the backing for ‘TV Song’ before presenting a collage of samples against a dirty, low-slung-riff. The vocals are blazing with rage, but only partially intelligible. ‘We Hate’ adds a dash of glam to the chugging wall of grey fury, but not a lot else. The same is true of CD-only bonus cut ‘The White Man Lied’: it’s got some glammy swing and quite some groove behind it.

The six-and-a-half-minute ‘Grifter’ slows the pace and marks a welcome textural shift, too. It’s by no means one of Ministry’s best cuts, but its placement in the middle of the album makes it stands out, and there are Trump samples galore. All well and good, but snippets of Trump’s worst moments are added to social media on a daily basic. Every press conference, every rally, every post on ‘Truth’ social gives us more insane babble from his rapidly unravelling sociopathic narcissistic mind. Do we really need to hear any more of this demented shit? Maybe we do: the media has normalised his cracked rambling. And what Ministry do here is remind us that this is insane. And it IS insane. How the fuck have we reached this point where a dribbling, shitting, dementia-ridden dictator is the most powerful person on the planet? I say person, but at this point, he’s slipped beneath even being human. And still his supporters clap like seals at his every vapid statement, and proponents of the far right here in the UK lap up his endless shit and proclaim that following his lead is the way forward. The worst of it is that most of us don’t only feel powerless, but we are powerless when it comes to turning the tide, because we’re battling against billionaires and bots – funded by the billionaires. AI manipulation is rife, and we’re all fucked.

Someone I’m ‘friends’ with on Facebook spent a good few months posting AI images of herself and band they like, before announcing that they’d been made redundant, their job having been replaced by AI. Fast forward a few weeks, and they tell the world how, after searching and applying for new jobs with no success, they’re using AI to search for and apply for jobs for them. And this is where we’re at. No wonder Jourgensen felt the need to unleash another salvo of blasting fury at the world. Hate To Go is by no means the best Ministry album, or even an album that sounds like a definitive sign-off. It sounds more like a work of business as usual. But perhaps that’s to miss the point – or it is the point. What I’m trying to say is that while Hate To Go is the band’s official last statement, it’s one which shows an understanding that their work will never be done as long as capitalism reigns – a sentiment articulated on ‘Singularity’. This track seems to summarise the album’s purpose – to document the end of times, to place a marker in history where Al and co can say ‘we told you so, and we give u-p telling you now’.

Penultimate track ‘Burned Out’ is one of the album’s strongest, a driving nihilistic assault that finally sees Ministry hitting the mark in brutal fashion and harking back to Filth Pig.

Closer ‘We’re Still Here’ features Paul Barker, and with its electro-driven intro also represents a late return to form as well as an unexpected expansion on the usual sound, unleashing a choir for the finale. I’m not sure I love it, but credit due for a late left-turn.

So where does this leave us? Who knows? Is this even the final final album by Ministry? Maybe we should ask this again in another five years. In the scheme of the Ministry oeuvre, Hate To Go is nothing special, and in many ways adds little to their corpus. But at the same time, it feels like an album that had to be made.

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Virgin Birth – The Dead End

Posted: 22 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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16th October 2026

Christopher Nosnobor

Well, this is bleak. And in reading the blurb which accompanies The Dead End by The Virgin Birth, which is described as ‘a collection of songs about exhaustion, isolation, dread, and the feeling that the path forward has narrowed considerably. It’s industrial punk for a world that seems to be running on fumes. There’s no solution waiting for you at the end of these songs… only a dead end’.

The Kentucky act have form for forging uncomfortable, challenging music, which at times harks back to the electroindustrial sound of Wax Trax! in the late 80s and early 90s, and occasionally with the confrontational, antagonistic stance of the power electronics scene, as exemplified by the likes of ‘From Behind’ (2024). Their last album, Total Annihilation, released in May of 2025 was every bit the exercise in nihilism its title suggested, and mined a seam of dark electronica with a sharp, serrated edge.

Now a trio, The Dead End sees Virgin Birth continue that trajectory, combining electro, punk, and industrial, and as the release notes point out, ‘where previous releases looked outward at collapse on a larger scale, these songs feel closer to the ground… more immediate, claustrophobic, and personal’.

And I want to focus on a couple of those words in the description before I plough into the detail of the songs themselves: ‘exhaustion’ and ‘dread’. Everyone is exhausted. All the time. to the extent that we’ve almost stopped mentioning it in conversation: it’s become the backdrop to life – or, perhaps more accurately, existence. It seems hardly any of us are really living any more: everyone is just dragging themselves through each day. It started during lockdown. In the UK, the bombardment of information, from the daily statistics to the ever-shifting lockdown rules, while everyone was trying to balance work and / or finances thanks to reduced furlough pay, while managing home-schooling, was beyond comprehension. We were mentally fried. And while I’m no conspiracy theorist, having read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, I have absolutely no doubt that many agencies – governmental and corporate – exploited that period of vulnerability. Five years on, we’re free to move… but the world is at war, we’re surveiled by CCTV and on-line virtually ever second of the day. Our movement and speech are constantly monitored. And tell me, honestly, if you never think your phone is spying on you? No wonder your exhausted.

And so to ‘dread’. As I already mentioned, the world is at war. Climate change has accelerated at such a pace that it’s less a question of if, but when, low-lying land will be submerged and crops fail, but AI could bring about the end of humanity before it happens. Call me a pessimist, but we’re fucked. But how, or when? It’s impossible to tell, but that sense of impending doom… it’s not paranoia, it’s not you. This is the news media, and social media, relentlessly prodding away with darkness. These day, I wake every morning at 6:30 and immediately check my phone – Facebook, news channels – to make sure the world hasn’t ended before I go downstairs to feed the cat and make a cuppa. It isn’t right, it isn’t healthy, but this where we are.

With The Dead End, Virgin Birth – now expanded to a trio – nail it in terms of capturing that fear and dread and intensely claustrophobic paranoia. The title track is an absolute rager, pat NIN, part Filter, part Stabbing Westward, part Pitch Shifter, it’s abrasive, full-throttle, and ‘PICK UP YOUR SKIN’ goes all out for the thudding techno groove, and also slams down some heavily processed guitar noise.

‘BEEF PONY’ sounds wrong and feels wrong: a glitchy collision of industrial and hip-hop that seems to draw influence from Faith No More and Godflesh, and drags in a bit of country and trance, too, but its success is all the attack. It’s also a reminder of just how impactful drum machines can be when used correctly. Here, the bass beats kick hard, and dominate the sound.

After the snarling industrial dance stomp of ‘GOOD BOOK’, ‘PERFORMATIVE LOSING’ delves into darker territories and I’m reminded of NIN circa ‘The Perfect Drug spun with late 80s Ministry. It’s ball-bustingly heavy, and is the perfect summation of the Virgin Birth sound. Heavy, intense, laden with anguish. It hurts. Don’t plead for mercy: accept that this is life now: constant punishment. Endless brutality. Relentless hurt. The brutally fucked dance piece that is the last track, ‘MYSTERY MAN’ is everything you need to know. It’s noisy. It’s intense. it’s claustrophobic. It’s bloody brilliant.

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Matt Rösner – Lost Meridians

Posted: 16 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 16th October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Writing on Lost Meridians, Jonathan Wilson observes that ‘traditional instrumentation is manipulated, twisted, stretched and weaved into endless webs. Recorded with whatever was at hand, like a phone or single mic, these short and sharp moments have been pushed far beyond their original convention. Sparkling highs and low sub sonics seem to linger throughout asking more questions than offering answers,’ adding ‘this is music to pause to, this is music to slow down to, this is music to dream to… But mostly, this is music to remind us that sometimes the unexplained things around us are just as important as the things inside us’.

The unexplained has – at least for those of us who are a certain age – connotations of The X Files, but also, to an extent, Tales of the Unexpected, and The Twilight Zone, resurrected post-millennium.

Now, some of the things – at least where the titles are concerned – on Lost Meridians are quire easily explained, not least of all the first composition, ‘Mountains, standing steadfast’. It’s gentle, slow, contemplative, hazy, and in many ways reflects, in sonic form, the experience of gazing up at peaks, partly obscured by cloud, in a moment of calm.

Each autumn, I make a trip with my daughter to the Lake District. We stay in a cottage on the shore of Windermere. The cottage has a private jetty, and we scattered some of my wife’s ashes there the first year we went. Looking across the water towards the ridge on the far shore, and, behind that, Coniston Old Man, I have felt that sense of stillness that comes from being in nature, and also the sense of insignificance. The mountains, the lakes, were here millennia before us, and will remain for millennia after. We’re just passing through, and all we can really do is make the most of the time we have, however brief – and for some, it’s briefer than others. I find comfort and solace in the fact she knew and loved this magnificent landscape, and we shared time in it, as a family, and that consequently, our daughter feels a deep attachment to these surroundings, too.

‘At First Light’ features almost unfiltered folk elements, with a gently-strummed classical guitar standing in the foreground against a vague, eddying background, which at times tapers off to nearly nothing, while the immense, nebular drift of ‘A Vastness, unresolved’ mirrors the connotations evoked by the title perfectly. Indeed, we exist as dots within a vastness that’s beyond comprehension, and as such can never be resolved.

‘Across a line’ consists of two parts, the first of which chimes and rings but briefly before fading out to be replaced by a droning roar – heavy rain? a waterfall? wind? static? – which in turn fades beneath a soft watercolour wash of sound, and it’s remarkably soothing. The pairing of the final two pieces, ‘Fractures in Silence’ and the title track, are each six and a half minutes in length. The former takes the form of a long, slow undulation, which sounds in some respects like the dying wheeze of a broken church organ, culminating in what sounds something like an elongated cymbal crash and frozen-frame electronic glitch. The latter gradually fades in, a low, rumbling hum which hangs like a dense, churning sonic cloud.

Over the course of the album’s forty-one minutes, Rösner creates some richly atmospheric moments, the elements interwoven into a magnificently textured tapestry.

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AD Ozium – Body Without Organs

Posted: 14 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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15th October 2026

AD Ozium is the musical vehicle for multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Moore, based in Washington DC – a vehicle for what he describes as ‘a fractured, hallucinatory convergence of freak folk textures, dark ambient, and no wave dissonance.’ That’s a lot to digest, just on paper. What’s more, this second album, which follows just four months after In The Style Of Dead Sparrows, ‘confronts themes of dehumanization, economic exploitation,

revenge, and systemic collapse. It argues that dehumanization functions as a gateway to sustained, trans-generational cruelty, and that societies built upon the denial of another’s humanity ultimately cultivate the conditions for their own destruction.’

That’s a pretty bleak proposal, but we live in bleak times – potentially the bleakest of all times. The last few decades have seen an ever-widening wealth gap. But the propensity for conspicuous consumption and status symbols which defines the 80s pale in comparison to where we are now. Billionaires simply didn’t exist then: now they’re a class. And instead of aspiring to owning yachts, these uber-rich fuckers – who each individually could eradicate world poverty and still be richer than anyone else can really conceive – choose to send rockets into space, not in the interest of expanding human knowledge, but in the sole interest of self-interest. Space travel is the Rolex and Hummer for the mid-2020s. Meanwhile, as we burn through ever diminishing supplies of fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate and the seas are rising more quickly than ever, it feels like we’re accelerating towards a cliff that has no bottom, just an abyss of incomprehensible proportions.

We live in a sick society, with an ageing population. And it’s that ageing population who seem determined to ruin any possible future for future generations. What the fuck happened? Where is the humanity? What happened to the adage ‘you can’t take it with you’? Now, it seems that the mega-wealthy and the boomers – I refuse to use to term ‘elites’ here, because they have no claim to superiority – have set a course for total annihilation and are determined to take the rest of us with them.

So yes, I feel passionately about the positioning of this album. And the fact it’s landed so soon after its predecessor indicates a sense of urgency where Moore is concerned. There’s a palpable sense that he’s doing this because he feels driven, is motivated by a compulsion to act in the only way he knows, the only way he can control.

The title, Body Without Organs hints at a deep-seated sense of detachment, and this translates into the sonic experience: as I said, it’s a lot to digest just on paper. As a listening experience… well, it does feel like the slow – but rapidly accelerating – end of everything. A stentorious baritone vocal rings out through a clamorous clatter of churning discord on the album’s second track, ‘Acceleration’, on which, contradictorily, time slows to a doomy crawl. One might call it industrial goth, or gothic industrial: it’s dark and has all the hallmarks of sepulchral drama, against a dingy backdrop or gnarly metal-griding and wailing moorland wintering ambient noise. Moore sounds as if he’s lost and wandering, not just in a barren landscape / soundscape, but in a psychological desert. New sonic ruptures burst unexpectedly, only adding to the sense of discomfort.

‘Thug Bait’ is a dirgy, purgatorial crawl through subterranean depths: the vocals are low in the mix and swathed in reverb, swimming through a dank swamp, dense enough to drown in.

The production values are positively black metal: Body Without Organs sounds like it as recorded on a Walkman positioned in the room next door on a well-used tape. But it wouldn’t work any other way. The heavy, soul-dragging atmosphere, which is so integral to the experience, simply couldn’t come from a nice clean, crisp recording made in a plush digital studio. ‘Curse of 39’ is a particularly woozy, abstract piece, whereby Moore’s vocals float amidst a slow drift of slow-building tide of flotsam and debris, and ‘Space of Flows’ is a fractured, dissonant wail. And the debris is strewn across this album – the debris and wreckage of human existence. Body Without Organs is the sound societal collapse and the slow dawning of the reality of what this means.

Shit only gets weirder as the album progresses., with grinding earthworks and tectonic ruptures churning and dredging away, spun across slow-drifting sonic clouds and warping. There’s a mesh of static which drapes itself over ‘Capitulation’, while at the same time untuned guitars twang and unravel with a complete disregard for musicality or structure. ‘The Illusion of Completeness’ borders on the surreal, as guitars scrabble against notes like elastic bands and so much rumbling ambience and lurching noise. The seven-minute ‘Most Beloved’ is dark folk and quite nasty noise, and again, Moore’s voice floats around vampirically, like the very essence of of doom, to be afraid of.

The experience of listening to Body Without Organs is not an easy one: it slowly drags the listener down into murky waters and a troubled headspace, one where confusion and dissonance reign. It’s great, it’s powerful – but it’s probably not for everyone.

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