Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Norman Westberg – The All Most Quiet

Posted: 16 June 2016 in Albums
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Hallow Ground – HG1605 – 1st June 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

While MRI, released by Room40 in February, was a reissue of a 2012 album, The All Most Quiet contains new material in the shape of two long-form tracks. Like its predecessor, The All Most Quiet is radically different from his contributions to Swans. The fact he’s actually found the time to compose and record new material is impressive in itself: the latest Swans album, The Glowing Man was released on 10 June, and the two-hour colossus of a sonic experience was developed and recorded off the back of a full year spent touring its predecessor, To Be Kind. Given the duration and intensity of a Swans live show, it’s remarkable that Norman Westberg’s had time to piss and still has the energy to stand, let along record a new album. But then, perhaps his solo work has therapeutic benefits, and affords him the opportunity to decompress after long days spent in the Swans pressure-cooker.

The All Most Quiet is, as the title suggests, not a loud album. It is also a gentle album. But that doesn’t mean it lacks dynamic tension, and while it is calming, it’s also not completely undemanding.

The title track starts its long, meandering journey as a mid-range drone which pulsates subtly. The tonal changes which emerge are gradual. It’s easy to let it simply drift by, and it’s pleasant enough to appreciate in this way, but attentive listening brings its rewards. The introduction of new layers, textures and tones, shifts in the scale and pace of oscillations change the mood, subtly, inconspicuously, but no less definitely. And while The All Most Quiet bears no obvious resemblance to Swans, it is possible to hear a certain correlation in the way Westberg builds on slow-burning transitions to hypnotic effect. There are hints of ominousness and darkness, but the sense of scale and grandeur seeps through the very fabric of the sound. The second track, ‘Sound 2’ maintains the atmosphere, and the absence of any clear highs or lows builds a tension beneath the calm surface.

The All Most Quiet once again highlights the trait I most admire in Norman Westberg’s approach to guitar laying: patience. No heroics. No sense of the ego common to guitar layers. His playing is focused on achieving texture and an overall listening experience. Whether he’s peeling off shards of noise, as on early Swans’ releases or creating more sculpted sound, as on their later releases, and in his solo recordings, at no point dos one ever find oneself thinking ‘what fretwork! What guitar wizardry!’ In fact, much of the time, Westberg’s guitar doesn’t sound like a guitar, particularly on The All Most Quiet. And for the most part, the sound is too immersive for one to really think at all.

 

Norman Westberg - The All Most Quiet

 

Norman Westberg Online

Glacis – ‘Love, If You Love Me, Lie Beside Me Now’

Posted: 13 June 2016 in Albums
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Tavern Eightieth – TVEI23 – 28th March 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Given the fact that this release contains pieces based primarily around delicate solo piano work, there’s a curious bluntness and odd directness about the title that stirred a discomfort on first contact with Euan McMeeken’s latest project. The phrase ‘Love, if you love me, lie beside me now’ has a kind of domineering tone, with hints of emotional blackmail. It’s needy, but with controlling undercurrents. But then, such lines, particularly with the doubling of the word ‘love’, also has echoes of Elizabethan poetry.

None of this is conveyed in the six compositions here, at least on the surface. ‘No One Can Reach Us Now or Ever’ is an elegant piano piece, although there are atmospheric rumblings in the distance. In combination, they contrive to form an emotional ambivalence: the possibility that this could be an uplifting dream of safety and security is equalled by the bittersweet elegy framed in the knowledge that the only safe place is not on this earth. Perhaps it’s another subtle tendril of control, the same need to cling manifesting as separation from the world, enforced isolation. Perhaps not. Perhaps McMeeken’s compositions are intended as blank walls on which the listener’s thoughts and reactions can be projected, mapped, explored. Perhaps Ali Millar’s short prose piece provides the direction in its melancholy-hued narrative. More than anything, it’s not what is said over the course of the six tracks, but what is unsaid and what lies beneath the surface.

The pieces, although not designed to follow any overarching theme, do flow into one another very naturally, and the tone changes progressively between the beginning and the end. Sadness creeps into ‘Seen Through a Doorway’, and the notes waver and flicker in and out on ‘Under the Arc of the Sky’, and hang in a thick air, intimating hesitation, uncertainty. Strings enter at the midpoint of the final track, ‘There is Nothing Yet I am Here’, spreading an uplifting mood and a sense of optimism. And yes, perhaps there is hope. Perhaps this album s best appreciated when not searching for the meaning. Sometimes, some things simply are, and this is a magnificent, thoughtful musical work.

 

glacis-759x500

 

Wolves In The Throne Room – Diadem of 12 Stars (reissue)

Posted: 8 June 2016 in Albums
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Artemisia Records – 17th June 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Wolves In The Throne Room have achieved that rare thing of achieving a substantial fan-base and widespread recognition, while retaining the ultimate cult status. They’re genuinely seminal, having reinvented and reinvigorated black metal, largely on account of the imagination they’ve displayed in their approach to the genre’s well-established tropes. Diadem of 12 Stars was their debut album, released in 2006 , and even now, it’s in a different league from the majority of the black metal being churned out in 2016.

Wolves in the Throne Room have always been about expanding the horizons of the black metal genre, and making music on their own terms, and their devastating debut clearly sets the co-ordinates for a monstrous musical adventure.

Originally released on a small DIY label and unavailable physically for many years, this reissued version has been carefully remastered by Jason Ward at Chicago Mastering Service. The band redeveloped every photograph from the original negatives, creating richer, high quality prints in order to present the artwork as originally envisioned. In short, there’ much to get excited about. This is an album that deserves to be appreciated as conceived and envisaged.

The tale around its conception and evolution is one worth retelling, because the context matters. To save some typing I shall quote from het press blurb: ‘Written almost exclusively in a windowless, black room over the long dark nights of Winter 2005, Diadem Of 12 Stars was the first official Wolves In the Throne Room release and built around the reimagining of black metal as an ode to rain storms, wood smoke and the wild energies of the Pacific Northwest… Diadem Of 12 Stars is about lunar sorcery on Cascadian mountaintops and encounters with wild spirits. In contrast to the icy, razor sharp soundscapes of their 90s Norwegian forebears, the sound of Diadem is lush and ethereal, dripping with rain soaked moss and lichen.’

Indeed, what really stands out is just how textured and varied the songs are. It’s blistering blinding in its intensity. It shows all the hallmarks of classic black metal, in particular the dominance of the dense wall of noise guitar and the ruined, demonic vocals. But there are passages of exquisite beauty alongside the raging torment. The first track, ‘Queen of Borrowed Light’ is by no means a post-rock track, but detours into magnificent and luscious instrumental passages which are almost the very definition of post-rock. Weaving between different moods and exploring both an emotional and sonic range, it’s an intriguingly

Multi-faceted composition which immediately set Wolves in the Throne Room apart from their peers.

The opening segment of ‘Face in a Night Time Mirror Part I’ is remarkably accessible, almost a conventional rock composition, which feeds into a delicate acoustic passage, before, of course, all hell breaks loose in an earth-shattering tumult of ferocious angst. This is exactly as it should be.

‘Face in a Night Time Mirror Part II’ dredges the silt beds of the bowels of hell for an excruciatingly heavy fourteen minutes. It’s black and it’s metal: it’s the sound of purgatory, distilled and amplified.

The last of the four tracks, he twenty-minute ‘(A Shimmering Radiance) Diadem of 12 Stars’ is beyond immense: it’s not simply a matter of length, and I’ll refrain from making any puerile gags about girth etc. for a change. Instead, shut up and listen and let your jaw hang as it transitions from expansive prog rock to snarling, speaker-annihilating metal of the blackest shade. The shock and awe is, again, less about the album’s extremity but its range. It’s an outstanding and incredible album, and the passage of a decade has done nothing to dull the fact. And this more than justifies revisiting it now.

 

Wolves in the Throne Room - Diadem

 

Wolves in the Thrown Room Online

Ashley Reaks – If I Hadn’t Become An Artist And A Musician I Would Have Been A Serial Killer Or Killed Myself

Posted: 7 June 2016 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

The phenomenally prolific Ashley Reaks – musician and collage artist with a left-leaning anarchic streak – follows up Cultural Thrift (September 2015, with Joe Hakim) and Compassion Fatigue (February 2015) with what you might rightly call a concept album. True, the aforementioned releases from 2015 were both marked by thematic unity, but this approaches things from a different angle, with each song being about a different serial killer.

That serial killers inspire a certain morbid fascination cross many sectors of society requires little qualification: the popularity of both real-life crime and fictional crime TV and literature speaks for itself. Serial killers are, in truth, extremely rare.

The industrial scene’s fascination with serial killers feeds into the broader picture of a fascination with inhuman perversions and brutality of every shade: Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Very Friendly’ is anything but, and Whitehouse’ early career was largely based on an obsession with sadism and serial killers, notably Peter Kurten and Dennis Andrew Nilsen, to whom their fourth and eighth albums respectively were dedicated to; but then there were also tracks like ‘Dedicated to Albert de Salvo’ and ‘Ripper Territory’ (that’s the Yorkshire ripper, Peter Sutcliffe), and ‘Fritz Haarmann’.

Ashley Reaks is no purveyor of industrial noise or one to employ base shock tactics. His weirdly psychotic collages are shocking enough, while the music on his latest album presents his now-trademark multicultural mash, with a heavy leaning toward anarchic dub reggae and post-punk. And in terms of his subjects, he’s shown a lot more imagination than most, drawing inspiration from an array of lesser-known killers. Should we be impressed by his research or concerned by his dedicated research? Probably, yes.

There’s no mistaking the fact Reaks is a complex character and an intriguing, multi-faceted artist, and as much as the album’s title caries an element of humour, it may equally carry more than a grain of autobiographical truth. Suffice it to say more troubled individuals of no artistic bent commit suicide than become murders. And Reaks’ interrogations of socio-political situations seems to be the primary motivation here. Curiosity, rather than glorification is what this is all about. And it’s a great album.

Over shuddering, throbbing dub basslines and some fairly easy-going grooves, Reaks explores the backgrounds and circumstances of a range of men – all men – convicted of heinous crimes, more often than not with a sexual element.

Amongst them, James Gregory Marlow, aka The Folsom Wolf – a white supremacist drug user with a body count five in a spree which ran from July to November 1986, and Robert Black, aka Smelly Bobby Tulip, a Scottish serial killer and paedophile convicted of the kidnap, rape, sexual assault and murder of four girls aged between 5 and 11 in a series of killings committed between 1981 and 1986, and suspected of 12 other unsolved child murders committed between 1969 and 1987. The album by no means glorifies any of its subjects, and instead serves as a narrative exploration.

The blurbage points out that the album features the improvised Eastern-tinged vocalizations of Norway’s Maria Jardardottir, prog-punk polyrhythms, as well as a guest solo from Jackson 5 and Commodores trombonist Frank Mizen. This is significant, not because of the namedropping it facilitates, but because of the artistic connections it highlights: Reaks has enlisted some admirable artists here, and the end result is quirky but accessible. Indeed, the sonic vibes stand at extreme odds with the dark and disturbing subject matter of the songs. But this is precisely how Reaks excels artistically. Balancing darkness and light, concept and execution, he leads the way through a warped alternative world of his psychic creation.

 

 

 

Ashley Reaks - Serial Killer

Rothko – Discover the Lost

Posted: 6 June 2016 in Albums
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Trace Recordings – 8th July 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s virtually impossible to hear or read the word ‘Rothko’ without thinking of the abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko – at least if you have any kind of cultural awareness. And if you didn’t immediately consider Mark Rothko on arriving here, then either kindly leave, or settle in for an education of sorts. I’d hate to be accused of elitism here, but equally, I anguish on a daily basis over the mass cultural ignorance of our supposedly educated society. Having not been taught something in school or the fact something predates one’s existence is no excuse since the advent of the Internet. ‘I don’t know any Beatles songs – they’re before my time,’ is something I hear depressingly often. They’re before my time, too, and growing up in the 80s and 90s there was no Google. Perversely, the same people who are clueless of their artistic cultural heritage know all about Star Wars and Scooby Doo and Marvel heroes created well before their time. These people are buying into nostalgia kitsch of years which predate their existence. But the chances are that while they’ll happily buy into marketed nostalgia, they won’ grasp real nostalgia or real history.

This, of course, is where the latest offering from guitar / bass duo consisting of Mark Beazley and Michael Donnelley comes in. Discover the Lost is an album out of time, and in many ways bereft of context. And yet, it’s important to orientate oneself in time and space before engaging with this album.

The black and white cover art is the very definition of nostalgia. It intimates the passage of time, the gradual decline of things made. The grass growing tall around the abandoned, rusted car is a representation of abandonment. Time moves on. The man-made world slowly degrades and is taken back by nature, But, during the process, the natural world is sullied by these once valued but now ugly, unwanted items, stains haunting the landscape with echoes of the past. But it’s important to distinguish between the kind of ersatz nostalgia of the mass-market, whereby the Rubik’s Cube and bigger Monster Munch are the focus of a widespread collective reminiscent sigh, and the kind of personal nostalgia which is altogether more difficult to communicate let alone package. Discover the Lost sees Rothko look beyond the consensus market-led strand of nostalgia and tap the vein of the latter in a work that’s evocative and intensely personal to the listener.

There is a grainy warmth to the instrumentation on the album’s ten tracks. The album’s intent may be upbeat, but the reflective atmospherics style of Rothkos’s music is thick with reflection, regret and missing. The analogue tonality of the guitar evokes through sound the sense of something old, worn to a deep patina by people long gone and forgotten. The music is slow, deliberate, haunting, the notes drifting into the air, carried on the echoes of empty rooms, as still as a tomb.

‘Thoughts for Tomorrow’ calls to mind the epic instrumental introduction to Her Name Is Calla’s ‘Condor and River’, but it would be erroneous to describe it as post-rock. It is, however, an evocative and subtly moving piece that resonates, and while the title suggests a forward-facing perspective, it’s nevertheless laced with melancholic retrospection. Strings sigh forlornly over ’Photographs of Then’. Of course, a photograph can only ever show the past, however recent, and often, the image only gains its full meaning or sense of place over time. Context reconfigures with hindsight. Nothing is fully fixed

The dark ambient drone of ‘Time that You Took’ marks a shift in tone. Upbeat it is not. A sinister bass prowls around ‘Truths and Signs’, before the closing couplet of ‘Way to Home’ and ‘You’ offer the light of hope.

The sequencing of Discover the Lost is integral to the listening experience: the tracks stand alone individually, but it’s only listening to them each in sequence that the full effect of the album really emerge. This is the beauty of Discover the Lost: it’s not about immediacy but a slow unfolding and realisation, the emerging discovery.

 

Rothko

Virus – Memento Collider

Posted: 6 June 2016 in Albums
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Karisma Records – 3rd June 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

When an album contains only six tracks, and is housed in over art like this, there’s a certain degree of indication of what one may reasonable expectancy. Memento Collider fulfils some of those expectations, but confounds just as many. For a start, it isn’t a drone / doom / metal album, although it is heavy and it is dark. And the tracks are on the long side.

Sure enough, the album’s ten-minute opener is a tense, dark and expansive affair, built around an interlooping bassline and uncomfortable, – guitars that bounce contra to said bassline to build an uncomfortable dissonance. It’s heavily steeped in the post punk / proto-goth tradition in the vein of acts like The Danse Society circa 1983, the flat yet portentous, nihilistic vocal delivery only accentuating the awkward and uncomfortable atmosphere, a sonic dystopia.

‘Rogue Fossil’ again works a groove centred around looped motifs, a hectic, nagging bas coupled with urgent, stuttering jazz drumming hammers insistently while the guitar clangs and chimes at obtuse angles against its claustrophobic shell. The theatrical enunciation of the lyrics, in particular the hook (i.e. the song title), which accentuates the ‘i’ in ‘fossil’ adds a peculiar, alien slant to the track’s angular discordance.

‘Dripping Into Orbit’ melds together theatrical goth-tinged art rock and hectic, angular math rock to forge a bleak and uncomfortable sonic space. The rolling tempo changes re disorientating, accelerating and decelerating bar by bar in a fashion that evokes the spirit and sound of Shellac.

As the album progresses, it becomes increasingly locked into an inward-facing mesh of difficulty, an aura charting increasing stress and crackling cognitive disorder. The effect is cumulative, but each song brings with it new layers of dis-ease.

Listening to the jarring post-punk of ‘Gravity Seeker’, the track which features the album’s title buried in its lyrics as guitars trip and trail all over a lugubrious and repetitive groove, I find myself being sucked into a vortex of bleakness and begin to wonder just what kind of hell the and members have endured to produce music this unflinchingly bleak. The recording sessions for Memento Collider can hardly have been a laugh a minute. But perhaps it was a lot more fun than the music suggests: it’s a mistake to conflate the art with the artist, and equally, catharsis can often be the means by which mental equilibrium can be maintained. Its’s healthy to channel all of the ark stuff the weird stuff and the negativity into something creative – and this is indeed dark and weird.

The final track, ‘Phantom Oil Slick’ spans a full nine minutes and fills it with jangling guitars which bounce every which way over a bass that surges and swells before it breaks in a tidal frenzy. It’s dark, intense, and borderline psychotic in every aspect. A collision indeed. Strap in and go for it.

 

Virus

Virus Online

Sarabante – Poisonous Legacy

Posted: 4 June 2016 in Albums
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Southern Lord – 10th June 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

I’ve said it before, but the reason the 80s produced so much exciting music wasn’t because of the emerging technologies, but because it was a decade of social and political turmoil, marked by widening division. Sure, post-millennium we laugh at the yuppies and the huge mobile phones and the computers with less capacity than a scientific calculator, but the present bears scary and depressing parallels with the past – although if anything, the stakes seem higher than ever before. The global economy is fucked. Ergo, we’re all fucked. The world is at war. It’s not some bickering over some distant islands or a couple of neighbouring countries quarrelling over borders that’s going on here: it’s 2016 and it’s nothing short of all-out, total war. These are supposedly civilised times, but it feels like the apocalypse.

Living in England, it’s easy enough to whinge about conditions living under the current government, primarily because they’re a bunch of greedy, smarmy, smug, lying cunts who loathe the poor, the sick and the disabled and whose only interest is self-interest, but I have a lot to be grateful for, and living in Greece right now would be a whole lot tougher.

Sarabante hail from Greece, and as the press release notes, it’s the country’s dark and difficult times which have provided much of the inspiration for Poisonous Legacy: ‘Heavily influenced by oppression and trying to withstand the ongoing crisis in their home country Greece, their new music is forged in times of extreme austerity, which has without doubt blackened their focus. As a result, the music on Poisonous Legacy is darker, filthier, more sincere and more destructive than before.

There are no two ways about it: Poisonous Legacy is a ferocious and devastating maelstrom of an album. It’s the sound of pure fury, rage distilled and bottled in shot-size explosions of power stronger than any of Brewdog’s gimmicky spirit-strength brews. The majority of the album’s twelve tracks clock in at under to and a half minutes. Poisonous Legacy is an album of punishing intensity and astounding force.

Instrumental interlude, ‘Forewarned Epilogue’, proffers a brooding, gothic sound by way of a reprieve from the full-throttle churning guitar, but to suggest it’s any kind of light in the darkness would be wrong. There is no light, only darkness. And there is no real respite.

 

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Harold Nono – Ideeit

Posted: 3 June 2016 in Albums
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Bearsuit Records – BS032 – 9th July 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Bearsuit mainstay Harold Nono returns – not that he’s ever really been away – and once again, he’s come up trumps – and thankfully, not Donald Trumps. Swinging wildly from rumbling, dark ambience to mellowed-out doodlesome synthesised post-rock, Nono’s latest effort is as inventive as ever. But on this outing, he’s definitely set his sights on sparse scenes: a gentle piano tinkles in the subtle mists which hover and hum through ‘Otosan’,

There’s a sinister undercurrent that intimates ‘sci-fi horror film’ about the atmospheric ‘Atam No Nai Uma Ga Hashiru’: in contrast, ‘I’m Disguised as an Idiot’ sees Japanese traditionalism collide with western glitchtronica, while ‘Unbeaten Brothers and Sisters’ created a darkly atmospheric tension with its fractured samples and beneath-the-radar fear chords.

‘The Saline Revival Show’ is an achingly mournful piece, a sparse violin / cello arrangement that’s brooding, moving, and evocative. The post-rock echoes carry through into the sparse closer, ‘Watashi Wa Ie Ni Kaeritai’, rounding off an intriguing album that is – as you’d reasonably expect from Harold Nono, and as you’d reasonably expect from Bearsuit – difficult to place, but a lot easier to dig.

 

HaroldNono-Ideeit

LXMP – Żony w pracy

Posted: 31 May 2016 in Albums
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Lado ABC – Lado A/18 – 21st March 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s all about the retro vibe. And it’s all about messing with the listener’s brain. Described as ‘an attempt at finding the perfect balance between beautiful and unbearable music,’ the Polish duo’s latest effort, Żony w pracy (trans. Wives at Work) Bringing a carnival of analogue synths to the party in a celebration of the machines of the East (Korg) and the West (Moog). Unfortunately, Żony w pracy often fails to find the balance it seeks, and ends up sounding more like a deranged duel than the homage it’s intended as.

Beneath a throbbing bass track, the time signatures of the percussion on the albums first track, ‘Brasilia’, are ever-changing, slipping the groove with to disorientating results. The track bubbles along nicely, mellow, jazzy easy-listening synth muzak until it sinks underwater into a muffles murk. So far, so middling analogue experimentalism, the likes of which has been done countless times before. It’s fun, it’s clever, but it’s awkward and twisty and difficult to really get into the groove.

But then things go crazy on ‘Torreador Janusz’, a frenzy of synths stab and loop and warp deliriously, descending into a riot of bleeps and squiggles flying in all directions. Wibbly, wobbly and whimsical, it’s smart and techy. But like so much music that’s smart and techy, regardless of genre – from jazz through avant-garde and experimental to post-rock, tech metal and prog rock – the mastery of instruments and a penchant for messing about with convention and form amounts to so much showing off. Yes, you can play – but how about some tunes? Still, XLMP manage to stay on the right side of the precipice that is unlistenable smug muso wank with just enough attention – or concession – to listenability.

‘Kosmos, Teil 1’ is perhaps the album’s most linear piece, a soaring, surging rush of synths in space that hints at Krautrock leanings. There are undeniably rather hipsterish overtones to it all, but it’s well executed and there is a sense that there’s an element of knowingness and self-aware humour at play here: Piotr Zabrodzki and Macio Moretti state that Żony w pracy is an homage to the real working wives, Anna and Zofia, and write, ‘Żony w pracy apart from being an homage to the homages, also, or even above all, ask one question of the “fundamental” sort – “How are you gonna play that live?”.

I’m not going to make any public judgement based on their latest promotional shot, and will keep my attention on the album itself and so, I will say this: guys – maybe you should listen to your wives. Żony w pracy has an indisputable novelty value, and does offer moments of fun, but how enduring its appeal is, well, that’s something that seems less certain.

 

XLMP

 

LXMP on Bandcamp

Sly & the Family Drone – Appetite For Tax Deduction

Posted: 29 May 2016 in Albums
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17th May 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

The ever-awesome Sly & the Family Drone return with another puntastically-labelled slab of awkward noise. Sticking to their staunchly DIY ethos (although, and I mean it as no criticism when I say that this may well be a choice but their options are likely to be limited), this latest effort is released on translucent green C33 cassette in a limited edition of 50, and digitally.

Apart from being a killer live band, their offbeat humour, not least of all as manifested in the referential titles have always been an integral part of their appeal (at least to me): 95 Minutes Over England documented their first tour, and all three of the recorded sets lasted longer than Suicide’s notorious show, and the band are willing participants in the ensuing percussion-led riots.

Understanding Appetite in any context of chronology is rather difficult, given that it originally appeared as a digital-only release a few months before their colossal full-length album proper, Unnecessary Woe. It’s not so much a companion piece but a contemporaneous standalone counterpart. But the main thing is that it contains a whole lot of dark noise.

While each of their other releases features at least one long-form sprawler, Appetite For Tax Deduction is an unusually concise work, with none of the four tracks crossing the ten-minute mark. Still, the first track, ‘Favour for a Favour’, is a dank, rumbling semi-ambient piece. Heavy, shuddering low-end sounds and growling vibrations sound like subterranean earthworks. It bleeds into ‘Wine into Water’. A mangling mesh of distortion and a continuous bottom-end drone that tears the air provides the gut-churning backdrop to extraneous electronic noise, shrieks of feedback and indecipherable, distorted to fuck vocals. It’s pretty sinister stuff, and its claustrophobic intensity is a world away from the cathartic and communal live performances.

With a title worthy of That Fucking Tank, ‘Simply Red Stripe’ is a classic example of the Sly humour. Its nine-minute sonic assault is built around an insistent, low-end throbbing, dense and immersive. Tonal shifts trick the ears into thinking there are fleeting moments of melody submerged in the hum, only for it to become apparent that it’s little more than a rising wail of feedback and the fizz of melting electrodes. It’s by far the most rhythmic track of the set, and, with nods to Suicide, Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse, it’s magnificently uneasy listening.

‘Your Mum’s a Provincial Rock Club’ features what appear to be horse’s hooves – the only overt percussion to feature on Appetite – beneath a cement-mixer mess of collages sound, booming bass blasts and fractured tweets and flutters of treble spiralling in a vortex of echo and infinite delay, building and building until the sound coalesces into a vast tidal wae of white noise that ultimately swallows itself.

 

Sly and the Family Drone - Appetite

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