Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

The Dwarfs Of East Agouza – Sasquatch Landslide

Posted: 20 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Constellation – 3rd October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The third album by The Dwarfs Of East Agouza (Maurice Louca (Lehkfa), Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls, Sublime Frequencies), and Sam Shalabi (Land Of Kush) promises ‘a focussed set of rhythmic psych-trance free/improv’.

As their moniker and the album’s title suggests, they demonstrate a collective interest in urban myths, the strange, the embroidered and embellished tale, perhaps spun with a twist of esoteric mysticism, but at the same time, aren’t entirely serious about it all. That is by no means to imply they’re not serious about the music they make, even when the pieces have titles like ‘Goldfish Molasses’, ‘Saber Tooth Millipede’, and ‘Swollen Thankles’. Because it is possible to be intense and serious and at the same time retain a capacity for humour, a sense of the absurd.

Sasquatch Landslide is an album that’s knowingly ‘out there’, but at the same time, it’s clearly the work of a collective who are completely immersed in the world they’re creating through a conglomeration of sounds which border on the transcendental. Elongated, quavering drones and an array of percussion merge in a haze to forge loose, yet curiously intense grooves. The aforementioned ‘Sabre Tooth Millipede’ is a full-on wig-out jazz frenzy played with the psychedelic loopiness of Gong as their most far-out, and at the same time, amidst the twanging and clattering, there’s something of the spirit of The Master Musicians of Joujouka about it. For an added addling bonus, there are tempo changes galore, and some parts where there are multiple tempos crossing one another simultaneously as the players seemingly detach from this physical realm into different plains of consciousness, separate from one another yet still connected by some kind of telepathy. Because however weird and disjointed it gets, somehow it works.

‘Double Mothers’ goes spaced-out, haunting, and atmospheric. On the one hand, it’s one of the most overtly jazz pieces on the album, but the wandering, reverb-soaked saxophone weaves its way through a nagging twang of a distinctly Eastern influence, while a pulsing heartbeat rhythm creates an underlying tension.

Single cut ‘Titular’ is busy and adds an easy listening, lunge-like organ trill which is completely at odds with the hectic hand drums and frenzied fretwork. They really cut loose on the ten-minute ‘A Body to Match’, stretching things out in all directions – tempo, texture, detail, serving up a pan-cultural smorgasbord of noodlesome improvisation. There, they slowly pick apart the component elements, a slow-motion explosion or deconstruction of the composition, each part slowly moving further from the rest. ‘Goldfish Molasses’ slowly melts, a plodding beat reminiscent of ‘What A Day’ by Throbbing Gristle provides the spine for this slow, pulsating Industrial thudder, where a woozy bassline undulates in the background, and incidental noises and chattering yelps fill the space behind some indecipherable vocal.

Sasquatch Landslide is big on warped, looping drones and layers of intricacy upon layers of intricacy, which weave a shimmering sonic cloth that ripples and shifts before the eyes – and ears. Time itself bends and stretches, taking on an almost elastic quality as the threads unravel to reveal new layers and dimensions. One can feel the instrumentation expanding outwards into infinity – and infinite reverb – in the same way that the universe is continually expanding, only in an accelerated timeframe. For all of its abstraction, Sasquatch Landslide provokes quite visual interpretations of the sounds emanating from the speakers. I expect to have very strange dreams tonight after this.

AA

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Ben Frost – Steelwound

Posted: 18 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 19th September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

There are many labels putting interesting and unusual, innovative releases into the world. The majority of them are small, and supremely niche, but survive by virtue of knowing their audience – and I say audience rather than market, because while they obviously need to balance financially, often on the minutest of margins, they exist for the purpose of disseminating art rather than the production of profit. The underground operates on a very, very different model, and with very different objectives, from the mainstream.

One label which is consistent in its output is Lawrence English’s Room40. The interview I conducted with Lawrence some years ago has vanished from the Internet now, as happens when websites cease to operate and their owners stop paying for their hosting, but it will always stand as one of my favourites. This is relevant, because we touched on the subjects of William Burroughs, cut-ups, and sonic collage, and lo, English, in his appraisal of Steelwound, recounts how ‘In the early 00s, Ben had been working on cut-up electronics, spilling over with floating rhythms, humming string samples and piano splices. It was a sound realised in part through the subversion of fruity loops and also owes a debt to Ableton Live which arrived in late 2001. His works to that point, gently saturated and bristling with a fizzy distortion at times, hinted at another sound world which would become his focused in the summer of 2002 and into 2003.’

A further note on Frost’s process is also informative by way of a preface, and comes again courtesy of Lawrence, who writes, ‘Working with a Fender Twin, often with the reverb dialled in at maximum, he found a language of shimmer and saturation, of compression and collision, that set the stage for a prolonged interest in how sound performs and is perceived at volume. It also is the first time that many of the tonal and melodic inflections that have come to be recognised as his compositional language are on display.’

This is the twentieth anniversary edition of an album that likely very few people have even heard of, let alone heard, and the chances are, it will remain that way despite this reissue. That isn’t because it’s not good, but because it’s ultra-niche and on a small label. But, in those certain small circles, it will likely receive attention, and deservedly so.

As is often the case, any technical and theoretical background is lost in the listening. The album’s first piece, ‘Swarm’, is an ambient work which may well weave a certain tension, but its trickling drone reveals nothing of the aforementioned context. The same is true of the epic ‘I Lay My Ear to Furious Latin’, which in itself is anything but furious, an floats, drifts and wisps abstractly over the duration of nine minutes, before the mellifluous ten-and-a-half-minute ‘You, Me and the End of Everything’ stretches out into post-rock territory, and in doing so extends its emotional pull, also. It’s slow and ponderous, spacious, and expansive, and strains of feedback scrape and push at the delicate, soft-focus edges, before the first vocals of the album arrive, haunted, detached, and deeply moving in unexpected ways. Sometimes, the human voice affects us more profoundly when any words aren’t discernible. We hear the emotion poured into them, and we feed on what we take implicitly. Sound and enunciation, delivery, can convey emotion and meaning which is beyond words, and that is very much the case here.

The title track, emerging from the rumble of thunder and heavy rain amidst a blustery backdrop scrapes and drones, trills and whines, a representation of an industrial soundscape that veers between the graceful and the brutal, the harsh, as feedback assails the ears frequently – but there are points at which it dissipates, and submits to drifting mellowness, even then the feedback continues. ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’, taking its title from Hubert Selby Jr’s classic, if gritty, novel is soft but with harsher edges.

It’s hard to comment on the initial resonance or impact of Steelwound twenty years ago. There likely wasn’t much. But as the whistles and wails of the title track dissipate in a gentle breeze, it does grow dark. Not SO dark, but darker that it was. This is an album of texture and detail, moving, but also captivating, a spell of gripping stillness, a pause to reflect. As the scraping, sonorous trails of ‘And I watch You Breathe’, it’s worth stepping back, taking a moment, and breathing. Just… breathing.

AA

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Whitehorse / Uboa – The Dissolution of Eternity

Posted: 14 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Tartarus Records/Sweatlung – 29th August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

My appreciation of the split release is well documented among these virtual pages, and this colossus of a monstrous beast is exemplary of the perfect balance of the contrasting and the complimentary. It’s quite the face-off, pitched as a head-on crash where ‘Australia’s heaviest force of nature Whitehorse teams up with sonic chaos conjurer UBOA for a split album that crushes, scorches, and transcends. The Dissolution of Eternity is not just an album, it’s a seismic rupture’. Yes. ‘A seismic rupture’. It’s a bold statement, bit one that’s hard to argue with, and the fact that this is getting a proper physical release on vinyl, cassette, and CD is something to get hyped about, especially the vinyl and cassette. The contrasts make the act of getting up and flipping the object an integral part of the experience, like an interval between acts at the theatre, or… well, really, like turning over a record. There’s no substitute for it when it comes to the elements of engagement with a physical release.

There must be something about bands with ‘horse’; in their name that plugs into a direct line to the world of heavy. Horsebastard, and the late, great Palehorse are just two example of UK bands who hit heavy, hard. And as for Whitehorse – not to be confused with Whitehouse, purveyors of extreme electronic noise – they are indeed as heavy as fuck. I’ll take their ‘heaviest band in Australia’ claim on face value, on the basis that ‘Wringing Life’ is almost seventeen minutes of grating, crawling, growling riff assault. It’s a heavy, harrowing, low-BPM sludge trudge, with the most choked, rasping vocals, buried low in the mix, sucking the oxygen from the air in dying gasps. The drum solo in the middle is punishing – sparse, slow, the cathedral-like reverb enough to make your head swim – and then the guitar and bass return lower and slower than ever. It’s bowel-trembling, rectum-quivering stuff, the sound of a slow, zombified clawing out of the cold damp sods: it’s the darkest, doomiest sludge imaginable. By comparison, ‘The Wait’, a mere seven and a half minutes in duration is a pop song. But it’s another crawler, its dingy riff mess strewn with feedback. This shit is so heavy it weighs down on your shoulders, your back, your lungs, just sitting in a chair listening to it.

File together Godflesh and early Swans and Oil Seed Rape and Sunn O))) and your halfway to the sternum-crushing weight of this.

Uboa’s noise brings a different kind of weight, and it’s compressed into shorter songs. When I say compressed, ‘Petplay Polycule Open Fire’ is a mere minute and forty-nine seconds of brutal, raging, clanging fury. It’s tempestuous, savage, demonic, a ravaging, brutal assault, and it bleeds into the gut-gouging morass of plunging, churning, amorphous noise that is ‘Wasted Potential’. Holy hell, is this dark and harrowing. You feel your innards slowly slump under its weight.

The theatrical piano of ‘Deamwalker, Fuck I Miss You’ certainly provides contrast, bit in terms of form and mood, and there’s a gloomy sadness which hangs over it before the darkening shadows gather at pace over the gloomy, semi-ambient ‘Pareidolia Shadow’, which reaches a sustained tempestuous crescendo that marries industrial with dark ambient and post-metal. The last track, ‘The Apocalypse of True Love’ is nothing short of a monster: clocking it at over nine minutes, it begins gentle, expanding synth ripples and surges, providing an atmospheric swell of sound, and you find yourself swimming, drifting on currents and tides… and then it expands in every direction, a surging blast of ambience ad noise and culminating in the most immense sustained crescendo… The final minutes are a slow, sloping comedown from the most all-encompassing blast that hits hard.

This release is quite something. It’s certainly loud. And it’s harsh, brutal, and unforgiving too. In short, everything we like – so this comes recommended.

AA

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Ran Slavin – Neon Swans

Posted: 12 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Nocturnal Rainbow Recordings – 5th September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

One significant downside to digital music formats is that is reduces the dimensions of the experience. With a record, and even a CD, there is a physicality which is in many ways integral to the experience. I’m not here to sell the whole multi-sensory experience and tactility of vinyl line: yes, I grew up with vinyl, and in the 90s, a new LP was maybe £7.50 while a CD was £11, so I would often buy vinyl simply because I could get more music for my money. And records do scratch, sleeves get bent, and generally, vinyl requires more care than a CD, so I’m as much a fan of 5” silver discs as I am 12” black ones. And now, vinyl has become something of a fetishised luxury item: as much as there’s still pleasure to be had from sliding a thick chunk of wax cast in whatever hues from a glossy, heavy card sleeve, there’s sometimes a sense that they’re all trying too hard, and the £30 price tag takes some of the shine off the experience. There are a few exceptions – recent Swans releases have been works of art in every sense, and the physical formats have added essential dimensions to music which is something more than just some songs, recorded.

Had Ran Slavin’s latest offering been given a vinyl release, it would have been a triple LP, containing as it does thirty tracks, with a running time of almost two hours. It would have been epic. But despite having released previous albums on esteemed labels including Mille Plateaux, Cronica, and Sub Rosa, it’s unlikely that Ran Slavin has the kind of fan base that could justify, from a label perspective, a triple-vinyl release. But what Nocturnal Rainbow Recordings have done here is interesting, and utilises the digital format in a novel way, by offering alternative artwork in recognition of the album’s multi-faceted nature. Yes, it’s been done by major artists who’ve released physical albums with variant covers, with a view to enticing hardcore fans to buy multiple copies and thus increase sales and enhance the chart position (The Rolling Stones’ Hackney Diamonds probably wins the award for the pinnacle of pisstake on this score), but the idea of buying an alternative digital cover for a nominal price isn’t something I’ve seen before.

As the notes on the Bandcamp page explain, ‘Just as the music migrates across genres, the visuals migrate across states of being, extending the album into a network of parallel identities. Together, they construct a fragmented yet coherent cosmos, where each image is both an entrance and a deviation, multiplying the ways Neon Swans can be seen, heard, and inhabited.’

Appropriately, Neon Swan doesn’t quite sound like anything I’ve heard before, either. To unpack that, it contains many elements which are common and familiar. There’s sparse techno, minimal dance cuts with sped-up vocals and swathes of space between low-key beats and glitchy grooves, as represented by single release and album opener ‘tell///me///now’ – one of many titles which reflect the sense of fragmentation and juxtaposition which define the album (‘s4dert1ac’ and ‘d3xr3rity’ provide other examples, but then there are the likes of which also disrupt the conventions of language in the same way Slavin disrupts the language of genre tropes).

‘audio ease my pain’ plunges into darker territory, while introducing rap vocals atop heavy hip-hop beats (although there’s an instrumental version as well further on, which offers a different perspective again on the same material). Elsewhere, ‘c-r-i-m-s-o-n-schema’ brings spacey, spaced-out bleeps, heavy percussion that has a late 90s feel, a blend of The Judgement Night soundtrack’s melding of rap and rock, and the Wu-Tang Clan.

For all of the space, the reverb, the minimalism, something about tracks like ‘searching_heart’ is quite claustrophobic: the intense repetition and synthetic feel, paired with crackling fizz, brain-melting glitches and some grinding bass tones. It may be constructed using the fundamental elements of dance music, but this is not dance music. Electronic music to induce uncontrolled spasms and twitches isn’t a genre, but if it was, Ran Slavin would be a leading exponent.

It’s a long album, with a lot to digest, and as it thumps and wobbles and glitches away, snippets and fragments collaged across one another, there are times it all feels a but much, a bit bewildering. At times it’s draining, exhausting, at times you simply zone out, and often, I find myself questioning the wisdom of persisting with it. The vibe is that of the kind of underground clubs I never got on with in the 90s and early 00s, and I’m particularly reminded of the time Whitehouse played an Optimo night in Glasgow in 2003: I was there for Whitehouse, who played for forty minutes starting around midnight, and the music being played was rather in the vein of the more groove-centric cuts on here. The people there for the DJs weren’t happy for the low-key electro pulsations to be paused for the noise and antics of Bennett and Best, but for my part, I struggled to get into the low-key electro pulsations. But the other reason I recount this experience, challenging in its incongruousness, is that in places, Neon Swans feels incongruous with itself, an album riven with unreconciled contradictions.

The execution of Neon Swans is hard to fault, and it does cover considerable ground, with range, over its expansive duration. But it is sprawling in its scope, its focus is variable, and it is very long. And it’s maybe better with drugs.

AA

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Agriculture – The Spiritual Sound

Posted: 6 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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The Flenser – 3rd October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Agriculture – the name brings connotations of the slow, the sedate, a simple and calm life, of rolling fields, tractors, luscious foliage, abundant harvests. One may picture hedgerows, and hear birdsong, the lowing of cattle in the mind’s ear. But LA quartet Agriculture describe themselves as ‘ecstatic black metal’, which on paper sounds like an oxymoron, but on hearing them, it makes sense, although it’s hard to really unpack precisely why this is so. I mean, it’s black metal and its raging and ferocious, tempestuous, and tumultuous, with relentless double-pedal drumming and frenzied fretwork. And yet… and yet from the abyss emerges a strange sense of euphoria. Uplifting is not quite the word… but the release, the spirituality of pure catharsis – this, this is where we find ourselves. And in this sense, the album’s title is apposite. This is the sound of rapturous liberation from the grounded state, and an album that goes far, far beyond the confines of black metal as we know it.

As they explain ‘Agriculture doesn’t offer salvation. The Spiritual Sound isn’t a map out of the fire. What it offers instead is presence: a confrontation with the moment, however unbearable, however divine. It insists that meaning is still possible, even in a world hell-bent on reducing everything to content, and where suffering itself can be conducive to recovery. As the Buddhist saying goes “the only way out is in.”’

The brutal lead single, ‘The Weight’, set the expectations high for this second full-length release. And if it set a precedent in terms of anticipation for high octane, high-intensity, full-blooded metal intensity, then it still cannot really prepare you for the full force of this album – or its range, as the band push in myriad directions, at times making music of soft, aching beauty which hits just as hard as the all-out blunt force that dominates.

A minute into ‘My Garden’, I’m ready to take some time out to lie down. The sonic density hits like a hurricane, the thick, distorted bass grinding hard into the solar plexus, the guitars as gnarly and dirty and fuck, the vocals dragged screaming from the very pits of hell come together and hit hard. It makes for five gut-wrenching minutes, jarring, jolting, squalling hard through angular discord that burns like a wildfire. But, towards there end, there is an unexpected bridge, which is nothing short of angelic, arriving like a mirage rising through a heat haze in the desert, which swiftly disappear in a welter of warping noise.

‘Flea’ sounds more like 90s grunge, before a blanket of fretwork crashes in. The grungy track caries on, though, and the result being some kind of sonic palimpsest. Elsewhere, ‘Dan’s Love Song’ takes the form of a slow-tapering shoegazey drone work, which is delicate and graceful despite the underlying density of the soaring, vaporous guitar, while ‘Bodhidharma’ starts out sparse and delicate before lurching into a bruising grunge riff.

There’s no question that ‘The Weight’ is a clear standout, for its sheer relentless force alone. The narrative of the lyric is as heavy as the sludgy guitar and grinding bass, and the rabid vocals top it all perfectly, inflicting maximum anguish. It’s not overtly uplifting by any stretch – in fact, it’s outright harrowing – but it’s the sound of vital emotional release.

Indeed, this is the trajectory of songs like ‘Serenity’, which is similarly fast and frenzied, and it does offer a strange sort of serenity – but when the notes are played so fast they blur and melt together, there comes a point where things smooth out and everything simply washes over you. I have a sense that it’s the kind of calmness and serenity which comes to those who are drowning just before they lose consciousness.

The title track, as it happens, is but a twenty-nine second interlude, a slow, low, rumbling drone, and the soft balladry of the almost folky ‘Hallelujah’ is simply breathtaking in its simplicity and the beautiful nature of its execution.

The final track, ‘The Reply’ is six and a half minutes of blistering blackened post rock / post metal, which in places evokes the searching emotional introspection of Her Name is Calla, while in others simply pounds and soars, simultaneously.

The balance of crushing weight and aching reflection is hard to reconcile at first, as the juxtapositions are extreme, but given time to digest and process, it proves to be perfect. The gentler moments pull it back from the brink of excess, and – strange to say – from being too much. Where Agriculture really strike gold is in their ability to sustain the emotional intensity through the gentler moments, meaning that while you’re recovering your breath, they continue to prod at those mental pressure points. The result is at times bewildering, overwhelming, even devastating. With The Spiritual Sound, Agriculture don’t only transcend black metal, but genre entirely, and the experience is dizzying, a visionary creative peak which is truly peerless.

AA

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Photo credit: Olivia Crumm

Osak:Oslo – Silt and Static

Posted: 1 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Vinter Records – 5th September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The post-rock boom feels like a long, long time ago now. Perhaps because it was: realistically, we’re talking about nearly twenty years since Explosions in The Sky and Her Name is Calla were super-hot topics. I discovered HNIC supporting iLiKETRAiNS on tour circa 2007, and Maybeshewill via their split 12” with Her Name is Calla, before seeing them playing with AndSoIWatchYouFromAfar… There are always chains and sequences, but the post-rock bubble burst in a tidal wave of oversaturation maybe around 2009. It all got a bit samey. But there was – and still is – always room for a band that take a genre template and take it somewhere else, offering something different, instead of a template-based rehash. Enter Osak:Oslo, who most certainly offer something different. Silt and Static is nuanced, but at the same time forceful.

There’s nothing like going all-out epic on an opening track, and that’s what precisely what Osak:Oslo do here, with the eight-minute forty ‘Biting In’, which begins with some enticing, chiming guitar that’s quintessential post-rock in every way, but then the rhythm section kicks in, and it drives along straight ahead, riding a solid motorik groove for a bit. After taking it down in the mid-section, they come back in, driving harder than before, a sprawling desert-rock soundscape expanding like a straight road headed to the horizon. Hell yes! You feel this. Exhilarating is the word.

They take things slower and bring more weight on ‘Days Adrift’, but still conjure rich layers of atmosphere, and bring things together with a chunky, chugging, bass-driven groove. In contrast, ‘Salt Stains’ is altogether more jangly, indie, at least to begin, and then, less than a minute in, a solid riff powers in, topped by soaring lead guitar work.

Over the course of the album’s nine expansive tracks, Osak:Oslo demonstrate a real knack for beefy riffery – nothing overloading, hugely overdriven, distorted or gritty, but just big, bold, solid and defined by a sense of forward trajectory, and what’s most remarkable is the way the band arrived at this work:

Recorded spontaneously, Silt and Static captures the band at their most stripped-down and unfiltered, balancing atmospheric fragility with crushing depth. With tape rolling and no roadmap, the album emerged naturally, giving shape to a sound that’s both deeply personal and bleak yet beautiful.

‘Bleak yet beautiful’ is a fair summary, but establishing, or unravelling, precisely what’s personal on an instrumental work is not easy, or sometimes even possible, although it is clear that certain elements, sounds, structures, transitions, which hit in a particular way are deeply evocative, often moving. But as a listener, those moments feel personal and are rooted in one’s own experience, one’s own individual response. I write this as someone who has sat with friends, playing songs saying, as I practically burst with enthusiasm, “Wait… there! That’s the key change!” or “That’s where the distortion comes in!” or “There! There!”, to be met with… mixed results. Is that moment which floors me the same one which the creators feel is the pivotal point in the song, the one which articulates, through the medium of sound alone, that deep-seated, complex emotion which has been tormenting your psyche for months, or even years? I suppose it doesn’t really matter. What matters – for artists and listener alike – is that connection, achieving that vital emotional resonance, where the music speaks.

‘Resonance in Ash’ slips into shoegazey territory, but also offers the most potent swell of noise that threatens the eardrums, bursting into a ragged explosion of noise, bordering on post-metal and racing to a blistering crescendo, and despite being one of the album’s shortest songs, ‘The Onward Strike’ feels like one of the most immense. Then again, there’s ‘Break and Sink’, which goes all-out to crush… It’s riffy, it’s heavy, and it lands hard. The bass… it grinds, alright.

The beauty – and creative success – of Silt and Static is that it succeeds on both levels. Because of the bold riffery – never succumbing to the post-rock cliché of the slow-build and epic crescendo, but instead forging these strong, cinematic, rock-orientated bursts of energy which are immersive, transportative, and reach far beyond genre confines. Silt and Static is an imaginative, inspired work, and the circumstances of its creation make it even more remarkable. It’s the work of a band operating with a rare level of cohesion, and it’s pretty special.

AA

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Johnny Richards & Dave King – The New Awkward

Posted: 31 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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False Door Records – 5th September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

More than five years on from the onset of the pandemic, and still pandemic projects are emerging. The arrival of this release provides a timely reminder of a time which already many seem to have moved on from, forgotten. More than likely, there was a collective keenness to return to normal as quickly as possible, to bury the trauma and make like it never happened. There are many, of course, who will never forget, for a host of reasons. Many lost loved ones, but still many more suffered mentally, from isolation, from being trapped in abusive situations, or simply – I say ‘simply’ as if it’s something minor – the fear of the virus and the way the entire situation was managed and messaged by governments and media – not to mention the bewildering effusions of misinformation on social media.

In between home schooling, struggling to work as key workers, or struggling financially due to reduced furlough incomes, the idea that we were all in it together was essentially a myth – but people found ways of coping, and for those of a creative bent, new ways of creating became the focus.

For Johnny Richards and Dave King, this new way of creating involved emailing digital files across the world to one another: as the bio explains, ‘Richards recorded piano parts, some prepared, some using the piano as an explicitly percussive instrument, then sent King the files to the US for him to record his drum parts. Richards would then record further piano parts and overlay them, in response to King’s parts.’

At the time, there was much talk, many virtual column inches, devoted to the discussion of ‘the new normal’. Fleetingly, there was optimism, a hope for a kinder world, a world where we consumed less fossil fuels, where work / life balance was more evenly distributed… but since the end of the pandemic, it’s been hell, as if people pent up all their hatred and fury and have been unleashing it in war and antagonism and making up for lost time.

And so it is that The New Awkward reminds us of that fleeting spell of optimism, and as they reflect, ‘It could have happened at no other time. With its multiple layers percussion and piano, treated and untreated, it would be impossible to recreate live.’

Awkward is an appropriate choice of word for the title of this album. There is something almost feverish about the compositions, which are bursting with complex – and often irregular, contrasting, even conflicting – time signatures. At times, drums and piano happen upon coincidental timing, but for the most part, they seem to be duelling one another – not in an aggressive or antagonistic way, but playfully. On ‘The Chance Would be a Fine Ting’, there are moments where the parts intersect to forge a groove that almost has a swing, a swagger, albeit a slightly off-kilter, drunken one that staggers a little, the tempo changing as if the crank handle of an organ is slowing, then picking up pace again.

It’s a little disorientating, but ultimately fun, as titles like ‘Sleepless in Settle’ suggest – a title which only really makes sense in the context of Johnny’s being based in Leeds, or, more broadly, the north of England. The best jokes are always puns, especially when they’re super niche.

AA

The seven-and-a-half-minute ‘Memory Man’ has something of a vintage film feel to it, as well as a strong swing, and it’s easy to forget that this album features only piano and drums while listening to what, for all intents and purposes, sounds like a busy bassline leading a full band. The title track twists and twangs, is a bit noir, a bit late-night jazz café, but weird and woozy. ‘Gene Heard Wrong’ is another busy piece, the drums, played quietly but shuffling rapidly around the kit, as it twitching with anxiety, while the piano… the piano chinks and rolls with a nervous energy. ‘Darts’ strolls and stutters, while the last track, ‘Climbing on Mirrors’ builds slowly from dark atmospherics through softly loping beats with jarring discordant piano, and it sounds like everything is winding down… down… down.

From my own experience of lockdown – balancing working from home and home schooling a primary-school-aged daughter while my wife also worked from home, converting the living room sideboard into a desk until she installed a desk in our bedroom – devoting time – or stealing time, carving cracks in time late at night – for creative output was about the only thing that kept me even half sane. The fact that The New Awkward is far from straightforward makes sense in this context: I can relate to becoming so immersed, so invested in a project that it becomes its own world, and that its creation closes the door on the madness outside, all the texts and other messages, the screaming social media frenzy.

The New Awkward brings a lot back, and does so with mixed emotions. But throughout, it buzzes with a tense creative energy, urgent but also immersive and upbeat, the sound of unadulterated creative freedom.

AA

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The Royal Ritual – Live at Infest

Posted: 30 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Analogue Trash – 15th August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been a busy spell for The Royal Ritual. You might say that David Lawrie is making up for lost time. With real-world activity off the cards during the pandemic, he assembled The Royal Ritual’s debut album, Martyrs, and followed up swiftly with the more sophisticated Pleasure Hides Your Needs last year, as well as an EP and some proper touring, which saw that sophistication taken to the stage in such a way that created a spellbinding live show and immense sound. Despite there only being two bodies on stage, two live guitars, a combination of programmed and live drumming, looped, not to mention ambitious visuals makes for a compelling performance. There’s no question that this this was a show that would be perfectly suited to a bigger stage, and landing a slot at Infest provided the opportunity for the band to truly come into their own. The live footage they’ve shared online confirms this, and the quality of the performance very much justifies this live album’s release, capturing as it does the full set with first-rate fidelity.

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It’s a masterfully structured set, which draws equally on the two albums, and begins with atmospheric organ leading into the slow-building ‘Vantage Point’, slow, brooding synths and a pulsating kick drum giving way to a barrage of beats and crunching, metallic industrial guitar. There’s no dead space between the songs: a tapering drone and snippets of samples maintain the atmosphere before ‘(nothing) On the Other Side’ thunders in on a thunderous percussive assault, and things only turn darker, heavier, more intense and more percussion-led on the claustrophobically intense ‘Pews in the Pandemic’. Lawrie gives it some guts in the vocal department, switching between menacing and wracked with anguish, and peaking at epic, emotive.

The processed-sounding guitars and synths have that KMFDM / Pig vibe and would be perfectly at home on a Wax Trax! release from the early 90s, but the colossal drumming sets it quite some way apart. Moreover, where The Royal Ritual really succeed here is in the way they preserve the sound – and the detail, and, importantly, the mechanical tightness – of the studio recordings, while the use of so many live instruments and, for wont of a better term, ‘moving parts’ means that this has the full energy and dynamics of the live setting, that edge, that bite. Naturally, this is felt more strongly when you’re actually in the room, in the moment, with the electricity of the proximity to the band, and in a room full of people, but this does a top-notch job of capturing it all through the medium of sound alone.

‘Martys’ is a full-blooded industrial-strength dark glam-tinged stomper, and ‘Modes of Violence’ takes things up a notch, combining solid hooks and gritty, hard-as-nails industrial guitars. It’s fitting, then, that ‘Coma’ closes the set with a more reflective feel, with expansive almost trance-like passages intersecting with electronic-led progressive segments. Lawrie’s soaring vocals are rich with emotion that’s almost spiritual as they ascend to the skies, before the set concludes with a glitching stutter, somewhere between a Morse Code SOS and teetering on a flatline, amidst a mutter of sampled dialogue and siren wails. It’s a bleak, almost apocalyptic, Bladerunner-esque finish. There is high theatre here, but there is also real human spirit, and an emotional range not always found in the sphere of electronic / industrial music, which can, at times, feel cold, clinical, detached.

The quality of the songs was already evident in their studio releases, but Live at Infest demonstrates that not only do the songs have further dimensions which only become apparent in a live setting, but that The Royal Ritual are a killer live act.

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The Royal Ritual - Live at Infest (Digital Cover)

Novembers Doom – Major Arcana

Posted: 29 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Prophecy Productions – 19th September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Founded in Chicago, by vocalist Paul Kuhr, Novembers Doom have been going since 1989, and have to date released a dozen albums, if we include their latest offering, Major Arcana, since their 1995 debut, Amid Its Hallowed Mirth.

According to their bio, having started out as exponents of ‘death doom’, they’ve come to formulate a genre unto themselves, ‘dark metal’, which blends their death metal and doom roots with progressive, folk, and classic rock influences. Sometimes, I think I should probably avoid reading bios before listening to releases, because this stylistic summation is somewhat offputting to my sensibilities. I also think bands should check their punctuation – particularly apostrophes – when declaring their name, but I’m a pedant.

As the album’s title suggests, the theme – or concept, such as it may be – revolves around the tarot deck, which originated in the middle ages and has inextricable ties to occultism and mysticism. The major arcana (greater secrets) are twenty-two cards which feature in the 78-card deck used by occultists and esotericists.

‘June’ is not one of them, but this atmospheric piano-pled intro-piece is a well-considered composition which blends neoclassical instrumentation, underpinned with a sense of foreboding, and menacing vocals, makes for a suitable appetiser. The songs are not all specifically focused on a specific card, but instead explore their meanings and more.

These are some long songs, extending past the five-minute mark and well beyond, and the scale of the ambition – both conceptually and musically – is clear. The sound is cinematic in scale, the production is clean and expansive, the drumming switching from double-pedal thunder to more standard four-four beats adding emphasis to a solid guitar sound.

It turns out that the bio is fairly accurate. Sometimes, they hit a crunching metal groove that’s burning with churning distortion and snarking guttural vocals, as on ‘Ravenous’, a powerful blast of infinite blackness. These moments are charred gold.

But as songs like the title track and ‘Mercy’ find the band easing into more melodic territory, emanating progressive, and in places, vaguely folk vibes. On the latter, they cross towards Black Album-era Metallica – by which I mean the mellowness of ‘Nothing Else Matters’, and such serious emotive efforts feel somehow wanting. In the main, they’re better when you can’t make out the lyrics, but more than that, it’s not easy take the overly bombastic, overwrought thing delivered with a straight face entirely seriously.

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‘The Dance’ brings a magnificent chugging riff that just goes on and on, relentlessly, and it’s satisfying and solid. But the vocals, gritty but tuneful, feel like a bit of a letdown in contrast. Perhaps it’s the context, which makes melodic tracks sound simply weak in contrast to the might of the full force they demonstrate elsewhere. Perhaps it’s just my personal preference. I can handle diversity and range across an album, but there’s a sense that Novembers Doom are simply striving to cover too many bases here, or otherwise show a lack of focus. Either way, as bold and ambitious and well-played as it is, and despite the thematic framework, Major Arcana isn’t particularly cohesive, switching styles hither and thither without really pulling things together. The eight-minute ‘Bleed Static’ is a standout by virtue of its sustained menacing atmosphere, and while it’s as guilty of the Metallica-isms and folk appropriations as other tracks, it’s realised in a way that feels more committed, and there’s a mid-point crescendo that lands nicely and everything falls into place… and I suppose it’s against this benchmark that other tracks fall short.

I doubt existing fans will be deterred by any of this, but, objectively, Major Arcana isn’t bad, but it is patchy, an album that’s mired in metal cliché and fails to scale the heights of its ambition.

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