Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Beauty In Chaos – Signs In The Heavens Reality Upside Down

Posted: 5 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

33.3 Music Collective – 5th February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It doesn’t seem like five minutes since Beauty in Chaos emerged with their debut album, and here, in the blink of an eye, we are looking at a twenty-nine track ‘reimagined’ version of the fourth album from this ever-expanding collective, curated by Michael Ciravolo (formerly of Human Drama and Gene Loves Jezebel. I’m not even going to start on the roll-call of personnel who have featured on these releases: I’d still be going by the time I’d finished listening to all twenty-nine tracks.

It’s certainly quite an expansion on the original eight songs which made up Dancing with Angels, which notably featured Wayne Hussey and Ashton Nyte among its guest vocalists. There is, as one might anticipate, an abundance of remixes – no fewer than five versions of ‘Holy Ground’, for example, and four of ‘Hollow’. Some are better than others, some are pretty radical, others less so, with the standard examples of slapping a big beat and some effects tossed into the mix with variable results, but Combichrist and Bellwether Syndicate are noteworthy for their contributions.

The ’almost acoustic version’ of ‘Made of Rain’ stands out not only by virtue of not being a remix, but also being a really good take on the song. But the selling point here are the songs which didn’t appear on the original album, which appear right at the very end of the monumental track-listing.

Their take on T-Rex’s ‘Children of the Revolution’ harks back to the early 90s when Al Jurgensen was arguably at his peak and dropping leftfield covers of ‘Lay Lady Lay’ and ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’, accompanied as it is by a video which finds the band performing behind a mesh fence, as Ministry did while touring Psalm 69 (as much for their safety as for effect). It also calls to mind the club scene in The Hunger where Bauhaus play ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, and I don’t doubt that this is also intentional: Bauhaus – and Bowie – can both be heard waving influence through Beauty in Chaos’ songs. “The revolution will be televised”, Al announces through a loudhailer, and well, if you’ve seen any news in the last fortnight, you’ll know this to be a fact. However, the issue isn’t that anyone’s being fooled here, but that no-one seems willing or able to stop it: just as the world watched on as Israel perpetuated genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza, so it gawps, motionless, as Trump and Musk undertake a coup, and not just making a grab for absolute control over the United States, but world domination. It’s absolutely fucking terrifying – unlike this recording. It’s a solid enough cover, but perhaps lacks the bite and heft it deserves, being more straight-up than cranked-up.

‘Open Your Eyes’, originally by Lords of the New Church, also feels apposite – indeed, lyrically, it’s never been more relevant, and while this cover, again, is almost entirely faithful to the original and is accompanied by a video clearly shot during the same session as ‘Children of the Revolution’, it hits home to wrap up the album in fine style.

AA

AA

Atomic Disc 4 Panel Wallet 2 Pocket

The Legendary Pink Dots – So Lonely in Heaven

Posted: 4 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

Metropolis Records – 17th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The arrival of So Lonely in Heaven marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the existence of The Legendary Pink Dots. And it’s a concept album. Edward Ka-Spel sets it out as follows: ‘Way way back in the early days I used to say a lot about ‘The Terminal Kaleidoscope’, a concept comparing the fragile planet we live on to a drowning human being with life flashing before his or her eyes, the images constantly accelerating. It’s 2024, a little over two decades since the turn of this unbearably turbulent century and the concept appears to have become an unlikely soap opera where we are the cast.’

It’s their second post-pandemic album, and it’s weighted with a sense of impending doom and biblical destruction spun in a suitably grand fashion whereby prog meets avant-garde and electronica.

It can be a bit of a gamble opening an album with a long song – the risk being losing the listener before things have even got going. But it’s a calculated risk, on an album where most of the songs are pretty long.

Some of it’s Ka-Spel’s tone and enunciation, but the title track which is that first long song, carries hints of an electronic reimagining of Suede, circa Dog Man Star. That is to say it also sounds a bit Bowie, and a bit Kraftwek, and with some weirdly bits of glitchy noise and reverby piano, it has echoes of Outside.

Thereafter, there are big sounds and big moods and big concepts in abundance, and it’s by no means an easy album to pigeonhole. Space and environmental issues are woven through the twelve tracks, which, as I fumble for a context, evoke equally the whimsical hippy trippiness of Gong and the inventiveness of The Young Gods. ‘Choose Premium : First Prize’ delves into tense electro territory, and presents a rather harder edge than the preceding songs, and it’s here we really begin to feel the sense of the ‘machine’ which is a central focus of the album’s thematic content:

The machine is everything we are. It sees everything, hears everything, knows everything and feeds, speeds, drinks us down, spits us out – we lost control of it at the instant of its conception. You may cough, curse and die, but the machine will resurrect you without the flaws, at your peak, smiling from a screen, bidding someone in a lonely room to join you. It’s an invitation from Heaven, where anyone can be anything they want to be, but it’s a Nation of One. You’ll be everything we are. You’ll be a shadow of yourself. You’ll repeat yourself – endlessly. You’ll be desperate for some kind of explanation. You’ll be lonely. So very lonely…

This is nowhere more apparent than on the sparse, acoustic-guitar centred neofolk bleakness of ‘Wired High : Too Far To Fall’, which swells and soars and expands to immense proportions, as well as plunging to dark, sonorous depths over the course of its seven minutes. Elsewhere, ‘How Many Fingers In the Fog’ has a more post-punk feel to it, but still spun with a proggy haze, and there’s a lingering wistful melancholy which clings to it.

That there are whimsical, light-hearted moments of plinky-plonky keys and segments of So Lonely in Heaven sound more like wide-eyed stargazing in pure awe shouldn’t trick you into thinking this isn’t a serious album. The medium is the message, and entertainment is a diversion, a distraction, the ultimate lie that it’s ok to sit, sedated, and forget the world. The shit that’s gone down in America is the absolute proof of this: while everyone has been entertained by the circus, a coup has been taking place. This isn’t hyperbole, and this isn’t simply some scuffle in a small third-world republic. Meanwhile, people, especially here in the UK, are largely preoccupied with the current season of Love Island or whatever instead of trembling in fear for the future.

For all the buoyancy and quite enjoyable moments – ‘Blood Money : Transitional’ offers a quite accessible, easy groove beneath its darker surface – ‘business is business’, Ka-Spel sneers over a quite Depeche Mode-like accompaniment.

So Lonely in Heaven is varied, and sometimes sounds as if belongs to another era – but at the same time, it’s unexpectedly and shockingly relevant and now, and is well worth your time – whatever time you have left.

AA

867980

Will Long – Long Trax 4

Posted: 3 February 2025 in Albums, Recommended Streams and Videos
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

Long Trax Productions – 31st January 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

The brief liner notes are almost as perplexing as the cover art and the rest of Will Long’s Bandcamp page. I mean, you might think that the title is the key here. While clocking in around the eleven-minute mark, these compositions, as much as they’re far from short, well, I’ve certainly heard many longer trax, with many albums featuring a single twenty-minute piece on each side. But of course, it’s a pun. Sort of. Regardless, spreading these four tracks across four sides of vinyl feels somewhat indulgent, although I won’t go quite as far as to say exploitative, despite the temptation.

Will Long has to date created an extensive catalogue of work, both with Celer, since 2004, and as a solo artist – and when I say ‘extensive’, I mean extensive, with Celer having released around a hundred albums (if you include collaborations and compilations), and his solo output is equally overwhelming in volume. The Long Trax releases have arrived sporadically between other releases, and are broadly connected, in stylistic terms. As Long puts it, ‘round 4 of the Long Trax series [is] the pivotal moment of truth. Four new deep cuts spread across 4 sides of vinyl in dual sleeves, and spun onto disc. An all-analog, hardware machine affair, full of glacial pads and icy stabs, rhythm composure (composer) sequences, round booming basslines, and narrators from beyond. It’s the real thing, still chugging along.’

Less than a minute into ‘One in the Future’, I’m feeling late 90s chilled techno vibes, and I’m dragged back to a handful of club experiences where I fucking hated the music and I hated the posers.

I’ll admit, I’ve always had something of a fraught relationship with dance music and its culture. I suppose I’ve generally leaned towards rock, but have found spaces in my head and heart for some dance and adjacent, loving the KLF from the start, and so much of the electronic music from the late 70s and early 80s. Chris and Cosey’s Trance is a straight-up dance album, and I dig it not just because it’s a Throbbing Gristle-related release. But, as I discovered when visiting a club in Brighton on visiting friends in the late 90s, some stuff, I just struggle to connect with. And this is it. To add to my story, I attended an Optimo night in Glasgow in 2004 to see Whitehouse. It was a strange event, in that most were there for the downtempo dance, which was halted for three quarters of an hour while William Bennet and Philip Best cranked out the most punishing, ear-shredding set to the sheer horror of the majority, before smooth beats returned, to their relief. My experience was inverse to the majority. Whitehouse did not go down well: the end of their set did. As the relentless bouncing beats returned, I was happy to leave, as were my whistling, devastated ears.

‘One in the Future’ is the longest eleven minutes of nondescript sonic wallpaper I have had the pain to endure in over a decade. It’s the monotony that hurts. It’s soulless, tedious, and nothing happens. And this is a fair summary of the album as a whole. To my ear, to my mind, to my insides, it feels so devoid of… anything that I can connect to. The samples blare, the squelchy synths blip and bloop and pulsate over tedious beats and maybe I need different drugs or a different brain, but this is relentlessly tedious, monotonous and crushingly dull. Get me out of here!

AA

名称未設定のアートワーク

Aaron Landsman / Norman Westberg – Night Keeper

Posted: 2 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

Hallow Ground – 7th February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

If it’s got Norman Westberg on it, I’m in. The longtime Swans guitarist is – and I’m not ashamed to say it – something of a hero of mine in the league of guitar players. The discipline he displayed churning out sometimes just a couple of chord at a crawling BPM is beyond admirable, and those releases, particularly from Cop to Children of God were entirely reliant on punishing guitar monotony, and while his post-Swans solo works have been of a significantly more ambient persuasion, his brilliance as a musician still lies in his adherence to a ‘less is more’ approach, playing to achieve sonic effect rather than to showcase himself or his musicianship. There’s something refreshingly egoless about this.

The context of this release is that ‘Night Keeper is a collaborative album by New York City-based artist Aaron Landsman and former Swans guitarist Norman Westberg that is based on the former’s eponymous play. Westberg recorded it together with performer Jehan O. Young for the Swiss Hallow Ground label, with Landsman serving as the record’s producer. The original piece was first performed in the Spring of 2023 at The Chocolate Factory Theater in Queens and filled the stark industrial space with spoken text, choreography, projections, and music in dim light and, occasionally, complete darkness. Westberg and Young afterwards brought it to the studio to record it as a two-part album in whose course his textural sounds, based on loops and samples, set the stage for her soothing, sonorous vocal performance.’

In a sense, then, it’s a soundtrack album of sorts, and it’s also a spoken-word album.

The accompanying notes explain that ‘Night Keeper is a performance inspired by sleeplessness and the wanderings of the human mind at night—about time and memory… The initial spark for Night Keeper was a run of almost sleepless nights in different neighbourhoods of a city that is perpetually insomniac. Instead of trying to force himself to go back to sleep by any means necessary, Landsman started writing down his thoughts.’

I first experienced insomnia at the age of five while staying at my grandparents’. As the time wore on, I grew increasingly scared, and convinced that if I fell asleep I wouldn’t wake up in the morning. Bordering on hysterical, I went downstairs to see my parents, who told me not to be ridiculous and to go back to bed. I cried myself to sleep that night, But I did wake up.

In my mid-teens, I came to embrace the insomnia, spending my nights watching television and videos, drawing, writing, making music, and later, dwelling in internet chatrooms and talking shit till the small hours while writing a novel and downloading stuff from Napster and Soulseek, before perhaps embracing it a little too hard in my mid-twenties, reaching petrifying levels of paranoia and experiencing hallucinations, before collapsing and being off work for six weeks.

I recount this, because the spaced-out, dreamy, disjointed stream-of-consciousness un-narrative of Night Keeper feels uncomfortably familiar. The way the internal monologue flows on, and on… and sometimes spills out to external monologue without realising. The soundscapes forged by Westberg as a backdrop to this is abstract, unsettling. At the end of the first part, there’s a glitching loop, which starts with a thud. It’s an uncomfortable rhythm, akin to water torture and replicates, to some extent, that heightened sensitivity and self-reflectiveness which interrupts the flow of the monologue: what is that? Am I going mad? Oh my god, I’m going mad. What is it? Make it stop… And then, it does, and the silence feels strange.

‘I still can’t sleep. Am I sleepy?’ the narrator asks as one point, after picking through an alertness to a range of sounds. There are people out there, and not everyone is asleep. Sleep’s for wimps, and you can get so much more done if you sleep less, even if that’s starting a fight club. The narrator counts the hours – not with close attention, but suddenly, it’s gone form 2:15 to 4:15. ‘How did it get so late? When is it time to give up?’ are questions which resonate. It’s no longer a late night, it’s no longer tomorrow, it’s almost time to get up for work again. It’s not worth going to bed. Might as well get a couple of chores done and arrive a bit early at work in the hope of an early finish. As if.

In the main, the musical backdrop is supremely subtle: occasionally, ripples of chiming guitar ripple across the murky surface of the dark, misty drones. Sometimes, there are some stuttering crunches, thick scrapes, and they change the dynamic, create seismic shudders which break through the low, slow, undulations. It’s the perfect soundtrack: sympathetic, subtle, nuanced, detailed, textured, dynamic, and understated. You find yourself drifting in and out of the words, and drifting in and out of the backdrop, too – and this is the most fitting experience, in that it’s the most accurate representation of the insomniac life. If you’ve ever not slept for a prolonged spell, Night Keeper will feel familiar. If you’ve had the good fortune to habitually enjoy the luxury of quality sleep, then Night Keeper may provide some education and insight into the torment of what it’s like, you lucky bastard.

HG2407_Outer Sleeve_643x328.indd

Matt Edible & The Obtuse Angels – The Optometrist

Posted: 2 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Inedible Records – 14th February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

This album seems to have had a long build-up, as well as being some time in the coming. After all, it’s been six tears since Stairgazing, which yielded the instant perennial classic, ‘Advent Beard’. Glam stomper ‘Mirror Shoes’, the first new material after Stairgazing, arrived in September 2023. Since then, we’ve had a couple more singles, in the form of ‘Idiot’ and ‘Triage’,

The title track provides the album’s opening gambit, and it’s an uptempo, upbeat affair. ‘Things are getting better all the time / You have to crush some grapes to make the wine’, Edible sings encouragingly in the first chorus – and it’s a chorus that’s irrefutably catchy, and this is an unashamedly accessible classic rock tune, with a dash of punk energy to push it along. And when I say ‘classic rock’, my first reaction to the guitar in the opening bars was ‘Summer of ‘69’. The fact I appear to have two copies of Reckless on vinyl, while my wife had a copy on CD for the car says this is not a criticism.

Listening to The Optometrist is rather like going round to someone’s house for some beers and they keep remembering songs from their collection that they simply have to play, making for an eclectic playlist spanning a host of genres and decades: the aforementioned glam monster that is ‘Mirror Shoes’ blams along with a stonking beat propelling a big, fizzy guitar and brings hooks galore, while ‘Idiot’ sounds like Nathan Barley for the 2020s yapping over a rhythm that’s got a strong Adam and the Ants vibe, where The Glitter Band glam meets punk, courtesy of former Kingmaker skin slapper, John Andrew.

Despite having the hallmarks of a sad anthem, ‘Cancelled’ is a snappy post-breakup song that reflects on a relationship that was doomed from the start, while ‘Better than Oasis’ is a factually accurate title for this Beatles-esque indie-pop love song which takes a run through ‘classic’ bands and makes nods to their styles, too. Sure, the ‘Queen’ segment may be a bit novelty, but it works in context.

The CD artwork notably splits the tracks into Side A and Side B, corresponding with the vinyl, and it’s clear that despite its constant style-hopping, The Optometrist is structured as an album in the classic style, with both sides culminating in a big, long statement song: for side A, it’s the eight-minute ‘Cat Piss,’ while side B winds up with the immense, nine-minute ‘The Big Reveal’. The former is a piano-led downer while spirals into Muse-like arena-prog territory about three minutes in that seems to offer something of a companion piece to ‘Cancelled’, while the latter slides into a far darker space.

Elsewhere, ‘Dog Dirt’ – thematically connected to ‘Cat Piss’ by more than just the title – is a quintessential indie cut with fire in its belly, and third single ‘Triage’ takes a slower, more reflective turn.

For all its range, The Optometrist works as an album, thanks to some savvy sequencing, which brings the changes in mood and pace at exactly the right points. Above all, the quality of the songwriting is right there throughout.

AA

a0492446347_10

Eamon The Destroyer – Radio Sessions

Posted: 1 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
1

Bearsuit Records – 31st January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been a while since we’ve heard form Bearsuit Records, and from Eamon The Destroyer, too, with Harold Nono’s The Death of Barra slipping out quietly in October, and the last ETD release being the Alternate Piranhas EP last April. Ok, so it’s not so long in the scheme of things, but in recent months, while the world has spun into new realms of insanity, the wonderful wibbly weirdness this label specialises in has been sorely missed.

As the factual, functional title suggests, this release features tracks recorded for radio sessions, recorded for In-Tune (BCfm 93.2 FM), broadcast in September of 2024, and Majjem Radio, broadcast at the tail end of the year. And if another release with no new material seems like overkill, since the last ETD was a set of remixes from second album We’ll Be Piranhas, which came out in October 2023, then it’s pleasing to be able to report that, no, while this may well be something of a stop-gap release, it’s a worthy addition to the catalogue. It not only provides some insight into what one may call the ‘promo cycle’ of an album, particularly for a DIY act, but also casts a different light on the songs, being stripped-back acoustic guitar-based renditions of the songs – which are a 50/50 split of choice cuts from We’ll Be Piranhas and its predecessor, A Small Blue Car.

The original versions may be sparse and lo-fi in their production, but that production, and the prominence of droning, wheezing synths is what really defines them. That’s not to detract from the songwriting or performance at all, but the downtempo, downcast mood is heightened significantly by the execution, and that thick, hazy sound is integral to that.

However, hearing these songs played straight, as it were, is something of a revelation. The parts are essentially unchanged, but apart from a bit of reverb, and some vocal layering, these takes are more live-sounding, as could be performed by one man with a guitar and a pedalboard or synth with a few loops.

A far shorter rendition of ‘Underscoring the Blues’ still packs in the magnificent oddness that encapsulates everything that’s special about both Eamon and the whole Bearsuit aesthetic, suddenly spinning off from a sparse picked folksy guitar into a fantastical fairground of whirling, waltzing organ.

I’ve written previously that Eamon The Destroyer’s songs have a certain quality which casts a long, bleak shadow of lugubriousness over the soul, and how the effect is, for me, at least, similar to listening to Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate. It’s an outstanding album, but it’s dark in a way which goes beyond the crushing lyrics of ‘Avalanche’, ‘Dress Rehearsal Rag’, and ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’. What I’m trying to articulate here is that there’s a special place for sad songs, songs which have a mood-altering effect, and this is Eamon The Destroyer’s strength. The lyrics are largely abstract and often difficult to decipher, but the feel is inescapable.

The ‘Avalanche’ on here, which first appeared on A Small Blue Car isn’t a cover of the Leonard Cohen song, but the stark atmosphere hits just as hard. It’s all about the minor chords, and the monotone croon. ETD adds layers of extraneous noise way down in the mix which adds tension to an already tense soundtrack.

Not because it sounds in any way similar, but ‘The Choirmaster’ calls to mind Chris Rea’s ‘On the Beach’ with its wistful tones and twisted hints of flamenco, and wraps the release with a vibe that’s almost uptempo, despite the heavy undercurrents of melancholy.

It’s the end of one of the longest, darkest, bleakest Januaries in living memory: we’ve been battered by storms, by global politics, by relentlessly traumatic news of war, of.. of… you name it. If you’re looking for a lift, steer clear of Eamon the Destroyer. But The Radio Sessions is nevertheless essential listening, showcasing the quality of the songwriting which lies beneath that fuzzing haze and reverb, and remember: it’s ok not to be ok.

AA

a4026067221_10

ILINX – Flipperen

Posted: 30 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Futura Resistenza – 27th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Some years ago (like about seventeen years ago), when I embarked on my reviewing journey proper, I was introduced to whacky experimental work and the world of microtonality. It was an absolute revelation. Just as, growing up in the 80s and raised on the Top 40 singles and Now That’s What I Call Music, discovering goth, alternative, John Peel, and Melody Maker completely changed my head, so did entering this new world. Onje thing that completely spun me was the way in which some artists extrapolated and academicized some pretty stupid or mundane stuff. This is a reasonable example. To quote: ‘Flipperen takes the randomness of pinball and turns it into music. Using recordings from old pinball machines, the music mixes chaos and structure, reflecting the Fluxus spirit of play and chance. It’s a wild ride through sound, where things don’t always make sense–but that’s the fun of it.’

Flipperen began as a lockdown / COVID project, of course. As they detail, ‘During the quiet and strange Covid days, Suzana Lașcu, Robert Kroos, and Reinier van Houdt began a recording project based on the soundbites of pinball machines. They visited the empty Dutch Pinball Museum in Rotterdam and captured field recordings of machines from the 1960s to the 1990s. From these, they selected 28 samples to serve as thematic starting points for what they called ‘game pieces,’ recorded in two sessions at Sonology Studios in The Hague. The recordings were then shaped into sound collages using cut-up techniques and probabilistic processes.’

These processes mean that the end product is a very long way removed from the actual sounds of metal balls pinging and rolling about inside a glass-covered case. Instead, landing between Brion Gysin and John Cage, we get a collection of weird and woozy fragmentary pieces – compositions would be something of a stretch – ranging from awkward ambience to crashing and banging that sounds like a prepared piano fitted with lump hammers. There’s playful, whimsical sighing and trilling, psychedelic trippery and some fairly straight jazz-flavoured piano in the mix. There’s Clangers-like whistling and clattering and clanking, pops and thuds, explosive industrial noise and frenzied country. There are moments which sound like someone grunting through a comb with greaseproof paper, others which sound like the strumming of an egg-slicer, others still which create the impression of a piano being dropped down a flight of stairs.

The final cut features twenty-six tracks, the majority of which are around a couple of minutes long, or even significantly shorter. But there are a couple which run to around six and a half minutes of uncoordinated chaos, and it’s a lot to take in.

The appeal from a sonic and experimental perspective is that ‘Pinball is a game that combines control and randomness—each action leads to an unpredictable result, and the outcome is always uncertain’, and as such, the patterns which provide the material for these pieces are erratic, unpredictable, and ultimately, not really patterns at all. And so it is that Flipperen shunts forwards and backwards, crackles and pops with zany snippets of this, that, and everything, conjuring a wild collage of disparate elements and all kinds of discord.

As much as pinball machines lie at the heart of Flipperen, it’s really a wide-ranging collage work with randomness at its heart. It’s fun, it’s fascinating, it’s brain-bending – and one might say it’s a work of Flipperen genius – but you definitely have to be in the mood for something quite this far out.

AA

a2489366009_10

Chaos Emeralds – Passed Away

Posted: 28 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Cruel Nature Records – 21st February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Cruel Nature are delivering a slew of releases on 21st February – an overwhelming volume, in fact. We’ll be coming to a fair few of them in the coming weeks, but first up, is the second album from Lanark / Reading based sludgy shoegaze project Chaos Emeralds, Passed Away, which comes in a hard-on-the-eye dayglo green cover which is catchy and kinda corny in equal measure.

According to the bio, ‘Chaos Emeralds is Formerly the solo project of Charlie Butler (Cody Noon, Neutraliser, Mothertrucker) with releases on strictly no capital letters, Les Disques Rabat-Joie and Trepenation Records, Chaos Emeralds has now expanded to a duo with Sean Hewson (Monster Movie, Head Drop, This) joining on lyrics and vocals.

Passed Away combines the lo-fi slowcore, shoegaze and doomy post-rock sounds of the previous Chaos Emeralds releases with a more song-focused approach to create a set of scuzzy emo gems.’

For some reason, despite ‘sludgy shoegaze’ and ‘lo-fi slowcore, shoegaze and doomy post-rock’ featuring in the above description, I didn’t quite expect the Pavement gone Psychedelic vibes of the title track which raises the curtain on the album. A primitive drum machine clip-clops away, struggling to be heard above a tsunami of feedback and waves of distortion on ‘Count Me Out’, which adopts the kind of approach to production as Psychocandy – quite deft, breezy and ultimately melodic pop tunes almost completely buried in a blistering wall of noise.

‘Juggler’ brings a wistful tone – somewhere between Ride and Dinosaur Jr – amidst ever-swelling cathedrals of sound, a soaring lead guitar line tremulously quivers atop a dense billow of thick, overdriven chords which buck and crash all about. The way the elements play off one another, simultaneously combining and contrasting, is key to both the sound and the appeal. It’s one of those scenarios where you find yourself thinking ‘I’ve heard things which are similar, but this is just a bit different’, and while you’re still trying to decide if it actually works or not, you find yourself digging it precisely because of the way it’s both familiar and different.

The vocals, low in the mix, feel almost secondary to the fuzzed-out wall of guitar, but their soft melancholy tones, sometimes doused in reverb, add a further minor-key emotional element to the overall sound, especially on the aching ‘Matter’.

When they do lift the feet off the pedals, as on ‘Welcome Home’, the result is charmingly mellow indie with a lo-fi sonic haze about it – and a well-placed change in tone and tempo, paving the way for the epic finale that is ‘In Our Times’, a low-tempo slow-burner which evolves from face to the ground miserabilism into something quite, quite magnificent, Hewson’s near-monotone vocals buffeted in a storm of swirling guitars as the drum machine clacks away metronomically toward an apocalyptic finish.

AA

a4117384026_16

Sketching Venus – An Impermanence

Posted: 27 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , ,
0

Mortality Tables – 24th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

One might say that this release has been a long time in coming – but from old works, left languishing, emerge new ideas having steeped over time. Initially recorded for an event in 2001, and having languished for almost a quarter of a century, An Impermanence now spearheads the latest project to emerge from the ever-inventive Mortality Tables. The Impermanence Project is set to be ‘a large-scale, multi-disciplinary collaborative initiative that will run for the remainder of 2025 [whereby] each member of the Mortality Tables Collaborator Community will be invited to contribute a response to the word “impermanence”.’

The bar is set high for the project with this opening gambit, which is a spectacularly dramatic work, even by the label’s standards. I shall return to this presently, but shall, momentarily, step back and quote at greater length than usual in order to set out the concept and evolution:

‘An Impermanence was conceived as a total conceptual piece of audio art based around several field recordings made with a dictaphone. In the event, for An Impermanence, only one recording was used, a 25-minute recording of an evening maintenance visit to an open-plan bank’s rising security screen system. This recording consists of a variety of interesting sounds, ranging from confirmation noises of ATMs, the expulsion of air pressure from the screen equipment, to occasional conversations and typing at a keyboard. The random, inherent unpredictability of field recordings created the feelings of impermanence that gave the track its title.
The field recording was mastered ‘as is’ to CD twice to enable continuous playing across two CD players. To add to the queasy feeling of everything ultimately being temporary, the CDs were processed completely live through a sequence of effects units, creating an unpredictable sonic onslaught veering from quiet passages of calm introspection to blazing flurries of electronic feedback and onward to the sculpting or white noise into digitally-synthesised modulations, continuing long after the actual CDs had finished playing.

The whole 54-minute track was recorded entirely live in one take without overdubs or editing, and is presented in its complete, unprepared form.’

It’s hard to conceive that this whole, fifty-four-minute work was recorded in a single take. Having been recorded on a Dictaphone, there’s distortion, there’s interface, there’s crackle. It takes some listening. What sounds, initially, like crackling noise and a load of distortion and flange, is, on closer listening, a siren – probably. It’s certainly something, anyway.

Blasts of noise like avalanches, like bombs, assail the speakers: there are bursts of ear-piercing feedback, gut-shuddering grumbles like earthworks and slow tectonic collisions. There are protracted spells of shudders and sparks, crackles and fizzes, sounds like fireworks and the hum of traffic. It’s nigh on impossible to actually place most of the sounds, and for the most part, this immense track sounds like little more than the rush of wind and things breaking, the crackling sound of tension reverberating inside your skull. As much as there’s no placing the sounds, there’s no escape from the torment, either.

And yet… and yet. I used to walk around with earphones wedged firmly in my lugs as I traversed from my house to the bus, then sat on the bus for half an hour, before then walking a few hundred yards to the office, and then in the lift and finally arriving, an hour later, at my desk. With the arrival of lockdown, the onset of a new anxiety meant I felt no longer able to listen to music as I went places – but instead, I became attuned to my surroundings, at all times. And there is always sound: birdsong, the breeze in the trees, traffic, planes or helicopters overhead, water trickling down drains, the babble of conversation the whirr of bikes passing, the thud and pant of joggers who pass so close as to buffet you with their air movement, and dogs, dogs, dogs, so many fucking yapping, gasping, snapping, shitting dogs, running off lead and at will. There is no escaping sound, and while the sounds on An Impermanence feel amplified, intense, unpleasant, overloading, they do very much seem to recreate the outdoor experience of the hypersensitive.

Keep your ears open. Stay vigilant. The world is everywhere. If the rest of this series is even half as intense, it will be… an experience.

AA

a2246862507_10

Cassels – Tracked In Mud

Posted: 27 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

Human Worth – 7th March 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

I hate to moan, I really do. No, really. But January has a tendency to be pretty shit, being cold, and dark, and bleak, and twice as long as any other month and having to turn on the lights at midday and crank up the heating and just wanting to hibernate, and the bills keep on coming but payday is still a lifetime away. But this January, January 2025… just fuck January 2025. It felt like the end of the world even before Trump took office, and now, as California burns and the UK is hammered by one of the worst storms on record, the end of the world looks positively appealing.

I’m not one to pray, but if I was, I would be praying for just one sliver of good news – and this would have been the answer to my prayers. Because a new release on Human Worth is always good news.

Things have happened in the Cassels camp sin the three years since their last album, A Gut Feeling:

“Close to burnout from heavy touring, the brothers Beck returned to their Harringay warehouse practice space. Jim, tired of his last record’s overtures at pop culture, got very into Converge. New songs came: heavy, and weird. Gone are the sharp-tongued character sketches, replaced with a heady cocktail of philosophy and body horror. Ditched, too, are the flirtations with mid-aughts indie rock and electro. On Tracked in Mud, we’re treated to something bigger. Wilder. More… elemental. This is a record about humanity’s disconnection from nature, after all.”

You might be forgiven for thinking that the cover art, so similar to that of A Gut Feeling signifies a neat continuation. It does not. While the sharp angularity of their previous works remains present, Tracked In Mud marks a distinct departure, and the newfound weight is immediately apparent on ‘Nine Circles’, which brings the riffs. Not that you’d necessarily describe their previous output as jaunty, but this hits hard, bursting with disaffection and blistering noise and collapsing into a protracted howl of feedback.

‘Here Exits Creator’ crashes in like a cross between Shellac and Daughters (thankfully minus the dubious allegations) – sparse, twitchy, drum-dominated spoken-word math-rock with explosive bursts of noise, before locking into a sturdy motorik groove.

The songs tend to be on the longer side on Tracked In Mud, with the majority extending beyond the six-minute mark. This feels necessary, providing the space in which to explore the wider-stretching perimeters of composition, and to venture out in different directions. Each song is a journey, which twists and turns. Midway through ‘…And Descends’, there’s a momentary pause. ‘Can someone change the channel, please?’ asks Jim, with clear English elocution, which could be straight from a 70s TV drama – and then spurts of trebly guitar burst forth and lead the song in a whole other direction. It lists and lees and veers towards the psychedelic, but then slides hard into a monster sludge riff worthy of Melvins.

‘…And Descends’ spits venom in all directions, and it’s tense as. The headache that’s been nagging at me half the day becomes a full temple-throbber as I try to assimilate everything that’s going on here. I’m not even sure what is going on here, but it’s a lot. ‘Two Dancing Tongues’ is almost jazzy, but also a bit post punk, a bit goth, its abstract lyrics vaguely disturbing in places… and then, from nowhere, it goes megalithic with the sludgy riffery.

Tracked In Mud is by no means a heavy album overall in the scheme of things – it’s as much XTC and Gang of Four as it is anything else, but equally Therse Monsters and early Pulled Apart by Horses – but it is an album that packs some weight at certain points, and explores the full dynamic range. There are moments which are more Pavement than Converge, but it’s the way in which they bring these disparate elements together that really makes this album a standout. The stylistic collision is almost schizophrenic at times, but, to paraphrase the point rendered in the most impenetrable fashion by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, schizophrenia is the only sane response to an insane world, and this has never felt more true.

Tracked In Mud is crazy, crazed, disjointed, fragmented. It’s not a complete departure from what came before, but it is a massive leap, a gigantic lurch into weightier territory. It’s a monster.

AA

HW043_Cassels_TrackedInMud_DigitalArtwork

Older Entries
Newer Entries