Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Pound Land – Live At New River Studios / Worried

Posted: 9 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 24th October 2024

Pound Land have become regulars here at Aural Aggravation, essentially because I absolutely love what they do and feel that it’s fitting use of the platform I have to broadcast the fact. They’re clearly not everyone’s proverbial cup of tea, with their overtly dour, dingy, misanthropic racket which provides the sparse backdrop to sociopolitical critique being presented with a grainy, lo-fi production which is absolutely guaranteed to ensure that they’re not going to be all over the radio, or even usurping the popularity of Sleaford Mods anytime soon, or ever. ‘Dour’ and ‘dingy’ hardly sound like strong selling points, but I’m clearly not alone in my appreciation of their work, and it’s been perversely satisfying witnessing the growth of both their reputation and audience.

But just to be absolutely one hundred per cent, cast-iron solid in guaranteeing this, their latest album is something of a twofer, a cassette release (of course) with a live set occupying the first side, and a single longform track in the shape of the half-hour long ‘Worried’ filling the other. It’s effectively Pound Land’s Ummagumma.

And while most bands who put out a live release pick recordings which are the most representative, while at the same time capturing them at their best – which is why a lot of live albums tend to be assembled from recordings made over the course of a whole tour, Pound Land are giving us a document of a one-off, as they write: ‘[It’s] a recording of the band playing live at New River Studios in North London in the summer of 2023. This was in the midst of a heatwave, without Nick on guitar, and joined by the good boss of South London DIY label Rat Run Records, Rob Pratt (who organised the gig and opened proceedings that night as his electronic alter-ego Entschuldigung). 35 minutes of dub-inflected psychedelic synth-soaked Pound Land has been captured, improvising through the heat and the alcohol, and laden with BBC Radiophonic-style special effects. Recorded by Tom Blackburn at the desk, then mixed by Tom and finally mixed and mastered by Nick Harris. This is Pound Land live as they’ve never sounded before (and possibly won’t again).’

Yes, it’s been mixed and mastered, but it’s essentially a warts-and-all document of a single moment in time.

Minus the guitar but with the addition of jittery sax, the bass-led rendition of ‘Violence’ reminds me rather of the Foetus track ‘Honey I’m Home’, which foetured on the live album Male and semi-official bootleg, with its simple, trudging chord sequence, especially with the drawling, thick-throated snarling vocal. Brutally atonal, it’s a hell of a set opener, and sounds like they’re on stage trying to see how many people they can drive out of the room in the first five minutes.

Single cut ‘Liar’ is a raw and raucous blast, motoric beats and monotonous bass groove laced with frenzied woodwind and a blitzkrieg of laser synths provide the sonic backdrop to Adam Stone’s ragged hollering, before they dig even deeper with ‘Flies’, which lands somewhere between The Fall and the Jesus Lizard. The eight-and-a-half-minute ‘Brain Driver’ is something of a standout: fully two minutes longer than the studio version, it’s a dirty, bassy, jazzy, reverby spaced-out journey through darkness.

And then there’s the new studio track on the reverse, which they describe as ‘a 30-minute-plus sonic odyssey’, expanding that ‘This mammoth audio-journey was the result of many months of hard work by Nick Harris, joined by Adam Stone on voice and guest-star Adam Pettis (ex-The Ofays/Fuck Fuck) from America, on guitar, electronics and vocals. Arguably some of the best production and sound work Nick / Adam have committed to tape.’

No argument there: it actually sounds produced (which is no criticism of their other work), and is an expansive and explicitly experimental piece with infinite layers of echo and delay giving this tense composition a dubby vibe. In the dark blend are elements of trip hop and late nineties / turn of the millennium apocalyptic hip-hop and nihilist No-Wave spoken word, plus tribal beats and a whole lot more, including a dash of Scott Walker and Suicide. The sound is cleaner – in that it’s not buzzing and fuzzed-out or breaking your guts with booming bass – but still murky, and treble tones and sibilant syllables in the vocals cut through it. It’s clearly a departure from their existing body of work but whether it marks the start of a new direction, or is, like the live set it’s being released with, a one-off, remains to be seen. Whatever happens next, this is a very different kind of offering from Pound Land, and one which proves they’re not moored to a fixed idea of what they are.

AA

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The Eurosuite – Totally Fine

Posted: 8 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 18th October 2024

Sorry, not sorry, as they say. In the spring of 2023, off-the-wall supergeroup collaboration featuring members of USA Nails, Nitkowski and Screen Wives, The Eurosuite, released their third album, through Human Worth. They were so sorry, they’ve done another. Only this time, they promise, it’s different.

As the accompanying notes explain, ‘Produced by Wayne Adams (Petbrick / Big Lad) at Bear Bites Horse Studios, the band have taken a different approach from their maximalist output on their second LP Sorry – do less. Where the songs on Sorry were built from a variety of jams, band member ideas, traded demos and looped phone recordings, the 10 songs within Totally Fine were all built and mercilessly edited from a full band improvisations, with individualism, indulgence and egos set aside to better serve the songs… That spirit of minimalism is threaded through each track, which veer from sinewy post punk (‘Crustacean Blue’), throbbing death disco (‘Antimatter’) and something between driving krautrock, surf rock freakouts and an evil version of the B52s (‘12 Diphthongs’, ‘Houseplants’)’.

Sorry was a cracking album: that’s essentially a fact. It still is. But it was seeing them live that they really clicked for me: something about that manic energy in the room, the way each member of the band bounced off one another, if felt as if there was something happening in real-time that went beyond the recorded work.

Here, all of the same elements are present: fizzling synths, jerky guitars, sudden thundering bass runs, changes of tempo, blasts of noise, beats that flit from disco to industrial pounding, and vocals which swing from half-spoken to shouty – and that’s only in the first couple of songs, with a combined running time of less than five minutes. But there’s a newfound focus and intensity, and well as, perhaps a greater separation of instruments which lays the components elements more evident.

There seems to be an emerging subgenre of weird, quirky, jerky noisy shit that’s a bit mathy but with some fried electronics and simply prone to exploding in any direction without a moment’s notice, and it’s noteworthy that both The Eurosuite and Thank, prime exponents of this wide-eyed demented frenzied kind of racket have both found homes at Human Worth. The label’s always had its ear to the ground and its tendrils out for noisy stuff with something different about it, and this feels like an emergent form.

Somewhere in the recesses of my overcrowded memory, there’s a vague recollection of an interview with a band sometime in maybe the late eighties – it may have been a grebo act like Gaye Biker on Acid on how the future of music might be weird, like ‘people playing bits of toast or whatever’ (the quote is from memory, since I’m buggered if I can find it on the Internet and don’t have a month spare to look through books and press cuttings for the sake of fact-checking a detour in a review for an album due out next week). Anyone who’s seen Territorial Gobbing will likely agree we’ve reached that point. But with the likes of Thank and The Eurosuite, they may not be quite that far out, but they’re pretty damn far out in terms of the way their compositions leap and lurch all over, and are simply so far removed from more conventional song structures with verses, choruses, mid-sections, even bridges and pre-choruses or whatever that song forms are being pushed to new limits. And this is exciting and brain-bending in equal portions.

Perhaps this is the culmination of everything that’s preceded it. Perhaps it’s a reaction to the crazy, overstimulated world we live in. Perhaps it’s the soundtrack to emerging from the other side of postmodernism. After all, postmodernism was deemed a ‘schizophrenic’ culture by Deleuze and Guattari in their seminal work, Anti-Oedipus¸ suggesting that schizophrenia is the only sane response to a deranged world. And perhaps this is the proof.

Totally Fine as a title intimates a breeziness, but the kind of airy offhand response which often masks a darker truth. Not that Totally Fine is a showcase of frenetic flailing and pedalling in all directions, and as such has a groundlessness to it. It’s the sound of searching, of grappling with reality, and the very concept of reality.

Some of the songs are barely a minute long: ‘Crustacean Blue’ brings a stuttering blast of a riff that lasts for a mere fifty-five seconds, electronic squeals adding that all-essential eye-popping dimension, and only ‘Reflection Monster’ runs past three minutes. ‘Bellyache’ is one of the most ‘conventional’ songs on the album, and comes on a bit like Suicide and early Cabaret Voltaire with a hint of Throbbing Gristle.

Somehow, by stripping things back, they’ve cranked up the claustrophobia and amped the intensity. There are some dark, low, grinding grooves and some manic hollering vocals on display here, and they do define the album – but that defines it more is the audacious racket, the wild anti-structures, the sheer imagination.

Clawing my way through ‘Bagman’ ‘Earworm’ I can feel my blood pressure increasing as the manic noise amps up… and up. But I’m totally fine. Really, I am. Totally Fine.

AA

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Rothko and Steve Parry – HOWL

Posted: 6 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Trace Recordings – 11th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

One might say that this collaboration has been a long time in coming: the pair have been friends for some twenty years, and have made contributions to one another’s recordings over that time. There’s no question that it was worth the wait. Their process and the way in which they each contributed is integral to the finished work, and here, not only to save typing, but to ensure nothing is lost in translation or paraphrase, I shall quote from the accompanying notes:

‘Emanating from the sounds of a church organ, with many short pieces recorded by Steve Parry in an ancient secluded church, and then embellished by Beazley, with his resonant bass tones, electric guitar and electronics, HOWL captures the senses of ambience, harmony, discordance and noise, with recordings of the churches space, of its emptiness, interspersed with the music.

‘The two, long, resulting pieces, create an almost ritualistic event, of something taking place that is mysterious, uplifting, and, in parts, unsettling.

‘The album reflects an emptiness, the echoes from ancient walls, a deep sense of place—and the refractions between these two artists. HOWL veers between moments of meditative beauty and unsettling discord, creating a soundworld that feels ritualistic, mysterious, and transformative.’

This is very much an accurate summary and fair description of the album, consisting as it does of two compositions each with a running time of around twenty minutes, but it’s more of a challenge to convey in fullness the resonant effects of this vaporous sonic drift. The first, ‘In the Season of Darkness’ is formed around elongated drones, but their organ origins isn’t immediately obvious in the ear. One associates the instrument with bold, piping swells which sing to the heavens, but here, it’s more subdued, almost a low, rumbling wheeze which provides an eddying undercurrent. Acoustic guitar and slow, meandering bass are far more dominant, and it’s very soon clear that this is by no means an ambient work, or a work without structure or form. The guitar and bass play distinct notes and motifs, often alternating with one another, but sometimes playing in co-ordination, and others still across one another. Treble strains like taut whines of restrained feedback filter through, these higher-end frequencies forming a counter to the resonating bass and the mid-range organ drone which slowly begins to emerge and take form a few minutes in.

The dissonant incidentals rupture the surface like lightning through a thick, rolling cloud cover. The mood is sombre, ominous. The fact it’s pitch black outside and has been since around 6:30, I’m feeling autumnal and writing by candlelight probably means I’m feeling it more, but this is music with a subliminal, subconscious pull. There’s a segment around the mid-point where there’s a pause, and there’s nothing but clatters and clanks, like tin cans rattling in the wind, before the drone returns, darker and denser than before, and with a sepulchral reverb, and it’s something which taps into something primitive and earth-born within. I can only really articulate it by way of a brief recollection of a time I visited an obscure stone circle in Scotland. Most of the stones were gone, but the shape of the circle was marked out by a ring of nettles. It was probably around twelve metres in diameter, and the few remaining stones were no more than three feet high. It was a little way off a minor road, in an unkept grazing field and as unremarkable as it was forgotten and neglected, and I had only paused by it because I had spotted it on the map. But, arriving at the place, something happened: the air temperature dropped a couple of degrees, the wind sped up and clouds obscured the sun; but more than this, there was an atmosphere which brought goosebumps and a shiver down my spine. The place had an atmosphere, and I almost felt as if I was for a brief moment splitting across millennia. The sensation was but fleeting, but it was palpable. The experience of hearing this piece is akin to that, resonating on a level beyond the sphere of commonplace experience.

Counterpart composition, ‘In the Season of Light’ is, again, constructed around a long, long, reedy drone, this time with piano and delicate scrapes and wind-like rustles and whooshes adding the additional layers and textures. It doesn’t feel our sound especially light or uplifting: dark sonorous tones and groaning creaks occupy the corners, before, again around the mid-point, a gentle guitar part, reminiscent of later Earth tunes, arrives, and there are some delicate strings, too. Finally, light begins to break through.

HOWL clearly has no correspondence with Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem, but does very much tap into something primal and primitive, the way we feel the effects of the seasons, the sun, the moon, possessing what one might perhaps describe as a ‘spiritual intuition’, reaching elemental aspects of the human DNA. Understated, but powerful and moving, it’s a subtly intense work.

AA

6 page ECOpack with measurements.pdf

Foldhead – Beserk Pinball Machine / Quasar Delirium

Posted: 5 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Having just effused over the benefits of Bandcamp Friday, as well as wrestled with the overwhelming volume of notifications and review submissions, this one lands as the kind f curveball only the likes of Foldhead are likely to deliver, in that this is by no means a new release. Beserk Pinball Machine / Quasar Delirium was in fact first released back in 2021, as something of an archival recording: ‘Recorded in 2015 for a tape label that ceased to exist prior to the intended release date. The 25 copies that had been made were distributed at the Experimental Yorkshire festival which took place at Hebden Bridge Trades Club on 21 July 2018’ And now the Bandcamp page has been refreshed, with ‘two new mixes + a new piece.’

I’m not sure if ‘beserk’ is an intentional variant of ‘berserk’, but I’m going to assume it is. The etymology of the word ‘berserk’ is quite fascinating. The word itself means ‘out of control with anger or excitement; wild or frenzied’, but its origin lies in the reverence the Saxons held for bears. ‘Berserk’ translates as ‘bear shirt’, and berserkers were the warriors placed at the front of a battle formation: their job was to chew their shields, gnash their jaws and foam at the mouth like frenzied bears in order to share the shit out of their opponents before the charge.

This release is every bit as scary and unpredictable as a frenzied bear, and certainly inflicts a bear-like mauling on the senses, being particularly brutal on the ears, and on the lower intestines for that matter.

The opener and lead track, ‘Beserk Pinball Machine’ is an absolute noise monster. There are – sort of – vocals in the mix, but they’re distorted and largely buried beneath a deluge of mangled noise, churning distortion and feedback all mixed together to forge the nastiest mess of trebly sonic ruination. It’s just shy of fifteen minutes shattering, explosive, convulsive digital meltdown which makes Merzbow sound mellow, and Kenji Siratoi supremely calm in comparison. Paul Whatshisface, having previously been a member of Smell & Quim and Swing Jugend – as well as occasional noise duo …(something) ruined has had a long career operating in harsh noise circles, and this is both noisy and almost unspeakably harsh. The noise frenzy ends abruptly, but there’s a spell of low-level hum at the end which offers some respite, however much the not-silence nags.

‘Quasar Delirium’ is appropriately titled: another quarter of an hour of brain-melting, tinnitus-inducing noise squall. Only this has more fizz, more squeal, more laser bleeps, more treble, and more feedback, more melting circuitry, all against a backdrop of churning cement-mixer grind, washing machine spin-cycle metallic reverberations. The experience is how I imagine standing next to a massive propeller engine without ear defenders, while a Star Wars type laser-gun battle takes place all around – while buildings explode and collapse all around, and there is nowhere to hide.

The concept of remixes in this context is rather amusing, and ‘Machine Pinball Bezerk’ and ‘Delirium Pulsar’ are more about fucking shit up even harder than remixing in the more conventional sense. ‘Machine Pinball Bezerk’ sounds like an atomic bomb: it’s noise on the scale of the scene in Threads where the buildings are decimated by a wall of white-hot flame. It’s a scene that seems to last an eternity despite being maybe five minutes at most. The fifteen minutes of ‘Machine Pinball Bezerk’ feels like a lifetime and you can almost feel the tinnitus coming on after just five minutes, while your brain melts and trickles out of your ear.

‘Delerium Machines’ delivers more of the same, the most pulverising, excruciating blasting racket. It hurts, and the overall experience is disorientating: an hour and a quarter of the most abrasive, churning noise imaginable. It’s not Harsh Noise Wall, but there’s not much variety, either, meaning that this release is a relentless assault that will likely leave you wilted, drained by the end – and that’s assuming you can still hear.

AA

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BØESWINE– bøeswine

Posted: 4 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 4th October 2024

Christopher Niisnibor

Unlike Record Store Day, which has been hijacked by major labels and swamped with overpriced reissues to the point that it no longer benefits any of those it was initially intended to, Bandcamp Friday is something I wholly endorse.

Bandcamp’s model is rather different from other streaming services in that it provides a platform whereby people can pay to actually own the music, be it in digital or physical format. While purchase is available through some – Apple, Amazon – rates for artists aren’t great. Many people have ditched physical media form reasons of convenience and space, but the trouble with streaming – and this doesn’t only apply to music – is that it can be removed from a platform at zero notice, which is irksome when you’re halfway through a series or really want to watch a particular movie… or want to listen to an album. The Internet is not the infinite, permanent archive of everything ever we were promised it would be around twenty-five years ago, and the reason for this can essentially be summarised in one word: capitalism.

Maintaining a site costs. Everything costs. The Internet and – especially streaming services – do not exist for the benefit of either artists or end users, at least not anymore. But here, Bandcamp Friday represents the best of the Internet, in that all proceeds go to artists. And artists deserve, and need, to be paid. Because we need art. It may be massively underappreciated and taken for granted as wallpaper, but humanity needs creative art to survive. It does not need capitalism: if anything, capitalism is strangling culture and, moreover, killing the planet. Art predates not only capitalism, but houses, farming, even language.

This does mean that every Bandcamp Friday finds my inbox even more swamped than usual with notifications of new releases, and the run-up means a significant influx of emails for review of simply notification, and it can be quite overwhelming.

It’s with almost clockwork consistency that Swedish obscure noise label Dret Skivor drop a new release on Bandcamp Friday, and this one is no exception, arriving in the form of a collaborative work between the notorious cult noisemaking vehicle that is Legion of Swine and bøe under the portmanteau moniker of BØESWINE.

In classic Dret form, bøeswine offers two longform tracks – ‘bøe’ and ‘swine’ – each of which runs for approximately twenty minutes and occupies a side of the ultra-limited cassette release. And so it is that ‘bøe’ groans and drones and groans and clanks and clatters out an amorphous mess of noise with sparks of tinnitus-inducing treble cutting through the endless hum and scratching distortion for a full nineteen and a half uncomfortable minutes. It’s pretty harsh, and darkly uncomfortable. More than harsh noise, this level of churning grey noise is hard on the ear: it’s like standing next to a cement mixer at the edge of a demolition site as every window is smashed by a wrecking ball. Once ‘bøe’ has assaulted the eardrums and left you in a state of physical and psychological ruination – and it will, it’s that dingy, grindy, mangled, abrasive – we come to the twenty-one-and-a-half-minute ‘swine’, another monster epic driven by dark noise, strains of feedback and fizzing electronics, and this time it’s amped up to the power of eleven to render THE nastiest noise.

It’s a relentless force, as harsh as an atomic detonation in your back yard. So much noise, and so relentless. And I love it. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, unyielding, positively painful. But musical experiences are simply entertainment of they don’t test. This is like the ultimate test, a work of the darkest, most fucked-up, unstructured noise. Any comparisons to Throbbing Gristle are entirely valid. Bøeswine is equally punishing and magnificent.

AA

boeswine for bandcamp

Human Impact – Gone Dark

Posted: 1 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Ipecac Recordings – 4th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

The band’s very name carries considerable weight. It’s a phrase oft-used, but rarely really assessed and processed. But the band’s comments around their second album place it front and centre: “This is more of a statement about how things are going in the world right now.” says Spencer. “Things were pretty shitty before. I think things may actually have gotten a little bit worse.”

In the last week, here in the north of England, it’s rained. A lot. Here in York, the river breached its banks for the first time this autumn. Last year, this didn’t happen until sometime in October, although – despite multi-million-pound work being done on flood defences – vast swathes of land lay under water for the best part of six months thereafter. It’s also rained a lot in the south, too, with flash flooding. Yesterday, I turned on the news to see images from the US, which showed trucks being driven on rapid currents of rivers which hours earlier had been roads. And yet still people shrug and say ‘meh, it’s cyclical, we’ve had ice ages, we’ve had climate change before, I don’t see any evidence it’s man-made. Besides, we’ve just had the coldest summer in years, how’s that global warming, eh?’ When it comes to climate denial, denial is the operative word. Sure, climate is ever-changing, but not at this rate.

But as a species, we seem hell-bent on self-destruction: seeing things unfold in real time in the Middle East is terrifying, the mounting death toll in Gaza – or what’s left of it – a horror almost beyond words, while Russia continually alludes to a nuclear response. But this isn’t even a return to the Cold War climate, because a very hot war rages all the while, with no sign of abatement or a peaceful resolution.

So, have things ‘gotten a little bit worse?’ It would seem so. And the thing about history is that it happens – or is made – fast, and sometimes faster than others. As I type, I’m having to turn the volume up to drown the sound of fighter jets running night exercises – I like to hope they’re exercises – nearby and over the city. RAF Eurofighters – currently, it would seem there are seven running circuits around the area – and occasionally US planes, too, have been evermore present of late, and it’s hard not to feel nervous.

Turning up the volume on Gone Dark at least is no chore: it’s an album which needs to be heard at the kind of level it was played, the kind of level you know it would be played live. Seeing Unsane at The Brudenell in Leeds back in 2011 will forever be a standout for me. Nothing fancy or showy: they were simply relentless and brutal. And so it is that Human Impact bring the best of their component parts, consisting as they do of Unsane frontman Chris Spencer and Cop Shoot Cop squallmaker Jim Coleman, with bassist Eric Cooper (Made Out of Babies, Bad Powers) and drummer Jon Syverson (Daughters). These are four guys who know how to make the most punishing noise. And if noise has colour, the colour of Human Impact is a stark, steely grey, with the texture of sheet metal.

As the accompanying notes explain, ‘Gone Dark‘s songs emerge from a cinematic miasma of dark ambience, processed field recordings, street rants and industrial grinding. Like embers flickering from an inhospitable wasteland, Gone Dark‘s nine tracks provide paths away from total annihilation, with Spencer barking “Wake up or live on your knees” (‘Collapse’); “Now is the time to resist” (‘Destroy to Rebuild’) and “Follow the sound … the future is now” (‘Corrupted’)
“It’s just sort of the modern state of being, to me. From really a human perspective in terms of us being part of the masses, all of us together as one giant conglomerate of production and taxpayer bullshit,” says Spencer. “I make a conscious effort to try to think of things in terms of ‘we’ and ‘us’ and what’s happening to us as a whole instead of just my stupid problems.”

Understanding this context is integral to appreciating Gone Dark. There’s a pervading weight to every song, and the mood is of rage – the kind of rage that comes from a feeling of powerlessness. ‘Collapse’ sets the bleak, nihilistic tone as it hammers away, the guitar and bass meshing together to form a dense sonic sludge. It’s abrasive, but suffocating, conveying a sense of desperate confinement. Anger, anguish, anxiety. Gone Dark positively burns with all three.

It would be wrong to bemoan any lack of variety across the album’s nine punishing assaults: Gone Dark reflects life in the real world. There’s no respite, only relentless, brutal onslaught, kicking after kicking. You don’t get to catch your breath or mellow with some nice time out: no, you just have to endure the blows and do whatever it takes to stay afloat, and you stagger, punch-drunk, swaying on your feet wondering how much more you can actually take. It’s not a real question, since there is no option to do anything but plough on. Life is harsh, and this is a harsh album – not in the sense of harsh noise, but in its unyielding density. Gone Dark is the sonic equivalent of a good kicking. It’s so raw, so harrowing, and so intense it hurts.

AA

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Baby Schillaci – The Soundtrack

Posted: 1 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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2nd October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Christ only knows what this is intended to be a soundtrack to, but the debut long-player from chaotic Welsh post-punky alternative rock act Baby Schillaci could be loosely considered a concept album. The soundtrack to a schizophrenic episode, perhaps?

Opening with ‘## TITLE SEQUENCE ##’ and with ‘## INTERVAL ##’ breaking the sequence midway through, there’s a semblance of a structure here, and while some of the titles do hint at a narrative art in keeping with ‘real’ soundtracks – ‘DISINTEGRATING SMALL TALK’ and ‘JACKIE’S GIRL’, for example, elsewhere there just seems to be more of an interest in brutality and mortality – consider ‘BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA’ and the crazed, explosive single cut ‘THE FLATLINERS’.

The aforementioned ‘title sequence’ brings tension – a stark piano and brooding bass builds and ultimately yields to a surge of expansive abstract dissonance, but with a widescreen, cinematic feel, before ‘ULTRA HD HAPPY FACE’ blasts in with some thick, scuzzy guitars and there’s a strong early 90s alternative vibe to it. But as much as it’s Jacob’s Mouse and the Jesus Lizard, it’s got that roaring grunge revival thing going on, and calls to mind Pulled Apart by Horses’ debut album. ‘tHe AnTi suNCreaM LEaGUe’ comes on like Therapy? in collaboration with Sleaford Mods with a bit of Rage Against the Machine going on, which on paper shouldn’t work, but it’s an absolute riot: furious overdriven guitars nagging at a cyclical riff paired with a relentless, vitriolic spoken word rant hits the mark, and again reminds us – at least those of us who were there – just how eclectic the 90s alternative scene was. This was the decade when shit got weird, in a good way. It was a time which will be forever synonymous with grunge and Britpop, but it also gave us the previously unthinkable musical hybrid of the Judgement Night soundtrack, and a whole host of less-than-obvious crossovers. Pop Will Eat Itself were a one-band hybrid of infinite proportions, while Faith No More were more contained but no less genre-busting, and there was just so much weird shit happening the only question was as to what’s going to happen next. Sadly, the answer was Oasis, and while interesting stuff was still happening on the fringes, Oasis simultaneously killed indie and alternative and musical innovation with their turgid pub-rock monopoly.

Built around a thick, low-slung, grinding bass, ‘DISINTEGRATING SMALL TALK’ has something of the industrial roar of Filter about it, but then again, some of the stoner swagger of Queens of the Stone Age. These guys don’t limit themselves when it comes to their songwriting. Genre? Pfft. Look, if it sounds good and they get to kick out some dirty noise, it’s good. And this IS good.

‘THE FLATLINERS’ starts out like early Interpol before flooring the pedal and accelerating in a deluge of guitar and frenetic drumming, and it’s like at least three songs in one, and it’s this crazed shift from one thing to another which defines The Soundtrack. Closer ‘BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA’ is a sort of motoric workout where The Fall and The Black Angels collide, but the sound is solid and it builds to a mighty climax.

The thing The Soundtrack needs now is the accompanying movie… I’ve no idea what it would look like, but it would be wild!

AA

Baby Schillaci - The Soundtrack Artwork BIG

God Bullies – As Above, So Below

Posted: 26 September 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Reptilian Records – 4th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s remarkable how quickly the future can become past. Take the Wikipedia entry for God Bullies for example. It closes with the statement ‘God Bullies are slotted to record a new album at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio this April set for a September 2024 release on Reptilian Records followed by touring In the US and Europe.’

The album recording happened, and here it is, but Steve Albini isn’t – just a month after the recording of this album, and the week of the release of the latest – and now last – Shellac album. Life has a habit of throwing unpleasant surprises – something I have first-hand experience of in the most devastating of ways.

It’s been quite the year for long-dormant bands crashing in with new releases, and certainly not only Shellac – the Jesus Lizard recently dropped their first album in twenty-six years, which is staggering. And it’s a belter, as, indeed, was Shellac’s To All Trains. God Bullies certainly sit in the same bracket, as purveyors of noise rock in the 90s and aligned to classic labels Amphetamine Reptile and Alternative Tentacles. Active between 1986 and 1995, they reconvened in 2010 for the Amphetamine Reptile Records’ 25th Anniversary concert.

But that was fourteen years ago, and it would remiss to ignore the fact as part of a balanced review that there’s some dispute over this release, because, as we know, bands have a habit of falling out, and it’s widely documented how there have simultaneously been two versions of Fleetwood Mac, of Hawkwind, among others.

Bassist Mike Corso, who runs the God Bullies website explains that ‘Mike Hard and his long time band “Thrall” have chosen to illegally co-opt the God Bullies Trademark in an effort exploit its legacy in hopes of fulfilling their delusional dreams of hitting it big. And the truly sick fact is that on numerous occasions they’ve held out that they are doing it in the name and spirit of our fallen comrade, David Livingstone… Mike Hard and his band Thrall have recently recorded a CD and plan on fraudulently release it calling it the God Bullies. A little back story here. The fact of the matter is that in 2002 the actual God Bullies (Adam Berg drums, Mike Corso Bass, Mike Hard Singer, David Livingstone guitar) have had a 10 song CD with all the drum and bass tracks recorded. All that was needed was for Livingstone and Hard to do guitar and vocal tracks to complete the project. You will see numerous times mentioned about completing that album. While finishing that album was mentioned many times, completing the God Bullies album was evidently never a top priority for either Livingstone or Hard.’

And so it seems we have two different perspectives on the ‘real’ God Bullies. It’s true that this is not the album the band recorded the bones of in 2002 that never made it over the finish line. But As Above, So Below certainly does feature vocalist and founder member Mike Hard, but not bassist and founder member Mike Corso. And guitarist David Livingstone sadly died in February of last year, an event which was always going to make any subsequent activity… not quite the same. Corso says it’s not a God Bullies album… but it’s here as a God Bullies album, and, well, it sounds like one. That is to say, it’s gnarly, mangled dirty noise-rock that is quintessentially of the sound of Amphetamine Reptile and Touch ‘n’ Go in the 90s, which saw God Bullies sitting alongside a host of bands including the Jesus Lizard, Tar, Guzzard and countless others who have largely been forgotten by the majority.

Sidestepping any interpersonal wranglings between (former) band members, on its own merits, As Above, So Below is a cracker. It’s a raging, roaring tempest of noise, blurred, slurred, dingy, dirty, and vaguely demented and delirious. The riffs rage and tear savagely, and As Above, So Below is a brutal, scuzzy blast of raucous noise and rabid, manic vocals.

‘Help’ is a twisted classic and finds Hard yelling and hollering like a man possessed, while ‘You Never Know’ is more brooding and overtly contemporary goth. ‘Love’ sounds like the kind of love that will likely end in strangulation, with a hookline of ‘You call this love?’ hollered over a larynx-vibrating bass snarl. In fact, everything snarls and grinds on every track.

No doubt fans will be riotously divided on this release, and that’s understandable. But objectively, As Above, So Below works as a classic example of the ferocity of God Bullies. It may not quite be the comeback album it’s been pitched as, featuring as it does more members of Thrall than it does original God Bullies, and I’ll leave it for the band and fans to fight that one out. Sidestepping all of the stuff, As Above, So Below is a brawling dingy blast of noise and it kicks some serious ass.

AA

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Keir Cooper + Eleanor Westbrook: Star Quality – Speculations for Guitar and Voice

Posted: 23 September 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Discus Music – 27th September 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

One way to tell an avant-garde musical work from its title alone is when the title provides a quite precise statement relating to its compositional nature. And so it is that this collaborative set of songs by Keir Cooper and Eleanor Westbrook are structured around guitar and voice.

‘Willow Tree – A Dialogue’ takes the interesting form of – perhaps not surprisingly – a dialogue of sorts, in which Westbrook’s adopts two contrasting modes of delivery, with a spectacular operatic aria juxtaposed with a spoken-word interrogation as a counterpoint. The effect is closer to a simultaneous internal monologue running across the song itself rather than a dialogue in the conventional sense. Meanwhile, the delicately picked neoclassical guitar is subject to interruption by clunks and distortion and occasional whirs and bleeps and the operatic vocal strays off kilter and the dream which drifted in twists and flickers with darker shades: not pronounced enough to be truly nightmarish, but unsettling.

The pair continue to explore the contrasts of melody and disharmony as Westbrook squeaks, squawks, trills, and purrs an infinite array of vocal gymnastics and Cooper’s guitar work, which chimes and treads delicately from folk to flamenco via classical streams, stamps on its own beauty with sudden and unexpected stops and stutters and forays into wrongness with stray notes and dissonance.

‘Superstar’ strays into the space which soundtracks a sense of derangement, the territory where things make no sense, and that place of incomprehension instils an unsettling confusion that borders on anxiety. ‘Modern Translation’ follows a similar trajectory: it’s a piece of magical neoclassical chamber music that’s twisted as if performed in an auditory hall of mirrors. Everything is wrong: something that should be soothing and beautiful is warped in a that it becomes unheimlich, eerie.

It’s hard to locate a touchstone or reference point for this: perhaps there are elements of later Scott Walker present, blended with hints of The Ex with its more avant-jazz leanings. One can only muse as to how they came to create this work: despite its clear foundations in the realms of classical and opera, Star Quality ventures so far from this path that it often bears little resemblance to any given style. The pieces evidently do have quite detailed and complex structures, as there’s nothing haphazard or uncoordinated about the way the two play together, but it’s impossible to decipher them from an outside perspective.

There’s a grand yet ethereal theatricality to ‘Bordering the Afterworld’, and ‘O’ soars and swoops and squeaks and whoops its way theatrically – and somewhat crazily – across some sprightly, if vaguely gothic-sounding guitar picking that suddenly, from nowhere, begins to buzz and thump. ‘The Time I Gave Up the Stage’ draws the curtain on an incredibly curious and as far off the wall as is imaginable.

Star Quality clearly has theatrical inspirations and aspirations, but shows two artists who are more interested in exploring their outer limits than taking the limelight in a mainstream setting – and for that, I applaud them.

AA

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BLOOM – Pooch

Posted: 22 September 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Kalamine Records – 14th September 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Whether it be solo works ranging from ambience to classical, or collaborations running the full gamut in the electronic field, Deborah Fialkiewicz’s output in recent years has been nothing short of prodigious, and spanning as many forms as her work does, there is never a dull moment. This latest work, under the POOCH moniker, in collaboration with Dan Dolby (Bassist in Mastiff, Noisemonger in Catafalque and Sulphur Nurse) is no exception. It offers a set of eight dark, stark electronic compositions which owe a considerable debt to early industrial and electronic works, bringing a combination of dark atmospherics and nagging beats. Although entirely instrumental, we’re in the kind of territory occupied by the likes of Cabaret Voltaire, Test Dept, and Chris and Cosey’s Trance.

As an opener, ‘Hades’ is as dark and subterranean as the title would suggest, a bleak, murky pulsation squelching around and leading the listener down, down, down. It serves as something of a primer, a mood-setter, but doesn’t fully prepare one for the altogether steelier, starker, more rhythmic and percussion-driven pieces which follow.

The title track pairs a dense, dirty bass with clattering, metallic percussion which assails the mind like a concerted assault with the contents of a cutlery drawer, and it bashes away relentlessly for four and a half minutes straight. On paper, it might not sound much, but as an experience, it’s pretty hard-hitting. Built around short, clipped repetitions, it creates a suffocatingly claustrophobic aural space. The word ‘pooch’ evokes a cuddly companion, something friendly, but there’s nothing cuddly or friendly about this, a listening experience closer to being whipped with a chain than fussing a canine buddy.

Each composition bears a one-word title (‘GameBoy’ being a forced blend-word (it doesn’t really qualify as a portmanteau) in order to maintain the theme. Funtime bit-tunes are bent with glitches and warping drifts of darkness here, before things begin to slide further into beat-orientated minimal techno.

The steady beat which dominates and defined the spartan ‘Quazar’ is almost soporific: the track assumes something of a background position as it clicks along nonchalantly, with a low, unshifting drone hovering just around the level of register. Nothing happens. It doesn’t need to. And while the thunder which heralds the arrival of ‘Midnite’ might initially serve as an alert, the piece soon melts into abstraction. The final track, ‘Stimpy’ may be missing Ren, but hits hard, built around a strong, thudding beat and looped electronic undulations.

For all of its cuddly connotations, Pooch is a pretty dark album. To my mind – and it could be to my mind alone – music which is heavily beat-orientated and instrumental feels impersonal somehow, and I find it somewhat disorientating, disconnecting, alien. And so it is that the pounding beats of Pooch leave me feeling somewhat dazed, detached, even dizzy. But it’s impossible to deny the detail, the quality of the execution, or the fact that this is an outstanding work.

AA

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