Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Sumac – The Healer

Posted: 14 June 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Thrill Jockey – 21st June 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

You want epic? Look no further that this. As the press notes set out, ‘Over the course of 4 tracks in 76 minutes, SUMAC presents a sequence of shifting movements which undergo a constant process of expansion, contraction, corruption and regrowth.’

Four tracks. An hour and a quarter. And then we have the context, and the content of ‘the thematic nature of the record – narratives of experiential wounding as gateways to empowerment and evolution, both individual and collective.’

The emotional weight may not be immediately apparent without this context, but the sonic heft crashes down the doors with the opening chord, a low-down, distortion-heavy heave. The dynamic is one of a lumbering lurch rather than a forceful blast, a long, slow spew, a ruined speaker flapping a sigh in devastation. And then the bass grinds in, so slow, so dark, so heavy, like an emptying of the guts – a slow, painful Dysenteric purge. Around six minutes in, drums and vocals enter the mix and the picture – a scene of the most ruinous pain beyond imagination – is complete. ‘World of Light’ is either the most ironic or misleading song title going: it’s twenty-six punishing minutes, with extended passages of droning feedback in between riffs more brutal than crucifixion. This one track alone isn’t only the duration of some albums, but contains everything necessary.

Comparisons are references are easy and abundant, but, equally, futile: The Healer is a singular, monumental work. It would be an oversight to comment only on the brutal, crawling riffs and gut-shredding density when there are passages of haunting elegance and quite touching beauty. Solo guitar ripples and eddies like a small, quiet stream, and there are moments The Healer of calm, of grace. And the consequence – apart from rendering this post-metal – is a strong dynamic, meaning hat the bulldozer blast gave more than double impact when they hit. And hit they do.

During the gut-churning ‘Yellow Dawn’, you feel yourself hollow out, slumping inwardly following a punishing display of power. It’s hard, it, heavy, it hurts. The final track, ‘The Stone’s Turn’, is again twenty-five minutes in duration and it’s a punishing, pulverising sonic assault.

The Healer leaves you feeling hollowed out, sapped, sucked to a husk. It’s also a work of ambitious enormity. Immense doesn’t come close.

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Paul K – Hyperobjects

Posted: 11 June 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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19th April 2024

It’s been out a little while now, but some releases have a slow diffusion. Hyperobjects is one of them, and it seems fitting, given that Paul K’s latest work is an immersive work which is ‘a study in musical simplicity with a stripped-down sound creating a space where the listener can both listen to the album and imagine the worlds created by each track’s individual atmosphere’. Paul’s long-shown a fixation with space, as his last album The Space Between, evidenced. But Hyperobjects does something different, and heads in a different direction.

Space. And it’s immediate relative, time. We never seem to have enough of either in the present, or overall. We live in a state of perpetual future-placement, eternal postponement, dragging ourselves through endless days of drudge while promising ourselves a brighter future, be it a holiday, breaking free from a bad relationship, leaving the awful job, or retirement. Gratification is always over there, the aspiration is forever just over the horizon, on the other side of the next hurdle, an inch beyond reach. And we find ourselves entrapped within the special confines of our limitations, the four walls of our homes, the constraints of being unable to go places because of needing to be up and at work the following day, confined by affordability, and so on and so forth. Horizons shrink, and time passes in a blink and suddenly, time and space have both evaporated. What have you done, and what have you got to show for it?

‘Hyperobjects’ is a gentle work, and while much of it is electronically-created, many of the sounds replicate conventional instruments. As such, it’s a moving and mournful piano which leads the first track, a four-part neoclassical composition, ‘Diaspora (Movements I-IV)’.

It’s the sound of a soft, rolling piano which dominates this album, which is in equal parts classical and post-rock, with ambient elements interwoven throughout. ‘Döstädning’ sounds a little like an instrumental outtake by Talk Talk. Ethereal whisps and traces of voice swish around the piano and occasional strings which trace the supple structures of ‘Hyperobjects’, but in the main, it’s showcase of the most minimal compositions.

On ‘Hyperobjects’, the tracks drift into one another to create a continuous, mellifluous whole. Its power lies in its simplicity, its purity, and in doing so, Paul K has achieved something new, artistically, as well as attaining a new peak.

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Disjecta Membra – Pearls Before Swine

Posted: 10 June 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Goths are the most knit-picking pedants and harshest critics of their favourite bands of any genre’s fans I know. Actually, that’s not quite true: fans of The Sisters of Mercy are the worst knit-picking pedants and harshest critics of their favourite bands. I preface this review with this observation as a Sisters fan first and foremost, and contestably as a goth second.

Y’see, most of the bands which emerged after that initial post-punk crop which included The Sisters, Siouxsie, The Cure, Bauhaus – disparate bands who have little in common sonically and stylistically beyond reverb, dyed hair, and studded belts – and sure, The March Violets, The Danse Society, UK Decay, and a handful of others, were toss. By the time ‘goth’ was formalised as a ‘genre’ it had gone to shit, mostly with every other band ripping off the guitar and bass for ‘Walk Away’ and diluting it to a pissweak rehash, and all too often with ghastly theatrical booming vocals. And they all started wearing waistcoats and frilly cuffs and appropriating ‘gothic’ imagery to boot. That was circa 86, by which time – that’s which time, not witch time – The Sisters and The Cure and Siouxsie had very much evolved, so we can probably as much blame The Mission for the start of the rather more naff second wave. By the 90s, derivative cack like Every New Dead Ghost was crawling out of the woodwork, amplifying the cliches on top of simply being laughably bad.

It so happens that Disjecta Membra have been going 30 years, emerging from that early 90s milieu of corny goth revivalism – presumably pining for 1985 and sobbing into their baggy sleeves when The Sisters went cock-rock with Vision Thing. This release is a career-spanning retrospective, which they’re giving away free on their Bandcamp. And this is the first I’ve heard of them.

I kinda wish it had stayed that way. It starts off with the single version of ‘Whakataurangi Ake’, which features Rob Thorne, and it’s a preposterous, pretentious semi-ambient new-age effort with over-the-top dramatic vocals. I mean, fair enough in that it draws on their New Zealand heritage, but it’s pretty obvious and cheesy as. And it’s all downhill from there.

‘Lilitu’ might actually be quite exciting if X-Mal Deutschland had never existed. But as it is, it might as well be a cover of ‘In Der Nacht.’ Talking of covers, there are a few here. And again, after The Sisters broke the ground of taking songs that didn’t obviously sit with the style – like ‘Jolene’, and disco faves ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’, and Hot Chocolate’s ‘Emma’ and made it their schtick, every other goth band thereafter just had to toss in some quirky covers… and lo, we get a take on Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’ and covers of other goth bands, because they obviously add so much more. ‘Rasputin’ sounds like you’d imagine, of course: drum machine with a head-splitting snare and spindly guitars. It’s cack, but the worst thing is that it doesn’t really bring anything new and doesn’t even sound like it’s done vaguely ironically, meaning it’s neither cool nor funny.

And while we’re in the realms of cliche, what’s the obsession with marionettes in contemporary goth? ‘Antoinette Marionette’ is as obvious as it is lame as wordplay goes., and with its crashing snare and chilly synths and spindly guitars, the best that can be said for it is that it’s uptempo. I did kinda wish that ‘Skin Trade’ was a Duran Duran cover instead of the po-faced and predictable goth-by-numbers that it actually is.

Apparently, ‘Madeline! Madeline!’ and ‘Death by Discotheque’ are both good enough to warrant two versions on a thirteen-track compilation. They aren’t, and it suggests a lack of material of a quality to fill a single album over the course of thirty years. The latter, especially is a derivative disappointment, a stab at rambunctious goth-country in the vein of Fields of the Nephilim while attempting to create their own take on Suspiria’s ‘Allegedly, Dancefloor Tragedy’- one of the few decent songs to come out of the early 90s revival. This isn’t a patch on it, and just seems to think it’s amusing bashing cybergoths. I mean, they have a point, in that cybergoth was a ridiculous thing, but of all the audiences to alienate in their position.

The last track, ‘Walking in Light’ is quite interesting, marking a shift in tone towards droning guitar ambience, at least initially, but then it descends into a glam-infused rock stomp which turns out to be a cover anyway.

30 years, and this is the best they’ve got.

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Legion of Swine – Live at Plourac’h

Posted: 8 June 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 7th June 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Legion of Swine trotted out for a few live exhibitions in the last few months, but Live at Plourac’h documents a show which was something of a one-off among these, with the performance having taken place in a studio (Soundfackery Studios in Brittany) and streamed live, followed by a Q&A, with audio from both featuring here.

Like many noise acts, T’ Swine tends to keep performances brief. The brevity is, in may respects, part of a tradition on the scene, and while Masonna’s explosive three-minute sets take this to an extreme – and why not? Noise is all about extremity, and finding new limits to push beyond. It’s all about the impact of the short, sharp, shock. Leave them wanting more – those who haven’t fled the room, hands clasped to their ears, while holding back the urge to vomit, anyway.

Even in the absence of the old performance aspects of Legion of Swine shows, whereby Dave Procter would be anonymous in a lab coat and latex pig mask, which means we get to witness the bearded, bespectacled northerner looking quite unassuming, sonically, LoS remains a formidable force.

Opening with strains of feedback and scratching buzzes of distortion, the set holds a single, undulating note of wailing, droning feedback noise for what feels like an eternity, the frequencies and tone changing but still offering nothing more than feedback for the first five minutes of the set. The level of strain and the tension builds, but still, holding back, holding back, testing the patience as well as the eardrums. To have been in a room with this, at gig volume would hurt. Then, unexpectedly, things drop in intensity, and it’s a heavy hum, a long, low, whine that nags and throbs.

As a noise sculpture, this is a restrained, patient piece which hovers within the parameters of a very limited range in terms of frequencies and particularly texturally, manipulating feedback in the mid- and lower-ranged for the bulk of the sixteen-minute duration.

Even recorded, with the separation from the actual event, the frequencies and volume are conveyed clearly here, and there’s a gut-trembling grind to the lower-end oscillations. The release notes summarise the kit as a ‘trusty metal roasting tin and a couple of effects pedals’, and whatever the truth of the facts around the gear involved – which I suspect would have been minimal – the racket created is significant.

There’s a long, long fade to nothing.

There is a certain amusement in the fact that the Q&A lasts twice the duration of the set itself. Dave speaks engagingly on the technical processes of his use of contact mics, and, yes a baking tin, and the mechanisms involved in changing pitch and creating feedback, and so on. It’s a nerdfest that Steve Albini would have been impressed by. He discusses room space, PA, body temperature. ‘Every time, it’s a different thing’, he says.

His recollection of room temperatures and their effect on sound is remarkable, and the dialogue is illuminating. Like so many noise artists, there is a yielding to the random, to circumstance, eventuality, accepting that no two performances will be alike as acoustics and the way sounds interact is spontaneous and unpredictable.

The interview is interesting and wide-ranging, but to discuss and dissect it at length here feels like a job for a longer, more academic discursion.

This is a niche release: that’s a given. Side one will inevitably receive more plays. But both warrant same time. Listen, and learn. Enjoyment is probably optional.

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Torpedoes – Heaven’s Light Our Guide

Posted: 7 June 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Bin Liner records – 5th July 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

The band hailed by Louder Than War as ‘probably the Last Great Gothic Rock Band’ – Portsmouth based post-punk/goth band Torpedoes – return with their fourth album, Heaven’s Light Our Guide, six years after their previous outing, Black Museum (2018). To compensate for the time away, they’ve made it a twenty-track beast of a double-album, and when coupled with something of a transition in their sound towards something rather more keyboard-driven, it’s almost certainly their most ambitious release to date.

The album’s themes are pretty bleak, but no-one’s here for a party goth album, right? The press release is worth quoting for context: ‘Principal songwriter Ray (Razor) Fagan (Ex Red Letter Day) gives his take on the world we must all inhabit whether we like it or not. Lyrically the album focuses on largely dark themes from the destruction of the planet & corruption to bereavement and historic tragedies. Including a song inspired by a mass suicide in the town of Demmin, north of Berlin in May 1945. Over a thousand of Dremmin’s inhabitants, mostly women and children elected to commit suicide rather than face the advancing Russian troops….’

Hopefully, this sets the context, rather than torpedoing the mood – pun intended, of course.

Heaven’s Light Our Guide is by no means a concept album, or a work which focuses specifically on any one tone or theme, which would be difficult to sustain and likely difficult to listen to over such a duration: instead, the album is in many ways a pick ‘n’ mix from the smorgasbord of goth, in the way that The Cure’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me offers contrasting elements of light and dark. These contrasts do make for a work that feels like it pulls in different directions at times – not nearly as schizophrenic as Kiss Me, but certainly the product of a band on a voyage of discovery.

‘Somekindaheaven’ kicks things off with a quintessentially gothy bass groove, that foot-to-the-floor, four-four thudding bass, and while it’s draped in cold synths, the guitars rip in just shy of a couple of minutes into its expansive six. There are some nagging gothy guitar breaks, too, and it presents balance between introspective and anthemic.

‘End of the World Party’ is far from a knees-up, but it’s a dreamy, wistful Curesque slice of jangling, indie which definitely sits at the poppier end of the goth spectrum. It’s fitting, inasmuch as it was The Cure who really broadened the spectrum of what is generally recognised as ‘goth’ – a term I really do struggle with despite principally identifying as such myself. Then, as many of the songs on here are more 90s grunge than goth, as ‘Idiot’ evidences perfectly.

‘Blue Sky (In the Rain)’ sits somewhere between Dinosaur Jr and REM, and in its execution ends up sounding not unlike later Red Lorry Yellow Lorry. None of this is a criticism: it’s a solid tune, and Heaven’s Light Our Guide has plenty of them.

There is a strong leaning towards that mid-late 80s alternative sound as showcased by the likes of The Rose of Avalanche and IRS-era Salvation. The fact that the latter toured extensively with The Alarm does give some indication of the more commercial sound which had evolved by this time, and hints at the tone of Heaven’s Light Our Guide. In the main, this is a highly accessible set of songs. But then they chuck in some really hefty darker-hued cuts along the way: ‘Made of Stone’ comes on like The Mission in their early years, but heavier and more fiery, and it’s by no means the only stomper in this vein here. The grungy ‘Your Democracy’ certainly brings the riffs on one of the album’s most blatantly political songs, which goes a bit Metallica, too.

The title track is different again, a sweeping post-rock instrumental sweep that really mellows things down, and it’s clear that Torpedoes really want to demonstrate their range and musical skills here. Takings its title from a novel by Dostoyevsky, ‘Notes from the Underground’ is another gritty slice of sociopolitical critique, which contrasts with the altogether folkier acoustic-based ‘Fear of Human Design’.

Despite its length, Heaven’s Light Our Guide manages to hold the attention: it’s varied and interesting enough to do so, but not so diverse as to feel unfocussed or messy. Perhaps an even greater feat is that it doesn’t feel like there are any filler tracks or any which it would have been beneficial to cut.

AA

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Celer – Perfectly Beneath Us

Posted: 5 June 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Field Records – 24th May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s funny to reflect on how things evolve, and how one evolves as an individual. Ten years ago, I was pretty underwhelmed on my first encounter with Celer, commenting on Zigzag that ‘aside from the occasional ripple and swell, there are no overt peaks or troughs, there is no drama. In fact, very little happens.’

Over time – a lot of time, in truth – I’ve come to appreciate that things happening aren’t always the maker of a quality album. And when it comes to more ambiently-inclined works, there’s not a lot that’s supposed to happen.

Released on 24th May, like every other album this year, Perfectly Beneath Us was originally released way back on CD in 2012, and now, 12 years on, it’s getting a well-deserved vinyl release, with four tracks spanning roughly thirty-four minutes occupying an album.

Each side contains a longform sonic expanse and a shorter piece, approximately three minutes in duration, and everything is segued to bring a connected flow the work. I’m not going to debate the pros and cons of the formats or how nigglesome some may be. If you buy the vinyl, you’ll need to turn it over after about a quarter of an hour. It’s exercise at least, and that’s a positive as this certainly isn’t ruining music.

Just as I complained that nothing much happens on Zigzag, nothing much happens on Perfectly Beneath Us, either, only now I’m not complaining.

Since the inception of Celer In 2005, initially as a collaborative project2005 between Will Long and Danielle Baquet, until the passing of Baquet in 2009, since when, as the Celer bio outlines, ‘Long opted to keep their project going, and Celer has continued to grow as an expansive exploration of purest ambient.’ Purest ambient is indeed a fair description of Perfectly Beneath Us, and to report that I found myself nodding off at my keyboard on more than one occasion while trying to pen my critique of the album is proof positive of a mission accomplished. It isn’t that Perfectly Beneath Us is dull, or boring – as I may have surmised many years ago – it’s just the very essence of ambience. It’s mellow, it’s background, it’s soporific, and it’s supposed to be.

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Beak> – >>>>

Posted: 5 June 2024 in Albums
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Invada Records – 28th May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Well, this one landed out of the blue. A boon for fans, a shock to everyone, necessitating a reshuffle of review diaries for the likes of me.

It’s been six years since the last Beak> album. There are good reasons for this, as they explain: “After playing hundreds of gigs and festivals over the years we felt that touring had started to influence our writing to the point we weren’t sure who we were anymore. So we decided to go back to the origins of where we were at on our first album. With zero expectations and just playing together in a room.”

This is a remarkable slice of honesty about the effects of touring on the creative process, and band relationships. Most bands start at home – in some sense – with writing songs and the aspiration of touring those songs. But the dynamics change with success, and when touring relentlessly, time to write new material is squeezed. Over time, particularly with a pandemic interfering with, well, everything, many bands evolve their methods to operate over distance, and there’s always a risk that some of the dynamic is lost and stuff gets dialled in. It’s true that it’s now possible for bands to operate at distance, intercontinentally, even, but that’s not the Beak> way. They thrive on that instant interplay, the interaction, and without it, there’s simply no Beak>.

When they do come together they work fast. Single ‘Oh Know’ was ‘recorded on the only day the band could physically get together during the winter lockdown’ and released in October 2021. They really do make the most of their time, and their music – particularly this latest effort – froths with the urgency of pressured time. The urgency which has always permeated their music is banged up a couple of gears here, and as a result, >>>> is a frenzied explosion, with perhaps a desperate edge.

This being a Beak> album, it’s brimming with experimentalism, oddness, woozy psychedelia and persistent Krautrock pulsations, relentless beats. This being a Beak> album, it’s bloody great, and a lot of fun.

But that said, much of >>>> actually feels pretty bleak. Yes, Beak> turn bleak. It’s like a band having a blast while staring into the abyss, conscious that the end is near, but carrying on because at some point…

Of the album’s sudden and unexpected release, the band say in their statement, “At its core we always wanted it to be head music (music for the ‘heads’, not headphone music), listened to as an album, not as individual songs. This is why we are releasing this album with no singles or promo tracks.”

‘Oh Know’ isn’t included here, but the album does, however, include flipside ‘Ah Yeh’, and it does slot in nicely with its downtempo, lo-fi Pavement on sedatives vibe. It’s kinda loose, with rattling drums and drags out with a quivering organ drifting over a tense bassline, and it works something of a trance-inducing spell over the course of six minutes. You get the sense that however long and far part these guys are, they share a magical intuition, and whenever they do manage to get into a room together, creative sparks fly.

The band continues, “the recording and writing initially began in a house called Pen Y Bryn in Talsarnau, Wales in the fall out from the weirdness of the Covid days. Remote and with only ourselves and the view of Portmeirion in the distance we got to work.”

“With the opening track, ‘Strawberry Line’ (our tribute to our dear furry friend Alfie Barrow, who appears on the album’s cover) as the metronomic guide for the album, we then resumed recording, as before, at Invada studios in Bristol, whilst still touring around Europe and North/South America.”

‘Strawberry line’ makes for fairly a low-key opener, with a trilling organ and psychedelic reverby-drenched vocals rippling atop a bubbling bass before a shuffling beat enters the scene. But it stands as an eight-minute statement of intent, with that statement being that >>>> packs density to equal its melody. ‘The Seal’ delves into Krautrock, with a relentless groove centred around the rhythm section dominating. It grows dark. It grows tense. It’s sparse, minimal, but it persists, and four and a half minutes in, there’s a taut, jangling Joy Division guitar part.

Chilly synths and a robotic, rolling, repetitive bassline dominate the slow-melting ‘Denim’, a hazy psychedelic downer which delivers delayed gratification with the bursting of a monster riff. ‘Hungry Are We’ is delicate, reflective, post-rocky, with vocal harmonies which again allude to 60s pop and perhaps a bit of prog.

‘Bloody Miles’ marks a stylistic shift towards groovier territory, with a nagging bassline that borders on funk, but the tone remains doggedly downbeat, without getting depressing. With one foot firmly in the early 80s new wave sound, there’s no shortage of weirdness and warpy, brain-bending discord here, not least of all in the shadowy vintage-sounding electropop of ‘Secrets’, that brings together elements of Soft Cell and The Associates with the atmosphere and production of New Order’s Movement.

>>>> is often stark and claustrophobic (and nowhere more so on the eight-minute closer), and it’s always intense and brilliant. Beak> have surpassed themselves – again.

AA

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DRAAGS – HEADLINES

Posted: 2 June 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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LAAG Recordings – 10th May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Over the last couple of decades, Leeds has thrown out some truly amazing acts, and while few have achieved the kind of commercial success of Kaiser Chiefs, in terms of creativity and sheer range, it’s come to stand in a league of its own. It was round about twenty years ago that The Brudenell began to build its reputation as being s place that provided a space for non-mainstream acts, notably becoming something of a residential spot for iLiKETRAiNS in their early days, hosting their Signal Failure nights. While I saw a lot of post rock there around this time, I also got to see the likes of That Fucking Tank, Pulled Apart By Horses, Blacklisters, as well as visiting acts which included Whitehouse and Unsane. The Brudenell may have expanded in terms of what it offers now, but it remains in many ways the essence of the Leeds scene, an open and accommodating space where pretty much anything goes, with emerging local acts still getting a platform and, significantly, high-profile support slots. And then that are – and have been – an array of smaller independent venues which have all been integral to the crazed melting pot which is the Leeds scene, from Wharf Chambers, to the Packhorse, via Chink and Mabgate Bleach.

From the quirky alternative noise of Thank to the banging rave mania of Straight Girl, Leeds in 2024 really does provide a broad span of representation, in every way. And if further evidence is needed, step forward queer-dance-punk five-piece DRAAGS, who offer up their debut album on their own DIY label, LAAG Recordings.

Their bio and album pitch set out their stall nearly, as they recount how the album was ‘Made in their home over 2023’, where ‘the five-piece explored themes of escapism, queerness, rebellion, anti-capitalism, -police and -mass-media, creating melodies and lyrics to reflect their feelings at the time. No one song sounds the same, just as no member of DRAAGS is the same.’

They go on to explain how ‘In Headlines we are grappling with the alienating nature of post-internet capitalist society, fuelled by a will to understand our surroundings and not succumb to normality and drudgery. The album is an unraveling of self-purpose, self-destruction and escapism vs reality in a world that distorts the truth and seeks exponential growth through false ambition. The work as a whole intends to reflect the overstimulating impact that a possessive individualist society has on the human psyche. How this obstructs our ability to connect and the challenges we face to not degrade our beings to reflect our bleak surroundings. This project has been a driving force for us to rebel, find togetherness, community, collective joy and purpose and we hope others feel that too.’

Headlines is a deranged mash-up of absolutely everything. ‘SPINNER’ is exemplary: starting with a recording of a standard call-queue experience – we all know that that the reason all the agent are busy and an agent will be with us shortly – or not – is because no company ever hires enough staff because paying staff to provide any real service eats into their profligate profits… and then everything goes crackers, a head-on collision between Age of Chance and iForwardRussia!, in turn continuing the lineage of Leeds bands who dare to be different. Then it goes a bit operatic, a bit Sparks, a bit drum ‘n’ bass, a bit Foetus, a but Mr Bungle, a bit Selfish Cunt. To say that it’s a crazed and bewildering three-and-a-half minutes would be an understatement.

Every single song on here is ABSOLUTELY WILD! It’s quite difficult to pay attention to the lyrics when there’s so much going on. It’s arch, it’s arty, it’s a bit campy, it’s WAY over the top. It’s a RACKET! And as the song titles evidence, THEY LOVE CAPITALS, because SHOUTING AND IN YOUR FACE IS THE THING! I don’t even mean that critically: this is an album that feels like a relentless blizzard of barminess, and everything is just brain-melting. ‘PAPERS’ is a full-on, brain-melting slice of jazz-flavoured derangement, and there isn’t a moment’s let-up here, with helium-filled freneticism leading a cacophonous carnival of dementiture.

Twisted jazz and grinding funk coalesce, or congeal, into a maniacal mess, and sometimes, it gets noisy, too. How do you possibly keep up with this, or stay sane? Maybe you don’t. HEADLINES isn’t really a SONGS album, so much as an EXPLOSION that leaves you shaking our head to get clear as you find yourself sitting dazed, utterly floored.

There is no sane or objective response to this album. There is no easy way to process it: there is simply too much.

DRAAGS are going all out here to push and test themselves and their potential audience. Surrender to the CRAZINESS.

AA

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Thou – Umbilical

Posted: 1 June 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Sacred Bones – 31st May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

‘This record is for the radicals, the crackpots, the exiles who have escaped the wasteland of capitulation. This record is for the militants and zealots refusing to surrender to comforts, to practicalities, to thirty pieces of silver. And this record is most especially for the weaklings and malingerers, burdened by capricious indulgence, hunched by the deep wounds of compromise, shuffling in limp approximation, desperately reaching back towards integrity and conviction.’

So Thou sell us their latest album, their first since Magus in 2018. And in this way they prepare us for a release which has no easy or comfortable positioning other than in the realms of outsiderdom. It was, of course, ever thus, their bio reminding us that ‘Thou transcends genre boundaries, drawing inspiration from a diverse array of influences spanning from ’90s proto-grunge icons like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden (all of whom they’ve covered extensively) to the raw intensity of obscure ‘90s DIY hardcore punk found on labels like Ebullition, Vermiform, and Crimethinc.’

Coming into my mid-to-late teens in the early 90s, it’s hard to overstate the impact and importance of the advent of grunge, the breaking through of Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden (who I wasn’t personally a fan of, but even at the time recognised their merits); this was a new wave of music which really spoke for us at that time, articulating the rage and disaffection. Put simply, grunge was our punk.

Times have changed, but by no means for the better: now, there is even more reason to be incendiary with nihilistic rage. And with Umbilical, Thou give voice to that rage. To say that they articulate it would be a stretch: the lyrics are completely unintelligible, a guttural howl spat with venom from the very pits of hell.

The titles are reflective of our times: ‘Narcissist’s Prayer’; ‘Emotional Terrorist’, ‘I Return and Chained and Bound to You’, ‘Panic Stricken, I Flee’ – these are all summaries of varying traumas, of deep psychological challenges. We’ve seemingly got better about discussing these things, bringing trauma out into the open and breaking down the walls of taboo, and in the process it’s become apparent that nearly everyone has suffered some trauma, but worse than that, the sheer extent to which Narcissism and abuse is rife is now beginning to emerge.

The guitars on ‘Lonely Vigil’; billow in blasts of nuclear detonation, the sound of sheer annihilation as the overloading wall of distortion decimates all before it. And then things step up even further with ‘House of Ideas’. Wails of feedback trace desolate trails amidst a landslide of the heaviest, most shredding deluge of sludge, and it feels like the idea that sits first and foremost is total destruction. Given the track record of major corporations and governments around the globe, this would seem a fair summary. Over the course of six-anfdf0three-quarter minutes, it scales heights of elevation paired with the deepest of trudging riffery.

‘I Feel Nothing When You Cry’, released as a single not so long ago, is the pinnacle of brutal nihilism, and ‘Unbidden Guest’, which follows immediately after plunges still deeper into the abyss. It’s a torturous experience that drags the listener to hell by the hair, and simply drops them there. ‘The Promise’ arrives as a surprise: a straight-up, no messing grunge metal stomper.

On Umbilical, Thou bring the riffs alright. By which I mean it’s fucking brutal. It’s not heavy: it’s hellish. It’s the sound of raw anguish, of unfiltered pain, and simultaneously an outpouring, a ceaseless spewing of untrammelled emotional tumult. There’s a purity to it which is powerful beyond words.

AA

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Frédéric D. Oberland / Grégory Dargent / Tony Elieh / Wassim Halal – SHIR

Posted: 31 May 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Sub Rosa – 24th May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Yet another 24 May release… It really does feel as if the world had conspired to release 75% of the years albums on this one day. So I’m still working my way through them. And this release from some known names is not what I was expecting. I can’t recall precisely what it was that I was expecting but certainly not anything as heavy or as percussion-led as this.

They describe SIHR as a ‘sonic manifesto by a post-anything quartet’, a work that offers up ‘new folklore for a devastated planet’. Within these words, there’s a sense of nihilism and gloom, but simultaneously an undercurrent of ‘fuck it’ and of quintessential avant-gardism, the principle ethos of creating anew only being possible from the destruction of that which came before. There’s a sense here that the destruction – the devastation of the planet – clearly isn’t something they’ve chosen, but in the face of apparent futility, they’ve come together to create, perhaps in the hope of a brave new world, or perhaps, more likely, something to be discovered among the ashes and the ruins of society and life as we know it.

The way in which they document their coming together and the creation of SIHR has all the hallmarks of the first stages of developing a mythology, which has the potential, in time, to grow its own legend: ‘The first sonic moves of this eclectic quartet, made in a bunker studio somewhere between Paris and Berlin, urgently took the form of a quest, that of a neo-folklore for troubled times, a music seeping with many kinds of atavism and experimenting in all directions. A fertile no-man’s-land where trance and contemplation, jazz and electronica, acoustics and electricity would merge in a stimulating mystical magma. From the possible emergence of a Babelian language to the shared desire to rediscover music as a ceremonial act, this encounter took place over three days of improvised sound bacchanalia, the phases of which were all recorded by Benoit Bel.’

The first track, ‘Oui-Ja’aa’ is a nine-minute colossus of a cut, drawing together elements of electronica and ‘world’ music with a dash of Krautrock and the sensibility of Suicide, with a throbbing rhythm melting into a hypnotic bubbling sonic cauldron. The tempo twists and seems to quicken as drones and jazz horns warp this way and that as if blown by the wind and everything builds to a frenzy before collapsing, exhausted in the dying moments.

While conjured in a bunker studio, SIHR sounds as if it was improvised around a fire in the middle of a desert while string out in an hallucinogenic haze. I suppose in some respects, the two scenarios bear numerous similarities in terms of their psychological effects: while one setting is a vast expanse of space with a huge sky vista and a distinct absence of other people, so the other, equally devoid of other people, forces the contemplation of the infinite realms of inner space.

‘YouGotALight’ is slow, smoking, soporific, a crawling, sprawling, mellowed-out meditation, before the glitchy whorl of bleeps and jitters that define the sound of ‘OhmShlag (Quake Tango)’ sees things take a very different trajectory at the album’s midpoint. A pulsating, seething miasma of sonic swampiness, punctuated with a metallic tin clatter of a snare that cuts through the murk, it’s like slowly sinking, not only in boggy terrain, but in a mental fog.

‘Babel Cedex’ eliminates the fog and just goes for the mental, beginning as another slow, serpentine, hypnotic exploration before building to a deranged frenzy of frenetic percussion and howling horns and chaotic discord that’s truly brain-melting. Eastern vibes and glitchtronica ripple through the woozy ‘Black Powder’, and you find yourself marvelling and utterly bewildered by the whole experience.

My earlier visions of desert campfires dissipate life vapourising mirages during the second half of the album, and I come to conclude that SIHR is indeed the sound of bunker life: one envisages the collective huddled in semi-darkness, hunched and half-crazed after months below ground in the wake of a global catastrophe, trying to keep it together in the hope of one day being able to return above ground. How will they know when it’s safe, when the coast is clear? Or is this a scenario akin to Philip K. Dick’s The Penultimate Truth?

We live in perilous times, and likely closer to the brink than any of us know or can even compute. In this context, SIHR feels like a document, and a message to future times.

AA

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