Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Lothar Ohlmeier / Rudi Fischerlehner / Isambard Khroustaliov – In the Gloaming

Posted: 1 February 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Not Applicable – 16th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

What we’re given to expect from this three-way collaboration is ‘an album of explorative, freely improvised electroacoustic music by an acclaimed trio of acclaimed genre-defying musicians’. I can’t help but blame the music press – as was, rather than the broken skeleton of what remains of the music press – and streaming algorithms for the obsession with genre. One could probably take it as far back as to the 50s when the press was all over this shocking ‘Beatnik’ counterculture, but to consider more relevant and recent history, ever since the ‘goth’ tag was applied to a fairly disparate selection of post-punk bands – and their fans – categorisation has been the method by which to both shortcut detailed analysis and to market acts. The groupings rarely make sense, or at least never did to me. For example, I loved Nirvana, but had absolutely no interest in, say, Soundgarden or Pearl Jam, who lacked ant of the elements I loved about Nirvana, and to my ear weren’t especially grungy. Bauhaus and the Sisters of Mercy have nothing in common beyond there being an arch, art aspect to their work, and the idea that both Throbbing Gristle and Ministry are ‘Industrial’ is absurd (and while I get that ‘industrial metal’ may be the distinction when considering Ministry, Pitch Shifter, etc,. it’s never rendered any more clear than when the term ‘hardcore’ is used. Many acts claim to be ‘genre defying’, but so few are. That said, the very function of the avant-garde is to defy genre, to smash preconceptions, to push boundaries, to do something different. In the Gloaming, remarkably, is something very different, and is truly ‘genre defying’.

It’s often intriguing to see just what players of such an unusual selection of instruments will produce when they come together and set out with the primary purpose of seeing what happens. Lothar Ohlmeier’s bass clarinet, Isambard Khroustaliov’s electronics, and Rudi Fischerlehner’s drums make for an interesting lineup, and sometimes, even the most experienced musicians will come together and create sound, but it doesn’t really gel. This is most certainly not one of those instances.

The album contains six pieces, and they each explore subtly different musical terrain, seemingly with all participants working on the understanding that less is more. There is a lot of space in which they all breathe and step back from soundmaking to allow the atmosphere to evolve. While the bass clarinet clearly has jazz connotations, this isn’t an overtly jazz album in any sense.

‘Leaf Silhouettes’ is a celebration of discord and dissonance, as clattering drum rattle like bin lids blown down an alleyway in a gale, the squelching electronic sounds conjuring an eeriness amidst seemingly random toots, while ‘Out to Dry’ has an almost sixties sci-fi feel, with hints of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop about the alien ambience, where the electronics take the lead, but remain restrained, with the result being sparse and atmospheric.

If any one of the pieces does have a more avant-jazz feel, it’s the nine-minute ‘Violet Weeds’, where the clarinet tootles and hoots every which way, spreading like tendrils over the bibbling synths. The percussion remains noteworthy for its restraint, as it does over the course of the album. And if ‘End Zone’ employs the same elements, the mood is quite different by virtue of the difference in balance of its instruments. It is, in the main, a subdued, understated piece, but whistles of feedback and extraneous bleeps bringing extra dimensions..

The final piece, ‘Pixel Head’ is a ten-minute monster of a composition, and one which, while spacious, brings so many different ideas and segments that it really does bend the brain.

From the beginning In the Gloaming is a work of intuition, and the interplay between the three musicians is something special.

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Barren Womb – Chemical Tardigrade

Posted: 30 January 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Fucking North Pole Records/Blues For The Red Sun – 16th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

One might think that after Anal Cunt, Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel, Rapeman, Cancer Bats, and Dying Fetus, all of the band manes people would find problematic had been exhausted, or otherwise people would have grown immune to blunt shock tactics. Yet it seems that Nordic heavy noise rockers Barren Womb have found a moniker capable of touching a nerve for its poor taste. I’m by no means about to invoke wokeism here, but we do seem to have witnessed an enhanced level of sensitivity in resent years. I can’t ever criticise anyone for calling out of sexism, racism, double standards, or general cuntiness, and wince when I see many of the predominantly right-wing wankers defending ‘free speech’ as a right to be offensive, racially, homophobically, or demeaning the poor or the disabled. But being overtly offensive simply because? Shock still has its place and its merits, and I’m more shocked that people are still shocked than by the shock itself. On balance, Barren Womb likely sits more in the ‘crass’ bracket than the overtly offensive, but it’s perhaps not really my call to make, and I’m here primarily to judge the album on its merits.

They’ve been going since 2011, since when they have ‘been raising both eyebrows and hell with their minimalist approach, earsplitting volume and defiant experimentation’, although it’s only recently that they’ve registered on my radar ahead of the release of fourth album Lizard Lounge, ‘a bombastic slab of modern noise rock in the vein of Daughters, Metz and Viagra Boys, to critical acclaim through Loyal Blood Records in 2020’ – I said of it that it was ‘wild and loud and absolutely hits the spot.’

Their bio informs us that ‘The duo make efficient use of crude dynamics and the power of the riff to hammer their point across’ and that ‘They have played close to 300 shows in the US and Europe so far, sharing stages with among others Entombed A.D., Voivod, Conan, Nomeansno and Årabrot, and have played festivals like SXSW, by:Larm, Tallinn Music Week, Øya and Pstereo.’ Clearly, then, the name has been no significant obstacle to their reaching an audience – and they’ve once again hit the spot with this effort.

Chemical Tardigrade is an absolute beast of an album. ‘McLembas’ blasts out of the traps an explosion of raging overdriven riff-fuelled fury. The barking vocals are pure fire, screaming a stream of references from the Bible to Fight Club and the guitars are lean, strangled, and sinewy before detonating hard enough to collapse buildings. The power of the drums is a real not-so-secret weapon: they’re up in the mix, but also really thick, and dense, with the kick and snare dominating and the cymbals backed off, the result being a full-on percussive pummelling.

If the feel is raw, rowdy punk, there’s also whole lot more to it than lump-headed fist-pumping choruses ‘Bug Out bag’ is more hardcore than grunge, and blasts into full-throttle punk, and ‘Campfire Chemist’ comes on like Fugazi playing while the studio’s on fire, before the flames lick at their heels and they ratchet up to the screaming mania of early Pulled Apart by Horses.

They’re not without humour, as titles like ‘D-Beatles’ ‘Dung Lung’, and ‘Batchelor of Puppets’ indicate, the latter, as a single cut, stands out, but it’s a ball-busting blast from beginning to end, with D-Beatles being a raging explosion of frenzied crust punk, marking another of many twists and turns in their expansive palette of mangled noise. It’s hard to credit that just two people can produce quite this much racket. ‘High Fructose Napalm Syrup’ is every bit as explosive and crazed as the title suggests, some hefty minor-key power chords lumbering around some frenetic drumming. They save the hardest and heaviest for the end, with ‘Dung Lung’ going all-out at the front end before surging to a melodic and uplifting climax. And for all the fury, all the weight, all the volume, all the intensity, there’s a sense of fun which filters through the entirety of Chemical Tardigrade, which makes the experience ultimately – and unexpectedly – enjoyable.

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Robert Poss – Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust

Posted: 27 January 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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25th January 2024

With Band of Susans, active between 1986 and 1996, Robert Poss curved an arc from the New York noise scene towards more of a shoegaze sound. With releases on Blast First and Mute, and featuring a pre-Helmet Page Hamilton on second album, Love Agenda, not to mention a reputation for eardrum-shatteringly loud live performances, the band unquestionably achieved more in terms of influence and cult cred than commercial success (something their final album, Here Comes Success (1995) seemed to acknowledge in its title). But what qualifies as success? Capitalist culture and media tell us that success is a career, promotion, cash, holidays, cruises, bug house big car. But that’s because these are the status symbols capitalism tells us we should aspire to. How about having enough to be ok, a home you like and feel comfortable in, having friends, knowing yourself and being comfortable in your own skin, and having the freedom to do things which give you pleasure? It’s a question of values: what do you value more, time, or money? Status, or the satisfaction of being true to yourself?

There seems to have been a fair bit made of fellow BoS alumni Karen Hagloff’s return to music making in recent years, but not so much about Robert Poss’ sustained output since the band called it a day. But then again, Poss has spent a career being somewhat overlooked and vastly underrated. Both his songwriting and style of playing is quite distinctive and unusual – quirky seems a reasonable adjective, and is certainly not a criticism. The notes on bandcamp note that ‘The release is dedicated to composer/filmmaker/photographer Phill Niblock, a long-time mentor, colleague and friend.’ The timing of this certainly renders this dedication particularly poignant, and also highlights the way in which exponents of avant-gardism feed off one another and evolve one another’s ideas in different directions.

The Niblock connection certainly sheds additional light on Poss’ approach to composition and sound, favouring drones and repetition over rigid verse/chorus structures and progression, and Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust does very much contain, as the title suggests, a miscellany of bits and pieces, ranging from exploratory wanderings to fully-formed songs using conventional ‘rock’ format of guitars, bass, and drums – and on some, there are even vocals, notably the punchy post-punk cut ‘Your Adversary’, which marks a change of style with its murky production and blustery drum machine backing.

The first of these, ‘Secrets, Chapter and Verse’ is a title which could easily be on a Band of Susans release and the song carries that Band of Susans vibe – jangly indie but played loud – and I mean LOUD, with strolling bass running back and forth and up and down beneath the layers of guitar, the vocals low in the mix and serving primarily functional capacity – sonic placeholders.

‘Out of the Fairy Dust’ combines jangling indie and ambient drone and in many respects does carry echoes of ‘Here Comes Success’ – but also Love of Life era Swans – at least until about halfway through where it takes a sudden turn into deeper folk territory. It’s quite a contrast with the deep, ultra-droney sonorous ambience of ‘Foghorn Lullaby’.

Like the epic solo workout that is ‘Hagstrom Fragment’, which comes on like some legs akimbo 90s rock, ‘Skibbereen Drive’ lunges into rock mode, and follows the chord sequence of ‘Flood II’ from The Sister’s of Mercy’s Floodland – and sounds very like it, with its cold synths and crisp drum machine, but without the acoustic guitar detail and lead guitar line. It’s a real contrast to the epic dronescape of ‘Into the Fairy Dust’, on which the drums are a million miles behind the drone as they clatter and roll away, onwards, ever onwards, but also almost entirely submerged in the mix. Elsewhere, with its snarling synth grind, ‘S Romp’ sounds like Suicide doing dirty disco, and ‘Trem 23’ – well, it takes us back to the 23 enigma.

Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust showcases a remarkable diversity of styles, and it’s neither as dry nor as dark as all that, with ‘Imaginary Music On Hold’ presenting a most whimsical feel. As a collection, it never fails to be interesting, or enjoyable, and showcases Poss’ eclecticism and range, and there’s pleasure to be had from listening to a collection of work by an artist who never feels constrained or compelled to confirm to a given genre or mode. It’s something that seems to trouble many people, not least of all labels and critics, that an artist’s creations are based on the pursuit of creative endeavour and interest rather than assigning themselves a category by which they must live. The flipside of this is that it may not feel particularly like an album it its own right, but more like a collection of demos and ideas – and just as the title summarises the contents as three separate elements – Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust – so it feels like it contains the seeds of three separate and distinct projects – a droney one, an indie one, and a dark rock-orientated one. It would be exciting to witness those three projects realised, but what we have here, regardless of future intent, is a document of forward-facing music-making and an artist whose sole priority is doing his own thing. This is, ultimately, the ambition for any artist: to create without concern for commercial matters. And Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust is an exemplary product of creative freedom.

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Resin Tomb – Cerebral Purgatory

Posted: 26 January 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Transcending Obscurity Records – 19th January 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Every day, every week, the world descends further into a pit of shit of human making. I feel as if I’m continually circling back to this same premise to frame almost every discussion, not just when writing about music, but any conversation I have about pretty much anything. The sad fact is that there is simply no escaping the fact that it’s not just me personally, but the whole of our existence which hangs under a cloud of gloom.

Only this afternoon, my mother texted me in her usual cack-handed typo-filled fashion bemoaning the succession of storms which has battered the country this week, commenting on how she can’t get over it and asking what we’ve done to deserve such crap weather. I simply couldn’t face pointing out that things have been heading in a bad direction since the industrial revolution and that we’re pretty much driven off a cliff at full speed in the last fifty years thanks to capitalism, and what we’ve done to deserve is fucked the planet with greed. She probably wasn’t really looking for an explanation, and likely wouldn’t have appreciated or even understood if I’d given one. Meanwhile, wars are raging around the globe, and escalating on a daily basis. And because we don’t have quite enough death and destruction, the state of Alabama has seen fit to pilot slow and painful executions by nitrogen gas. What the fuck is wrong with the world? And is it any wonder we’re experiencing a massive mental health crisis?

In the face of all of this, you do what you can to get by, and while many will advocate meditation and calming music as an alternative, or supplement, to medication, catharsis can also provide a much-needed means of release. And after releasing a couple of well-received EPs, Australian band Resin Tomb have dropped their debut album, Cerebral Purgatory. It’s a title which pretty much encapsulates the condition of living under the conditions I’ve outlined above – and purgatory is the word, because there is no escape and it feels neverending. The first track, ‘Dysphoria’ perfectly articulates the existential anguish of life in these troubled times. Again, the title is spot on: I frequently see – and have likely made my own – mentions of how we are seemingly living in an amalgamation of every dystopia ever imagined. But what is the psychological response to this? Dysphoria: ‘a profound state of unease or dissatisfaction’, the antonym of euphoria. Much as I do sometimes feel like cheering humanity to the finish line in the race toward self-extinction, for the most part, I feel not simply gloomy or pessimistic, but a deep sense of anguish and anxiety, not to mention powerlessness. And I am by no means alone – although it’s more apparent from time spent on line than conversations with friends, family, or colleagues, perhaps because people tend to shy away from heavy topics for the most part, and instead prefer to shoot the breeze about the weather. But ‘Dysphoria’ is a brief, brutal blast, gnarly mess of difficult emotions articulated through the medium of full-throttle guitar noise and vocals spat venomously in a powerful purge.

As their bio puts it, ‘They’ve forged their own sound which is a remarkably cohesive mix of dissonant death metal, gravelly grind and somehow even thick, blackened sludge.’ And yes, yes they have. And it’s a dense, powerful, racket they blast out. There’s little point in drawing on references or comparisons: there are simply too many, and they all tumble over one another in this cacophony of monstrous metal noise, a flaming tempest of gut-ripping heaviosity.

‘Flesh Brock’ packs tempo changes and transitions galore, packing more into three minutes and eight seconds than seems feasible. And in packing it all in, the density reaches a critical mass which hits with the force of an atomic blast.

Four minutes and twenty seems to be Resin Tomb’s sweet spot, with four of the album’s eight tracks clocking in at precisely that. And when they do condense so much energy and weight into every second, four minutes and twenty seconds affords a lot of room.

The title track comes on with hunts of Melvins, a mess of overloading guitars and a bass so fucking nasty and so forceful it could shatter bones, melding to deliver a colossal bastard of a riff. ‘Human Confetti’ comes on heavier still, pounding away with a pulverising force and playing with elements of discord and dissonance in the picked guitar line – and while the lyrics may be indecipherable, the title alone conjures a gruesome image.

If ‘Purge Fluid’ and ‘Concrete Crypt’ again convey their fundamental essences in the titles alone – and these are absolutely brutal, punishing pieces – the album’s final track, ‘Putrefaction’ absolutely towers over the murky swamp of black metal and grindcore with a dramatic, nagging picked guitar and a cranium-crushing wall of noise. Holy fuck. It hurts. And good. Angry is good, and better to channel that anger into art than knifing people in town on a Friday night. That’s one for another time, perhaps. At this particular moment, we have this – an album so heavy, so violent, it’s an exorcism.

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Phill Niblock – Looking for Daniel

Posted: 25 January 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Unsounds/Echonance Festival – 2nd February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s never a comfortable experience to learn of someone’s passing, even if it’s someone you’re only really aware of rather than familiar with. My knowledge of Phill Niblock and his work was relatively scant, although I had written about a few of his releases over the years. I wasn’t particularly enthused by Touch Five back in 2013 – an album I would probably appreciate considerably more now. This likely says as much about me as it does Phill Niblock, but does perhaps indicate just how artists who fully espouse avant-gardism are always ahead, and tend to only be truly appreciated later. And so, to learn of Niblock’s passing only this month, from the press release which accompanies this release was a… moment, a cause to pause.

And so as I read how this release serves to ‘commemorate the late Phill Niblock with this release made in close collaboration with the composer,’ and features recordings of some of his very last compositions just before his passing in January 2024. ‘The two works on this album, ‘Biliana’ (2023) and ‘Exploratory, Rhine Version, Looking for Daniel’ (2019) represent the hallmarks of his unique approach to composition where multiple, closely-tuned instruments and voices are used to create rich and complex sonic tapestries…

The fact that he was still composing up to the age of ninety is remarkable. The fact these two pieces don’t feel radically different from much of his previous work is impressive. And yet, in context, the fact that these final works are such long, expansive, and unsettling compositions feels fitting.

To understand and contextualise the pieces, it’s worth quoting directly: ‘In Biliana, written for performer Biliana Voutchkova, her violin phrases and vocalizations carve out a deep sonorous space full of fluctuating overtones. By emphasizing on the physicality and materiality of her sound, the piece gives us the sensation of stepping back to reveal a singular portrait of the musician. ‘Exploratory, Rhine Version, Looking for Daniel’ was recorded by two Netherlands based ensembles, Modelo62, and Scordatura ensemble from a live recording made at the Orgelpark, Amsterdam during the Echonance Festival in February 2023. It is a complex work comprising of 20 parts, where lines seem to emerge and disappear out of a landscape of harmonies and sonic spectra. There is also a voice hidden in this mass of instruments, just like in Biliana, giving both works an added human element – something that always emerges out of Phill Niblock’s seemingly dense musical constructions.’

Each piece takes a long form, extending beyond the twenty-minute mark.

A decade ago, I bemoaned just how ‘droney’ Touch Five was, how it was impossible to perceive any tonal shifts. Listening to ‘Biliana’, I’d have likely posited the same complaint, bit with hindsight and personal progression, it’s the eternal hum, the intense focus on the most minute and incredibly gradual of shifts, which are precisely the point and the purpose – and the things to appreciate. On the one hand, it is testing. It’s minimal to the point of a near-absence, an emptiness, but present enough to creep around your cranium in the most disquieting of fashions.

It’s not uncommon to lie awake and night or have deep pangs of regret which knot the stomach when you replay that awkward exchange, that time you said the wrong thing, the occasion when you plain made a twat of yourself one way or another. The same anguish hangs heavy over reviews where I’ve simply been wrong. There’s no way of undoing them – and to repost or revise down the line would be disingenuous, an act of historical revision. You can only correct the future in the present, and not in the past. We all know how rewinding history to make a minor alteration goes. Before you know it, your hands are fading and you’re about to become your own father or something.

You almost feel yourself fading over the duration of ‘Biliana’ as the eternal glide of string sounds hangs thick and thickening in the air and somehow at the same time remains static. Where is it going? Where are you going? Everything feels frozen in time, slowed to complete stasis in a slow-motion drift. Wondering, waiting… for what? A change. But why would change come? Breathe, let it glide slowly over you, however much you feel a sense of suffocation.

‘Exploratory, Rhine Version, Looking for Daniel’ begins sparser, darker, danker. Ominous, string-line drones swell and linger, here with scraping dissonance and long-looming hums. Nothing specific happens… but it crawls down your spine and you feel your skin tingle and creep. Nothing is quite right, nothing is as it should be.

Over the course of his long, long career as a defining figure of the contemporary avant-garde, Niblock was outstanding in his singularity, and the unswerving nature of his compositions, a vision which, as this release evidences, remained unaltered to the end.

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Polevaulter – Hang Wave

Posted: 24 January 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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26th January 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Polevaulter haven’t come from nowhere but have, it seems, evolved – or devolved – from a regular band with guitars and a regular drummer, to a brutal drum-machine driven duo, a model which has landed them some high-profile support slots and attention in their own right. Debuting – at least in this incarnation – with ‘HILTSCTW’ (That’s ‘How I Learnt To Stop Chewing The Wasp And Face The Bulldog’) in February 2020, they’ve put out a couple of EPs on tape and CD, both of which have sold out, as well as a couple of digital singles, ahead of this, their debut album, which they performed live for eight hours straight and streamed it on YouTube as a fundraiser for Palestine the other week. It might not have had the intensity of one of their half-hour support sets, but it set out their position politically and as people, suggesting that as much as they’re about impact, they’re also about endurance.

With the exception of the last couple of singles, none of the songs on Hang Wave have been previously released. Hang Wave, then, is no sweeping up of their catalogue to date, but an album proper, and a work which is focused on where they’re at now, not where they were.

It’s a thudding pulsing bass drum bear that drives ‘Mia Goth Made Me Do It’, the first of the album’s ten tracks. It’s tense, and it’s dark: the bass is low-slung and bulbous, but the vocals are subject to really high-treble EQ and some crisp, dry reverb which gives them a harsh edge. This is no gentle introduction: they’re straight in and at the jugular. A mangled, confrontational industrial / goth assault, it makes for a challenging, confrontational opening to an album that’s stark and uncompromising.

Single ‘Trend’ packs snappy (and in places somewhat bizarre) lyrics, with lines like ‘Don’t tell me to put my vase away’ and ‘I do a line off a horses dick’, and stuttering beats, a monstrous bastard of a bass noise and some woozy discordant notes that bend and melt in the incendiary heat of the fire of the vocal ferocity. ‘Pissed in the Baths’, just unveiled as a final taster of the album is another murky morass of dingy post-punk, and as likely to deter more prospective listeners than it will attract. You get the impression that Polevaulter couldn’t care less, and that they’re not doing this to garner popularity, to get played on the radio, for accolades or to get rich or famous – which is a good job: in articulating alienation and also simply venturing, without restraint, down the deepest, darkest, and most obscure tunnels against a backdrop of the most unrefined, angular noise, Polevaulter have pretty much guaranteed they will achieve none of these things. Of course, in repelling the majority, they’re appealing to an extremely devoted minority of people who actively enjoy music that hurts, physically and mentally.

It’s hard to make out what the fuck they’re ranting and raving about most of the time, but the delivery – half spoken word, half hollering – is strong and is a message in itself. Because anger is an energy, and shouting into the abyss is the most exultant catharsis. Polevaulter deliver that catharsis in the bluntest, starkest of manners, and the production accentuates it all.

‘Industry Plant Based’ seems to be a swipe at more than one contemporary issue, and it’s fair to say it’s hard to imagine an act further from The Last Dinner Party.

There are no tunes to speak of on Hang Wave, and choruses are in short supply, too. Perhaps the most obvious and valid points of comparison are Benefits and Sleaford Mods – but whereas the latter bring hooks and groove, Polevaulter present nothing but bleak trudging, and while the former are focused on the channelling of rage with passion and a politically-charged message of unity, Polevaulter bring us blank nihilism delivered with a twist of crushing desolation. There are dance elements in the mix, but the mix is a cement mixer churning away a blend of grit and napalm, and this is nowhere more strongly evidenced than on single cut ‘Violently Ill’, a song so wrecked as to twist your intestines, while the air-raid siren howl of ‘GabWorld’ is chilling and unsettling.

The album winds up in a twitching, glitching, explosive mess in the form of the snarking, sparking, meltdown that is ‘any%WR’.

Hang Wave is harsh. There are no mellow moments, or softer interludes. There is nothing remotely pretty or pleasant about it, either. Outside, a storm rages – the second in as many days, and the tenth since October. The river just a few hundred yards away has burst its banks again. The sound of other people’s recycling rattles past my front door as it bowls down the street, and it’s a potent reminder of the reality and the palpable effects of climate change. It looks very much like we’re on the brink of WW3 s the UK and US dig deeper into their commitment to fire missiles into Yemen; Gaza is all but decimated; Trump looks like he’ll running for president once again, and no-one seems particularly concerned because they’re fretting about how they’ll pay the rent and the next energy bill. It’s a sick, sick world. All of it mounts up and compounds and you feel ill. With Hang Wave, Polevaulter do absolutely nothing to lift the mood or make you feel better, but Hang Wave is the perfectly bleak, nihilistic to these utterly fucked-up times.

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Farming Incident – unreleased 3rd LP tracks

Posted: 22 January 2024 in Albums
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skoghall rekordings – 8th January 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

There’s nothing like a descriptive title to set out plainly what you’re getting. As the notes which accompany this EP release inform us, ‘Leeds postpunkspacerockers Farming Incident released a couple of LPs over their existence and ceased to be in June 2010… The three songs on this release are the first and only batch of recorded songs that were put to tape in late 2007 as part of the proposed 3rd LP which sadly never came into existence…… These songs were rediscovered by FI vocalist Dave Procter in December 2023 and are now released in their full glory.’

Agent Procter has been busy with myriad musical projects since the demise of Farming Incident, many of which have been covered here at Aural Aggravation, and his relocation to Sweden to escape the post-Brexit hell of this sorry island meant that we lost another great Leeds / York postpunkspacerock act in the form of boilersuit-wearing motoric mofos The Wharf Street Galaxy Band. Perhaps in another decade we’ll be treated to some of their final lost session recordings – but for now, we should keep our attention on the release at hand.

To establish the chronology, the band’s untitled third album, which was clearly very much in its early developmental stages, was in progress before their second album, Nine Degrees of Torture (reissued last year) was released. On the strength of just three songs, it’s difficult to determine the level of ‘overlap’ and / or ‘departure’ when weighing up the content of the next album versus its predecessor.

‘the message’ is a heavy-duty full-throttle blast that really transports the listener back to that bridging point where punk split into post-punk circa 79, and with its stonking bass and hectic drumming, I find myself thinking of Joy Division’s early demo recordings as Warsaw. It’s raw, furious, and all the fire. Busy, jangly, messy with treble and without even a smear of polish, it’s real alright. Procter isn’t a singer – he’s a vocalist, and the fact he strains for the higher notes – which is half the song isn’t just ok, but integral to the raw sound. He sounds rather like David Gedge on ‘the pit of doom’ as he sings ‘you’re slipping on the slope / grasping for the rope’, while the band scrabble and scratch away at the instrumentation. The guitar is a scaping chang of treble which chops and splinters into a mesh of top-end amidst streams of feedback.

‘menezes’ is another rough and ready guitar-driven explosion that’s more the sound of ’79 than ’07… although I’m struggling to think what the sound of ’07 actually was. There’s a sense that this was something of a murky spell for music. The post-rock explosion which had erupted circa 2003-4 which seemed to last an eternity was in fact dying of in 2007, and while there was undoubtedly good new music out there – and I was writing about it – there was no real dominant form, no genre which stood out as defining the period, and we trudged and lurched our way through a no-man’s-land of nothing much at all. Small wonder that a band like Farming Incident should peter out. They weren’t part of the zeitgeist: there was no zeitgeist. It’s a shame: Farming Incident were good, and their works in progress showed serious potential, however out of step.

As an aside, their page mentions that ‘All proceeds of any sales will go to Médicins sans Frontières. Thanks for your donation. Go to this link for more details -> http://www.msf.org and of course donate directly here -> http://www.msf.org/donate. Ta(ck).’ It’s good. Give it a blast. And give money.

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Cower – Celestial Devastation

Posted: 22 January 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 1st February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Anyone familiar with the works of William Burroughs will likely be aware of the so-called ‘23 enigma’, which essentially centres around the auspicious frequency of the occurrence of the number 23. It may be a case of confirmation-bias, but once attuned, it’s impossible not to notice, and the fact it’s filtered into mainstream consciousness via the KLF and the 2007 Jim Carey movie The Number 23 is worthy of note, if nothing else. So the fact that catalogue number HW023 has been assigned to the second album by supergroup COWER, featuring members of The Ghost of a Thousand, Petbrick, USA Nails, Yards, The Eurosuite and JAAW is something that may be of no real significance, but then again…

Few would necessarily expect the album to begin with a soft, gentle piano ballad with ‘We Need to Have the Talk’. It’s contemplative, and even if the talk is direct at times lyrically, the mood is low-key and lulls the listener into a sense of false calm. Immediately, ‘Summoner’ crashes in with pounding drums, a snare like smashing a bin lid, and a bass so thick and grimy as to churn your very guts. This broad shift is precisely what you expect from COWER, as they push parameters and do things different; this is what you want from COWER, and this is what they deliver. It’s a rambunctious roar, with an elevated artful tone and all the rage. They pack a lot into a mere three and a quarter minutes – and a lot of what they pack is beefy riffage and furious noise. It’s an instant rush, and at the same time, your muscles tense.

‘Hard-Coded In the Souls of Men’ presents as a downtempo slice of brooding electropop with hints of Depeche Mode, even down to the soulful baritone croon and spacious sound with soft synth interludes. In a parallel universe, this song would get played all over on Radio 1 and would make all of the mainstream radio and Spotify recommended playlists, and people in their tens and hundreds of thousands would love it. And then they would arrive at the album, and wonder ‘what the fuck?’ as they simultaneously shat their pants. This would be the perfect outcome, but is of course, highly unlikely, because acts on small labels just don’t have those opportunities.

The funny thing is that back in the 80s, major labels would back all kinds of bands and would promote – and shift mega-units of – an album based on a largely unrepresentative single. Back then, you couldn’t hear the album online, so would head down to Boots or Woolworths or WHS, or add it to your selection with Britannia Music, and you might love it or you might hate it, but they’d shifted the unit either way and because you only had a handful of records or tapes, you’d play it enough times there was probably a 50% chance you’d come to like it even if you hated it at first.

COWER succeed by being unpredictable, and whichever way they turn, be it noise or electropop, what they deliver is top quality. ‘Buffeted by Solar Winds’ boasts a stalking bassline and brooding vocal, as well as some synths and some circuit-melting overload that shows Nine Inch Nails how it’s done. ‘Deathless & Free’ is pure Depeche Mode circa Songs of Faith and Devotion: soulful, dark, and sonically immense, with percussion that utterly blasts you away. How is this right? And how does it work, when songs like ‘False Flag’ bring the most raging, sinewy punk, half fired-up post-punk, half incendiary grunge, entirely raw, ragged antagonism. The end result is New Model Army meets Big Black, with some wild sax tossed in for good – or crazy – measure.

The tile track is a slow, slow groover, driven by immense, industrial beats. What a contrast the energetic, intense and ultra-tense ‘Bury Me in the Lawless Lands of the West’ which really exploits the tropes of early 80s goth with is throbbing bass and fractured mesh of lattice-like guitars. Celestial Devastation;, however you pitch it, is hefty.

There are many so-called supergroups who aren’t especially super, who seem to trade on their main projects as the selling point. COWER amplify the intensity of their individual main projects to the power of three. Balancing mangled guitar noise and some pretty harsh electronics from beyond, Celestial Devastation is as good as it gets. Celestial Devastation is special.

AA

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AUREOLE – Alunarian Bellmaster

Posted: 19 January 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Lupus Lounge – 9th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

The notes in the press release which accompany this release are strange and intriguing in equal measure, and pique my interest for all of the things they evoke, mysteriously and evocatively. The one thing they don’t really do, it set my expectations stylistically, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

‘For whom the bells toll in the Citadel Alunar shall encounter the Bellmaster!.. The particularly sinister and insidious musical and lyrical universe that Markov "M.S." Soroka is continuously creating with his various projects AUREOLE and TCHORNOBOG as well as ETERNIUM, KRUKH, and DROWN is enriched by a new chapter… The third AUREOLE full-length Alunarian Bellmaster differs stylistically from its direct predecessor Aurora Borealis (2016) in atmosphere and feeling. The album returns to the spirit of the 2014 debut Alunar albeit as a more advanced version with the added experience regarding production techniques and conceptual writing that Soroka has acquired over the years.’

It goes on to explain how ‘Armed with a vicious sound, the album’s lyrical theme is echoed in the sound of 30 bells sampled by Markov and incorporated on Alunarian Bellmaster. The story told on this album is part of the same grimdark fantasy and science fiction based cosmos that AUREOLE and TCHORNOBOG share.’

I don’t know what even half of this means, and I can’t help but be a shade sceptical when bands talk of things like a ‘grimdark fantasy and science fiction based cosmos’. Either we’re plunging into deeply enigmatic territory here, and have perhaps gone beyond a point where lore and mythology and are merely influential elements to become something altogether greater, or we’re in the realms of self-absorbed pretentious guffery. There’s a fine line between high art and theatre, and wank.

In the event, the themes and concepts behind the album are very much that – to the back when it comes to the actual listening experience. The vocals serve as another facet of the overall sound rather than being pitched to the fore, and the titles, too, are sufficiently abstract as to be unobtrusive: that is to say, it’s possible to listen to and appreciate the album without becoming bogged down in any narrative or pseudomythos, while stylistically… well, it soon becomes clear why there’s no attempt to align AUREOLE with any genre. Just as ‘female fronted’ isn’t a genre, neither is ‘experimental’: these are adjectives, and it’s possible to experiment in so many ways within – or without – the confines of any given genre. But experimental, for many, brings with it connotations of happenstance, of the random, the arbitrary, and while the way in which samples and sounds are explored is experimental in nature, to define Alunarian Bellmaster as an experimental work would be to unfairly downplay the detailed, structured nature of the album’s many-layered and multi-faceted compositions.

‘Alunarian Ghosts of Bellmaster’ grows and swells organically from the drones of low ambience searing post-rock, only with ghostly There are echoes of guttural vocals reverberating in the eternal darkness. There are also echoes of Gregorian chants, and guttural mutterings, amplified and reverberated to a colossal scale, which very swiftly swells to become something truly immense. This in itself is a difficult thing to process, even in isolation. In context – an ever-evolving one, where the sounds and textures shift imperceptibly – we find ourselves adrift and in motion through an expanding alternative universe.

The thirty sampled bells are multiplied – and multiple, and multiplied again – to create the immense sound of ‘10000 Bells Resonate Cosmos Untold’, a title which sounds like a phrase from a William Burroughs cut-up. Muttered voices, uttering in an unknown language, flit in and out of earshot. ‘Arrival of the Deathless Interlopers’ is a bold, surging piece of grand proportions and high drama, which isn’t only spectacularly cinematic, but a sweeping piece of neoclassical music which evokes the same stirring of the senses as Mars from Holst’s Planets Suite. If there is a sense of narrative flow between the pieces, then ‘Orbiting Among Alunarian Ruins’ tells us that not everyone here is deathless, as purgatorial howls and screams swirl in a pitch void, from which emerges a big post-metal riff with an atmosphere reminiscent of Field of the Nephilim at their most doomily bombastic. At nearly ten minutes long, it is epic in every sense, while ‘Alunarian Surrender’, another ten-minute monster soundtracks doom and destruction in slow motion against a backdrop of contemplative strong sounds before everything is obliterated by thunderous percussion and slowly the tide turns to another soaring expanse of post-rock with the darkest, most sinister undercurrents. ‘UGC 2885’ is a last piece truly worthy of the word ‘finale’, almost fourteen minutes of dark ambience, through which a piano echoes into nothingness, through the sound of matter slowly collapsing in on itself.

AA

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GUHTS – Regeneration

Posted: 17 January 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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New Heavy Sounds – 26th January 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It begins with a yawning, wailing drone, before thunderous bass, drums, and a rolling piano crash in tempestuously. But if you think this is just another heavy doom-leaning record with a dash of theatre, the arrival of Amber Gardner’s vocals changes everything. She brings an antagonistic, nihilistic punk vibe at first, but then, as the song transitions into a grand, sweeping expanse, reveals a softer side. And so it is that ‘White Noise’, the album’s eight-and-a-half-minute opener is a real shape-shifter, sliding back and forth between crushing weight and spellbinding atmosphere. But when it goes heavy, it’s utterly pulverising, and the sustained crescendo which occupies the last three minutes is gut-wrenching, annihilative, a rare exhibit of raw, chest-tightening emotional heft combining with the most punishingly brutal instrumentation, which leaves the listener feeling wracked, drained, ruined.

It may sound strange, but it’s often more difficult to write about albums which really hit you, which have the most impact. To scrabble for an analogy, it’s like being kicked in the chest and left lying breathless on the ground then being asked to describe the experience while still barely able to draw oxygen. It’s like… like… It leaves you stunned, numb, dazed, and at a loss. Regeneration is one such album. It’s all well and good clutching and comparisons and scratching for similes, but no words can really come close to articulating the spectrum of sensations which engulf your very being when faced with something so intense, so close to overwhelming. Yes, it’s dancing about architecture. What you want to do, more than anything, is to forcibly sit people down and say “listen to this! No, really, listen! Feel that!”

New York-based GUHTS (pronounced ‘guts’) declare themselves to be an ‘avant-garde post-metal project, delivering larger than life sounds through, deeply emotional music’. It’s the emotional aspect that hits harder than the punishing power chords, but it’s the combination of the two which really is the killer here.

The album’s seven tracks are incredibly ambitious in scope and scale, and in terms of balancing emotional depth and sheer brutal force. For the most part, the compositions extend beyond the five-minute mark, but are confined to under eight, and are effectively doom/goth epyllia – expansive, dense, cinematic. The prominence of piano – particularly notable on the slower, intensely wrought and dynamically varied ‘The Mirror’. One of those songs which sustains a surging sensation from the very beginning, it’s truly worthy of the ‘epic’ descriptor.

‘Till Death’ has hints of Cranes about it in Amber’s ethereal vocal delivery, but it’s paired with megalithic guitars of absolutely crushing weight, while the shortest song on the album, ‘Handless Maiden’ is monstrous in its unyielding heaviness. Gardner brings another surprise with her rabid howl, which is utterly petrifying.

There isn’t a weak track here, nor a single second that doesn’t feel utterly vital and doesn’t crackle with intensity, and Regeneration is an immense and powerful album. ‘Generate’ rolls into graceful shoegaze territory, with rolling drums and chiming guitars which wash and ripple mesmerically, gradually building to a sonic tsunami.

There’s something inevitable and completely perfect about the way it all leads the way to the ten-minute ‘The Wounded Healer’, which comes as a truly monumental finale. And what a finale! It begins delicately, ringing xylophone or glockenspiel chiming out mellow tones, before a grinding low-end grinds in and from here, the build is slow and inexorable. Gardner traverses the sonic space, shifting mood and tone in a flicker. The guitar twists and spins, tense and serpentine against the ever-swelling wall of booming bass and by only halfway through, you’re drowning, the air pressed form your lungs… and then… then… Christ. Gardner is possessed, and the guitars pulverise and you feel your skull beginning to compress. Finally, around the seven-minute mark, there is levity. Clawing for aa comparison, I arrive at Amenra, although it’s less than half the story of a song, and an album, which is utterly peerless and completely beyond spheres of comparison.

Regeneration is special, hard-hitting, unique. Really. Listen! Feel that!

AA

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