Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Aidan Baker – Engenderine

Posted: 9 May 2023 in Albums
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Midira Records – 5th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Aidan Baker is one of those artists whose output is almost impossible to keep pace with – but the more remarkable thing is that for all of this hyperproductivity, the standard of work is of an unstinting quality. Recorded between 2020 and 2022, Engenderine – a double CD – lands almost simultaneously with Trio Not Trio, the first in a series of five albums on Gizeh Records, and just as Baker is gearing up for a tour with Nadja, the ‘ambient doom / dreamsludge, / metalgaze’ duo he is one half of.

To pause for breath for a moment, it’s worth stepping back and running through the context of this, which is worth quoting:

‘The neologism ‘engenderine’ comes from Lydia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan, a futuristic/dystopian/cli-fi retelling of the Joan of Arc story, and describes beings partially composed of pure energy capable of manipulating matter who, amongst a largely devolved human population, might be considered post-gender and a new evolutionary step.

‘Other song titles come from phrases and images from Tricia Sullivan’s duology Double Vision and Sound Mind, surrealistic fantasies about the nature of reality and perception and, like The Book of Joan, the possibilities of manipulating those.

‘Musically, the songs on Engenderine began as a series of slowly evolving ambient guitar loops – a bed layer of reality, so to speak – over which were layered bass, drums, and organ parts. These instrumental additions – the trappings of perception, signifiers, metaphorically speaking, our attempts to codify perception – incorporate traditional rock structures and progressions but are stripped down to a sort of somnambulant minimalism that might encourage introspection, a meditative background, uneasy listening, as much as they demand attention.’

It really is extremely uneasy listening. It’s perhaps as well it is, for the larger part, ‘background’, because the two CDs, while only containing eight tracks in all, span almost ninety minutes. We’re not quite in Sunn O))) or latter-day Swans territory, but still…

The first track, ‘Baby Dragon Slaughter’ pitches a long, unchanging organ drone note against a growling doom guitar and stop-start percussion which crashes hard. It’s hypnotic, paralysing, and I can imagine some might toss in a Doors comparison, but that’s only on account of the organ and the slightly trippy vibe, because it’s not only nothing like The Doors, but infinitely better.

If you want comparisons – because pretty much everyone seems to work on the premise that everything sounds like something else and recommendations – mostly algorithmic and based on purchases or streams, depending on the platform, Engenderine sits in the low, slow, doom-drone bracket of Sunn O))) and Earth 2. And this is indeed some ultra-low frequency shit. The first track on Disc 2, ‘Resurrection of the Child Army’ features some melodic, trilling pipe sounds around seven minutes into its nine-and-three-quarter-minutes gloomy, thick humming drone, is something you feel as much as you hear, and it resonates through the intestines and vibrates eternally.

The bass on ‘Calabi Yau Manifestations’ is pure dub, floor-shakingly dense, dark, minimal but quiveringly heavy, and it dominates the erratic drum clatters and rumbling roar of a drone that sounds like a jet engine warming up several miles away. Having experienced jet engines nearby, trust me., this is a good thing, but the rumble is unsettling. And then there’s ‘Dorvay’, which seems to take its cues from The Cure circa Pornography, with its hefty percussion dominating the sound.

Engenderine isn’t an album for a track-by-track, blow-by-blow critique: the tracks melt into one another and it’s an album that needs to be experienced as an album – and in context, that’s a continuous droning hum of murky noise without any clear sense of shape or form.

The second disc feels lower, slower, darker and more difficult: the erratic jazz drum-work on ‘Fear Sculptures’ is difficult to digest and assimilate – but then again, so is Engenderine as a whole. It’s just so much dark and difficult droning to chew on that it leaves you feeling low on energy, sapped, physically and mentally. But this isn’t about entertainment, and artistically, Engenderine is an outstanding exploratory / concept work.

AA

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Omnibadger – Famous Guitar Licks Vol. III

Posted: 8 May 2023 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 26th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

If ever a band could be defined by constant flux and evolution it’s this Derby duo, who began life as Omnibael before becoming the more frivolous-sounding Omnibadger. Working their way through doom-grunge riffery to all-out industrial electronic noise, theirs has been an interesting journey thus far, and one that it would seem is by no means over yet.

So many acts set themselves into a mould and stick to its form for the duration of their career. Some may find a market and thrive in it, but for many, it becomes a trajectory of diminishing returns as they plough the same rut over the course of successive albums, as things become evermore predictable and wearisome, and people lose interest. But then, so many acts make a radical shift and lose a substantial part of their audience in the process. You simply cannot win.

Only, Omnibadger have done things differently: they have spent their career trying to decide who they are, meaning each release has been different, with one release often landing leagues apart from its predecessor. To say that they’ve spent their career deciding may suggest that search is now complete, but that would be a wrong conclusion: that quest continues, and likely will: Omnibager exist to eternally push the boundaries, to seek, to progress, to evolve. There is no linear progression, only expansion.

It all kicks off from the outset with ‘Lick One’, and it gives little away in many respects: it’s a semi-ambient collage of rumbling noise which gives way to tribal percussion, and it’s a confusion of collage that’s difficult to find a hold in. But that’s no criticism: it’s tedious knowing what you’re going got get for the entirety of an album from the first four bars. And this isn’t a ’bars’ album: it’s a hotch-potch sonic soup where rhythm really is not a dominant element, and at times isn’t even present at all.

‘Speeding Ground (Part 1)’ is an epic electronic exploration, stun lasers and gleeps and glops and trilling top-end drones shrill and challenging, like a Star wars scene – and then it goes hypno-prog, a thumping rhythm backing a screeding sheet of noise. And on it goes, thumping and thundering a relentless beat. At Nearly fourteen minutes, it’s a monster.

‘F.I.X.’ slams in some gnarly electro stylings, with undulating synths and insistent, fretful beats twitching away as a backdrop to howling vocals. It’s as if Gnaw Their Tongues and Cabaret Voltaire had bit in a head on collision. There’s no winner here, just a mangled, smoking mess. And as if to reinforce the point, ‘You Never Tell Me What You Think’ crashes in with a nagging bass groove and aa shedload of aggro, and battering away at a simple monotonous grind while the vocals are mixed low in a ton of reverb with the treble cranked to the max, it sound like early Revolting Cocks. Elsewhere, ‘But What I Want Is Not the Most Important Thing Right Now’ spins like an outtake from Pretty Hate Machine, all mangles electronics and gritty guitar.

Clocking in at over ten minutes, final track ‘Equations for a Falling Body’ is the album’s second monolithic piece, and it grinds and scrapes and sheers and saws it way through its duration. Within a couple of minutes, it’s built to a full-throttle racket of discordant electronic chaos, a tempest of noise.

That’s ultimately a reasonable description of Famous Guitar Licks Vol. III (their second album, which is largely guitar-free) overall: audacious, like Throbbing Gristle ironically calling their first (and second) release ‘best of’ and their second album First Annual Report.

By way of a ‘difficult’ second album, with Famous Guitar Licks Vol. III, the only difficulty is for the listener, who is faced with a harsh and challenging listen. But for all of its racket and unpredictable nature, the experience is rewarding, and even enjoyable in a perverse way.

AA

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Trowser Carrier – A Flower For My Hoonoo

Posted: 5 May 2023 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 5th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The liner notes to Trowser Carrier’s A Flower For My Hoonoo, originally released in some form or another back in 2013, say everything you need to know about Trowser Carrier – the duo consisting of Dave Procter (Voice) and Java Delle (Noise) – and their purpose.

‘Noise and vocal delivery tend to occasionally focus on edgelord taboo subjects. Trowser Carrier are not like that. After 10 years, Trowser Carrier once more ask the following question – why can’t noise be nice? Find the answers amongst harsh noise and insipid words.’

Procter in particular is no stranger to the noise scene, performing as Legion of Swine and Fibonacci Drone Organ, among others, not to mention countless collaborations. and he’s no doubt encountered more than his fare share of edgelords along the way. Like many makers of noise, he’s also a fan, but not incapable of critique and criticism, and not without humour. And as such, A Flower For My Hoonoo is something that you could describe as a humorous act of rebellion – and since noise and all of the serial killer and pervo shit that is often the subject matter of noise that’s designed to shock ‘normal’ society – this is a rebellion against rebellion, an attack on cack cliché, a parody of po-faced posturing.

The result is a collection of pieces that resemble Alan Bennett fronting Whitehouse, and the track titles largely speak for themselves: ‘a nice cup of tea’; ‘this ketchup is nice’; thanks for hoovering’; and ‘I remain you humble servant’ are all representative – and it’s perhaps as well the titles do speak for themselves since most of the actual words are, in true noise fashion, largely inaudible for blasts of intense pink, white, and brown noise layered up with distortion and overloading synth meldown. ‘sausages for supper’ extols the virtues of vegetarian sausages, with lines like ‘my body is a temple… and I don’t eat The Lord’s creatures.’

From the words it is possible to make out, ‘nice’ is probably the word which appears with the most frequency after ‘the’, and the bland lyrical niceness, a porridge-slick spill of pleasantry worse than saccharine sweetness in that it’s a world of magnolia in word form. It’s like being forced to sit in a corporate ‘wellbeing’ room plastered posters of motivational quotes, only instead of pictures of beaches and sunrises as the backdrop, there are images of crashed cars and slaughterhouses as the ear-shredding electronic racket blasts relentlessly. The fact that they’re short bursts – most around the minute mark – doesn’t make it any easier on the ear: if anything, it’s worse, as the stop-start nature of the sonic assault has the same effect as various methods of torture. The ear-shredding blasts are of the bubbling crackling fucked-up analogue kind.

The ‘mix’ versions of the tracks – which double up the sixteen tracks to thirty-two place the vocals up to the fore and back off the noise (which is different), meaning Dave’s sappy words are nauseatingly clear as he gushes gratitude for tine spent washing dishes together and courteous manners.

The contrast between the aural punishment and the fist-clenchingly pleasant banalities of the lyrics is amusing and frustrating in equal measure. Procter utters these grovelingly insipid lines in a blank monotone, often repeating a singe verse twice to fill the minute of noise as it froths and sloshes and foams and bubbles and drives the meter needles to the upper limits of the red.

It’s overtly silly, but does make serious points about the genre trappings and songs lyrics and musical forms more broadly.

AA

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Live Skull – Party Zero

Posted: 4 May 2023 in Albums
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Bronson Recordings – 26th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

90s alt-rock band Come, fronted by Thalia Zedek, provided my route to discovering Live Skull, which she joined in 1987 and took over lead vocal duties. But my curiosity and interest in evolution and lineage led me to pick up cheap vinyl copies of Bringing Home the Bait and Don’t Get Any on You, which, brimming with shouty vocals, scratchy guitars and low-slung bass, could reasonably be described as No-Wave classics.

Somewhat ironically for a band which emerged out of the foment of 80s New York which also spawned Sonic Youth and Swans, the Live Skull reportedly disbanded in 1990 due to sustained lack of commercial success.

Perspectives change over time, although it was perhaps more of a returning to their original motivations which spurred them to reconvene in 2016, since when they’ve released two albums, with Party Zero being the third, and the seventh studio album of their career.

Delivering an album that’s described as ‘a fiercely political album, in keeping with this politically fierce age’ and ‘timely music, essential, impassioned, angry and beautiful’ founder Mark C. It is a politically fierce age, and now more than any time since the late 70s and early 80s – a period which spawned so many bands who existed as an outlet for frustration and anger and all kinds of difficult and even ugly emotions through nihilistic noise and various forms of confrontation and antagonism.

Sonically, Party Zero isn’t especially nihilistic or noisy, confrontational or antagonistic, but does very much refine these elements and hone the delivery of an almost obsessive focus on corruption, abuse of power, inequality and injustice.

If the sound is rather more polished and widescreen than their 80s releases, the key ingredients are still there, not least of all jagged guitars that blur and crackle with treble and careen into dissonance and discord against big, bold basslines. There’s a palpable sense of urgency to the songs on Party Zero. It may not be their strongest album or their most innovative or distinctive – but it’s an album that’s necessary.

“We’ve been pushed to the edge – how do we claw our way back? That’s been a common theme in Live Skull since the beginning, and so it is now. We’re trying to provoke thought.” There seems to be a rising tide of bands out to achieve these same ends, now, and from a vastly diverse range of stylistic contexts, from the minimal beats and loops of Sleaford Mods to the raging ranting noise-blasts of Benefits via the angular post-punk of I Like Trains. People are pissed off – and they’re frustrated, and scared – and those people in bands are using their platforms to call the bullshit, the fearmongering, the manipulation, the rise of the right and the immorality of governments and multinational companies.

It’s not just the pithy lyrics: ‘Neutralize the Outliers’ sounds like a rabble-rousing protest song, more New Model Army than anything that belies the band’s origins, and it works because it feels necessary, vital.

‘Chords of Inquiry’ plugs away at a simple, spare riff driven by crashing drums, and the drumming is a strong contributor to the album’s dynamic feel, and nowhere more on ‘Mad Kingship’, as they thunder along in a sustained roll. ‘Inside the Exclusion Zone’ is accessible, but driven, choppy, urgent, with a contemporary post-punk feel – think Radio 4’s take on the Gang of Four sound – and the same is true of ‘Turn Up the Static’, with its dubby strolling bass that ambulates through the reverby verses (before the chorus slugs out a mid-tempo fist-pumping holler-along call to arms).

And this is why the surge in protest music is what we need right now. It likely won’t change the world; the chances it won’t change opinions or provoke all that much thought, since most people who are likely to listen to Live Skull are the kind of people who are already in the same camp of political frustration or despair – and that’s ok. What these people – we – need is to know we’re not alone, and to feel a sense of unity and community, and for these feelings of frustration and anger to be articulated by relatable voices. Party Zero does that – and with some solid tunes.

AA

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Gintas K – Resonances / Fluxus +/- / Sound & Spaces #2

Posted: 4 May 2023 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

‘I’m sorry, I’ve been busy’. We’ve probably all heard it: and most of us have probably spoken the phrase. I’m guilty, too, and hate myself for it. Everyone is fucking busy. Too busy to text, to open a message even, too busy to reply to emails, catch up with friends, too busy to fucking live. What is everyone so busy doing, and why is it that in a time when technology was supposed to make our lives easier, and in supposedly affluent western cultures, people are both fiscally porr and time-poor?

Naturally, I blame the current strain of capitalism: keep everyone too busy to live, to breathe, and too skint, and they’re not going to be protesting, they’re going to be too busy wondering where the next meal is coming from to fuck shit up. After everything, they’ve only got the juice to be ‘busy’ bingeing Netflix or the new season of The Mandalorian.

Admittedly, I have been genuinely busy parenting, publishing stuff, and writing a review a day while battling through an evermore overwhelming volume of submissions, but is that really a reason, or just an excuse? Right now, I’m not sorry either way. I keep myself to myself and I write when I can when I’m not doing laundry or cleaning or paying bills or feeding the cat

Gintas K is always busy, and he’s been having albums released at a ratee beyond that at which I can even download them, let alone listen and digest. And so it is that March and April have seen the release of three – yes, three – albums by the prodigious Lithuanian.

I must have been absolutely nuts to have set myself the task of reviewing all three together. The idea was to soak it all in with an evening of electronica, and report on what I expected to be an immersive experience. But knowing Gintas K’s work over the years, this was, in hindsight, an unlikely outcome. The headline here is that there is no overarching theme, there’ s no evolutionary trajectory, and nothing to really take hold of. But that in itself is K’s selling point: his work is exploratory, varied, sometimes playful, and often difficult.

Resonances, the first of these, ‘was recorded live, using computer, midi keyboard & controller on Autumn 2021’ and has been released by Sloow Tapes in an edition of 70 copies. It spins slow-swirling vortices around hovering hums and low-humming drones over the course of its ten, comparatively short (only a couple extend beyond four minutes), ponderous tracks. It’s perhaps one of his more varied works, both sonically and atmospherically – and Resonances really does explore atmospheres and cavernous swampy echoes.

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Fluxus +/- is a split collaborative release, which finds him working with Kommissar Hjuler Und Frau on a longform track, while a piece by Wolfgang Kindermann & PAAK occupies the other, and what we get here is just shy of eighteen minutes of really weird shit, bubbling swampy noise and loose collage layering of all sorts of snippets and a mish-mash of all kinds of everything that’s not easy to digest.

And then April saw the arrival of Sound & Spaces #2, which is perhaps more Gintas K’s standard fare of bubbling, foamy froth and stuttering, stammering glitch-heavy sonic mayhem. It stutters and scuffs, bleeps and wibbles, and at times sounds like the speakers are shredding, the cones torn and flapping in the blasts of random noise bursts, while at others… well, at times it’s a foaming froth and as others, it’s really not very much at all. The pieces run into one another to create a continuous stream of crackling distortion and bibbling trickles of tweeting and twittering, and while the effect is the most incomprehensible and difficult to digest, it’s by far the most quintessentially K. If it’s what I’d expected, then what this trio of releases demonstrates is that Gintas K continues to defy expectations and to produce work that’s different and diverse.

Sound & Spaces #2

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Mho – Blueprint

Posted: 30 April 2023 in Albums
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Sinners Music Records – 15th May 2023

On reviewing the debut EP by Fashion Tips recently, I commented that the northern noise ‘scene’ was, in effect, more of a community. I suppose this is something that is true of many more niche corners of the musical world, and it’s certainly true of the electronic scene, particularly that which has grown up around the EMOM (Electronic Music Open Mic) nights that take place around the country as a platform for all strains of all things electronic based (several of which I’ve reviewed, and a few of which I’ve performed at). These nights are a broad church, and have not only welcomed me, but opened the doors for myriad collaborations, as well as providing a safe space for testing stuff out as well as an opportunity for seasoned performers and novices alike to connect with an accommodating audience, and this release comes courtesy of Sinners Music Records, established by Ian J Cole, another face familiar to attendees of the York EMOM nights, who also streams the Audiophile radio podcast showcasing weird and wonderful exploratory electronica.

Mho – that’s ohm backwards, and pronounced ‘mo’ – is the musical vehicle of Dave Walker, who’s been a regular face at the EMOM scene, and has become established as being instantly recognisable for his stagewear, with neon-splatter t-shirt and hat. Obviously, these visual props don’t translate to the recordings, which must stand on their own merits – and they very much do.

Over the course of ten tracks, Walker showcases a broad span of styles and sounds, and the compositions are all accomplished and considered. As his bio states, he ‘began his foray into making electronic music at school when he built a Transcendent 2000 synthesiser and a ETI String Synth, as the Polymoog synth cost as much as a house back then’. He’s since switched to more contemporary kit, but his years of experience have led to a nuanced approach to musicmaking: there’s a lot of detail, but nothing’s overdone. Every drop, every time the beats bang back in, every layer, every stutter, every new sound and sample, is perfectly placed – but not in such a way that the precision leads to sterility. Walker’s tunes flow with a rare naturalness, and there are no jarring jolts or awkward lurches between segments.

Predominantly, these pieces are built around conventional piano sounds and broad strokes of synth which fill out broad spaces, and there’s a lot of analogue-style pulsations, too, cut from the cloth of Mike Oldfield and Tangerine Dream.

There’s something familiar that I just can’t quite place about the melody of ‘Nie Rozumiem’ (which will undoubtedly annoy me for days), and elsewhere, ‘Chorale’ brings ambience with low-key beats that washes along nicely, being largely undemanding but pleasant. ‘Eternal’ brings a hint of Eastern promise and a vaguely operatic vocal carried on a soft breeze of shuffling beats and rippling piano.

‘Contact’ and ‘Moon’ appear to be thematically linked, the former bursting with samples and laser-beam bleeps, and it does have quite an 80s feel to it. This, though, is true of much contemporary electronic music which isn’t overtly dance – or EDM and the encroaching Americanism would have it. The latter is a seven—minute sonic exploration that expands through time and space with crackling radio transmissions from the lunar landing of 69.

‘Take it Easy’ is pure 80s retro tootling melting into 90s euphoric trance, and while well-executed, it’s perhaps the least engaging or enticing tracks on the album, but it’s but a brief weakness in an otherwise solid album which concludes with the surprisingly light and accessible spin of ‘I Am With You’ which practically skips along.

With EMOM sets providing just ten to fifteen minutes for artists to showcase their style (these nights are absolutely bloody packed, to the point that despite being ‘open mic’, all slots are usually taken a full month in advance), it’s good to hear the full span of the elements which feature in an Mho set, and even better to hear that Mho has the material for not only a longer set, but a full album which is at once diverse and cohesive.

AA

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Ky – Power Is The Pharmacy

Posted: 30 April 2023 in Albums
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Constellation – 12th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Ky Brooks’ solo work is, on the face of things at least, a very far cry from her output with noise-punk trio Lungbutter. This, of course, explains why it’s her solo project rather than the new addition to the Lungbutter catalogue: sometimes things just don’t belong together under the same banner.

That said, there was always a slightly experimental / arty bent to Lungbutter’s work, and it’s this which stands to the fore on Ky’s solo album. The title track is exemplary – and ultimately, fucking weird. Entitled with ‘teeth’ in parenthesis, it features a robotically-delivered monologue about ‘the integrity of the teeth’ and some weird shit over a gently gliding drift of warm, fuzzy synths. Teeth often make me think of Martin Amis, and specifically Dead Babies, but also my late grandmother who had all of her teeth removed when she was nineteen, to be replaced with false teeth she would wash with soap. I suppose you might say I’m easily triggered on account of my randomly-tripping memory which tends not to be my friend. But if it seems like an epic tangent, bear with me: it’s relevant because this is what music does: it sends you places. They’re not always good places, they’re not always or even often the places you expect, but it can open doors to recollections.

I suppose this makes the joy of music something of a double-edged sword, something I hadn’t always appreciated. You want it to open the channels and provide conduits for emotional connection, to evoke and provoke – well, at least some of us do. It’s not always comfortable or easy, but it’s about feeling something, and that emotional resonance simply cannot be found in the oil slick of mainstream middlingness, where everything is processed and pre-digested. Power Is The Pharmacy is anything but.

‘All the Sad and Loving People’ does rippling, pulsating ambience before whappy automated vocal wanders around all over it and things go strange. It’s pinned together by a slow, clacking beat that’s murky and subdued, evoking the spirit of Portishead with a smoky trip—hop vibe, which is in stark contrast to the sharp, stark spoken word of ‘Work that Superficially Looks Like Leisure’ which is unsettling in its Stepford Wives pro-conformity zeal which we instinctively understand to be false long before it turns rabid, both in its vocal delivery and crashing jazz drum explosion that rides in on a swell of expanding noise.

‘The Dancer’, released as a single is hypnotic, entrancing, and detached, deranged, with a looping synth blip bubbling along through sonorous scrapes and driven by an insistent, impersonal beat. You can probably dance to it, but you’re more likely to feel a growing tension as it cyclically bubbles its way over the course off nearly five minutes.

But then what do you do when immediately presented with a song like ‘Revolving Door’? It’s like Jarboe-era Swans and Big |Brave, with crushing chords providing the backdrop to a breathy, haunting vocal. You certainly don’t find a comfortable category for Ky or her work that’s for certain. ‘Dragons’ brings next-level intensity, and while there numerous comparisons which float into my mind, perhaps it’s better to highlight a unique talent rather than tame it with contextualisation.

There are so many details and textures here that make Power Is The Pharmacy an album that requires repeat listens in order to absorb them. That’s a challenge in itself, because it’s not an immediate album, and it’s a record that leaves you feeling like you need a break, to sit and stare into space for a bit after.

And perhaps that’s the way to approach this: with space, to allow it to breathe, and with no concrete expectations. The spoken word passages are very much akin to David Bowie’s Outside, I realise, and Power Is The Pharmacy could be described as a concept album of sorts. It’s certainly a strange album, but it’s interesting.

AA

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Resurrectionists – Now That We Are All Ghosts

Posted: 28 April 2023 in Albums
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Seismic Wave Entertainment – 3rd April 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Now That We Are All Ghosts is the second album from Milwaukee’s Resurrectionists. It was self-engineered, recorded and produced; and mastered by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service. The blurbage describes the album as featuring ‘nine songs of Doom Chamber-Americana, all powerfully cinematic and ripe for video treatments, leading the group to take the unusual and ambitious step of commissioning videos for every one of them.’ And we were privileged to premier the clip that accompanies ‘Let Me Talk You Through This One’ at the start of this week. Privileged because it’s really something special, not to mention unique.

It’s a crazy project for a crazy album. Returning with a different lineup and different approach to songwriting from their 2019 debut What Comes In, Now That We Are All Ghosts is, on the one hand, a set of accessible and somewhat folksy Americana songs. On the other…it’s dementedly intense and anything but the accessible Americana it presents as.

It’s noisy, and it’s intense, and the first song, ‘A Classic Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue’ (also my first encounter with the band) is a magnificent work, an example of songwriting that gets the slow-build, the power of transition, evolving from a sparse and gloomy to a rip-roaring soul-purging in no time, and it paves the way for a tempestuous, tumultuous album that drags the listener through some tough and unexpected twists and turns. ‘Hobnobbing With High Value Targets’ is superficially docile but channels darker undercurrents, both sonically and lyrically.

Whatever this album seems to be, it’s always so much more. The songs always end up in a very different place from there they begin: ‘The Ghost This Time’ is a slow blues-crooner, but it’s bruised and raw and there are some tendrils of post-rock tendencies which tickle their way around the wandering bassline. Joe Cannon sounds fraught, wracked, caught in a turmoil, and to draw an obscure reference, it brings together the most fucked-up evangelism with the psychological spasms of Mark Eitzel’s sole turn at fronting Toiling Midgets on the album Son.

‘The New Winter’ starts out with some vintage 70s US rock swagger, but rapidly shifts somewhere else and winds up coming on like Dinosaur Jr, while ‘Blue Henry’ begins softly, before erupting in a tide of anguished emotion, Cannon practically choking on his words as he wrenches them from his throat. Thew downtempo ‘Let me talk You Through This One’ is two minutes of wistful, reflective slackerist Americana, with hints of The Silver Jews.

The album’s final – and finale – track ‘(hotel with pool)’ may sit in parenthesis, but it encapsulates all aspects of the album and amplifies them further in a monumental six-minute monster, that grows and grows, from a somewhat tentative and soulful start to climax as a raging tempest, where instruments and vocals alike are pushed to the limit.

Now That We Are All Ghosts is one of those albums that really does take you by surprise, curving in first from one way and then the other, sliding in gently before tearing shreds in its own very fabric. Understated yet intensely potent, this is a powerful and accomplished album.

AA

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Material Object – Telepath

Posted: 20 April 2023 in Albums
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Editions Mego – 24th March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Editions Mego have since forever released ultra-niche but eternally-fascinating exploratory works. Since their inception in 1994 as MEGO, before transforming into Editions Mego, bearing eMEGO catalogue numbers, the label has given home to pretty much every significant and emerging artist working in the field of electronica given to abstraction, minimalism, glitch, and the more experimental side of things. As such, this release is a very comfortable fit in the catalogue.

As the bio details, ‘Dismantling the acoustic to feed the electronic, Editions Mego presents Telepath, the new album by Material Object. Born out of a single improvised recording session with a lone Violinist, Telepath is a startling album of future electronic music, resulting in an LP of unique and timeless tracks that reimagine a classic sound for an endless future.’

Nothing about Telepath sounds remotely like a violin in any recognisable sense. Even the long, soaring tones and strong-scrapes which sound like a violin sound, in context, processed, abstract.

It’s all about the process, of course, and it’s the literal processing and manipulation of sound which renders the output so far from the initial input. The results are interesting, to say the least.

To return to the bio for context, Telepath is presented as ‘Boldly departing from his previous canon of largely ‘ambient’ work, Material Object’s Telepath renders itself out as something much stranger, something more spacious, more subtle and gradual. Moments of bouncing minimalism meet moirés of delayed pure tones phasing in and out of resolution, giving way to a series of strobing foreground gestures arranged and offset in disorienting landscapes which scatter themselves asymmetrically amongst crystal pools of reverb.

There are moments of deep, rumbling ambience to be found here, but it’s certainly not the album’s dominant feature.

‘Enter’ isn’t quite microtonal in its focus, but does very much narrow down to an extremely small sonic spectrum in order to interrogate minor changes and the relationship between notes as they resonate and bounce off one another – and that focus is intensely concentrated, remaining fixed for some nine and a half minutes. It sets the stall for Telepath overall: the fifteen-minute ‘Hyphae’ flickers and clicks as sounds bat back and forth at a rate of rapidity that’s tension-inducing, particularly as the click-clack becomes overwhelmed by a bubbling cloud of dense sound yet remains persistently audible.

Structurally, the album alternates between longer works and shorter interludes of a couple of minutes or so: these serve, I suppose, as the sonic equivalent of palate-cleansers, and they’re necessary in breaking up the vast sonic swaths of hyper-focussed detail as interrogated over five minutes or more.

It may seem a contradiction, but while focusing microscopically on the most minute details, Telepath also covers a lot of ground. It’s all about contrast and contradictions, and arguably these are the foundations of this intriguing and often quirky work.

Following the twitchy, processed pings of ‘Thermo’, the eleven-and-a-half-minute ‘Exit’ is the perfect bookend to stand opposite ‘Enter’. And as the album leaves us reflecting the whisps of mist left in its trails, there is a hanging sense that there is something yet to come. From among the shadows, Telepath presents us with an unexpected sense of insight, both outside and in.

AA

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Spotlights – Alchemy For The Dead

Posted: 18 April 2023 in Albums
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Ipecac Recordings – 28th April 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

As their bio explains most succinctly, ‘Spotlights occupy the space between a push-and-pull of jarring metallic catharsis and sweeping distortion. Even as either side vies for supremacy, neither extreme ever completely tightens its grip, allowing waves of melodic vocals and expressive sonic sorcery to breathe in the middle. This deft balancing act has enabled the trio—husband-and-wife Mario Quintero [guitar, vocals, keys] and Sarah Quintero [bass, vocals] joined by Chris Enriquez [drums]—to carve a singular lane. Armed with an uncanny ability to wield darkness or light, the trio’s fourth full-length offering, Alchemy for the Dead [Ipecac Recordings], finds them exploring something we all face, yet few embrace…’

Expanding on this, Mario explains the album’s overarching theme, which the title alludes to: “One of the major parts of our lives, is the fact we’re all going to die,” he says “Most people are terrified of it, some people learn to look forward to it, and some see it as a way out of their misery. Various cultures view it differently. There isn’t necessarily a story to the album as a whole, but each song deals with the theme of death. It could be fantasy such as bringing a loved one back to life or darker moments like suicide and deep depression.”

It’s a fact that, at least in Western culture, death remains perhaps the last taboo, something of which even the dying tend not to talk about, not properly.

It was back in 2018 that I first encountered Spotlights: their cover of ‘Faith’ by The Cure from their Hanging by Faith EP was an instant grab. This was a band that really ‘got’ the atmospherics of the track and captured the essence of what, for many, myself included, remains as an untouchable trilogy of albums, 17 Seconds, Faith, and Pornography.

Alchemy For The Dead doesn’t sound like any Cure album specifically, but still takes cues in terms of weighty atmosphere. Following a gentle introduction that borders on dark synth pop, it’s not long before the blasting power chords crash in, thick and dark and heavy. And the thick, processed bass on ‘Sunset Burial’ blends with a rippling guitar that’s richly evocative and reminiscent of Oceansise at their best. But when they break into monolithic crescendos of distortion, I’m reminded more of the likes of Amenra, of BIG ¦ BRAVE.

There are some extravagant guitar breaks, but somehow, they’re as forgivable as the more processed prog passages, which in the hands of any other band would likely sound pretentious: Spotlights sound emotionally engaged and sincere without pomp or excessive theatricality: this isn’t something that’s easy to define, not least of all because it’s such a fine line when weighing up musical that’s so reliant on technical proficiency and very much ‘produced’. And the production is very much integral here: the arrangements require this level of separation and clarity. But this is where it’s important to distinguish between production and overproduction, and it’s testament to Mario’s skills at the desk that he’s realised the band’s vision so well. The bass really dominates the sound, which is so thick, rich, and textured, and also explores a broad dynamic range: the quiet passages are delicate, the loud ones as explosive as a detonation at a quarry.

Similarly while the songs tend to stretch beyond the five-minute mark, there’s nothing that feels indulgent or overlong here. ‘Repeat the Silence’ builds on a simple repeated sequence almost reminiscent of Swans’ compositions, but thunders into a bold, grungy chorus that’s more Soundgarden.

The album’s shortest song, the three-and-a-half-minute ‘Ballad in the Mirror’ is also the most overtly commercial, a straight-up quiet/loud grunge blast, and the riffage is colossal.

‘Crawling Towards the Light’ marries monster riffage with Joy Division-esque synths, and somewhere between Movement-era New Order and Smashing Pumpkins, but rendered distinctive by the propulsive drumming which drives the track which builds to a roaring climax.

The seven-minute title track is sparse and suffocating. It has a nostalgic quality that’s hard to define, and it’s perhaps something that’s only likely to punch the gut of nineties teens in this specific way, but it’s understated and emotive, and then the guitars crash in and it’s fucking immense and… well, what a way to conclude an album.

Alchemy For The Dead is a huge work, an album that draws its own parameters and digs new trenches around genre definitions before bulldozing them to the ground with riffs. Complex, detailed, and unique, Alchemy For The Dead is something special.

AA

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