Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Tony Buck – Environmental Studies

Posted: 29 June 2023 in Albums
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Room40 – 30th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

There is no quick way to consider this album. And for many reasons – the first being that it needs to be heard in its entirety before being able to summarise and pass critical comment. The second being that after hearing it, one needs to drag themselves from the wreckage of their psyche and process an experience that is likely akin to a week being subjected to psychological experiments at the hands of the CIA under MK Ultra. Brace yourself…

As his bio points out, ‘Tony Buck is no stranger to the realm of durational performance and composition. As a part of Australian unit The Necks he has been central to defining a reductive, but rich sound language that equally interrogates timbre and time…[and] with Environmental Studies he moves even further into these longitudinal pursuits.’

Longitudinal is one word to describe this album. It’s a single, continuous piece, some two hours in duration, and while there are a couple of five-minute excerpts designed to give potential listeners an indication of what it’s like, it’s simply impossible to convey the experience in snippets. The snippets are lifted from the album’s lighter moments: that doesn’t mean they’re mellow, melodic, but the multi-layered clattering percussion that’s evocative of some kind of space-jungle and brief segment of avant-jazz feedback is nothing in the wider context. And – as I always say – context counts.

While chart music – geared toward snappy three-minute cuts which are 90% chorus – and the inclusion of streams when compiling charts, has effectively killed the album in the mainstream, further afield (and to be fair, you can’t get much further afield than this), the album is still very much a cherished format for both artists and listeners alike. In fact, it’s interesting to observe the rise of the really long album. I will often harp on about Swans releases from the last decade, but they’re not isolated. Frank Rothkkaramm released an album as a 24-hour CD box set – which couldn’t be much more different from Throbbing Gristle’s 24 hours box – as he explored sounds which helped with his tinnitus. Numerous doom, drone, and ambient albums in recent years have really pushed the parameters of an album thanks to digital releases not being subject to the same limitations of physical formats – or the same production costs. Is the medium the message? Perhaps, at least to an extent.

The recorded medium was always an issue: even going back to the height of the classical era, once recording became possible, the media limited what could be released, meaning to hear a full performance of, say, Handel’s Messiah, you had to be there, since even a recording which required a box-set album release required truncation. It also, of course, required the turning of records and the segmentation of the work.

In its day, Earth’s groundbreaking Earth 2 challenged the conventional notion the ‘the album’ – more even than any monster prog releases like Yes’ eighty-one minute Tales from Topographic Oceans and the two-hour plus, sprawling triple YesSongs. Because what differentiates these is the fact that Yes was a lot of noodling wank, while Earth did something different, with a specific desired effect intended, and its duration was in fact integral to its cumulative effect, namely that of a sonic blanket of suffocation. Anyway: the point is that Environmental Studies is an absolutely immense album, and it’s a work that needs to be heard as an album. You may find yourself drifting in and out, but it feels as if this is part of the experience: better to drift than experience in fragments.

The accompanying notes describe Environmental Studies as ‘An incredibly dense matrix of interwoven voices and layers, each occupying and exploiting a unique space within the fabric of the sound-environment, co-existing to slowly reveal themselves in multiple interconnected relationships.’

Immediately from the start, the listener is assailed by a deluge of discord and dissonance and streams of noise. It gradually drifts through an ever-evolving, eternally-shifting journey, where mellow jazz piano and slow-melting notes emerge and drip slowly over cascading cymbals and an infinite array of extraneous sounds which wash in and out. There are passages of supple, strummed acoustic guitar – which get harder and more challenging at times but also explore mellow passages –– and gurgling extraneous nose, straining, clattering. There are sections which so tense, straining and submerged by noise that as feedback twists and turns and groans and hums, that the enormity of Environmental Studies finally hits.

There are infinite layers of percussion rattling shakes and clangerous curiousness, with errant twangs and all kinds of shades of strange, with dingy distortion crashing in heavy amidst the a maelstrom of noise that sounds like a hundred pianos being thrown down a hundred flights of stairs at the same time while someone in the top floor flat blasts a Sunn O))) album at wall-cracking volume and there’s a fire broken out in the basement and it’s rapidly escalating upwards.

An hour in, we’re in sonic purgatory – and it’s absolutely magnificent. The polytonal percussion builds and builds; industrial, tribal, everything all at once, with sonorous drones and crushing distortion and noise and wailing feedback whistling and screaming all the while, it’s a relentless barrage of sound – but not noise, and that’s an important distinction here. There are noises, and they’re collaged into something immense, with the rattling of cages and furious beating of skins.

When it does simmer down, some time further in, we find ourselves in an alien landscape, that’s strangely spacey and tense before the next round of percussion barrels in. Environmental Studies is big on beats, but not all of the beats are big: insectoid skittering and scratchy flickers are as integral to the complex interweaving as the thunderous floor toms and reverberating timpanis, and everything melts together to weave a thick sonic tapestry.

While there is nothing about Environmental Studies which is overtly heavy in the conventional sense, to immerse yourself in the album is an exhausting experience, both physically and mentally. But if art doesn’t challenge, what is it for? It’s merely entertainment. This is not entertainment. But it is an incredible work of art.

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Listen: ‘Invocations’ by High Priest FULL ALBUM STREAM

Posted: 25 June 2023 in Albums
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Chicago riff-doom four-piece HIGH PRIEST officially present their debut full-length Invocation to the world, now streaming everywhere and available in record shops across the galaxy from 23rd June 2023.

The band comment: “Our debut album Invocation is the culmination of years of hard work and collaboration”, guitarist John Regan writes. “We wanted to represent our breadth of influences and create something new while harkening back to the bands that inspired us to play music in the first place. I am the most proud of this record of anything I’ve ever worked on, and I’m so excited to share with the world.”

Hear it here:

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Gutslit – Carnal

Posted: 24 June 2023 in Albums
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7th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

When it comes to band names, metal is one of those genres that has a unique way of throwing out monikers that mean you know it’s a metal band just from the name – unless, of course, you can’t read it because of the unintelligible spiky logo, in which case you absolutely know what to expect without even knowing the name. Indian deathgrind act are a quintessential example. Just look at that cover! It’s all the thorns – and it encapsulates the listening experience perfectly. Yes, it’s sharp, it’s a set of songs that snags and tears at your skin and your psyche.

Fifteen years into their career, Carnal is their third album, and if it sounds like that’s perhaps slow progress, the eight brutal cuts on here suggest that the time goes into compressing everything down to its tightest, densest form, honing it to the point at which its mass and velocity is absolutely optimal.

With the exception of the six-minute epic closer and the forty-one second blast of mid-album track ‘Insidious’, the songs range between around three-and-a-half and four minutes – and they pack everything into these compact sonic slabs. They don’t do fiddly, twiddly stuff, and there are no squealy notes or solos, apart from on ‘Bodysnatcher’ where they work -and wank – all the frets in a frenzy: this is music which sounds like it’s the output of a car-crusher – compacted, mangled, brutally fucked and as dense and weighty as it gets.

The album’s themes are clear from the song titles, with opener ‘Son of Sam’ setting the tone, ahead of ‘Bind Torture Kill’, ‘Body Snatcher’, and ‘Alter of Putridity’, which, like the font and everything else, pretty much speak for themselves. They’re well into their serial killer shit, but as I observed just the other day, this stuff is mainstream now. Pouring over mass murder and serial killing is no longer the domain of trenchcoat-wearing loners who aspire to wreak their own revenge on this cruel world; it’s David Tennent on ITV scoring eleven million viewers per episode.

That doesn’t mean that this kind of brutal tempestuous racket is mainstream, but people can no longer judge the work of a band like Gutlsit as sick or perverse when their subject matter is primetime. We’re all murder junkies.

‘The Killing Joke’ opens with a sample from an interview with notorious sadistic serial killer John Wayne Gacey (who makes Son of Sam with his seven victims look like a mere hobbyist), saying ‘The dead won’t bother you. It’s the living you gotta worry about’. Gracey may have been somewhat flippant in his remarks, but he had something of a point.

Gutslit sound neither dead nor living, their grating attacks sounding more like the undead on EST, a least vocally, and they go all out to deliver punishing intensity on a satanic level. It’s a churning mass of guitars that grinds at your guts as beats blast so fast as to blur to a flickering rattling sound rather than form an overtly structured rhythm. The obligatory guttural vocals growl and snarl, switching between styles fast and often between growl and barks, coughs and vomiting streams of vowels. It’s frenzied, demonic, furious. It sounds murderous, it sounds brutal, disturbed and disturbing.

‘Primeval’ is slow in terms of chords, but countered by a thunderous rush of beats, which renders it disorientating, harsh, and high on impact, and as a whole Carnal is pretty nasty – just as intended.

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Guerrilla Miner – Sounds from Underground

Posted: 20 June 2023 in Albums
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skoghall rekordings – 19th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

This was originally released some time ago, and now it’s getting a digital release and a CD reprint once the last of the old stock is gone, and it’s the first release on Dave Procter’s new label, skoghall rekordings, which he’s set up to home non-noise material which doesn’t sit comfortably with the remit of his Dret Skivor label. If I didn’t know better, I’d think this guy had mastered cloning, given the release and touring schedule of his myriad musical projects, the range of which is vast – although it’s fair to say that anything involving words will be a politically-charged vehicle for reminding us how shit governments, right-wingers and tabloid media are, and how capitalism shafts the workers without whom there would be no wealth for the elite. And so it is with Sounds from Underground.

‘Justice for the 95’ say the notes accompanying this release, some of the proceeds of which are being donated to the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign.

Memories are short, even among those who live through momentous events in recent history, and the miner’s strike of 1984-85 was one of those. It wasn’t simply a strike like we’re seeing with… most sectors right now, in what feels almost like a replay off the early 80s… the handling of the strikes was tantamount to civil war, the (Tory) government against the workers and the unions. The 95 then, refers to the 95 arrested at the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’ in South Yorkshire in June 1984, but all charges were dropped. As the BBC reports, ‘Police confronted pickets outside a coking plant in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, in what the miners said was a military-style operation to attack them… Former miner Kevin Horne said: “We were only striking for the right to work.”’

This is by no means the first musical work which focuses on the miner’s strikes: Test Department’s 1985 LP Shoulder to Shoulder, with South Wales Striking Miners’ Choir was released as a fundraiser, while ‘Statement’ from 1986’s The Unacceptable Face of Freedom is centred around a recorded statement detailing the brutality of the policing of the picket lines: ‘25 pickets… 150 policemen… I was dragged off to this van… another one had me in a headlock… I thought I was going to black out…’ It’s a harrowing account, and one which seems as relevant now as ever given the current government’s expansion of police powers, promoting greater use of stop and search, and the police’s ‘management’ of events like Sarah Everard’s vigil. It’s all too reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange.

As the accompanying notes outline, ‘This LP documents coal mining in all its forms – the pride of the job, the struggles of the job and the occasional deaths because of the job. A lot of my family were coal miners and most of them died from lung disease before their time.’

Yes, the miners got fucked every which way, and while the twelve acoustic-based songs on Sounds from Underground may not be as visceral or hard-hitting as some of Test Department’s works, they’re truly heartfelt. And that registers, emotionally.

While ‘Fiddler’s Ferry’ is a simple and wistful song that would perhaps class a s a sad protest song, the super-sparse ‘Macgregor th’ butcher’ is heartaching in its mood and the simple narrative. Similarly, ‘At the Face’ is simple and tells of the everyday realities of mining life – and the physical toll on those men who grafted and grafted, until death. It would be easy to romanticise the northern accent and barely-held melodies, but the fact is, it works because it’s real, and ultimately sounds like The Wedding Present covering Billy Bragg, if you need a comparison.

‘Me, A Picket Line’ and ‘Horse’s Arse’ are straight-up spoken word pieces, and perhaps the album’s most affecting tracks, because they’re so direct, the latter in particular, echoing as it does the narrative of Test Department’s ‘Statement’. But ‘Horse’s Arse’ references 2016, and you realise, nothing changes, and while sometimes things are reported and there is outcry and uproar, so often, events are ignored out of existence, and the narrative becomes skewed, rigged. But mention that and you’re a conspiracy nut, of course – more often than not dismissed by the conspiracy nuts. ‘Tory Twat’ is self-explanatory, and getting straight to the point.

And this is perhaps where we can see how Guerrilla Miner and Test Department share common ground, beyond subject matter: as much as they’re both political – because this is political, and it’s impossible to avoid or deny that this has a heavily political aspect – they’re both ultimately concerned with the human aspects of the miners’ strikes, and this in turn reminds us that the current strikes, too, are about people and their livelihoods. You will see reported, time and again, the government vilifying the striking workers for the disruptive impact of their industrial action. But any a striking worker will tell you that striking is a last resort, the only way to be heard when all avenues have failed, and if strikes are disruptive to consumers, they’re even more so to those striking. And it’s rarely simply over pay, but also conditions: and at the heart of it all lies capitalist exploitation, and such exploitation shortens and destroys lives, placing profit before people. And this is what really hurts.

Sounds from Underground is direct, real, human, affecting and ultimately sad. Listen, learn, and do everything within our power to stop history from repeating again, and again.

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Celestial North – Otherworld

Posted: 18 June 2023 in Albums
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7th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

A year after unveiling ‘The Nature of Light’ with the promise of a debut album in September 2022, Celestial North’s Otherworld is finally with us. With the title track and ‘Yarrow’ having also built a level of anticipation, it’s left like an album that’s been a long time coming.

Some things simply cannot be rushed, and Otherworld is appropriately-titled, as Celestial North creates songs which sound as if transported from another world, and another time. A she says of the album’s evolution, “I imagined that I was time-traveling through different and exciting worlds. Wandering through the ancient, sacred stone circles at Machrie Moor and then jumping straight into an underground rave in the forest.” And on Otherworld, she transports the listener on these journeys alongside her.

The album opens with the sweeping dreampop of ‘Are You Free’, which begins as a spoken word piece with misty synths, her Scottish accent strong and honest, before piano ripples in and she slides with grace and elegance into her lilting singing voice. It’s a question phrased as a statement, and I suppose it serves to remind us that whatever society’s constraints, we can, to an extent, choose our freedoms.

And yet, for all this ethereality and otherness, Otherworld has a deep-seated earthiness or sense of nature flowing through it. I don’t mean it feels like Celestial North is connected to nature: she is nature, and channels it through her ever molecule.

Raised in Scotland and now residing in Cumbria, Celestial North channels her natural surroundings and their rich, ancient history and heritage. Many artists have promotional photos shot by standing stones and in stone circles, but she describes her music as ‘pagan euphoria’, and listening to Otherworld, you feel that this isn’t image or posturing: these are the spaces where she belongs, and draws the energy from these places. Some – many – will likely dismiss the notion, but many of these locations do possess a unique and indescribable power that goes beyond mere awe. Castlerigg, near Keswick, is one which surprises me every time I visit; yet I have also felt something, like a crackle of electricity, on stumbling upon a minor circle, only half-intact, while in Scotland; the landscape was barren, and gorse had grown beside it, but the full circle was marked by a ring of nettles and a chill ran over me. These are the sensations which emanate from Otherworld.

Her piano-led rendition of REM’s ‘Nightswimming’ is a magnificently-realised slice of quintessentially dreamy indie. Ordinarily, I’d question placing a cover as the third track on an album, but context counts: this featured on a lauded and band-backed charity compilation released by God is in the TV – but moreover, it just works. ‘Olympic Skies’ is breezy, wistful, easy, airy, with a lilting melody that brings folk and dreamy indie into perfect alignment.

The aforementioned title track packs pitter-batter rhythms and sweeping synths and soaring backing vocals which wrap themselves around a fragile, yet confident-sounding lead vocal as it floats on air, before the more overtly 80s electro-sounding ‘Restless Spirit’, another paean to freedom, this time driven by a thumping dance beat. Her voice is unique and complex: it’s quiet, reserved, breathy, with hints of Suzanne Vega and The Corrs, but also Cranes’ Allison Shaw but also Maggie Riley on ‘Moonlight Shadow’. It makes for compelling listening, especially on songs like ‘The Stitch’, which convey powerful, wild-outdoors Celtic pagan vibes – but again, in an understated fashion. ‘Yarrow’ plays the album out with a rolling piano-based post-rock piece that’s sedate and soothing. Otherworld avoids the bombastic clichés which tend to mar much so-called pagan folk or electronic folk: many acts overdo the gothic leanings, and go for bold (melo)drama, which feels contrived and emotionally empty, simply because it’s trying too hard.

For Celestial North, it all comes naturally, and the dancier elements feel comfortable because one doesn’t get a sense of the artist trying to be simultaneously ‘hip’ and ‘deep’; this is simply her music, her style. Otherworld demonstrates that ‘powerful’ doesn’t have to be heavy or hard, and that ‘light’ doesn’t have to mean lightweight or flimsy. It’s accessible, but complex, deep but not dark or difficult. Sit back and let it carry you.

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13x – This

Posted: 17 June 2023 in Albums
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13th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

This. It’s a statement in itself. It’s simple, direct, to the point. It might indicate the image of a finger pointing down at the thing in question, like some kind of cartoon graphic or meme in the making – but there’s no need for it, or anything else. ‘This’ requires no qualification: it simply is. Self-contained. Precise. And this… well, this is 13x

It’s been a while since we last heard from ‘Multi instrumentalist transgirl’ 13x, who melted our brains good and proper in 2019 with antiscene. And it’s been a while because reasons, as the notes which accompany This outline: ‘Recorded over a 3 year period, this difficult release was made at the start of lockdown, and remained unfinished until now. Dealing with topics such as racism, transphobia, disingenuine people, the Government, abuse, loss and isolation, it goes from manic, crushing noize to quieter, more sombre tracks.’

Many, even most, of us, have endured some truly awful times these last three years, but it’s fair to say that some have endured more and worse shit than others. This is a document of some of the aforementioned shit of the notes, and the track titles encapsulate the mood and / or sentiment pretty neatly.

The first track, ‘TERFkilla’ is largely sparse and minimal in terms of both sound and arrangement, as a dissonant synth bleeps over a stuttering beat and low, droney bass. But shrill noise breaks over the top and the anger crackles within the cloud of abrasive noise. ‘fukt’ is, well, fukt, a sprawling mess of grinding synths and scratches, and some murky snippets of vocals with something of a hip-hop feel, and they sound sampled but appear to not be. They’re so cut and mangled, that when twisting and stammering against a backdrop of a shuffling drum loop and some low-end distortion it’s hard to know what the hell is going on – and it works.

There are plenty of samples woven into the fabric of This, and from an eclectic range of sources, ranging from Nirvana to a 60s interview with a catatonic schizophrenic, via a BLM interview after George Floyd was brutally murdered and Kate Winslett from Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.

‘Fucking cunts’ is the looped refrain from the stomping aggrotech beast that is ‘Cistem Error vx.02’ – the most accessible and danceable track on the album, and simultaneously the most hard-hitting, while ‘brOkEnhEddz’ encapsulates the entirety of the album in just five minutes. Warped, woozy, it’s fractured and dark, whirring electronics and stuttering beats – but it builds and finds a groove, and from the chaos emerges something magnificent, an expansive, driving slab of dark synth pop.

I still find it unfathomable that we live in a world where vast swathes of society proclaim themselves to be anti-woke: if you’re anti-woke, you’re expressly pro-racist, pro-misogynist, pro-homophobic, pro-abuse, pro-anything that’s cunty. But then, we live in a world where vast swathes of people subscribe to Donald Trump’s view that ‘antifa’ is the enemy. But if you’re anti-antifa, you’re expressly pro-fa. There is something gravely wrong with this picture. ‘Truth Against Fascism’ and ‘The System Is Wrong (For George)’ are in effect a diptych of thematically-linked compositions. The former is a bleak mid-tempo trudge through mangled circuitry that reminds of the synapse-twisting impossibility of engaging in meaningful, rational discussion with right-wing shits who harp on about ‘stopping the boats’ and so on, while the latter has a gentler, more contemplative tone, laced with a wistful melancholy.

It’s this melancholy, expanded deeper into an aching sadness, which drapes itself all over both ‘Neeko’ and the album’s final track, the twelve-and-a-half-minute ‘Wintercutz’. I’m reminded vaguely of The Cure’s ‘Carnage Visors’ soundtrack from 1981, perhaps primarily because of the rolling drums of ‘Neeko’ and the expansive atmosphere which permeates both pieces. But there’s something special here: you can almost taste the nostalgia, and after the aggressive, angry start, there’s a sense that by the end of This, there is some sense of peace, acceptance, and a looking to the horizon in the hope of… something.

There’s often a significant disparity between the lived experience and its articulation in any medium: such is our wiring that even the most accomplished and attuned artists spend lifetimes striving to find the method that best suits them in their quest to convey what’s in their head to an audience who exists outside of their head. Sometimes, it’s not even about the audience: sometimes, the creation of art is a process by which to make sense of and deal with all of it. By purging the shit from the mind into something constructive and creative, however unappealing it may be to the masses, and there’s a strong sense that This is as much about purging and process as it is about communicating. But what This achieves is, in fact, both. This speaks without words, and says much, while at the same time, leaving substantial room for the listener to pour their own experience and frames of reference into the shifting sonic spaces. Over the course of ten pieces, This achieves a considerable amount: This has range. And This, while drawing on a host of elements from different places, sounds quite unlike anything else. This is This.

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Divide and Dissolve – Systemic

Posted: 16 June 2023 in Albums
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Invada Records – 30th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

You know what? This never gets tired. I started reviewing live stuff in the 90s, but it wasn’t until 2008 I started receiving albums for review. Receiving albums ahead of release was a big deal back then: it made me feel somehow special. Advance promos probably meant something more then, on reflection. They would be, more likely than not., a single CD – or even a single-track CD – and my objective would be to get my review out ahead of, well, as many people as possible. It wasn’t so much about generating buzz as feeling a buzz.

I miss the steady drip of CDs and vinyl through the letterbox, although am coming to accept that space is an issue here, and if the endless bombardment of emails with downloads and streams sometimes – often – feels overwhelming, with up to fifty review submissions a day, when I clock a release I’ve been getting excited about well before time, the buzz still hits.

The way albums are released now isn’t quite the same, either: time was when there would be a single or two ahead of release, there’d be reviews and then the album would arrive and you’d have to buy it to hear it. Now, singles aren’t really singles and half the album’s been released on various streaming platforms along with a bunch of lyric videos and ‘visualisers’ (that’s one for another time). But having only slipped out a couple of tracks in a relatively low-key fashion in April and May, this landing in my inbox to download ahead of release, gave me a genuine buzz.

Gas Lit, released in 2021, was a powerful, album on so many levels. As they put it, the album was their ‘fight for Indigenous Sovereignty, Black and Indigenous Liberation, Water, Earth, and Indigenous land given back.’. The Australian duo make music with meaning, and do so with passion and sonic force.

How often do we hear recently that the failings were systemic? Systemic failings in the NHS led to deaths, and systemic failings in the schooling system resulted in kids committing suicide, systemic failings in vetting and so on has resulted in a culture of racism and misogyny in the MET police… daily, we hear or read news about systemic issues. And we know, we know the system is fucked. Not merely flawed: fucked.

And on fourth album Systemic, Divide and Dissolve examine ‘the systems that intrinsically bind us and calls for a system that facilitates life for everyone. It’s a message that fits with the band’s core intention: to make music that honours their ancestors and Indigenous land, to oppose white supremacy, and to work towards a future of Black and Indigenous liberation.’

“This music is an acknowledgement of the dispossession that occurs due to colonial violence,” says Takiaya Reed, saxophonist and guitarist in Divide and Dissolve. “The goal of the colonial project is to separate Indigenous people from their culture, their life force, their community and their traditions. The album is in direct opposition to this.”

Divide and Dissolve represent a people for whom the system hasn’t failed: it was always pitched against them, and succeeded in stripping Indigenous people of everything. What kind of system is it where this brutal debasement is a success? A capitalist one, of course.

Systemic certainly isn’t a flimsy pop record, then. But it is inherently listenable and does unashamedly incorporate pop elements, and this dynamic only serves to heighten its sonic power.

‘Want’ lulls us into a false sense of tranquillity, a looping motif pulsating over grand drones: it’s quite pleasant, even. And then ‘Blood Quantum’ hits: after a delicate, supple chamber-pop intro, the guitars crash in and it’s like a tidal wave. It’s a slow-stomping riff that grinds hard, and the textures are thick and rich.

The setup is simple, and the guitar and drum combo has become increasingly popular in recent years – but for all of its limitations, it also has considerable versatility, and Divide and Dissolve exploit and push those parameters by exploring the interplay between the two instruments when played slow and heavy and at high volume. And so it is that without words, their songs convey so much.

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Photo by Yatri Niehaus

There’s almost something of a Duane Eddy / Western twang to ‘Simulacra’ before it explodes in a thrashing flurry of distortion and pummelling percussion. But for all the sludge-laden noise of ‘Reproach’, there is a grace and beauty about it, too, and this is what differentiates Divide and Dissolve from their myriad ‘heavy’ contemporaries: they imbue their songs with a palpable emotional depth. ‘Indignation’ begins with trilling woodwind, and possesses a wistful, aching jazz vibe before the thunderous deluge of guitar and drums heaps in. Featuring a spoken word recital from Minori Sanchez-Fung, ‘Kindgom of Fear’ is the only one of the album’s nine tracks to feature vocals: it’s a more minimal musical work which allows the words to stand to the fore, supplementing them with atmosphere and adding further variety and contrast to the album, notably ahead of the ragged riffery of ‘Omnipotent’.

The tranquil strings of ‘Desire’ provide the perfect bookend to stand opposite ‘Want’, and their synonymity is highlighted in this way. To want, to desire, something – something back – seems reasonable, should not need so much fight… but while there is the need to fight, Divide and Dissolve make protest music. It may not be protest music in the way many of us recognise it, but slogans and punk and folk are tired and worn, and on Systemic, Divide and Dissolve speak in their own strong and powerful way.

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Cinema Cinema – Mjölnir

Posted: 14 June 2023 in Albums
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14th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

I could harp on about how I was introduced to Cinema Cinema way back some time around 2012 when I was writing for fringe magazine Paraphilia, and the fantastic interview I got to do with Ev Gold on the release of their second album. But my recollections for dates are hazy, and no-one really cares.

Cinema Cinema simply don’t do predictable. The only thing you know to expect for sure is that whatever they do, it’ll be different. There are few bands so committed to the pursuit of doing whatever the fuck they please. While many will find a sound a adhere to it, or otherwise make a marked shift in direction having worn a template out, Cinema Cinema push themselves with each record to be different, and to see just how far their can expand. They describe themselves as art-punk, and have been described as ‘experi-metal’, while venturing deep into the terrain of avant-jazz on their two collaborative releases with Matt Darriau of The Klezmatics (CCXMD (2019) and CCXMDII (2021)). There is something uplifting to see a band who refuse to be defined or limit themselves: Cinema Cinema are whatever they want to be.

For this latest outing, their seventh album, the New York cousin duo is again trio, this time featuring the mighty polymath percussionist Thor Harris. Having witnessed Harris performing with Swans, he is an immense presence onstage – and that also translates to her performances in general. The man can turn his hand to practically any instrument that can be used for percussive purposes, and he doesn’t just bring percussion, but an impressive collection of synths to the party, marking another substantial shift in Cinema Cinema’s sound on Mjölnir. It couldn’t be much mor dramatic: they’ve not only ditched the free jazz but gone for short, punchy pieces: with the exceptions of ‘Zero Sum’ and ‘Voiceless Idaho’, the majority of the album’s eight tracks are around five minutes long or shorter. Structurally, then this is different: the last couple of albums featured ten, even eighteen-minute monsters with sub-two-minute interludes. As such, Mjölnir feels more even, more balanced.

It also feels like something of a return to their noise roots, as demonstrated by recent single, the roaringly aggressive ‘War On You’, a driving explosive sonic attack that sounds – quite unexpectedly – quite like The Screaming Blue Messiahs with its thunderous drums and choppy blues-based riff – while at the same time pushing in yet further new directions. And those directions are myriad: Mjölnir is the musical equivalent of an octopus, its tentacles reaching in all directions at once.

But before that, ‘This Dream’ is a warped nightmare of woozy, bending synths, dark drones and twisting discord. There’s a nagging bass groove that sits somewhere between Air’s ‘Sexy Boy’ and Suicide. That probably should not be a statement that even exists, but it’s a measure of Cinema Cinema’s range, and the fact they make it work is a whole other matter. The guys have a rare knack – and that’s an understatement.

‘Zero Sun’’, the first of the album’s sprawlers, — this one clocking in at seven minutes and forty-five – is a beast, with trilling organs and lasers on stun – and couldn’t be much more of a contrast to the chopping, drum and bass0driven blasts that define the album; s sound.

Mjölnir is tense, and Mjölnir is and noisy. There are moments that worder on progressive, but overall, it’s noisy, aggressive droney, and exploratory. It’s not an easy listen: for as much as it’s got name contributors, it’s challenging, antagonistic. No two tracks are alike, and instead the tracks are blurring… ‘Blurring’ is bewildering, and the bleak vocals of ‘Voiceless Idao’ which border on the demented as they scrape across a track that wrestles with itself into crumbling and collapse.

The shrieking cacophony of that last track is particularly hard-hitting, and reminds us of what Cinema Cinema’s recent work have been lacking: riffs. That’s no criticism: they recent works just haven’t been very riffy. But now, the riffs are dank and dense and it’s no hyp to say that Mjölnir finds Cinema Cinema at their absolute peak. This… yeah, this is good alright.

AA

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Antania – Lividity

Posted: 12 June 2023 in Albums
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9th June 2023

Christopher Noosnibor

The fascination with true crime has exploded in the last decade, and it’s hard to know what to make of it. Some true crime documentaries, like Making a Murderer and even The Staircase (the 2018 one, that is) have been hard-hitting and ultimately compelling. But then the dramatisations of not only The Staircase, but also David Tennant playing Dennis Nilsen, feel like perhaps a step too far into the macabre serial killer revelry that saw bands like Whitehouse vilified in the 80s. At some point, serial killers and all the dark gruesome shit that historically was the domain of weirdos and outcasts shot into the mainstream.

It’s a curious contradiction. While America is immersed in an existential crisis over the right to bear arms, quite literally hundreds of children and teens – and teachers – have been shot dead already this year – and bearing in mind it’s only early June it’s beyond terrifying. The anguish of killings is almost unspeakable… and yet it’s now great TV. What does that say about our society? As the accompanying notes explain, ‘The songs on Lividity were written right from true crime stories, Each song represents a true story of murder and violence as the Antania duo find their inspiration from real events.’

But then, this doesn’t have to be about sensationalism: the title of Antania’s album is pure Law and Order, and we could reasonably trace a lineage back to Ed McBain’s novels of the 60s, which saw pulp pave the way for the birth of the procedural crime novel.

And with this release, they promise a set that ‘mixes a “doom bass” sound with acid metal, for a ‘a slow, rhythmic bass-heavy release’. And that is precisely what they deliver, with ten tracks of rapid-fire drums and gnarly darkness bashing through mangled samples and snarling, swampy synths.

The samples on the first song, ‘3 Days’ are culled from recordings of Angela Simpson, who openly admitted to the torture, murder, and dismemberment of her wheelchair-bound victim: “I beat him to death… I killed him and cut him up,” Simpson told 3TV in a jailhouse interview shortly after her arrest in 2009. Hot on its dingy heels lands ‘Antania’, and it’s got that back metal sound to it, grainy, gritty, as if recorded on a 90s Walkman from the room next door.

This kind of production makes sense at times, but at others – at least for me – it doesn’t so much. Yes, to obfuscate the details creates an intrigue, and imbues the recordings with a quite literal obscurity. But if Bathory created a gnarly template that ploughed the deepest subterranean depths to drag the burning coals of Satan’s soul from the bowels of hell, most of those who followed in their grim wake have simply mined the seems of unlistenability.

The heavily processed vocals on here, which are so OTT cliché ‘scary’ that they actually emerge on the other side to be genuinely scary, are paired with swampy synths and creepy extranea. There are even some riffs happening here, as on the churning grind of ‘Angels and Demons’. It’s utterly fucked up and tormented, the sound of a soul in torture. There’s o clear indication, however, of what each of the individual tracks were inspired by. It’s a shame, because although Lividity is about the blacker than black atmosphere., given the context, it would be interesting to know whose vocal samples occupy the various songs, and which cases the songs are inspired by. I daresay there are clues for the hardcore true crime fanatics, but the rest of us would like to feel included, too.

That said, there aren’t many points of entry into what is a difficult and utterly brutal album. Every track feel like the soundtrack to the goriest, bloodiest, most brutal murder ever. Every track feels loser, slower darker, heavier, gnarlier.

‘August’ plunges yet deeper, darker depths, and Lividity just keeps on getting nastier and nastier. From whichever perspective you view it, it’s not a pleasant album: as the songs succeed one another you feel the life slowly ebbing from you, as one by one they pound away without mercy. You will it to stop, but no: Antania keep on bludgeoning away until you’re beaten, your head lolling with exhaustion.

As I felt myself being battered, tortured, by this most brutal racket, I felt myself sag, and also recalled the earlier days of the internet – specifically, the discovery of sites like gruesome.com where you could find a full reel of film of pics taken by a couple who had dismembered the body of the woman’s husband and posed the body parts to show him picking his nose and the like.

There’s little need for crime fiction when true crime is this sick, and Antania provide the perfect soundtrack to this gruesome shit.

A

AA

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TAKH – TAKH

Posted: 11 June 2023 in Albums
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Consouling Sounds – 26th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Size matters. Or at least, scale does, if you’re measuring epic. You can’t do epic by halves, and that’s a fact. And when an album weighs in with just five tracks but has a running time of almost forty minutes, you know you’re in proper epic territory (and that it certainly isn’t an EP masquerading as an album). And this is one hell of an album, and it goes beyond epic.

As the bio explains, TAKH emerged from ‘The fruitful collaboration between The Black Heart Rebellion and Echo Beatty’s Annelies Van Dinter on the People album was the beginning of a new musical story. After the end of TBHR Alexander, Annelies, Emeriek and Pieter went deeper in their quest to write music reflecting the true emotions of the musicians. After about one year of free improvisation, TAKH created something truly unique. The idea was very simple: to release the result of the collaboration without pre-orders and announcements…’

There is absolutely nothing out there on-line which provides a precursory listen to this album, and that in itself is beyond rare in an age when bands – and labels – hype releases to the nth degree. More common is that you’ll have heard every track weeks before the release, and this makes TAKH’s stealth approach all the more welcome. It takes us back to the days of before the Internet, when you’d read about a band in Melody Maker or hear about them from a mate or on the sixth form stereo – the means by which I introduced my friends to / tortured my friends with Swans and Godflesh during breaktime.

Swans are one of the bands listed as influencing TAKH, and it shows in the compositions, and to some extent, the musical arrangements, not least of all the way the final track echoes latter-day Swans in their hypnotic, immersive swells of sound.

‘Salomonne’ enters in a swathe of ancient Eastern mysticism, long, trilling vocal drones and esoteric spiritualism which sets the atmosphere before the arrival of the drums, bass, and rasping vocals. In combination, the tension builds as does the sense of vastness, and you feel an endless desert and sky spreading before you, extending infinitely to the vanishing point at which the two meet and fade in a haze. It slowly trudges, shimmering, simmering, and burning, to its weighty climax. It’s metal, but not in a particularly recognisable form.

The percussion dominates the droney ‘Unabashed and knowing’: if The Cure’s Pornography comes to mind, it’s a fair comparison, but this actually feels more like The Glitter Band paired with Joujouka and the triptastic done of a digeridoo. Around five minutes in, seemingly from nowhere, rising like a desert storm, the dual vocals rise up climactically to deliver something resembling an impassioned chorus, even bearing a semblance of a hook, before being drowned in a rising wave of sound: part shoegaze, part eddying panic and a sense of unfamiliarity, and all propelled by a relentless percussion., before ultimately fading to a heavy elongated drone.

The album’s shortest song is also perhaps its most conventional: a crawling bass and plodding beat pin ‘Drôme’ together, and the vocal passages are intersected with a chiming nagging guitar motif before the tension breaks – or more cracks a little – around four and a half minutes in. Perhaps it’s just me and I’m a little cracked, but the break into the light makes you want to cast your eyes to the skins and open our arms, not necessarily expecting a response but to simply absorb.

‘Azure Blue’ has a warped sea-shanty feel to it, amidst the crushing post-rock crescendos which surge and splash. Spread out over almost seven-and-a-half minutes, it’s a beast, albeit one that’s subdued and contemplative.

The album concludes in reflective style, with the ten-minute ‘Hair of a Horsetail’. Captivating vocals, at once ethereal and earthy, quaver over a slowly wavering drone. It’s a duet of sort, and one which delves into deep and ancient spirituality. The bass rolls in around the midpoint, from which the song builds, making for a climactic closure to an album that’s powerful, while often understated. It has so many levels, so many layers, so many depths; at once uplifting and exhausting.

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