Lifted from the blistering and bleak It Won/t Be Like This All the Time, an album with not a single duff track, ‘Shooting Dennis Hopper Shooting’ is perhaps one of the clear standouts. Taking its title (seemingly) from a review of the Denis Hopper documentary American Dreamer published in The Guardian in February 2016, it requires little further verbiage beyond ‘check it out’ here’:
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BIG | BRAVE share the first full track ‘Sibling’ from their incoming album, A Gaze Among Them (Southern Lord, 10th May) by way of a brilliant video by Mathieu Ball & Robin Wattie.
Since their inception in 2012, BIG|BRAVE have explored terrains of experimental rock with a clear focus on the key principles; space, volume, and raw emotion. The essence of BIG | BRAVE’s magic has always been the way they balance these dynamics, and particularly how much sheer power comes from the beautifully quiet moments.
The same principles are the starting point for the new album, only the approach is different, beginning with the question "How do we take very little and make something bigger than what we actually have?" vocalist and guitarist Robin Wattie explains further "the biggest challenge was to not do what is easiest. i.e. what we knew worked for the last albums or what is, for us, easy to write. With A Gaze Among Them, Mathieu and I put ourselves through the ringer – I did not want to do what seemed to me to be a ‘logical next step’ in what we could do musically. I wanted to go back to our original concepts and work from there – space, tension, minimalism and voice (finding melody and musicality in pieces that consist of one note for longer than ten minutes, for example) were the primary concentrations I wanted to push."
In the process of revisiting their early intentions, BIG | BRAVE have boldly evolved, emerging with a thrilling new body of work that is all at once refreshingly new, explosively heavy, dynamically loud, beautifully minimal, carefully repetitive, and totally and utterly cathartic.
A Gaze Among Them features Robin Wattie (vocals, electric guitar, guitar amp, bass amp), Mathieu Ball (electric guitar, guitar amps) and Loel Campbell (drums) with guest appearances from Thierry Amar (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt Zion) on Contrabass and Seth Manchester‘s synth overdubs. The album was recorded with Seth Manchester at Machine with Magnets in Pawtucket Rhode Island.
The beautiful image adorning the cover (created by Robin Wattie) further demonstrates that BIG | BRAVE have blossomed. The trio sound rejuvenated and confident, and A Gaze Among Them is the sound of a band truly honing their craft, and feeling totally satisfied with it. Compelling. Necessary. Important.
Watch the video here:
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BIG | BRAVE LIVE DATES WITH MYDISCO:
16/05 DE Nurnberg Kantine *venue change
17/05 DE Berlin Urban Spree
18/05 PL Poznan LAS
19/05 CZ Prague Altenburg 1964
21/05 NL Haarlem Patronaat
22/05 BE Antwerp Kavka
23/05 FR Lille La Bulle Café
24/05 UK Bristol Rough Trade
25/05 UK London Raw Power
26/05 UK Glasgow Stereo *new addition
27/05 UK Newcastle The Cluny
28/05 UK Brighton East Street Tap *new addition
29/05 FR Paris Instants Chavirés
30/05 BE Brussels Magasin 4
31/05 DE Mannheim JUZ *new addition
01/06 CH Winterthur Gaswerk
03/06 DE Wurzburg Cairo
04/06 DE Hamburg Schute
05/06 SWE Malmo Plan B *new addition
07/06 SWE Gothenborg Skjul Fyra Sex *new addition
08/06 SWE Stockholm Slaktkyrkan *new addition
Details of US tour dates with Dreadnought & Primitive Man can be found here.
Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion) and Kevin Doria (Growing, Total Life) have joined forces on the new LP are SING SINCK, SING, out via Constellation on 10th May. As a first offering, the duo have shared the track ‘We Will’, which layers oscillating waves of melancholy drone with plaintive, reverb-cloaked vocals, before eventually coalescing into a determined and hopeful refrain. You can hear it here:
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As the title suggests, this is also an interstitial album of sorts, an identity-bridge that leads away from Menuck as ‘solo’ artist and towards SING, SINCK SING which will be the new band name for future work by the duo.
Efrim Manuel Menuck & Kevin Doria Live Dates:
09 May – Montréal, QC @ Ritz PDB
10 May – Toronto, ON @ The Burdock
11 May – Hamilton, ON @ Christ Church Cathedral
16 May – Brooklyn, NY @ Murmrr
25 May – Biarritz, FR @ Festival Usopop
27 May – Limoges, FR @ Le Phare
31 May – Zottegem, BE @ Dunk Festival
01 June – Amsterdam, NL @ Best Kept Secret Festival
02 June – Barcelona, ES @ Primavera Festival
03 June – Poznan, PL @ LAS
04 June – Berlin, DE @ Arkaoda
06 June – Brussels, BE @ Botanique Rotonde
07 June – Diksmuiden, BE @ 4AD
09 June – Paris, FR @ Villette Sonique
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After releasing "Mining For Gold" and "I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry" alongside the announcement of their forthcoming LP Trinity Thirty, Deadbeat & Camara are thrilled to share "Working On A Building" ahead of the album’s release next month. The Berlin-based Canadian duo reshape the original Cowboy Junkies arrangement into a tense, slow burn. A languid yet insistent bass line anchors hushed, spectral vocals from Monteith, Camara, and guest singer Caoimhe McAlister, while accents of plucked acoustic strings and snippets of mechanical sound harken back to its origins as a traditional work song. Listen to it now in advance of Trinity Thirty‘s release on 26 April.
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Earth announce new album, Full Upon Her Burning Lips, to be released by Sargent House on 24th May 2019. Ahead of this, they’ve unveiled album track ‘Cats in the Briar’, which showcases the evolved sound of the band – now stripped back to core duo of Dylan Carlson and Adrienne Davies, and so resembling, albeit with different instrumentation, their first iteration.
In addition to scaling back on their ranks, Earth altered their previous trajectory by entering into Full Upon Her Burning Lips without a conceptual arc to guide the process, relying instead on their collective subconscious to hone in on the overarching muse as the songs developed. “In the past I’ve usually had a strong framework for an album,” Carlson says. “This one developed over the course of writing and recording. It just felt like ‘Earth’—like just the two players doing their best work at playing, serving the music.” The absence of a pre-existing narrative guiding the compositions meant that the songs were more open and intuitive, often resulting in more terse musical vignettes like the richly harmonic “Exaltation of Larks” or the dreamily itinerant “Maidens Catafalque”. Yet subconscious impulses gradually created their own subtext for the album. “I wanted this to be a ‘sexy’ record, a record acknowledging the ‘witchy’ and ‘sensual’ aspects in the music… sort of a ‘witch’s garden’ kind of theme, with references to mind altering plants and animals that people have always held superstitious beliefs towards. A conjuror or root doctor’s herbarium of songs, as it were.”
Listen to ‘Cats in the Briar’ here:
Dylan Carlson is also undertaking a succession of solo dates around Europe, including the UK, which are as follows:
MAR 21 Newcastle, UK @ The Cluny
MAR 22 Bristol, UK @ Rough Trade
MAR 23 Manchester, UK @ Soup Kitchen
MAR 24 Birmingham, UK @ The Flapper
MAR 26 London, UK @ St John of Bethnal Green
MAR 27 Brussels, BE @ Botanique
MAR 28 Lille, FR @ La Malterie
MAR 29 Duisburg, DE @ Explorado Museum
MAR 30 Berlin, DE @ Cassiopeia
MAR 31 Prague, CZ @ Futurum
APR 01 Vienna, AT @ Grillx
APR 03 Munich, DE @ Feierwerk
APR 04 Lausanne, CH @ Le Bourg
APR 05 Zurich, CH @ Bogen F
APR 06 Paris, FR @ Sonic Protest Festival
Modern Technology’s eponymous debut EP got us foaming with excitement the other week, and they’ve now unveiled a video for the song ‘Project Fear’, which pairs the full-throttle guitar abrasion and politically-charged anger with stark, grainy black and white images that seer the retinas. It’s fucking mint, and you can watch it here:
After sharing the track ‘Dysfunctional Helper’ in late January, Joni Void – the avant-garde electronic project of Montréal-based composer Jean Cousin – is unveiling a second song entitled ‘Abusers’ from his forthcoming album Mise En Abyme. ‘Abusers’ highlights Cousin’s ability to craft gorgeously layered sonic collages, dextrously incorporating minimal percussive elements and melodic tones sampled from Ai Aso’s ‘Most Children Do’ with vocal contributions from fellow Montréal artist Sarah Pagé. Minute snippets of sound fit together in tight sequence, eventually giving way to stretched vocal arcs that remind us of the organic, deeply human instincts that root Cousin’s digital explorations.
Listen to ‘Abusers’ here:
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Ahead of the release of their latest album offering, Revenant (Burning Witches Records, 20th February 2019), Manchester / Leeds duo worriedaboutsatan offer up ‘Making Your Masks’ as a flavour of what’s to come. And it’s seriously tasty….
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There’s also a short tour to promote the release.
The dates are:
5th: Servant Jazz Quarters, London (w/ Lowering) [sold out!]
6th: Cafe Kino, Bristol (w/ LTO) [tickets]
7th: The Castle, Manchester (w/ She The Throne) [tickets]
8th: Wharf Chambers, Leeds (w/ Dean McPhee + Steve Hadfield) [tickets]
Spotlights, the Brooklyn-based band whose music finds “that perfect balance between crushing heaviness and dreamier melodies” (WFPK), release Love & Decay on April 26 via Ipecac Recordings. Spotlights’ music is iron tone in a velvet glove. They strike with full force, perfectly balancing the weight and sound spectrum of each instrument. And yet it’s a weight that’s also sublime in it’s beauty, with dream-like vocals encased in the mix of subharmonics. A rich and unctuous vibration that melts in your ears, nourishes your brain, and engulfs you with their warmth, like the gravity of a small planet.
"The Age of Decay encapsulates everything we do on this record,” explains guitar player/singer Mario Quintero. “Musically, it has some of the heaviest moments as well as the most dynamic and melodic. It shows little bits of what we get into throughout the entire album in one track. Lyrically, it reflects on personal points in my and Sarah’s relationship, how things grew from when we met, moving around the country and chasing this thing together. The juxtaposition about love against this backdrop of a world that can be hard to deal with.” Mario continues “It’s intangible, It’s intense. It’s beautiful. There’s an impending darkness underneath everything and a sense of unease, but it’s also honest and vulnerable. It’s just really important to us. Regardless of why anyone might react, that’s why we do it.”
As a taster, they’ve aired ‘The Age of Decay’, which you can listen to here:
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Aural Aggravation 