Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Knitting Circle / JUKU / Small Gauge – The Black Horse, York, 2nd April 2026

Posted: 3 April 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Since starting out with Horsemusic last year, these nights – hosted at a pub (a classic boozer that for some years was a Tap and Spile before reverting to its previous name) just outside the city walls on the first Thursday of the month – have become rapidly established as showcases for local and regional talent, focusing primarily on York acts, but also providing a platform to emerging talents from places like Hull and Leeds. This, their seventh event, perfectly encapsulates their approach to curation and once again highlights the depth of quality acts knocking around in the locality right now.

Small Guage, from Leeds, are relative newcomers, but they’re clearly well-rehearsed and tight with some sharp endings played with precision. Pitched as ‘Leeds post-punk’, their sound is more mid-80s indie. There’s debate after their set as to which bands they’re actually reminiscent of, and while the whole C86 sound and 4AD are floating into my mind, I run into a friend at the bar who makes a spirited comparison to The Monochrome Set, while agreeing that there’s not just a slew of bands but a whole era that seems to have been absorbed into their sound, which is melodic and jangly, with two interweaving guitars and a singing female drummer with minimal kit – bass, snare, floor tom, no cymbals. The songs are held tightly together by some solid note-on-the-beat basslines. They’re also quite gentle…

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Small Gauge

The same can’t be said of JUKU. Discussing them beforehand, I summed them up to someone as ‘loud’. “C’mon,” was the reply, “That’s not a style, or what they sound like.” Ordinarily, I’d agree, but the description on the flyer simply states ‘bring earplugs’, and I pity anyone who didn’t. This band is nothing short of a rabid riff monster. They play big, dumb riffs, reminiscent at times of The Stooges, The Ramones… with everything cranked up to eleven… They play hard and fast and with a frothing intensity. Naomi sings and whacks her bass and spends the set willing her glasses to stay on her face to the end of each song. They have a few issues with feedback from the mics tonight, which have likely been turned up to compete with the blistering volume of the backline. But if the result is chaos, it’s utterly compelling and immensely powerful. Brittle surf-goth lead guitar lines echo through the squalling wall of noise, and it’s wild to see a band of this calibre – and of this volume – for free in a York pub with a capacity of maybe seventy-five, when they’re worthy of headlining at The Brudenell in Leeds.

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JUKU

Knitting Circle may not be as punishingly loud, but their busy live schedule means that they’re super-tight, and looking and sounding confident. As well they might: they’re on fine form, and in terms of performance, tonight is a couple of steps up from when they played on the other side of town at The Fulfordgate WMC in February. While the vocals are a bit muddy-sounding, and Pete’s guitar is a little more midrange in tone than usual, muffling the Andy Gill-style trebly chop, but it still cuts through against Jo’s bass, which is nicely up in the mix and positively throbs.

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Knitting Circle

The ultra-succinct ‘Create, Don’t Destroy’ (which may be a recent addition to the set, if I’m not mistaken) is a standout among a set of more established standouts, including ‘Safe Routes’, which (sadly) remains ever relevant, ‘The Fox’, and closer ‘Losing My Eggs’. The crowd want more, though, and manage top coax them to deliver an encore – and the unplanned and seemingly unrehearsed instrumental sound like Shellac, thunderous drumming exploding behind a rumbling bass groove and mathy guitar line. It’s a great finish to another great night. 

Small Rocks – The Future in a Rearview Thumbnail

Posted: 1 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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6th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Matt Wand is best known for his work as a founder member of experimental samplists Stock, Hausen & Walkman between 1989 and 2001, although his body of work in collaboration with other artists, and under numerous pseudonyms, and as a solo artist is extensive. His latest project came to my attention via a friend, and a tape, and suddenly it felt like the 90s again, when word of mouthy was the most likely source of introduction to new music – alongside the weekly inkies and John Peel. Not that I’m about to harp on about the good old days, particularly as I have the good fortune to be fed a constant stream of music that never fails to amaze and confound, but it does highlight and remind just how limiting the force of the algorithm is, the endless conveyor belt of ‘if you like this…’ and services simply lining up the next track in an eternal playlist which subscribers tend to passively permit to pass into their ears, and how the cultural relationship has changed over time. And yes, something has been lost: endless streaming music on tap isn’t the boon it’s often hailed as. Spotify and the like delivers sonic wallpaper. How many of its users will listen to an album end-to-end and multiple times in sequence over the course of a week and a month, really engaging and excavating every last detail while it beds in?

I’ve begun with a digression, but the joy of music – for me, at least – is the way in which it inspires trajectories of thought, often in the most unexpected directions. It’s as if it has the capacity to unlock doors to forgotten recesses within the mind. Anyway, to shift focus specifically to the album at hand, while credited to Small Rocks, the album’s cover (the artwork of which is almost as disturbing as that of the first Toe Fat album) appends this with the words ‘in dub’, and this very much gives a clue to the contents – that is, fourteen instrumental compositions centred around dense, strolling basslines and sparse, echo-soaked beats.

A number of the tracks on here – ‘A Lung Full Of Woofer Gas’, ‘Give Me Back Me Bucket’, and ‘Blind Mute Specialist’ – date back to 2002’s three-way split album Dub TribunL, which featured Small Rocks alongside Atom™ and The Rip-Off Artist. This is an album which has been a long time in its gestation.

Leisurely grooves and rippling reverberations abound, with puns and wordplay making for an added bonus – ‘Curlew Curfew in Corfu’, anyone? On ‘Bassically Unsettled’, the thick, rubbery bass bounced its way through subtle and mildly disorientating tempo changes, while ‘Mirror Sigil Manoeuvre’ is sparse and spacey, the beats landing like drips from stalactites in an immense cavern. And yes, as minimal as it is, the sounds are mentally and visually evocative.

Landing in the middle of the album – or the end of side one on the cassette – ‘The Moss Veil’ is less dubby and more a work of dark ambience with hints of Dr Who amidst the dank swampiness and sporadic whirrs and bleeps. It calls to mind the weirdy sci-fi sounds of soundtracks of the late 70s and early 80s and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

The title track, which raises the curtain on side two, is more uptempo and verges on being some mutant drum ‘n’ bass, before the multi-00layered ‘Keep Quiet & ROT (mit bADbLOOD JA Kötting) ‘, which takes a swerve into more industrial territory, while hinting at the cut-up tape experiments of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, conducted in the later ‘60s and early ‘70s, while at the same time coming on like a reggae Butthole Surfers. It really is all going on here on The Future in a Rearview Thumbnail. ‘a Lung-full of Woofer GAS’ is a hybrid of dub with minimal techno, and ‘Give fe me back Me BUCKET’ brings an industrial-strength percussive clatter that owes as much to Test Dept as any other act, while ‘The Custodian’ closes the set with a warping, glitchy tension that’s again infused with a more retro vibe, although the distant snare which lurks in the background is swamped in reverb and vocal fragments float around in a dubby fashion.

The Future in a Rearview Thumbnail is a rare expression of experimentalism, an album which dares to venture in different directions, and celebrates its strangeness.

AA

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The 113 – When I Leave

Posted: 31 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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EMI North / Launchpad+ – 30th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The 113 have done it again – only this time, more so. Like its predecessors, single ‘When I Leave’ is take from the forthcoming debut EP, The Hedonist, which is due to land on 17th April. And once again, it steps things up.

It follows the noisy path of debut, ‘Leach’, a vitriolic blast which powers in on a thick, thunderous overdriven bass, paired with an attack of heavy-hitting, cymbal-smashing percussion, slamming in with hard impact in the opening bars. Immediately, it’s the sound of a band that means business and arrives with a physical force. The vocals are straight in with a pumped-up spleen-venting tone of disaffection, and on this outing, the focus of their dissection and dissatisfaction with the conditions of contemporary living is lasered in on ‘the personal, exploring the gamified and repetitive nature of dating apps, where every interaction can seemingly begin to blur into the next’.

The accompanying notes expand on this, explaining how ‘the track captures that specific sense of cyclical monotony; scripted conversations, fleeting intimacy, and the almost inevitable feeling of disillusionment that can occur following the search for something real within systems designed with the purpose of endless scrolling: “Nice to meet you! Scratch the skin and we’re done, and hold the stench of a thousand pros playing for fun”.

Does anyone actually gain anything but grief and stress from dating apps? A few shit experiences, perhaps gathering a stalker or pest along the way, but really, how many find love – versus how many find nothing but the dregs of humanity?

It’s perhaps relevant to mention here that I met my (now late) wife online, in a music chatroom, at the turn of the millennium, before dating sites existed and before it was socially acceptable to meet people from online in real life. Her friends and parents were far from encouraging about her meeting me: back in 2000, the perception was that the Internet was full of weirdos, creeps, stalkers, and worse. Now… perhaps we’re more willing to take those gambles with the ever-expanding creep of isolation as a result of floating office hours, where people only see one another occasionally, the death of after-work drinks, and social media taking precedence over in-person interaction. How do you meet new people nowadays? Is this really what we’ve come to? It would seem the answer is yes….

And then, the guitar kicks in over that thick bass and pounding percussion, and it’s squalling and dissonant and then everything hits a laser focus to drive home a blistering chorus – their strongest yet – and POW! ‘When I Leave’ is two minutes and thirty-seven seconds of concentrated, distilled intensity.

AA

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Credit: Naomi Whitehead

MESH – The Truth Doesn’t Matter

Posted: 27 March 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Dependent Records – 27th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Now in their thirty-fifth year, MESH have always unapologetic in the way their music reflects and incorporates their influences, spanning Yazoo, Depeche Mode, Giorgio Moroder, Massive Attack, and Depeche Mode. It’s the latter that seems to cast the longest shadow over their latest offering – an album brimming with uptempo anthems propelled by driving beats, urgent synth bass grooves and busy sweeping lead lines.

In this context, it’s often all too easy to get swept along on the tide of electric energy and skim over the lyrical content, which is considerably darker, as the title reflects. As they summarise, ‘This is the age of post-factual lies…’ and as they grapple with difficult times, there’s ‘a dark undertone that occasionally seeps into their new songs’. There’s a feeling that anyone who isn’t affected by the current state of the world is either ignorant or in denial, and for those operating within the arts or any creative fields, I would question how it’s possible to create without these external conditions filtering into the work. And how can anything not be political right now? Time was – not so long ago – when a lack of acceptance or belief in official versions of events was the domain of fringe conspiracy theory. Now governments blatantly lie to our faces: Israel are adamant that every death in Gaza was a member of Hamas, or otherwise a ‘human shield’, the USA insist that they’ve won the war with Iran and have decimated their nuclear capabilities which were likely to destroy the entire Western world tomorrow, and the UK government insists it’s in no way involved or even complicit in any of this. Meanwhile, there’s nothing to see in the Epstein files. Right.

For all that, there’s a lot of emphasis on relationships and the like. Timeless issues, which cut to the core of the human condition, but not necessarily hitting the heart of the zeitgeist. But it’s impossible to be contemporary and timeless, I guess.

On The Truth Doesn’t Matter, MESH are straight out of the traps with a brace of back-to-back anthems, before arriving at the slower ‘I Lost a Friend Today’, which conveys a deep, painful sincerity – but at the same time it emotes with the dramatic flourishes that only a band with gothier leanings could pull off. But then the buoyant disco beat and skittering, soaring synths of ‘Trying to Save You’ somewhat undermine the sentiment. The same is true of ‘I Bleed Through You’, on which some heavy words are diminished by a poppy disco backing.

‘Kill Us With Silence’ follows the same template, but the dark shades are overtones rather than undercurrents: the gothier leanings work well here, as do the more experimental shades of the sample-soaked ‘1031030’, which has a read 80s vintage feel to it.

MESH are definitely at their best when they go dark, and when they go experimental. Single cut ‘This World’ straddles the different aspects of the album, and as such, is arguably the single song which most accurately represents what The Truth Doesn’t Matter. The same is true of ‘Exile’: it’s a belting dark pop tune, but it’s a bit too Erasure to really reach those emotional depths.

There’s no lack of quality or consistency here in terms of songwriting or production, so the only issue is its stylistic focus, or lack of, and just how poppy it is for an album which aims to venture into dark domains. But sixteen tracks is a lot, especially when the majority are four or even five minutes long. The Truth Doesn’t Matter, but focus does, and while it’s not a bad album, trimming it down and concentrating on the theme of its title would have likely made for a more focused album, and one with greater impact.

AA

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Rayan Haïdar – Cities burn as we dream of a return

Posted: 26 March 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Dragon’s Eye Recordings – 20th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The sad fact is that many of us have become somewhat numbed by the endless live rolling news of war in recent years. It’s easy to do when smoke and rubble and statistics are standard. In some ways, COVID – or more specifically, the media coverage of the pandemic – prepared us for it, by keeping us in isolation with only the TV and Internet to connect us to the outside world. As the numbers kept ticking up, as the number of deaths grew, so did our panic, but equally, so did our sense of distance. Unless we had directly lost a friend or relative, it wasn’t quite real.

And now, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the genocide in Gaza – it’s not a war – and its escalation to surrounding areas, plus in recent weeks Iran and the whole middle east exploding, our shock and alarm gradually becomes mutes by overexposure and – worse – for many, a lack of concern over something that’s so distant. There’s annoyance at rising prices, particularly of fuel, but little more: people go about their lives as normal and don’t give too much thought to what life must be like for the people living in these places – or how it must be to have friends and family in constant fear for their lives, what it must be like for those who have fled to witness the scenes and the news reports, and likely see a huge disparity between the versions.

Cities burn as we dream of a return gives pause for thought and to reflect on these things. He’s a Beirut-born, Paris-based multi-instrumentalist, and the album is described as ‘a profound meditation on displacement, longing, and the impossible distance between memory and its aftermath’.

As the accompanying notes detail, ‘The album began as home recordings in 2024 — fragments inspired by Beirut and the quiet melancholy that had always permeated Haïdar’s childhood place. Shortly after beginning work, the aggression against Lebanon escalated, and Haïdar found themselves in the surreal position of documenting their relationship to home while watching that same place be destroyed from afar. The recordings became inseparable from the violence unfolding in real time, each track absorbing the grief and anger of witnessing loved ones continually hurt with no ability to intervene.

‘As Haïdar entered 2025, they continued recording, carrying more grief and anger than when they had begun. What emerged is not simply an album about a place, but about the way we carry our homes and the people we love within us—how they become part of our interior landscape regardless of physical distance or destruction.’

In context, what’s perhaps surprising about Cities burn as we dream of a return is just how gentle it is. Each piece takes the form of a masterfully spun cloud of abstract ambience, the layers and textures twisting and merging and separating, a constant flux, as distant samples echo through the mists.

The tone does, however, shift somewhat as the album progresses. Although indistinct, the samples appear to convey a narrative of increasing anxiety, as do the titles. The title track’s serenity is broken by the sound of panicked voices, while ‘On people we once met and places we once saw’ is imbued with a heavy air of melancholy beneath its soft flow. With it comes the realisation that many of those people and many of those places either no longer exist, or are otherwise altered beyond recognition. Everything changes, everyone changes, but the difference between growth and progress over time, and absolute destruction is beyond compare.

‘At dusk, looking down’ draws the album to a close with an achingly haunting atmosphere and a sense of loss that’s difficult to define but nevertheless inescapable. The album’s six pieces are subtle, gentle, and comparatively sparse, and much of the emotion they convey is indirect and implied. Cities burn as we dream of a return is nuanced and contemplative, and quietly moving.

AA

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Teleost – Teleost

Posted: 25 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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22nd March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

After an eon evolving their sound with comparatively little to show in terms of releases, Teleost have really picked up the pace of late: Three Originals was released in January 2025, followed by ATAVISM in December of last year, and here we are barely three months on faced with a new eponymous EP. Clearly, they concentrate their mental energy into the music rather than the naming of their EPs – and rightly so. The title is inconsequential: the music is what this is all about. moreover, what this, and what Teleost are all about, is exploring those dark tones and the ways in which frequencies resonate against one another, particularly at volume.

Live shows – particularly of late – have more than attested to the necessity for volume for Teleost, in the same was as is true for Earth, and Sunn O))). The simple fact is that some sounds, some frequencies, some resonant interplays, simply cannot occur at low volumes. Anyone who suggests that these bands – and Swans and A Place to Bury Strangers, among others – exploit volume gratuitously simply doesn’t understand the way in which vibrations change things. Teleost, however, very much do. And with their ultra-slow doom-drone, this is a band who really go into microcosmic detail when it comes to tonal shifts and reverberations within their great wall of sound.

This – their second EP, and sixth release in all – features three tracks. And once again, epic is the word. The four-and-three-quarter-minute sludgefest that is ‘Palanquin’ feels like a brief bridging piece between the megalithic ten-minute ‘Navigator’ and the eight-minute ‘Standing Stone’. And holy shit, is this heavy.

With Telost, the guitar has always been heavy, thick, grinding, the sound more akin to two guitars – or more – grinding out a speaker-shredding tsunami. But this… this takes it up several notches. It’s not just the guitar sound itself, of course: the production achieves the rare feat of capturing not just the rib-rattling, lung-shredding sound of a duo that take Melvins’ reattenuation of Black Sabbath to a skull-crushing level of pain.

With Teleost, there’s a clear sense of structure, of linear progression, too. ‘Navigator’ starts out gently, a textured hum, a buzzing drone, clean strings strummed but resonating. Low tom beats enter the mix and the build is slow, deliberate. Leo Hancil’s vocals reverberate – detached, a pagan-like incantation low in the mix. The suspense builds. Dissonance chimes, but still we traverse through deep fog and mud-thick tracks. And then at five minutes, it hits. And it hits so hard but so sweetly. The impact is immense. THAT is a riff, and how to land it. It completely knocks the air from your lungs, then proceeds to tear your limbs off, one by one, while shredding your skin with blunt but brutal claws.

How two people can create this organ-bustingly megalithic noise is unfathomable. But they do, time and again, growing ever more immense with each show, and with each recording. Yes, I say it every time, but every time, it’s true: Teleost have transcended to another echelon with this release: denser, heavier, louder, more punishing – and at the same time more immersive and transportative.

AA

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Octavian Winters – Elements of Air

Posted: 25 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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25th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Pitched as ‘one of the most exciting new bands on the North American dark post-punk scene’., Octavian Winters formed – or, as their bio would have it – ‘was born into the ghostly isolation of San Francisco’ in 2022. Already, the pandemic seems to have receded into a past which feels like a fever dream. The fact that German post-punk legends Pink Turns Blue dig them enough to have picked them as support for their tour of the western US in April speaks for itself, and in many respects, so does this single, a thick slice of classic vintage-style gothiness that’s cooked to perfection.

Frontwoman and lyricist Ria Aursjoen says: “‘Elements of Air’ is about how we see the world, our chosen frame of reference, and how much power that holds over us — including the power to destroy things we value. The direct inspiration was someone I knew who chose to view the world through a lens of hate, and how that ultimately cost the friendship.”

In these times of extreme division, this is likely to be a scenario which is relatable to many. While the arrival Trump in the Whitehouse (and the advent of Brexit here in the UK) was an obvious moment of rupture, the pandemic proved to be a defining moment in time where people seemed to take more polarised positions. And since emerging from the successive lockdowns, the world feels like a different place – a place not only in the grip of war, but a place where people seem intent on causing anguish, antagonism, and aggravation, as if they’re spoiling for a fight, and if it’s not over immigration or race or the like, then they’ll settle for sparking a dispute over car parking or dustbins. Disharmony dominates the social discourse, and many have found themselves having to sever ties to once-close friends in the interests of self-preservation.

Driven by rolling drums and a dense bass, it’s topped by a choppy, metallic, flange-coated guitar, reminiscent at times of X-Mal Deutschland, which scratches and scrapes it way through the track. And then there’s Ria Aursjoen’s airy vocals which breeze in and weave a spellbinding melody. Part Toni Halliday (Curve), part Maria Brannigan (Sunshot), she brings an almost poppy vibe to the dark-edged post-punk party. Sure, it’s a formula that has its roots much further back, with The March Violets and Skeletal Family incorporating an accessible, pop-with-a-twist vocal, with snaking melodies steeped in Eastern mysticism.

Listening to any ‘new’ goth inevitably leads me down a rabbit hole of memory lane excursions into ‘old’ goth: the genre is rich in intertext and references, influences and appropriations, and it was ever thus, the early 80s acts who were goth before the label existed – Bauhaus, The Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie – all belonged to the post-punk milieu, which draw on Bowie, The Doors, The Stooges. Perhaps more than in any other genre, there’s a lineage and a trajectory which can be traced back through the decades to its musical prehistory and which has remained quite intact through the various waves, of which there have now been several.

As such, it’s not so much about breaking new ground, but how inventively the tropes are used, and how well-crafted, how well-executed the songs are. And in the case of ‘Elements of Air’, the crafting and execution is spot on.

AA

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Octavian Winters band photo (greyscale)

The SPKtR – The Last of Men

Posted: 24 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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24 March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

SPK require little introduction, although industrial / electronic pioneer Graeme Revell has spent most of his time in recent years exploring and talking about AI – not just its applications, but its implications – having been an early adopter of this now world-changing technology. As such, SPK have been effectively dormant since the late 80s, with their last new material having been released in 1987. In their absence, their legacy has grown, but the fact that last year saw the first musical activity in a very long time, with a couple of live shows in Europe, with Graeme performing with his son, Robert, still came as a surprise to many. Then, Revell announced the birth of The SPKtR – a new phase for SPK – although he wasn’t giving much away.

But now, finally, The SPKtR have unveiled ‘The Last of Men’, and it’s a chilling slice of dark, industrial-strength electronica. The vocals are heavily processed, low, ominous, doomy in a filmic sense, a shade Darth Vader, the lyrics hinting that the future is a synergy of man and machine:

We are the last of men

We are the broken faith

The soul is a lie

The mind is a ghost

We are the machines

Marching to the future

Not so long ago, this was purely the domain of science fiction. But of course, science fiction in its purest form takes emerging science and uses it to create a fictional narrative based on potential scenarios (I’m thinking here of works like Prey and The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, which specifically cite research papers, rather than the more hallucinogenic kind of work by Philip K. Dick or the cyberpunk works of William Gibson, although the latter does very much explore the space of virtual and alternative realities, the likes of which became habitable with the advent of the Internet). And now the futures depicted in works of science fiction are here, and the prospects for where we go from here are giving rise to extremely divided views. Some people are embracing AI wholeheartedly, while other are experiencing abject fear, and not only over the prospect of losing their job to AI. There have been reports of AI weaponry overriding commands and going rogue in simulations, and AI coaxing vulnerable individuals to take their own lives. For every person who loves AI, there is another who loathes it and is of the belief it will bring about our doom.

If the song itself sounds like the end of days, the accompanying video – a clip of which accompanies the stream on Bandcamp is truly apocalyptic. And it’s AI generated, of course, as is, quite clearly, the single’s artwork. Whatever your stance on AI, there’s no question that it’s visually striking, and works as an accompaniment to the audio.

Writing on the single, Graeme explains its meaning and presents a more balanced, nuanced position:

“‘The Last of Men’ is not about human extinction. It’s about the end of a certain idea of Man — sovereign, central, in control. Is it a warning? Yes, if we cling to a myth of human exceptionalism while delegating cognition, memory and desire to systems we barely understand, we risk becoming decorative in our own civilisation. A celebration? Yes, of transformation rather than replacement. Humanity has always been prosthetic. Fire was prosthetic. Language was prosthetic. Electricity was prosthetic. AI is a cognitive prosthesis. The anxiety comes from the fact that this prosthesis talks back.

If there’s a message I’d stand behind, it’s this: We are not witnessing the end of humanity. We are witnessing the end of human centrality. Whether that becomes tragedy or metamorphosis depends less on the machines than on our willingness to evolve ethically, imaginatively, and politically alongside them. It’s always an investigation. SPK prefers probing thresholds rather than conclusions.”

It’s a lot to unpack, and everyone reading this will likely hold a different view on this. The extent to which AI was involved in the music itself is unclear – the video, more obvious. Is applying AI to this extent as part of an ‘investigation’ valid, or is it something which, by its very nature is complicit in the expansion of AI, a surrender of creative control to a machine which we don’t have a rein on?

‘The Last of Men’ is a striking release, and a powerful return for SPK, with the new SPKtR moniker denoting the start of a new era. How it will unfold remains to be seen, and will likely be interesting. All we can do is watch this space…

AA

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The SPKtR - The Last of Men cover art

Andracca / Misko Boba / Bruul / Darkened Void – The Fulford Arms, York, 22nd March 2026

Posted: 23 March 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

It’s a good thing it’s not raining or bitterly cold, as they’re running late setting up. Consequently, there’s a hoard of black clad folks milling about outside waiting to be let in – although thankfully, we’re allowed to go and get drinks from the bar to bring back outside. In fairness, it’s a rare thing here, and many much bigger venues are prone to opening the doors a lot more than ten minutes late. Nevertheless, I’m glad I decided to wear a hat, because Spring is still in its early stages and there’s a nip in the air.

It’s still winter inside, though, as we kick off a night of back-to-back black metal. But who knew there were so many shades of black? The four acts on tonight’s bill are all denominations of black metal, but couldn’t be more different.

Darkened Void, from Hull – yes, that’s a ‘u’ and not an ‘e’ – promise ‘melodic death black metal’. How this translates is that some of the guitar work is a bit Brian May at times, and there are some epic choruses in the mix. But there is much heavy darkness to behold, too. They’re certainly tight, and are at their most powerful when they put their heads down and churn out the monster riffs, which benefit significantly from the heft of two guitars.

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Darkened Void

Bruul, purveyors of ‘barbaric black metal’ who hail from York have their priorities right, sorting the incense sticks before their guitars and mic stands. This seems pretty civilised, if a tad bohemian, rather than barbaric. But they bring the density with a solid wall of the filthiest guitars and hell-for-leather drumming to deliver a brutal and relentless rabid blast of bestial fury. They’d probably put some effort into their makeup, but playing in near darkness they probably didn’t need to – they’re all but invisible but for the lead guitarist’s white trainers – although the atmospheric presentation certainly heightened the impact of their pummelling racket. The sheer force of their set is nothing short of stunning, and to his this level of volume and intensity so early in the night is staggering.

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Bruul

Misko Boba are the main reason I’m here after they devastated my ears in this same venue at the tail end of 2024. While being based in York, they’re a band of international origin – vocalist Kanopa is Lithuanian by origin, and her delving into Lithuanian folklore adds a level of mystique. More than that, her stage presence is nothing short of terrifying. But there’s a lot more happening here: the demonic shriek of the blood-smeared singer is paired with churning guitar work and gut-juddering five-string bass. Perhaps singing in Lithuanian (the setlist features an English translation beneath each of the song titles) adds a dimension of otherness, but everything about their performance is blindingly intense. They play hard and fast – very fast. What on the surface sounds like a blizzard of noise is, in fact, highly detailed, and the pace of the fretwork and percussion is dazzling. The effect, ultimately, is so powerful as to kick the air from your lungs.

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Misko Boba

Andracca purport to bring us black metal ‘devoted to suffering… To a Bare the Weight of Death encapsulates 5 years of grief plagued with successive deaths…’ says their bio. With faces and arms smeared with black and a massive skull (what it’s supposed to have belonged to is a mystery) on stage, they’re the quintessence of black metal. But they also highlight the tightrope that is black metal – the fine line between full-throttle, immersive rage and corny theatrics.

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Andracca

‘Thank you!’ vocalist Kieran Dawes rasps, in character, before, in a normal and very polite voice, ‘can I get more vocal in the monitor, please?’ In an instant, the spell is broken. Whereas Bruul maintained the magic by staying mute and just playing the songs, and Kanopa of Misko Boba relaxed into an affable character between songs and switched into fiery demonic mode for the songs themselves, Andracca can’t maintain a consistent approach. Perhaps more cringey than that, though, is the fact that in terms of posturing and cliché, they’re a bit Spinal Tap, but thankfully the drummer doesn’t explode. That said, I seem to be alone in finding the lofted guitars, playing back-to-back, and the power poses rather daft, and the packed crowd laps it up with pumping fists. Seriously, they are well into it, especially the front rows, and this reciprocal energy loop makes for a great atmosphere – and there’s no mistaking the technical skills or epic nature of the songwriting of Andracca, whose forty-five minute set features just seven songs. There’s new material on offer, and they conclude with the seven-minute ‘Oceans of Fire’.

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Andracca

They’re probably the third best band on the bill tonight, due to presentation more than content. But what tonight demonstrates is just how strong the metal scene is round here. Despite what seems to be an ever-diminishing number of venues and the ongoing cost of living crisis, it’s heartening that there are so many quality bands around, and people willing to stump up to go and see them – especially on a Sunday night.

Neurosis – An Undying Love For A Burning World

Posted: 22 March 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Neurot Recordings – 20 March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Unless you’ve been keeping a very close eye, or have been privy to insider information, you could be forgiven for thinking Neurosis were done as a band. And reasonably so. It’s been ten years since their last album, and it’s been almost four years since word emerged that founder and vocalist Scott Kelly had departed the band under a cloud and announced his retirement from music.

Nevertheless, one would have probably expected some kind of hype, a build-up to the first album in a decade by these post-metal colossi. Perhaps they felt a little reluctant under the circumstances of quietly ejecting Kelly in 2019 he admitted abusing his wife and children, keeping quiet on the matter out of respect for privacy from his wife. The fact they expelled him well before the news broke in 2022 sends a clear message on the position of the remaining members, who, after time has passed, have recruited Aaron Turner, formerly of Isis, and then Sumac. I shan’t dwell on how it must feel as a band to discover that one of the people they’ve worked with so closely for so many years is a piece of shit, an abusive lowlife, but will swerve here onto the topic of how Tom Meighan, formerly of Kasabian has been welcomed back to the gig and festival circuit following a conviction for domestic abuse largely on the basis that his abused girlfriend forgave him and went on to marry him. But that’s how it is with abuse. Victims don’t leave, and there comes to be an understanding that it’s in the past and the abuser is somehow rehabilitated and everything is ok now, so the world moves on.

This shouldn’t be the cloud that hangs over Neurosis’ new album, and because of how they’ve dealt with it, it isn’t really a cloud, but something which needs to be addressed by way of context, rather than skipped over or swept under the carpet. Thankfully, Kelly doesn’t get a pass, a career rehabilitation after a break, and with a respectful hiatus and Turner coming into the fold, An Undying Love For A Burning World marks the opening of a new chapter for Neurosis.

The album’s title encapsulates the place in which the band – and, indeed, many of us find ourselves, and the statement from the band on its release expands on this:

“We need this, perhaps more than ever, and we suspect we are not alone. The trials and tribulations in our personal lives and as a band, combined with simply trying to navigate the insanity of our society, with the stress, anxiety, and isolation that come with it can be excruciating. Add to that the existential confusion and sorrow of the climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction.

“It is enough to cause you to completely lose your mind if you can’t find release or catharsis. This strange emotionally charged music has always been our method of trying to survive this and this is what we’ve always been singing about. When you have spent a lifetime engaged with these energies and utilizing this form of expression to purge and purify, it feels detrimental to our well-being to let it sit idle and neglected. This was now or never.”

First, the pandemic. Then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Then Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And now – effectively – World War 3, with gas and oil facilities ablaze, all while the oceans rise and the global climate becomes evermore inhospitable. It’s a battle to simply exist and keep it together at times, because the last few years have felt truly apocalyptic. And STILL people are shitting on one another: displays of racism and misogyny are becoming more rife and more extreme and as much as there’s abundant cause to fear for the imminent elimination of the human species, there’s a strong case in favour of it for the good of the planet.

And so it is that An Undying Love For A Burning World is a difficult album, in that it grapples with these difficult, ugly, and complex issues.

“The dissonance is deafening!” Turner hollers on the brief intro piece, ‘We Are Torn Wide Open’, before blasting into the jarring noise blast of ‘Mirror Deep’. Immediately, this feels like a different Neurosis. They’ve always explored tone and texture, but this feels different: fast, hard, heavy, with a punkier edge to the driving metal blast. This rages, hard. The riffs and jarring, dissonant, and Turner’s vocals bring a different kind of energy. And it’s an energy that’s a vital injection.

Of course, there are still megalithic lumbering riffs: ‘First Red Rays’ brings the first of them, and it’s a crushing trudge, but then suddenly everything explodes. It sounds as if they’re playing for their lives, and purging hard here. Even the expansive instrumental passages are imbued with an emotional heft that’s intangible and fundamentally inarticulable, and while the nine-minute ‘Blind’ offers some atmospheric passages, they’re decimated by raging riffs, and ‘Seething and Scattered’ sure as hell does seethe from its very core.

The last two tracks are both immense, clocking in at ten and seventeen minutes respectively, but far from being meandering plods – and there are quieter, gentler passages which have an exploratory edge – they’re both dynamic explosions brimming with anguish, and riff and rage hard. The final track, ‘Last Light’ begins with a Suicide-like pulsating electronic beat and fizzing electronics before the riff piles in, and takes off with with some expansive space-rock vibes and a nagging hint of shoegaze, and it’s as majestic as it is monstrous.

This is the sound of a band reinvigorated, and, more significantly, grappling with issues, both personal and circumstantial. It’s a band striving to push forward, a band unbeaten but emerging from and processing a trauma. The world is burning: that’s not political or controversial, but it’s difficult to assimilate and contemplate what the future holds. An Undying Love For A Burning World takes the listener down to the darkest depth, but also hints at hope. Right now, hope is all we have, and it’s hard to cling to… but cling, we must. Otherwise, what else is there?

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