Portuguese eccentric and avantgarde metal project Hoofmark have recently revealed a lyric video for a new song off their second album Blood Red Lullabies, recently released on Raging Planet Records.
Titled ‘Folktales of the Archdemon’ this new video can be streamed here:
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Notorious punk singer Blag Dahlia (The Dwarves) teams up with Ukrainian artists The Mad Twins on new animated video ‘Contraband’
The track features Dexter Holland (backing vocals) and Josh Freese (drums).
Introducing Ralph Champagne – Blag’s first full-length solo record of retro Americana music with a healthy dash of outlaw country, old-school crooner and modern miscreant in the mix! The LP is out now on Greedy Media and distributed by MVD.
Watch the video here:
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Photo: Julia Lofstrand
Venomous Concept, the hardcore punk band formed by Kevin Sharp of Brutal Truth and Shane Embury of Napalm Death, return in 2023 with their 5th album ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’. Bonding over their love of punk heroes such as Black Flag, GBH and Poison Idea, the duo have been the core members of the band since 2004.
Now all these years later Venomous Concept are about to release their most unique album to date on 24th February. "When the pandemic hit we decided we needed to make an album that didn’t fit – we all loved so much other kind of punk and rock, so why not explore that which is in essence closer to our hearts?. To do the same album over and over again would be boring” Shane comments.
‘The Good Ship Lollipop’ sees Sharp and Embury joined by fellow Napalm Death member John Cooke alongside Carl Stokes, former drummer with UK death metal legends Cancer. ‘Having John Cooke of Napalm Death on guitar brought a new variety to the record, and Shane’s lifelong friend Carl Stokes formerly of the bands Cancer, Current 93 & The Groundhogs came in on drums to lay down some more solid rock grooves and old school power” Kevin adds.
New single ’Timeline’ showcases the quartet’s equally catchy and crunchy new direction paired with visuals as pulse-pounding as this new track. Watch the new video now:
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Venerate Industries – 4th November 2022
Christopher Nosnibor
Now this is a fine justification of why I don’t do end of year lists. This may or may not have made mi ne, because I simply haven’t had time to process or digest it, but it’s been out a month and a half and I’ve only just got my lugs around it, with only a week or so left of 2022 – and it’s one of those albums that slaps you around the skull and has that instant impact by virtue of its sheer force.
Their bio tells us that Athens-based ‘Mammock’s compositions stray from the typical rock forms, incorporating various elements from punk to jazz, post-hardcore and the nineties’ US noise rock scene. The quartet possesses the self-awareness and technical capabilities to carve their own sound and explore their character into finely tuned songs, which grab the listener from beginning to end.’
What it means is that they make a serious fucking racket and sound a lot like The Jesus Lizard, from the rib-rattling bass to the off-kilter, jarring guitars, and the crazed vocals. Some of the songs sound like they have some synths swirling around in the mix, but one suspects it’s just more guitar, run through a monster bank of effects. Overall, though, they seem to be more reliant on technique than trickery.
They formed in early 2018 by Giannis (guitar) and Klearhos (bass) with the addition of Vangelis (drums), they started out as an instrumental trio, before the addition of Andreas (vocals), and if it seems like a contradiction to remark that they feel like a coherent unit when cranking out so much jolting, angular discord, but that’s one of the key tricks or deceptions of music like this: it isn’t mere racket, and in fact requires real technical precision: those stuttering stops and starts, judders, jolts, changes of key and tempo require a great deal of skill, intuition, and of course, rehearsal.
They take many cues from Shelllac, too: the drums are way up in the mix – to the extent that they’re front and centre, something Shellac make a point of literally on stage, and replicate the sound on record, with the guitar providing more texture than tune, and the vocals half-buried beneath the cacophonic blur.
The last minute or so of ‘Dancing Song’ blasts away at a single chord that calls to mind Shellac’s ‘My Black Ass’ and ‘The Admiral’. The lumbering monster that is ‘Bats’ is a bit more metal, in the sludgy, stoner doom Melvins sense.
Stretching out to almost seven minutes, ‘Jasmine Skies’ blasts its way to the album’s mid-point, a wild, grunged-up metal beast with an extended atmospheric spoken-word mid-section which gives the lumbering black metal assault that emerges in the finale even greater impact.
If the semi-ambient ‘Interludio’ offers some brief respite, the ‘Boiling Frog’ brings choppy, driving grunge riffage and a real sense of agitation and anguish, and the album’s trajectory overall paves the way for an immense finish in the form of the seven-minute ‘Away from Them’ that roars away as it twists and turns at a hundred miles an hour.
Yes, Rust packs in a lot, and it packs it in tight and it packs it in hard.
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Darkwave band, Stariana has just unveiled their new single, ‘Paradise Is Lost On You’.
‘Paradise Is Lost On You’ is an anthemic rebuttal to the flawed notion that a person loving and living outside the traditional norms of society is somehow immoral or broken.
We will celebrate being alive and live as vibrantly as possible, regardless of what those who won’t understand might think or say. Paradise is lost on them. In other words, the song brings the message of not giving up in the face of adversity.
Check the single here:
Stariana is a post punk/darkwave trio based in Eugene, Oregon, heavily influenced by post punk mainstays such as Depeche Mode, New Order, Bauhaus, Jesus And Mary Chain and 90’s era Britpop; Elastica, Blur, The Stone Roses with just a little bit of Blondie and Joan Jett mixed in for flavor.
Stariana is:
Nikki Brackett & Victor St. Petersburg (of Black Magdalene) and Tethys.
Darkwave project, Distance H has dropped their new single & video featuring Marita Volodina, ‘Waters Of Woe’.
‘Waters Of Woe’ addresses the necessity to overcome the pain and anguish of broken promises, by others or by oneself, making the promised lands inaccessible. It’s the saving distance to escape collapse when the time comes for resignation and abandonment. It’s also the distance to be taken with our ghosts, (past or present), which haunt the mind and the memory.
To free yourself from the stigmata of the past, to emancipate the psyche into the present. That is ‘Waters Of Woe’.
Parisian producer/artist, Manuel H once again invites a feature singer, Marita Volodina, for the new single.
It’s vintage goth with a contemporary spin. It’s also a cracking tune. We dig it, and you can check it out here:
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To celebrate the release of debut album Presence, Attawalpa has today unveiled the video to new song ‘Get Down’. Directed by photographer Dan Martensen and creative directed by Emma Chitty, the video was shot at Drop Studios in north London and Hampstead Heath. Attawalpa, who recently supported The Rolling Stones at Hyde Park and performed at All Points East, is featured on Edith Bowman’s ‘Play Next’ podcast.
“’Get Down’ was me trying to write an upbeat song about depression!” explains Attawalpa linchpin Luis Felber. “I was in a pretty detached and in a neither here nor there place when we cemented the chorus ‘I’m like someone else, when there’s no one here, if I am myself will I disappear? I keep calling out until someone hears, they got to be somewhere, gotta be somewhere!’. I think it describes my ability and tendency to disassociate pretty well! I came to get down but now I get down lolz. It’s funny because it is true! I partied my youth well into my early thirties. And lived at least a decade with a hangover, many not great decisions and a certain uncertainty of who I was. I got down and it got me down! Dan Martensen made the video with my long-time collaborator Emma Chitty as creative director. We also shot the album cover over these couple days. The video is a very simple interpretation of ‘anglofying’ my Peruvian roots".
Watch the video here:
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Christopher Nosnibor
With Jeffrey Dahmer being all the rage on Netflix, hot on the heels of David Tennant’s portrayal of Dennis Nilsen on ITV, serial killers are no longer the domain of weirdoes and fans of industrial music: this shit is now completely mainstream. So while Le Cycne Noir’ss latest effort may have previously been considered in dubious taste, that’s no longer the case. It’s not even ‘edgy’ now: it’s regular evening televisual entertainment. This is, in many ways, more disturbing than the subject matter itself. What happened? When did so many become so twisted? When did this shit become mainstream, and why?
And so, here we are: to mark Halloween, Le Cycne Noir is planning a special seasonal new EP release entitled ‘Death & Consequences’ (out 28th October, via Anger Management Records), which they pitch as “Returning with a harrowing set of songs all about serial killers, the renegade electronic/prog artist is leading the way with the featured single ‘Burn Bundy Burn’”. A nonstop lasughriot, then.
The cover art is as tasteless as the topic, and it’s a trashy slab of crisply-produced punk-tinged hard rock with a ska-tinged rhythm and piano and lyrics that rhyme ‘clinically insane’ and ‘10,000 volts right through your brain’. The semi-spoken verses remind me of something I can’t quite place and it’s a shade derivative, but for all its faults, it’s a solid tune and kinda fun.
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‘Phenomena of the Mind’ is a re-mastered EP of selected tracks from the album of the same name released by Mieko Shimizu in 2006, the year after the London Terror attacks. Something dispirited and unexplainable lay heavy in the air off the sprawling city we lived and breathed. In the title song, ‘Phenomena of the Mind’, her intense Japanese rap echoes the deafening noise of the chaotic streets we walk each day. “Visualise”, she said, try to imagine a way to fight your way out of this ominous, dystopian world.
In the track ‘Signal Found’, the theme continues to shattered Dance Hall beats that reverberate to the “twisted sound of broken down London town.”
“Have you lost the plot? Are you ok?” she asks.
In the track ‘Black Salt’, a dark melancholic theme floats over fragmented, glitchy beats, compounded by the repetition of “black” which hammers the constant bombardment of racism prescient of the call for freedom that Black Lives Matter.
Wonderland Magazine has described Mieko’s music as, “beautiful poetic verses and stunning musical arrangements” and Mark Taylor of Record Collector as “An avant garde artist pushing boundaries.”
Mieko Shimizu is a London based Japanese singer, songwriter, composer and producer. Mieko first erupted onto the UK electronic scene as Apache 61; her searing alter ego. The self-titled album garnered plays by John Peel and she quickly build a name across the London & Berlin underground scenes.
Previously she had released 2 albums in her own name, Totem & Road of Shells, then the album Minimal Dance as Mekon Zoo and in 2020 she released her latest album I Bloom.
Watch ‘Phenomena of the Mind’ here:
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Industrial band Panic Lift continues the unraveling of its themed EP release cycle with the band’s first release of 2022 titled Stitched.
This four song EP features two new songs titled ‘Every Broken Piece’ and ‘Bitter Cold’ with remixes from Mechanical Vein and Tragic Impulse.
Lyrically, “Every Broken Piece” and “Bitter Cold” continue with the familiar themes of stress, coping, and concerns of self-image. Hardcore Panic Lift fans may remember “Every Broken Piece” from Panic Lift’s lockdown shows in 2020 that were broadcast online during the height of the COVID19 Pandemic.
For Stitched, Panic Lift explores a harsh ebm sound more stylistically similar to their landmark debut record , Witness To Our Collapse. James Francis explains “I’ve always tried to find a happy medium between what I’m doing now, and where I started” he continues “but now that I’m doing smaller releases, I have the ability to experiment with different styles without having to worry much about how they fit with the rest of my catalog.”
Watch ‘Every Broken Piece’ here:
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Aural Aggravation 