Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Glasshouse Red Spider Mite / Speedreaders / Wolf Solent – The Fulford Arms, York, 16th September 2026

Posted: 17 September 2026 in Live, Reviews
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It’s a decent lineup and a pleasant evening. I’m down early doors and sitting with a pint of Vocation Heart & Soul listening to Slint and Drop Ninteens and Boris over the PA, and wondering where the fuck is everyone? It does seem to be a thing now, particularly at certain venues, where people will be outside the room until the band starts, and spend the time between acts outside, whether it be the bar or beer garden, as well. On a personal level, there are positives to this: it means I can make notes and sup in relative peace, and maintain a decent spot near the front, but it does seem a bit odd to see barely a handful of people around and a near-deserted bar, and with the number of people in the room barely touching double figures when the first act is due on, it feels like something’s amiss.

Still, Danny Barton’s a seasoned pro, and he’ll play to five people or five hundred without there being any difference in his performance. It seems like some time since he’s has been out as Wolf Solent, having been doing Sewage Farm stuff with Sam Forrest (Nine Black Alps) in recent months. They’re the kings of anti-promo, announcing the release of their new album by stating that they’re ‘deeply ashamed to announce that fuck it is our fifth and worst album yet. It’s out on 24 april as limited edition CD and all forms of digital garbage.’ For the record, Fuck It is brilliant. It’s still infinitely more promo than he gives Wolf Solent, and his solo work is a very different proposition from the roaring rock ‘n’ roll of Sewage Farm, which very much has all the hallmarks of a bedroom-based project – low-key, lo-fi slowcore with pedals, sequenced backing and drum machine. Switching his acoustic guitar for an electroacoustic 12-string, he conjures a swirling drone by way of a backdrop to his drawling vocals, delivered while hiding behind beard and hair.

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Wolf Solent

Speedreaders have often been represented by Dave Mudie performing solo on recent outings, meaning it’s been a while since I’ve caught a full-band set (my records indicate it was July last year, when they supported Needlework, and went on before Divorce Finance, who I’m still angry about. I know, I need to get over it, but fuck me. Anyway, Speedreaders. They’re consistent, they’re tight, they’re a quality act. There’s not much movement in terms of their set list, and no new material, but what they have is performed with assurance. They’re not a chatty band, and, on discovering Dave’s left his capo in the dressing room, there’s a protracted – and very quiet – pause. There’s considerable air between the notes during their slow, introspective, sad songs. They pick up the tempo for the final song, ‘Down Round’, which is a bit Wedding Present circa Bizarro, and ends abruptly and precisely on time.

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Speedreaders

Brighton’s Glasshouse Red Spider Mite are making their first trip to York, and they don’t seem too distraught to be playing to around twenty-five people: quite the opposite, in fact. They seem pretty chuffed that there is an audience, and an enthusiastic and supportive one at that, and for those still present (it has thinned rather after the local supports), they turn in a solid and dynamic set, delivered with energy and enthusiasm. It starts with a cacophonous samplefest, and there’s dialogue and narrative about spiders / mites spun between almost every song.

The liberal use of samples is reminiscent of Maybeshewill, although Glasshouse Red Spider Mite have vocals. Their overall sound straddles post-rock and shoegaze. Tonight’s set presents a band which has evolved significantly since their debut EP, and this could not be rendered with greater clarity than when they delve back to play ‘Everyone Loves You’ from What Do You Mean The Monster?… Hahaha… released in May of last year, and the new song which follows, which is a driving 90s-flavoured blast of energy that hints and Ride and Loop.

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Glasshouse Red Spider Mite

Comparing tonight’s performance with their recorded output to date suggests that Glasshouse Red Spider Mite are a band at a crossroads, and in the midst of a giant evolutionary leap. They sound absolutely fantastic, and seem like a band with a lot to give.

Time will tell, of course, but heading home in a heavy autumnal drizzle, it felt like this was one of those ‘I saw this band before they got big playing to barely any people’ moments. My mate always loves to tell me how we saw Editors at Fibbers in York play to three men and a dog before their debut album, and I saw The Young Gods play to barely more than that when touring Super Ready (and they were fucking incredible). Glasshouse Red Spider Mite have it all, and look and sound like they have the potential captivate a substantial crowd at The Brudenell. And if there’s any justice, in their next tour, they will.

30,000 Monkies – Super Rebound

Posted: 15 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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FKN KVLT REKORDS – 18th September 2026

The band describe their latest album, Super Rebound, as ‘is an action packed record with an unsound hero at the wheel. Wildly navigating through a landscape filled with leaden riffs, open harmonies, foghorns, and a dose of unadulterated joy and radiant bliss. Deranged, but sweet. Fuming with feels.’

This is only their third full-length album in their fifteen-year career, although they’ve maintained a steady flow of EPs, some of which have been on the longer side (their last release, HONESTY INTEGRITY FRIENDSHIP PASSION contained only four tracks, but due to the last one having a run time of twelve and a half minutes long, it spanned a full thirty minutes) – and they reckon this could be their definitive document, their magnum opus, the apogee of their riff-centric intent rendered concrete.

It’s certainly a big old guitar-driven racket, and it’s not without detail or humour, either. The first bars of the first song, ‘The Gums’, are kinda nicey-nicey, picked, melodic, a bit indie, a bit emo even, then all hell breaks loose with a thunderous slab of a riff and rabid vocals and I’ve no idea what the fuck they’re yelling about, but waaaauughh! It’s all good. Then there’s a rather Shellac-like mid-section where they persecute a single note for what feels like an eternity before going black metal in a blanket of fretwork and explosive percussion. It’s a lot to cram in to five minutes, but in keeping with the band’s name and general ethos, it’s chaotic and wildly unpredictable.

The punningly-titled ‘Prism Break’ melds driving repetition and the dingy riffery of early Melvins with something more fiery as they fire up all cylinders for a brutal sonic assault.

The three pieces with (quite self-explanatory) parenthetical titles are instrumental interludes where they lay down the guitars and explore very different territories. Consequently, after the meandering instrumental of [Horns Wailing], the sledgehammer sound of ‘Mountainesque 4’ his even harder by virtue of contrast. It’s six and a half minutes of unbridled raging racket, which hammers away relentlessly. The guitars are as dirty as they come and blur into the bass in a mess of overloading distortion, the barking vocals low in the mix… the midsection is, once again, a complete shift, venturing into almost neoprog territories, with swirling synths and pomp-filled bass runs. It borders on muso, but feels somewhat tongue-in-cheek – not quite parody prog, but the lilting, picked notes which play to the fade certainly mark a contrast. And then there’s the recent single, ‘Unsound Hero’, which tests the patience with the most protracted, strung-out intro, consisting initially of nothing but a crashing snare for the longest fifteen seconds imaginable, and then a clean guitar pulse enters the mix and… are they in time with one another? Something doesn’t seem quite right… Yes, of course it’s intentional. I’m momentarily reminded of The Melvins’ track ‘Mine is No Disgrace’ from The Crybaby, with JG Thirlwell – a sprawling eight-and-a-half minute behemoth that pushed the quite-loud dynamic thing to its absolute limit – because here, 30,000 Monkies drag that intro out, and out, teasing at when the levee will break and the riff will hit, exploring a melodic, proggy, Oceansize-like melodic drift… at two minutes and seven, there’s a pause. Silence. Nothing. Suspense. Two seconds is a long time when you’re teetering on the brink, when you’re hanging, waiting… But at two minutes and nine, BLAM! And that riff is low, grinding, and raw. The slow grinding notes ring long and resonate as they trudge into the domain of rib-crushing weight. Stripping it all away leaves the sound of a soul being torn apart and offers no solace – quite the opposite, in fact – before the devastating onslaught of the final minute.

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You might think these guys are fucking with you, and in a way, they probably are. The title track is nothing short of pure riffmania, nearly seven minutes of punishing, pulverising power that’s absolutely relentless, crushing, and again holding a single chord for what feels like an eternity in the final minute.

This is noise rock with the emphasis on the noise, the filthy overdrive and feedback cranked to the max, and any moments of respite are simply lulls and lures designed to amplify the impact of the most brutal, rib-cracking riffs when they land. The formula isn’t genius, or even new, but 30,000 Monkies know precisely how to utilise it for optimal impact. And ‘Swerver’ hits hard, alright.

The ringing layers of ambience which shape [Bells Ringing, Tale Melting] are a world apart from the rest of the album, and while the warping sounds which drag and drift aren’t entirely soothing, they’re on another plane from the fiery wall of guitars which dominate Super Rebound… until the final three minutes, when they pull out the most devastatingly crushing doom of the entire album. It feels like a trick, an ambush, and one we should have seen coming, because 30,000 Monkies just can’t help themselves. There has to be a bone-splintering, skull smashing riff at some point in every song. It’s just a question of when it lands.

Super Rebound is a work of genius, with 30,000 Monkies really delving into suspense and detail – but more than anything, it’s a riff-laden rager of an album.

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Damage Control & OHMelectronic – Red Lines EP

Posted: 15 September 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Metropolis Records – 11th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Red Lines, the new EP from international electro-industrial group Damage Control – centred around a core quartet of Bill Barsby, Richard Thacker and Alex Wise (all based in Australia), plus Markus App from Germany – and finds them in collaboration with the Canadian duo OHMelectronic.

“‘Red Lines’ is about psychological warfare, the endless cycle of human conflict and the hunger for power that lies in the hearts of men,” says Huxtable of the EP title track. “While the lyrics were inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the same themes haunt America and it’s global conflicts. As tyranny and the fog of war repeats itself through every age, so too does the hope that we learn from our mistakes.”

I only wish I had that same hope, could share that optimism: the trouble is, we never do seem to learn from our mistakes. One might have thought that we – as a species – would have learned from the outcomes of two worlds wars, the second of which involved genocide and nuclear annihilation. Yet somehow, we’re in a place where to suggest that there’s a genocide taking place in Gaza is controversial, and we have world leaders who are so unpredictable that in recent months, I’ve taken to checking news sites on my phone on waking at 5am to make sure the world hasn’t ended. But then, it’s not just world leaders who seem perilously close to the button – because despite myriad dystopian sci-fi works detailing how AI will destroy us, those who run the multi-billion dollar corporations developing it are more interested in next year’s profits than the future of humanity. I say humanity, but something has changed in recent years. A trigger has flipped. Where is the humanity?

Russia had seemingly been biding their time during the pandemic, and pounced on Ukraine the moment restrictions were lifted. But the whole world changed during the pandemic: people emerged from restrictions fired up and angry. The mask – and the gloves – were off. The evidence was plain to see: people were suddenly ok driving aggressively, yelling at random strangers in the street, and being openly racist. Politics turned a new shade of ugly, and while America leads the way there, the rest of the world isn’t far behind, and war is all around us and escalating by the week, to the point that much conflict around the globe goes unreported in Western media. Even the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, have seemingly faded into the background in much of the news media, giving the impression that it’s mundane and life goes on. What the actual fuck happened? Is this really where we are, who we are?

Before we arrive at ‘Red Lines’, the EP’s lead – and title- track, the percussion-driven ‘Manifesto’ pounds in, and thunders and pumps hard under a thick sonic haze. It’s a quintessential techno-electro / industrial cut, which reaches back to the late 80s and early 90s Wax Trax! catalogue for references.

The title track is tight and oppressive, quiet, queasy, dense, grinding bass with serrated edges, and thudding beats are welded together as the backdrop to minimal synths wavering cautiously. The vocal is understated, monotone, but breathy, while reeling off a list of horrors. By the end, the sensation is suffocation, and there is no room, and no air, to breathe. It’s not only Damage Control at their absolute best, but one of the most gripping tracks in the genre in a while. It’s the claustrophobic intensity that makes it.

‘Modernity’ is tense and dense, a pumping hard-edge disco groove, and a snarling response to the to the dark and difficult word in which we find ourselves. It marks a fitting close to a powerful document of these difficult and alienating times.

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Push For Night – That Porous Line

Posted: 13 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 7th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Three years on from Lasped Gasps, their collaboration with Jon Mueller, experimental duo Push For Night, consisting of Oliver Chapoy and James Elliott, decided they needed to take a slightly different approach and pull back on the intensity a tad and allow some hints of light into the darkness for the follow-up.

They write in the accompanying notes – as if offering reassurance to anyone who may be concerned that this means that their new album is some kind of breezy pop fun – that That Porous Line ‘is absolutely a collaged, flickering, chaotic, electro-acoustic record. The project is the project after all. Although our tomb-room isn’t fully hermetic (what is?), I think it is a place PFN will always reside. A total escape outside into harshly lit reality without mystery is fairly unappealing, for us anyway. Inside is personal, guarded from too much light; a dark terrarium of weird ghosts and peculiar shadows ripe for conjuring and harnessing in order to make them kick and howl in a way pleasing to us. Or at least be near enough to them to try and hear what they sing. That’s the motive. We decorate the cave, invite the specters to reveal a message, and try to capture something. Inside, cocooned in the semi-dark of our uncommon space, we bang our heads against the act of interpreting these shifty, chimeric, hidden sonic shadows. How big is it in here? How much further down can we go? Did something move in that corner over there? Can it touch us? Can we catch it? That’s where the fear is. That’s where the fun happens. That’s why we listen. That’s why we play.’

Compared to Lasped Gasps, pretty much anything would be lighter and less tense. But the first composition, the nine-and-three quarter-minute ‘A Good Hosing Down’ immediately makes clear the difference, opening with some scratchy strings and chiming notes which ring through a soft static and ambient mist. There’s no real sense of danger or threat here, and you don’t immediately feel as if you’re suffocating. But around seven minutes in, the atmosphere does change, and shit does get weird. Warped, spongy electronics rub against one another as they twist and turn in unpredictable directions.

The underlying structure of ‘Fang Vendor’ is a low, slow beat and swampy bass that’s almost a desert rock reimagining of Suicide, but over these are strains of retro-futurist space-age synths and random glitches and all kinds of sonic incursions that disrupt the flow.

At the centre of the album stand a brace of monolithic works: ‘It’s Sure To Be Dark If You Shut Your Eyes’ and ‘Idler’s Reward’ both pass the eight-minute mark, and place the collage nature of their approach to the fore. On the former, fragments of processed, glitched-out vocal samples and random snippets intersect with a piano motif which fades in and out while flickering beats flit around subtly in the distance, by no means driving or propelling the piece forward, instead adding further distraction to a palette already overloaded and blending to indistinction. Heavy drones, elongated organ sounds, ominous rumbles, and electronic explosions fizz and spark all over. Cymbals crash and tension builds. The latter provides some respite, with a slow, gradual glimmering change of hue accompanied by a sparse pulsation. I start to envisage the deep sea, the gentle, fluid movements of jellyfish… but then there’s a corrupted proggy synth break that utilises an awful farting synth sax sound or something, and further on, there’s some trilling jazz-infused woodwind. No two ways about it: That Porous Line explores experimentalism to the max. Asserting that the duo apply the collaging of materials indiscriminately may sound like a harsh criticism, but I make the observation more in the context of William S. Burroughs’ cut-ups, which brought collage to the page, and, shortly after, audio works, with the intention of creating art which was closer to life, and the way we experience an array of sensory inputs simultaneously. That Porous Line may be a fair bit smoother in its application of the methodological principles than early adopters of sound collaging – from John Cage to Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, but ultimately, this is about applying a technique established a long time ago in art to other media, specifically sound. And the aim is to be disorientating, to overlay fragments to achieve a certain effect.

‘Bait is Lowered’ is a dark, rippling wash of unsettling layers of sound, creeping, thrumming, before sputtering beats burst amidst a wail of siren-like sounds and everything dissolves into a panic-infused morass of sound. In many ways, it’s low-key: there are no brain-shredding walls of white noise here, but nothing about it is right, nothing about it is easy, comfortable.

That Porous Line isn’t one of those albums where you find yourself praying for it to finish, and it doesn’t suck the life out of you – but it’s no party, either. Culminating in the wall of static wash that is the final minute of ‘Turned Slowly and Slowly Turned’, and the somewhat proggy, somewhat Krautrock, somewhat ambient title track which draws the curtain remarkably gently. It’s a journey, and no mistake.

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KiKu – Suzhou / It’s All The Rage (feat. Blixa Bargeld & Black Cracker)

Posted: 12 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Everest Records – 25th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

What we effectively have here is a pair of EPs from Swiss avant-garde act KiKu, led by trumpeter and composer Yannick Barman and drummer and percussionist Cyril Regamey, each one a collaboration – but rather than rendering them separate works, what we get is an album of two distinct halves, conceived, we’re told, as a diptych: ‘two distinct bodies of work held together by a shared musical architecture’, where, ‘on one side, Blixa Bargeld moves through language with precision, restraint and abrasion. On the other, Black Cracker turns language into rhythm, pressure and momentum. Between them, KiKu constructs a dense, unstable framework of trumpet, drums, sampler and electronics’. The result is something akin to a split album, on which the two sides of KiKu are as much a defining feature as their collaborators.

The first of the four works with Bargeld, ‘Orlando’s Victory,’ slides in with some retro-vibing electropop which isn’t a million miles away from late-career Leonard Cohen. Simmering synths strike some dramatic shapes and brooding tones atop a slightly shuffling, trip-hop infused beat. ‘The Number of the Millibeast’ is a slice of dark storytelling, a minimal, almost folky instrumental provides the backing for a half-sung, half spoken narrative, delivered with a theatrical flourish, before ‘Suzhou XX XY YX YY’ continues in the same sonic vein, while the lyrics become more abstract. The instrumentation becomes ever sparser and the lyrical cohesion crumbles with each successive piece, culminating in the flickering pulse and gasping weirdness of ‘Nonsense Rock ‘n’ Roll’, which seems to be a moan about some people playing music in the street in the night which rapidly escalates in divergent directions. The atmosphere is that of late-night, downtown, smoke and rough liquor, Bargeld adopting a persona that’s a bit Tom Waits, a bit Charles Bukowski, but which comes across with a hint of grizzled old man, chewed up and ground down by life, veering erratically between raconteur and curmudgeonly malcontent. ‘Do I like the music? No! Nonsense!”

While it’s Regamey’s percussion which sits to the fore on the Bargeld cuts, it’s Barman’s brass which takes the lead on ‘Bull Whip’, the first of four ‘bull’- themed tracks with Black Cracker. ‘So much road rage / so much road kill’, Black Cracker reflects. His delivery here is soulful yet sad, and the trip-hop vibe of ‘Suzhou’ makes a subtle but distinct switch to hip-hop on ‘It’s All The Rage’. ‘Leaping Bull (Chicago)’ is different again, and something deep within the song – the way the mournful trumpet which echoes out over stuttering beats, and Black Cracker’s grizzled, world-weary vocal, vaguely reminiscent in its patina to Mark Lanegan – tugs at half-forgotten emotions and a sense of memories of the past, hazed by time. And then, halfway through, it switches to a dense, droning slab of dark hip-hop, tense and twitching with angst. Coming out of nowhere, it hits hard, but paves the way for ‘The Running of the Bulls’, where bleak instrumentation and soulful but anguished vocals combine to convey a sense of conflict between the interior and the exterior. ‘Sleeping Bull’ notably is subtitled ‘Woke’ in parenthesis, and its lyrical and sonic latticework makes for a compelling combination while reminding us where the term ‘woke’ actually came from. It’s absurd to think that it’s been adopted as a pejorative term, predominantly by white, right-wing wanksacks. It’s high time to reclaim it, and to not only be woke, but woke and proud.

Decidedly more downtempo and downbeat than ‘Suzhou’, ‘It’s All The Rage’ feels less driven by anger or rage than it conveys an aching sadness, the kind that permeates the body to the core, and makes the limbs and the very heart weigh heavy. As a whole, Suzhou / It’s All The Rage is very much an album of two halves, precisely as intended. And as contrasting as the two sides are, they do, most definitely compliment one another, and, perhaps more importantly, they tap different triggers for response. It’s a multifaceted work, and most certainly an album to chew on.

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Greg Bullock – 26EP

Posted: 11 September 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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7th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

What do Depeche Mode, Pink Floyd and Roger Waters, and The Cure have in common? No? A bit stumped? Well they’re all listed as touchstones for the new solo EP from Greg Bullock, who’s perhaps better known as co-founder and one half of Cyborg Amok, purveyors of goth-infused synth-rock – although he his solo career has always coexisted alongside. The band’s name seems particularly salient in context of the recent news of AI’s exponential self-advancements: what was essentially science fiction just a couple of years ago is now the reality of the world in which we live. And it’s the reality of the world in which 26EP is firmly routed, exploring, as he puts it ‘ideas we may not always find comfort in: persecution, contamination, ignorance, and mortality’.

It’s true: few find comfort in any of those topics, and while the romanticism of death is a fairly popular and eternal trope in art through the centuries, few find much by way of warmth when confronted with issues of mortality in immediate proximity. In fact, it’s strange how even the most philosophical – or nihilistic, or tough-seeming – individuals who are brazen about death wilt at the loss of friend and relatives and are suddenly moved to proclaim that someone in their sixties or seventies was ‘of no age’ and ‘taken too young’. In short, death in the abstract is fine, but the actuality is something we can’t even bear to contemplate. Meanwhile, persecution, contamination, and ignorance provide the daily fuel for fiery exchanges on social media and inflammatory reports in the news media. It seems that in recent years, we’ve come to thrive on these very things which tear us apart, as individuals, and as a society. I suppose it comes down to the separation of the keyboard to the life experience, the chasm which yawns between concept and corporality.

‘In Other Words’ starts with a bassline reminiscent of The Cure circa Faith, before plunging into a dark gothy post-punk space, somewhere underground and airless. ‘The deeper the trench / The higher the climb’, he croons in a reverb-soaked baritone, dry, crunched, but ringing clear. It’s a lyric based in logic rather than one which provides a revelatory insight, and yet… and yet, we seem to have become so mired in distractions and misinformation and futile infighting, that simple, basic truths have been cast by the wayside, and in this context, this plain observation carries unexpected weight, particularly as we continue to dig ourselves ever deeper, not only increasingly entrenched in polarised views, but also in embracing AI and practices which accelerate climate change. We’re digging our own graves, here. The trench is approaching the depth of very depths of the oceans. And still we dig.

The folksy ‘Thirty Pieces’ is sparse and dark, despite some lilting instrumentation. Bullock’s rasping vocal lands between Leonard Cohen and recent releases by James Ray, while ‘I Ain’t Goin!’ presents a hybrid of early post-punk and electropop, with a primitive production aesthetic reminiscent of the era, a basic drum machine with a whip-crack snare dominating the mix.

The riff on ‘Blu-Green Beauty’ leans on ‘You Really Got me’ by The Kinks, but filtered through Dr Mix and the Remix as Bullock rails against climate change and paints a bleak yet somehow encouraging picture in which there is still choice: ‘You can close the curtains / You can close your eyes / You can kill everything / You can kill, blu-green beauty.’ Do we still have a choice? If so, for how long?

26EP is pretty bleak, but still contains glimmers of optimism. Where I’m sitting, the future is dark, so I hope he’s right.

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Everything Decays – Requiem II: We Will Slaughter the Lambs

Posted: 10 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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11th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Numbering a debut album ‘II’ might seem rather odd, but it’s by no means a first: Throbbing Gristle’s debut was The Second Annual Report, after their first two cassette-only releases were entitled The Best of Throbbing Gristle (Vol I and II respectively). However, with Everything Decays, it follows their first EP, Requiem 1: The Serial Killer’s Symphony of Liberation, Deliverance and Relief, and the album, written as a story, continues an ongoing narrative in which each song is a chapter. So far, so conceptual. When it comes to plot, there are certainly no spoilers in the nots which accompany the album, which they describe as ‘A descent into the darkest corners of the human mind, where oppression breeds trauma, trauma ignites rage, and rage demands retribution. The album follows the journey of those who have been stripped of their humanity, rising against their oppressors only to discover that revenge comes at the cost of their own souls. It is a story of pain, resistance, justice, and the thin line between liberation and becoming the very evil they swore to destroy.’

The Dutch deathcore / hardcore quartet threaten ‘crushing riffs, filthy grooves, savage vocals and bone-shattering breakdowns, dragging hardcore aggression into one hostile wall of sound. They describe their music as an overload of quick and loud noise.’

Opener, ‘Miserere mei, Deus’ arrives with an unexpectedly folksy ring and a thick but elastic bass sound which sounds almost synthy, and the whispered vocal is soft but menacing… and over the course of two and a half minutes it builds… and it builds. But then faceripping guitar chords and thunderous drums crash in and the vocals turn rabid, driving into a complex but hard-hitting slab of metalcore rage, which dovetails directly into lead single ‘Crowd Control’ where shit really goes off. We’ve all seen how police and governments implement crowd control – and, at times, somewhat selectively at that – and Everything Decays approach the topic with a suitably extreme suite of imagery, with tendrils, bones, peeled flesh and spilling guts in a frenetic, kinetic, and frankly devastating metal explosion. The final section is a slow trudge that draws as much on the pulverising weight of Swans and Godflesh as anything from the death / hardcore end of the spectrum, but dropping the BPM to that of ‘barely alive’ means that ‘Broken Vessels’, which powers in at a hundred miles an hour has even more impact. And this is something that does stand out about Requiem II: We Will Slaughter the Lambs – the pacing, the switches. Unravelling the narrative may not be an easy task, or one most listeners are even willing to undertake, but the way in which the individual songs move between one segment to the next, and how the songs, in turn, slot together to build the album as a whole… it’s clear there’s been a great deal of thought and technical application gone into this. It certainly isn’t just a bunch of songs cobbled together in a fortuitous sequence.

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It is, however, a crafted sequence of compositions planned and pieced together for maximum impact, and Requiem II: We Will Slaughter the Lambs is both relentless and brutal. The album’s centrepiece – and the longest of the seven tracks – ‘Adrenaline – A Lifetime Filled With Rage’ rips the doors off their hinges as it enters the set. A spindly, serpentine intro tinged with esoteric Eastern flavours swiftly melts into a wall of annihilate anguish which goes straight-up Nu-Metal a couple of minutes in, lumbering low and heavy.

‘Guillotine’ is a rush of snarling, gnarly fury, although the contrasting dual vocals, which pitch a clean delivery sits alongside all the swirling chaos. Hints of accessibility eddy on the peripheries, until finally, we arrive at the exit and ‘Rejoice the Butcher’ with an unexpected but well-timed glimpse at an approximation of pop, or at least melodic metal. Ordinarily, I’d say that a song like this breaks the mood but here, now, the prospect of escape, and time time just to breathe has appeal. Because Requiem II: We Will Slaughter the Lambs is nothing short of breathtaking. Soak it in, and enjoy, while you can.

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Pic: Dave van Hout

Isn’tses – Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole

Posted: 9 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 14th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Working under the Isn’tses moniker, London duo Lisa McKendrick and Tim Drage have spent more than a decade sculpting noise with their own unique slant, evolving not only their own methods and methodologies, but their own circuitry, perhaps most famously the ‘Chernobylizer’, a compact yet devastatingly powerful noise-generating device.

The notes which accompany this, their latest release in a prodigious and ever-expanding body of work, describe Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole as ‘raw and chaotic’, departing from noise alone to deliver a work where ‘a mix of complex beats, textures, unpredictable sounds and frenetic rhythms enter the music, at times with melody and screamy vocals as they push the boundaries of electronic music,’ and finally summarising it as ‘an intense mind-bending spacey journey of wild explosive emotion and sonic textures.’

It contains ten compositions – songs would be a hell of a stretch – the titles of which either seem purposefully incomplete and therefore impenetrable, or otherwise oblique, apart from those which include references to ‘rave’. There is certainly an abundance of heavy-duty pulsating electronic beats and whoops and cheers and yelps crop up with a certain frequency. But if this is to be considered in any way a ‘dance’ album, it’s in the context of late 70s and early 80s electronica – the warped groves and unsettling, detached vocals of Throbbing Gristle circa 20 Jazz Funk Greats, and Chris and Cosey’s Trance. The beats are industrial strength, but shudder and stutter, pulsing through fuzzed-out, distorted synth waves and an endless array of extraneous interjections. Demented shrieks and wailings rise though the thick atmosphere towards the end of the first track, ‘Sol Receiver’, and ‘I Spit on Your Rave’ only amplifies their commitment to melding propulsive beats and throbbing synths and melting them together with a sonic haze and disconcerting sense of psychopathy.

The majority of the pieces evoke a kind of derangement of the senses, repetition and disconcerting discord conjuring a trance-like evocation – but it’s dark and murky, and there’s a thick, squelchy analogue feel which contributes to a sound that feels more like the drug-induced hellish nightmare of a cult than spiritual transcendence. The thumping, clumping stomp or ‘Freekfall’ is nothing short of purgatorial, and you want to escape, but you find your limbs are leaden and limp, and you can’t move as you find yourself staring into a swirling vortex, even when you close your eyes. There is no escape.

‘Undo Fear Biases’ is an unadulterated seething miasma of heavy noise propelled by a palpating myocardial spasm of a beat, while ‘Free The Party’ is centred around an interview or some other monologue about the days of rave culture. In contrast, ‘I’m Not The’ is the soundtrack to the rave where the trip is bad, man. It’s like hearing The Prodigy and some shit shoegaze indie at the same time while your brain is exploding one lobe at a time and the fragments form small vortices as they cascade from your ears. Pleasant, it is not, and the same is true of ‘Do Or Die’, with its sonic allusions to ‘Discipline’ and ‘Whorl of Sound’, and which escalates to something akin to the detonation scenes in Threads. Total sonic annihilation, absolute obliteration. Sitting here with only a beer, my head is beginning to spin and my stomach is slowly starting to churn. This isn’t accidental: Isn’tses understand the impact of frequencies, and the way sounds interact.

Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole is by no means especially harsh as noise goes, but it is relentlessly, unyieldingly hellish in its conception and execution. It’s no criticism when I comment that this is hard work and a difficult album: it’s supposed to be. But why is the churning, shifting, reverberating discord of Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole more challenging than a screeding blast of continuous harsh noise? Everyone’s brain processes things differently, so I can only speak for myself when debating this, but it’s more often than not possible to allow waves of noise to wash over and flow across the mind, to go with the flow, as it were. Dance music is different in many ways, but by the same token, it’s easy to process a steady four-four beat, particularly when it’s the constant, consistent bass thump which defines the majority of dance music – it’s that beat, and that consistent tempo, which makes it music for dancing. You zone out the extranea, and focus on that core element. And that’s the common ground shared by dance and noise when it comes to how we process it – by zooming out and focusing on something within it. This isn’t possible with Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole. Everything about how each piece is assembled is built on continual disruption. There’s nothing to latch on to, there’s nothing consistent. Yes, there are rhythms, but they’re jarring, riven with irregularities, or what the brain will likely perceive as irregularities, and there’s so much else going on, disconnected and disjointed sounds flying in all directions, that any attempt to filter them out and focus is impossible.

Back in the late 70s, much of what Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire were doing was inspired by the tape experiments of William S. Burroughs, and the proposed methods for psychic warfare using sonic weaponry as detailed in Electronic Revolution and The Revised Boy Scout Manual. There’s a palpable sense that with Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole, Isn’tses are returning to the origins of industrial music. And what’s remarkable is that even now, it’s absolutely devastating. Complete sensory overload. A derangement of the senses.

AA

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Cor de Lux – Year of the Horse

Posted: 8 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Ipecac Recordings – 18th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Their bio tells us that ‘Cor de Lux didn’t come out of a content pipeline, a shared folder, or an algorithmic moment. They came out of a rehearsal room,’ and their Bandcamp page describes them as ‘4 friends in a Post Punk-Noise Rock band. Melodic hints and synth tones that trickle into a garage angst progressive fury.’ These two snippets give an insight into what kind of band they are, and how they operate, but don’t really give the measure of Year of the Horse, an album which goes beyond both post-punk and noise-rock or any permutational crossover of the two to render something that’s varied, embraces experimentalism, and at times is quite off the wall.

Single cut ‘The Cringe’ is exemplary, crashing in on a lolloping rhythm and blistering squall of guitar by way of a backing to a dispassionate but nevertheless urgent-sounding dual vocals from Tim Lusk and Dawn Moraga, before suddenly pulling up and following a short but meandering moment of ponderous desert rock, swerves off in a vaguely trippy prog direction, with a swirling synth and strolling synth. In contrast, ‘Ping Pong’ – not a cover of the Stereolab classic – is a slice – and at six minutes long, a very generous one – of quintessential dream-pop. A laid-back, balmy indie song with a hint of C86 whimsy, gently melodic and evocative of dappled sunlight in woodlands in early summer, it’s neither post-punk nor noise-rock, but it’s easy on the ear – until the switch that lands around the four-minute mark when it unexpectedly takes off like a rocket. And it’s here that it becomes apparent why Ipecac would be interested in them. They’re a band unconstrained by genre boundaries: not necessarily weird, but different.

AA

‘Cannibal’ takes the chiming guitar and driving bass of the UK goth sound circa 1984 and spin them with slightly spiky vocals and a mid-80s indie twist – nothing that’s immediately specific to a band, but then not entirely generic either.

‘The Western’ whips up a choppy frenzy and is perhaps one of the most overtly post-punk-meets-noise-rock songs on the album, and it drives pretty hard, before ‘Bread Bag’ serves up a slice of mathy post-rock… but that’s not quite it. But I can’t think long enough to capture my thread because there’s a sudden explosion over overdrive, and then it’s off somewhere else again. As the album progresses, the harder it becomes to situate it in a way that feels in any way meaningful – but that doesn’t mean that Year of the Horse is in any way incoherent. The more wide-ranging and eclectic the songs are, the more the sound of Cor de Lux is defined.

‘The Deli’ is simultaneously motorik and noodly: Pavement might be an obvious touchstone, but it’s more obscure acts like Moderate Rebels that come to mind, and Rosa Mota, too, and as fast as can process and much faster than I can type, we’re into another post-rock noise burst and then some more breezy, jaunty indie rock. One thing that does stand out is just how un-American they sound, at least to my ear. Year of the Horse is quirky. It’s not a common American trait. It’s nuanced, and wile it’s by no means a flippant, inconsequential work – it’s anything but – it’s threaded with a kind of knowingness, a twinkle in the eye which hints at a certain humour. But more than anything, Year of the Horse is a work of genius, in that it brings together myriad incongruous elements and doesn’t just make them gel, but amalgamates them in a way which feels entirely natural. How do they do it? Magic, alchemy, or something, I guess.

So many acts strive to make hybridity work, and so many fail, because it feels forced, self-conscious, the segments don’t flow or connect up, and it sounds awkward, jarring. Not so with Cor de Lux, and Year of the Horse keeps it succinct with just nine songs and a run time of thirty-eight minutes, the majority of the songs sitting in the three-and-a-bit-minute bracket. It’s a rare beast, this: an album that will blow your mind, but subtly. It’s crazy, but it’s packed with tunes. Truly inspired.

AA

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Photo: Olivia Howe

hubris. – White Shores

Posted: 7 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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10th September 2026

Having never felt compelled to explore Tolkien’s writing – and perhaps consequently even less compelled to watch Peter Jackson’s epic Lord of the Rings trilogy – I feel in some ways unqualified to review White Shores¸ the fifth album by Swiss post-rock band hubris. which follows four albums inspired by Greek mythology.

This is one of those albums which does require some grounding in context, not only in terms of its literary inspiration, but also the personal circumstances which prompted the shift in focus, and so I shall quote from the accompanying notes in order to avoid any misinterpretation.

In Tolkien’s legendarium, elves in spite of their immortality (a trait often coveted by humans) refer to death as the “Gift of Men.” This paradox offers a striking alternative to the Western perception of death as purely tragic. A “gift” implies something desirable, even fortunate. While Tolkien presents multiple perspectives on death throughout his works, the one that resonated most deeply with Jonathan comes from the main protagonist Frodo’s departure at the end of The Lord of the Rings: "the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.”

In the wake of his grandfather’s passing, this perspective became Jonathan’s emotional and conceptual foundation of White Shores. The album unfolds across five movements, each representing a word in a single sentence: Death. Is. Just. Another. Path.

The sentence is drawn from Gandalf’s words to Pippin in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation. It was spoken in the face of what appears to be their last moments. This phrase serves as both a moment of respite and a thematic conception.

Inevitably, fans of the books and the films – and there are many – will appreciate White Shores in ways I simply cannot, in that they will be able to identify references and revel in the details. This is clearly an album where detail is important. Comprising five movements, the album is designed to reflect Dr. Kübler-Ross’ theory on the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance – although split into six tracks, with none making any obvious reference to this, it’s not readily apparent.

The first piece, ‘death’ is a delicate, rolling work, which is expansive and feels comparatively calm, particularly for the first three minutes. Additional layers of guitar with overdriven, choppy chords arrive at this point, but the same interweaving lead part continues to drift on through, before it all dissipates into a slow-motion ambience to fade near the end. This in turn segues into ‘is’, which is textured, and builds, but does so gently and in a way which remains easy on the ear. It’s pleasant, but there’s very little grab or bite to it, and as such, it’s music that’s easy to let slip into the background.

The nine-and-a-half-minute ‘just’ is the centrepiece in every way, and with its rolling drums, and a crashing snare which cuts through the rippling guitars which lap away for the first four minutes, it’s the first composition that feels like it’s going somewhere, and offers a glimpse of emotional intensity. The same overdriven guitar sound which brought the power chords on ‘death’ crunches in to underpin an arpeggiated lead line. There’s a definite tension which pulls through the weave of this cinematic composition, but while it conjures sweeping vistas and rolling hills, there’s no rugged, mountainous crescendo, nothing which conveys any palpable sense of anguish. As the final minutes taper down through a soft piano segment, there comes a greater sense of tranquillity, and a sense of ill-ease and frustration at the passage of time, but equally a sense of musical restraint placing limitations on what could have been an impactful epic, and what could have been.

The album’s shortest piece, ‘another’ goes a bit Radiohead, before the final movement, ‘path’ arrives. Split into two parts and with an overall run time of nearly twelve minutes, it unquestionably meets the ‘epic’ criteria. Around the four minute mark, they do finally cut loose, at least a bit, but it still feels lacking somehow.

White Shores is a most listenable album, but it’s not an album that makes you want to listen to it. Instead of grappling with the fundamentals which inspired in a way which demands attention, hubris. seem more interested in keeping things safe. The instrumental work is faultless in its execution, and the compositions are considered. The quieter passages are achingly magnificent and evocative… but they sound like they’re holding back, and the peaks don’t peak much: everything sits around the middle, rather than exploring a greater dynamic range which would have so much more impact, sonically and emotionally.

White Shores is pleasant, and near-flawless on a technical level. But perhaps that’s it’s greatest failing: it places technicality and production over dynamism and impact, and while I like it well enough, I simply find myself wanting more.

AA

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