Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Yorkshire Modular Society + Peter Digby Lee – Beneath the Hanging Sky

Posted: 10 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Dragon’s Eye Recordings  – 22nd August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

A year on from my review of Yorkshire Modular Society’s Fiery Angels Fell, I find myself presented with another release of theirs on LA label Dragon’s Eye Recordings, and I can’t help but contemplate the circuitous routes by which music travels, since the release landed in my inbox courtesy of a PR based in Berlin – while no-one in my sphere of acquaintance, which includes a broad swathe of electronic artists around York and, indeed Yorkshire as it spreads in all directions – appears to have even the first inkling of the existence of YMS, despite their connection to Todmorden. But then, I often observe that what holds a lot of acts back is confinement to being ‘local’, and it’s a lack of vision, or ambition – or, occasionally, practical matters – which prevent them from reaching the national, or international, audience they deserve.

Yorkshire Modular Society clearly have an audience, and it’s not going to be found at pub gigs in their native county. This is true of most experimental artists: there’s no shortage of interest in niche work globally, but it’s thinly spread. There are places, predominantly across mainland Europe, and like Café Oto, which cater to such tastes, but they’re few and far between, which explains why most such projects tend to be more orientated towards the recording and release of their output, their audience growing nebulously, more often than not by association and word of mouth.

This release – which is the first collaborative album from Yorkshire Modular Society with Peter Digby Lee – could only ever really be a download. With ‘a suite of four ambient compositions shaped by intuition, ritual, and shared resonance’, it’s over two hours in duration, giving recent Swans a run in terms of epic.

The story goers that ‘The artists first crossed paths not through conversation, but through shared vibration — at the resonance Drone Bath in Todmorden. A quiet alignment. Some time later, Peter sent over a treasure trove of sound: samples he had recorded and collected over many years — textures, fragments, and moments suspended in time. From this archive, Dominick Schofield (Yorkshire Modular Society) began to listen, to loop, to stretch, to shape… What followed was a process of intuitive composition—letting the materials speak, revealing what had been buried in the dust and hum. This album is the result: four pieces, each unfolding from the source material with care and curiosity, a shared language spoken in tone, breath, and resonance.’

The title track is soft, gentle, sweeping, lilting, serene, floating in on picked strings, trilling woodwind and it all floats on a breeze of mellifluousness, cloud-like, its forms ever-shifting, impossible to solidify. With hints of Japanese influence and slow-swelling post-rock, it’s ambient, but also busy, layered, textured, thick, even, the musical equivalent of high humidity. It moves, endlessly, but the breezy feel is countered by a density which leaves the listener panting for air. The sound warps and wefts in such a way as to be a little uncomfortable around the region of the lower stomach after a time, like being on a boat which rocks slowly from side to side. ‘Beneath the Hanging Sky’ lays for almost thirty-six minutes, and it’s far from soothing, and as a consequence, I find myself feeling quite keyed up by the arrival of ‘Glass Lung’, another soundscape which stretches out for a full half-hour. This is more conventionally ambient, softer, more abstract, but follows a similar pattern of a slow rise and fall, an ebb and flow. Here, the application is emollient, sedative. I find myself yawning, not out of boredom, but from relaxation, something I don’t do often enough. And so it is that this slow-drifting sonic expanse takes things down a couple of notches. You may find yourself zoning out, your eyes drooping… and it’s to the good. Stimulation is very clearly not the objective here.

Third track, ‘Echo for the Unseen’, is the album’s shortest by some way, at a mere twenty-two minutes in length. It’s also darker, dense, more intense than anything which has preceded it, and as ambient as it ss, the eternal drones are reminiscent of recent both latter day Swans, and Sunn O)). The epic drone swells and surges, but mostly simmers, the droning growing more sonorous as it rolls and yawns wider as the track progress. There are harsher top-end tones drilling away in the mix as the track progresses. It makes for a long and weighty twenty-two minutes, and we feel as if we’re crawling our way to the closer, ‘Spiral of Breath’, which arrives on a heavy swirling drone that’s darkly atmospheric and big on the low-end. Instead of offering levity, ‘Spiral of Breath’ is the densest, darkest piece of the four, as well as the longest. With no lulls, no calm spells, no respite, it’s the most challenging track of the release. It’s suffocating. There is no respite. There is, however, endless depth, and eternal, purgatorial anguish.

AA

a1425387917_10

Dragged Up / Juku / Pea Sea / Chaffinch – Fulfordgate WMC, York, 8th August 2025

Posted: 9 August 2025 in Live, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Christopher Nosnibor

The third Utterly Fuzzled event boasts another strong lineup, with a mix of out of town talent, the cream of the crop from York, plus new and emerging acts. It seems wholly fitting that they’ve found Fulfordgate WMC as a home for these events. One might describe it as quaint, but it has everything you’d want for a DIY musical microscene – stage, PA, cheap beer, a little way off the beaten track but still accessible from the city centre – and some things which are harder to define. A sense of community, and quintessentially northern, unpretentious.

I recently finished reading Sleevenotes by Joe Thompson of Hey Colossus and Henry Blacker – which is, hands-down, the best book about being in a DIY / small band, and I cannot recommend it enough. So many of the observations on the DIY scene resonated with me as an attendee – and occasional performer – at venues which are rehearsal rooms, rooms upstairs or at the back of pubs, gigs where there are fifteen people in attendance, and eleven of those are the other bands. He writes of playing these spaces, some with capacities of fifty, and being grateful that anyone turns up at all, about how they all have day jobs and make music because… because, and not with any hope of making money – covering costs to pay for the petrol back is winning.

On my way out, JUKU’s Dan Gott asked if I would be doing a review, and expressed disappointment when I said I would be. He said he wanted me to just enjoy a gig. But just as for makers of music, making music is a compulsion, so is writing for me. As much as I assess and analyse, this project, or whatever it is, is ultimately a document – an ever-evolving document, a diary of sorts. Just as Hey Colossus have been ploughing their furrow for an eternity – or since 2003 – so I’ve been a heavy gig-goer for many years. I can’t remember everything. But I can document it.

Dragged Up are one of those acts who clearly aren’t in it for the money. I’ve covered a few of their releases, and on seeing that they were making the trip from Glasgow to play this humble venue was immediately buzzed. I suppose something about straddling being press and a music fan, and having a Facebook network largely made up of people in the same circles, it’s not always easy to maintain perspective when it comes to a band’s status. There’s an element of ‘wow, are they really playing this little place?’ – and then you’re faced with the fact that any band that’s big in your world isn’t necessarily big in the wider world. It goes both ways, of course: there are bands I’ve never heard of selling out O2 venues and bigger.

The first act on the bill is so new and emerging that they didn’t even have a name until about a week before the event, and so suffice to say that Chaffinch were an entirely unknown quantity. It transpires that they’re a new permutation of Knitting Circle, a band centred around Jo and Pete Dale, who also happen to be the movers behind Utterly Fuzzled events. Tjeir set is clearly a work in progress – Jo confessed that the lyrics to one of the songs, on a sheet of paper in front of her, had only been completed that morning. But they show great potential. As my cursory notes attest, there’s ‘jangle, post-punk, angular, Band of Susans riffiness, elsewhere more 80s indie, a bit Wedding Present. Mathy dynamics. Interesting and a very promising first outing.’ It’s a fair summary that requires little expansion.

Pea Sea is a singer/songwriter whose set is a mixed bag of rearranged traditional folk songs, and quirky narrative led indie tunes, even incorporating bossa nova rhythms, and some quite nice blues, too. It’s kinda ramshackle, and inherently Scottish, and it’s entertaining enough, although I’m not sure if it’s because of or in spite of the bad puns and awkward chat and spaces between songs.

DSC02994

Pea Sea

I was already down for this the second I saw Dragged Up were coming to York, but the addition of JUKU to the bill absolutely made it. I’ve been banging on about them since their debut gig. And still, some of my mates who’d come down tonight seemed perplexed as to why they hadn’t seen them, as their brand of punk rock played hard and fast and at blistering volume absolutely blew them away. My mates should pay more attention to my reviews, I say. Suffice it to say, JUKU were fucking blistering. Naomi is kinda nonchalant but also goes hard, and there’s the constant worry as to whether the mic stand will fall over or her glasses will slip off her face (in the end, by some miracle, neither) and Dan wrings noise from his guitar with clenched tattooed fists, hunched over so low his forehead is practically scraping his strings. It’s primitive, four-chord punk cranked up to eleven, and they play so, so hard. This is a band that destroys every stage it sets foot on. They need to be on a label. They need to go national, international. Live acts don’t come better than this.

DSC03008DSC03020

Consequently, Dragged Up perhaps suffer from having to follow JUKU. They’re decent, though, and no mistake. But venturing out with their new bassist, things feel a bit tentative at times I’m too into the set to make many notes. I’ve hashed together some observations on how they’re masters of post-Fall post-Pavement ramshackle indie, and how their songs chime and crash with strolling bass and shuffling drums.

New single ‘Clachan Dubh’ lands around mid-set with its chunky, chuggy driving groove driven by thick bass and energetic drums, and they swing between succinct killer blasts and sprawling beasts led by thumping grooved and manifold swerves and detours.

It’s hard to tell if they’re not quite firing on all cylinders or if this is simply the way pf Dragged Up, and it’s likely a bit of both. But there’s no question that they simply do their thing and don’t really give a crap, and the attitude is worth all the applause and plaudits alone.

DSC03033DSC03037

Dragged Up are one of those bands who don’t even have a game to raise most of the time. They play their songs. They have some good songs, and people take notice.

It’s a tidy/messy end to a night of solid quality.

Papillon de Nuit – Frozen Charlotte

Posted: 8 August 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1

8th August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The seventh single released by the Papillon de Nuit project / collective / ensemble centred around Stephen Kennedy is perhaps the most ambitious yet. It’s clear that Kennedy, who has for a number of years, operated as a live music promoter under the guise of The Velvet Sheep, is an irrepressible creative, a restless spirit never content to do or be any one thing. In Papillon de Nuit, he’s songwriter, arranger, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, bringing to this track vocals, found-sounds, additional percussion, additional piano. And here, in just three and a half minutes, he and his collaborators have produced a song which is many things at once. They’ve also got Steve Whitfield, known for his work with The Cure and The Mission (admittedly, some of my least favourite works by The Mission, but that’s more a matter of material than production) in as producer again.

Being drawn to certain names because of songs is, I suppose, only natural: favourite songs create images and associations which in some way we use to orientate ourselves within the world, internally. And there’s no doubt that Charlotte, like Alice, is a name with special resonance to those with musical tastes which lean towards the gothier domains. That Robert Smith’s inspiration for ‘Charlotte Sometimes’ was inspired by Penelope Farmer’s haunting 1969 novel of the same title was reason enough for me to track down and read a copy of the book, and in context, the doubling / overlapping of the vocals can be seen to represent the parallel / interchangeable lives of the lead character.

‘Frozen Charlotte’ is also a work of a historical persuasion, described as ‘a dark Victorian morality tale about the folly of vanity.’ And it is, indeed, dark. It arrives with a sharp squeal of feedback and the crunch of feet on gravel, before a low but springy – classic goth – and ultimately stealthy bass strolls in and completely shapes the song’s framework. Rolling drums – a minimal, Mo Tucker style, which adds to the stark, brooding atmosphere. The addition of cello and piano builds things further ahead of the arrival of the vocals. It is all about the intro and the build here, but Kennedy gives a magnificent performance. It’s not the overdone booming baritone goth cliché, but a rich, soulful delivery which imbues the lyrics with meaning, in what I can perhaps best describe as a ‘literary’ sense. What I mean by this that while studying English literature at university, some lecturers had the ability to get you completely hooked in a writer because the way they delivered the quotations had impact: they felt the words, and could convey them in a way that opened your eyes to the fact the word on the page contained so much more depth when orated with passion.

The chorus here is understated, the emphasis very much on the dark atmosphere, although the vocal melody does still provide a clear and vital hook, and the ultimate result is alchemical.

AA

AA

Frozen Charlotte artwork

Gintas K – Intense Beauty

Posted: 4 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

28th July 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. Certainly, it requires a fairly specific subjective standpoint to hear the beauty in a bleeping rush of effervescent electronic froth, but there is something in it – and yes, it is intense – to the extend that it’s like a fizzing chemical reaction, like vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, exploding in your brain. And it’s quite a high.

Intense Beauty finds Gintas Kraptavičius (Gintas K) in his most common setting, with the album being fully improvised, ‘recorded live, using computer, midi keyboard & controller’. Recorded in June 2025 of this year, by the power of the Internet and micro-labels, it was released as a limited cassette on Tokyo-based label Static Disc just weeks later on 10th July, before also becoming available on Gintas’ own Bandcamp page.

As is common to many of Gintas K’s works recorded in this manner and with this – seemingly unique setup, there’s something playful, even joyful and uplifting about the sound. It is chaotic, but it’s also carefree, and it’s not remotely dark or heavy: there’s nothing harsh or abrasive to be heard here. ‘intense’ is skittery and skittish, off-key electric piano thumps and stomps erratically, glitching in and out throughout, while cellular sounds fly around all over like plankton in a storm before gradually slowing, tinkling and flitting at a more sedate pace until grinding to a halt.

‘harmony’ isn’t particularly harmonious, instead merging static and drone with groaning whirrs before yielding to discordant bent notes playing across one another. One thing that is a constant throughout Intense Beauty is a sense of movement. There isn’t a moment is stillness, as sounds and ideas flit from one place to another with no discernible flow, and th9is is nowhere more apparent than on the shifting sonic collage of ‘gal bet’. It’s hyperactive, and should be exhausting, but the sheer energy is contagious and uplifting.

Watching the accompanying video of Gintas recording for the album is illuminating, particularly the vigour with which he plays, simultaneously striking keys on the keyboard with hands, wrists, forearm, seemingly at random, but with remarkable speed and dexterity, while cranking knobs hard and fast: the camera and table shake under his frenetic kinetic activity. K isn’t one of those who creates sound simply by pushing buttons here and there: this is a full-body physical performance. This, too, is an example of intensity, and the artist pours it into the act of artistic creation.

There are a lot of experimental electronic artists around, but no-one else sounds quite like Gintas K.

AA

AA

a3925363230_10

fåntratt – skitstövel

Posted: 3 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

Dret Skivor – 1st August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Having debated the merits – or otherwise – of the extensive, expansive, hyperdetailed press release, and having felt a certain trepidation when tackling a work rooted deeply in weighty postmodern theory beyond the peripheries of my personal field of – perhaps rather specialist – expertise, I find myself on altogether more confident footing here. The latest release on Dret Skivor, a Swedish label devoted primarily to drone, noise, (darker) ambient, and general weird shit, offers up two longform tracks, each corresponding with a side of a C30 cassette, accompanied by precisely zero information, beyond the fact that it was ‘Mastered by Dave Procter at Svinig Studio, Skoghall.’ Hell, it doesn’t even have any capital letters.

I’m at ease with this. When it comes to abstract / instrumental / experimental works, I don’t need to know who the musician or musicians are, what gear they’re using, and unless there’s something quite specific which inspired or motivated the work on a theoretical or personal level, I generally prefer to allow the music to speak for itself, and for my mind to do the work of interpreting how the sounds affect me.

The tracks are, in fact, both exactly 14:27 in duration – which is oddly precise. It’s the only thing which does seem to be precise, but not odd, about the compositions – such as they are, with ‘my crustacean brother’ manifesting as a huge, churning wall of full-spectrum noise. It’s the mod-range that fills the space and fills your ears and your head as it barrels from the speakers, a dense, relentless rumble like a mangled engine – but there’s low end that hits around the gut and enough treble to add an extra level of pain. Sometimes, it sounds as if there may be fucked-up vocals gnarled up in the machine, distorted, fractured, and buried in the mix – but it’s as likely that it’s my ears deceiving me as my brain tries to subconsciously find form in the formless. If you mic’ed up a tractor engine and then ran the recording through half a dozen distortion pedals, it would likely sound like this. The sound feels mechanical, analogue: rather than harsh in the way pure digital often is, this is the sound of moving parts, or rusted metal flapping as it slowly disintegrates. Around eleven minutes in, it seems to gain in volume and intensity, but this again could be an auditory hallucination. Yes, this is how methods of torture involving sonic elements, the likes of which were trialled as part of MK Ultra, work. It’s not sensory deprivation, but complete sensory overload. When it stops, the silence feels wrong.

‘gås!’ is a fraction less dense, favouring treble a little more, and also containing more detail, or at least more clarity, which allows the detail to be heard. There is a distinct throb which creates a rhythm – one which glitches and stutters as it snarls and roars. It’s harsh, pure, brutal sonic punishment, taking the Merzbow template and… replicating it perfectly, not just sonically, but in the spirit of inflicting damage, both physical and psychological, on the listener, knowing that the whole thing is insane, beyond excessive, testing the patience as well as the stamina over the course of almost a quarter of an hour. It’s nasty, and I love it. You (probably) won’t like it, sugar…

AA

a0540901673_10

Haarvöl – Horizons of Suspended Zones

Posted: 2 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
1

Crónica – 1st July 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Only yesterday, I expended considerable contemplation – and verbiage – on the matter of press releases, and the level of detail they contain nowadays compared to the old A4 1-sheet – which sometimes contained just a few lines under the heading and the logo. It’s wasn’t really a complaint, as much as an observation, although there is, sometimes at least, a sense that most of the reviewer’s job has been done for them in advance.

However, there are other ways in which the detailed press release can prove to be a double-edged sword, and this is one of them. And so it is that I’m plunging into unknown territory with this release. Not in that I haven’t spent many hours immersed in ambient recordings, and not that I’m unaccustomed to postmodernism, in theory and its application, how it applies to the world as we experience it. But sometimes, a work is so inspired and invested in something specific, specialised, and conceptually-focused that it feels like I’m not fully qualified to approach it, much less critique it.

Before I do dive in, this is the context. Are you sitting comfortably?

At the end of the 1990s, Hakim Bey wrote a book about the then-emerging possibility of the virtual. With the lucidity for which he is known, he recognized at the time that the virtual was nothing more than a new avenue for the expansion of capitalism. He introduced the concept of temporary autonomous zones as a kind of Foucauldian heterotopia — spaces that existed only for as long as they could evade capture. Today’s reality reflects a radical intensification of what Bey was referring to in the 1990s. Temporalities have changed completely. We are now almost overwhelmed by an incessant pursuit of instantaneity, accompanied by the mounting impatience it inevitably breeds.

The temporalities of sound, therefore, are naturally different too.

Time must be disobeyed.

The sounds of our autonomous zones aim to be the opposite of what technology offers us today: fascination and dazzle through excess — more buttons, more effects, louder… AI. These are bare sounds, defiantly rejecting the paraphernalia that surrounds them. They are simple yet perhaps carry the greatest complexity of all: turning their backs on spectacle and presenting themselves as they are: unmasked.

This work is the outcome of a series of studio sessions recorded during the summer and autumn of 2024. We followed an exploratory approach grounded in clearly defined premises and a pre-conceived compositional outline shaped by three key notions that are central to us: repetition, silence, and duration.

There is no post-production manipulation. What you hear is what was played. Inactual by conviction, this represents an utterly contemporary mode of being. These are sounds that seek to endure as a resistant, autonomous possibility — even if only fleetingly. Suspended between silences. Those marvelous, singular, sounds that Cage taught us to hear. They are there to last for as long as they can.

The title Horizons of Suspended Zones is inspired by a book from Hakin Bey.

I find that I’m sitting rather less comfortably now than I was a few minutes ago. I’ve never read a word by Hakim Bay. I’m aware of him and his work, but have never got as far as investigating. Therefore, I’m deficient. And so, in my head-swimming uncertainty, bewilderment and state of flaking confidence, I arrive at this fifty-five minute articulation of time-challenging theory/practice feeling weak, overwhelmed. Where do I even begin? Can I relate it to my own lived experience?

I struggle, because it doesn’t communicate that postmodern overlapping and disruption of the time / space continuum in a way that I can relate. For me, cut-ups and collage works convey how I experience life: the eternal babble of chatter and time experienced in terms of simultaneity rather than in linear terms.

‘Zone One [stay]’ is a drifting, abstract, ethereal ambient work, and while over ten and a half minutes in duration, the time simply evaporates. It drifts into ‘Zone Out [unfamiliarly cosy]’, which is appropriately titled, and I find that I do as instructed, as the slow chimes and resonant tones hover in the air like bated breath. There’s a sense of suspense, that something will happen… but of course, it doesn’t.

For all of the detail around the concept, there’s very little around the construction by comparison. But perhaps a bell chime is simply a bell chime and an echo simply an echo. But those echoes matter. I find myself wading through the echoes of time, how it passes, how we lose time. How did we get to August? How did we – my friends and I – get so old? How, how, how is the world so utterly fucked up right now?

Each extended abstraction turns into the next, and so ‘Zone Zero [nameless]’ arrives unushered, unannounced, and unnoticed. There are whispers, the sound of the wind through rushes, and there’s something dark in the atmosphere. It’s only on returning to this after some time to reflect that I come to note the squared brackets in the titles. It’s an unusual application of this punctuation, which is more commonly found in academic work, and which I assume isn’t accidental – but why?

Anyone who’s read Beckett will know how painful and challenging, and, above all, how his work can be, and so ‘Zone Lessness [with Beckett]’ certainly reflects the emptiness of many of Becket’s works – the sprawling nothing where there are no events, no… nothing, and how life itself bypasses us as we wait. Life, indeed, it what happens while we’re making plans. It has a painful habit of passing us by. Life is not the Instagram shots or ‘making memories’ moments. It’s the trip to the supermarket, it’s endlessly checking your bank balance, it’s the dayjob and the cooking and washing up. It’s the dead moments that count for nothing. Those moments occupy the majority of time. And on this track, a low laser drone slowly undulates throughout, and over time, fades in and out, along with incidentals which allude to lighter shades, and ultimately, the nine minutes it occupies simply slip away.

‘Zone In [landscape]’ is sparse but dense, moody and atmospheric in its rumbling minimalism, and the last cut, ‘Zone Warming [hidden]’ chimes and echoes, bells ringing out into endless silence, without response, before tapering contrails of sound slowly and subtly weave their ways in and out. There are spells of silence, and the silence casts spells, and the spells float upwards in suspension.

Perhaps an appreciation of the context and theoretical framing of Horizons of Suspended Zones is advantageous, but it remains accessible as an abstract ambient work without that deeper comprehension. And it still feels as if there’s a sadness which permeates the entirety of the album. It’s by no means heavy, but it does have an emotional weight that drags the listener in, and then drags the listener down. And then leaves them… simply nowhere. Caught with their thoughts, and nowhere to take them.

AA

AA

a4170718585_10

MOTHS – Septem

Posted: 1 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

1st August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The other day, while riffling through my record collection, I found a few LPs and 12” I had quite forgotten owning, including a promo copy of ‘Chance’ by Red Lorry Yellow Lorry. Stapled to the plain black die-cut cover of this white-label record with the title hand-written in biro, is a press release which simply reads ‘I know this is what you’ve all been waiting for….. Yep. The new Red Lorry Yellow Lorry single It’s called “Chance” and as usual it’s on Red Rhino Records. It’s very good’ and is signed ‘Yours condescendingly’.

You just don’t get press releases like that any more – especially not typed in all block caps and photocopied.

I appreciate the effort that goes into a good press release, and a solid band bio, because it does help me as a reviewer get a sense of context, of what a band’s about, what an album’s about. But the counterpoint to that is that there’s so much detail being spoon-fed, there’s less room for creative interpretation. The fact of the music industry has changed radically since the 80s and 90s, the days of the weekly inkies, the time before the Internet.

There simply was no way of ‘doing research’. And writers had tight deadlines. And so they just riffed to fill the column inches. Facts were hazy, critiques were often based on first impressions and knocked out in an hour after an extended liquid lunch. Names, dates, titles weren’t always accurate. And fans scoffed at the errors – and still do when clippings are posted online – but that was the nature of the beast.

Now, misspell the name of the bassist or give the wrong year for their debut EP, or somesuch and PRs, labels, and bands are onto you straight away asking for corrections. In a competitive market – I often report that on average, I receive around fifty submissions a day – simply getting coverage is a massive feat. This is certainly not to say that those times past were better – simply different, and I simply navigate my way to this release via this route to demonstrate the ways in which things have changed in the years since I started out writing about music in the 90s. It’s also altogether rarer now to find negative reviews, and while a part of this is due to the overwhelming amount of music being released meaning that reviewers are generally more inclined to spend what time they have promoting music they like, there’s also a certain element of fear of there being a social media pile-on, or having their supply of gratis music cut off. But artists and their labels and PR really need to accept that they’re not going to please all the people all the time, and sometimes, it’s necessary to call out an act with dodgy politics or whatever, or to simply call a turd a turd.

Anyway. Before I’ve even hit play, I’ve learned that this release by MOTHS is ‘a visceral journey through the Seven Deadly Sins, with each track embodying a facet of indulgence, obsession, and self-destruction — from the corrosive jealousy of “Envy” to the insatiable hunger of “Gluttony” and the rage of “Wrath”. The album plunges listeners into a dark, immersive experience where desire spirals into chaos’, and that ‘Diving deeper into heavier territory, MOTHS fuse elements of death and black metal with their signature blend of progressive, psychedelic, doom, and stoner metal, crafting a sound that’s both aggressive and atmospheric. With every step forward, MOTHS continues to explore new sounds and challenge genre boundaries, proving that music has no limits when driven by passion and innovation.’

I feel as if my work is already done. I can pour myself a large vodka and kick back, right? Well, I could. But that’s not my style. At least not the kicking back part. Large vodka in hand, I brace myself for the sonic onslaught… to be faced with some tinkering banjo or acoustic guitar giving country licks that are pure blues / Americana. And it gets jazzier and groovier as it goes on. What the fuck is this?

‘Sloth’ slides into ‘Envy’, a slippery, sultry alt-rock cut where the vocals are bathed in reverb, and the lo-fi production belies the fact that this is a vaguely jazzed-up take on grungy emo, at times coming on like Paramore recorded on a 90s cassette four-track. The haziness of the recording is actually something of a positive, but these are songs which require a slicker, fuller production. As a consequence, these takes sound more like demos than final versions.

The murky rawness works better on ‘Greed’, which brings rabid, raw-throated, growling black metal elements to the vaguely gothic metal compositions. It segues into ‘Pride’ which goes full-throttle skin-peeling abrasion before suddenly going commercial rock with fancy licks at the midpoint. I like ZZ Top, as it happens. I just wasn’t expecting a riff from Eliminator here.

‘Pride’ does take things full heavy, a prime slice of sludgy doom, and ‘Lust’ is, without question, a slugging slab of doominess, with some fancy fretwork thrown in on top. There’s certainly a lot going on here, and most of it works. MOTHS certainly bring some megalithic riffs and a lot of fire to an album that may be unpredictable in places, but is, overall, solid and with no shortfall of gutsy, guitar-driven heft.

AA

MOTHS - cover

Trudger – Void Quest

Posted: 31 July 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Floodlit Recordings – 29th August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Having discovered Swans in my teens – it was the late 80s and a friend introduced me to their most recent album, Children of God, which swiftly led me, via weekends spent at record fairs, to Cop, whenever I’m forewarned that a new release is ‘heavy’, I invariably find myself thinking ‘really? How heavy? Bring it on!’

I read – am forewarned – that Trudger’s ‘new album Void Quest… released on August 29th through Floodlit Recordings, a new label venture from guitarist of Pijn and Leeched… [is]

absolutely savage’. I saw Pijn live a few years ago and they slayed, so I consider this a positive in advance. And there’s no question that Void Quest is something of a monster. Arriving a full eleven years on from their debut, it’s as if they’ve distilled all the rage and festering fury of a decade into the nine songs on offer here.

The first track, ‘Merciless Sabre’ is fast and furious, but arrives with a surplus of fast licks and an element of black metal fretwankery that, in my ears, diminishes its weight despite the rampant, rabid ravings of the vocals, the tempestuous blast of the instruments combined to create a thunderous wall of noise.

Things settle to a more organised shape with ‘Occupied Frequency’, where math and metal merge. It seems as if they flung everything into the blender to grab the attention at the start and possibly overdid it, as things aren’t quite as wildly ostentatious thereafter. Sure, the guitar work is fast and furious, and it’s still showy and perhaps a bit over-the-top, but they layer down some magnificent textures and judicious detail amidst the relentless sonic assault, the eardrum-bursting blast.

‘God Rest’ is slower, heavier, and utterly devastating in its driving density. ‘Battle Hardened’ is simply out-and-out brutal, a song that slays all comers. Think you’re hard? Wait for this. This is shit that will slice your head off and ruin your internal organs.

Void Quest is heavy, but what makes it really heavy is its relentlessness. Thirty-five minutes or so of blasting ferocious noise, it leaves you feeling like you’ve just been given a good kicking. I wouldn’t recommend taking a kicking, but I would recommend this.

AA

a2040788392_10

Bruxist – Bruxist

Posted: 30 July 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Gutter Prince Cabal – 19th July 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

As far as I can recall, I first encountered the word ‘bruxism’ in the early 90s, through the back-print of my Therapy? ‘Teethgrinder’ T-shirt. I fucking loved Therapy?, and the shirt was one of my favourites. I regret selling it, but I needed to eat, and a stretched and faded T-shirt that would pay for a whole week’s worth of groceries was an obvious choice for bunging on eBay.

I’ve since come to realise that I, myself, am prone to extreme jaw clenching during times of anxiety, and while listening to particularly intense music. Which brings us to the eponymous debut by Bruxist. As the pitch outlines, ‘Rooted in crust punk fury and d-beat momentum, Bruxist crashes through the gates with chainsaw Stockholm-style death metal, grimy rock’n’roll swagger, and even shards of frostbitten black metal. It’s a high-speed collision of sound: filthy, feral, and dangerously alive.’

And it is. The album offer seven relentless, pummelling tracks, half of which are under – or only just over – three minutes in duration. ‘Inversion’ doesn’t so much launch the album as kick down and throw in a massive stash of Molotov cocktails before starting a riot as the building burns. It’s frenzied and filthy, the guitars are a murky blur, the drumming is frenetic and the vocals a gargling raw.

‘Six Feet Headfirst’ staggers and swaggers, brawling, snarling and rabid, before ‘Black Sheep Discipline’ slams in at a hundred and fifty miles an hour.

The album is relentless in its pace and brutality. There’s a moment in the closer, ‘Divide and Conquer’, where it breaks down to just the bass for a few bars. It’s the grungiest, gnarliest noise imaginable. Then everything piles back in and nothing short of absolute devastation ensues in that final minute.

Bruxist is done in around twenty-three minutes – and in that time the band delivers something that’s almost unspeakably savage. It’s a proper, full-throttle, furious jaw-clencher, that’s for sure.

AA

a1744781853_10

Headless Kross / Pound Land – Headless Kross / Pound Land

Posted: 29 July 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

Cruel Nature Records – 12th September 2025

Cruel Nature have a solid track record for putting out some storming releases by bands who you could reasonably describe as ‘difficult’ but also ‘cult’. This is pretty much Pound Land in a nutshell. As for Headless Kross… The Glaswegian act’s Bandcamp describes them as ‘the ideal soundtrack to the slow unravelling of the world as we understand it. Their sound has been described as psychedelic doom – monolithic riffs, rumbling bass and primal beats lurk behind waves of effects, all strangely underpinned by ethereal shrieks of half heard words, possibly real, possibly not.’ That their name is – I’m assuming – an allusion to the fourteenth album by Black Sabbath offers something of a clue. The fact the label has pushed the boat out for an advance-order lathe-cut vinyl version of this release speaks for itself. At least in relative terms, this is a big ‘un.

Having toured together, they decided to put out a split release, and it’s pleasing to see these making a comeback – something Cruel Nature in particular has been spearheading. I’ve sung the praises of the split release on a number of occasions in recent months, and this is a perfect example of why they’re great: here, we essentially have an EP apiece from two quality acts who are – and this is significant, and absolutely key – contrasting and complimentary.

As the album’s accompanying notes are keen to point out, ‘The result isn’t your standard split album – it’s a sonic blood pact, equal parts homage and havoc’, going on to explain that ‘They also agreed to trade riffs and cover a song by each other: Pound Land tear into ‘Signed In Blood’ and Headless Kross unleash a doom-laden crushing riff-tastic seismic version of ‘Pathogen’.

Headless Kross are up first with their trio of ball-busting, sludge-trudge riffery. ‘The Thing Invisible’ is six minutes of thick, treacle-like riff-wading, with some extravagant solo work before the snarling, mania-driven vocals join the fray a couple of minutes in. Their take on ‘Pathogen’ is nothing short of devastating: a rabid roar tears over a thunderous trudge, and hints at how Pound Land would sound if they could be arsed to be angry or metal. The solo that breaks out toward the end is brief, but wild.

‘The Necessity of 3 Conditions’ is eight and a half minutes of relentless brutality. A Suicide-like throb pulsates: the drumming is almost buried in the dingy low-end mess and the vocals rip bling rage across the whole dingy grind.’

If you’re wanting some light relief, you’re not going to find it with Pound Land’s five tracks: operating here as a six-piece unit with Jase Kester back in the lineup and bringing layers of abrasion, they set their stall up straight away with the anti-capitalist, bollock-to-billionaires agenda served up neatly with their first track, ‘Fuck Off to Mars.’ It’s gnarly, twisted, dark, and despite the low-slung, dingy bass and rabid, reverby vocals which evoke Fudge Tunnel’s first album, there’s something about it that drags the listener in by the throat.

‘I See Crime’ is messy, dirty, but works, although I’m not sure if it’s because of or in spite of the angular contradictions of honking horns ad grimy guitars with a nasty low-end attack.

Nothing about this release is accessible: it’s low, slow, riffy, hard, heavy. Very heavy. Hypnotically heavy. It’s all the riffs, and is something special. Very special. Get this, now.

AA

a3551559418_10

Older Entries
Newer Entries