Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Hellripper – Coronach

Posted: 3 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Century Media – 27th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Pentagram-shaped goat heads adorn Hellripper’s website and Bandcamp. “All hail the goat” is a band slogan of sorts, and is emblazoned on the body of the compact disc, which depicts a goat in an approximation of a lion rampant stance, thus combining James McBain’s strongly Scottish identity (the album comes in ‘Wild Thistle’ pink, ‘Saltaire’ blue, ;’Highland Mist’ grey and ‘Black Cuillin’ vinyl editions’ and Baphomet, adopted as something of a mascot within the black metal community since the dawn of the genre with Venom’s Black Metal in 1982, and Bathory’s genre-defining eponymous debut in ’84. there’s a giant goat forged from mist and cloud on the moody, mountainous cover art, too.

The ‘one-man black/speed metal band formed by Scottish musician James McBain in 2014’ has been crowned ‘Scotland’s King of the arcane mosh’ by Metal Hammer magazine, with a style which is very much rooted in 80s black metal, and, as the Hellripper website states, ‘heavily inspired by witchcraft and the supernatural, Hellripper is also deeply rooted in its Scottish origins, using the landscape and historical events as a backdrop for its lyrics and imagery’.

Coronach is Hellripper’s fourth full-length album, and features eight riff-ripping songs with a total run time of forty-four solo-centric minutes. The instant ‘Hunderprest’ powers in at a hundred miles an hour, McBain is straight in with the flamboyant fretwork, and some of it is just wildly excessive. ‘Less is more’ is not a motto Hellripper abide by. But the riffs themselves are killer, and she snarling, rasping vocals may be of the genre, but add to the gnarliness of the dark whirlwinds which blast through each and every song. The pace is relentlessly fast and furious and the style cohesive throughout.

That said, as much as I say that this is ‘of the genre’, Coronach does show ambition and awareness when it comes to composition and arrangement: ‘The Art of Resurrection’ starts with a delicate, atmospheric piano passage, while the title track includes Sir Walter Scott’s poem of the same title (Scott was Scottish) and bagpipes (of course).

‘Baobhan Sith (Waltz of the Damned)’, the first of the album’s two bona fide epics, with a span of six and a half minutes, rounds of the first half, and with the fancy fretwork reined in (a bit, at least) in favour of driving riffery, it’s a powerful, pounding beast of a tune, while the title track, which draws the curtain on the album, is a towering, monumental nine-minute monster which goes all-out anthemic and which flies the flag of tartan black metal with pride.

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Mass Hallucination – Mass Hallucination (EP)

Posted: 2 May 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Makeshift Swahili – 11th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Leeds’ Mass Hallunication’s thing is short, fast, noisy hardcore noise. This eponymous three-track EP is their debut release proper, following a digital-only self-released demo, which clearly laid the groundwork and set the template for this (right down to the fact that the three songs, despite being different songs, have the same durations of 1:19, 0:56, and 1:12, which is a remarkable coincidence).

And so it is that Mass Hallucination clocks in with a total run time of three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, and while it would be misleading to say that it’s more polished than the demo, the sound quality and the mix is better. Beyond that, this is savage, brutal, raw, rage triple-distilled and bottled fresh, rough and unaged at 100% proof.

‘Lacerated’ raises the curtain in a wail of feedback and a bowel-bothering bass which strolls in tentatively, before everything goes off in a flurry of unbridled violence. Centred around a cyclical riff, it’s a dirty gnarly assault delivered with a skin-shredding ferocity. Each track starts and ends in screeds of feedback, and the whole EP runs as a continuous piece, segued by the scream, the songs themselves blasting out in frenetic fits.

The lyrics are chewed, gargled, and spat, the words themselves lost in translation but the sentiments as clear as anything, everything coalescing to conjure a purgatorial purging, everything louder than everything else, a relentless roar of the most primal anger. Ugly and uncompromising, Mass Hallucination is pure catharsis, and a definitive statement.

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Trowser Carrier + Fern – Helping Old Ladies Cross The Road

Posted: 1 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 1st May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Trowser Carrier – formerly of Leeds and now of Värmland, Sweden – is a genre unto himself, being, to my knowledge the sole exponent of polite harsh noise on the planet. And if that seems like an oxymoron, that’s entirely the point: 2013’s A Flower for My Hoonoo (reissued in expanded form in 2023) offered up musings on cups of tea and tablecloths and all manner of English manners against backdrops of raw, skull-shattering abrasive noise.

For this release (I won’t suggest, as music journos so often do, that it’s long-awaited, as I doubt more than five people have noticed the time between Trowser Carrier releases), TC has paired up with fellow Värmland resident Fern (whose error was released by Dret Skivor a couple of years ago).

The compositions are considerably longer than on the previous releases by either artist, with Helping Old Ladies Cross The Road containing four new compositions, each four to nine minutes in length, plus a thirteen-minute remix courtesy of horse funeral.

It’s the title track which lifts the curtain on this characteristically quirky set, and it seems that Fern’s input has tempered the harsh noise of Trowser Carrier, replacing blanket distortion and abrasion with muffled, exploratory, experimental electronica, which swims casually between space-age weirdness, semi-ambient Krautrock, and sci-fi drones reminiscent of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. TC’s vocals are low in the mix and masked and mangled by distortion and a host of other effects, barely discernible and wholly indecipherable amidst layers of reverb and tremolo. It all sound quite polite and considerate in the delivery, though.

‘Lovely show pillows’ is a work of dank, dark ambience which is unnerving, unsettling. The lyrics are completely beyond unravelling, the voice serving more as another instrument in the slow swirl of sound, but the title speaks for itself, as is also the case on ‘Nearly clean? No really clean!’ a slow drift of cloudlike ambience with submerged vocals which likely references a TV advert from the 80s or perhaps early 90s, the specifics of which elude me. It sounds like a disjointed message beaming in via satellite from a space mission circa 1970, crackling through space and time against a backdrop of whale song. Maybe I need to clean my ears: perhaps they’re only nearly clean. But then a barrage of noise like a thunder storm breaking hits with the arrival of ‘The smell of a lawn at dawn’. This is, of course, peak absurdism, and precisely what one would expect from the label, and in particular Trowser Carrier, whose objective is essentially to take the piss out of harsh noise and power electronics and industrial ambient and all the rest, while exploiting the form with a commendable aptitude.

Horse funeral’s remix of ‘TC + Fern’ appears to meld down the album in its entirety to a single seething morass of undifferentiated slow-moving sonic gloop. Here, any vocals are boiled down and simmered to mere bubbles in a broiling broth, and the track eventually evaporates to nothing.

What to make of this? Well, it’s not designed to meet conventional musical standards. Quite the opposite, in fact. But Helping Old Ladies Cross The Road sees Trowser Carrier + Fern belongs to a territory all of its own, dismantling the tropes and forms of the genres to which the album belongs. It would be commercial suicide if commercial potential was an issue. As it is, it’s simply a magnificent example of obstinate perversity – and good noise.

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Celer – Capri (Remastered Deluxe Edition)

Posted: 30 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Two Acorns – 15th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Remastered reissues can be more than simply an event for collectors, and aren’t always an act of exploitation on the part of the label or the band. In some instances, such as this, they afford the opportunity for a work to be released as was initially conceived, or otherwise tweaked to iron out imperfections which have rankled for years. And they also provide an opportunity to reflect and reassess – for both the artist and the listener. This is also true in this instance, particularly for me in my capacity as listener. As such, it’s worth sharing from the accompanying note:

‘Originally released in 2009, Capri is a concept album composed of fragmented vignettes, lost minutes and scenes from an idyllic imagining. A collection of brief moments, suspended shimmers, and frail settings, Capri was never meant to be more than its own thin veneer; a naked and subtle wash of saturated and semi-transparent colors, rolling as gently as ocean waves against rocky beaches, of fading afternoon sunlight, of momentary experience. Peaceful yet isolated, quiet yet collapsing, they are fading moments without definite borders, directions, or conclusion.

‘Remastered by Stephan Mathieu from the original tapes, and expanded to include the complete recordings excluded from the 2009 CD edition, this collection is finally present in its complete form in the deluxe edition as a black vinyl 3xLP, and 2CD. All music by Danielle Baquet and Will Long, 2007-2008.’

Presumably for reasons of length, the original release featured truncated versions of the tracks. Given the fleeting, fragmentary nature of the compositions, a piece cut here and there was likely deemed reasonable and barely noticeable, a fair trade for keeping the album down to a single CD (released in a limited edition of 400) back in 2009. It was one of the first Celer albums to be released on a label, after all, after Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long (who would leave a short while later) had spent the first years of their career doing everything the DIY way and producing physical releases by hand. So this is the restoration the album as intended some seventeen years ago.

My first encounter with Celer was in 2014, and at the time, the minimal nature of their ambient forms only had limited appeal, and my reviews, while positive, were brief, partly because I was knocking out up to half a dozen short reviews a day, and partly because I didn’t find there was much to say about albums which contained, to my ear as it was, not a lot of sound. And this, then, is the re-evaluation, the reflection, the reassessment – and the admission that not only has my palette expanded over the years, and I’ve become more accommodating, more amenable to different forms, but that I was perhaps not capable of listening so closely, not as attenuated to nuance and detail twenty-two years ago as I am now. That doesn’t mean my hearing’s improved (because that’s highly unlikely) or my attention is greater (it really isn’t: lockdown and worsening anxiety in the subsequent years have had a substantially detrimental impact there), but perhaps because of these things, in addition to an evolving appreciation through exposure, I’ve found that concentrating on musical works of a sparser nature can be quite therapeutic.

‘Falling in Trickles’, one of the longer pieces on the new edition, at three and three quarter minutes, was omitted from the original release, as were ‘Red Elements’ (5:40) and ‘I Slow for Love’ (2:50). And it’s here that it becomes apparent just how cropped down the 2009 release of Capri really was, with twenty-nine track, compared to the thirty-six of the new edition.

Given the nature of the material, the question of precisely how much impact the cuts made to the overall listening experience is debatable: as with so many Celer releases, Capri is abstract and nebulous, more about the overall experience than specifics. There’s no ‘hey, here comes a good bit’ nudge moment. The fact is, there are no ‘moments’ to be found here, just a succession of vaporous drifts, textures and tones which resonate against one another to create subtle shifts in atmosphere. ‘Bracelets Passed To Spanish Hands’ brings piano to the fore, but the sound is still in soft-focus, and at a minute and a half long, it feels more like a dream, fleeting, ephemeral, than anything – and this is in many ways a fair summary of the album as a whole. On the original edit, only ‘Lint White’ (at an expansive, ponderous seven and a half minutes) surpassed the four-and-a-half minute mark, with most pieces rising up and fading away after just a couple of minutes, and the fact that each piece is distinct and separate instead of one drifting or melting into the next creates more of a sense of a sketchbook – in this case, a huge portfolio of sketches, incomplete, in progress… but then, so often the finished work polishes away the essence of that sketch. Nothing about Celer suggests an immediacy which might be diminished through the expansion of the ideas presented, and yet… and yet. Listening to the drifting fragments, many of which are barely two minutes in length, there’s a sense of… something incomplete, like a dream or a thought that slips from your mind in an instant.

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The Family Men – Co/de/termination

Posted: 29 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Welfare Sounds & Records – 8th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The Family Men sound like a bunch of nice, respectable, friendly fellows who espouse upstanding, moral values… in name, that is. Musically, they describe what they do as ‘Total Harmful Sound’, and following the release of their debut No Sound Forever in 2024, their bio records that ‘the band have toured extensively across Sweden and beyond, steadily building a reputation as one of the most intense and uncompromising live acts on the circuit. That relentless momentum feeds directly into Co/de/termination, a natural yet sharper continuation of their sonic evolution.’

They go on to add, ‘Pushing both intensity and precision to new extremes, the album refines the band’s sound into something tighter, heavier, and more deliberate than before. Urgent yet controlled, abrasive yet purposeful, Co/de/termination stands as a focused and uncompromising statement’. It’s certainly a bit more accessible, a bit cleaner, than its predecessor, but then, most records are.

‘Calamity’ arrives in a swirl of noise, the repetitive motifs of grunge – but also in some respects reminiscent of Pitchshifter after the change from being Pitch Shifter – with metallic guitars set to stun, and percussion pumping hard – while the raw, ragged vocals are more rooted in hardcore. And it all blasts in amidst a noise-rock tumult that bucks and blisters, acid house bleeps suddenly submerged in a tidal wave of guitar and driving bass. ‘Scanner’ and ‘Luxury’, too, belong in part to the Nu-metal revival, while clearly retaining roots in industrial and noise rock, and it makes for a pretty potent (and angry-sounding) cocktail.

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In places – ‘AOR’, and ‘Solving the Light Issue’ for example – they invite comparisons to early Revolting Cocks, colliding electro and industrial strength guitar atop some infectious – and really quite danceable – bass grooves and shouty vocals. The latter of these, in particular, boasts a particularly phat, distorted bass sound and pounding beat, and for all of the gnarliness and aggression of the sound – and Co/de/termination is an album that’s fully in-yer-face – it’s apparent that The Family Men know how to render a certain swing and introduce a level of catchiness.

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That said, elsewhere, they just go all out on the attack: ‘Heaven’ hits as a brawling scuzzfest, laden with feedback reminiscent of the most ferocious cuts on Daughters’ You Won’t Get What You Want (an album sadly sullied by subsequent revelations regarding their front man). Elsewhere still, the hypnotic, spacious ‘New Clear’ ventures towards shoegaze territory. Rather than seeming incongruous, it’s welcome, proving that it’s possible to create an album that’s focused while still having range.

It’s high-energy, high-octane stuff, and it’s certainly not tame or timid.

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Russell Haswell – Let it Go

Posted: 28 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Editions Mego – 1st May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

With absolutely no referencing of that animated Disney movie, the textual contextualisation for Russell Haswell’s latest sonic assault echoes what I’ve been saying – and writing – for some time now. I feel a small sense of elation… but equally a certain tiredness. I’m 50. And while no doubt global history is essentially a tale of innovation and destruction in equal measure, the last quarter of a century has felt truly hellish, as if the exponential pace of progress has run in parallel with an ever-accelerating desire to wipe ourselves as a species from the face of the planet.

It has been twenty-five years since the seismic events of 2001—when twin towers collapsed under terrorist attack and Coventry’s sonic insurgent Russell Haswell launched his inaugural salvo on the original Mego label with Live Salvage 1997–2000. The intervening era has delivered unrelenting turbulence: protracted wars, institutional corruption, a global pandemic, the resurgence of fascist currents, rampant media distortion, and omnipresent surveillance. For Haswell, a lifelong admirer of 1970s and 1980s dystopian cinema, the verdict is unequivocal: “Science Fiction is now!”

It’s hard to argue that the moment in which we find ourselves has all the hallmarks of every dystopian fiction ever imagined rolled into one unimaginable fusion, and that we are inching closer by the second to the end of days.

Haswell has long used sound to articulate the horrors of the 21st century, both as a solo artist and in collaboration, notably bringing additional layers of abrasion to Consumer Electronics, and while the accompanying notes detail quite extensively the equipment used, the influences, and the creative aims of Let it Go, my focus here is more on what it actually sounds like and the listening experience.

The first few seconds of the first track, ‘Exit Downwards’ are innocuous enough: a drone, nondescript, smooth – but within seconds its rent with shuddering glitches, squelches, and discordant clanks, not to mention the stammering thud of a particularly sharp kick drum. And over the course of seven minutes, it pumps and pounds blasts and bleeps like a circuit in meltdown. It’s pretty tense stuff, and descents, tension, and anxiety are recurrent themes not only in the titles, but in the formations of the compositions themselves.

‘Fall 3’ and ‘Fall 2’ follow the theme of descent, and manifest as wibbly collage works, while ‘The anxieties of our time’ is fairly straightforward in its implications and manifests as a head-swimming, dizzying panic attack, a meltdown in musical form, the crackling industrial glitch monster that is ‘Stress Testing’ functions on numerous levels. As much as the phrase relates specifically to financial, economic, and societal systems, there is also the stress test as it relates to the effects of physical activity on the heart, and, by association, it feels like an implicit hint of the stress we as individuals find ourselves subject to on a daily basis: how far can we – individually, and collectively – be pushed under the late capitalist model? At this moment in time, it seems like we’re close to finding out. And through swooshing sweeps and rippling fractures in sonic fabrics which twist and flare, Russell Haswell renders an aural replication of the overwhelming experience of life right now.

In comparison to some of Haswell’s releases, Let it Go is not particularly noisy or abrasive, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less intense. Even the ambient hums of ‘Curated narrative’ bring a hovering tension which is difficult to step away from.

Christmas is a difficult time for many, and while there’s no indication of what inspired ‘Thu 25 Dec 2025’, it buzzes and throbs for a relentless six and three quarter minutes like an angry hornet, trapped in a greenhouse which is slowly collapsing in on itself. The final track, the thirteen-minute ‘There’s always a bit of light somewhere’ seems to offer a thin ray of hope in its title, but the fine metallic scrapes and glistening edges which intertwine ominously and with no discernible form are far from comforting, and you find yourself on edge, sensing darkness visible and encroaching from all sides. Yes, There’s always a bit of light somewhere, but that somewhere isn’t here.

Let it Go is varied, exploratorily, and an artistic success, but it’s by no means the easiest listen. And for that, I say ‘good’. Embrace the challenge.

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Codex Serafini / Amon Acid / Sunbreather – Santiago’s Bar, Leeds, 26th April 2026

Posted: 27 April 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Situated in a retail arcade in Leeds city centre, Santiago’s is a hip but alternative bar (in that it’s £6+ a pint of keg, and they play Nirvana and have band posters on the walls – although they also include rather less obvious bands like OFF! and Cerebral Ballzy) downstairs, and somewhat contrastingly, a poky dive with a capacity of maybe 80, accessed via a rickety staircase and with a stage that’s barely six inches high, upstairs. Said upstairs room affords an unusual view of the streets outside through a large arched window which occupies the entire wall beside the stage. Seeing people and traffic moving around on the street below while the bands perform seems a strange juxtaposition, and with the limited lighting inside the venue, the interior starts unusually bright and grows progressively darker as the night progresses.

Sunbreather’s name may suggest something a bit hippyish, and in some respects, it’s not unrepresentative. They play doom heavily influenced by what in the 70s was heavy metal: that is to say, big Sabbath- style riffs. They play them with a certain swing, too, which is refreshing, and it’s nicely done. They close their four-song set with a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’, stripped back and heavy. The coda is played with the classic bassline at half-pace, with all the weight, and the wild guitar solo replaced by thunderous chords until the very end. It’s an inspired interpretation that works well, and isn’t out of place with the rest of the set.

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Sunbreather

Amon Acid are all about the flares and hair and lace and shades, and if the name sounds like something of a giveaway, then you’d be close enough: their thing is epic stoner doom with the deep infusion of psychedelia. The vocals are low in the mix, bathed in galactic-scale reverb and delay for good measure. The two guitars melt into one another, and while they may not be masters of innovation, they clearly know what they’re doing – and thankfully, the sound engineer has a handle on it, too. Winding up with a mammoth space rock groove, which skims out for an eternity, brings the set to a searing finale. And the longer they play, the hotter it gets. By the end of their set, we’ve all liquefied, and I find myself deliberating whether I need another £6.70 pint of am ok with the prospect of dehydrating.

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Amon Acid

While I’m deliberating, they put the fans on around the room. Meanwhile, some pissed-up cokehead cunt in an orange t-shirt who seemingly thinks he’s at a rave is going off his nut and trying to get onstage while Codex Serafini are setting up, and five minutes before they’re due on I get a sinking feeling and am hoping he’ll be leaving very soon. Mercifully, I realise around a third of the way through the set that he’d fucked off, hopefully his exuberance overtaken by a melted brain.

Codex Serafini are indeed brain-melting, after all. They’re a band I’ve been waiting to see for some time, and given the enormity of their music, the intimate nature of the venue is something of a surprise on some respects. But jazz-infused doom with a punk edge is pretty niche, and an act with albums released on Riot Season are never going to be playing anywhere huge. But this is precisely why we need small venues, and labels like Riot Season. And for all that, they definitely deserve a wider audience: when novelty acts like Angine de Poitrine are racking up millions of views, it’s apparent that the public aren’t averse to stuff that’s different or weird – in fact, they’re drawn to it. Especially when there are outfits and masks involved, as the popularity of Slipknot, Ghost, and Sleep Token (who aren’t nearly as weird as their presentation would suggest) – which means that it mostly comes down to PR. The fact of the matter is that ‘viral’ is almost never ‘organic’. And so here we have Codex Serafini, in red robes and tasselled face-masks, wrapped in Saturnian lore, merging metal, jazz, and post-punk, and this is what the music world needs right now, if only people would realise.

The first half of their ten-song set consists of material from their most recent album, Mother, Give Your Children Sanity, released last November. ‘Cause and Effect’ is an early standout for its deft, vaguely disco-hued drumming and almost funk-tinged groove. Matt McCartney’s bass doubles as rhythm guitar, the incidental melodies and atmosphere brought by the sax. And all the while, the percussion is cataclysmic and the vocals nothing short of other-worldly.

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Codex Serafini

‘Cronus’, ‘Janus’, and ‘Fountains of Enceladus’ are performed back-to-back in the sequence they appeared on Serpents of Enceladus, and Landing as the penultimate song of the set, ‘I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust’ is the sole representation of previous album The Imprecation Of Anima (2023).

At around fifty minutes in duration, their set is intense and sonically immense, filling the space with cathedrals of sound. It’s the last night of the tour in support of Mother, Give Your Children Sanity, and the Leeds reception sees it end on a high. And on a personal level, they were more than worth the wait. Would see again. Many times.

Picking / Gnarled Fingers – Picking / Gnarled Fingers

Posted: 25 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 27th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

This one’s been out for a bit, but was too good to let go without comment. Some will likely thank me for this: others may be less grateful as they sit, hands over their ears, wondering why they should ever pay heed to a word I write. It’s niche and it’s noisy – as the notes which accompany the release on Bandcamp make clear from the outset:

Gnarled Fingers and Picking are two artists drawn together by a shared love of bleak, crushing, low-end oblivion.

Picking is a new raw doom / noise / drone project from Charlie Butler inspired by lifelong incessant excessive picking of nails.

Gnarled Fingers is an experimental, ambient drone project, relentless wall of fuzz and atmosphere, no escape, created after growing up in Somerset Levels with stories of witchcraft and pagan superstition.

The Picking track, ‘Toenail’ sits in the droney doom bracket dominated by Sunn O))), but there’s something magnificently lo-fi about this, which adds a layer of filthy muck and treble distortion that conveys a performance which is of a volume just beyond the capacity of the equipment used to record it. It’s fourteen minutes of raw, howling guitar noise, and because of the way in which they seem to be struggling to contain the feedback while ploughing relentlessly at a loose semblance of a riff, the result is something along the lines of Earth 2 crossed with Metal Machine Music. ‘Uncompromising’ is a word that music journalists and bands alike chuck about, but this is the absolute epitome – although something about this recording is possessed of a primitivism that suggests they don’t know how to do it any other way. Is it uncompromising if that’s the case? Feel free to make that question a topic for debate next time you’re down the pub with your coolly opinionated music-loving mates, but whatever side of the fence you find yourself on, Picking make a gnarly noise, and if your toenails ever bear visual comparison to this, I would strongly recommend consulting a podiatrist, and sooner rather than later, before your entire foot rots off the end of your leg.

Gnarled Fingers showcase a more polished form and a sound which sits closer to the Sunn O))) template of ribcage-rattling density, whereby a chord struck every twenty seconds conjures an atomic detonation that hangs heavy in the air. Downtuned and distorted to the max, their track ‘Echoes from Futures Past’ is a wall of crushing devastation. Sixteen and a half minutes of guitar noise so weighty it feels like how one might imagine being trapped under rubble after a nuclear bomb. Feedback scrapes so abrasively that it strips the skin, and all the while you’re slowly suffocating. It’s brutal.

While some split releases benefit from contrast, this is one where similarity is strength. This type of music is most effective when subjected to prolonged periods of exposure, ideally at high, even extreme volume. The desired effect is complete immersion, to reach the point where your body feels detached, as if its floating. This is some heavy-duty drone shit, and it sure hits the spot.

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Utterly Fuzzled 7.5: Bhajan Boy / Lou Richards / Piró / Andrew DR Abbot / Jo Dale – Fulfordgate WMC, York, 23rd April 2026

Posted: 24 April 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

It may be numbered 7.5 in the Utterly Fuzzled catalogue, but there’s nothing ‘half’ about this event. Showcasing quieter and more acoustic-based acts than usual, it does mark something of a departure from their usual mix of indie / alternative / different / stuff, but this stacked five-act bill still brings variety and quality in equal measure.

The joy of these nights is that you can turn up without knowing anything about the majority of the acts and still know there’ll be plenty of interest, even if it’s not all to your taste. Put another way, an Utterly Fuzzled night is not dissimilar to how it was listening to John Peel: a mixed bag, you might not love all of it, but it would never be dull and you’d always come away with something new that made an impression. And tonight is absolutely no exception.

Jo Dale – event co-organiser and bassist with local favourites Knitting Circle is on early doors, nervous and questioning the wisdom of putting herself on for a solo acoustic set – doesn’t make the obvious choice of playing versions of Knitting Circle songs. Oh no. Instead, it’s a whole new set of songs played on acoustic bass, one of which was penned mere hours before when she realised her set was too short. The combination of nerves and newness make for a slightly shaky start, but she’s a deft tunesmith and the audience is behind her (metaphorically speaking, that is) and she finds her feet and confidence over the course of her handful of songs.

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Jo Dale

Andrew DR Abbot is an old hand, and a longstanding feature of the DIY scene in the North. It was more than a quarter of a century since I first stumbled upon him playing baritone guitar as one half of That Fucking Tank, supporting Whitehouse at The Grapes in Sheffield. Whitehouse were too quiet and rather disappointing on that occasion, and TFT were the act of the night by miles. While now performing – again with James Islip, and still with the baritone guitar – as Lands and Body, he’s also doing solo stuff which is an electroacoustic sort of set up, involving field recordings by way of a backing to guitar that’s looped and layered. He’s at ease on stage, and the set simply flows. Starting with a 12-string guitar and switching to an eight-string, Abbot deploys a bottle, a tiny bow, and various other tools to augment some technically proficient picking and fretwork. Cascading notes create an immersive, atmospheric continuous piece which transitions through a sequence of passages. To say that it’s ‘nice’ may sound weak and noncommittal, but as a listening experience, that’s exactly what it is, and I find myself feeling calm but subtly exhilarated.

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Andrew DR Abbot

Piró – over from Spain and touring alongside Andy Abbott – plays vibrant folksy songs with a Latin flavour, routing an acoustic guitar through some pedals with loops and distortion making for some interesting sounds. His set was marred somewhat by some noisy sods at the back who talked and laughed constantly, and talked and laughed louder during the louder parts. But like a pro, he kept a level head and simply played on, and gave us some nicely worked loops and guitar detail in songs performed with heart.

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Piró

Lou Richards’ set was a compact affair comprising just four songs, the last of which was a John Cale cover performed alongside one of her former bandmates. But less is more, particularly when it comes to poetical words paired with delicately picked clean electric guitar. It’s pleasant, a very different kind of folk, about hedgerows and heritage, nature and nurturing.

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Lou Richards

Bhajan Boy is sporting a Fall T-shirt and brings big drones which form the basis of a set that builds slowly and deliberately, with some clattering and clanking that adds considerable texture. It’s only gradually that the drone evolves into a dense noise, as the set bhuilds subtly in layers and volume. Twenty minutes in and I’m wondering how much further he can take it, how much more he can add. That’s when he starts on the bellows and the sound really swells to a huge swashing sonic tide, rendered all the more full-spectrum by bleeps and crackling distortion, before gradually pulling back through a very long tapering wind down.

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Bhajan Boy

It’s an immersive soundscape, which is very different from the rest of the lineup. This in itself is the quintessence of the Utterly Fuzzled ethos, and in a time where live music is struggling and touring is difficult, a night like tonight stands as a beacon.

Chaidura – Plastic Beauty

Posted: 24 April 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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10th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Postmodernism supposedly not only marked, but celebrated, the death of originality. Some time after the turn of the millennium, postmodern irony and the wit of parody began to evaporate, and now everything simply draws on explicitly stated influences. Art has become an endless treadmill of predictable recycling. There are rare exceptions, of course, and Chaidura is rare indeed.

Chaidura has been on the scene for a couple of years now, during which time he’s birthed an EP, Temple Paradise, and some standalone singles, showcasing styles ranging from JRock to emo, with his bio describing this work as ‘blending visual kei, emo, and alternative rock into a sound that’s heavy, emotional, and honest’.

Now resident in London, but raised in Asia, where, he says ‘beauty is often weaponized as a prerequisite for success’, ‘Plastic Beauty’ is the third single to be taken from forthcoming EP, Liminal. And what a single it is! It’s nothing short of an explosion of ideas– an entire album’s worth and more (hell, many bands with careers spanning decades don’t demonstrate this many ideas), packed into less than four minutes – leaping wildly yet also effortlessly and immaculately from one genre to another with each of the multitudinous segments.

And yes, the presentation is stunning – musically, of course, but also visually – taking cues from Adam Ant and Falco’s ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ – to forge something that is nothing short of spectacular, while at the same time presenting a strong message. Opening with a soft piano intro, we’re soon thrown into some loungey jazz with an understated drum ‘n’ bass beat before – a mere thirty seconds in – being hit with a ferocious blast of metal. The experience is akin to watching Roger Moore as James Bond being spun at organ-damaging speed in a centrifuge in Moonraker, one where you mind feels as if it’s been separated from your body and transported to another dimension. It’s like all of the new year’s fireworks from around the globe going off simultaneously. And yet, incredibly, it’s got a huge chorus with an instant hook that’ll be an earworm for a week. Nothing short of phenomenal. Now, excuse me while I go and lie down for a bit.

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