Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Fear of the Object – Leaves never fall in vain

Posted: 24 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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True Blanking – 1st December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

No-one will be surprised to learn that I spend little to no time listening to mainstream or chart music anymore. I say anymore, as growing up, this was my first access to music, just as it was for anyone else growing up in the 80s. Top of the Pops, the top 40 on a Sunday night on Radio 1, The Chart Show (which even had an ‘indie chart’ rundown)… This was a time when ‘alternative’ bands scored top 40 singles. People of a certain age always hark back to the revelation that was seeing Bowie perform ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops, and seeing Marc Bolan. For me, I have formative recollections of Killing Joke on Top of The Pops… Divine… The Sisters of Mercy. I didn’t necessarily know what to make of these artists at first, but they made an impression. And after the Top 40 in a Sunday, there was the request show with Annie Nightingale, which played all kinds of stuff… and this was, I suppose, a route which led towards John Peel, reading Melody Maker… Now, to find anything different, outside of the mainstream takes effort – but equally, unless you’re already actively engaging with it, one has to actively seek it. Since The Internet became the dominant medium, terrestrial radio has seen its role and reach significantly diminished.

But from the little contemporary pop I have heard in recent years, I’m acutely aware of how songs have got shorter, how intros are abridged to the point of non-existence, how diving straight into the chorus as soon as possible is the objective. Delayed gratification? Forget it. Build-up? Huh? Albums?

Outside the mainstream, in evermore fragmented circles, artists have been pulling in the opposite direction. Albums designed to be played in sequence, containing songs with long intros and slow buildups are actually in favour.

Fear of the Object’s Leaves never fall in vain is an object which would likely strike fear into the heart of anyone unaccustomed to non-mainstream music. It’s a rumbling, dark ambient work, entirely devoid of beats, and almost of vocals (featuring as it does features the poem “Democracy Destruct” by David Henderson, produced by Kjell Bjørgeengen at Harmolodic Studios in 2003), and contains just the one track, which has a running time of over fifty minutes. There’s no ‘getting to the chorus’ on this epic slab of sonic abstraction.

Leaves never fall in vain, which takes its title from Japanese poet Chori (1739-1778), is a live recording, which documents a concert at Kunstneres Hus (Artists ́House) in Oslo October 2023. It features an expanded lineup, featuring original members Aimeé Theriot on electric cello and Ingar Zach on vibrating membrane/transducers, with the addition of Inga Margrete Aas on double bass. Not that you would know from the sound alone that there is a double bass in the mix – or indeed, any single, specific instruments. The instruments all melt together to create a free-flowing – or, perhaps more accurately, free-trickling – babble of sound, which is simultaneously busy, bubbling, with top-end activity frothing and scraping like a mountain stream, but with long, slow currents of droning mid-range flowing sedately beneath. There are passages where, perhaps, the sonorous tones of the cello are discernible, but in the main, it’s a conglomeration of sounds meshing together – layered, certainly ranging in tone and frequency, with a foam of treble which pressures the top-end of the aural spectrum at times, not to mention the nails-on-a-blackboard incidental scrapes. In places, the interweaving feedback takes on a texture like Metal Machine Music on heavy sedatives, and as much as the interplay between the performers is remarkable, so, it has to be said, is their patience. It takes a certain skill to hold your nerve and play a piece out like this. And the longer they maintain this slow-roiling, minimal-yet-dense drone, punctuated by occasional crackles and rips, the tenser it becomes.

Henderson’s poem arrives in the final minutes, a spoken-word piece which stands, stark, dry, crisp, and clear, and unaccompanied, after the instruments have died away and fallen to silence. It’s a powerful work in its own right, and placed as it is, hits with unanticipated impact. As the silence takes over the space occupied by sound for the best part of an hour, you’re left feeling affected, and somehow altered. The power of Leaves never fall in vain lies in is understatement, its subtlety. But also, its duration is a factor, being as if the entire track was an extended intro to the passage of poetry. Buildup, delayed gratification… alien to the attention-deficit age in which we live, Leaves never fall in vain stands out for existing in another world completely.

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Hungry Ghosts – Segaki

Posted: 23 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Nakama Records – 29th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Is there such a thig as music-listening burnout? Probably not, but reviewing a new album on a more or less daily basis is knackering. There’s listening to music, and then there’s listening to music: one is passive, while the other is very much an active pursuit. But engaging – and fully engaging – with different forms of music can be strong and vigorous exercise for the mind, and when presented with music which is overtly challenging, there is a sensory workout involved, too. And Segaki, the second album by the Norwegian-Malaysian trio Hungry Ghosts, consisting of Malaysian tenor saxophonist Yong Yandsen ‘accompanied by the Norwegian powerhouse duo of Christian Meaas Svendsen on double bass and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums’ is most certainly challenging.

As their biography attests, ‘their debut record has been described as an album with an ‘unstoppable energy’ and like actual hungry ghosts (my italics) — the unfortunate souls who are reborn as pitiful creatures into their own miserable realm, punished for their mortal vices — the trio has an insatiable appetite for more… This appetite was temporarily quenched during their European tour in 2022. As part of this tour they played in a small Austrian town by the name of St. Johann in Tirol. That concert was recorded, and that recording became the raw ingredients for this release. Now, after having gone through a rather extensive two year long digestive system of listening, mixing, listening, mastering and listening again, the trio has brought us their second dish of hard hitting improv.’

The digestive system must be in quite a state if the album’s first track is anything to go by: ‘In search of filth like vomit and faeces to eat’ is sixteen sprawling minutes of frantic percussion and discordant sax frenzy. The title conjures an array of disturbing scenarios, from the dog, driven by stress, boredom, or anxiety to eat bodily waste, to something altogether more depraved and disturbed. The music itself provides no answers, only a crazed sprawl of rabid jazz which wanders and lurches in all directions, but amidst the mania, the phrase ‘shit-eating grin’ pops into my head uninvited. Of course it did. Some swear by various narcotics to open the mind, but for my money, music is the most powerful gateway to making unexpected associations and triggering recollections and reminiscences from almost out of nowhere. It’s not a grin I’m wearing by the end of this wild excursion, though, but a grimace, white knuckles gripping the sides of my chair as I exhale slowly. My head’s swimming, and I’m dizzy from the rollercoaster ride, and it’s the phrase ‘eat shit and die’ which bubbles up into my mind from my churning innards.

The viscerally continues on the altogether shorter ‘Small bits of pus and blood’ which completes side one. It’s sparser, atmospheric, uncomfortable. The percussion is altogether more restrained, yet dominates the minimal arrangement, and rhythms fleetingly emerge from the erratic clomps and clods before petering out to a lone trilling whistle.

Flip to side two and ‘Mountain valley bowels full of grime’ starts quietly but soon builds to a sustained crescendo, and keeps on crashing and braying away with a cranium-splitting intensity for almost twenty-two minutes. The drums explode in a perpetual roll, the double bass runs… run and run beneath sax mania that sounds like a jet engine.

‘A great decomposing odour’ delivers the final blow: at a minute and fifty-three seconds long, it feels like a jazzed-out sucker punch which takes unfair advantage of the dizzy, bewildered state one finds oneself in having seemingly, unknowingly, fallen down the mountainside into the valley and into the grime head-first.

The titles feel as if they belong to a gritty, grimy, sludgy metal album, but what Hungry Ghosts evidence on Segaki is that darkness, weight, intensity, and befouled viscerality are not exclusive to the metal domain, and that it’s possible to articulate sensations with a rare physicality without the need for distortion or snarling vocals – or, indeed, any vocals at all. With Segaki, Hungry Ghosts achieve a level of intensity and a power which is intensified by just how unexpected it is.

AA

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Heartsink / Bug Facer / Wench! – The Fulford Arms, York, 21st November 2024

Posted: 22 November 2024 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Hull has produced some impressive bands – especially at the noisier end of the spectrum –in recent years, with Cannibal Animal, Bedsit, and Ketamine Kow being particular standouts, but not to forget BDRMM, Chambers, or Low Hummer. It’s always a treat when they send a contingent to York. Warren Records have established some sort of exchange programme with The Fulford Arms, offering some quality lineups for little or no money – as is the case tonight, thanks to the support of a well-deserved arts grant for the label. Turnouts tend to be decent, too, with an unusual ratio of travelling fans from that spot just north of the Humber.

Having raved about Bug Facer’s releases, there was no way I was going to pass upon the opportunity to see them live, and there’s a growing buzz around Wench! too.

It’s immediately apparent that the buzz is more than justified. Wow. Fuck me. Wench! are phenomenal. An all-female power-trio with the emphasis on power, they play proper punk, and play loud and hard, and they’re as tight as they are fierce. It’s drummer Kit Blight who covers the majority of the vocals, and the vocals re strong, all while blasting beats at a hundred miles an hour. Bassist Hebe Gabel, a headbanging blur of spikes and studs is a dominant physical presence on stage, and steps in with some super-heavy wah-wah loaded lead breaks which owe more to stoner rock than punk. The interplay between the three is magnificent: each brings a different style of musicianship and performance to the stage, and they are one hundred percent complimentary. This may only be their second gig outside of Hull, but shows like this are almost certain to get them bookings – and fans – racking up fast.

When you read about how grassroots venues are vital for feeding the upward chain, and you realise you’re watching a band with the potential to join the ranks of Dream Wife and Amyl And The Sniffers a few years hence, the narrative takes on a powerful resonance.

Wench

Wench!

Bug Facer’s studio work is a blinding cacophony. Live, they’re something else, a brain-melting, eardrum-punishing, feedback-shredding squall of filthy chaos. The vocals are shared between the drummer and bassist – who is also, it turns out, guitarist, to add to the confusion.

They look like they sound, and sound like they look: the bassist is a burly guy with tattoos and a Meshuggah T-shirt; the bassist looks like he’s travelled in time from 1974, sporting an orange Adidas T-Shirt, flared cords and long hair with a home-cut fringe; meanwhile, the drummer wears comfort-fit faded jeans and a comedic cast T-shirt. You never saw such a bunch of misfits, and it translates directly into the music – perhaps more accurately described as a blast of sonic mayhem.

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Bug Facer

Driving rhythms underpin a wild tempest of discord and noise. They boast the crunchiest ribcage-rattling bass and a wall of guitar noise that sounds like war. The vocals are an array of shouts and grunts and monotone spoken word mumblings and psychotic screams. More than once, the bassist and guitarist swap instruments.

They don’t say much. “Is this in tune? It’s close enough” is representative of both the bantz and the approach to performing. It’s not punk, it’s not post-punk, it’s not sludge, or stoner, or anything really; but it contains elements of all of the aforementioned, and they play like they want you to hate them and getting the biggest kick out of being as sonically challenging as they can muster. Ragged, raw, and absolutely wild, it’s one hell of a set.

Credit to Heartsink for being on this bill and willing to follow Bug Facer, with whom they’ve shared a stage previously. It’s certainly a brave move – or an example of insanity.

The last time I – knowingly – saw them was when I caught the tail-end of a set at The Key Club in Leeds in 2018. Six years is certainly time enough to evolve. But punk-pop doesn’t really evolve, and exists in a state of arrested development, just as it always did, when, on breaking in the early 00s, middle-aged men would sing songs about being in school and having crushes on their classmates, or their teachers, or their classmates’ mums.

“Is anyone a fan of the US Office?” In this question, we get a measure of both the quality of the chat, and the inspiration behind their songs. I’m not entirely convinced it counts as evolution.

Heartsink

Heartsink

Credit where it’s due: they are undeniably solid, energetic, the songs are catchy, and they’re clearly enjoying themselves. People down the front are enjoying them, too. They’re co-ordinated with matching rainbow guitar straps… and trainers, and beards. They do bring some big riffy breakdowns in places, and the melodies are keen. But… but…ultimately, it’s generic and bland. And pop-punk. There’s clearly an eternal market for this, and fair play, especially as, what they’ve ultimately achieved is to get people out and dancing to original (‘original’) songs at a grassroots venue on the coldest November night in a decade. When venues around the country are disappearing by the week, and the ones we have are hosting tribute acts five nights a week, having the option to view three solid quality bands – two of whom are absolutely out there, albeit in very different ways – for no quids is something to shout about.

Dolium – The Products Of Our Own Demands And Commands

Posted: 19 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Sister 9 Recordings – 22nd November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Anniversary editions and reissues have become a massive part of the music industry in recent years, in keeping with the ever-growing tendency to milk all things nostalgic. Many are shameless cash-ins, designed to compel dewy-eyed fans to purchase an album from their your again at eye-watering expense in order to hear it in a new ‘improved’ remastered form, accompanied by several discs of demos, outtakes, acoustic and alternative versions, and contemporaneous live recordings that no-one ever plays more than once if at all, while cherishing a deluxe booklet of photos and whatnot and reflecting on just how fucking old they are and wondering where the decades have gone.

That doesn’t mean there’s no merit to marking anniversaries, and this release is rather different, being a part of the commemorations of twenty years of Sister 9 Recordings with a comprehensive retrospective of cult Sheffield act Dolium, who first broke onto the city scene around the turn of the millennium, before coming to the attention of John Peel in 2004. The band went on indefinite hiatus in 2010, but during their years of activity, amassed a substantial body of work, including two full-length albums, Kisses Fractures (2005), and Hellhounds On The Prowl (2008). A third album, Brother Transistor, was recorded but never saw the light of day… until now. Add all of their singles and other bits and bobs, including their shelved debut single – which made it to test pressing but no further due to lack of funds – and this four-CD set provides instant access to their complete discography, and more. As such, it’s a boon for fans and an ideal introduction for anyone unfamiliar with an act described by KERRANG! as ‘a less depressing Joy Division mixed with the black horror of Bauhaus and the melodic dynamics of the Pixies’.

I’m not entirely convinced there’s much ‘black horror’ to be found in Bauhaus’ catalogue, but it does capture the punky / goth stylings of a band who espoused the indie / DIY ethic and injected every moment with pure adrenaline. They started out with a drum machine, but progressed to live drums when Simon Himsworth joined. Being a small world, it would appear that this is the same Simon Himsworth who would later play guitar in brief but legendary York band We Could Be Astronauts alongside former Seahorse Stu Fletcher.

There’s an obvious chronology about the first two discs, which contain Kisses Fractures and Hellhounds On The Prowl respectively, with contemporaneous EPs and singles by way of bonuses. As titles like ‘She’s The Pill That Makes Me Want To Stay’, ‘Drug City’, and ‘Whore Whore’, all from Kisses Fractures indicate, this is a band who are fully committed to the trash aesthetic of sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll – with a heap of death and suicide on top – and Kisses Fractures is a low-fi blast of post-punk drama. With hints of The Jesus and Mary Chain and The March Violets in the mix, likening the sound to any specific bands is difficult and rather too specific: what they bring is an assimilation of an era and an aesthetic, and the sound is more that off the mid-80s than the mid-00s. It’s exciting: there’s no let-up, no mid-album lighter-waving anthem, just back-to-back overdriven explosions of raw energy that are every bit as punk as anything released in ’77 or ’78. ‘Driving With The Deathettes’ B-side ‘Daddy’s Swinging in the Attic’ cranks up the sleaze true-crime dirt, against some repetitive lo-fi riffage.

The same themes are present on Hellhounds On The Prowl, which delivers another batch of tightly-packed squalor-filled shock, horror, and filth with titles like ‘“Suicide” Was My First Word’, ‘Coughin’ In The Coffin’, and ‘Junkie Howlin’’, the latter being a swampy, hipshaking fucked-up rockabilly boogie which pretty much sets the level for the album, which does feel more evolved, if not necessarily more mature. ‘We Want Your Blood’ is a lurch into straight-up B-movie horrorcore, and the thunderous ‘She Can’t Steak My Heart’ continues to place the vampire fixation, while ‘Gü the Destroyer’ melds the high-octane explosivity of Dead Kennedys with an Industrial edge. It works, and they get away with it because there’s clearly a dash of pastiche and self-awareness infused with the relentlessly rambunctious rock ‘n’ roll.

As much as they’re about drawing on, and revelling in, cliché, and the work of their precursors, there’s clear common ground with contemporaries like Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster. I say ‘like’, but it’s a very short list, to say the least. Then again, the scuzzy garage blitzkrieg of tracks like ‘Godspeed Your Love To Me’ sits comfortably alongside garage revival acts like The Strokes and The Hives. Only this evidences that Dolium were better. As is so often the case, it’s not always the good bands who make it, and perhaps Dolium were just too intense, too wild, too primitive. Among an endless list of contemporaneous vampire-themed ragers, including ‘Holy Water’, ‘Oh Lord, I See No Reflection’, ‘These Fans Have Fucking Fangs!’, ‘You’ve Got Holes!’ comes on like Queens of the Stone Age, and if nothing else, showcases the band’s eclecticism.

I’m sure forums and fans have debated the ins and out of why they decided to call it a day before putting out album number three, but there’s little out in the world on the topic, and hearing the material on its belated arrival gives no clue: it presents the band in ferocious form, evolved to another level, bursting with gritty guitars and showcasing a newfound level of songwriting ability – there are hooks galore, and the production is meaty. It may be more accessible than its predecessors, but it’s by no means mainstream. ‘Get Off on My Machine’ brings the riotous grunge blitzkrieg of Pulled Apart By Horses; ‘(There Goes My) Jellies Girl’ offers unexpected melody and could almost qualify as ‘anthemic’. The gritty uptempo chuggernaut of ‘The Future In Hands’ seems to take not-so-subtle cues from ‘My Sherona’. It’s so tempting to contemplate what might have been… but to do so is futile. The past is past, and Dolium’s peak is certainly past, but Brother Transistor is a belter and that’s an ineffable fact.

AA

The fourth and final disc, which brings together everything else not included on the other discs, namely the first four-track demos and a bunch of offcuts and rarities from the span of their career, is, as one would anticipate, something of a mixed bag, and often raw, rough, and barely ready. The demos provide an insight into the early evolution of the band and their early material, again sounding more like they were recorded in 1983.

With seventy-six tracks, this is not only a monster, but a truly definitive collection which presents the good, band, and the ugly – but mostly it’s either good or ugly. One thing is clear: Dolium were a band out of time: sounding like 1984, they’d likely have gone down a storm now or as part of either the goth revival of the late 90s or a few years ago. They just weren’t the sound of the post-rock dominated mid-noughties. But if there’s any justice, history will recognise Dolium as underground greats.

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Simon Whetham – Successive Actions

Posted: 17 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Crónica – 5th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Simon Whetham’s latest work is a fascinating hybrid which incorporates found sounds and elements of layering in order to create a whole other world, a different dimension. The album itself is part of a larger project, which is more readily explained through quotation than a stumbling stab at paraphrase:

Successive Actions is an iteration of the larger kinetic sound performance project series Channelling in which various motor devices, salvaged from obsolete and discarded consumer technology, are activated by playing sound recordings through them. In turn, this produces new sounds from the devices, which are amplified using various microphones and techniques. The title comes from Dirk Raaijmakers’s "The Art of Reading Machines" as a term for mass production processes. As such, the recordings played through the devices are recordings of other devices used in previous versions of Channelling, in which the sounds used were seemingly mundane sound phenomena that occur unpredictably and irregularly in everyday life, as passing traffic, wind, doors closing. So now the sounds of devices malfunctioning and breaking from their programming are causing further action and disruption.

Successive Actions contains sixteen pieces, although only four extend beyond four minutes in duration, with the majority sitting only a short way over the two-minute mark, giving the album a fragmentary feel. But there’s a strong sense of cohesion, too: the title of each of the pieces ends in ‘action’, from ‘Action’ to ‘Protraction’, via ‘Inaction’, ‘Impaction’, and ‘Abstraction’.

While much of the album takes the form of abstract ambience and general murk, there are moments which stand out with levels of heightened discomfort: ‘Reaction’ conjures the bleak whistling wind of a nuclear winter. ‘Inaction’ scrapes and buzzes; it’s unsettling, but it’s not uncomfortable to the point that it’s unbearable: it just makes you feel tense, awkward. You want to seem a less stressful environment. But there s no less stressful environment, and life is stress: to escape that is to deny the reality of the everyday, for the majority. Under capitalism, we are all stressed, and on Successive Actions, Simon Whetham gives us a soundtrack to that stress and anxiety.

Mass production is, arguably, a fundamental source of our woes in the modern age. The Industrial Revolution brought so much promise, but as capitalism has accelerated and expanded at a pace which exceeds our capacity to assimilate, so it has become an ever-greater source of alienation. And here we are, overwhelmed by the road of the big machine as it continually whirrs and grinds. Sometimes its but a crunch and a gurgle, a hum and a thump. A buzz of electricity, a mains hum, as dominates both ‘Retroaction’ and ‘Counteraction’. It’s a cranial buzz and pushes frequencies which are uncomfortable, and as the album progresses it plaiters, and turns dark.

For myself, I feel a certain sense of release while immersing myself in the textures and layers of Successive Actions. There are moments when the album really achieves a heightened sense of – and in panic, of anxiety, of intensified reality. Other moments are altogether more sparse, steering the listener inside themselves into a the depths of an interior world.

Successive Actions is deep, dark, difficult. And so is life. On Successive Actions, Simon Whetham captures it, all elements of life that is. It crackles and fizzes with tension, and tension is high.

AA

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Eville – Ballistic

Posted: 15 November 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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15th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

“Do not tell me to smile / I’m feeling volatile,” Eva Sheldrake warns menacingly against a dense, churning chug of overdriven, distorted guitar. Sporting a pink bikini but wielding a baseball bat, you can sense things are about to kick off. And oh boy, do they kick off.

Eville have balanced fire and fury and dense nu-metal guitars with killer hooks and keen melodies from day one, and ‘Messy’ represented a peak in terms of their accessible but hard brat metal stylings, but something has happened here.

Eva’s clearly the band focal point, and as the vocalist and lyricist, to some extent sets the agenda, and on the evidence of ‘Ballistic’, she’s reached her limit and she’s calling it out on shitty men being fucking cunts.

Daily, there are articles in the news and music media about men who are sleazy, rapey, slimeball abusers as victims – exes, fans, colleagues – reach their limit and speak out. Even when there’s no abuse involved, women are faced, daily, with leering, with looks, with salacious comments, patronising mansplaining, being told to cheer up, or to smile, and simply endless shit from twatty men who feel entitled to invade their space in any way they please. ‘Ballistic’ is an explosion of rage that simply says ‘enough is enough’. As such, there’s less focus the accessible melodic elements and everything is channelled into the message, with the medium corresponding with zero compromise.

The familiar stuttering beats kick in at the start before ‘Ballistic’ fulfils the title’s promise and explodes like ‘Firestarter’ on steroids. The band’s performance sees Eville take a giant leap to a brand new level: the guitar is a concrete wall, the drums thrash frenetically, and the vocals… Sheldrake howls like a demon, a full-throated roar, while simultaneously, the accompanying video shows the band taking their bats and smashing various objects in pure unbridled anger.

‘Fuck the system! Go ballistic!’ It’s a simple hook, but pure perfection in its concision. It’s a battle cry, it’s rousing, it’s time to fuck shit up. It is not time to accept the status quo, to tolerate bullshit and plain shitty behaviour.

It’s sheer coincidence that ‘Ballistic’ has landed just a week after the dismal US election result, and misogynistic wankers started ‘your body, my choice’ trending on the festering cesspit promoting every ‘ism going in the name of ‘free speech’, but with this timely release, Eville have delivered an uncompromising anthem that shoves it to all the incel bros and all the other douches. They’re not all necessarily rabid Andrew Tate fans, but just your everyday casual sexist creep.

Clocking in at two and a quarter minutes, ‘Ballistic’ is everything Eville have promised to date, and more, delivering an absolutely definitive statement, and one the most powerful songs you’ll hear for a long time to come.

AA

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dEddGvRL – Anhedonic Succubus

Posted: 14 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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11th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

13x is reborn – or perhaps reanimated, resurrected, something – as dEddGvRL, and the title of gives a hint as to its tone and themes of this this seven-track release.

As she summarises in the accompanying notes, Anhedonic Succubus is ‘More a collection and recovery from extreme trauma over the past couple of years. Fake friends, S.A, declining mental health, alienation, despair, suicide, revenge….’ As such, this is music that’s issuing forth from a dark and difficult place, and there’s not only no escaping the fact – it’s necessary to take this head-on. There are doubtless many who will find these subjects triggering, but life does not come with trigger warnings, and a key function of art is to get to grips with life in all its complexities, all its pain and ugliness. And in connecting with art which does this, we strive to find ways to navigate life and the traumas it puts us through.

From a creative perspective, many artists channel their own experiences – however painful – into their craft as a channel of catharsis, a release, a way of comprehending or coming to terms with things. All of this is clearly an oversimplification of a complex relationship between an artist and their art, the nature of the creative process, and the way an audience – an infinite array of individuals rather than a collective with a single, fixed perspective – receive and respond to said art, in whatever medium. But I tentatively step towards Anhedonic Succubus with this preface because it’s particularly pertinent.

As has been the case with work as 13x, dEddGvRL channels considerable pain and anguish into these works – something which represents a continuation of the inspiration behind much of the previous work as 13x. But dEddGvRL plunges deeper into those dark places, and the eclectic sample credits feature some illuminating inclusions:

Drums on "Ophelia: Drained" taken from Tool "Die Eire Von Satan"
"Deathbearing Machine: Killng December" contains a segment from Charles Manson’s interview with Dianne Sawyeri
Cock Speech on "Sterben, Kranke Fotze" – "Female Trouble" (John Waters – 1974)
"Scared Of This Place" – Johnny Depp in Court
Catwoman (1968) appears on "Valenbitch"

‘Ghosts of My Body’ starts the set off quite gently, as it happens: dark, atmospheric, yes, but not without a certain levity, with hints of early-80s Cure B-sides and a dash of Disintegration, until the fizzing, distorted spoken-word vocals bring a more unsettling aspect. It creates a sense of detachment, which is likely almost entirely the objective, given the context.

Slow, sparse, murky, ‘Ophelia: Drained’ is reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails circa The Fragile. The tension builds and the percussion tears through the surface of a swirling wind and things start to get darker fast from hereon in.

Based on the context and the content, one may be forgiven for expecting more rage, more abrasion, more visceral noise, more attack. But Anhedonic Succubus is harder and heavier in its absence: instead of exploding outwards with a brutal sonic assault, dEddGvRL keeps things contained, introspective and seething. The effect is disturbing and menacing. Electronics buzz and hum around distorted vocals, and the percussion, too, is restrained, subdued. Things crackle and glitch, stutter and clatter, and the atmosphere is claustrophobic, oppressive.

When things do get noisier, on ‘Fuck What You Kill’, it really hits hard, and that’s before one reflects on the perverse implications of that title and hookline. But even then, the noise is sociopathically restrained, and pinned to a hypnotic repetition. The technoindustrial stomp of ‘Scared of This Place’ is by far the most accessible – and uptempo – track on here, and it works well and is well-placed, providing a late – and unexpected – rush of energy, before ‘Valenbitch’ leads the way to the exit in a relentless churning grind.

Anhedonic Succubus is heavy, but not in overt or conventional ways: instead, as the title threatens from the outset, it slowly sucks the air and energy, dragging the listener into dEddGvRL’s hellscape. It’s a tough listen, but artistically, it’s a success, delivering on its promise.

AA

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The Battery Farm – The Dark Web

Posted: 13 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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A1M Records – 29th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

For most bands, unexpectedly parting company with their record label on the eve of the release of an album, the lead-up to which has involved three well-received single releases on said label, would be a devastating blow. But not so The Battery Farm. Even before A1M Records swooped in to fund the CD release, they’d already announced that the album would be going ahead as planned. That’s resilience defined. It also encapsulates the spirit of this indefatigable, undefeatable band. The Battery Farm embody tenacity, stubbornness, bloody-mindedness, and graft. They’re not making music for fun, or as a hobby, but by compulsion, with dark themes and dark grooves being very much front and centre of their work.

Flies – released two years ago almost to the week of its successor – was a strong debut, one which showcased the work of a band unafraid of experimenting, of embracing a range of stylistic elements, or revealing literary leanings. They’ve gone deeper and darker on the follow-up.

‘Under the Bomb’ whips in with synths buzzing a crackling static electricity before a sparse acoustic guitar comes to the fore, a sonorous bass note sounding out as Benjamin Corry sings – an intimate croon – and paints a bleak scene that calls to mind the grim images of Threads, the revered BBC film marking its fortieth anniversary this year. Considered by many to be the bleakest and most harrowing film ever made, its anniversary is a reminder of just how recently cold war tensions were so high that the fear of nuclear annihilation was both real and justified, as well as of just how quickly things can escalate – and, indeed, have escalated already in recent years. The closing lines ‘Survival makes you wish you’d never been born / Envy the dead after the bomb’ articulate the sheer horror of the fallout and a nuclear winter, and the song creates the context for an album which is dark, tense, and – justifiably – paranoid, scared.

The band fire in hard in jittery, driving post-punk mode on ‘The Next Decade’, Corry roaring full-throated, raw, raging, then shifting to adopt a more theatrical, gothic-sounding tone. It’s an impressive performance, reminiscent of Mike Patten on Faith No More’s ‘Digging the Grave’, and the overall parallel feels appropriate here. It’s a punchy, sub-two-minutes-thirty cut that’s almost schizophrenic and bursting with tension, paving the way for single ‘Hail Mary’, which hits hard. Minimal in arrangement, it’s maximal in volume. It’s gritty and taut, and when the bass blasts in after the two-minute mark, the sheer force is like two feet in the chest.

The singles are packed in tight, with the mathy noise-rock crossover of the manic panic of ‘O God’ coming next. Again, it’s the lumbering bass that dominates the loud chorus, and it’s a strong hook that twitches and spasms its way from the tripwire tension of the verses. ‘O God, which way is hell?’ Corry howls in anguish. The answer, of course, is whichever way you turn. You’re doomed. We’re all doomed.

The title track lands unexpectedly, as a slow-paced rock ‘n’ roll piano ballad which sounds like it’s lifted from a musical, an outtake from Greece or maybe Crybaby. But midway through it springs into life and takes off in a burst of proggy bombast. As was the case with Flies, The Battery Farm are never predictable, never afraid to throw a curveball, and they get the impact of making such switches, meaning that ‘Stevie’s Ices’, which lands somewhere between Muse and Queens of the Stone Age. The squelchy strut of ‘Icicles’ is different again: part Pulp, part Arctic Monkey in the spoken-word verse, more Nirvana in chorus, the essence of the album as a whole comes together here. The songs, in presenting two almost oppositional aspects between verse and chorus reflect a world that’s torn in two, collapsed, pulling in different directions – and while its theme may not have been directly inspired by the most recent events, given that its writing and recording predate the US election, the circumstances which brought us here – via a political backdrop which sees the UK, US, and so many countries split almost 50/50 between hard-right and broadly centre-left, a situation that brought us Brexit, which brought us Reform and fourteen years of Conservatism, which means that speech in support of the Palestinian people is met with hostile calls of antisemitism… Division and polarity defines the age, and debate is dead.

Powering through the raw big-bollocked punk blast of current single ‘John Bull’s Hard Times’ and the moodier, more reflective ‘It’s a Shame, Thanks a Lot’, a song which confronts anguish and misery and the desire to die in the most direct and uncompromising lyrical terms against a backdrop that borders on anthemic, we stagger to the fractured trickling gurgle of the disembodied ‘After the Bomb’ which spirals towards a climax before it slumps into a wasteland of ruin.

As dark as it is, The Dark Web packs some meaty tunes and beefy grooves, which elevate it a long way above Threads bleakness, but by the same token, it’s by no means a lightweight, sugary confection. Once again, The Battery Farm balance dark themes and slugging noise with moments which are that bit lighter, and even sneak in some grabs and hooks. The Dark Web is a dark album for dark times, but steers wide of being outright depressing. This takes some skill, and The Battery Farm have skill to match their guts.

Battery Farm - Dark

Buñuel – Mansuetude

Posted: 11 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Overdrive/SKiN GRAFT – 15th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

When it comes to writing about bands who clearly function as a collective unit, it usually feels wrong to focus on any one member. But Eugene S Robinson is someone who stands out, not only in his singularity as a member of any band he plays with but within the alternative scene more broadly. The fact of the matter is that there aren’t many suit-wearing, bespectacled black men in noise rock, and this is a man who has blazed trails and then some. Famously founding Oxbow in 1988 as a means of recording his ‘suicide note’ before departing the band this year due to “the weight of irreconcilable differences, none of them aesthetic or musical.” It’s perhaps an understatement to remark that this is a man who has carved a unique path in music, and Mansuetude marks something of a shift for Buñuel following the trilogy of albums comprising A Resting Place for Strangers, The Easy Way Out and Killers Like Us.

Mansuetude is a whole lot more direct, less experimental, than any of its predecessors.

The album comes in hard: ‘Who Missed Me’ crashes in with an ear-shredding squall of feedback and distortion – that bass! And you’re swimming in noise before the crunching riff slams in… and then there’s the beat and… fuck. It’s too much! It’s brutal, launching between frenetic hardcore and pure mania. By the end, it feels like three songs playing at once and I’ve got heartburn before it collapses into a simmering afterburn. And then the blistering mathy blast of single cut ‘Drug Burn’ roars in with the deranged, lurching intensity of the Jesus Lizard at their fiercest.

There is absolutely no let-up: ‘Class’ is led by a big, dirty bass and hits with a density which hit around the solar plexus.

Just two songs in, you feel punch-drunk, breathless, weak at the knees. And they’re only just getting warmed up.

‘Movement No. 201 broods and skulks in a sea of reverb, and offers brief respite and alludes the kind of spoken word /experimental pieces on previous albums, but the explosions of noise hurt. ‘Bleat’ gets bassier, dirtier, heavier, more suffocating., the warped and twisted layering of the vocals intensifying the experience, the sensation of everything closing in.

It’s the relentlessly thunderous percussion that dominates ‘A Killing on the Beach’, but then the guitars roar in like jet engines and holy shit. Again, the multi-layered vocals raining in from all sides sting like the tasers referred to in the lyrics and everything is fizzling and sizzling in the most intense way. And then they crash in with ‘Leather bar’: it’s s seven-and-a-half-minute monster, a droning colossus and a true megalith of a track. As much as it recalls Sunn O))), I’m reminded of a personal favourite, ‘Guitars of the Oceanic Undergrowth’ by Honolulu Mountain Daffodils. It culminates in a thick wall of distorted guitars, the kind you can simply bask in. It borders on the brutality of Swans circa ’86. It’s harsh, it’s heavy it’s punishing.

The high-paced alt-rock, hardcore-flavoured frenzy that is ‘High. Speed. Chase’ is heavy and puns at a hundred miles an hour, and ‘Fixer’ is a tempest of raw energy, bleeding into the sub-two-minute gut-churner that is he blistering hardcore grind of ‘Trash’. ‘Pimp’ collides punishing repletion with skull-crushing weight, while the last track, the six-minute ‘A Room in Berlin’ finally brings an experimental edge and a spoken-word element to the soundtrack to a nuclear winter, with the most harrowing effect.

Everything about Mansuetude is dense, dark, and raging. It’s relentless in its ferocity, its raging intensity, an album that never lets up and is truly punishing at any pace. It’s an outstanding album, but it hurts.

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Saliva Birds / DDK Soundsystem / The Bricks – Lendal Cellars, York, 9th November 2024

Posted: 10 November 2024 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

It’s easy to become complacent about the stream of bad news of endless pub and music venue closures, until it happens on your back door, in a way that directly impacts your social life. It’s been a really bad couple of weeks when it comes to establishments in York: first, we learned that the property owners of The Victoria Vaults have decided to close a pub of 130 years standing in order to flog it off, presumably to be converted into flats, and The Maltings, a city centre pub of national renown, is to be converted to an Irish Bar following the retirement of the previous owners who had run it for over thirty years. This follows on the heels of the revelations that The Roman Bath, another city-centre pub popular for live music, is to be rebranded as a sports bar. And on top of all this, there’s the result of the American election to digest. Right now, I can’t really contemplate, let alone dwell on, this.

We all have our ways of dealing with bad news. Me, I like to immerse myself in the experience of live music. For some, uplifting tunes in the form of buoyant pop or something singalong and anthemic is the remedy. Personally, I simply find joy in the experience, immersing myself in the moment and revelling in music that’s good. The Bricks being dependable, as I’ve reported an almost embarrassing number of times in the last couple of years, meets that criteria.

The fact that tonight’s show is being hosted at Lendal Cellars is also encouraging in the face of the aforementioned bad news about venues. It’s an interesting venue – a remarkable space, really, a city centre pub that’s by the river – and prone to issues with the toilets due to the frequent flooding in York – in a series of fairly low-ceilinged vaulted rooms – cellars, as the name suggests. I used to frequent it often in my early office days, back in the late 90s, but haven’t been in over twenty years, and I’ve never once I attended a gig here. There are reasons for this, one being that I don’t recall the place hosting bands, and another one being that in recent years I’ve been avoiding Greene King establishments on account of their business model when it comes to buying up breweries and shutting them down. I’ve also tended to avoid venturing into the city centre on weekend nights – especially racedays – because as a magnet for stag and hen parties and twats in general, not to mention recent reports of gangs of youths harassing and even attacking random strangers, York city centre has become less appealing as a destination for me. But this is a source of optimism, in that there may be potential for another pub venue, albeit of incredibly limited capacity, to step up and plug a gap.

“It’s very Cavern in here,” says the bleach-blonde with sunbed orange skin and sports gear on her lower half and a red crop-top on her upper, who’s celebrating her birthday and inviting random strangers to guess her age, to her mum as they quaff prosecco during the soundcheck. I suppose it is, and it’s also very incongruous – to the extent that I’m reminded of the night I saw Sunn O))) at The Sage in Gateshead, and was queuing to enter the venue, on the same night an X-Factor performer was performing in the lobby.

I’m here first and foremost for The Bricks. I’m not ashamed to say I absolutely bloody love this band because they’re absolutely brilliant. Having seen them in gig venues on abundant occasions, it’s a test of their mettle to be placed in this setting, and for those out for a regular Saturday bevvy with their mates, decked out in their nicely-ironed shirts and fancy dresses, hearing them is likely to come as a shock. Perhaps not as loud, or, initially, as assured on some previous outings, they’re still solid and hit like a spiky post-punk punch in the face. The band as a whole, are powerful, but Gemma, when she’s singing, at least, is absolutely fucking terrifying. Between songs and offstage, she’s meek, self-effacing, even apologetic, but when she steps onto the songs there’s a switch that flicks and she blasts out every line like a woman possessed. The slower, bluesy stroll of ‘Snake’ afforded the weekenders the opportunity to scurry for the exit without the full assault of the PA on the way out. There are a few sound issues early on, particularly with the mic feeding back and not being loud enough, but by the last couple of songs they really are firing on all cylinders.

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The Bricks

This leaves me pondering between sets over the crisis facing live music at a grassroots level, startup acts and even those who have been going a while but are very much pub and small-venue circuit acts. As the number of dedicated grassroots venues diminishes, perhaps this is the future: to put live music right there in people’s unsuspecting faces. A lot will shit themselves and leave, but perhaps enough, after a few drinks, will come to appreciate hearing – and seeing – something different.

My contemplations are curtailed by the arrival of DDK Soundsystem. If The Bricks revived the spirit of the early 80s, DDK’s take on dance rock is unapologetically rooted in the 90s. They are, ultimately, a covers band, but they’re a lot of fun.

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DDK Soundsystem

They kick off with a stomping rendition of ‘Open Your Mind’ by U.S.U.R.A., and in some respects, the treatment isn’t a million miles off Utah Saints, in that they present as much as a rock act as a dance act, and fuse the elements together: there are live vocals and guitar and bass, samples and backing tracks and sequenced drums all firing in synchronicity. Sure, there’s an element of middle-aged men doing rock posturing to dance tunes and some mum-disco 90s dance vibes, but they’re clearly enjoying themselves, and it is all well done.

Mid-set they really rock out, sending more lanky bozos with bumfluff moustaches and fake eyesh-sporting girls scurrying for the door. It’s at this point the gig hits proper volume, too. There’s no chatting idly over this. Overdriven, flanged guitars – and it’s been too long since I heard such epic swirling flange – blast out on a storming cover of Kylie’s ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’, before they drop ‘Encore d’un Fois’, a song I’d forgotten about, but an undeniable banger, and ‘Hey Boy, Hey Girl’ also lands near the end of the set. While one could readily contend that it’s corny and cheesier than a bowl of nachos, it’s also massive fun.

Saliva Birds were solid when I caught them low on the bill at an all-dayer back in April last year, and they’re solid again on this outing, turning out a set of sturdy, kick-ass US-style rock ‘n’ roll. The guitarist, in baseball cap, plaid flannel shirt, and faded blue jeans encapsulates their sound visually. It’s hard to get really excited about them, given that there have been band around sounding like this for at least the last thirty years, and they don’t really bring anything new, but to describe them as ‘workmanlike’ is by no means a criticism. They’re good at what they do, and they didn’t clear the room.

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Saliva Birds

And if an eclectic lineup like this can keep enough punters unaccustomed to live music that isn’t straight covers or tribute acts, then perhaps there’s some mileage in shows like this. It seems like a back-to-basics approach, like how in the 70s and 80s bands used to play working men’s clubs and club nights to audiences who weren’t fussed at best, and were more into playing pool and getting booze down their necks than anything else. But given the choice between jostling with baffled townies slopping their lager and cocktails to see bands, and not seeing bands because there are no bands playing anywhere, I know what I’d pick every time.

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