Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Deadpop – Ohm

Posted: 16 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 11th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Name three great but seemingly disparate acts for a collaboration, and the chances are that no-one, but no-one would pick Ghold, Bruxa Maria, and Test Dept. But here we are with the arrival of Ohm by Deadpop, which promises ‘Hard hitting & riff heavy sludge rock’ out of London.

It’s a pretty far-out work, it has to be said. Riding in on a siren-like wave of noise, ‘Saboteur’ announces the album’s arrival loudly and intensely, and it makes you sit up, alright, and your eyes pop when the guitars slam in after some forty seconds – which is a long time when it comes to listening to twitching, glitching feedback. The bass and drums meld together in a thick sludge of overdrive.

I’m not sure what the two parts of ‘Tomahawk’ are about – although it’s probably more likely to be a punk thing or the missile than expensive steak, and they bleed together for forge six minutes of thunderous racket which takes me back to circa 2009 when bands like Pulled Apart by Horses, Blacklisters, Chickenhawk (later rebranded as Hawk Eyes), and These Monsters were exploding on the Leeds scene. Sure, there’s been noisy shit in circulation forever, and grunge may have opened the doors to a wider, more mainstream, audience, but the indie charts and John Peel’s radio show was chock-solid with wayward guitar-driven racket. Human Worth have championed big noise from day one, but have perhaps leaned toward a different shade – or perhaps there hasn’t been anything quite of this nature released recently. And am I really feeling nostalgia for circa 2009? Well, actually, perhaps I am. It was sixteen years ago, after all. Kids doing their GCSE exams weren’t even born then.

I digress – as usual – but it’s relevant when positioning this release, an album that brings the kind of big sonic mayhem that feels less common now, and in context, feels quite different from anything else that’s been released recently. ‘Tomahawk II’ adds the percussive frenzy of Test Dept to the party, calling to mind early releases like the ‘Compulsion’ 12” and Beating the Retreat.

‘Third Metal Wheel’ is a lurching cacophony of lumbering guitars, layers of echoed vocals, and thunderous drumming, the outcome being something akin to Melvins current releases, and while the monster riffology of ‘Dirt Cheap Rage’ provides but an interlude at under two minutes, it’s well placed ahead of the experimental oddity of ‘Disgrace’, which straddles sludge rock, heavy psychedelia, and punk.

The six-and-a-half-minute ‘Yesterday’ summarises the album, really: a thick, full-heft riff slogalong that pounds away, relentlessly, it calls to mind Melvins, but also encapsulates the spirit of all that is stoner, sludge, and doom in a capsule.

The album’s final track, ‘Skygrave’ delivers a driving finish, a blistering blast of full-on, speaker-shredding distortion, with some brief warping samples and disturbances thrown in for good measure, and it’s a truly brain-melting occurrence. If on the surface, Ohm is just another sludgy / stoner noise, the actuality is so much more: this is an album that brings a certain experimental bent, on top of all the riffs. And yes, it does bring all the riffs. And that’s a fact. Ohm is a heavyweight riff-slugger – and that’s a fact, too. This album is a beast.

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thisquietarmy – Langue Hybride

Posted: 15 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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18th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Eric Quach has been making music – or perhaps more accurately sculpting sound on the fringes of music – as thisquietarmy for over twenty years, amassing a substantial body of work as a solo artist, with an expanded band lineup, and with various collaborations, the most recent being Cîme, his second with Tom Malmendier

We learn that Langue Hybride was written and arranged in less than 4 weeks during thisquietarmy’s music residency at Centre d’Expérimentation Musical (CEM) in the region of Saguenay—Lac-St-Jean, Québec.

The album consists of five longform tracks, which range from seven and a half to sixteen minutes in duration. It’s the shortest work, ‘Les Rayons Cosmiques’ which lifts the curtain the album, with droning, dolorous strings and distant, delicate percussion conjuring evocative atmospherics, coloured with both a simmering tension and an underlying sense of sadness, which, while hard to define, is palpable. Around the midpoint, that distant percussion builds to stand front and centre and a groove emergers, suddenly and unexpectedly, and the whole feel changes towards something that’s a cinematic hybrid of folk and space rock.

‘Respirer l’instabilité’ crashes into altogether darker territory, a gloomy, doomy trudge of slow, deliberate drumming and a low, grinding bass, over which discordant sonic mayhem plays out. After a lull of calm around the mid-point, a pulsating rhythm merges, and things evolve into a strolling wig-out with some strong jazz-funk leanings and already, a pattern is beginning to emerge in terms of compositional structure, in that around halfway, the trajectory shifts, and the piece ends in a completely different place from the one in which it started.

This is confirmed by the pivot which takes place around five minutes into the third track. Reminiscent of latter-day Swans, ‘Les radicaux libres’ is woozy and weird, expansive and haunting, and begins to pick up pace and volume six minutes in, building to a bursting sustained crescendo that’s both hypnotic and tense, and if ‘Organismes en aérobiose’ starts out soothing, the sound of dappled sun through leaves on a summer’s day, it transitions to a fist-waving stomper and concludes as a skyward-facing surge of sonic exultation, via the detour of a post-rock tidal wave, while fifteen-minute closer ‘Solastalgie impalpable’ rides a wave of thick riffage and strings reminiscent of the long play-out on ‘Layla’ – only this is arguably more successful, as it always felt like an epic and overlong anti-climax in the wake of that guitar-line. True to form, ‘Solastalgie impalpable’ does make a shift, tapering into some elongated swirling drones which reverberate and rattle the ribs and taunt the senses, before suddenly bursting into life with a driving rock riff by way of a climactic finale.

Langue Hybride is a wild ride, and while claims for acts producing ‘genre-defying’ works are not just tedious and predictable but usually completely spurious, there’s no neat way of categorising this schizophrenic hybrid, where each track is a work of two halves, presenting almost oppositional styles and characteristics .But this stylistic polarity makes for exciting – if challenging – listening: given that the only thing that’s predictable is that each piece will fly in a different direction at some point, there’s no way one could call this album predictable. The vision – and its execution – are superb, and with Langue Hybride, thisquietarmy offer something which is quite different, and rather special.

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Ultha / Ante-Inferno / Wolvencrown / Terra / Oneiros – The Fulford Arms, York, 13th April 2025

Posted: 14 April 2025 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Ultha have been going for over a decade now, and have amassed an impressive catalogue of releases, but this is the German black metal band’s first UK tour. They’re out with Ante-Inferno as touring buddies, and tonight offers an impressive five-act lineup with early doors. And what could be better than back-to-back blistering metal on a Sunday evening? Some may suggest pretty much anything, but for many metal fans, this is the ultimate escape before the return to work. And with an early start and an early finish, this is gig perfection in terms of planning.

It’s not far off in terms of bands, either. Back-to-back black metal may sound like a slog, but tonight’s showcase presents the full spectrum of an increasingly diverse genre, with much to be excited about.

The venue is pretty busy from the start, and Oneiros make for a solid opening act, with atmospheric passages giving way to big, throbbing riffs. In terms of guitar work, apart from a bit of Brian May flourishing at the start of the second song, there’s nothing particularly flashy on display here, instead focusing on bold heavy chugs, and the songs evolve through movements defined by some deft tempo changes. There are some slower, trudging grooves which work nicely, and the front man doesn’t use his growly singing voice in between songs, which is a bonus. Sometimes, theatre is a stretch too far. They’re decent, for sure.

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Oneiros

Power trio Terra arrive in a wall of feedback and then blast in with some bowel-shredding bass. And they bring power to the max, with dual vocals and a maximalist sound. The bassist has obviously nabbed his stance from Lemmy as he leans back and raises his head up to the elevated mic. This is fierce. These guys have all the hair and all the beards and deliver a devastating wall of noise, with lengthy instrumental passages plugging away at expansive, repetitive riffs: they’re something like a black metal Hawkwind. The set’s five listed songs were performed as a single, continuous thirty-minute piece, and it was truly immense. For a band of this calibre to be so low on the bill speaks volumes about the quality of the lineup here.

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Terra

Wolvencrown are rather more clean-cut, but still bring beards, albeit trimmed ones (apart from the drummer). The quartet also bring the evening’s first synths and a whiff of Deep Heat. Their sound is crisper, cleaner, more cinematic, with rolling piano and soaring strings in the mix amidst their wide-screen compositions, which are overtly more technical in their bent, the lineup boasting seven-string guitar and five-string bass. The vocals hit the higher range, which adds a certain tension. Expansive, emotive, and highly polished, they’re hard to fault technically, and offer some immersive noise, too.

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Wolvencrown

Ante-Inferno bring the face paint. Not corpse paint, but dark smears, extending to arms and chests, too. With imposing candelabras positioned either side of the drum kit and smouldering incense smoke drifting from the stage, we’re in dark pagan territory here, and dressed in black and smeared in black, they’re barely visible in the low-level lighting. The sound is as filthy as their skins, scorched by the flames of hell as they create a sonic blanket that evokes pure purgatory. Heavy isn’t even close. It’s brutal and relentless, and there is no let-up at any point during their forty-five minute set.

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Ante-Inferno

Ultha’s lighting of choice is red, and red only. The stage is bathed in a bloodlike hue as they unleash their relentless fury. Their kit has two bass drums, and they’re blasted hard throughout. The vocals are a rabid squawk, pitching down to a guttural growl, and the interplay between the two vocals is perfect. Apart from the drums, which are up in the mix and clear as day, the instruments mesh into a dense squall of noise. This meshing creates a wall of noise that borders on shoegaze, only with thundering percussion and everything coming at a thousand miles per hour. It’s a full-throttle raging racket and they play primarily under red lighting, but seem remarkably affable between songs, even laid back, unflustered by a bust snare as they borrow one from another band. Theirs is a confidence that only comes from experience, and it shines through in the solidity of the performance.

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Ultha

For anyone who is of the opinion that all black metal sounds the same, tonight’s lineup abundantly disproves such a misconception, and while it may sound perverse to many, there’s something, if not necessarily soothing, then escapist about extreme metal shows. Mostly, the fans immerse themselves in the barrage of noise, nodding along in their own worlds.

Even having worn earplugs, I leave with my ears screaming, but feeling ultimately calm and uplifted.

The Birthday Massacre – Pathways

Posted: 13 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Metropolis Records – 11th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

For some of us, at least, 1999 feels pretty recent still, but the depressing fact of the matter is that the 90s are as far behind us now as the 60s were in the 90s. And I write as someone who, growing up in the 80s, would watch things like The Golden Oldies Picture Show with my parents on an evening. The premise of this particular show was to play 60s hits with naff reimagined contemporary promo videos, many of which were absolutely heinous – a cartoon of a ball bouncing around as an accompaniment to Bobby Vee’s 1960 hit ‘Rubber Ball’ stands out as a particularly excruciating example. Things have – thankfully, when it comes to this – progressed, but the point here is that it’s been twenty-six years since The Birthday Massacre came into the world. At that time, it felt like the interesting in goth was diminishing and both cybergoth and technoindustrial had kinda had their day, too. But as is often the case, and to paraphrase Throbbing Gristle, I think it may have been, if you stick around long enough you’ll come into favour. No doubt someone will correct me on this, and that’s fine: the point remains valid.

That The Birthday Massacre have sustained a career for more than a quarter of a century is impressive, and testament to both their perseverance and their capacity to connect with a niche audience. It’s often the way that a cult act which never really achieves commercial success or comes into fashion will retain the kind of hardcore fanbase trendy acts will only ever be able to dream of, and while there’s much scoffing about so-called ‘one-hit-wonders’, many no-hit acts enjoy far more consistent careers.

And consistency is the word here: The Birthday Massacre have become dependable for the consistency of their output. And if Pathways sounds like a quintessential cut from The Birthday Massacre, well that sounds good to me, and likely will to fans, too. It packs a hard edge, but balances it with some magical melodies. It has poppy, commercial tendencies, but then, the same is true of 2022’s Fascination.

The album careens in on a bluster of feedback before hefty industrial guitar grinds in hard on ‘Sleep Tonight’, a track that bangs with such energy that it guarantees you most certainly won’t sleep tonight or even maybe for a week. It’s a magnificent blend of hypnotic, ethereal electropop and grating industrial metal. KMFDM and PIG immediately spring to mind, particularly in the execution of the hefty, chugging riffs and expansive, discordant mid-sections, but equally, Pathways presents glorious gothic grandeur and, by way of a more commercial reference, the emotive arena rock of Evanescence.

The title track is a contemporary goth-rock stomper, anthemic, with crystalline lead guitar meshing atop a driving bass and pumping percussion. It’s accessible and tuneful, and casting aside genre distinctions for a moment, a cracking rock / pop song delivered with some power, and with ‘Whisper’ they pack another anthem and once again demonstrate their consistency.

‘Wish’ may be a shade lighter, a bit more 80s radio rock / pop, but it’s delivered deftly, and the final song, ‘Cruel Love’, which stretches out for almost five and a half minutes is suitably anthemic, in the most 80s pop way. It’s quite a shift from the opener, but there’s a trajectory which is traceable through Pathways, as The Birthday Massacre lead the listener toward the light – and it works nicely.

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War San – The Miraculous Life of Stella Maris

Posted: 12 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Transnational Records – 10th April 2025

James Wells

War San is the musical vehicle for Kim Warsen, an artist given to experimentalism and combining a range of genre elements. To date, he’s released four albums and an EP since starting out in 2019, and The Miraculous Life of Stella Maris is album number five. That’s quite a work rate.

Warsen himself points toward a ‘diverse range of genres, including alternative rock, electronic, and world music.’ The concept of ‘world’ music is very much a Western one, whereby Western music presents an infinite spectrum of styles, where there’s pop, electropop, EDM, EBM, rock, alternative rock, indie, indie rock, indie pop, punk, post-punk, heavy metal, thrash metal, folk, country, jazz, while the rest of the world is represented by ‘world’ music, a determination which suggests an otherness, a separation, and something of a dismissal that puts ‘everything else’ ‘over there’. I do not blame Kim Warsen for any of this: it’s simply how our (western) world works, and we use compartmentalising genre distinctions which are widely recognised as short-cuts in order to pitch works in a culture where attention is limited at best.

The first of the seven tracks, ‘The Drunken Thief’, delivers on the promise, as Warsen croons in a Leonard Cohen-esque tone over a shuffling beat, and a conglomeration of mournful strings, which surge on ‘The Sanctuary of Wonders’ amidst busy hand-percussion, while there’s a dash of David Bowie to be found on ‘Rise Rebel, Rise’, which I suspect is intentional, and if anything is even more pronounced on ‘The Iberian Oracle’. The title track is hushed and intimate, in contrast to the expansive ‘Celestial Doorway’.

Overall, The Miraculous Life of Stella Maris has a magnificently fuzzy feel, a blurry haze which clings to all aspects of the sound and the overall production lends the album a sense of mystique, and of there being something behind or beneath what you hear that’s just out of reach.

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Gans / Mince / Richard Carlson Band – The Fulford Arms, York, 8th April 2025

Posted: 12 April 2025 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

This isn’t one of the three bands for six quid efforts I’ve been raving about, but three bands from out of town for eleven quid is hardly extortion, even on a Tuesday night, and Gans might have much social media presence, but they definitely have some traction building. Bearing in mind that it’s the Easter break and many students at both of the universities have gone home, the place is noticeably busy, and there’s a conspicuous number of really tall bastards in tonight, young and old. And while I’m inching towards being an old bastard myself, I shall never be tall, but will be eternally aggravated by the towering twats who step to the front row in a venue with a stage that’s barely a foot high. That’s just a personal peeve, and there’s not much you can do about biology.

But there is something you can do about being a decent band, and I’ll admit my expectations are pretty low at the start of the set by the Richard Carlson Band, from Sheffield. It’s not the sax per se, but the slightly awkward presentation, the smooth jazzy leanings, my instinct to summarise this as ‘nice; and move on… but while their set is jazzy in part, it’s also varied, in places evoking Ian Dury, in others Duran Duran circa Seven and the Ragged Tiger… ‘Barrymore’s Pool Party’ goes darker and calls to mind Girls Vs Boys and The Fall, only with sax. They’re a five-piece with two – or three guitars, the third guitarist sometimes does keyboard, and they’ve no bass, instead finding the second guitar being run through a pedal that turns it into a bass. It’s unusual, and their set is both interesting and well-played.

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Richard Carlson Band

Mince, from Leeds, are also a quintet, and appropriate for their name, serve up some fairly standard meat and two veg punky fair. In fairness, they do at least do it with some energy. A few songs in the whip out a choppy guitar that’s pure Gang of Four and for a moment they’re ace. Then it’s back to sounding like The Godfathers crossed with generic indie / punk. The pace picks up as the set progresses: the standard doesn’t, descending into shit shouty indie. The last song, their upcoming single, is the best they have by a mile. It’s solid, but they’ve set the bar low.

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Mince

Gans are something else, and that something is superlative. Hard-hitting two-piece acts have become a prominent feature of the rock scene in the last decade, with Royal Blood blowing open a fair few doors before blowing their cool in spectacular fashion. Being rather less preoccupied with classic rock and more about raw punk energy, Gans are more reminiscent of Slaves before they sold out to the Man and became Soft Play. Gans set out to entertain, and absolutely give it their all, making a massive bloody racket in the process, with only bass and drums. I say ‘only’, but that bass sound is immense, and the bassist can’t keep still for a second: he positively vibrates with energy, while the drummer… kicking out rolling rhythms that have the glammy swagger of Adam and the Ants and The Glitter Band, he plays hard and with style: watching him, I continually return to the question ‘how does the man breathe, let alone sing while doing this?’

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Gans

Although they’ve only released five songs to date, they’ve got plenty more in the bag, and there’s no filler to be found here. They are truly a joy to watch, and they maintain the energy from start to finish throughout their high-intensity forty-minute set. Catch them in a small venue while you still can.

Hasswult – Sauerstoff

Posted: 8 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Negative Gain Productions – 21st April 2025

James Wells

Sometimes, an album really slaps you round the face with its sheer force and brutal intensity. Boom! Sauerstoff, the latest from Hasswut is one of those albums. No two ways about it: this one is a real face-melter.

Technoindustrial acts in the vein of KMFDM are ten a penny, and while Europe has long been a hotbed for this kind of thing, it’s in the US that it really seems to have take off in the last decade, and something that was once predominantly the domain of the Wax Trax! label in the late 90s and early 90s is now ubiquitous. And that’s cool, but it’s no longer ‘edgy’ like it was, because it’s simply become so commonplace, an endless conveyor belt of bands with distorted vocals snarling over pumped-up techno and some gritty sampled-sounding guitars.

Then Hasswult come along and absolutely piss on the majority of their peers by taking it to the next level. It’s more metal, for a start, and less processed. And it’s brutal. Sure, there are beats you can go nuts to, but the abrasion is intense, and hits so hard you’ll see stars.

It’s overtly European to my ears – if I didn’t know they were Spanish I’d think they were German, and not just on account of the lyrics being in German, which presents an unexpected, unusual, and interesting twist – and proper, full-on aggressive, a complete melding of aggrotech, technoindustrial, and industrial metal. Sure, the obligatory KMFDM nods are on display, and in the mix there’s a whole load of Rammstein, and Ministry circa Psalm 69. It’s hard, it’s heavy, and it’s seriously potent.

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Kadaitcha – Urban Somnambulistics

Posted: 7 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Ant-Zen – 7th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Kadaitcha’s Urban Somnambulistics was originally released on cassette in 2017, and was lauded for its dark atmospherics and rumbling narrative, spoken in Russian. A lot has happened since then, and the Ukrainian duo have, against all odds, remained active, releasing Tramontane in September 21023, and now a new version of Urban Somnambulistics, with the vocals in English. It’s not only the urban landscape of Ukraine which has changed since the album’s initial release, but the cultural landscape also, and the decision to re-record the lyrics in English was in some ways a reaction to the cultural and political context which has evolved, with Andrii explaining to me that, for him, Russian has become ‘a language of occupancy’.

There had been a shift following the annexation of Crimea in 2024, with some people switching from speaking Russian to Ukrainian, something which became more prevalent following Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

It’s hard to really grasp, from a position of comfort and safety, what it truly means to be an artist in a country which is not only at war, but has now been so for more than three years. The idea of making art under such circumstances seems completely wild, but at the same time, something we’ve learned from the long history of war – and indeed, history as a long thread, riven with tribulation – is that art has always been something we’ve made. It seems as if it’s almost a part of our survival mechanism, and that in difficult times, it’s a compulsion within the human psyche that there’s an absolute necessity to document, to create.

Urban Somnambulistics is dark and intense, and while it’s devoid of beats, it’s far too noisy and gnarly and bears the hallmarks of Throbbing Gristle at their darkest, most experimental best, abrasive, and anything but ‘very friendly’. The vocal on ‘hiding the angel’, while clean but reverby on the original version, is thick with distortion this time around, and significantly darker and more menacing in tone. ‘bushmeat’ is nine minutes of blown-out distortion and fizzing electronics, snapped cables and firing sparks, and it’s not only tense, but intense, not to mention unsettling. It’s a messy noise drift that would work as part of a soundtrack to Threads, a post-apocalyptic drone with the whistle of a bleak wind cutting across a desolate landscape. There is shredding noise, too, metallic devastation: you can almost picture ruined farm buildings hanging on their frames beside cropless fields.

Things really step up with ‘symbiote’, five minutes of oppressively dark industrial grind, before the rather more airy expanse of ‘paninsecta’, a piece that groans and drones, clanks and clatters, cut through with snarls and burrs, distorted vocal utterances just beneath the level of audibility adding an unsettling layer of discomfort. The eleven-minute title track provides the finale, and again, it’s very much in the vein of Throbbing Gristle’s more experimental works – menacing, uncomfortable, unpredictable, and noisy, collaged overlays enmeshing with crunching metal, melting circuitry, harsh drones rising up, a surging sonic tempest.

It’s remarkable that this is an album which was recorded before life in Ukraine changed beyond all recognition, because Urban Somnambulistics appears to convey all the tension and all the devastation of conflict in its presentation of sonic extremities, and its embracing of noise that hits like… like… It has significant impact, and that’s a fact.

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Plastic Ideas – Afterglow

Posted: 6 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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28th February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

I’ve had a few interesting conversations about Shoegaze in the last couple of weeks. Largely – and massively – maligned in the UK music press at the time, many of the leading exponents of the style in the 90s – Ride, Slowdive, Chapterhouse – had all formed in the late 80s and had petered out by the mid-90s. What goes around comes around, and both Ride and Slowdive have been enjoying second careers following a significant shoegaze renaissance spearheaded by younger, up-and-coming acts like Pale Blue Eyes and BDRMM. But I learned that amongst my friends and peers, the genre remains divisive, perceived by some as wishy-washy, and described by one of my friends as ‘music for people too lazy to have a wank’. Personally, I find I’m too busy, rather than too lazy, and have been enjoying the resurgence, while aware that there is a danger that the next couple of years could see Shoegaze reaching the kind of saturation we saw with Post-Rock in 2006. Because it is possible to have too much of a good thing, especially when bills contain three or even four bands who all sound more or less identical.

But it transpires that this is not necessarily the same outside of the UK, and while Pale Blue Eyes and BDRMM are packing out venues of increasing sizes with each tour, over in Turkey, remains a marginal interest, although it is starting to gain traction. And at the forefront of this are Plastic Idea, formed in Istanbul in 2019.

Afterglow is their second album, following Bakiyesi Belirsiz Ömrüm (My Life With an Obscure Remainder) released in 2022. Like its predecessor, Afterglow was recorded, mixed and mastered completely by Berkan Çalışkan in his bedroom, although this time around, five of the album’s eight tracks bear titles in English.

The band write that ‘although there is a general melancholy throughout the album, brief moments of hope are also evident,’ pointing to the title track, as well as ‘bedroom-poppy vibes like in ‘Some Days’ and post-punky feels like in ‘Yıldızlar Düştü Gökyüzünden’. The album’s cover bears all the hallmarks of a reference to My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, and there’s no doubt some influence here.

It’s the title track which launches the album, beginning with chiming, picked, clean guitar before a cascade of overdrive crashes in simultaneous with bass and drums. The song continues to exploit the quiet / loud dynamic between verses and choruses, the vocals floating in a wash of reverb. It’s pleasant, but nothing particularly remarkable, but that changes with ‘I Wanna Fall In Love’, which is altogether darker, more haunting, with some undefinable blend of desperation and menage in the vocal delivery which reverberates amidst fractal, crystalline guitars. It’s as much post-punk, even shaded with hues of gith, as it is shoegaze.

‘Some Days’ drips with downtempo melancholy and echoes of early Ride, while ‘Kolay Mı Yaşamak; is a real standout, with a snaking psyche-hued guitar shimmering through the verses before a full-blooded grunge blast of a chorus, and ‘Yıldızlar Düştü Gökyüzünden’, too, delivers a surging finale with an attack that’s more the sound of angst than floppy moping, and the six-minute closer, ‘Don’t Let Them Bring You Down’ goes epic, and if the solo’s overplayed, it still works in context.

While I’m personally a fan of the genre, pitching Afterglow as a shoegaze album may deter some from exploring an album that’s wide-ranging and pretty gutsy in parts. Afterglow offers edge and dynamics, and is a far cry from the wishy-washy vagueness that’s often synonymous with shoegaze.

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A-Sun Amissa – We Are Not Our Dread

Posted: 5 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Gizeh Records – 4th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Returning for their eighth album, A-Sun Amissa, purveyors of drone-centric ambience centred around founder Richard Knox pull back from the rather larger avant-rock sound of 2024’s Ruins Era to concentrate once more on ‘unsettling drones and claustrophobic atmospheres’. Knox is joined for the third successive release by Luke Bhatia and Claire Knox, indicating that this is a fairly stable lineup, and perhaps this has been a factor in the album’s exploratory, evolutionary approach.

The promise is that the record’s ‘washed out and ethereal sound drags electric guitar, clarinet, voice and piano through pillows of reverb and distortion to build heaving, desolate dronescapes. Moving through dense, oppressive passages of sound and diffusing into sections of gloomy, haunting restraint. We Are Not Our Dread is filled with majestic, textural detail. It envelops and, at times, smothers you before releasing just at the right moment, resolving in a billowing, melancholic, distorted reverie.’

The first thing that strikes me – as is often the case with any project centred around Knox – is the evocative nature of the title. Perhaps I’m feeling uncommonly sensitive right now, but this one in particular lands with an unexpected impact, and as much as the implication is one of positivity – no, we are not our dread, our dread does not define us or dictate our lives – there is equally the emphasis on the fact that we have that dread. And not you, or I, but us, together, collectively. And so it is that dread become the focus, that thing which looms large over not only the title or the album, but our lives. Why do we have this dread? It would not be an overstatement that the pandemic changed everything: the world that we knew lurched on its axis and no-one knew how to handle it. And since then, insanity has run free. 9/11 may have rattled the rhythm of life for a time, but not it seems that the entire world spent the pandemic years just waiting to wage war, and now nothing is safe or predictable – not your job, your home, your ability to post stuff online. You don’t need to be a prominent protestor or social agitator to attract the wrong kind of attention. The dread hangs over every moment now. We thought we had seen the worst when COVID swept the globe and lockdowns dominated our lives, and began to breathe a collective sight od relief when things began to retract, as we looked with optimism toward the ‘new normal’. But who ever anticipated this today as the new normal the future held?

We Are Not Our Dread consists of four fairly lengthy instrumental compositions, and ‘Electric Tremble’ arrives in a dense cloud of ominous noise which immediately builds tension, and if the rolling piano which drifts in shortly afterwards is gentle, even soothing, the undercurrents of rumbling discord and distant thunder which persist maintain a sense of discomfort which is impossible to ignore.

Ever since his early days with Glissando, melding post-rock with ambient tropes, Knox has had an ear for the unsettling, deftly manoeuvring elements of the soft and gentle with the spine-tingling. And while the eleven-minute ‘All The Sky Was Empty’ is a quintessential work of epic post-rock abstract ambience, rich in texture as it turns like a heavy cloud billowing and building but without an actual storm breaking, instead dispersing to offer breaking light and a sense of hope, the wandering clarinet brings a vaguely jazz element to the sound.

‘Sings Death or Petals’ arrives on trails of feedback and rumbling guitar noise, and is immediately darker, and those dark undercurrents continue with crackles and rumbles and elongated drones which persist beneath the ghostly, ethereal voices and reverb-heavy piano and picked guitar notes. At times, this bears the hallmarks of latter-day Earth, but at the same time there’s a less structured, less motif-oriented approach to the composition, which leaves much open space. I still can’t choose between death or petals here. It builds to a churning whorl, before the final track, ‘Our Hearts Bent As Crooked Lightning’ stirs from a rippling array of simmering noise and evolves into a colossus of rumbling drones, and, over the course of ten-and-a-half minutes, grows supple with softer waves of expansive synth which remind you to breathe again. For all the fuzz and broad swells of abstract, buzzing noise that’s equal parts gripping and soothing, the overall effect is sedative, and welcome.

We Are Not Our Dread leads the listener through some challenging moments, and as each listener experiences works differently, as I hear the final soaring strains of ‘Our Hearts Bent As Crooked Lightning’ this strikes me personally as dark and challenging. The intentions may be quite different, but this is undeniably a work which is sonically ambitious, spacious, resonant. Even as the tension lifts, the mood remains, like a dream you can’t shake, like the paranoia that persists even when you’ve dome nothing wrong.

That We Are Not Our Dread is true, and so is the fact that, to quote from Fight Club, you are ‘not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis.’ And you are not your dread. It may at times possess you, but this, this is not it. This, however, is a great album.

AA

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