Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Esoterik – Archetypes EP

Posted: 18 December 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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29th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

While the entirely of this EP has already been made available as individual tracks, some of which have made our ‘recommended streams’ pages, songs as standalone pieces are one thing, but understanding them in context can often be quite another.

And so it is that Archetypes ‘explores timeless themes that have shaped societies for centuries. The band delves into the power of language and storytelling, celebrating legends that transcend time and culture. These stories, rich in symbolism and ritual, carry the wisdom of generations and continue to captivate audiences with their enduring lessons and sensational nature.’

Hearing the songs in isolation, the sense of thematic unity which unite them as an EP isn’t immediately apparent, particularly with the visual accompaniments of highly stylised neon-flashing cyber-tinged promo videos. They’re necessary – even essential – tools for grabbing attention in our hyper-stimulated, visually-obsessed world. Post some words, or some audio, and it’s like standing in the middle of a field at night dressed in black and expecting attention – but post an image, or a video, and people notice. It really is that clear-cut. It’s as if people need their media injected directly into their eyeballs, but listening the songs in sequence and only in audio, draws the attention to the music itself.

‘Mentor’ opens the EP, driven by a sturdy industrial groove and some tidy two-way vocals which form a dialogue and pivot around themes of disconnection while pitching a magnificently melodic chorus that really brings all the hooks. ‘Trickster’, the first song to be released from the EP, is bold and energetic, and if the backing is like a pumped-up disco interpretation of Depeche Mode, the belting vocals bring from-the-gut passion. The song’s overt pop sensibilities are enhanced with this raw edge, making it a clear and instant standout.

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As the title implies, ‘Shadow’ is darker, and finds the duo tunnelling deeper into the psyche and troubled waters, and satisfaction – or lack of – bubbles to the surface amidst the lyrics, and what filters through over the course of the EP is that as much as Archetypes is about the power of language, Esoterik are interrogating the shortcomings of language to fully convey complex emotions – the elements of which constitute our very DNA which ties us to those myths and legends of centuries past, and which, ultimately, are the essence of the human condition.

‘Hero’ makes for a strong, bombastic finale, the big drum-fills and powerful snare sound evoking the spirit of the 80s power ballad as they push to the conclusion with a surging chorus. Just how effectively they explore the elements of symbolism and ritual may be questionable, but as a superbly-realised slab of dark pop, Archetypes is hard to fault.

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Lemon Power – I’m An Animal

Posted: 17 December 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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5th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Growing up in the 80s, when Wide Awake Club, and subsequently Wacaday was a huge thing, ‘Mallett’s Mallet’ engrained word association as a lifelong mental exercise. And of course, the rules “you mustn’t pause, hesitate, repeat a word, or say a word I don’t like… The one with the most bruises loses!” are indelibly etched in my mind.

Lemon Power reminded me of this, inadvertently, and certainly not by their own design, by triggering my brain to recall The Mighty Lemon Drops, Lemon Jelly, The Lemonheads, and Cat Power, for no reason other than spontaneous word association. I guess alternative music is packed out with lemons. The London-based duo, fronted by vocalist and guitarist Sere, with Ale on bass, bear precisely nil resemblance on any level, but I felt a compulsion to share my workings, so to speak.

‘I’m An Animal’ is pitched as ‘a stirring, introspective anthem exploring themes of escape and self-discovery, so the fact my mind escapes and ventured on a circuitous voyage of self-discovery before I even hit ‘play’ feel like reasonable preparation.

Although ostensibly the same song, ‘I’m An Animal’ is significantly different from ‘Animal’, which featured on their 2022 EP release A Ghastly Meaningless Aggregate. Over a minute shorter, it’s faster, more stripped back and at the same time, punkier, with more edge and more guts and drive.

It’s fascinating to observe just how a change of treatment can alter a song, and it’s evolved from a slow-burner with a nagging groove and ‘big’ chorus to a proper eye-opening slap. It shows that a good song is a good song however you spin it, but it does feel like they’ve really nailed it with this version, with its bold energy and sense of self-liberation. It’s time to let the animal inside loose.

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Aidan Baker / Han-earl Park / Katharina Schmidt – Thoughts Of Trio

Posted: 16 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 6th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

The ever-prolific Aidan Baker has been a frequent and recurrent feature on the pages of Aural Aggravation since its inception in 2016, and I’ve been listening to, and covering, his works since a fair few years earlier. He’s an artist who never fails to intrigue, and his manifold collaborations see him revealing new aspects to his creativity.

This three-way collaboration was, according to the accompanying notes, ‘recorded live at Morphine Raum in Berlin, Germany on February 21, 2024 by Canadian guitarist Aidan Baker, Korean-American guitarist Han-earl Park, & German drummer/percussionist Katharina Schmidt. The group brings together their respective, disparate musical backgrounds to explore the intersections of ambient music, improvisational (free) jazz, and musique-concrète.’

It’s worth noting just how many live releases of collaborations there seem to have been released recently: in fact, only yesterday I was delving into the dynamics of the latest offering by CEL. This may be a ‘cost-of-living’ matter, in part: economic circumstances really aren’t favouring anyone who isn’t two-homes-and-at-least-one-cruise-a-year rich, and this is a global issue, whereby post-pandemic the disparity between the wealthy and the rest has increased exponentially (a word I’m mindful of tossing about being aware of its actual meaning), and it’s never been a tougher time to be a musician, unless you’re Taylor Swift, or Ed Shearan or Elton John or Coldplay… you get the idea. And it’s certainly not (only) because of the shit streaming revenues paid (or not) by Spotify. Studio time is expensive: getting together for intercontinental collaborations is expensive… and when it comes to it, it’s not always easy, or even possible, to recreate the energy, the frisson, the immediacy of a live performance in the studio.

And so here was have Thoughts Of Trio, which captures a set from the start of the year, mastered as eight segments, simply titled sequentially ‘TOTone’ to ‘TOTeight’. The arrangements are often sparse, and combine nagging, regular repetitions with erratic irreglularities: ‘TOTone’ sounds like a pulsating wave or a slow alarm simultaneous with a game of ping-pong and some urban foxes foraging through bin bags. I mean, it doesn’t really sound quite like that, but the different elements belong to different places, and while it does work, it does not feel like a composition in any conventional sense. And this is very much the form of the album: there are no overt structures, there is no sense of cohesion or linearity.

But where Thoughts Of Trio evades the pitfall of being a discordant disaster is in just how they somehow keep things together, with an absorbing, if loose, sense of rhythm, which is both absorbing and bewildering, but, however subtly, ever-present. ‘TOTthree’ features springing guitar twangs and lurching grumbles, but a distinct sense of almost abstract rhythm. Clanking rattles and slow-bending, woozy drones hover and slowly wilt, with scrapes and subterranean bumps and nudges unpredictably rising and falling.

There’s no obvious shape to any of this, but amidst a set of pieces which are five or six minutes long, the eighteen-and-a-half-minute ‘TOTseven’ stands out a dominant track on the album, although one suspects that for those who were actually there, it was difficult to differentiate the pieces, which tend to bleed into one another. It rumbles and hums, tense and dense, simmering, without ever breaking through the tension that holds down the surface.

There’s little to no audience noise, no applause in the interludes or intersections, which works well in terms of the overall listening experience, but means that this doesn’t sound or feel like a live album. That’s by no means a criticism, and again illustrates how live recordings can replace studio recordings for so artists. This simply doesn’t sound or feel like a live recording, and that’s not only due to the lack of audience noise, but the way everything flows.

For all of the discord, the twists and knots and disparities, Thoughts Of Trio comes together somehow. While it’s is by no means overtly, jazz, Thoughts Of Trio sits between jazz and ambient, with an experimental / avant-garde. Ultimately, it does its own thing.

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CEL – Five minutes to self-destruct

Posted: 15 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Gagarin Records – 6th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

You might be hard-pressed to call CEL a supergroup, but Felix Kubin has been creating sound here, there, and everywhere for a long time now, and Five minutes to self-destruct is definitely a coming together of established creative forces, containing as it does five recordings of live tracks performed by longstanding Kubin and longstanding collaborator Hubert Zemler, remixed by Warsaw sound engineer Jan Wroński.

And the thing about creative collaborations is that they often rely on spontaneity, immediacy, the frisson between the individuals in proximity, feeding off one another in the moment. And so it is here, as the accompanying notes set out: ‘The expressiveness of these recordings is evident not only in their unbridled live energy, which can hardly be reproduced in the studio, but also in a musical nervousness that sets itself apart from the current wellness folklore of the modular community. The pieces gather in their DNA the paranoid plasma of cultural unease, chaos and upheaval.’

To make a small sidestep, we hear endless decrees that employees need to return to the office in order to foster the spirit of collaboration and all the rest. We know that this is bollocks, and is simply about working the instruments of control. Collaboration and the coalescence of energy for creative ends is not something which cannot be forced, and it happens, regardless of distance, time, and space, given the right connection and chemistry. Hearing the performances on Five minutes to self-destruct, it’s immediately apparent that this is not something that could ever be created by desire or will alone.

As the accompanying bio notes, ‘The expressiveness of these recordings is evident not only in their unbridled live energy, which can hardly be reproduced in the studio, but also in a musical nervousness that sets itself apart from the current wellness folklore of the modular community. The pieces gather in their DNA the paranoid plasma of cultural unease, chaos and upheaval.’

The title track ‘Five minutes to self-destruct’ is a quote from Michael Crichton’s sci-fi classic The Andromeda Strain, which describes a research team’s fight for survival against an accidentally triggered self-destruct mechanism, underpinned by trigger impulses and increasing panic.

My own experience of the modular community may not be on quite the same scale or the same higher circles as theirs, but it does feel primarily the domain of the middle-class, middle-aged white male these days, and there’s a certain air of ease and the satisfaction of hobbyism about it. Needless to say, not so here. There’s a tension that runs throughout the entirety of the release. ‘Krakenwaltz’ cartwheels and loops in jittery circles, head-spinning rhythmic cycles with no small degree of attack, with some sharp, aggressive snare sounds and a frenetic, frantic undercurrent which grows increasingly disorientating over its near-six-minute duration.

‘Eskalacja’ is dominated by hectic percussion and a whirl of fairground bleeps and toots running in ever-tighter concentric circles. It some respects, it calls to mind the frenzied looping and wild, vaguely manic excesses of early Foetus 12” singles, seeing just how far they can push the concept, and themselves in the creation of hyperactive sound.

The seven-minute ‘Blauer Dunst’ which sits as the album’s centrepiece marks a distinct shift in tone and texture, a rumbling dark ambient piece that invites comparisons to some of the more abstract works of Throbbing Gristle. It predates the rest of the set by almost four years, having been recorded in October 2020.

It’s back to more upbeat, stomping percussion-led synth work on the DAF-like ‘Neustart Generation’ – but don’t mistake upbeat for uplifting: it clatters and bangs with a clipped, regimented, Germanic feel, and the grooves are taut and tense, and it’s simmering tension which crackles beneath the lumping, shuffling, organic rhythms which underpin the sparse, tetchy title track. A couple of minutes in, a loping percussive cycle breaks out and the repetition of this and the dominant synth motif, amidst a swell of extraneous sounds – samples, sirens – makes this one of those tracks where you can feel your blood pressure increasing as it progresses and the pace quickens to a blur. It ends before reaching the point of inducing an aneurysm, and the assurance to the applauding audience, “We’re still alive, it’s ok,” at the fae injects some unexpected humour to proceedings.

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Street Soldier / Colpoclesis / Final Words / Miško Boba / Theseus / Idle Eyes – The Fulford Arms, York, 13th December 2024

Posted: 14 December 2024 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

‘Do your research’ has become an admonition in recent years, mostly since the advent of COVID, and it’s probably sound advice when it comes to picking gigs. But a mate who had tickets alerted me to this one, and as it was pitched as a night of hardcore and the poster was bristling with illegible spiky writing, I thought it would be worth a punt. It’s healthy to be exposed to the unknown, to new artists and acts which may exist beyond the domain of your comfort zone. If you don’t like them, what have you really lost? I elected to do precisely no research in advance, and to take the bands as they came, with no expectations.

In the event, none of the acts were hardcore in any sense I’ve come to understand the term, and we’ll come to this – in particular Street Soldier – presently, but first, there were five other acts on this packed lineup.

With it being an insanely early start, arriving at 6:40, I only caught the last couple of songs by Idle Eyes. They presented a quite technical sound, with a sort of progressive instrumental metal feel. They announced the end of their set that they’re on the lookout for a singer. I’m not entirely convinced they need one, but it would likely broaden their audience potential.

Next up, Theseus opened with samples and atmosphere… And then went heavy and the headbanging and moshing – or solo slam dancing – started. With 5-string bass and two 7-string guitars, they bring some chug and churn. The songs have a fair amount of attack, but their sound is fairly commonplace metalcore, the look being regulation beards and baseball caps. Fine if you dig it, but it’s all much of a muchness.

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Theseus

Miško Boba stand out, being the only female-fronted band – and indeed, the only act to feature a woman in their lineup – and also the only black metal band of the night. My mate shrugged and said that he simply didn’t ‘get’ black metal or its appeal, and it’s easy enough to see his point: as a genre it has a tendency to be pretty impenetrable. Misko Boba only accentuate the impenetrability with lyrics in Lithuanian, and they’re dark, the songs propelled by double pedal kick drum. But while black metal conventionally shuns any kind of studio production values, Misko Boba sound crisp and sharp through the PA, and are straight in, hard and fast, with raging guitars and demonic vocals. Epic blackness, and relentlessly fierce, and above the reasons mentioned previously, they’re a standout of the night for quality.

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Miško Boba

Final Words’ bassist has a hint of Derek Smalls about him, but with a 6-string bass and the biggest earlobe holes I’ve ever seen. The audience member who looks like he’s here for East 17 and keeps busting moves which are more like bad street dancing is bouncing around while they’re still setting up. They may have the grimy industrial hefty of early Pitch Shifter, but ‘motherfucker’ seems to account for sixty percent of the lyrics, and in terms of fanbase, they’re less industrial and more tracksuit and camos wearing, kick-the-crap out of one another metal and it’s carnage in the crowd. By now, the place is rammed, but there’s a good ten feet between the stage and the first row proper, with people staying back to avoid risk of harm from the increasingly wild scrummage down the front.

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Final Words

It may have been after their set that the bar staff were out mopping the floor after what I had assumed was beer spillage, but transpired to have been the result of a couple of punters standing on a radiator to get a better view, resulting in the radiator coming off the wall and water from the broken pipes soaking the floor. And then of course, they legged it. It would be this story which would eclipse the night on social media and even make local press. It’s always sad when the actions of a small minority eclipse the representation of the majority. I don’t want to dwell on this, but by now the space near the stage was a high-risk area, and anyone with a camera was cowering in the small safe zone either side of the stage – which meant pretty much shoulder and ear to the PA stack.

Colpoclesis soundcheck the vocals with a handful of guttural grunts. They’re still setting up the drum kit ten minutes after they’re due to have started. Proportional to the stage, the kit is immense. It’s a lot of kit to sound like the click and rattle of a knitting machine. But they are, indisputably heavy, and sound nothing like the vocalist looks, blasting out brutal grindcore. Between songs, they sound like affable Scousers, then announce the songs in a raw-throated roar. There’s something amusing about this, in that stepping into the song they suddenly switch into ‘hard guy’ mode. Inflatable clubs suddenly proliferate around the venue and comedy violence ensues, followed by a circle pit.

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Colpoclesis

Street Soldier, I soon learn, are exponents of a new – at least to me – kind of hardcore. Alternating between quick fire tap and guttural metal, they whip up absolute carnage. A scan online suggests there is no such thing as tracksuit metal, but perhaps there should be, and defined as ‘grunty metal by people in vests and trakky bottoms and baseball caps shouting “c’mon, motherfuckers” a lot while people windmill and karate kick the crap out of each other with Nike trainers’. “I wanna see violence, I wanna see blood!” they exhort, pumping the crowd into a frenzy.

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Street Soldier

It’s difficult to put a finger on precisely why this doesn’t feel comfortable, but having recently extolled to a friend how metal gigs often felt like the safest of places, where people were ultra-considerate and kind to one another, united in their outsiderdom and sense of society being wrong. Sure, as with other moshpits, the fallen got picked up, but not before a few punches and blows, and however playful, I felt an undercurrent of senseless brutality, the tang of a lust for violence intermingled with the smell of sweat, and there was something dystopian, Ballardian about the spectacle. Having given up on fighting the man, Street Soldier,– as their Facebook page puts it, in ‘SPITTIN SHIT MADE STRAIGHT FOR THA PIT’ have adopted the self-aggrandising tropes of rap, and with cuts like ‘Middle Fingaz’, ‘Nonce Killaz’ and ‘Nah Nah Fuck You’, they appear to espouse anti-societal nihilism, but in a form that’s more aligned to rap than metal, while encouraging crowd behaviour which is more akin to blood lust and a reimagining of Fight Club than unity. Given the current state of things, it’s not that difficult to comprehend their appeal, especially to the under twenty-fives: smashing the living shit out of themselves and one another is probably far more appealing than whatever dismal prospects the future offers. But this is a bleak and nihilistic entertainment, and it sort of feels like torture dressed as fun.

Moose Knuckle / Perennial / JUKU – The Fulford Arms, York, 11th December 2024

Posted: 12 December 2024 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

My review of JUKU’s debut, at a Sunday matinee show last summer, continues to receive significant hits, and while they have played only a limited number of shows in the interim, it seems their reputation has been growing without their needing to take to the stage. It does mean that, personally, I’m keen to see them whenever the rare opportunity arises, and April seems like a long time ago.

They don’t disappoint: this is one tight, loud, band, and they pack the songs in back to back, no chat, no pissing about tuning up, no stalling to mop brows or regain breath. There isn’t a weak song in their half-hour set, but there are some standouts: ‘Pressure’ has the gritty drive of Motorhead and ‘No Fun’ is, actually, much fun. The set packs riffs and hooks like The Ramones on steroids… the lead guitarist is understated, focused, while on the other side of the stage, Dan is going ballistic, stomping and thrashing every ounce from his guitar like a man possessed. Sonically, they create contrast, too, with crisp, twangy tones cut through the huge, distorted roar blasting from Dan’s amp. They’re practically faultless, and the set ends in a ragged howl of feedback.

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JUKU

When the opening act is this strong, it’s a guaranteed good night either way: the rest of the acts are going to have to be bloody good to top them, in which case you’ve got a run of belters, or if they don’t match up, you can go home early knowing you’ve seen the best band of the night by getting down early. Tonight proves to be a bit of both.

New England trio Perennial – comprising guitar, synth, and drums, with dual vocals, are here on their first UK tour in support their third album, Art History, released over here by York-based label Safe Suburban Home Records. Sporting matching striped tops, they look vaguely nerdy, and unless you’ve heard or seen them before, nothing can quite prepare you for their wild stage act. Chelsea (keyboards, vocals) windmills and bounces all over, hyper as hell, and Chad Jewett, who’s a big fella, is a blur of movement, jumping and lurching and hurling himself and his guitar around, almost toppling his cabs just a couple of songs in. They positively crackle with energy, and are clearly absolutely loving every second of what is a remarkably well-conceived and structured set. They play US punk rock – or ‘modernist punk’ as they call it – with wit, and a keen sense of humour, delivering entertainment amped to the max. They clearly had a fair few fans in, and there was some exuberant dancing down the front. Definitely one of those bands that, if you get the chance, you should see.

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Perennial

Moose Knuckle showcase a solid sound, and some swagger, but the bar has been set incredibly high. They don’t have nearly as much energy as either of the two previous acts (although more every than Perennial would probably cause a power cut across the entire city), and they’re simply not quite loud enough or otherwise sonically powerful to get away with such a static performance. On another night, or had the bill been reversed, they’d have been decent enough, but they’re very much a meat and two veg rendition of punk, with most of the songs’ lyrics involving the repetition of a single line about forty times. And they’re not exactly inspired lines, either: ‘I need my dope, dope, dope, dope, dope,’ and ‘Dead! Beat! Daddy!’ is about the level of lyrical quality, the level of the lyrical quality, the level of the lyrical quality, the level of the lyrical quality.

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Moose Knuckle

Starting the set by calling everyone forward, only for them to all have to step back again to make way for the videographer prowling back and forth the full width of the stage a t least twice every song kinda backfired a bit, too.

Ultimately, there was nothing really ban about their set, it just lacked inspiration and energy in contrast to the previous acts.

The format of the night worked well, though: three bands, half an hour each, fifteen-minute interludes, 10:20 finish. Bish, bash, bosh. Perfect for midweek, and y’know, two outta three ain’t bad.

Nicholas Langley – ‘Matthew’s Hand’

Posted: 10 December 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 22nd November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Matthew’s Hand by Nicholas Langley is the twenty-fifth instalment in Mortality Tables’ LIFEFILES series, now in its third season. The principles of this ongoing project are simple: ‘Recordings of places, people, objects, moments in time, environments and quotidian events are shared with a range of artists working across different disciplines. Those artists are free to respond to the recordings in any way they like.’

Simple principles, but in actuality, giving free reign to the artist to respond to the source material offers near-infinite possibilities. And so it is that Nicholas Langley presents to six-minute pieces in the form of ‘Milton Keynes University Hospital, 3 April 2024’ and ‘Milton Keynes University Hospital, 17 April 2024’.

Label head Mat Smith provides the following context for the source material for this release: ‘On 2 April 2024, I fell over while walking near Smithfield Market on my way to work, and broke my hand. The two recordings used by Nicholas were both made at Milton Keynes University Hospital – the first while waiting for an x-ray that confirmed the fracture the following day, and then two weeks later while in the waiting room for the cast to be removed.’

I’ll spare the tale of the time I fell and broke my ribs and shredded my hand one night, but shall move to the point that for some of us, the reaction to an event which contains an element of shock and even mild trauma is to document it. Having photographed my bleeding palm, and recorded the horrendous roar of the oxygen machines which were installed in our living room for the final nights my wife was with us, I can only conclude that recording these things creates a separation which enables us to process them as being ‘media’, for wont of a better term, rather than the painful reality of our actual lives. I certainly prefer this rationale to the idea that it’s a sociopathic impulse to revel in experiences of trauma and pain.

‘Matthew’s Hand’ captures the ambient chatter and clatter of a waiting room, at least initially, before this fades out to be replaced with something that one might describe as echo-soaked abstract synth jazz. Langley applies the principles of dub reggae, but without the percussion. The sonic experience is in some ways like the lived experience of the waiting room, as the chatter dims into the distance and your head slowly swims in a sea of overwhelmed strangeness as you wish you were elsewhere.

Someone recounts the grim tale of someone who was close to a mortar explosion at the beginning of ‘A Mortar Went Off Near Him’, before heavy elongated, humming drones enter the mix, and Langley builds a dense soundscape of whistles, hums, and whooshes which owes as much to early 80s industrial as it does to more contemporary dark ambience. A monotonous throb emerges, and it’s overlaid with scrawls of feedback and sharp, needling treble. Ultimately, little happens over the course of its seven-minute duration but somehow, you feel the effect.

Taken together, the two tracks have an impact which somehow extends beyond their sound alone.

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Papillon de Nuit – Amber

Posted: 10 December 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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10th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Less than a fortnight after Yorkshire-based collective Papillon de Nuit unveiled their first track, ‘Scarlet’, they present to the world the second fruits of their recent recording sessions, mastered by none other than Tom Woodhead, formerly of ¡Forward Russia! at Hippocratic Mastering. While ‘Amber’ continues the colour-themed song titles, they promised something different, and, indeed, that’s precisely what they’ve given us.

‘Scarlet’ was a somewhat folk-infused tune with a rolling rhythm: in contrast, ‘Amber’ sits more in neoclassical territory, in terms of composition and arrangement, with a lone piano providing the primary instrumentation; around the sung segments are spoken-word poetical passages. Again, Stephen Kennedy leads, but there is a counterpoint in words composed and spoken by Edinburgh-based polyartist Monica Wolfe, and the interaction between the voices and modes of delivery is engaging. This is not rock, or pop, or folk, but unashamedly music as art, and as compelling as it is beautiful.

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Codespeaker – Scavenger

Posted: 9 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Ripcord Records – 8th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Codespeaker are a post-metal band from Edinburgh, which their press release describes as ‘Scotland’s sombre capital’. Of all things, I’d never really considered it to be a sombre place, and I’ve been a fair few times – then again, having lived in Glasgow for four years, I am aware of just how bleak the long Scottish winters are. Further north by latitude than Moscow and separated from the Arctic Ocean by only more water, things can be pretty grim and the nights can feel like weeks.

They promise an ‘atmospheric, dark, and heavy post-metal sound’ with ‘thunderous drums and colossal guitars reminiscent of titanic bands like Neurosis and Cult of Luna’, on an album which ‘marks a new chapter for Codespeaker… [a] massive-sounding record [which] offers a towering and immersive experience, ebbing and flowing between hypnotic, mammoth-sized riffs and intense vocals, while also embracing atmospheric and contemplative moments.’

Having had no television for three months after a storm took down the aerial during my time in Glasgow, again, this does seem to represent the bleakness of those long, long nights which seem to stretch from 2pm to 9:30am, as well as articulating the state of the world right now. It’s at war. It’s on fire. It’s fucked up. It’s scary. Scavenger picks it way through the fragments and scraps, the mess of confusion and roars to the sky, an unbridled utterance of raw anguish.

They’re straight in with the thunder on the first song, the six-minute ‘Usud’ and the weight only grows on the roaring blast that is ‘Signum’. The drums are half-submerged by the thick wall of overdriven guitar when they’re in full-on riff mode, and the force is something else, a sonic tsunami. When they break it down to quieter passages, it feels like a lull in a storm, but more than that, they reveal an altogether more reflective aspect, and while they do so, they brood hard and their knack for introspective atmospherics is matched by their technical skills – both the musicianship and composition is deft. And they prove themselves to be masters of the build-up, too: to continue with the storm analogy, the mid-section of ‘Recission’ is exemplary, as if the winds gradually begin to build before suddenly, bam! You’re hit by a torrential downpour driven by a ninety-mile-per-hour gust. The beginning of ‘Karst’ again shows that they’re capable of moments of magnificent poise and calm, before gradually building… and building… it’s a while before they let fly with all the riffs, all the pedals, all the volume, and the impact is devastating.

Instrumentally, ‘Hetacomb’ calls to mind segments of Amenra’s Mass VI, the soft picking giving way to a bone-crunching chug, while ‘Samsa’, the album’s shortest track, coming n at under four minutes, is also perhaps the most brutal. ‘Enso’ sprawls over almost seven minutes of blistering savagery, an exorcism of pain and a tempest of catharsis. They’ve got yet more up their collective sleeves: the final track, ‘Verte’ is a work of magnificent, alternating dreamy shoegaze segments, with volcanic metal eruptions which hit with a bowel-quaking force.

All told, Scavenger is pretty special – equally emotive and high impact, this is intelligent, articulate, and monumentally heavy. I suppose you might say it’s the perfect equilibrium between deft and heft.

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Christian – and knowing is half the battle

Posted: 8 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 6th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Another Bandcamp Friday, and another release from Dret Skivor, Swedish microlabel specialising in noise and weird shit on super-limited cassettes. This time, they promise a ‘beast of a release with artwork by the manbear that is Christian Blandhoel’. Side A of this cassette is supposedly the ‘hard side’ and Side B the ‘soft side’, but these things are relative. Mellow it is not, and it really is a beast. I’d been forewarned that it was a long one, and landing the same day I received my copy of the new Swans live album, which clocks in at a solid two and a half hours, I kinda shrugged it off, thinking ‘yeah, it’s long, but it’s not that long…’ and while that’s true, I perhaps should have paid more heed. It’s not just about the length with this one. It’s about the intensity. For the records, Swans’ Live Rope is intense, and anyone who’s seen them live in the last couple of years will appreciate this. But the recordings simply do not capture the experience of being in the room, the decimating volume.

The thing is, there’s listening to music, and listening to music. I listen to music while I’m cooking, but it’s simply on, whereas listening to music with focus is a true commitment, and takes some energy. Listening to and knowing is half the battle takes a lot of energy.

Only a minute or two into ‘bad things keep happening’, the first of the album’s seventeen tracks, there’s some extreme panning that’s churning my guts and making me dizzy, and that’s without the feedback whistles that land just in the region of tinnitus. It’s a challenging six minutes, which culminates in a slugging blast of lung-rattling bass sludge.

‘Danger draws near to what you hold dear’ is an ominous piece of dark ambience with static and hum, crackles and horrific ruptures of noise. There’s a low-end mechanical thrum, low-end doom frequencies which flicker and throb, and nothing comfortable. Trilling feedback whistles for what feels like an age before more bass frequencies hit, and then static and distortion hums and hovers from left to right. This feels like an album designed to inflict optimal pain and anguish. ‘Loaded for bear what a nasty spectackle’ hums and drones and bursts distortion to a point at which is inflicts pain at first, before diminishing in its confrontational intensity.

Scraping strings and ominous drones and unsettling discord and dissonance are all the things one might expect from a track bearing the disturbing title ‘i always hope to find you fully dilated and bleeding’, and when it suddenly ruptures into a surge of fizzing distortion, the experience becomes quite overwhelming – and it only grows more intense and anguishing as it progresses.

‘rendering flesh’ is a horrible mess of buzzes and hums, feedback trills and screams, snarling whirls and blips and glitches. And the unpleasant frequencies, the serrated waves, the tension-building noise just keeps on coming, with the pieces packed back-to-back with no pause for decompression. At times it sounds like a bulldozer ploughing through the speakers, at others it’s more akin to the soundtrack to psychological torture or one of those anxiety dreams from which you wake, drenched in sweat, which fuck the entirety of your day.

Christian may be in pain, and and knowing is half the battle is his way of letting it out. Or perhaps he’s a sadist who derives pleasure from inflicting pain on others. Either way, and knowing is half the battle is likely to stand as an endurance test which many listeners will fail. Christian seems to have a knack for finding all the frequencies which resonate in the wrong way: every throb and click is a tension-building, gut-worrying microassault. ‘Abakan hyperburst’ again exploits both wild panning and distortion to distressing effect, before ‘the current trend of selective autism’ presents a sparse but challenging question. What is he trying to say here? Well, it does seem that a certain type of person will defend shitty behaviour by claiming that they may be on the spectrum – undiagnosed, of course – or have some other issue as a justification, which diminishes and undermines those who are truly autistic, in the same way as the people who shout loudest about their mental health and take time off work for mental health reasons aren’t necessarily those who are truly suffering. It is a minefield, and a topic which goes far beyond the reach of this review, but one that we shouldn’t ignore, since Christian has raised it.

Other titles are perhaps less provocative, and instead are more surreal – such as ‘mcdelivery plush trumpet’ and ‘the wonder of phosphorous burned eyeholes’, but ‘exploding heads in peacetime’ is a blistering trill of feedback worthy of Whitehouse, underlaid with billowing bass.

This would be a tortuous work regardless of duration, as Christian remorselessly pushes all the buttons for noise which is uncomfortable, distressing, but the fact this album seems to last a lifetime only heightens the tension. and knowing is half the battle is painful, horrible in every way – so needless to say, I love it, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

AA

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