Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Pissed Jeans – Half Divorced

Posted: 29 February 2024 in Reviews
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Sub Pop – 1st March 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

When grunge exploded and was endlessly touted as ‘the voice of a generation’, there was considerable truth in this: as a teen in the early and mid-90s, it felt like a moment in time which was fresh and exciting. After years of polished pop and hip-hop becoming the dominant forms, a breakthrough of music so raw and visceral felt like a tidal wave, crashing through the airwaves and obliterating the endless sameness, while articulating the angst and disaffection that filled the stagnant air at the time. Sub Pop unquestionably played a significant part in bringing these vital bands to the world – the label equivalent of a grass-roots venue putting out records by bands they believed in – and that belief proved to be justified. Even the ones who didn’t go full Nirvana or Hole, like Mudhoney and Tad, were culturally significant and remain so.

Every generation seeks music which speaks both to, and for it, in some way or another. Which brings us, smoothly, to Pissed Jeans. A racketous grunge band on Sub Pop who speak to, and for… well, I sort of feel an audience who are growing up – by which I mean older and more disillusioned all the time – with them. If grunge was initially supposed to be the voice of working class, blue-collar, flannel-shirt and knackered up jeans wearing folks and articulating the angst of the stuck in small town in menial dayjobs, then Pissed Jeans brought a post-millennial, global capitalist, tertiary industry aspect to it. Their appeal has always been their ordinariness: ordinary guys with ordinary office dayjobs, writing songs about the shitness of ordinary life in ordinary office dayjobs, office politics, and generally mundane things that really grind your gears. We love them because when they finally get enough time out of the office to make music, it’s real, and it’s relatable, venting all the frustration and anger that an accumulation of small niggles over the course of a crap day at the office can build to a desire to shout and kick stuff.

Pissed Jeans have always been, if not heart-on-sleeve, a band whose separation between life and art had been fine at most. As the awkwardness and ennui of disaffected youth has faded, so it’s given way to reflections on the tribulations of responsibility and the cloud which descends with the realisation that time is passing – and at an ever-accelerating pace – and what have you got to show for it? You’re still grinding away at the dayjob, you’ve maybe made it to be a call centre team leader or something equally mundane and FUCK!

As much as they’re a band who don’t appear to take themselves too serious, it’s also clear that they’re serious about what they do: they need this outlet, this escape. And so while it’s tempting to focus on Matt Korvette as the lyricist and focal point, their work is very much a collective thing. They all went to school together, and have grown together, and you can imagine them all collectively ad individually navigating arranging band practices around work, wives, and so on. Why Love Now was a dark exploration of office politics and crass chauvinism and the fact that men suck, and attempting to navigate these times as average white men – because when you see average white men posting online in response to the latest grim revelation that it’s ‘not all men’ your heart sinks because it’s clear it’s most men at some time and we all need to do better – isn’t easy when you recognise that you are part of the problem and there’s no escaping it. Korvette’s lyrics are burning with bile, and while loathing abounds, the fiercest, most incandescent anguish manifests as immolatory self-loathing.

Half Divorced is an album burning with blind, impotent rage and life and the hand it deals. It sees the band really dive in hard to their hardcore roots and pack in track after track. Whereas Why Love Now may have ventured into more exploratory territory under the guidance of Lydia Lunch as a producer, with some longer songs, Half Divorced packs them in tight, with most songs coming in well under two minutes, in proper old-school hardcore style, and it’s one of their fiercest collections to yet.

The three singles released in advance, with the latest being ‘Cling to a Poisoned Dream’, are full of dark energy. Whereas its predecessor placed the lyrics more to the fore, they’re often buried in the blurry murk of the furious, balls-out hardcore assault, and overall, Half Divorced is about sonic impact and it rages hard through dingy basslines and squalls of feedback. Half Divorced is an angry record, and you get the impression they’re angry about everything, but a large portion of that anger is inwardly-focused. I mean, what’s more perfectly midlife than making an album that recreates the sound of your teens while being pissed off with work, the world, and the shitness of your ageing self? ‘Alive With Hate’, clocking in at just over a minute and a half is everything the title suggests, and pretty much sums up this dirty articulation of raging while ageing. If they’re overcompensating by cranking it all up a few notches, well, they can overcompensate away: as OFF! demonstrate, age is no barrier to being cool as long as you’ve still got the fire. Right now, Pissed Jeans have got all the fire, and Half Divorced is relentless and raging and as good as they’ve ever been.

AA

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Stewart Home vs JIz – Problematic Memorials

Posted: 26 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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26th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Having recently had his early punk rock recordings reissues, Stewart Home makes a new foray into the recorded medium, this time with a rather more experimental collaboration with JIz. Delivering a spoken word list of ‘problematic memorials’ (as the title suggests) with some additional commentary, in a fashion not dissimilar from The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu’s ‘It’s Grim Up North’, across three variants with backing that ranges from swampy experimental noise to minimal avant-jazz, Home leads us on a tour of London taking in sights that most people don’t realise have unsavoury connotations and commemorate people and events which probably ought to be damned rather than celebrated.

The long history of slavery throughout the British Empire has – belatedly – become subject to more open discourse in recent years, but our current government, who seem determined to resurrect the spirit of the empire through jingoism and xenophobia and a completely false reimagining of history as a way of selling Brexit as a win, are averse to such discourse, branding anything and everything from the Army to the National Trust as ‘woke’ – as if being woke is a bad thing.

For the most part, the sense of ‘Britishness’ which is increasingly only a sense of ‘Englishness’ in our ever-more isolated and impoverished part of a small island on the edge of Europe – geographically, and sinking off the coast of Europe politically – is born of ignorance. Stubborn, belligerent ignorance, but ignorance nonetheless. And out of such ignorance arise pathetic, futile culture wars.

Home has so far managed to slide his antagonistic sociopolitical position under the radar in recent years – in contrast to his controversy-piquing earlier years when he was churning out pastiche works about skinheads and riots and anarchy. What happened? Perhaps in developing his approach to be more subtle, Home achieved even greater subversion by being able to continue his mission without interference. Whatever the reason, here we have Problematic Memorials. Call it woke, call it what you like, but it needs to be heard. And beyond the message, it’s a top-notch spoken word / experimental music crossover collaboration, so go get your lugs round it.

AA

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Nnja Riot – Violet Fields

Posted: 25 February 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Recordings – 23rd February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Nnja Riot is the solo project of Lisa McKendrick, who also happens to be one half of experimental electronic noise duo Isn’tses, with Tim Drage, who makes serious noise as Cementemental.

It’s a small world, especially in circles of noise and experimental electronics, and so it is that a few years ago, I paired with Tim for a one-off collaborative set in London at the bottom of a bill curated by Human Worth, with the mighty Modern Technology headlining. I lost my hearing in one ear before the set due to some congestion, and by the end, I’d lost my voice, too. Somewhere along the way, I’m convinced I’ve crossed paths with Isn’tses, too, but can’t find the evidence at this moment in time.

Anyway, my needless digression brings me to the point of observation that their individual projects are quite different from one another, and their collaborative output. This is ultimately a good thing, because while algorithms which have seemingly replaced the music press in making recommendations of the ‘if you liked listening to this, you’ll like this’ ilk, it ain’t necessarily so. Because algorithms don’t understand art, or the fact that an artist’s output may be widely varied.

And so it is that as Nnja Riot, Lisa takes a much more songwriterly approach to things, and Violet Fields contains seven songs which can be described broadly as stark industrial electropop. ‘Horror Heart’ brings all of the elements in together to raise the curtains on the album: understated verses, with a thumping heartbeat bass beneath a delicate vocal bathed in reverb, are suddenly blown away in a wave of noise and monotone robotics with whipcracking synthetic snares cutting through the murk with some harsh treble.

‘The Evolve’ is a low, slow, dark pulsating grind which swells to a blistering ruckus of bubbling, broiling eruption of glitching electronic froth, and things get mangled fast and hard. Nnja Riot is indeed an appropriate moniker: the noise grows and takes over by stealth, as if from nowhere: one minute things are pretty mellow, the next, it’s all going off and you’re being carried away on a sonic tidal wave.

The album’s longest track, ‘Dark Assassination’, stretches beyond the seven-minute mark, and with a stuttering, beat hammering like a palpating heart in a state of fibrillation against the ribcage, it’s creates a muscle-tightening tension which is uncomfortable. The vocals are disconcerting, sounding as they do detached, off-key, non-melodic. Desperate drones bend and warp in the background, adding layers of dissonance and discomfort.

Everywhere across Violet Fields, there are subtle but essential incidental details, little lines of melody which ripple and fade. The title track is hazy, sedated, spaced-out, with melodic elements juxtaposed with swerving sci-fi noise which threatens to drown out the erratic beats and she cuts loose to another level of intensity with the vocal delivery: fuzzed with distortion, there’s a outflowing from the innermost which pours into the swirling wash of multi-faceted noise.

Violet Fields crackles and fizzes, often promising structures which crumble and evaporate and leave the listener feeling a little lost, grasping for something uncertain and just beyond reach. It’s this sense of vagueness which remains after the grainy ‘Musical Fix’ and the ephemeral drift of ‘Slow Release’, a mere fragment of a song which carries a spiritual richness on a ritual drumbeat before fading. There’s a sense that hearing Violet Fields and fully grasping it are not one and the same, and it feels that however long one spends engaging with it, there will always be depths and layers of implicit meaning that exist beyond the realms of conception. You wave a feeble hand, desperate to clutch and cling, but it’s gone. It’s gone.

AA

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Elizabeth Joan Kelly – LF17/Edinburgh

Posted: 25 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables are blasting out the second series of LIFEFILES releases at quite a pace, and LF17 is the seventh release in the season.

Describing LIFEFILES as ‘creative exchanges’; the premise is simple: ‘Recordings of places, people, objects, moments in time, environments and quotidian events are shared with a range of artists working with sound. Those artists are then free to respond to the recordings in any way they like, either through manipulation or composition.’

LF17/Edinburgh is Elizabeth Joan Kelly’s response to a set of recordings made in Edinburgh in August of 2021 by Mat Smith, namely Emeka Ogboh ‘Song Of The Union’ installation, Calton Hill (24.08.2021), Princes Street Gardens (24.08.2021), and Car on Calton Road cobblestones (25.08.2021).

The titles are plain, factual, locational, without any sense of the temporal or any indication of connotation, association, or resonance. And this is fitting, since the three compositions – ‘Calton Hill’, ‘Princes Street Gardens’, and ‘Calton Road Cobblestones’ are gentle, electroambient works which speak little of either the time or the place. These pieces are very much responses to the recordings themselves, rather than their location. Based in New Orleans, and purveyor of ‘post-apocalyptic junkyard drone pop’, Kelly has brought her own perspective to the source materials. Of course, this is precisely the spirit of the project – to see how each artist interacts with the material to forge something new, and the fact that each artist will have a completely different approach is what makes this so interesting. Because when given material and parameters, however much freedom an artist has, those parameters will also have a bearing on the output alongside the variables of the input itself and the artist’s methodologies.

In Elizabeth Joan Kelly’s hands, the sounds of a vibrant city are rendered, smoothed, with cross-hatching, delicate shading, some light smudging, a soft blending, by which everything clamorous is faded out to leave a slow hazing. There is, ultimately, no sense of Edinburgh itself here, and we find ourselves adrift, drifting on slow tides of sound with no connection to time or space. It’s not an unpleasant experience, by any means.

LF17/Edinburgh couldn’t be further removed stylistically from Ergo Phizmiz’s release, The Tin Drummer Has Collapsed, which came out only the week before. Where there was collaging, there is blending, mixing, reshaping, and where there was noise, there is calm. Neither release is in any way ‘better’ than the other – just different. And these differences are to be embraced.

AA

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Paal Nilssen-Love & Ken Vandermark – Japan 2019

Posted: 24 February 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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7CD Box-set PNL Records/Audiographic Records – 9th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It may be a way off Throbbing Gristle’s 24 Hours box set or Kenji Siratori’s 12-disc Merzbomb set, but seven hour-long CDs culled from live recordings from a 16-date tour of Japan in 2019 is a huge, huge thing to be faced with. It’s extravagant, indulgent, and frankly excessive, but a boon for fans – at least the really hardcore ones with an obsessive bent.

This is, of course, a document – and a painstakingly detailed one that that. One may question the need to release recordings of almost half the dates of a single tour, but but when improvisational artists play, no two sets are alike, so there was never any danger that this would feature seven discs with the same set played as a carbon copy. But what’s more, this particular tour was noteworthy for introducing new collaborations with legendary Japanese musicians: Akira Sakata (reeds/voice), Masahiko Satoh (piano), and Yuji Takahashi (piano).

As the accompanying notes outline, ‘The group is known for its creative intensity, that constructs and deconstructs material with utmost freedom and spontaneity, and which has been documented on 11 albums since its inception. The addition of such incredible musicians from Japan only heightens the kinetic nature of their playing and the speed in the exchange of musical ideas documented with this collection.’ And this box set, limited to 500 copies – which while not massive, isn’t exactly a tiny run, and as such indicates the kind of fan-base they have, not only in terms of size but also devotion – is being released to coincide with their next tour of Japan.

Each disc features a set performed by a different permutation of players, bookended by sets by Paal Nilssen-Love / Ken Vandermark, with all the variants of the duo with the addition of one to three Japanese collaborators covered across the span of the seven discs.

Each disc is split differently, demonstrating just how different each set was. The first couple of discs, featuring Paal Nilssen-Love / Ken Vandermark and Paal Nilssen-Love / Yuji Takahashi / Ken Vandermark respectively, documents the performance on 4 December 2019 and contain a couple of pieces running for around half an hour and a couple more which run to the ten to fifteen-minute region. The next night’s performance couldn’t be more different, with the first two moments running for forty and thirty minutes respectively, followed by a further nineteen-minute behemoth.

I say it couldn’t be more different, but of course, all four sets are built around some epic jazz workouts which aren’t always easy on the ear – in fact, quite the opposite, as anyone familiar with the work around the Paal Nilssen-Love axis would reasonably expect.

Japan 2019, then, contains a lot of wandering, often straining, discordant, and manic sax, which runs every whichway atop thunderous arrhythmic percussion that clatters and thumps its way stutteringly, yet confidently, all over the place.

My appreciation of this type of brainbending jazzery has evolved over the last few years from a baseline of zero to quite digging its bold adventurousness and stubborn refusal to be shaped into anything remotely structured or normal, pushed outward by an immense respect for the way improv performers are capable of bouncing off one another with such intuition that they sound incredibly well-rehearsed. That’s real musicianship. But it doesn’t mean that it’s listenable all the time, or even half the time. And then there’s the fact that this release is seven discs: that’s around seven hours, or a full working day – of warped sax work and percussion which rattles and clatters all over and it’s still difficult to process, to contextualise. At times, it’s a frothing frenzy of energy; at other times, we hear the performers pull things back and create not only a space that’s broad, but allows for a leisurely stroll around the sonic geometry of their interplay, and as such facilitates broad exploration.

There’s simply so much of this that it’s easy to get lost and disorientated in the labyrinthine tunnels which twist and turn endlessly.

Ultimately, a Paal Nilssen-Love & Ken Vandermark album is the jazz equivalent of an absolute riot – and with this one spanning seven discs, it’s more of a war than a battle, and perhaps best digested in smaller doses.

AA

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Hammok – look how long lasting everything is moving forward for once

Posted: 22 February 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Thirty Something Records – 1st March 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Norwegian noise rock act Hammok have been giving much cause for excitement in recent months. Having first encountered them by way of their Jumping/Dancing/Fighting EP, just over a year ago, they’ve continued to produce something just that bit different. Noisy, yes, but also jerky, and quirky. Something about their sound and the delivery grabbed me. Perhaps it was the instant tinnitus brought on by the full-throttle blast delivered with unbridled mania. Jumping/Dancing/Fighting was less a knock on the door followed by polite head nodding and a round-the-group introduction than rocking up at a dinner party, kicking the door down, pissing on the welcome mat and setting fire to the hallway to announce their arrival.

The title of their debut album look how long lasting everything is moving forward for once, makes no sense linguistically, as a phrase, or even in terms of content. It’s a loosely-assembled succession of words that sort of convey something, although its precise meaning is unclear. And as such, it seems quite right and fitting for the sonic riot it hosts. Since Jumping/Dancing/Fighting late in 2022, they released a second EP last June, and with almost an album’s worth of material already out there, their first album doesn’t include a single track off these first releases, and, trailed by single release ‘Séance’ last month, look how long lasting everything is moving forward for once is an album devised as an album – rather than a collection of songs.

look how long lasting everything is moving forward for once is a short, sharp shock, and a brutal blast, to boot. It pack in eleven songs, and while a few are of a solid length – ‘Wannabe (Billboard No. 1)’, ‘BRAINROTDESPERATION’ and ‘Eat You Alive’ all stretch beyond the four-minute mark, but the majority off the songs are under three minutes, with a fair few – the 1:20 ‘Post Wannabe’ and 1:55 ‘Post Wannabe’ and 2:19 ‘Trap Door’ and 2:28 single ‘Séance’ all blasting hard like sonic injections, eye-popping explosions of innovation and raw energy.

‘Long Lasting’ crashes in on wave of feedback before blasting into an incendiary wave of noise with frenetic drums and manic vocals screaming all explode like a sonic supernova. Charging into an album headlong like this has impact, alright, but inevitably poses the question of just how sustainable that kind of energy is. Immediately after, the raging post-punk ‘Séance’ feels like the obvious lead single choice, with its neat synths, pumping percussion and something almost resembling a hook. It’s a cracking tune, but it’s wild, crazed, and intensely noisy, combining the screamy grunge of Pulled Apart By Horses with a ferocious hardcore punk element.

‘Nothing’s Never Better’ maintains the pace and the raging nihilistic fury, but again hints at an evolving signature for Hammok – a minuscule break, often no more than a couple or bars – where from amidst the chaos and the discord, there’s the briefest flicker off melody, or levity, like a single ray of run breaking through a thoroughly clouded sky following twelve hours of solid heavy rain. It’s so fleeting as to seem almost imaginary.

There’s grunge, noise rock, post-punk, hardcore, and post-metal all in the mix here, all fermenting away fervently, and it’s a lethal cocktail, which has resulted in an album that’s too hard, too fast, too wild, too varied, to get down with straight away.

‘Wannabe (Billboard No. 1)’ is almost pop-punk… almost. Because it brings an unexpected and hard to reconcile range of elements, from the charging fury of early Idles and the shimmering, chiming breaks of Interpol, delivered with a dash of shoegaze and for all the rambunctious rage, there’s something inherently sad about it – the mood, not the song or the band.

‘H.F.D.’ is as much of a blasting wall of house as it gets, making any Strapping Young Lad mentions appropriate, and then there’s a sudden lurch into gnarly metal with a lot of detail. Meanwhile, ‘BRAINROTDESPERATION’ is a magnificent piece which manages to cross post-rock with hardcore and brings a dramatic, gothic edge. The riffs and rackets keep on coming, back-to-back, end-on-end, and the intensity does not let up. There are brief flickers of melody which peep through the blanket of noise, occasional lines with almost resemble hooks, but they’re whipped away as soon as you catch a glimpse of them, leaving you wondering if you imagined them. ‘Eat You Alive’ is a ferocious squall of guitars, the vocals are positively rabid, and the final track, ‘Terror’ arrives not only as a contrast but a surprise, with some jangly indieness paving the way for something that’s an incongruously upbeat slice of emo metalcore.

look how long lasting everything is moving forward for once is an overwhelming experience. There isn’t a dull moment, or even a moment to catch breath, and consequently, knocks the wind out of you and leaves you dizzy and dazed. look how long lasting everything is moving forward for once is imaginative, inventive, insane, and is solid proof that Hammok are no slouches when it comes to mongering noise.

AA

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Dual Analogue – Long Divide

Posted: 20 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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13th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Another day, the organic evolution of another obscure splinter-genre or a genre cooked up by the music press, or, indeed a band themselves. Given the ever-expanding void in the space where the music press used to exist, that particular scenario is increasingly unlikely, meaning genre demarcations tend to now originate by word of mouth among fans, or from bands. And much as there’s a heavy cringe element to the way in which the music press historically created genres, from goth to shoegaze and Britpop, alongside a whole bunch which failed to ignite, like Romo and The New Wave of New Wave. Sometimes, trying to build a pigeonhole slips into the domain of trying too hard, and more often than not, genre labels simply serve as shortcuts which bypass the requirement to engage in meaningful dialogue as to what an act is actually doing, what they really sound like,

And so the arrival of ‘Long Divide’ by ‘Seattle-based ‘turbowave’ pioneers, Dual Analog serves as an educational piece. They pitch themselves as ‘combining New Wave and Heavy Metal into a brand new genre.’

There’s nothing wrong with ‘Long Divide’, but it doesn’t sound especially metal or new wave, carrying most of the trappings of 80s electropop – although image-wise, there’s a whole heap of 80s hair-rock influence going on, with bandanas and studs all in the mix. And hair. Lots and lots of hair.

‘Long Divide’ isn’t really the sound of bandanas and studs and hair, and is more Depeche Mode circa Songs of Faith and Devotion with some guitars played lowed but mixed low, meaning the synths dominate the sound. The vocals register in that same baritone region of Dave Gahan and a whole host of post punk / goth bands, but there’s something about the delivery – level, tone, pitch, I’m not sure – which hovers on the cusp of uncomfortable… but as the song progresses, it seems to slot together rather better. And then they whip out a big old guitar solo near the end and boom, you’ve got you hair rock fix.

Time was I’d have wrapped up a review with a pithy summation., but this feels increasingly forced and corny, and at the same time, presenting a verdict feels little different to casting oneself into the mould of a star-rating – it’s arbitrary and lazy in equal measure. As much as ascribing a genre is a short-cut, so is declaring an album a 7/10; it’s a box-ticking exercise that appeases the lowest common denominator. A hedge-betting 6 or 7 out of 10 is the coward’s way of saying you’re being polite and sitting on the fence. Whereas I’m ok with saying this is… ok, so-so, middling to me but likely to find a solid fanbase.

AA

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Ever Elysian – Feeling Good / House of the Rising Sun

Posted: 19 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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16th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

A good cover brings something different to a song. That doesn’t mean rendering it unrecognisable or necessitate complete irreverence, but a cover that’s so faithful to the original as to be a carbon copy is utterly redundant. Marilyn Manson’s cover of Soft Cell’s cover of ‘Tainted Love’ is a perfect example of a pointless cover. Johnny Cash’s cover of ‘Hurt’ and The Fall’s take on ‘Lost in Music’, on the other hand, are everything you could want from a cover. ‘Owning the song’, as they say on shit like X Factor and The Voice.

How could any artist bring anything new to either of these well-trodden and frankly threadbare standards? That Ever Elysian have actually succeeded is quite a feat, and a welcome and pleasant surprise. They pitch themselves as purveyors of ‘classic rock,’ ‘soft rock,’ and ‘soul rock’ which does them rather a disservice on the evidence of this inspired offering.

The blurred image which serves as the single’s artwork conveys the woozy, warped opening of their take on ‘Feeling Good’. It’s still got the essential jazzy vibe, but it’s twisted, messed: sultry is replaced with sedation, as if the room is spinning in a late-night nightmare. It’s the sound of ‘feeling good’ a few moments before you fall flat on your face and find you’re incapable of getting up, and you realise everything looks weird and you haven’t a clue who you are, let alone where. And then it takes wings with some big, bold strings, and finally, the flourish of a heroic guitar solo.

‘House of the Rising Sun’ again pairs it back, and slows it down, too, getting deep under the skin of this cautionary tale to render it with nightmarish qualities. This is one of those covers that gives one a moment’s pause to confirm it is in fact a cover, and when the penny drops as to how they’ve approached it… it’s a shiversome moment. Deep, dark guitar tones imbue the performance with a haunting, gothic quality, delivered with a dash of theatricality. The jazz flavour leans into tipsy post-rock and a slow burn that surges to something like the Amy Winehouse Bond theme that never was. It’s a daring rendition, but by absolutely no means disrespectful or irreverent: instead, these two interpretations draw out dark elements which lie at the heart of the originals and bring them to the fore. These are smart, considered, well-executed and exciting versions.

AA

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Ergo Phizmiz –The Tin Drummer Has Collapsed

Posted: 18 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 16th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

For myriad reasons, my head’s a shed of late, and I’ve been doing this for coming up for sixteen years now, cranking out reviews on a more or less daily basis, sometimes during certain spells up to five or six in a day and taking in three or four live shows in a week, on top of dayjob and, since 2011, parenting. So I can be forgiven for not remembering every artist I’ve covered, let alone the details. But somewhere along the way, on seeing this arrive in my inbox, I recall that I have written about Ergo Phizmiz. I have no idea what I wrote, or when, whether I dug it or not, what kind of music it was, but I did write. Ergo Phizmiz isn’t a name one forgets easily, after all.

And so it is that ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ is the sixth release in the second season of Mortality Tables’ ‘LIFEFILES’ series, a series of singles whereby ‘Recordings of places, people, objects, moments in time, environments and quotidian events are shared with a range of artists working with sound. Those artists are then free to respond to the recordings in any way they like, either through manipulation or composition.’

Seems I’ve got some catching up to so, since, ‘Season 01 of the LIFEFILES series commenced in March 2023 with contributions from Simon Fisher Turner, Veryan, Xqui, Rupert Lally, Andrew Spackman and Dave Clarkson,’ and ‘Season 02 commenced in September 2023 with contributions so far from Audio Obscura, Todeskino, boycalledcrow, Simon Fisher Turner, Maps and Ergo Phizmiz.’

The one thing about arriving at a late point in a series and not even in the first season of singles, over a TV series is that there’s no cause for consternation over the plot arc or who the characters are or their back-stories. A single is a single, and it should, by its nature, stand alone, free of the context of series or album, and ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ does.

As the accompanying notes inform us, ‘The following three source sounds were chosen at random:

1. Loud bass music played from a car at the Akeman Inn, Bucks (21.06.2021)

2. A rubber lid stretched across a ramekin (07.07.2022)

3. Seren playing an old acoustic guitar (01.11.2023)’

Phizmiz’s response is to hurl them all together at random, too. ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ begins with a roaring barrage of noise, the roaring thrum of an engine and what I understand to be ‘loud bass music’. On ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’, Phizmiz doesn’t collage or overlap the source materials – which would likely have produced an utterly head-smashing cacophony – instead favouring a different kind of cut-up method, akin to the ‘drop-in’ method devised by Burroughs and Gysin, whereby the different segments are dropped in, ‘randomly’. The sources follow one another, and it’s a haphazard-sounding patchwork of unrelated sounds, although the rubber lid and acoustic guitar aren’t as different as one might anticipate.

‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ is strange, and interesting, and as an experimental assemblage, it isn’t designed to be accessible or musical, or conform to any conventional expectations of a ‘single’. This is nothing more and nothing less than an artistic response to a set of parameters set as part of an experiment – and one that’s novel in its directness and simplicity.

AA

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Nine O’Clock Nasty – Smash Grab & Go

Posted: 17 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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17th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Writing on their single ‘Existential Dread’ in these virtual pages in October, James Wells was hugely enthused by the track, but made no bones about the fact he wasn’t keen on the band’s name. But listening to this, it makes perfect sense: with a filthy, serrated bassline that grates away like a rusty saw, it’s nasty alright, and probably best not to be aired pre-watershed. It’s punky, but also owes an immense debt to The Fall, not least of all with the delivery of the sneery, snarky vocals, chewing on the refrain and spitting it out, mangled and messy. The there’s the thumping repetitive drumming and, appearing unexpectedly, some quite buoyant 80s indie synth work. But it’s not just some cheap Fall rip-off – although its lo-fi fizz is integral to its appeal – but brings elements of The Pixies into play as part of its grungy four-chord stomp. They’re not wrong when they describe it as ‘Simple. Direct. Violent.’ And say that they’ve made ‘a song that sounds exactly like the adrenaline rush when you realise that life will never be the same again.’ Clocking in at two minutes and fifteen seconds, there’s no space for mucking about.

They add: ‘We made a song about something complex and difficult. Identify. Surveillance. Scrutiny. Or maybe it is a song about sending dick pics or shoplifting? Really, it means whatever you want to mean. In Crowland you decide what something means. What is truthful.’ One may argue that this is something of a cop-out, but by the same token, it acknowledges and accepts that songs take on meanings which are personal and individual to each listener, and to impose meaning is likely futile – or a likely cause of disappointment to some. There aren’t many lyrics to unravel, as it happens, with the verses consisting of the lines ‘Pixelate me! Hide my face!’ between choruses consisting of the title repeated. Its simplicity is its genius.

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