Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

miska lamberg – Evening, window

Posted: 31 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Dragon’s Eye Recordings – 23rd January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The facetious part of me reads the title of this as being a greeting to a pane of glass. I should probably get my coat after such a shameful revelation, but never mind. I’m here with my ears for this complex and detailed release, and will share the standard biographical info to provide much-needed context here:

‘Evening, window is the debut full-length album by Helsinki-based sound artist and ambient composer miska lamberg. Working with intricate field recordings that gather the overlooked moments of daily life – rainfall, distant traffic, animal calls – lamberg threads these textures into compositions that ache with personal memory. On Evening, window, the familiar becomes spectral: fragments of sound blur into melody and mood, capturing the stark melancholy of Nordic winters and the soft violence of remembering.’

The album features some long pieces: four of the six compositions are over eight minutes in duration, and this allows the pieces the appropriate and necessary time to build.

It begins with a metallic clattering. Heavy rain on a tin roof? Perhaps. Then there is a rumble – possibly thunder – but chattering abstract voices and soft, gentle synths drift in a cinematic spatiality and an organ swell gradually comes to dominate as it drifts… Evening, window is a sonic diary of sorts, a compilation of recordings captured in everyday settings as she goes about her life. The nine-minute opener, ‘Half-memories absorb us’ is both immersive and transportative, provoking contemplation. In some respects, the title does more than speak for itself, and also speaks of the way our minds work. And how do our minds work, exactly? Erratically, unpredictably, leaping from one place to another. And we’re thinking one thing while looking at another.

From a certain perspective, Evening, window can be seen to operate within the same field as William Burroughs’ cut-ups, and in particular the tape experiments he made with Iain Sommerville, although the collaging of field recordings and various layers of sound aren’t nearly as extreme here, blending the field recordings and decontextualised samples with carefully-crafted layers of ambience, which maked for a rather more listenable experience. Different objectives through similar intentions, one might say.

There are some haunting, unsettling motifs which cycle through Evening, window: ‘Seeing only faces turned away’ is dark, and listening to the ghostly swathes of ambience which hang dark and heavy is uncomfortable, a repetitive chord sequence conjuring, if not outright fear, then a sense of tremulous trepidation and unease. While Evening, window is a work of lightness and air, it’s also a work of slow, dense weight.

There are children’s’ voices. There are supple strings. At times, the atmosphere is soothing, sedative, but more often than not, there are undercurrents of tension, befitting of a dystopian thriller. Some may consider this to be something of a disconnect from the concept of presenting, or representing, fragments from the everyday life of the artist. But life is strange; the world is strange, and scary.

‘I remember the day the world lost color’ is bleak, barren, conveying the murky gloom of a blanket of fog, while ‘Its monotony is unrelenting’ is the drudgery of life – at least some periods of it – summarised in four words. Anyone who has endured a crap job will likely be able to relate to the sense that life is slipping by while days evaporate trudging through eternal sameness and feeling a sense of helplessness and a loss of identity, a distancing from the self. The sound is muffled, and very little happens over the course of eight minutes of crafted stultification during which the chord sequence of ‘Seeing only faces turned away’ is reprised, only slower, more vague, somehow tireder-sounding. It’s the soundtrack to hauling your living corpse through another dead, empty day – and another, and another, and another.

Evening, window isn’t depressing as such, but it is not light or breezy, and the mood is low and melancholy. It’s a slow, gradually unfurling work which drags heavy on the heart, an album which radiates reflection and low mood. It’s a dose of stark and sad realism, and an album which speaks so far beyond words.

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Tangerine Dream – 50 Years Of Phaedra: At The Barbican

Posted: 30 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Kscope – 30th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

My parents weren’t really big on music. They had maybe fifty-odd, maybe seventy-five or so albums, and didn’t really seem to listen to many of them when I was growing up in the 80s. Most of those records were old… at least, that was how I perceived them at the time. There was a bunch of Beatles LPs, some Steeleye Span, and the same shit that occupied pretty much every collection at that time, at least for people of a certain age: Tubular Bells, Queen’s Greatest Hits, and Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra. They probably had Oxygene by Jean-Michelle Jarre, too. The 70s and 80s may well have been a boom time for the alternative breaking into the charts, with punk bands and the likes of Killing Joke making it onto Top of the Pops, and it may equally have been the period of peak postmodernism, but living through it then and reflecting on it now, the mainstream cultural dominance was anything but fragmented, and the comparatively limited choices of the time – can you imagine only four television channels, and no Internet? You had to be there, really – meant that there was a huge cultural homogeneity. Everyone watched the same TV shows – with something of an unspoken class division between BBC and ITV – and there was only really Radio 1 and Radio 2, and everyone listened to the radio.

And like most people their age, my parents thought they were hip buying the first Now That’s What I Call Music albums, and my mum would groove while listening to Phil Collins, The Bee Gees and Tina Turner while ironing, records purchased through Britannia Music. I’m not remotely nostalgic for any of this. If anything, my gentle, middle-class upbringing was marred by these experiences because it wasn’t just bland, it was… Look, imagine car journeys to UK holiday destinations in Devon and The Lake District spent listening to Barbara Dixon and Elkie Brooks and 80s Cliff Richard. I love Devon and The Lake District, but the soundtrack to my life as a child was fucking awful, and I feel a certain trauma tripped my life as a consequence. I don’t know if I ever heard Phaedra at home, I just spotted it while flicking through their collection.

Phaedra seems like something of an outlier in the context of such a collection, but it was a huge breakthrough release, the Hot Fuss of 1974. Or something. It spent fifteen weeks in the UK album charts, and achieved six-figure sales.

In context, it was truly a landmark album, famously the first to showcase their seminal sequencer-driven sound, and launched The Berlin School, the foundation of ‘space music’. The fact that it’s been fifty years since the album’s release is unfathomable, but it’s unquestionably appropriate to mark its anniversary. And while the thirty-fifth anniversary brought us Phaedra Revisited – a live performance of the album in its entirety, but reconfigured, retaining the thirty-eight minute duration of the original studio release, but with an abridged rendition of the title track making space for a new composition in the form of ‘Delfi’ at the end.

There’s no such sense of limitation when it comes to 50 Years Of Phaedra: At The Barbican – a colossal triple-disc of a commemorative live performance by the current incarnation of the band, consisting of Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane, and Paul Frick – none of whom played on the studio version.

As the accompanying biographical notes acknowledge, ‘Part of Phaedra’s magic lay in its imperfections: the original sequences were never truly quantised, their timing drifting unpredictably through the Moog’s analogue circuitry. That subtle instability became part of its charm – a human pulse within the machine’ – before going on to explain that ‘it long left current bandleader Thorsten Quaeschning intrigued by what a fully realised version might reveal. Now, fifty years later, Tangerine Dream have revisited the work with the precision that technology once denied them. 50 Years of Phaedra: At the Barbican is the first time Phaedra has been performed fully quantised, each motif beautifully aligned with a crystalline precision previously unheard’.

It’s hard to find fault in either the performance or the fidelity here. It does sound great: there is so much detail, the experience is absolute, a sensory immersion, and that ‘crystalline precision’ means it feels more like an alternative soundtrack to something like Avatar.

The track listing also sees the current iteration move some considerable distance away from the sequencing of the original album: after a brief intro, they play ‘Sequent C’, followed by ‘Movements of a Visionary’, and then ‘Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares’. Of these, the first two are substantially longer, the third a couple of minutes shorter. Then they transition away from the original compositions to explore ‘The Hippolytus Session’, a work in eight parts, spanning some forty-odd minutes, but returning to fragments of ‘Phaedra’ in the form of ‘Phaedra 2024’ (and much later, there’s a reprise of sorts with ‘Phaedra 2022’. Hippolytus being the stepson of Phaedra in Greek mythology, there’s a clear trajectory in what they’re doing here – pushing the original concept out and exploring the stated intention of discovering what the album may have been had current technology been available in 1974. The concept is interesting, but in some ways feels like it should exist as a satellite or supplementary work, and as is the case with last year’s monster From Virgin To Quantum Years: Coventry Cathedral, it’s very much one for the more devoted fans, and ones who are accommodating of the fact that this is a different lineup and a different time. It’s nice and all, but it’s by no means an improvement on the original.

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Ashley Reaks – Nature Reversed

Posted: 29 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Ashley Reaks is an artist who has very clear creative cycles, releasing, as standard, an album a year, and sometimes two, which make the fallow periods more conspicuous. This is not one of those fallow spells: Nature Reversed arrives just four (dark, cold, wet, gusty, wintery and generally depressing) months after At Night the World Belongs to Me, released at the end of September last year. And it marks something of a shift, and even ventures into the realms of what one might consider a ‘concept album’.

Reaks describes the album as ‘a stark, hallucinatory journey through the Yorkshire Dales and the inherited wounds of a father–son lineage. Mixing messed-up jazz fragments with rural, almost medieval folk textures, the album follows a narrator who must invert his own nature to survive the authoritarian “Old King” and then claw his way back to himself through wildness, shame, desire, and the raw, cyclical violence of the natural world.’ That’s a lot to unpack. If it was the plot for a novel, it would be a twisty-turny work, rich in allusion and haunting imagery – but likely jazz-free. But to compress all of this into nine songs and forty-five minutes… Ambitious would be one word for it.

The album’s first piece, ‘I Don’t Like The Old King’ does very much explore the expansive fields of folk, but through a proggy filter, performed with synths, and underpinned by a strolling bass – somewhat reminiscent of the Bauhaus song ‘Part of the Third Part’, at least at the start – and a beat that both shuffles and swings. It’s the bass that defines ‘We Forage in the Gutters’, going full Jah Wobble in its dubbiness. But at the same time, there’s a sparseness, an introspection which is different here. The elements we’ve come to expect from Reaks are all present and correct, but Nature Reversed takes those elements to another place, and it feels like the freneticism has been turned down in favour of a more focused approach.

As with everything Reaks releases, Nature Reversed is interesting… by which I mean it’s a collage of weirdness that draws together a host of disparate elements. Just as Reaks’ artworks are crazy collages, so his music is relentlessly unpredictable. ‘The Desire to Seduce Euphoria’ is perfectly representative: it brings together some moody, melancholic postpunk, with chiming, reverby guitar… there are some processed vocals and there’s some jazz in the mix… I say ‘some’, but the mid-section is a massive blast of horns, before it careens into a heavy prog synth workout What the fuck IS this? This is no criticism: Reaks relentlessly challenges the borders, and does his own thing.

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Nature Reversed gives us all of the conventional Reaks elements – but the wild jazz is dialled back significantly. He describes it as ‘cut-up jazz, awkward Eastern folk, medieval motifs, old ghosts, and new life pushing through ancient stone walls — music about inheritance, rebellion, and what survives when you break things wide open’, and so it’s no surprise that William Burroughs features in the list of inspirations, ‘ranging from ‘nature poet’ John Clare and William Burroughs to Rip Rig + Panic, Talk Talk, PJ Harvey, Robert Wyatt and Captain Beefheart, Nature Reversed fuses literature, music, and visual art into a chaotic, lyrical, and intimate landscape. Ultimately, it’s a meditation on survival, rebellion, and renewal — the feral life that surges when you break open your origins.’

As is always the case with Reaks’ work, Nature Reversed is a huge intertext, and it would be reasonable to describe him as a classic postmodernist, celebrating and revelling in multitudinous sources, plundering his influences and inspirations openly and emphatically. This feels more restrained, more contemplative, and lyrically there’s a proliferation of images drawn from nature – but then again, there’s no shortage of sharp-edged, darker stuff, as on ‘Picking on the Meat Membranes’, and ‘Swan in a Womb’ brings together post-punk grooving bass, sprawling jazz, glittering prog synths and vocal processing – and this is point of definition for Nature Reversed, really. It’s everything, all at once, but at a sedate pace. Don’t be fooled by the gentler, more introspective sound: Reaks stull pushes experimentalism to the absolute limits, and Nature Reversed is the singular sound of creative freedom.

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Corpus Delicti – Liminal

Posted: 27 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Twilight Music – 28th November 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

I’d apologise for being a little late to this one, but given that Corpus Delicti took some thirty years to reconvene for this, their fourth studio album, I think I can be forgiven. Formed in 1992, they kicked out three albums in quick succession establishing themselves as leading exponents the goth renaissance, or the next wave of goth (which wave is which… is a subject of debate, but that’s perhaps a topic for another time), before departing a short while after the release of Obsessions in 1995. During their time away, they’ve had more compilations released than they had albums, and it seems their popularity has grown significantly during their absence.

Their planned reunion in 2020 was scuppered by the pandemic, but they finally reemerged as a live entity in the spring of 2022 and now, finally – finally – they deliver Liminal. And if you’re into that later goth stuff – from Rosetta Stone to all things Nightbreed – it does everything you’d want it to.

From the outset, Liminal is dark and brooding, with fractal guitars and infinite reverb: ‘Crash’ brings the stark post-punk dynamics of X-Mal Deutschland paired with the soaring theatricality of The Associates, and it’s a work of high drama which evokes Bauhaus at their best. That’s by no means to suggest that it’s derivative, but it’s clear they know their heritage.

They also know how to bring kineticism and range, and how to sequence an album to best effect. ‘Room 36’ comes on like an industrial reimagining of Soft Cell, landing like She Wants Revenge cranked up to eleven, with lasers and guitars set to stun. ‘It All Belongs to You’ channels Bowie, but again via SWR and The Associates – at least vocally: instrumentally, there’s layered synth work and swirling shoegaze guitar all over. But for all the dark, Liminal is a work of magnificently-crafted pop.

‘Under his eye’ is an obvious reference to The Handmaid’s Tale, a book the which has become more resonant in recent times than could have ever been foreseen at the time of its writing and publication in 1985. Led by a rolling piano and augmented with sweeping strings, there’s drama galore. Between the driving guitar buzz and snaking bassline of the super-urgent ‘Chaos’ propelled by lolloping drums, and ‘Fate’, which brings an atmospheric shoegaze aspect to some trad goth stylings, there’s a lot going on here – and they pack in some really sharp hooks and strong choruses.

As an example of modern goth, Liminal brings so much of what’s missing from many recent releases in the same field – broad in range, big on energy, this is how it’s done.

Corpus Delicti are on tour in the UK in February, performing Edinburgh (19th), Newcastle (20th), Leeds (21st), Birmingham (22nd), Portsmouth (24th), Bristol (27th), and London (28th), with dates in Mainland Europe in April. Full details and tickets are available HERE.

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Band image - pic Loreleï J ade

Photo: Lorelei Jade

Irk / Algernon Cornelius / Care Home – Wharf Chambers, Leeds, 24th January 2025

Posted: 25 January 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Irk (not to be mistaken for Lancastrian newcomers Irked) certainly took their time over their second album, so the fact their playing its launch gig four months after its release is fitting.

The last time I saw them would have been 2018, in the now-defunct CHUNK, alongside Britney and Beige Palace (also now sadly departed), at the launch of debut album. Back then, CHUNK – a fairly basic rehearsal space which also hosted gigs – was the hub of an emerging DIY scene which spawned a bunch of noisy bands who emerged in the wake of the likes of Blacklisters, Hawk Eyes, That Fucking Tank. Fortunately, the Leeds scene is resilient and continues to thrive with new spaces and new bands popping up – and Irk are still here, despite geographical dispersal and general life stuff like jobs and families doing little to boost the time and energy available for creative work.

One of the new bands to have emerged more recently is Care Home. Care Home no doubt won themselves some new fans when they landed the coveted slot of supporting the Jesus Lizard last January. Tonight they’re a late substitute for Blacklisters, who were admittedly, an additional draw for tonight, but it’s hard to be too disappointed with the choice of replacement, kicking the night off in suitably noisy fashion. The interplay between the guitar and synths works well and affords them a greater range when it comes to the arrangements. The bass work alternates between a stop/start jolting and insistent solid four-four groove, and when paired with some busy, beat on every beat drumming, they’ve got a sturdy spine around which everything else hangs nicely. The vocals are straight-up, unpretty (post) hardcore shouting, an effluence of nihilism in t vein of Kowloon Walled City.

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Care Home

Algernon Cornelius proved to be an inspired choice, breaking up a rock-orientated bill with some highly inventive and energetic hip-hop. Pulling together a truly visionary array of sources, spanning jazz, punk, and metal and even sampling a Beige Palace song, it’s all going on during his lively set.

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Algernon Cornelius

Irk’s set is a squalling blast of noise from beginning to end. The bass is simply immense. Recorded, it’s not immediately apparent that the sole instrumentation is drums and bass – and not only because various guests add additional detail in various form, but this means that on stage, the fact they blast out such a dense racket with so little only accentuates the impact. But that bass… the sound is pretty varied and big on texture, from the rib-rattling mid-range, compressed sound which resembled tearing cardboard to the bowel-quivering low-end, there’s substantial range. Meanwhile, Jack Gordon hollers and howls through a host of effects and distortion, and this show – like the album itself – was worth the wait.

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Irk

With ‘The Seeing House’, they’ve really honed things and learned the benefits of shifting tempo and tone: ‘Eating All of the Apple’ is the perfect example of how they’ve absorbed the sparser, joltier aspects of Shellac’s output on board. Gordon’s vocal has more range, too, veering toward more gothic territory. And still they slam forth colossal riffs, paired with meaty beats and rabid yowling.

But for a serious band, they just can’t do serious when it comes to their shows: there’s a comedic elements to Gordon’s delivery and postures, not to mention the chat between songs, where he would take time to share wisdom he had discovered on that Internet from the mini-ons, printouts of which he would hand out to members of the audience.

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Irk

There’s something so, so quintessentially Leeds about Irk – quirky, self-effacing, a disparity between the abrasive noise and the affable nature of the people themselves – and they are genuinely nice guys. But this is so often the case: the music is the outlet. And the atmosphere tonight is one of warmth, of camaraderie. A lot of people know one another. This isn’t a scene in the sense of posing, self-importance or smugness, but one defined by camaraderie and mutual appreciation.

Irk’s set was punchy and abrasive, delivering fifty minutes of intensity interspersed with comedy, making for an event which felt like the perfect launch for the album. And I shall treasure my numbered, annotated minion forever.

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Elkeyes – Elkeyes

Posted: 23 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Bearsuit Records – 23rd January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been a little while since our favourite label for oddball quirky stuff, Edinburgh’s Bearsuit Records, tickled our eardrums with new noise, but they’re kicking off 2026 with the eponymous debut from Elkeyes, a new addition to the roster. And suffice it to say, it’s a good fit in their catalogue of curious compositional contortions. And since we have Wolf Eyes and Hawk Eyes, KATSEYE, and, er, Eagle Eye Cherry, why not Elkeyes? It’s an interesting choice of creature, but one which seems appropriate for this intriguingly leftfield musical project – although my eternal internal game of Mallett’s Mallet leads me to conclude that Elkeye Brooks should also be a band name. Christ only knows what they would sound like, but surely it would be no stranger than this twisted concoction, which should be filed in the ‘experimental electronics’ section.

‘Trial’ conjures the disorientating bewilderment of Kafka’s labyrinthine novel via the medium of sonic collage which brings together warping synths, clinks and clatters, disembodied, ghostly voices, sweeping string and echo-laden horns which add the most incongruous – yet somehow fitting – jazz element imaginable, plus fizzing blasts of extraneous noise.

‘Yamanote Line’ twitters and flaps its way into the realms of ambient abstraction, building atmosphere and an air of the uncanny. It’s not dark in the horror sense, but sets the nerves jangling, particularly in the quieter passages which evoke bleak moorlands and deserted cemeteries. This is the beauty of abstract, ambient, instrumental works, works which are free from the constraints of conventional form: rather than direct the listener in a specific direction, they encourage the opening of neural pathways and invite the formation of visualisations and ideas by free association. The scraping, trilling string sounds, stark piano chords, and random chimes which reverberate through the haunting ‘Thalassophobia’ (the fear of deep bodies of water, such as the ocean, seas, or lakes’).

Ironically, ‘The Dark Forest’ is the most light-hearted piece on the album, skipping oscillations and chiming chanks like dappled sunlight skips around this way and that on the album’s shortest track, although it does fade to darkness with a gong-like rumble and some dissonant chimes at the end.

There are vast expanses of minimalism. Soft tones drift. Time sits in suspension. Voices ring out – operatic, ghostly – amidst spacey swirls of phase. ‘Breathing the Blues’ is barely there at times, and the final cut, ‘Fallen’ is similarly sparse.

Over the course of these eight tracks, Elkeyes wander into some dark places, riven with static and low-level rumbles which disseminate tension, scrape at the cranium, gnaw at the intestines and fuck you up by stealth. In places, this feels like a slow unpicking of the seams of musical conventions. It’s sparse and transportive, hypnotic and simultaneously tense and soothing. Elkeyes are all the contradictions. And that is reason to love them.

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Blue Monday! feat Flat Moon / Trip Sitter / Gents & Ginger / Pedestrian – The Fulford Arms, York, 19 January 2021

Posted: 22 January 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

The third Monday in January has been labelled ‘Blue Monday’ because studies have found it to be the most depressing day of the year. Christmas and new Year are but memories which have faded into the eternal darkness of dull days where sunrise happens after going to work – if it happens at all – and sunset has happened not long after lunch. For those on salaries, after the early pre-Christmas payday, bank accounts are drained and it’s still a long, long way till January payday, it’s cold and wet and frankly it’s all shit. For those not on salaries, the same is true minus the January payday. And that’s before you throw in the prospect of World War 3 and markets crashing around the globe while AI is rapidly taking over everything. So the idea of a cheap – four bands for three quid in advance cheap – gig with an uptempo party vibe and something of a ‘beach party’ theme is genius. Simple, but genius. In terms of marketing and the economy, enticing people out to put a few quid over the bar is infinitely better than everyone staying home vegetating while watching shit TV, and I’ve written variously on the therapeutic properties of live music.

This bill wasn’t quite as therapeutic as I might have hoped. I’m absolutely not averse to fun, but can’t say I’m mad keen when that fun is appended with a ‘k’. Because of a last-minute change from the advertised running order, Trip Sitter and Gents & Ginger (who were originally supposed to be on third and second respectively) swapped places and as a consequence, the first half of the night was very funk-orientated. It’s a matter of taste, of course, and the audiences – it seems there’s a different crowd in the room for each act, which feels strange (I’m accustomed to bands bringing their own fans and not all of them sticking around for all of the acts, but this was like a shift-change in the audience each time there was a switch on stage, and each lot brought a very different atmosphere) – would tell quite different stories.

Reformed for tonight only, former college act Pedestrian bring a ska funk groove, and one song sounds far too much like RHCP to be forgivable. In fairness, they make up for it with a Mr Bungle cover. While they’re tight, handling the complex song structures with precision, the stage energy is quite low and seemingly self-conscious for a party band, but their mates go absolutely fucking ballistic. I find myself cowering beside the speaker to avoid being moshed to death by 6’6" sixth form virgins who seem hell-bent on breaking one another’s limbs.

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Pedestrian

Gents & Ginger offer up some sort of lounge jazz muso wankery involving chords that require eight fingers spanning five frets, and with bad shirts. They play with eyes squinted and looking like they’re inhaling their own farts. The bassist has a knitted teacosey on the head of his guitar, and the last song sounds like Kings of Leon or something. They go down ridiculously well, too. I need more beer.

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Gents & Ginger

Trip Sitter proved a very different proposition, the foursome offering a Latin spin on 80s rock. And they do actually rock out and venture into blues territory with some style. And the last song of their energetic set is Eurovision worthy.

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Trip Sitter

Flat Moon won me over the last time I saw them, despite reservations. Tonight…. No. Perhaps I was listening with different ears. Perhaps the very, very different crowd that suddenly packed to the front created a very, very different atmosphere. They were shouting and dancing and hugging and having a good time, but something just felt jarring, and Flat Moon were cocky and exuberant throughout their set of jizzy jazz-infused ska cuntery.

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Flat Moon

But loving all the bands is not always a prerequisite to a good night: seeing friends and simply getting out is enough. At this time of year, finding the motivation to leave the house can be the issue, and seeing friends doesn’t have to entail talking loudly over the bands, either. The bands could play, they went down well, people came out and supported live music. Good. And that’s all you need.

The 113 – Leach

Posted: 21 January 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

I find it most disconcerting shopping in my local Co-op. The self-service checkouts film you, and you can see yourself on the screen above your head while you scan your items. Surveillance and facial recognition is everywhere now. The other day, I passed a venue where a guy in a flat cap was ordered my security to remove his hat and “look into that camera” before being told he could replace his cap and enter the venue. We really have come to this: you can’t go shopping or go for a drink without a capture of your visage ‘for security’. I appreciate that shoplifting is at a record high and violent crime is rife, but is this really the solution? How about asking why we have these issues? And what happens with these captured images? Who views them? How long are they stored, and where? Are they being passed off to train AI?

The ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about’ argument is missing the point, and no longer holds water. The state of things in America with brutal ICE raids where countless American citizens have been mauled, detained, and even murdered (because regardless of the official line, Renee Nicole Good was murdered: those shots were not fired in self-defence, and we live in a horrible, brutal, fucked-up world). And this shit affects you. Well, it certainly affects me, and I know I’m not alone in feeling jumpy, on edge, endlessly anxietised by the prospect of what may happen next, the prospect of waking up to discover that WWIII has broken out while asleep.

This new single by 311 touches on this, significantly, as it happens. as their bio notes summarise: ‘Propelled by discordant guitars and thunderous offbeat rhythms, ‘Leach’ is an abrasive dystopian statement on surveillance, data harvesting and the quiet unease of modern digital life; both a rallying cry against the advancement and negative impacts of big tech, and an honest admission of powerlessness and inevitability in the face of it all.’

It’s a killer single and yet again evidence of just how fertile Leeds is as a spawning ground for fantastic bands. London, Manchester, even Sheffield receive so much hype, but despite being the epicentre of goth in the early 80s and the place for post-rock in the mid 2000s, Leeds seems to be criminally lacking in recognition for its contribution to music, despite Blacklisters, despite Pulled Apart by Horses… and 311 are another bands that should be flagging the city on the national – and international – radar. Because ‘Leach’ brings it all, from churning math-rock, angularity and anguish, colliding post-rock with post-punk and huge energy, they pack menacing and searing riff energy and… and… yeah. This is good.

It’s worth remembering punk and post-punk emerged from terrible times, where it felt like music offered a rare escape, both for those who created it and attended shows. And here we are again.

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Cindytalk – Sunset And Forever

Posted: 20 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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The Helen Scarsdale Agency – 30th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Cindytalk has been going almost literally forever, at least in terms of the life cycle of bands. A brief scan of my own archives reveals that the last time I wrote of Cindytalk was way back in 2013, covering A Life is Everywhere, released on the esteemed experimental label Editions Mego. The musical vehicle of Scottish musician Cinder, with an ever-shifting supporting cast, Cindytalk has been in a constant flux and perpetual evolution since the project’s formation in the early 80s – emerging from the post-punk scene and exploring every direction since, a career defined, as they put it, ‘by a continued process of disintegration and regeneration’. This is the very essence of the avant-garde, which was built on a manifesto that said that its function was to destroy the old to build the new. And implicit within that concept is the need to destroy its own creations in order to progress. Cindytalk has very much espoused that ethos over the course of the last forty years or more, with a career defined by perpetual reinvention.

Described in the press blurbage as ‘a labyrinthine opus, one that returns to the themes of the sacred and profane that have rippled through all of Cindytalk’s recordings’, Sunset And Forever opens with the eighteen-minute exploration which could reasonably be described as a (dark) ambient work. And it is dark. Spectral voices and spirits haunt every second of this unsettling drone-led work.

‘Labyrinthine opus’ is a fair description for an album which begins with a sprawling eighteen-and-a-half-minute ambient monolith, where falling objects cascade in caverns of reverb before slowly undulating drones gradually grow and turn. At times dense, at other more nebulous, around the mid-point, the scraping trickle of ‘embers of last leaves’ turns into a darker place, and is ruptured with percussive crashes and unpredictable extranea, while haunting voiced fade in and out through the swelling churn of abstract noise. This first piece, alone, feels like an album.

With seven tracks and a running time of around sixty-mine minutes, Sunset And Forever takes it time in exploring sonic contrasts, with graceful sweeps of watercolour synth washes underlaid with scratches and hisses and harder, uneven textures, the sonic equivalent of cobblestones underneath a velvet rug – or somesuch. Put another way, the soft and gentle is rendered uncomfortable by something altogether less soft or comfortable beneath, and hidden beneath a pleasant surface, and those hidden elements are reason to tread cautiously or risk twisting an ankle. It’s almost as if each track contains two compositions overlaid, a kind of collage or a palimpsest of a gentle ambient work and an altogether less gentle noise construction.

On ‘tower of the sun’, the dissonance and angularity rises to the fore to make for a skin-crawling ten minutes, while ‘my sister the wind’ screeches and scrapes, shards of drilling treble buffeted along by a train-track rumble.

The sound – and the meaning – of Sunset And Forever is forever just beyond grasp. For as much as the sounds and textures rub against one another and create discomfort, as a whole, it’s vague, indirect, hazy. It concludes open-ended, with questions unanswered and leaves a sense of uncertainty.

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