Archive for the ‘Singles and EPs’ Category

Solcura – Imposter Syndrome

Posted: 14 May 2023 in Singles and EPs
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19th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

A couple of months after the epic grind-influenced outing that was ‘I Am Weak’, Bournemouth-based quartet Solcura return with their fourth single since their debut album, Serotonin, released in 2021, ‘Imposter Syndrome’. They describe it as an ‘absolute rager’ and ‘a result of the miasma of deceit and media tyranny we are all forced to swallow every single day of our lives.’

Music that was so angry and overtly political was rare only a year or so back. Practically every other release was a lockdown project, or addressed the challenges and traumas of lockdown; the isolation, the depression, and it was only natural that that would be the case. Not everyone is over lockdown or has recovered from the impacts of the pandemic and its handling, not by a long shot. Many suffer from levels of anxiety – particularly social anxiety – not experienced before, and many still haven’t got back on track financially, either. So many people got fucked in so many ways, and the likelihood is that it will take years – and years – before people are back to themselves again.

But the mood has definitely shifted, at least here in the UK, and particularly in England. The zeitgeist is no longer one of reflection, and if the mood remains on the downside, it’s no longer directed inward, as the fallout of the Johnson administration has ignited an incendiary rage that eclipses any inward-looking darkness. As the corruption of our government becomes exposed with new revelations practically by the day, from the billions tossed to mega-rich buddies for PPE that either never materialised or was otherwise unfit for purpose, to the crumbling NHS and public network system, while top execs and shareholders gouge immense profits while workers – now striking en mass – are being told there’s no spare cash for wages because of inflation, the swell of anger at the sense not only have we all been had, but that we’re being utterly screwed and lied to, brazenly, has built from a mutter of dissent to a scream of rage.

For a time, Sleaford Mods and Killing Joke were pretty much the only acts telling it like it is, but the explosive rise of Benefits, on paper the band least likely to go massive and hit the festival circuit of all time tells you precisely where we’re at now as a nation. And this is where Solcura are at: they’re pissed off and are going to shout about it.

‘Imposter Syndrome’ finds Solcura exploring some richly atmospheric vibes at the start, with spaced-out, slightly trippy, stumbling guitar and mystical wordless vocals that radiate spiritualism. Then, thirty-odd seconds in, the guitar slams in on hard overdrive and bangs into Soundgarden territory, with a beefy riff. The drums really stand out among it all, the snare a sharp crack that cuts through the thick distortion, with a hint of Therapy? pulling through it all.

The commination of melodic, reverby vocals and chunky riffage also reminds me of early Amplifier, but then there are some dark overtones and screamy backing vocals that are more nu-metal than neo-prog, and the two elements combine to optimal effect. This is some savvy musical alchemy here, and ‘Imposter Syndrome’ is a dense work with depth and dynamics. Yes, it harks back to the early 90s, but that’s another reflection of the time we live in. Recycling is good, especially when it’s done this well. Believe the hype. Believe in Solcura.

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GLYTSH – V.H.S

Posted: 11 May 2023 in Singles and EPs
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4th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been a few months since we last heard from London based industrial/alternative rock duo GLYTSH, who made some waves with their first single releases – and rightly so, because they were absolute bangers: their cover on Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Closer’ on hinted at the original material that was to follow, with both ‘(Hard)core memory’ and ‘SAV@Ge’ kicking serious arse. They’ve been busy in the meantime, landing a live slot supporting Tom Saint in June as part of the publicity for their upcoming debut EP, which ‘V.H.S.’ gives us a flavour of.

‘V.H.S.’ – that’s ‘Vulgar Holy Spirit’ – is pitched as ‘loud, proud and kind of a sombre love song’, which Jennifer Diehl – who now goes by the pseudonym of Luna Blake when she’s in Glytsch mode – expands on as being “about a lost relationship trying to be resurrected… It’s a dark romantic tale 2.0 with a Frankenstein flavour and could be seen as the sequel to our second single – ‘Hard(core) Memory’”.

It’s another slice of savvy songwriting that does so much all at once, starting out like some clean, crisp ‘alternative’ pop – the kind of electro-goth that pretends to be menacing but really isn’t – before going absolutely raging wild, demonic screaming with a barrage of noise exploding white hot and devastating. There’s a really thick swampy low-end and the production is dense and dirty – and it’s a real asset in realising the song’s full impact potential, because it very much accentuates the sense of volume, with the drums being pushed down beneath the speaker shredding guitar… and the guitar is a wall of sheet metal and it’s a riffy as fuck and properly heavy…and yet, somehow, there are glimpses of melody, a keen chorus that breaks out from the demonic rage of the verses, which returns us to the point where we’re forced to consider that there is a keen pop element to their songs. How can it be? And how can it all happen in two and a half minutes?

There’s no time to think or dissect it: it’s hard to take in what’s going on. It’s a blur, a blitzkrieg, an in-out smash-and-grab, fast, furious, violent and so well executed.

In the wake of Nu Metal and Marilyn Manson – who rose in on the tattered mesh coattails of Trent Reznor who brought the kind of niche noisy shit that was the domain of Wax Trax! and strictly underground to a huge global audience and then took it up several notches, aggro stuff has become quite normalised, not to mention predictable – but Glytsch bring something new and unique, and it’s not just that they’re female. They present a new hybrid, and a new level of ferocity that’s absolutely terrifying.

They’re racking up radio plays already, and they’ve got world class quality howling from every pore.

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Photo Credit: Ulrich von Trier

The Twilight Sad – Live 2022 EP 4

Posted: 7 May 2023 in Singles and EPs
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5th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Back in the day – that is the 80s and 90s and the time before YouTube and pretty much all things Internet – bands of a certain status would find their live shows being released first as crappy tapes on market stalls with even crappier photocopied sleeves for £3.50 a pop, and later, on CDs which flooded record fares at £12 a go (and for the bands with a real cult following, the late 880s and early 90s there were heaps of vinyl pressings, too). Most of them sounded terrible, but fans lapped them up because they’d buy anything, especially from a show or tour they’d attended. And it wasn’t always the biggest artists who were the most heavily bootlegged: it tended to be the bands with the most hardcore cult followings, which explains why The Sisters of Mercy were more bootlegged than Prince.

The Internet and YouTube and technology in general has changed things rather, in that anyone with a smartphone can upload footage of a show within seconds of the event, even sharing, say, an unreleased song in real-time. But if the quality of 80s audience recorded live bootlegs was ropey, shaky footage of an artist shot on a mobile phone from the third row while the individual dances, slightly drunk, while being jostled about is infinitely worse.

This is where the self-documenting methodology of acts like Throbbing Gristle are the answer. ‘Beat the bootleggers’ was a slogan I heard in the 90s. I always thought it was fair in principle, but the kind of people who bought the shitty tapes at the market already owned everything on every format, so the idea that they were stealing from the artist seemed questionable. Anyway, some acts made it work for them, with Throbbing Gristle’s 24 Hours box set, which contained tapes of their last twenty-four live shows, making most of the boxes different from one another, being an obvious example.

Live 2022 EP 4 shares two tracks with its recent predecessor, EP 3, namely ‘And She Would Darken the Memory’ and ‘That Summer, At Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy’, both from their debut album and both set staples to this day. There’d be riots if they weren’t. And the point of these EP releases is really for the fans – the hardcore devotees who want to hear the details of the differences of the performances from every show, and I get it: consecutive nights on a tour can sound and feel so different, dependent on so many variables, not least of all venue, location, audience, band. If you’re not convinced, go and watch and compare a band playing Glasgow and Nottingham on consecutive nights.

This EP, recorded in Belfast, is certainly different from its predecessor, recorded in London, not least of all because this is an acoustic set performed by James and Andy alone, and it contains six songs against the four off the last one. Personally, a large part of the appeal of The Twilight Sad is the ear-splitting volume and intensity, but as these versions highlight, they’re a consummate live act.

‘VTR’ is a song that loses none its potency with a stripped-back arrangement, while ‘Last January’ lends itself particularly well to the acoustic treatment with its aching melancholy emanating from every note with poised perfection. Much is often made of the passion behind James Graham’s vocals, but rather less tends to be made of the fact he has a magnificent voice, and it’s never been more apparent than here.

In context, ‘And She Would Darken the Memory’ doesn’t suffer from the absence of the blasting crescendo finale, and the quality of both the songwriting and the musicianship shine through.

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Old Mayor – Shelter Ceremony Collapse

Posted: 2 May 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Human Worth – 17th March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

For context, I shall quote from the notes which accompany this release: ‘Old Mayor are Adam Kammerling and Owen Gildersleeve (Modern Technology / Human Worth). They were most active between 2005 – 2009 sharing bills with the likes of Boris, Russian Circles, Heirs, A Storm of Light, Orange Goblin and ASVA. ‘Shelter Ceremony Collapse’ was recorded during a stint in New York in the winter of 2008, where the duo laid down this beastly three track, recorded by Chris Pierce at Technical Ecstasy Studio in New Brunswick. But the recording never saw the light of day, with the duo parting ways soon after.

‘Fifteen years later, on hearing the news that legendary Brighton promoters Tatty Seaside Town, who’d given the band their first shows back in the early years, were calling it a day and putting on a final weekender the duo felt it was the right time to finally come back together. To celebrate they unearthed this EP.’

They certainly achieved a considerable amount during their time active, but left a scant record of it in the form of a critically-lauded eponymous five-track EP, which makes the immensely-belated arrival of this archival recording all the more welcome, and for those unfamiliar with them the first time around (myself included), Shelter Ceremony Collapse provides an outstanding introduction.

There’s an adage about how you treat people when you’re on the way up, and this release and the circumstances surrounding it are very much characteristic of Owen and Human Worth: not only reconvening Old Mayor for a farewell concert, but releasing the EP with a portion of proceeds going to charity speaks for the nature of the people and the operation.

As for the EP itself… While the title has a ring to it as a phrase, while conjuring mental images of crumbling edifices and societal disarray and something vaguely post-apocalyptic (or perhaps I simply have a vivid imagination which steers oof its own accord toward the bleaker, darker prospects), it’s also the titles of the EP’s three songs in the order they appear.

That said ‘Shelter’ is so heavy it almost brings about its own collapse inside the first two of its monstrous six minutes. It’s a slow, dirgy tune that begins delicately with clean, picked guitar, building a misty atmosphere of mist and loam, the resonant timbres of the strings rich and earthy and redolent of Neurosis – and then the distortion and drums pound in, hard and heavy and hit like a tidal wave crashing with full force against the abdomen and knocking the air from the lungs.

Kammerling’s screaming vocals are largely buried beneath the sludgy landslide; he sounds possessed, but is barely audible for the downtuned sludge, and Owen’ hard-hitting drums cut through with thunderous force.

‘Ceremony’ is but an instrumental interlude, a cacophony of shrieks and wails. It may only be a couple of minutes long, but the sounds of tortured souls leave you feeling unsettled and uncomfortable, which is either a bad state or the ideal state to receive the shuddering blast of the crushing ‘Collapse’. It’s properly heavy, snail-paced doom, and it’s potent, powerful stuff.

It would be wonderful to think that the one-off reunion wasn’t a one-off, and that it might spur more performances and perhaps even more new material – but they’ve already spoiled us, and Shelter Ceremony Collapse is the perfect release to expand and confirm their place in the annals.

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Argonaut – Save

Posted: 1 May 2023 in Singles and EPs
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1st May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Argonaut are a band who have certainly embraced the potentials of the Internet, making the most of the ability to take ownership of their release schedule and optimising the possibilities for their DIY aesthetic, not limited to home recordings released within a week via Bandcamp and no-fi videos posted to YouTube.

Nathan and Lorna kept things flowing through lockdown with their homespun ‘Videostore’ project, and now they’ve reconvened, the band are making the absolute most of the limitless options of streaming formats.

Historically, an album had to be no more than around forty-five minutes to fit on a 33rpm record: CDs expanded it to seventy-two minutes, which was probably the length of most double albums, only much cheaper. Tapes provided greater duration but less durability, especially over longer formats: the old C120s were dangerously fine, meaning double-play cassettes were things to be handled with care (as the three copies of The Cure’s Concert and Curiosity I lost proved, although however carefully you might handle a cassette, the heads on your tape deck just stropped and chewed stuff out of spite). More recently, CD capacity has expanded to eighty minutes. Every medium has its limitations: digital streaming has limits to quality and you never know if a track or site will remain, and streaming when your Internet connection drops every three minutes is a massive pain the fucking arse. And it perhaps goes without saying that downloading a track just doesn’t have the same buzz as owning something physical like a 7” or even a CD. That’s something that’s difficult to explain to anyone under thirty, who considers physical ‘stuff’ just so much clutter and the prospect of going to a shop an inconvenience. I get it, but I guess it’s hard to feel you’re missing out on something you’ve never experienced.

But what Argonaut have realised is that an album doesn’t have to be a completed article on release, and this is where their latest project is really interesting. Songs from the Black Hat is probably the first ‘open-ended’ album, whereby they just keep adding songs to it with a new song released on the first of each month. Whereas The Wedding Present’s ‘Hit Parade’ project also saw the release of a new single each month, it had a fixed end, on the premise of there being a 7” single released each month – the album, a compilation, was seemingly an afterthought and its parameters were always going to be finite. Songs from the Black Hat as it stands has no parameters, and ‘Save’ is the sixth song and something of a departure, not just in terms of the album, but for Argonaut more broadly.

They’ve built a career on punchy post-punk tunes which are often concise to the sub-three-minute mark. But as they write of ‘Save’, ‘Clocking in at six and a half minutes, ‘Save’ is Argonaut chanelling [sic] nineties indie anthem 12 inch remixes a la MBV and the Telescopes.’ And it is indeed a beast. As they also explain, ‘The lyrics were inspired by the Thai cave rescue and a genuine primary school comprehension test answer to the question ‘why didn’t Grace Darling save everyone at the same time?’

It’s a reverb-soaked behemoth where the echoing drums soon become overtaken by a chubby bass and a yawning synth drone, with multi-layered bubble-gum pop vocals, reminding us that ‘You can’t save everyone’. No doubt our government will be playing this at the airport in Sudan as they turn away citizens with work visas and the like but no physical passport. But facetiousness aside, this is a beautiful and sad song that also bursts with fuzz and reverb, and spins vintage and contemporary together with a rare deftness of craft.

Let’s see what they pull out of the hat next month…

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Spiritual Front – Bigmouth Strikes Again

Posted: 26 April 2023 in Singles and EPs
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25th April 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Today I did something that was pretty alien to me: I took a break. Having dropped the car at the garage for a service, I walked some four miles back into town, and with another mile and half to get me back home, I stopped in at a pub and sat on the first floor with a pint, just looking out of the window watching people drift by on the street below. There were some interesting tunes being aired through the hidden speakers, from early New Order to The Jesus and Mary Chain. At some point, Dum Dum Girls’ cover of ‘There is a Light That Never Goes Out’ came on and not for the first time in recent months, began to reflect on The Smiths, since I recently offloaded my entire vinyl collection of their works. It wasn’t just that I need the money – and the £800 I raised was certainly useful – but this was an act of purging. That Morrissey is a monumental cunt had certainly been bugging me for some time, but then I have many records by people who have long been known to be monumental cunts and I haven’t felt the compulsion to jettison their junk. No, his cuntdom was just the tipper after I came to the conclusion that these records no longer spoke to me and hadn’t been played much since I left my teens, and the death of our monarch, which led to the obvious song gaining ubiquity on my social media feeds simply left me weary.

But on hearing this cover, I found myself thinking ‘but this is a great song’. And so, arriving home to find Spiritual Front’s cover of ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ in my inbox felt somewhat serendipitous.

Taken from their upcoming album of Smiths covers, The Queen is Not Dead, it’s a very straight cover that not only pays homage but great attention to detail in terms of the arrangement, mostly only adding swathes of strings near the end. And it, too, is – still – a great song. Although not all of The Smiths’ songs were great – the albums included a a lot of pap, like ‘Frankly, Mr Shankly’ – but it’s hard to fault their singles and the craft. Perhaps, then, it does come back to the issue being Morrissey, his cuntiness and his adenoidal tones which my wife always hated so – meaning that, ultimately, at least for me, it becomes a question of context, and hearing covers of the songs is preferable and less problematic than hearing the originals.

As the bio which accompanies the release details, ‘With The Smiths carved so deeply into the Romans’ collective heart that they had played full shows featuring the English rockers’ classic hymns in recent years, it was only a short step to record a full tribute album when taking a break from touring. Spiritual Front went about their task with the explicit aim to pay a respectful homage yet at the same time to stay away from cloning. Across the album’s fifteen tracks, which many consider sacred, the Italians stayed true to the original recordings, while pulling those songs closer to the sonic world of Spiritual Front for example by adding strings and horn parts.’

This, of course, is the ultimate pull of The Smiths: anyone who has endured those awkward teenage years as an outsider, who’s been sixteen, clumsy, and shy, will feel that connection to these songs. And for a band whose recent output, dubbed ‘nihilistic suicide pop’ has drawn comparisons with Nick Cave, Swans, and Scott Walker, it still makes sense that The Smiths would be there in the background.

But to hear the weathered, tattooed Simone Salvatori enunciating ‘ah-ho, la-la, ladadada’ – well, it does seem somehow incongruous. For all that, he pulls it off well, and while I’m on the fence with the video, it’s a solid cover that suggests the album will be worth hearing.

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Spiritual Front by Marco Soellner

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Fashion Tips – Fucking Hell

Posted: 25 April 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Panurus Productions – 28th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

There are many things to love about Panurus Productions releases, the main one being the music, which probably goes without saying. But for me, the notes which accompany their releases are always quality – dense slabs of prose that convey the releases in the most physical of terms. And it’s fitting, seeing as said releases, which showcase the vibrant noise scene in the North-East, do tend to be the kind which evoke a certain physical reaction.

The one thing that is apparent is that the scene does involve a lot of bands sharing personnel, and four-piece Fashion Tips are no exception, featuring Esmé Louise Newman of black metal muthas Petrine Cross on vocals and microkorg. She’s joined by Butch Lexington (drums, drum machine), Liam Slack (bass, bass VI) and Jorden Sayer (guitar), and the four tracks were recorded t Liam’s house in County Durham, and was mastered by Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe of Thank and Beige Palace (because there’s a fair amount of cross-sharing in the Leeds scene too, and the northern DIY scene in general. In fact, it’s less of a scene and more of a community, and it’s nice, and I mean that sincerely: in an industry that’s pretty harsh, cutthroat, backstabby and all that shit, it’s a source of joy that there’s a sense of collectivism where artists are mates and help one another out: it should be a model for society in general).

And so it is that Fashion Tips’ debut EP is described as ‘A dance but one of mania, possessed by a need to expunge, switching between mournful and self effacing to raining down scorn. A quivering musculature of strings erupts in spasms of screeches and squawls, held to arched backbone of drums by straining bass tendons. Run through with varicose electronic veins bursting near the surface of skin, a fraught body emits its secrets through a variegated range of croons, shrieks and bellows.’

It sounds a terrifying prospect. The result is, in fact, altogether less scary, although those accustomed to Esmé’s chthonic guttural growls may be surprised by the helium-filled hollers ad yelps here.

Fucking Hell is pitched as ‘Sitting at the uncomfortable mid point between the upbeat and deeply visceral; Fashion Tips drag you in with virulently infectious riffage while simultaneously drenching you with noise and battering you with wild eyed and frantic vocal delivery’.

‘Lunched Out’ is scuzzed out, bass-driven and noisy, but also lively and hooky, and comes on more like X-Ray Spex than anything from the noise-rock scene. The guitars are fizzy fuzz, and the definition comes from the throbbing bass that’s melded to a crisp drum and then there’s the warping space-rock synth lines that really lift it.

Things get heavier with ‘Waltzing’, with hints of Cranes and Daisy Chainsaw bouncing around between the Stranglers-esqe synth, before it melts into a swirling sonic stew on ‘Cinema Vérité’.

‘Standing O’ brings crisp, cutty guitars and a certain (post-)punk minimalism against a swirling mess of feedback and noise, and synths tones that gyrate and grate against one another as everything surges to a rabid climax of barking vocals and a swirling soup of nasty noise.

Fucking Hell stands apart from other Panuras releases on a number of levels, its brevity being one of them. With the longest song clocking in at under four and a half minutes the whole EP’s duration is less than fourteen minutes. But that’s all it needs: Fucking Hell is about instant high impact. And it delivers. It also – unexpectedly, in context – delivers some decent, catchy tunes.

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Two Dogs – Mom’s Birthday

Posted: 21 April 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Everest Records

Christopher Nosnibor

Guess it pays to learn to trust your sources: if I’d seen pics of these guys or simply seen mention of this release in passing, passing is precisely what I’d have done, without a second thought. It would have vert much been my loss.

A skim over the press release cause me to take pause as I read that ‘Two Dogs are Beat Keller on guitars and Joke Lanz on turntables and voice, both based in Berlin. An uncompromising union of two musical individualists who are shaking up the noise world.’

Shaking up the noise world, are they? In that case, I’m all ears to hear what these two Swiss musicians who ‘oscillate between perfect dissonance and intelligent harmony’, and who, ‘with their stripped-down instruments, Lanz and Keller create a unique language somewhere between pavement poetry and free improvisation.’ The pair both have impressive resumes, which even mention artists I’ve heard of.

‘Mom’s Birthday’ is the first track and lead single from their debut album, Songs from the Trash Can. It’s a short (sub-two-minute) glitched-out collage of whacky shit which finds Lanz half-speaking, but almost shouting, about the events which befell him on waking, namely his inability to find his toothbrush or toothpaste. But, here’s the real wince moment: he got drunk and forgot his mum’s birthday. Ah, shit. So he sings an off-key rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ by way of a belated apology. As you do when you’re probably still drunk from the night before.

‘Mom’s Birthday’ is discordant and chaotic and sits very much at the experimental end of noise: it’s also very much of the lineage from early 80s tape-looping noisemaking – think Foetus’ Deaf!.

It’s a fitting companion to ‘In the Pub’, the quirky track that’s available to stream as a taster for the album, which, with tongues firmly in cheeks, pokes droll fun at English pub culture with an astuteness of observation that should shame most natives, and in just two minutes, they capture the reasons why I avoid town pubs and miss Europe, and why these guys are great.

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Two Dogs (uncredited photo)

Kill, The Icon! – Heavy Heart

Posted: 21 April 2023 in Singles and EPs
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21st April 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

You know you’re onto something when you get banned from a platform, and so it is that the promo for ‘Heavy Heart’ got canned from VIMEO, usually one of the more forgiving platforms, and you have you ask ‘why?’ It features clips of various failed British Prime Ministers – notably Theresa May’s infamous grooves and various right-wing twats like Farage and Fox and Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson my arse), pontificating and being pelted with milkshake: nothing untoward, just news footage. So what’s the issue? Perhaps the platform took issue with the featuring of the visage of that out-and-out fash Suella Braverman. But more likely it was starving families juxtaposed with Churchill, toting a machine gun while smoking a cigar, because fuck me, that exposé of the dark side of British politics is hard to swallow for some. No-one wants to contemplate the possibility that Churchill was a twat – an aristocratic political defector and an imperialist – which makes Johnson’s idolisation make deeper sense.

Nishant Joshi’s words which accompany this release are a grim indictment on ‘Great’ Britain in 2023 – the nation which chose to leave the EU (albeit by a slim margin, and that’s something that can’t be stressed enough) on the basis of an ‘advisory’ referendum in 2016. Because ‘the will of the people’? Half the country didn’t even bother to vote because it was a non-issue for them, and only a slender majority of those who did made it happen. But it’s that slender majority who were the most vocal.

He says ‘I was faced with racial slurs when I was younger, but nobody has uttered a racial epithet to my face for many years. But, I know the racists who existed in the 90s are still alive and well. They didn’t die out all of a sudden, and neither did their ideas. So, the point of this song is that everyone acknowledges that racists exist. But nobody will ever admit to being racist – so where did they all go? My answer is that they all wear disguises: as politicians, right-wing journalists, and talking heads for shady think-tanks. The brazen racism has retreated into the shadows, and subtle racism has taken over.’

Will Self said it best when he said ‘Not all Brexiters are racists, but almost all racists will be voting for Brexit’. And that sad fact is, we live in not only a divided society, but, post-Brexit, a more overtly racist society. The referendum outcome has emboldened people to espouse their racist views, with racially-motivated attacks not just affecting blacks and Asians, but also Eastern Europeanss, notably Poles, etc.

Fuck’s sake. We’re a mess. Who do we think has been picking out strawberries and delivering our coffee in Starbucks and Costa thee last decade? The people shunting stacked-up trolleys for click and collect and home deliveries from the supermarket? Large fries?

In Britain, capitalism itself is institutionally racist in a century-long hangover from the empire.

‘Heavy Heart’ kicks straight in with a buzzing, fuzzing, gritty bass and kicking drums that yell urgency. And yes, this is urgent, and it and locks into a throbbing groove that really grabs you hard, a magnificently poised dance / punk hybrid. Just as punk gave voice to a generation frustrated and marginalised, so, sadly, what goes around comes around, and once again, it’s music which is a powerful medium for channelling that frustration. We need change, and it’s voices like Joshi’s which give us hope. And in the meantime, Kill, The Icon! give us a unifying energy, and exhilarating tunes.

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Beige Palace / Cassels – Waterloo Sublet / About Not Writing

Posted: 13 April 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Human Worth / God Unknown – 28th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The release date may be a long way off, but I wanted to get in early with a review and put word out before it’s sold out – not least of all because I’ve been following Beige Palace from the very start, catching their live debut at now defunct DIY rehearsal-space-cum-venue CHUNK in Leeds in 2016. And Christ, I miss that place. It wasn’t the most accessible of spaces, but still within walking distance of the train station, and they hosted some bloody great bands. And it was the place where …(something) ruined made its debut, meaning that on a personal level, it will always be remembered as a special place. Beige Palace impressed then (so much so they used a quote from my review on their website and in press releases), but there was no way of foreseeing that they’d go on to support both Mclusky and Shellac on their visits to Leeds in recent years, bringing their brand of minimal lo-fi indie to the main room at the legendary Brudenell. I’d like to claim I have an ear / eye for bands with unique qualities, and that my many long nights spent seeing unknown bands in tiny venues is not only indicative of a commitment to grass roots music and seeking out the next hot act, but something of a talent, but the truth is I simply enjoy these smaller shows.

The fact that Mclusky and Shellac chose to play the 450-capacity Brudenell suggests they are of the same mindset.

And so it is that the ever-brilliant and ever-dependable Human Worth have teamed up with Good Unknown for a split 7” featuring Beige Palace and Cassels – thus demonstrating the beauty of the split single, which more often tan not you tend to buy because you like one of the bands, and then discover another band in the process.

This split single is a corker.

The punningly-titled ‘Waterloo Sublet’ is a dingy, dungeon-crawling post-punk drone where a long intro of feedback and gut-quivering bass paves the way for a deranged up-and-down angular noise-rock workout that leaves you feeling punch-drink and dizzy. The dual vocals are more the voices of psychosis than a complimentary bounce back-and-forth, and the result is psychologically challenging. It’s not easy or accessible, but it is unhinged and big on impact. And once again, Beige Palace show that you don’t need extreme volume or big riffs or loads of distortion to make music that disturbs the comfortable flow in the best possible way.

Cassels also bring some spiky, jerky, jarring post-punk, and their crisp, cutty guitar work paired with half-sung narrative lyrics are reminiscent of Wire. And then, halfway through, the tempo quickens and it erupts into a guitar-driven frenzy and from out of nowhere, it goes flame-blastingly noisy. It pretty much articulates my own relationship with writing – and not writing, and channels a whole range of complex issues spanning the relationship between mental health and the creation of art. It’s a cracking tune, and one that says that for the unfamiliar, Cassels are a band worth exploring.

Split single – purpose fulfilled.

AA

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