Archive for the ‘Singles and EPs’ Category

Looking Tigers – They’re Coming

Posted: 19 March 2023 in Singles and EPs
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24th February 2023

James Wells

Looking Tigers is Marcel Moliner, based in Leith, Edinburgh, and he describes his style as ‘animal techno’, since it’s all based on or inspired by tigers. That’s Not to be confused with Techno Animal, although in reality, this is unlikely.

With a hard bass thudding insistently, this is one of those tracks that’s sparse and stark yet at the same time dense. It’s all about the bass. Or, as Marcel suggests, ‘a steady 125bpm kick acts as a safety net against all unforeseen turns, where tiger roars unveil a very primal experience that won’t be forgotten.’ ‘They’re coming’ is dark and brooding, foreboding, and has strong hints of instrumental remixes of Nine Inch Nails or Depeche Mode, as well as calling to mind early Factory Floor.

Yes, it’s danceable, but it’s also cerebral, and it makes you feel compressed and tense, paranoid, even. You can almost feel their breath behind you: they’re coming, but who are they, and what are they here for?

Equally big on groove and atmosphere, it doesn’t necessarily convey the energy of a prowling hunter or savage beast, but this is interesting.

Grub Nap – God Pile

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

Christopher Nosnibor

God Pile is the debut release from Leeds duo Grub Nap, a duo consisting of Dan Barter (Dvne, Joe Pesci) on guitar and ‘back mouth’ and Steve Myles (Cattle, Groak, Thank, Khuda) on drums and ‘front mouth’. As if their joint pedigree isn’t recommendation enough (and having witnessed the majority of the aforementioned acts playing life for myself, I can vouch for that), it’s being released on Human Worth, and the limited run of fifty tapes has gone in advance of the release date.

And being Human Worth, 10% of all proceeds are being donated to charity, in this instance Leeds Mind, promoting positive mental health and wellbeing and providing help and support to those who need it most.

Now, I’ve mentioned this variously before, but for mental health and wellbeing, music can be – and certainly is for me – an immense help, and it’s the gnarlier, noiser stuff I often find provides the greatest comfort, especially in a live setting. It’s all about the escape, the release, the catharsis of raw emotions pitched against raging noise.

And Barter and Myles, who, according to the band bio ‘first played together in a hardcore band in their late teens and have teamed back up to churn out sludgecore for folks with short attention spans and no interest in wizards or flag waving’ definitely bring the noise, and the describe God Pile as ‘a golden brown, 15 minute, crumbly, introspective riff lattice. Snappy(ish) songs about greed, crippling anxiety, suburban nuclear mishaps and flagellant rozzers. 6 knuckle dragging clods of down tuned insolent rage.’

The longest of the six songs on here is three minutes and eighteen seconds long: the rest are all between a minute and two-and-a-half minutes long.

They pack a lot of action and a lot of noise into those short spans. The guitars are so thick and gritty the riffs churn your guts, so you don’t miss the bass, and Myles’ hard-hitting drumming is dynamic and varied, with shifts in both volume and tempo keeping the songs moving well, and the Raw-throated vocals are absolutely brutal. There’s a late 80s / early 90s feel to their brand of dingy noise, landing somewhere between early Head of David and Fudge Tunnel, then going full grind on the minute–long ‘The Daily Phet’.

Slowing to a downtuned crawl and ending with a howl of feedback, one suspect the title of the last track, ‘Crowd Pleaser’ is likely ironic – you can’t really have a go-nuts mosh to this. But then, after the intensity of the preceding cuts, you’re a knackered sweaty mess already – and that’s just sitting at home listening. Oh yes. Grub Nap hit the spot.

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Metamorph – Witchlit

Posted: 15 March 2023 in Singles and EPs
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7th March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Having emerged in 2016, Metamorph are, in the grand scheme, relative newcomers to the goth scene, but the voice behind the name, Margot Day was an integral part of the 80’s NYC underground music scene while fronting the legendary Goth band The Plague with their album Naraka in 1987.

While goth tends to be associated with the early 80s, it was in 87/88 that the genre broke the mainstream, with The Sisters of Mercy’s Floodland and The Mission’s Children going massive on an international level. It was a boom time slightly below the mainstream radar, too, with Fields of the Nephilim releasing two major albums (Dawnrazor in ‘87 and The Nephilim in ’88), and Christian Death’s controversial landmark Sex and Drugs and Jesus Christ also being released in ’88. These were still dark times – the opening of Disneyland Paris provided only so much distraction from the fact this was the height of the cold war.

No doubt the Metamorph story, whereby Margot ‘escaped temporarily to the jungle by the sea to conjure new witchy Metamorph songs… after she had a miracle healing and felt summoned to make more music’ will be repeated ad infinitum, so instead, I’ll skip straight to the new single, the first new material since the Kiss of the Witch concept / narrative album released in September 2022.

‘Witchlit’ may not belong to the same suite of songs as the album, but there are clear thematic connections, and it’s a corking slice of quintessential gothy electropop, dark, seductive, a driving beat and bass and a teasing twist of menace and aggression with an explosive chorus that speaks of obsessive tendencies and longing – and it’s all tightly packed into a concise two and a half minutes. ‘Witchlit’ is single perfection.

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Sara Persico – Boundary

Posted: 13 March 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Karlrecords – 10th March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

When I started out reviewing, I always thought how cool it would be to get to hear new releases by acts I like in advance, and to opine on the latest releases by acts familiar to many. But I’ve come to realise that the real joy – and what I now see as my purpose – is to discover and share new and lesser-known artists. It is a gift which keeps on giving, for I hear so many people in my demographic moan about the lack of any decent new music. It’s simply not true: they’re just not looking in the right places (and their idea of ‘decent’ music tends to be rooted in their youth and coloured with nostalgia, which is sad really. Opening one’s ears and opening one’s mind is the key to keeping young. Or something). Of course, it’s always subjective, but there is a rare exhilaration and delight in – after all this time – hearing something that doesn’t sound like anything else.

And so here we have the debut EP from Sara Persico, which prefaces a full album in the pipeline. It doesn’t remind me of anything – but it does give me a rush, but also chills me to the bone.

It’s dark and it’s stark, and it’s challenging.

According to her bio, she was ‘born and raised in Naples, Berlin-based sound artist/vocalist Sara Persico cut her teeth experimenting on the fringes of Naples’ fiery underground experimental/noise scene, developing a technique that would integrate her voice with analogue electronics, field recordings, and samples.’

Fiery would be a fair description of the six tracks on Boundary, released on cassette. It’s big on bass and beats. Big big big. The percussion bashes at the cerebellum and kicks the cerebral cortex, while bass resonates through every fibre of the body. This dense and weighty stuff. It’s the elements of dance music slowed to a glacial crawl. Instead of making you want to move, it absolutely freezes you solid, tense, immobile. And as for Persico’s voice – it’s something else. She sounds tortured, trapped, and transcendental.

Stripping things back to a stammering, glitched drone on ‘Exit’, she switches between ethereal lilt to banshee howl, and the two are overlaid in a sonic collage that’s compelling and terrifying simultaneously. ‘Under the Raw Light’ is tense, aggressive, even, in its ferocious beats and Persico’s voice that sounds as if it’s coming from the other side, frenzied, tortured. In contrast, the closer, Umbilical’ is a disconcerting spoken word work pitched against a thudding heartbeat and muffled bass. It leaves you feeling… what? Detached, in some way.

Despite being built around familiar elements, Boundary doesn’t sound like anything else, and launches Sara Persico as a unique and exciting voice.

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Weekend Recovery – No Guts, All the Glory

Posted: 7 March 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Criminal Records – 24th February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Strange sense of deja-vu? Whatchoo talkin’ about? Whatchoo talkin’ about? Lori wants to know on the lateest kick-ass single from Weekend Recovery.

Yes, ‘No Guts, All the Glory’ was released as ‘No Guts’, the lead track to the EP of the same name, almost a year ago to the week, but a year on it’s getting a reboot thanks to an arts council grant, and the nomadic power trio currently based in Sheffield are releasing a rerecorded radio edit version of this solid tune as the second single from their upcoming third album, Esoteric, ahead of more touring activity.

Perhaps the hardest thing about being a band nowadays is maintaining profile. Social media and Spotify has changed the model, and we’re back to the 1960s when artists are conveyor-belt release-machines. You don’t release anything for six months and it’s like starting over: people have forgotten you exist and you may as well be a new band climbing the mountain of audience-building. Well, perhaps not quite, but still. While the nostalgia market for the over forties for whom time stood still from their thirtieth birthday, for the rest, memories are short.

Weekend Recovery have done a pretty decent job of keeping a flow of activity and output and social media engagement, and recently signing to The Kut’s Criminal Records imprint certainly hasn’t done then any harm. This timely release won’t, either.

Rerecorded it may be, but it’s certainly not hyper-polished and sanitised ready for Radio 1. Smoothed out with some eddying synths and Lori’s vocals switched up in the mix and sounding a bit cleaner, and clearer, it is more radio friendly than the original version, but it’s not totally cleaned-up and sugary: the guitar, bass, and drums are still absolutely driving and the song feels urgent, as if they’re playing like they depend on killing it. And they do. It’s a storming tune, and I for one am revved for the album.

Ritual Cloak – Left Behind

Posted: 6 March 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

Bubblewrap Collective – 3rd March 2023

Ritual Clock may sound like some gloomy metal act, but is in fact a post-rock duo consisting of Daniel Barnett, formerly of Samoans and drummer/producer Andrew Sanders.

2021 saw them release two full-length albums, Divine Invasions and A Human Being Is The Best Disguise, a reworking of the debut album, with new lyrics and vocals by writer and comedian Autumn Juvenile, followed by a cover of R.E.M.’s Orange Crush, plus the meditative collaboration Witaj w Domu with Polish photographer, Michal Iwanowski.

They explain that “‘Left Behind’ wouldn’t exist without the influence of George Harrison and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. The song revolves around a sitar-like guitar line that we knew we wanted to have constantly looping to create a meditative drone. The lyrics are a collage of different lines and ideas that when brought together create a story of a long-forgotten ‘saviour’ that’s coming back but nobody needs them anymore.”

It is indeed an epically spacious drone-based compensation, and possesses a distinctly 90s feel – thankfully more the kind of stuff you’d hear on Joh Peel than Kula Shaker, despite its trippy eastern vibes. It drifts and meanders in a sedated fashion for its five-and-a-bit minute duration and it’s kinda mellow but kinda spaced and dreamy and vaguely disorientating. Not bad at all.

The Reflecting Skin – II

Posted: 2 March 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

A year on from The Reflecting Skin’s eponymous debut – with a gnarly, feedback-strewn live recording from July 2022 released in September if last year, they’re back with II.

Lead track ‘Irreversible Damage’ is a warning of what this will do to your hearing. It’s the dirties, nastiest overloading, overdriven black racket you’ll hear. The drums clatter away and everything is cranked up to distortion, the snarling vocals just a barking, screaming, growling mess of pain, anguish and nihilism. It’s the easiest-going out of the three on what is a spectacularly nasty work, that goes deep, dark, and heavy all the way.

It was listening to John Peel in the early 90s that was my passage to music of such extremity, via acts like Extreme Nose Terror. At fourteen or fifteen, it opened doors to a whole new world. Then again, The Reflecting Skin sound more like they’re opening doors to the pits of hell. And anything less, well, it would practically be pop music.

II is not pop. It’s pain.

‘Loose Hiss’ arrives in a howl of ear-splitting feedback before getting heads—down on a driving riff bashed out at a frenetic pace and it’s a sonic blitzkrieg that’s all over I a skull-pounding minute and fifty-one seconds.

They stretch the dingy ‘Grimace’ out over five tempo-shifting minutes where a dirty downtuned bass dominates while everything else drills into your soul. If you want heavy, look no further. II is immense.

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Argonaut – Move Fast

Posted: 28 February 2023 in Singles and EPs
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1st March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The title of their new single is a fitting one for a band that really doesn’t piss about when it comes to getting things done. Nathan and Lorna, who make up half of this London-based energetic indie-punk foursome cranked out lo-fi bedroom-recorded cuts at a remarkable rate during lockdown, and now, despite working dayjobs and all the rest, the band have not only reconvened but released a new EP Songs from the Black Hat on February 1st, for which they’ve been unveiling in instalments (a number of which have found exposure here, not least of all ‘Futoko’ a year ago) by way of promo.

‘Move Fast’ is pitched as ‘Channelling Gen X Silicon Valley sloganeering,1980s pop synths and nineties noise!’ – which is in many ways quintessential Argonaut – big on energy, some bright, breezy melodies, but a dark undercurrent and a degree of social unrest.

With its clean, chorus-tinged guitar sound, there’s a Cure-esque post-punk element to the track, with a cute, almost bouncy vocal, there are classic indie-pop / shoegaze aspects dominant here, and then of course, the chorus breaks out the big fizzy guitars and busy, dizzy synths. It all comes together to give us an energetic tune which comes on like a lo-fi Blondie, and it’s a winning formula.

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Kill, The Icon! – Protect the Brand

Posted: 24 February 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Blaggers Records – 24th February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Having recently signed to Blaggers Records, Kill, The Icon! Unveil the first taste of their debut EP in the form of single cut ‘Protect the Brand’ – a song they describe as being ‘loosely based on David Fincher’s Fight Club’.

As Chuck Palahniuk wrote in the novel on which the film is based, ‘You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis.’ This is capitalism laid bare: the workers defining themselves by brand allegiance, working all hours to eke out a living and make themselves feel better by buying shit they don’t need with money they don’t have. It’s a fucking con, and it’s never been more transparent as energy companies rake in record profits while people struggle to afford to stay warm and feed themselves, blaming the so-called cost of living crisis on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and mass strikes taking place across the UK while rail companies siphon off millions to pay execs and shareholders while claiming there’s no money for staff wages, and the NHS coffers are bare for paying their staff because they’ve haemorrhaged billions on redundant PPE provided by companies owned by government chums like Michelle Mone.

The trouble is, it’s taken too, too long for the general populace to twig that they’re being shafted, and the government has been quietly bolstering its powers to dismantle protest and limit rights – not just workers’ rights but human rights since Brexit – that pushing back against it all is incredibly difficult. And many still don’t even see corporate brainwashing for what it is as they obediently trudge back to their offices at their own expense for two or three days a week for the ‘hybrid office experience’ corporations are insistent is essential for both productivity and wellbeing.

This realisation is the narrative of ‘Protect the Brand’, a song which the band explain is ‘viewed through the lens of an overworked and underpaid office worker who is tasked with mind-numbing, repetitive jobs until he finally engineers his own sacking. The Worker stumbles through a crisis of realization, as he starts to question the purpose of work within a capitalist framework.’

It’s driven by a mega-dense bass, and the vocal is a perfect counterpoint, a monotone that chops between corporate inanities and anti-corporate vitriol. It absolutely works, and creates a tension that doesn’t entirely resolve. Once again, Kill, The Icon! are on the money and nail the zeitgeist. Listen up, and listen good.

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Rewired by Neon Insect

Posted: 23 February 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

Former Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles dominated social media here in the UK following the tubby tosser’s proclamation that he doesn’t play unsigned bands because they’re crap. He has, naturally, provoked a virtual riot. All bands were unsigned at some point, and without anyone backing them, they’d have remained unsigned forever, even hiss beloved oasis – who should have probably remained unsigned and instead played their pedestrian pub rock to pub-gig audiences before fucking off to the mediocre day jobs they deserved.

The same applies to so many bands. Most bands who get the break do so because of luck, not talent. They’re not better than the unsigned acts, they just have a contract because someone decided they might have commercial potential. But what do labels know, really? They select taste based on their opinion and observation.

A large percentage of the bands I review are unsigned or otherwise independent, and Neon Insect are yet another. The musical vehicle of German composer and multi-instrumentalist Nils Sinatsch, Neon Insect is a project which provides the soundtrack to thee dystopian present.

The press release reports how ‘Nils found it difficult to continue on the cyberpunk, dystopian-themed path that began on the preceding release; the full-length LP, New Moscow Underground. It’s not hard to understand why. But ahead of the forthcoming album, they’ve given us ‘Rewired’.

It’s industrial, alright, in the 80s sense, a grinding mess of crunching drums, swampy synths and churning bass, bringing elements of Ministry, NIN, and Foetus. It really gets dark and dingy in the final minute, and it’s heavy and intense.

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