Archive for the ‘Singles and EPs’ Category

Abrasive Trees – Moulding Heaven with Earth

Posted: 5 May 2022 in Singles and EPs
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28th April 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

While physical formats for music may not be especially popular these days, there really is no substitute for holding an article in in your hand. It’s not just about the artefact or the possession – although increasingly, I feel that actually ‘owning’ your music seems like a sound move as acts pull their music from popular platforms – particularly Spotify – and acts who no longer exist cease to maintain their websites and BandCamp profiles and their works simply disappears. Nothing is permanent, but when it comes to things which are virtual, their ephemerality is even more pronounced. This is a long way to coming around to saying that the CD for Abrasive Trees’ new single is magnificent as an item, and it’s very much a fitting way to present the musical contents, and with three tracks including a remix of ‘Moulding Heaven with Earth’ by Mark Beazley (Rothko), it’s a proper 12” / CD single release, the likes of which are sadly scarce these days.

I don’t just love it for the nostalgia: this feels like a proper, solid package in every way, and ‘Moulding Heaven with Earth’ is very much cut from the cloth of sparse, minimal shoegazey post-rock, which provides the backdrop to a stirring spoken word performance before spinning into a slow-burning extended instrumental work. It builds and it broods, the atmosphere growing denser and tender as the picked guitar lines unfurl and interweave across a slow, strolling bass. A reflection on life and death, earth and afterlife, it’s a compelling performance, and the words would stand alone either on a lyrics sheet or as a poem. From there, it’s a gradual, and subtle journey that culminates in a crescendo – that’s strong, yet restrained.

B-side / AA side ‘Kali Sends Flowers’ is moving: again, it’s understated, and yet so very different, spinning a blend of post punk – even hinting at the gothier end of the post-punk spectrum – and psychedelia that in places hints at Spear of Destiny in the way it’s sparse yet rousing. It’s one of those songs that simply isn’t long enough, and that demands for ‘repeat’ to be hit immediately to keep it going.

Mark Beazley’s remix of ‘Moulding Heaven with Earth’ accentuates the atmospherics, and while it retains the rhythm – and if anything it highlights the beef of the bass – and is generally quite respectful in its treatment, and somehow expands the vibe and introduces a more ambient feel, while at the same time shaving over a minute off the time of the original. It’s an interesting – and I mean that positively – reworking, and one that most definitely brings something fresh to the track, rounding off what’s as close to a perfect EP as you’ll hear all year.

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Skylights – Outlaw

Posted: 1 May 2022 in Singles and EPs
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25th March 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Skylights have been making waves of late, especially locally. But then, the question of local success is, to what extent can it translate regionally, nationally, and beyond? Recently, there has been significant coverage of the band playing a brace of major shows (two due to such high demand for the first) at a large-capacity venue – in a village on the edge of York. Now, I applaud their DIY ethic, the fact they’ve sorted these Easter weekend shows themselves and sold them without press or PR or label backing. Recent years and moths have really shown just how far bands can go independently, with Benefits in particular really owning independence to the point that they’re selling out bigger venues nationally with no backing beyond word of mouth and Steve Albini.

Of course, there’s always an element of luck, but outside of the world of manufactured success, it’s largely down to whether or not what you’re selling has demand, and in Benefits’ case, the demand is there by the spadeful.

Skylights may not be as unique as Benefits, but they’re carving their own niche, and on the evidence of the first single from their debut album, they’ve clearly got game.

‘Outlaw’ packs that mid 80s post-punk Leeds sound with heavy hints of The Rose of Avalanche and Salvation, with a big dose of The Cult thrown into the mix. ‘Outlaw’ isn’t exactly a ‘She Sellls Sanctuary’ life, but the guitar break definitely takes some cues from the Bradford band’s major smash. If Editors and Interpol and White Lies spearheaded a new wave revival around the turn of the millennium, the latest crop of revivalist acts definitely offer something different.

The production balances pomp and haziness, the defining factors that allude to the ‘big’ sound of the 80s; it’s ultimately an amalgamation of goth, indie, and arena-rock, and some thirty-five plus years on, it’s a sound that seems to be coming back in vogue. Skylights have the sound absolutely nailed, and better still, ‘Outlaw’ says they’ve got the songs to back it. The future is looking bright for Skylights.

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Sta Prest – Keep Drinking

Posted: 27 April 2022 in Singles and EPs
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22nd of April 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

I can’t help but think of Stewart Home’s riotous 90s novels with wild tales of skinhead antics around London penned in parody of Richard Allen’s seminal pulp youthsploitation ‘Skinhead’ series of novels from the 1970s when I see ‘Sta Prest’. In Home’s early novels, there’s a skinhead dropping his Sta-Press trews to receive a blowjob every ten pages, and it’s high comedy and the pages are infused with the sounds of punk rock and ska.

Essex snappy-dressers Sta Prest can genuinely claim to have been there, having started life in the 1970’s. Their return after a LONG time out follows the retrieval off their demos from ‘78 from the vault at Abbey Road Studios.

Back in the day, they only released a brace of singles, with a retrospective compilation emerging in 2010, and it’s only now that they’re finally getting to release their debut album proper, Shadow Boy, with ‘Keep Drinking’ being the first cut released to the world.

They describe it as ‘a modern drinking shanty’ and it’s a rough and ready, choppy, jaunty slice of punk that sounds like the school of 78, only with references to conference calls at lunchtime;’ and various other contemporary markers. Ultimately, as much as it’s a shanty or a punk rock tune, it’s an anti-capitalist, anti-organisational song that’s delivered with a fist-pumping energy. And the sentiment – the desire to ditch it all and fuck off down the pub – is timeless. It’s energetic, it’s fun, it’s relatable, and I’ve got time for one more.

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Sta Prest - Artwork

Run Into The Night – Common Stream of Consciousness

Posted: 26 April 2022 in Singles and EPs
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29th April 2022

James Wells

I keep hearing – mostly from people over thirty-five, admittedly – that there’s no decent new music now. They’re talking crap. There has always been decent and exciting new music if you keep your ear to the ground instead off R1 and Jools Holland and don’t rely on recommendations from Spotify for everything.

Having formed in 2017, Glasgow duo Run Into The Night managed to build a fanbase with some hard touring before the pandemic hit, and ‘Common Stream of Consciousness’ slams into the public domain to coincide with their return to the live arena with a tour in May. It is, unquestionably, and absoluter belter.

‘Common Stream of Consciousness’ is s thundery, blustery, bass-driven (post) punky sonic attack that’s barely three minutes in duration, and it’s The Runaways, it’s Suzie Quattro – and it’s also early Royal Blood and Queens of the Stone Age. It’s proper energetic rock, and it’s a cracking tune.

Artwork - Run Into The Night

SINE – Mantis 1

Posted: 20 April 2022 in Singles and EPs
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eMERGENCY heARTS – 6th May 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

SINE’s new 5 song EP, Mantis 1, is the first in a trilogy of EPs, “Mantis 1, 2 & 3”. The hype for the release pulls a spotlight on the involvement of a name producer, with the EP being ‘produced by SINE founder, Rona Rougeheart in collaboration with esteemed audio engineer Charles Godfrey at Scary American Studio in Austin, TX. Godfrey, in his two decade plus career, has been engineer/producer on over 75 recordings, including the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’, It’s Blitz! and Mosquito, The Black Angels, Indigo Meadow, and notable work for…Trail of Dead, SWANS, among so many more’. No question: Godfrey’s resumé is impressive, and there’s similarly no question that a decent producer can make a huge, huge difference, with great production having the capacity to render a recording far more than the sum of its parts (Joy Division simply would not have been the same without Martin Hannett’s work, however unconventional and difficult his methods), while equally, poor production can be crippling. Then again, engineering is perhaps equally important: it’s worth noting that Steve Albini doesn’t consider himself to be a producer, but his engineering skills have brought the life to so many albums, and not just the ones he’s renowned for. Still, for all that, you can’t polish a turd: you still need songs and for them to be played in a way that does the material some kind of justice.

Everything comes together just so on this release, and one question I often consider is how close to the artistic ambition is the end result? I have a sense that Mantis I is everything Rougeheart had in her head at conception.

‘Attack’ certainly brings plenty, a combative, dark disco thud of a beat pitched against a relentless throb of synthesised bass. In contrast, ‘Until’ is more overtly pop, but it’s pop in the way Garbage are pop – eclectic, savvy, the production simultaneously crisp and grimy. ‘Future Whores’ is stark, and if there’s something of an early New Order vibe about it, there’s equally some early Pet Shop Boys, and that’s by no means a criticism. Then again, the expensive, yawning notes border on the mellow new age grooves of The Beloved, while the distorted vocals and thumping bass are more industrial… in combination, it crashes hard in the domain of industrial shoegaze, and if that’s not yet been recognised as a thing, now is the time because it’s here and it’s in your face.

Things get murkier and meaner on ‘Blurred’, where I’m reminded of The Human League’s ‘Being Boiled’, only with a harder technoindustrial edge, and the pulsing, bulbous bass is dominated by Rougeheart’s blank, robotic monotone vocal, that’s treated with a metallic edge and some grainy reverb.

Closer ‘Control’ burrows deeper into the darkness, a shuddering mass of slow velocity – yet for all the crushing grind and gnarly digital distortion, the dislocation and thunderous tribal drums, it still slides in a truly aching bridge with a magnificent vocal melody that evokes wistful summer scenes, before crushing them like ant underfoot in a driving death-disco slam.

It all adds up to a meaty and pretty powerful release, and if the idea of releasing three EPs instead of an album seems perverse, it will be interesting to see how SINE utilise the format after such a strong start.

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The Funeral March Of The Marionettes – Slow (Trapped in this Moment)

Posted: 16 April 2022 in Singles and EPs
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11th March 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

When it comes to goth, you might say that the apple never falls far from the tree: there’s a long history of references and recycling, with bands often taking their names from songs or otherwise referencing other bands, and there is, or at least should be, a goth band name generator somewhere on the Internet, with ‘Children’, ‘Sisters’, ‘Grooving’, ‘Dead / Death’ and ‘Ghost’ featuring prominently in the not-so random permutatable word selections. Funerals and marionettes are pretty popular, too, from as far back as 1986, when The Marionettes began life as The Screaming Marionettes.

Taking their name from the Charles Gounod composition of the same name, best known as the theme music for the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The Funeral March of the Marionettes go back to that mid/late eighties heyday (broadly 84 or 85 to 87 or 88) that saw ‘goth’ solidify from being a nebulous array of post-punk bands (The Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, Alien Sex Fiend) being lumped under an umbrella by a lethargic press into an actual genre with more defined stylistic boundaries, typically drawing on the aforementioned acts, but with more indie-leanings typical of The Mission and the style of guitar Wayne Hussey introduced to The Sisters on his arrival in 1984

The Funeral March of the Marionettes, from Rockford, Illinois, cite The Cure, Bauhaus, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and others among their influences, and while they describe their latest offering as something of a departure, it’s still dense with latter-day gothic tropes, albeit leaning more towards the atmospheric post-punk/industrial crossover space, whereby you’ve got Depeche Mode covering Joy Division, a brooding atmosphere as cool synths drift in an ocean of reverb while angst oozes from every corner of the dense, gloomy production.

Yet for all its adherence of those tropes, for all its stylistic familiarity (just look at that cover art, that’s The Sisters of Mercy / Merciful Release meets Joy Division via Rosetta Stone), ‘Slow’ hits a spot, because it’s dark, dark, dark, and the execution is spot on, sending a shiver of torment down the spine that entices you to bask in the gloom.

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Sweet Giant – My Bones

Posted: 16 April 2022 in Singles and EPs
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18th April 2022

James Wells

To promote their new EP, Sweet Giant are releasing a track a month from it, and so precisely one month on from the unveiling of the bright and breezy ‘Til You’re Blue’, they’re back with ‘My Bones’, recorded and self-produced by the band and mixed by Callum Barter (Courtney Barnett/ Kurt Vile).

This outing is a little more paired back, while it’s still big on the breezy melodies, the lyrical bent is rather more reflective and a shade less runny than its predecessor, with Annie Needham mulling on the nature of time as futures past drift together and apart.

‘I can smell my bones / don’t think that they’re my own / like they came from somewhere old / somewhere long ago’, she sings as if lost, adrift in time and uncertain of where she’s heading or where she’s been. It’s not surprising if she feels dislocated and out of time / place, living in London yet so clearly yearning for deserts and dust, freeways and festivals (just check the band pic to see where they see themselves at home).

The band cite along their many influences Fleetwood Mac and Creedence Clearwater Revival, and they really do capture that easy-going 70s American rock vibe, making their music ideal for driving on a sunny day with the windows down and the stereo up.

Band photo 1 - Sweet Giant

The Palpitations – Denial

Posted: 8 April 2022 in Singles and EPs
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15th April 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

It may sound a bit screwy, but then, we’re here on the Internet and I’m sure you’ll have read far screwier things presented in more enticing ways that are far more dangerous than my theory that individuals are somehow psychologically and biologically attuned to certain kinds of music. It’s a complex issue, and one I’m yet to fully unravel, but it feels like something that slots into the nature / nurture debate: are people born predisposed to appreciate darker music, or is it triggered by life events – or a combination of the two?

In 1983, at the age of seven or eight, I saw Killing Joke on Top of the Pops performing ‘Love Like Blood’. I was, in hindsight, enjoying a mundane middle-class upbringing, but this moment – and it was one of several – went a long way to cementing my appreciation of darker music. I’d never suffered any kind of trauma and hardship beyond maybe some kids taking the piss out of my coat or whatever, but still something drew me towards this kind of thing.

Nearly forty years on, and ultimately, nothing’s changed: the turn of the millennium brought a new wave of post-punk influenced acts, with the likes of Interpol and Editors setting the grounds of darker territory. And, in turn, we’re seeing bands emerging now that very much echo the sound and style of post-millennial wave of post-punk, or new millennium new wave if you will (there doesn’t really seem to be a label for it, but if that one ever gets used, I’m claiming it).

This is the long and meandering route to the arrival the new single from London-based alt-rockers The Palpitations who – like so many acts – emerged during lockdown out of a need to so something, and the foursome – Tom Talbot on vocals, Brett Rieser on guitar, Nishant Joshi on bass, Florin Pascu on drums – set out their agenda with the ‘Feed The Poor! Eat The Rich!’ EP.

But there’s a nugget in the Palpitations bio that shows they’re not just another bunch of musicians who were loafing around listlessly and decided to bung some tunes together to fill the time whole on furlough or unable to play live. Talbot and Joshi were, in actual fact, working as frontline doctors, and both were instrumental in protecting NHS staff with upgraded PPE, and also took part in protests that gained international attention. Joshi later took the government to court over their PPE failures, winning a landmark case.

It’s out of this passion and a sense of frustration that the music of The Palpitations comes, and ‘Denial’ is a belter, smashing together a spindly, soaring lead guitar, with cool, meandering synths and a thumping solid rhythm section; if Interpol collided with Bivouac and Eight Storey Window, you’d probably have a handle on their post-punk grunge crossover, although there’s perhaps more than a hint of Placebo in the blend, and ‘Denial’ packs some darkly melodic angst and significant tension into its four-minute duration. It resonates not just on an emotional or sonic level, but on  a cerebral and biological level – and it’s an instant grab.

Subterranean Lovers – Brilliant Things

Posted: 7 April 2022 in Singles and EPs
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Futura Futura Records – 6th April 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Ah, romantic love… that all-encompassing, all-immersive burst of excitement that comes with the new. It’s that euphoria that drives people crazy, that people spend half their lives chasing, only to find it elusive, and it’s the blinding dazzlement of this ‘love’ that’s inspired infinite pop songs and poems through the ages: it was the very cornerstone of the tropes for the Elizabethan sonnet, and not a lot has changed in five hundred years, in real terms. It’s not that it’s a myth, it’s just that it’s fleeting at best.

Subterranean Lovers know this when they sing ‘I want to love you like a mother / I want to love you like a king / I want to love you like a god / I want to love you more than I’ve loved anything / I want to love you like a poet / I want to love you like an artist…’ and this makes ‘Brilliant Things’ a savvy slice of gothy pop.

Building from simple acoustic guitar and vocal and introducing the other instrumental elements of drums, bass, synth in succession, ‘Brilliant Things’ may glow brightly, but there’s a dark undertone beneath the lustrous, basking glory of these elevated aspirations, as if the weight of them drags such perfection beyond reach. This, in itself, brings a twist of anguish, the realisation that perfection is even more unobtainable than that magnificent, pedestal-standing object of desire.

‘You’re silver and gold / you’re mine to hold / you’re everything’ hints at the all-consuming and ultimately potentially damaging way obsession isn’t healthy, and the delivery is bold and dramatic, with a captivating vocal melody that’s enriched by enticing layers of harmony that leave you aching for more. Brilliant indeed.

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Artwork - Subterranean Lovers

Holy Coves – The Hurt Within

Posted: 4 April 2022 in Singles and EPs
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Yr Wyddfa Records – 25th March 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

The latest offering from Holy Coves (who hail from Holy Island, Anglesey, renowned for its long historical links with pirates) is a bold, mid-tempo stroller. Infused with psychedelic and stoner rock, above anything, it’s got arena-friendly anthem stamped all over it – although I don’t mean that as the insult it could be taken. Not everything has to be edgy to be any cop.

Popular doesn’t have to mean weak, watered-down, lowest common denominator, and sometimes artists are popular because they’re good, rather than in spite of the fact. And there was, after all, a time when U2 and Simple Minds both made decent music, and they were packing out immense venues long before they became pompous, overblown parodies of themselves. It from this seam of 80s upscaled sound that ‘The Hurt Within’ is mined: everything about it feels huge, effortlessly amalgamating The Cult and Bruce Springsteen and coating it in a smooth reverbiness.

Holy Codes may or may not have aspirations to be immense, but their sound most definitely is, and it’s got that big, spacious feel; there’s probably an equation that involves ambition plus songwriting and production somewhere, and if there isn’t, then someone should map the co-ordinates of ‘The Hurt Within’ and take it as a blueprint.

New enough to grab anyone with ears, nostalgic enough to appeal to the forty-somethings and perhaps even older, and solid enough to stand up in its own right, it’s hard to fault from where I’m sitting.

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