Archive for the ‘Singles and EPs’ Category

Argonaut – The New Argonaut EP

Posted: 15 August 2018 in Singles and EPs
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7th September 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

Argonaut are back with a new line-up and a new EP. You’d never guess from the title about there being a new EP. Having booked the studio for eight hours, the whole session was wrapped in six, with ‘minimal overdubs or embellishments’ as they put it. This honest, unlaboured approach gives the songs a directness and urgency which is integral to the appeal here.

All clocking in at between two and a half and three minutes, the four tracks on Argonaut’s latest offering are punchy, spiky, and with uncluttered arrangements and lo-fi production values, are perfect examples of punk/new wave crossover, delivered with the zeal of riot grrrl and grunge. And it’s great fun.

The band indulge their pop tendencies with a gloriously joyful rendition of Strawberry Switchblade’s ‘Since Yesterday’ (they do quite a line in covers, as it happens). It’s faithful to the original, but where the original was a shade twee, their take is free, vaguely ramshackle, and has a superbly messy guitar sound fizzing away.

With guitarist Nathan sharing the vocal duties on ‘March!’ – which is built around a simple, cyclical chord sequence played jangly and off-kilter – they come on like Brix-era Fall, and it’s the exuberance that crackles from ‘Girl Talk’ that pretty much serves to define the spirit of the EP.

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Weekend Recovery – In the Mourning

Posted: 11 August 2018 in Singles and EPs
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27th September 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

They’re still touring their debut album, Get What You Came For and already Weekend Recovery are moving on with a new EP that marks another step in their ever-advancing evolution.

If the album saw them ditch the Kerrang-radio-friendly Paramore-influenced alternative rock of their early efforts in favour of a more direct, punk style (nevertheless marked by a pop sass that passed a nod to Blondie), this latest effort finds Weekend Recovery get grittier and grungier. And once again, it’s a move for the better, and while it may not exactly be garage but more grunge, it is full-tilt and raw, while also benefitting from a fuller sound that showcases the material to best effect.

The band haven’t been around that long in real terms – I first caught them a couple of years ago in a basement bar in Leeds, and they were good, but clearly still searching for their identity, although Lauren came on like a star in the making, rocking up in a faux-fur coat and ready to kick ass. And not only live but on record, she’s really evolved as a performer, and behind the scenes, as an artist. The same goes for the rest of the band, too: this is solid and assured, and everything about In the Mourning marks a progression.

They’ve dug deep for this, and the press release points out that ‘Lori has doubled down on the transparent window into her own turbulent world that ‘Anyway’ [from the album] provided with a formidable and resonating track in ‘I’m Not That Girl’. The song in question finds the band mining an almost country seem albeit amped up to eleven with driving guitars dominating the chorus of this gut-spilling reflective confessional.

But it’s the choppy ‘Bite Your Tongue’ that grabs the attention as the EP’s opener, a thumping four-square bassline underpinning a quintessential grunge dynamic of chiming chorus-soaked verse guitar and overdriven chorus. And they totally nail it, with a hefty, heads-down riffcentric mid-section. Beneath the breezy woah-oh-oh-oh chorus, there’s a tension that’s both sonic and emotional, and the title track steps it up a couple of notches, propelled by a twisted disco groove that drives an explosive chorus. The guitars are up-front and meaty, and Lauren’s delivery balances melody with a raw passion that comes from churning internal anguish that has to find an outlet.

In the Mourning sees Weekend Recovery take another leap into forging their own identity, growing bolder and braver and more confident. Where they’ll be in another 18 months… I’m on the edge of my seat to see.

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Haq – Antics In A Maze EP

Posted: 8 August 2018 in Singles and EPs
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Bearsuit Records – 14th July 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

The Bearsuit philosophy is, to the best of my understanding, essentially built round a l’aissez-faire approach to experimentalism and collaboration. Stuff happens, when it happens, as it happens. Sometimes it happens without input or collaboration. And it’s all fine as long as it’s not mainstream. Truth is, nothing any of the Bearsuit acts could produce in a million lifetimes would ever even hint at mainstream aspirations. The reason I’ve been a personal advocate of the label and its output for a while now is simply because they do what they so, and don’t give a crap about trends, commercialism, or anything else. As I wrote the other day, albeit in a slightly different context: it’s for the love, not the money.

The label’s latest release sees Haq (the alter-ego of another Bearsuit would-be legend, Harold Nono) return. Five years on from the ‘Nocturnals’ album, this EP offers three remixes frm the album, plus two new cuts.

Lead track ‘Antics in a Maze’ moves far beyond the avant-trip-hop leanings of its predecessor and froths with fanciful flights of incongruity, and brims with an air of otherness. Breathy vocals waft over drifting, trilling swathes of gauze-like synth, crossed with bursts of odd electronica, deep dub and driving drum ‘n’ bass. Warped snippets of thee tunes for fictional TV shows and films from the 70s and 80s emerge fleetingly for the ever-shifting compositional aneurysm.

‘Norvell’ is the second new cut: with sonorous, brooding synths and rich, layered strings that sweep and tug at the tear ducts, as well as percussion that simultaneously clatters and thunders, it’s a dissonant and haunting work that straddles industrial, goth and shoegaze, with hints of Cranes and a messed-up air of dark beauty about its detached, haunting evocativeness.

The remixes are varied, in terms of style, interest and significance – but at least they are varied. Senji Niban’s remix of ‘Are You the Elephant’ thumps along insistently, a far cry from the slightly eerie, chilled original, while The Autumna remix of ‘Bees in My Feet’ is but a humming drone that’s elevated above ambience by virtue of maintaining a pitch that’s impossible to ignore, however hard you may try.

There’s nothing ordinary about the music on this EP, and while it’s bewildering at times – as you’d reasonably expect from Bearsuit – it also contains moments of extreme elegance and grace which are spellbinding.

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FEHM – Scarborough Warning

Posted: 30 July 2018 in Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

Leeds synth-led post-punk outfit FEHM have mellowed a fair bit since they first burst onto stages in and around their hometown three or four years ago. New single, ‘Scarborough Warning’ may lack the abrasive edges and wild, wide-eyed bass-driven gothy mania of early songs like ‘Sinking Sands’, but that isn’t to say this more commercial sound is without edge.

This means that while Paul Riddle’s frenzied holler has softened to a brooding croon, and the instrumentation sounds less like X-Mal Deutschland and more like early Human League with a hefty dash of The Cure in the mix, not to mention a lead guitar part that’s pure (early) New Order, there’s a dark, melancholy edge to this slice of disco-pop. It’s heavy on reverb and imbued with a nagging wistfulness, and it’s also still deeply rooted in the first half of the 1980s.

I dig.

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FEHM will also be playing a handful of dates in August support of the release:

2nd: The New Adelphi, Hull

3rd: The Brudenell Social Club, Leeds (With full supporting line up including Drahla)

9th:The Underground, Newcastle

10th: The Castle, Manchester

11th, The Shacklewell Arms, London

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Rotting Monarchs – Disorder

Posted: 19 July 2018 in Singles and EPs
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James Wells

You’d never guess that this York-based band was hardcore, with a name like Rotting Monarchs. ‘Disorder’ isn’t a Joy Division cover, but a self-penned slab of churning, bile-brimming noise that comes off the back of last year’s debut EP and provides a flavour of their debut album, also entitled Disorder, set for release next year.

It’s 2:22 of trebly, shouty, full-tilt abrasion. It’s not pretty, and it’s not technical: instead, it slams in at a hundred miles an hour, fiery and full-throated, pissed off and petulant, and with a simple, hollering chant of the title by way of a refrain, it’s got a vintage punk vibe: uncomplicated, antagonistic, sloganeering. Its primitivism is much of its appeal: it’s direct, an uncomplicated shout of dissatisfaction.

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Rotting Monarchs

Mike Frank – All My Possessions

Posted: 12 July 2018 in Singles and EPs
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15th July 2018

Recently named ‘artist of the month’ at The Great Frog, former Arrows of Love drummer, film and game soundtracker and artist in his own right, Mike Frank is on a bit of a roll.

He’s written and recorded two albums post-Arrows: ‘This is going to get weird… I’m going to make this weird’, which he describes as ‘a collection of orchestral and experimental film music songs’, and an album featuring Rufus Miller, Lyndsey Lupe and Artur Dyjecinski which is ‘full of dark sounds and Middle Eastern instruments’. Only the former has yet seen the light of day.

A taster of a forthcoming album, ‘All My Possessions’ has no connection with either project, and is infinitely more accessible – I’ll refrain from going so far as to say commercial – than anything we’ve heard from him so far. What’s more, this downtempo yet somehow simultaneously jaunty, jangly indie rock tune, which boasts a really rather catchy chorus, hints further at his songwriting range. With delicate, understated, picked guitar and a bleak croon, the opening resembles Leonard Cohen, and there’s a darkness which shadows the song as a whole.

Bukowski’s influence is rendered explicit in the lifted footage which accompanies the song, which is essentially about the vagabond life of a writer, but also, as he puts it ‘about feeling down and out, lonely or even desperate’ – and you wonder which voice or perspective lines like ‘she’s so good to me / I’m such an asshole’ and ‘I like to drink because I can / It makes me feel like I’m still with the band’ are really coming from.

It’s got a nice slow build that swells subtly to a full finish, and is, as a song, rounded and satisfying. And really very nice, if kinda sad.

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Spotlights – Hanging By Faith EP

Posted: 2 July 2018 in Singles and EPs
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Ipecac Recordings – 15th June 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

Having teased us with the Cure cover which accompanies four remixes from their Seismic LP and provides, in part, the EP’s title, Spotlights deliver the rest of the tracks.

There’s substantial range here: Kris Dirkson’s remix of ‘Hang us All’ (retitled ‘The Hanging’) hinges on cinematic shoegaze, ethereal but, whittled to half its original length, feels focused and tightly structured.

Mario Quintero’s remix of ‘Ghost of a Glowing Forest’ (‘Till Darkness Comes Out’) is quite the contrast: a sprawling, murky, dubby beast that transitions from near-ambience to slow industrial thud, it sits between NIN and Portishead.

‘The Size of a Planet’, here reworked by Void Mains and retitled ‘I’ve Giant’ accentuates the heavy, bass-led doom drone that lies beneath the graceful lead parts on the album version, and draws it out to almost seven minutes. It’s pretty hefty. In combination, they make for a strong release, and while standing well in their own right, serve to return the attention to the album that spawned them.

The rendition of ‘Faith’ is utterly breathtaking. They’ve not messed with the original in terms of form or structure, and it’s remarkably faithful (sorry) and respectful – but with the heavy guitar work and even heavier drumming, it amps up the intensity to epic levels.

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Mayflower Madame – Premonition EP

Posted: 28 May 2018 in Singles and EPs
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1st June 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

It all starts with an air-raid siren. A historical sound with connotations of WW2 for many, but still heard in places like South Korea and Japan, it’s a sound which provokes an almost biologically-wired shudder of unease. They may only be tests, but the sound of sirens in the last 12 months reminds us that stability is but precarious. And then the snaking, surfy bass strolls in, awash with reverb… and then the guitars… It’s all pinned to a locked-down groove, and Trond Fagernes’ voice rises up from amidst it all as if from the back of a cathedral. You saw it all coming, right? They obviously did and approach by stealth, before building to a whiling cacophony by way of a climax. But for all of its noise and tension, this feels more introspective than anything they’ve done before.

Norway’s Mayflower Madame draw heavily on post-punk influences – music born out of the dark days of the early 80s, corresponding with the period when cold war tensions escalated to warrant the labelling of ‘the second cold war’, and the economic boom years widened the chasm between the haves and have-nots was rendered more conspicuous by the rise of the yuppie. And so on.

What Mayflower Madame bring to the gothy party is a potent dose of Nordic noir psych and a dash of shoegaze, all doused in massive reverb, and the four tracks on Premonition continue the trajectory of their 2016 debut album, Observed in a Dream.

The claustrophobic focus continues on the swirling, shoegazy ‘Before I Fall’; the guitars twang through a gauze of drifting synths and echoey fx that create a certain distance between the listener and the actual song, an unusual sense of both space and an absence of space. ‘Alma’s Sermon’ is centred around a backed-off yet insistent motoric beat and has greater immediacy and – it’s all relative – upbeat vibe. But then closer ‘Siders Seek’ plunges deeper into darkness: a paranoid shiver runs down the spine of the track’s tremulous guitars, and everything about the song’s construction seems to be about concentrating the tension. And yes, this is tense.

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Mayflower Madame – Premonition EP

Adrena Adrena – Cybals / Toys

Posted: 2 May 2018 in Singles and EPs
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20th April 2018

James Wells

Adrena Adrena is an experimental audiovisual duo consisting of. E-da Kazuhisa (Boredoms, Seefeel) and artist Daisy Dickinson, and they’re pitched as being for fans of Can, Faust, Wire, etc. According to their press release, ‘the duo cut a raw blend of drums, noise and organic visual work, featuring in their performances an eight-foot white sphere that hangs above Kazuhisa’s drum kit and which Dickinson maps videos on to.’

Naturally, the organic visual work doesn’t translate to the medium of recoded sound, but nevertheless, it’s a multisensory experience, which resonates on various levels, at least half of which are subliminal.

‘Cybals’ is a mess of murky noise, thumping, tone-shifting drums muffled by bass and mid-range and drowning in a sea of reverb. It’s industrial in strength, with echoes of Revolting Cocks’ ‘Beers, Steers and Queers’ bouncing angrily around an electro space. There’s some pretty aggressive modulation, not to mention savage treble going on.

‘Toys’ may have playful connotations in its title, and it’s a fair bit less abrasive than its counterpart, with a twittering see-saw motif dragging and quavering over a simple, repetitive beat. But the fills are dubby, clattering and laced with heavy echo, and thick ripples of bass cut through like squelchy, booming foghorn pulses. The effect is one of a certain resonant dissonance, a sonic collision.

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Cannibal Animal – A Decline in Morality

Posted: 29 April 2018 in Singles and EPs
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Warren Records – 16th March 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

We think we may have mentioned Cannibal Animal once or twice before here on Aural Aggro – and there’s a very good reason for this: the Hull band make a dark, dense, swampy post-punk racket that owes as much to The Cramps and The Volcanoes as anyone else, on account of the serpentine lead guitars and reverb-soaked surf sound. With a thunderous rhythm section, it’s more like surfing a tsunami than coasting on the crest of a wave, mind. Throw in a dollop of early 90s underground noise – think in particular early Therapy? And you’ve got the measure. Their latest offering, ‘A Decline in Morality’ is a belter. As if lead single ‘Ellipsisism’ didn’t already demonstrate it already.

The band explain that ‘Lyrically these songs are about the moral compass of specific fictional characters’, with ‘Lack of Skin’ turning focus to ‘the candle burning nymphomaniac’. If ever a track distilled a potent blend of tripwire tension and a loose, near-tribal groove, it’s this one, with bone-rattling beats and a fat, fuzzy bass driving a fury of guitar bathed in cavernous echo. The effect is one of terrifying entrapment, but edged with a twist of sleaze.

The desperation and anxiety that drives the band’s work has hit critical mass here: it’s less about sonic density and thick, overdriven guitars, and more about scorching, wild-eyed mania. And I can’t recall the last time I heard a conventional fade-out…

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Cannibal Animal -Decline

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