Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

Bell Barrow – Saltire

Posted: 7 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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16th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

2026 is certainly off to an interesting start: did anyone seriously have what looks quite feasibly the first move in World War 3 on their bingo card? Consequently, the level of noise has simply exploded. There is shock. There isn’t much awe, but there is bewilderment, there is panic, and infinite speculation. And infinite noise.

Thankfully, 2026 is already offering up some interesting noise on the musical front, and for my money, the most effective way to tune out all that other noise is by turning off the TV, putting the phone down – or better still, switch it off and leave it in another room – light some candles, pour a drink and listen – properly listen, and engage, with some new music.

Saltire may not be the most soothing soundtrack to push aside all of the external turbulence, an obvious balm to calm a psychological spasm. In fact, it’s pretty grim at times, a big blanket of darkness which drifts and envelops, riven with top-end trilling whistles and a host of wide-ranging elements, both sonic and stylistic, which clash hard. But relaxation isn’t necessarily what the Dr ordered. Sometimes, the best remedy is one that shocks the system to the extent that all the other shit is displaced.

The band say of the album, “Through a time-based, panoramic view of past, present and future, the album’s composition is a dissection of familial cyclical patterns of violence, abuse and addiction, and whether supernatural events or one’s own choices impact fate. Each track is a voice spanning multiple dimensions and time frames of reference. Is our eventual destruction predetermined and independent of will? Or can we control the course of events through determined pleas at salvation?”

Right now, it doesn’t seem that many of us have any control over anything, particularly global affairs, and while some aspects of history do seem to be repeating themselves, this moment in time feels like a huge rupture in the flow of modern history. And all we can do is watch as things unravel, and at pace. It’s terrifying, and anyone who isn’t scared is deluded or simply burying their heads in the sand. But taking time out to bury my head in the sand for the duration of an album is necessary. And clocking in at over seventy minutes, this is a decent slab of time to pursue this objective.

From the outset, Bell Barrow’s Saltire brings some uncomfortable noise. ‘Death Lullabye’ is dark, droney, unsettling and uneasy. In contrast, the frenetic noise rock explosion of ‘Breath of an Acrobat’ sits in the field of the wild angular noise of, say, Daughters, while at the same time introducing a frenzied jazz element, and propelled by black metal drumming, but with the treble cranked to the max. ‘Cor Orans’, too, is a frantic blast of lo-fi gothy metal. This is tempestuous stuff, and with the treble up in the mix, the sound slices the top off your head, while at the same time slamming you in the gut repeatedly with a lump of wood.

Wide-ranging would be one way of describing this expansive exploration, which ranges from drone and ambient to New Age, from prog to post-metal.

The seven-minute ‘Beyond the Labyrinth’ is quintessential weird darkness, warping, droning, while the nine-minute behemoth that is ‘Sybian Interval’ builds dense, billowing clouds of dark noise, rumbling, swirling, heavy, oppressive, but rent through with screams of treble and whines like a dentist’s drill, which are counterbalanced by soft, vaporous watercolour sweeps. ‘We Reek of Utopia’ arrives in a muffled package of irony before the squalling assault of the title track applies scissors to the brain in a wild explosion of jazz-metal discord served with a heavy helping of ‘what the actual?’ And this is good. This is healthy. Music should challenge. Art should challenge. Saltire challenges on many levels: there are no songs to speak of, and the pieces veer wildly in stylistic terms. ‘A Carrion Call Rings Out’ plunges into heavy industrial noise, and it hurts.

They do threaten ‘an obvious tension and release feel to the style’, and they deliver on that, although the tension is significantly greater than the release, proportionally speaking. Saltire offers no pause for reflection, no sigh of relief, no time to simply sit back and reflect: it swings between atmospheric states most unexpectedly, most dramatically. It’s hard work, but at the same time elevatitive and revelatory.

By no means an easy album, Saltire offers angularity – and some significant reward.

AA

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Total Annihilation – Mountains of Madness

Posted: 1 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Testimony Records – 16th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Four albums in twenty years isn’t a particularly impressive work-rate, but I’m assuming that liker the majority of bands, the members of Total Annihilation have not only day jobs, but families and all of the stuff that adults tend to. The fact that they’ve managed to continue making music – and earned themselves both a fanbase and level of reputation – is no small feat, and is a testament to their commitment to making music. This seems to be where a lot of people lose their way in life, and end up feeling bitter and unfulfilled, accepting the process of succumbing to the drudgery of capitalist structures, and becoming increasingly resentful of the way that parenting and domesticity take over. These guys clearly have no shortage of rage, but it’s not over how their lives have turned out, and of course, they have an outlet – a substantial outlet driven by heavy guitars and pounding hell-for-leather percussion… a healthy outlet. It’s an observation I’ve made before that metal gigs are some of the friendliest, least threatening, environments I’ve experienced, and the more extreme the metal, the nicer the folks. There are always exceptions, as the 90s Norwegian black metal scene evidenced, but by and large… extreme metal channels those difficult emotions, the anger, the rage, the hatred.

Mountains of Madness promises ‘all the Swiss precision and trademark elements their following has come to expect of them but also with more of everything: more tempo and serious speed, more brutality, more power, more thrash, more death but also more harmonies, more melodies, and more musicality!’

I’m not entirely sure that what we want from a death metal album is ‘more harmonies, more melodies, and more musicality’: me, I want more grunt, more grind, more attack, more brutality. May be I just like punishment, maybe I just want music that bludgeons and batters, maybe I seek catharsis through sonic violence.

The blurbage also informs us ‘There are also more tentacles, more jaws, more razor-sharp teeth, more twisted mutation, and definitely more evil! Talking about tentacles, the album title points already towards the famous cosmic horror novella At the Mountains of Madness (1936) by American gothic author H. P. Lovecraft, who has been a constant source of inspiration for the metal scene in general and TOTAL ANNIHILATION in particular…

Yet for Total Annihilation all this horror is not just escapism for entertainment but it serves a meaningful purpose. The album is permeated by a deep moral disgust and burning anger towards all the evil and reckless destruction that humanity forces onto itself and all other forms of life on this planet and earth itself. Mountains of Madness is conceived as an echo of and a bold manifesto about the state of the world as well as an artistic sign of our time.’

And there it is: it’s hard to argue, if you have any sense if the current state of the world, that we’re fucked. The question at this point seems to be less ‘will humans become extinct?’ and more ‘will we become extinct through war or climate change?’

‘The Art of Torture’ brings the rage in frenzied blast of beats, riffery, and raw-throated vocals. there is, of course, the obligatory monster solo which occupies the majority of the second half of the song, but the title track brings an instant shift. Yes, it’s very much driven by dingy guitars and pulverising drumming, but it snarls into the abyss and is gnarly and heavy, and while there are some bursts of obligatory fretwankery which feel very much template-driven, it brings the weight – before ‘Chokehold’ grinds in hard, overloading volume and thick distortion paired with rapidfire double-pedal drumming and some wild harmonic guitar soloing.

Mountains of Madness hits hard. Across the eleven tracks, Total Annihilation bring riffs galore, and while there is melody in the lead guitar parts, it’s hardly tuneful in the conventional sense. The sound is solid, the bass and guitar both chunky, the drums blasting, and the pace and rabidity seem to increase as the album progresses.

AA

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In A House Of Heartbeats – Divination of Dreams

Posted: 30 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Ripcord Records – 16th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

What do we know about In A House Of Heartbeats? Personally, nothing, and I can’t be alone in that, so will draw on the band’s bio to provide some necessary insight by way of an introduction: ‘Emerging from the shadows of Essex’s underground scene, instrumental trio In A House Of Heartbeats have been quietly sculpting soundtracks for euphoric nightmares since 2022. Their music, steeped in atmosphere and cinematic tension, walks the line between dream and dread, an ever-shifting blend of post-rock, doom, goth, and shoegaze, filtered through inspirations that reach far beyond the musical world.

‘From arthouse cinema and silent film to folklore, myth, and the murky corners of the subconscious, the band construct deeply absorbing sonic “journeys” rather than conventional songs. It’s a style that encourages deep listening: passages unfold with deliberate patience, building from whispered ambience to tectonic weight, always leading the listener somewhere unexpected.’

They pack pretty much every musical aspect of their broad range into the album’s first track, the behemoth that is ‘In a Perpetual State of Wonder’. A hiss yields to a drone before a colossal riff and soaring lead guitar crash in on a surge of powerfully atmospheric post-metal portent… and that’s just the first minute and a half. Spindly gothy guitars weave spidery webs over rolling tribal beats before the next round of the riff. Towards the end, the pace picks up, and drags the listener headlong into a thrumming tremolo-driven blast that’s like a black metal My Bloody Valentine. I went for a seven-mile walk this morning, and it took me just over two hours but it was nowhere near as mentally and physically intense or exhausting as this eleven-minute blizzard of guitars.

Next up, ‘Cambion’, which first surfaced back in December 2024, is altogether more sedate, at least initially, with a chiming, almost folk-infused prog-flavoured intro creating a calmness before the inevitable storm which pounds in with a sustained post-rock crescendo before things get heavier… and heavier. The level of detail, the attention to texture and the frequent twists and turns make this feel like an entire album compressed into a single – albeit lengthy – track. Along the way, chunky bass rips and guitars chime and soar, and I find myself thinking I must be into the next track, but no.

The sample-laden post-rock drift of ‘Parasomniac’ (that would be someone who suffers from the effects of ‘a category of sleep disorders that involve abnormal movements, behaviours, emotions, perceptions, and dreams that occur while falling asleep, sleeping, between sleep stages, or during arousal from sleep’ (according to Wikipedia)) is reminiscent of Maybeshewill, and provides a welcome interlude between the epics before ‘Oneiromancy for Beginners’ lands with the gutsy punch of Andsoiwatchyoufromafar – surely one of the most remarkable and potent riff-driven acts to have emerged from the early noughties post-rock scene. This is a band bursting with ideas and bursting with energy.

The final two pieces, in combination, form a whole, as the Shakespeare-referencing titles suggest: ‘Drift into Sleep…’ bleeds into ‘…Perchance to Dream’, with its title casting a reference to Hamlet, to forge a twelve-minute opus that begins with a ticking clock and a sample from a guided meditation recording which is almost a carbon copy of a recording used for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). It’s likely uncomfortable for anyone who’s been through it, and I find myself squirming through the juxtaposition of soothing, flat vocals and churning noise, but suspect that’s part of the objective here. It’s disorientating and challenging, the second part conjuring atmospheric distortion and endless space with ambient tones and bold sonic washes, before slowly strolling towards an immaculate conclusion, defined by a smooth, swirling climax.

Divination of Dreams certainly delivers on the promise of ‘an ever-shifting blend of post-rock, doom, goth, and shoegaze, filtered through inspirations that reach far beyond the musical world’, and it would be impossible to deny that the end result more than achieves the ambition. Everything about Divination of Dreams is immense, from its ambition to its overwhelming listening experience. It simply covers so much ground – and does so with a rare confidence and finesse. It’s a rare beast, and a spectacular work.

AA

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Photo: Charlie Hill

Richard Francis – Combinations 4

Posted: 26 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 19th December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

2025 has been something of a year of noise for me – on the reviewing front, for sure, but perhaps more so on the creative front. Noise doesn’t have to be confrontational or antagonistic. Moreover, it can most certainly be a release. Richard Francis’ latest offering, Combinations 4, is a work which offers up some substantial noise, with a broad exploration of frequencies which are immersive rather than attacking. Churning, droning, unsettling, it spans the range of what noise can do without venturing into the domains of the harsh. Nevertheless, this makes for a pretty challenging work.

Francis’ summary of his working practice and of this album is worth digesting, for context, as he writes clearly and factually:

‘Since 2010 all of the recordings I make and release are improvised live takes, recorded down to a stereo digital recorder with very little editing other than EQ, trimmed beginnings and ends, and the occasional layering of two tracks together… I arrived here through spending many years prior trying to build an electrical system (which I now call the ‘fugue system’) that would do what I did in composition/studio work but in a live setting: combining together dozens of sounds with open feedback and generative channels, and discrete control for each. Then when I finished building that system using digital and analogue tools, I preferred what I heard and recorded ‘on the fly’ more than what I was doing in composition, so that system is now my instrument in a way.’ Precisely what this system is and how it works is unexplained, and we probably don’t need to know: process and tech can very easily become tedious and adds little, when ultimately, it’s about output.

As the title suggests, this is the fourth in his Combinations series, and here, Francis suggests ‘there’s a bit more structure and layering to the works, if that makes sense’. It makes more sense in context, I assume, because on its own, Combinations 4 is a tour though difficult terrain, and any structures are at best vague.

‘Four A’ is a deluge of dirty noise, curtains of white noise rain cascade, and ‘Leave it all alone for months’ is a queasy mess of drones and groans, a morass of undulating dissonance. This piece is quiet but uncomfortable, the sound of strain, whining, churning unsettling. ‘Parehuia’ booms frequencies which simply hurt. In places, it gets grainy and granular, and the experience is simply uncomfortable. I feel my skin crawl. From here, we plunge into ‘My Fuel! I Love It!’ It’s six-and-a-half head-shredding minutes of sonic discomfort, dominated by rising howls and rings.

Assuming ‘Phase effect on wet road’ is a purely descriptive title based on the source material, it’s three minutes of the sound of heavy rain heavily treated while undulating phase hovers and hums, creating an oppressive atmosphere which bleeds into the slow ebb and flow of ‘The alphabet is a sampler’. The effect of Combinations 4 is cumulative, and while the final four of the album’s ten compositions tend to be comparatively shorter, they’re dense and difficult to process. By the arrival of the quivering, quavering oscillations of closer ‘Four J’, which become increasingly disjointed and discombobulating as the piece progresses, you’re feeling a shade disorientated, and more than vaguely overwhelmed.

For an album which appears, on the surface, to be a fairly innocuous work of experimentalism, with Combinations 4, Richard Francis has created something which delivers substantial psychological impact by stealth.

AA

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Zu – Ferrum Sidereum

Posted: 23 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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House Of Mythology – 9th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Zu just keep on defying genre and creating music that lands from a different angle every time, even after the best part of thirty years. While postmodernism – which emerged in the 1950s and became the defining mode of art and culture from the 1980s – fundamentally revelled in endless recycling, embracing the notion that anything original has already been done, and that the future of creativity lies in how creatively one may appropriate and hybridize the past, Zu have spent their career bucking that trend with relentless creative innovation.

After a six-year lull, Ferrum Sidereum is their second release of 2025, following the wildly eclectic Jazzisdead under the moniker of RuinsZu in April, a live document of a collaboration between Zu bassist Massimo Pupillo and saxophonist Luca T. Mai, with drummer Yoshida Tatsuya, founder of the Japanese band Ruins.

Ferrum Sidereum – Latin for ‘cosmic iron’ finds the core trio back in the studio, and drawing inspiration ‘from the mythological significance of meteoritic iron, found in artefacts like ancient Egyptian ritual objects, Tibenta ‘Phurpa’ blades, and the celestial sword of Archangel St Michael. This elemental force,’ they write, ‘imbues every moment of the album’s apocalyptic sound.’ On a purely personal level, I’m drawn immediately by the idea of an ‘apocalyptic sound’. We live in what feels like apocalyptic times, after all. I am surely not alone in feeling that since the arrival of the pandemic, we’re racing towards the end of days, and if anything, the exponential rise of AI only seems to be accelerating that race.

Zu are staunchly anti-AI when it comes to their own approach to art – a topic they touch on with single cut ‘A.I. Hive Mind’ – and explain, “We are very spiritually-oriented people,” says Massimo. “Machines and AI do not have spirituality. So they can mimic and they can assemble existing things, but they cannot create. That spirit is probably the most important thing that our music carries.”

Recent AI releases by the howlingly abysmal artificially-generated retro-rock act The Velvet Sundown and even more cringe-inducingly gash country wank of Breaking Rust may show how far the technology has come, but simultaneously reveals just how it’s absolutely no substitute for real, human-made art. This derivative, soulless wank is beyond derivative: that is to say, it’s precisely what you’d expect from melting down the entirety of a genre and regurgitating the lowest common denominator output. It also demonstrates precisely why Zu could never be recreated by any kind of digital modelling. They are completely off the wall in every direction all at once, and on Ferrum Sidereum, ‘The music combines the complexity of progressive rock, the grit of industrial music, the precision of metal, the spirit and energy of punk, and the freedom of jazz. The result is a sonic journey that is as cerebral as it is visceral, defying easy categorisation while remaining unmistakably Zu.’

‘Charagma’ makes for a forceful opener. It’s a full-on sonic blast, at first harsh noise, then pounding industrial riffery, which lunges into sprawling jazz-infused metal, then lurches back to the riffery but with an expansive, proggy twist. It’s a big seven minutes – which is different from a long seven minutes. It doesn’t drag, but what it does do it leave you with whiplash. ‘Golgotha’ whips out all the brass and woodwind at once, and this provides the backdrop to some highly-detailed math-rock which goes all-out crazed around the three-minute mark. And it turns out they’re just warming up.

There’s some hefty chug and churn going on here. There’s also a whole load of manic horns blasting away. Recent single ‘Kether’ is representative, but at the same time not, in that it’s a seven-and-a-half-minute beast of a piece that lurches and lumbers all over, but there’s no way anything can be truly representative of an album that covers so much ground, and is so wildly unpredictable. ‘Kether’ reflects the heavier end of the album… and also the more twisty, melodic side, too – which essentially makes my point. Any thirty second snippet of the album would present a different story. The aforementioned ‘A.I. Hive Mind’ is spasmodic, jazzy, mathy, frenetic, intense, six songs in one.

‘La Donna Vestita De Sole’, the first of the album’s megalithic cornerstones cocking in at nearly ten minutes stands, towering, in the centre. Initially it’s soothing, smoothing, restful, ambient, but of course built to tumultuous towers of monumentally powerful prog, and they lay down some seriously solid grooves. ‘Hymn of the Pearl’ – clocking in at just over nine and half minutes again starts out easy in a haze of slow-building bass and electronic, a bass groove building until it eventually erupts – and when it does, it does, massively.

Arriving at the title track and finale, amidst a whirlwind of noise and all kinds of otherness, there’s something of a post-punk vibe in the build-up… not to mention bass to make you shit your pants. But then it’s got desert rock vibes and elements of Krautrock as it pushes forward, and they still find time for an explosive post-rock crescendo around a third of the way in. The finale is devastating. It’s too much to keep up with – and at the same time, it’s perfection. Zu do zu, as they say. Alright, not, but close enough. The bottom line is that this is a uniquely crafted work, to which AI could never get close. Not remotely.

Ferrum Sidereum is simply huge in every respect: scope, scale, ambition, sound, production. It’s heavy, it’s inspired, and it’s an album to lose yourself in.

AA

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Ulver – Neverland

Posted: 22 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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House of Mythology – 31st December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Ulver’s fourteenth studio album is described as ‘a journey into undiscovered lands’, and promises ‘more traditional song and production structures’; than the preceding three, as well as marking ‘a new chapter in the revered Oslo band’s history’. By this, they explain that “With Neverland we embraced a more ‘punk’ spirit – more dreaming, less discipline – freer, quite simply”. For a band which started out black metal before shifting towards electronica and ambience, this does seem like another substantial shift, at least on paper. This is encouraging, as some recent releases – not least of all The Assassination of Julius Caesar had seen them push quite some way into pop territory, and not in a good way.

It begins promisingly enough: ‘Fear in a Handful of Dust’ presents a collage of tweets and chirrups, jungle birdsong and a suitably bombastic spoken word narrative, which sounds quintessentially sampled, reverberate across atmospheric ripples and washes of synth, paving the way for some melancholic neoclassical piano work on ‘Elephant Trunk’. Glitches and static haze cut across this as atmospheric electronics build, and before long we find ourselves in expansive electronic post-rock territory, the likes of which sits neatly alongside the likes of Nordic Giants.

The transitions are subtle, and the changes creep up on the listener in such a way that one finds oneself nearly halfway through the fourth track, ‘People of the Hills’ to the nagging awareness that this is some quite upbeat trancey dance tune which doesn’t feel in any sense out of place. I mean, it’s not fucking Pendulum and there’s a meaty bass groove and some rather pleasant progressive stylings going on, but it’s a bit pop, a bit commercial-sounding, too.

‘They’re Coming The Birds’ blurs the lines still further: the samples are warped, the synths cinematic, the bass in places a deep, dark post-punk groove, but the beats veer from gothy electronica to more club-orientated fodder. In contrast, there are some magnificent widescreen ambient moments to be found, as on ‘Horses of the Plough’ and ‘the evocative and stirring ‘Quivers in the Marrow’, while ‘Pandora’s Box’ is an exploratory noise work which delves deep into dissonance amidst a swirling quasar of sound where Krautrock meets late 70s early 80s industrial. But then ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ returned to some pretty naff ‘90s new age dance tropes and it feel corny and cheap. There are dudes all over tinkering away with expensive gadgetry in the back bedroom and trying it out to twenty people at EMOM (Electronic Music Open Mic) nights up and down the UK and around the globe creating stuff so, so much better than this. And perhaps this is the frustration with not only Neverland, but Ulver’s work more broadly: some of their compositions are great, absolutely outstanding, rich in atmosphere, big on texture, the concept and execution so perfectly aligned, but a similar number are just lazy and frankly shite.

Neverland is definitely an improvement on The Assassination of Julius Caesar and the Sic Transit Gloria Mundi EP – which deterred me from bothering with the next few releases – but it’s still very hit and miss, with the emphasis on very here. Experimental and varied are one thing, but this is simply wildly uneven and unfocused.

In their summation, they proffer questions as to what Neverland actually is: ‘Pop music from in-between worlds? A sonic hallucination? Or better: a collage of dreams. It’s up to you’. It’s generous of them to leave it open like that. A collage of my dreams would be a lot scarier and more intense, and would consist of buildings collapsing, ruins, cars crashing, being late, being lost, being chased. Neverland certainly isn’t that. It seems that in pushing the question to us, they’re trying to avoid the question of their own identity crisis. Come on then, Ulver, what is it? What is it supposed to be, and is what you’ve given us what you intended when you set out? Is it?And is it punk? Really? Really?

AA

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David Shea – Meditatons

Posted: 21 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room 40 – 7th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Today, December 21st, is the Winter solstice: in terms of daylight hours, the shortest day of the year, and the longest night. As I write, we’ve had cloud, fog, mist, and rain most days here in York for weeks, so it’s essentially felt like one perpetual night for nigh on an eternity. I’m certainly no summer sun lover (I have fair skin and suffer with hayfever), but do struggle with this time of year – always did, but personal circumstances have accentuated the struggle. Watching Shutter Island with my fourteen-year-old daughter earlier (it seemed like a good idea to avoid conventional ‘family’ ‘Christmas’ fare), she commented on how the ‘man with dead wife is troubled and has wild dreams’ trope is perhaps disproportionately common in movies. She’s absolutely right, of course, but the observation hit hard and brought me back to the reason we were avoiding the schmaltzy family Christmas shit – and reminded me that there’s simply no escape from my personal narrative, that my wife was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer just before Christmas in 2021, and died just after Christmas in 2023. These facts not only make it hard for Christmas to be happy, but dealing with all of the stuff like Christmas shopping, present-wrapping, arranging seeing relatives, etc. – stuff that was primarily her domain – on my own is a significant source of stress.

And this is why, on seeing this release had arrived for my attention, it made sense to do myself a favour, for a change. Music is, after all, one of the best therapies. While I’ve little to no interest in new age cack or pseudomystical bullshit, and have generally failed at any attempts to mediate with the limited assistance I’ve had, the idea of a method of achieving mental calm still holds significant appeal.

As David Shea explains in the album’s accompanying notes, ‘Meditations is a set of 8 works based on the experience of meditation practice. Music made for both meditation and reflecting the realities of a life of daily practice. The breath, the quietness, the listening, the distracted dissonant and consonant thoughts that pass through. The texts throughout the pieces are fragments of the Buddhist Heart Sutra, the shortest and created from a mixture of traditions and sources, produced long after Buddha’s death and meant to be chanted or sung as a ritual and personal meditation. The experience of meditation, so often covered in mythology and one dimensionally peaceful symbols, is in fact a complex set of traditions in all cultures and has roots in indigenous cultures world wide and involves the limitations of thought as well as the quietness of the mind as a source of understanding and health.

‘The Buddhist teachings that are in focus in this album are in a sense a sequel to the record Rituals of 2015 in that they are adapted as Meditations that cross and combine traditions with any attempt consciously to synthesize them into a new whole. A conversation between traders, in the form here of musicians, languages, sound sources and the peace and struggle of maintaining a real meditational practice and living in the chaos and violence of society as well as accepting the world as it is, with all of the internal conflicts and release and rise of tension.’

Each of the eight pieces is around eight minutes in duration, and are centred around Shea’s piano, with a host of musicians bringing a range of electronic and acoustic additions, ranging from singing bowls and vibraphone, to samples and midi guitar. The resultant work is gentle, subtle, and sedately-paced. There are tweeting birds flitting around notes which hang, suspended, resonating for substantial durations. Hums and drones. Hints of melodies. Any structures are not based around motifs or repetition, but a flow. That flow is not a linear trajectory, a passage from A to B, but a flow which weaves into the places where the calm is residing.

As much as I’ve always struggled to work with visualisation in guided meditation, Meditations somehow conjures mental images through its abstraction – perhaps because of its abstraction. Being told to visualise a stream, a woodland, a beach, is too much direction, too much ‘relaxation to order’, the meditative equivalent of mandatory of fun in a corporate environment. But with open-ended, non-specific assistance, the channels seem to open more freely. Just as I find ideas and words come to me more readily while out walking, when my blood is oxygenated and my lymphatic flowing comfortably, music which invited free interpretation and successfully evokes images without directed prompts unlocks doors and presents access to unknown passageways.

Piano and acoustic guitar ripple and trickle and ebb and eddy. On ‘Sitting in a Painted Cave’, which ventures more overtly into experimental and Eastern-influenced territory, picked acoustic guitar weaves a textured tapestry. The spoken word interjection is something I find proves to be a distraction in terms of the flow, but I feel this is more because my ideal tranquil space contains no evidence of human existence whatsoever. As a human being myself, I do accept this contradiction, just as I accept the irony of my rage at the presence of others when out for a walk seeking solitude. The track’s second half is rather more dissonant and difficult, with muffled voices adding an unsettling edge. It’s rather less relaxing.

The harmonics, drone, and piano-led ambience of ‘Stillness’ is rather more tolerable, but still wailing drones and tapers quaver before the rippling piano rises from the dissonance of amid-range feedback.

I might have expected ‘The Morning I Awoke’ to be more uplifting, and more… hippy, but it’s largely piano and calming acoustic strums and brooding strings. ‘Tye Heart Sutra’ more than compensate, and offers a spiritual trip and then some. But how to differentiate between business as a need to maintain production? It’s felt like It’s felt like the longest night of the year for about 2 months now.

‘The Heart Sutra’ arrives unexpectedly, before ‘Svaha’ arrives boldly but swiftly tapers into a droning serenity. The sound is dense, a resonant ‘om’, and it leads the listener – at last – to slow, deep breaths, as an undulating vocal –a folky, almost shanty-like lilting quaver- comes to the fore.

Despite its intentions – as specified by the title – Meditations is not quite the sonic still water is first implies. There are dark currents, difficult swells amidst the soothing flows. But for that, it feels more honest, more real.

AA

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Vandampire – Hope Scars

Posted: 20 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Ripcord Records – 31st October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Every year this happens. My social media and every website, every mag, every paper is publishing its end of years round-ups. There’s the annual circular at work sent around a few friends for best / worst gigs of the year, most-listened to albums… and here I am, on 19th December, with at least one more gig to attend – which could as easily be a contender for the best, or the worst, or most surprising gig, or whatever – sifting through my inbox and discovering albums released in October still. Albums that might blow me away, at that.

How on earth did I miss an album pitched as ‘For fans of: Old Man Gloom, Cult of Luna, Kowloon Walled City, Big Business, Neurosis, Russian Circles, Torche, Pelican, Isis, Hey Colossus’? I mean, this is an instant grab! This is emblematic of a fairly modern issue, in that there is too much music. It’s not a complaint. But it is a fact that even the most devoted fan of even the most niche genre won’t have the vaguest hope of keeping up with all of the year’s releases in that field. It’s a double-edged sword: listeners are spoiled for choice, and it’s a boon time. There is always something new, and likely of an extremely high standard, whatever you’re after. If you’re a band, how do you get heard, when there are more albums released each week now than there was in the whole of 1988 or whenever? Being good, even being fucking awesome isn’t going to cut it. And hiring a PR – even a good one – doesn’t mean your release won’t languish in reviewers’ inboxes for a nearly three months – especially when reviewers are likely on the lookout for covering acts that will bring their blog hits: in other words, acts that already have some traction, moderate coverage… and so on.

Holy fuck. This… this is what some may call ‘the shit’. And it’s heavy. At this juncture, it’s perhaps unpacking the concept of ‘heavy’: the general perception of ‘heavy’ music seems to focus on distortion, overdrive, sounds associated broadly with metal. But weight and distortion are not necessarily synonymous.

Vandampire is a post-metal band from South West England who have been going since 2018, and they’ve very much learned the power of dynamic, and the strength of detail. They do hard-hitting riffs, but show a clear appreciation of the impact not only of clean, but of clang. Cited influences Neurosis and Kowloon Walled City are prime exponents of creating crushing weight and brutal, bludgeoning force with minimal distortion, and Vandampire have very much embraced their stylistic approach.

The title track is exemplary. It’s low-tempo, hard-crushing, doom-weight, and starts out menacing but relatively quiet, bar the thunderous percussion… and then it hits. Hard. It’s not outright metal, but it hits like a slow punch to the gut as the cacophony rages. And it’s LOUD and it’s raging, but it’s not all that big on distortion. I find the clean or moderately overdriven guitar sound in a heavy context hits hard in many respects, and the arrival of ‘Ultralow’ is nausea-inducing. This is loud and heavy on every level, with chugging guitar and bass that grinds slow and dingy it’s almost enough to make you shit your pants. But in its finale, it offers near-transcendence, a magnificent and majestic soaring climax that is nothing short of skyward. ‘Ultralow’ hits as a bludgeoning blast of fury, and the sinewy guitars, grinding bass and blankly nihilistic vocal leans heavily on the style and sound of Kowloon Walled City. I should be annoyed by this level of stylistic appropriation, but then they lunge into a low, grinding riff and… it’s clear they’ve got something as the song disappears intro a squall of feedback. ‘A Promise Main’ rages equally hard, blending elements of post-rock and post-metal, with soaring guitars and an obliterative rhythm section, not to mention some gut-churning chug and howling vocals to forge a monster cut that, in places, invites positive comparisons to Amenra.

When they do pair it back as on ‘In Ascension’, the vibes border on expansive ambience, with some rich textures and rippling melodic elements which contrast with the majority of the album. ‘I Will Miss Everything I Forgot’ is an achingly evocative acoustic-led track which sounds like nothing else on the album and demonstrates their range extends far beyond anguish and rage.

It’s clear that they’ve made optimal use of the recently-added second guitarist here. Hope Scars is richly textured, and there’s some magical musical interplay on display here. They bring all of this together on the colossal twelve-minute closer, ‘Let Ruin End Here’, a piece which is nothing short of devastating in impact, while at the same time offering intimations of a spiritual journey. And it is ALL the riff. It’s nothing short of monumental.

I don’t do end-of-year lists for numerous reasons, and if I did, I’d have missed this. This would have likely been a strong top twenty contender if I was going to make a list though: and since I’ve posted over three hundred reviews this year, that speaks of its quality. Yeah: this is one killer album, alright.

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COH & Wladimir Schall – Covers

Posted: 18 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Hallow Ground – 21st December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Ivan Pavlov has been releasing music as COH since circa 1997, and in the last twenty-eight years has amassed an immense catalogue which includes some thirty-six albums, often on respected experimental / avant-garde labels like Editions Mego and Raster-Noton. This body of work features a fair number of collaborations. This is his first with ‘the mysterious’ Wladimir Schall, who is no stranger to performing radically overhauled cover versions, not least of all his 2020 release on an endlessly looping cassette with his take on Satie’s Vexations. Suffice it to say, then, that none of the seven pieces on here could be described as ‘straight’ covers. Then again, given the nature of the selected material, how would one go about performing a ‘straight’ cover, and what would be the point, precisely?

As the accompanying notes explain, ‘the two multi-media artists are not content with the mere reinterpretation of their source material, but strive to reimagine it. According to them, the seven pieces on Covers were conceived as “a series of manoeuvres with an ambition to expose the machinery of Music in detail and with utter honesty, without making up for the faults of its traditional instruments or of the compositions themselves.”’

Perhaps the best known and most easily recognisable of the compositions is ‘Merry Christmas Mr Erik’, which opens the album by reworking Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence’ as a sparse, almost jazzy work where it’s acoustic guitar which leads before the arrival of piano, which remains at a respectful distance. Not long after, we’re transported into a sparse, foggy trip of piano-led ambience. Perhaps one of the most audacious ‘covers’ is Soii Blanc’, an original COH composition which appeared on IIRON in 2011 – the album which was, in fact, my introduction to the world of COH. This version transforms the sparse electronic piece where experimental synth music meets early industrial grind into a soft piano work that’s as light as a feather but also mysteriously atmospheric through its subtle dissonances which grow with ringing, buzzing tones which gradually disrupt the delicate ripples with digital discord, creating the effect of some form of mechanical breakdown. Then again, ‘Snowflakes’ sees the pair ‘cover’ a ‘non-existent’ original’. It’s evocative: close your eyes and you may well visualise snowfall in your mind’s eye – but then glitches and scrapes cut through the reverie. In the main, it’s subtle, but enough to be disconcerting.

While there’s no clear or specific arc to the album, there is a sense that as it progresses, digital decay and interference gradually erode the graceful atmospheres conjured by piano and acoustic instruments alone – and by the arrival of the final piece, the brief bookend that is ‘Starost ne Radost’ – or ‘Старость не радость’ (joy and sadness), the juxtaposition of scratchy in the vintage sense and scratchy in the ersatz, manipulated digital sense comes to share a meeting and sensation.

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Falling You – Metanoia

Posted: 17 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Projekt Records – 1st December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Having recently written on the retro qualities of Lowsunday’s latest release, the latest hot landing in my inbox is from another act which is preoccupied with a previous time – and who can blame them? I am painfully aware that old bastards like me constantly bemoan the shitness of the now while reminiscing about the golden era of our youth, and it’s no different from boomers still banging on about The Beatles and the music of the 60s and 70s as if time stopped when they hit thirty or whatever. There is a lot – a LOT – of exciting new music coming out right now, and much of it is pushing boundaries in unexpected directions. I for one will never cease to excited by this. But there is a significant amount of music emerging that draws its primary influences from the eighties and nineties, created by artists who simply cannot be drawn by nostalgia. Falling You are a perfect example.

Metanoia is pitched as being for ‘fans of 1980s 4AD dreampop (This Mortal Coil, Dead Can Dance), ‘90s shoegaze (Slowdive, Lush), or the darkwave / ethereal / ambient-electronic releases of the Projekt label (Love Spirals Downwards, Android Lust). It’s quite a span, but the fact is that this is a release with its inspirational roots well in the past. It pains me to be reminded that 1995 is thirty years ago when it feels like maybe a decade. The cover art of previous releases very much state shoegaze / dreampop, and while this album accompanied by altogether moodier artwork, which may in part serve to reflect the album’s title, it’s nevertheless hazy and evocative at the same time. ‘Hazy and evocative’ would be a fair summary of the album itself, too, and the dreamy / shoegaze elements are countered by some really quite unsettling spells of rather murkier ambience.

It starts strong with the bold swell of steel-stung acoustic guitar and a strong vocal – I’m not talking about a Florene Welch lung-busting bellow, but a controlled and balanced performance that really carries some resonance, and it’s mastered clear and loud… and then things swerve into a more electronic, almost dancy territory. Immediately it’s clear that this is going to be less an album and more a journey, and ‘Demiurge (Momento Eorum)’ immediately affirms this with its spiritual incantations and sonorous, droning rumblings.

‘Alcyone’ is the first of the album’s ten-minute epics, and it uses the time well: that is to say, with shuffling drums, spacious synths and layers of lilting vocals, it’s very much distilled from the essence of The Cocteau Twins, and slowly unfurls with an ethereal grace. A delicately-spun pop song at heart, the extended end section tapers down to a softly droning organ.

While the atmosphere is very much downbeat, downtempo, understated, one thing which is notable is the album’s range: ‘Ari’s Song’ is built around a soft-edged cyclical bass motif, around which piano and synths swirl, mist-like, the drums way in the distance, and even as a disturbance grows toward the end, it’s so far-away sounding, and the song itself, beyond that ever-present bass, barely there, and the same is true of the dank, dark ambient echoes of ‘Inside the Whale’. If ‘Ariadne’ is another shimmering indie tune hazed with fractal electronic ripples, the second ten-minute epic, ‘They Give Me Flowers’ provides a suitable companion piece to ‘Alcyone’, swerving from a brooding country and folk-tinged song with hints of All About Eve, and the album’s final track, ‘Philomena’ effectively completes the triptych, pulsing along gently and dreamily before slowly tapering away to nothingness. It’s a fitting conclusion to an album which at times is so vaporous and vague, it’s barely there – which is precisely the design. But in between the hazy drifts and particle-like waftings, there are some beautifully atmospheric and utterly captivating songs with strong leanings towards the dreamy pop side of indie. In terms of achieving an artistic objective, Falling You have absolutely nailed it with Metanoia.

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Falling You - Metanoia - cover

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