Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

Helen Svoboda – Headwater

Posted: 17 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 26th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s rare that an album sits so far beyond the realms of any genre that it’s difficult to know where to start in discussing it. Helen Svoboda’s Headwater is one such rare album.

The pitch describes Headwater as ‘a stream of fragmentation, individuality and wholeness, shaped by disparate and complementary aspects of Helen Svoboda’s solo practice. Sixteen threads or ‘earworms’ run throughout the record to form an abstracted picture of self, rooted in a devolved songform. It can be experienced as a tapestry that blurs the edges of identity; strange, beautiful, evaporative, and fluid, like memory itself’.

Lately I’ve been quite amazed by how little people I know can actually remember from times past. I don’t mean the fact that friends from school can’t remember people from our year we weren’t eve n friends with (although I do), but just events and things in general. I find myself haunted by memories stretching as far back to when I was just three, but most people I know can barely remember what they did last week, or what they had for dinner. Seeing my mother slide rapidly into a haze of dementia forgetfulness in recent months, I’ve spent a lot of time lately reflecting on memory on many levels. I’ve long considered it analogous to a vast ROM drive, but have wondered about the means of access to the stored files. And as much as these contemplations have led to some dark places, I’ve become more accepting of different capacities for recollection, while still feeling a degree of fear for the future.

The ensemble she’s has assembled certainly makes for an unusual combination, consisting as it does of Helen Svoboda (double bass, voice, composition) with close collaborators Jacques Emery (double bass), Finnish vocalist Selma Savolainen (voice), and Tilman Robinson (electronics, production). Double bass is rare. Two double basses – in a quartet – is unheard of, and makes for some incredibly unconventional instrumental interplay across the sixteen compositions.

Many of those compositions are brief – under two minutes in duration – but convey so much.

‘Veins’, released in advance of the album and featuring vocals from Selma Savolainen is sparse, ethereal, and is representative – to some extent, although the range of the compositions is such that no one piece could ever truly summarise its contents.

The album’s first song, ‘If’, is a deeply atmospheric amalgamation of stylistic elements. In many respects, it’s predominantly a folk song, and one built on foundations of curving drones and rousing vocals. It’s stirringly evocative, and calls to mind in some ways the earthy feel of Wardruna, only without the tribal percussion or sense of the cinematic. This feels more inwardly-focused and reflective, but is certainly no less powerful.

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‘Child’ begins almost acapella save for a sparse, low-key drone, but builds to a wailing crescendo, and Svoboda’s voice is nothing short of captivating, conveying so much more than the words alone. In contrast, the instrumental ‘Blur’ is a sawing strain of dissonance as a cacophony of strings scrape and scratch discordantly to create a nerve-jangling tension. It may only be two minutes in duration, but it’s ten minutes in intensity.

There’s spacey experimentalism and loose jazz leanings on ‘Void of Space’, and ‘Evening Hepuli’ brings high drama and breathy, operatic hysteria over stop/start strings which ring and reverberate. The final piece, ‘Hepuli Earworm’ is commanding, in places a wild jazz frenzy, occasionally inviting comparisons to The Necks, in others conjuring expansive soundscapes and moments with real emotional edge.

Headwater is not a straightforward album: it’s quirky and unconventional, and not always immediately accessible. But it’s inventive, imaginative, truly unique in composition and delivery, and, in parts, incredibly powerful.

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Photo: Celeste de Clario

Sinister Shadows – Sinister Shadows

Posted: 16 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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27th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The two single cuts from this eponymous debut couldn’t have been much more different, with ‘No one home but me’ taking the form of an epic, fuzzed out stomper that straddled authentic post-punk and second- or third-wave goth, while ‘Just Begun’ ventured into more epic, emotive territory.

I was intrigued as to the extent to which they represented the album as a whole – while at the same time harbouring certain misgivings over the use of AI for the videos and graphics. It was immediately obvious that the lyrics on the lyric video for ‘No one home but me’ weren’t entirely accurate, and while visually striking, the vid for ‘Just Begun’ was a bit ‘off’, straying into the same territory as the comeback by SPK / SPKtR. I get the appeal, particularly for self-releasing artists with no budget who can’t afford to pay professionals to do artwork and make videos… The spirit of DIY was always to find a workaround, to make something crappy yourself and be proud of the often amateurish results, whether it was a record sleeve made with a pencil sketch and stencils or a video shot in the back alleys near your house. There’s the argument that no artists are losing out, since no artists would have been employed anyway, but as much as AI stuff looks slicker, at the same time, it’s also lacking in soul and in that respect looks no more pro than the self-made work that accepts individual limitations. And that’s before we consider the environmental impact.

It may sound like it, but I’m not judging Ryan Michalski here – he’s only doing what everyone else is doing, and musically, he’s doing a lot more than most, covering quite literally everything: voice, guitar, synth, bass, drum, programming. Apart from the intro and outro, which take the form of dark rumbling noise courtesy of Clint Listing, aka The Slumbering. And he does a decent job of it, too.

The pitch for Sinister Shadows is as a ‘Gothic Death Rocker meets Post Punk project .Think Bauhaus , The Mission, Sisters of Mercy meets Wire and Killing Joke’, and there’s plenty of all that in the mix – as well as something quite unique – and much of the appeal is in the homespun and raw nature of the recordings. The songs don’t so much end as simply cut off and slam into the next one – no fade-outs or full stops – and it’s kinda cool in its primitivism. Similarly, the sound and mixing is a bit more advanced than the four-track tape recoding of old, but not much, and again, this is integral to the sound. The guitars are gritty, the drums / drum machine crisp but often partially submerged bar the crack of the snare which cuts through the welter of thick distortion.

‘Kiss the Dead Gothic Girl’ is expansive, emotive, with the layers of synth often washed away by a tsunami of overdriven guitar. ‘Day go by’ very much showcases the same sound as ‘No one home but me’, Michalski’s baritone vocal bathed in reverb, low in the mix amidst a tumult of fuzz and a soaring lead line, as he intimates dark thoughts. ‘I’ll make you suffer / I’ll make you bleed…’ he croons menacingly.

The guitars dominate, and showcase a distinctive sound that suits the material well, and the album favours mid-pace brooding. As such, the variety comes not from variations in pace but mood. ‘Lost My Mind’ is sparse in its arrangement but dense in its sound, and it finds Michalski pouring anguish, sounding brittle and vulnerable amidst a deluge of distortion, through which cheap synths blip and bleep through on occasion. This is the prelude to ‘No one here but me’, a song that reminds me of how desperate I was for a few minutes with the house to myself during lockdown. Yes – I was waiting for no-one home but me. It also reminds me that you should be careful what you wish for. It’s a killer tune, six minutes of relentlessly grinding away at a maxed-out riff while Michalski growls amidst cavernous reverb about waiting like a disease. The album’s worthwhile just for this.

The last couple of ‘proper’ songs, ‘Waiting here alone’ and ‘Your Breath’ round the album off nicely: the former is particularly dark, dense and sludgy, and arguably the album’s most Killing Joke / late 90s goth moment, the latter brings a lighter sensation, before another abrupt cut, and we’re thrown into the dolorous doom of ‘Outro’.

Sinister Shadows is everything the singles promised – bold, dark, guitar-driven, textured, deep. Exciting. The videos and cover art do the album a disservice. Raw, immediate, driving, this is killer.

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Death-Static – Red Fire In The Open

Posted: 16 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Sound in Silence – 18th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Sound in Silence produce nice releases. Like the Loom label and early Gizeh releases, they disprove the notion that the CD format is impersonal, no more than mass-produced plastic. The latest offering from Death-Static, released as a run of 200 handmade, hand-stamped, and hand-numbered copies is exemplary. It’s more than just a CD. It’s art, and an artefact, and one worthy of the music it houses.

Death-Static is the solo project of Gareth S. Brown, who has no small catalogue of output to his credit, having previously released music as a member of the bands Hood, The Declining Winter and Memory Drawings, and solo under his real name and various aliases. We learn that Red Fire In The Open, his second full-length album, ‘is more drone-based than his last year’s debut Time Is Ignorance and consists of three tracks… conceived as a prelude, interlude and main piece, using bellows instruments, organs, cellos and field recordings’.

The prelude takes the form of the fourteen-minute ‘Blackhorse Infirmary’ and it starts out as a quavering analogue drone which stutters and stalls in between undulations. It’s the kind of warm tone that’s eerily close to the human voice. Organs and bellows are uncannily breath, and the polyphonic exhalation which defines this piece is uncanny and somewhat discomfiting. It swells like a chorus of voices humming, wordless, all around you, as trilling synth drones and elongated scrapes ripple, with feedback occasionally rising up through the slow, dense drift. The final minutes are a rustling, rupturing cacophony of churching chaos and discord. Although not entirely unpleasant, it is challenging, and feels like being assailed by a storm.

In context, the interlude, in the form of ‘The Last Days of Light’ is welcome. It’s a piano-led moment of reflection. Quiet, calm, with a hint of melancholy, it’s soothing, and extremely emotive. I feel a certain sadness. Not in having been manipulated to sadness, but because there is simply something about it. Life is sad. The world is sad.

The title track, ‘Red Fire In The Open’ is the main event – a composition which stretches beyond thirty-four minutes in an exercise in patience. It’s pitched as being ‘like a guided meditation, using bellows instruments, organs, cellos, and field recordings to move the listener from the grimy, urban trudge of a major metropolitan train station to a woodland dawn chorus – and at the same time towards a sense of possibility and hope.’ It very much marks a shift in tone, but at the same time expands on the gentle drone forms of the previous pieces.

Like cheese, or for some, bacon, birdsong always makes everything better. I used to march into town to get a bus to the office on the city’s outskirts on the opposite side from where I live under the power of the MP3. Since lockdown, I’ve sought silence and felt the need to keep my ears open, and to venture into nature as much as possible. This has been a huge life change in many ways. I actually appreciate the sound of the breeze, the ripples of air though the leaves of trees, now, not because I’ve turned into some massive hippy, but because I crave the sounds of life, and feel I need that connection. The nature on my doorstep has become far more meaningful to me than any David Attenborough documentary. Whales are cool, but so are bees and birds and green spaces closer to home. We live in the most horribly overstimulated of worlds. We’re far beyond the postmodern blizzard Lyotard and Jameson wrote of, in that we’re in a place where we’ve devolved, concentration spans have been diminished to mere seconds and most people use AI to do their thinking for them. We’re so fucked, in so many ways, and on so many levels. But Red Fire In The Open reminds us that there is an alternative, and that there is more. It reminds us that it’s still possible to step outside, and to open your eyes and open your ears, and open your lungs. Please, do, while you still can.

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Flocks – Lagoon

Posted: 13 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Karlrecords – 22nd May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Flocks is the duo consisting of drone specialist Werner Durand and percussionist Uli Hohmann, and their second album, Lagoon, we’re informed that ‘the duo further explores the aesthetics it has crafted on its selftitled debut (2023, on the now defunct ZEHRA imprint): DURAND and HOHMANN shape drone-y soundscapes based on their self-built wind- & stringed instruments, Persian percussion and subtle electronics, drawing additional inspiration from Krautrock (listen to the irresistible, hypnotique, ever-changing rhythmic pattern of the title track) as well as JON HASSELL’s “fourth world” aesthetics, placing the duo nicely between tradition and experiment!’

For those unfamiliar with the fourth world concept, it can be traced to the 1980 collaborative album Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics by Hassell and Brian Eno, with the former defining the fourth world as “a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques.” And it does very much describe the sounds on Lagoon, where electronic drones and quavering digital textures are melded with percussive forms of ancient origin. Indeed, Hohmann’s credits on the album include kanjira, riq, ghatam, Tibetan bells, Venetian shells, and bamboo tube zither. And the result is nothing short of hypnotic.

The three longform tracks share aquatic-themed titles, matched with gloopy tones and fluid forms. Side one contains two ten-minute pieces in the form of ‘Whirls’ and ‘Tidal’, while the twenty-minute title track fills the entirety of side two.

The length of the pieces means they each have time – and space – in which to fully explore the tones and textures of the instruments involved, and to create fully immersive soundscapes. There are breathy stutters amidst the wavering undulations, and sounds which evoke the sound of waves lapping the sides of a small boat. There are gentle ripples, ebbs and flows in these extensive sonic expanses, and it’s not difficult to let go and simply succumb to the drift.

The arrival of some quite smooth sax in the middle of ‘Tidal’ is something of a surprise and feels kind of incongruous at first, but in time it manages to nestle in nicely. ‘Lagoon’ features stronger, busier, percussion and denser, more claustrophobic drones, and is also the most overtly ‘jazz’ of the three compositions due to the more prominent sax work. Over its extended duration, it builds a solid groove, and seems to quicken in pace, although it may only be an increasing density and the tension of eternal repetition. Eleven minutes in, and you really begin to feel it: the relentless rhythm and eternally monotonous drone which underpin all of the additional layers have a cumulative effect. As horns and clients and an array of extraneous sounds from twittering to laser-like bleeps come and go, it becomes increasingly disorientating, and while the experience is by no means unpleasant, it does fully envelop the mind and body.

The combination of sci-fi sounds and weird electronica with urgent polyrhythmic percussion does, indeed, feel other-worldly – of this planet, and not, of the distant past and the equally-distant futures of imagination. And among it all, the listener finds themselves lost, adrift between the two, in time and space unknown.

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Ferg’s Imaginary Big Band – The New Atomic

Posted: 11 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Trash City Records – 26th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibnor

With over thirty members, there’s nothing imaginary about the bigness of the band led by Fergus Quill, and this, their third album, we’re told, ‘celebrates the full gamut of big band music from the big screen showbiz razzmatazz of yore to Charles Mingus, to John Zorn, to the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra’.

But first, a brief potted musical history of the big band, and the origin of this one, which was established as ‘a celebration of the neglected possibilities of the big band’. ‘Following World War II, big bands, with their large ensembles were considered commercially unviable for most, hence the transition to the smaller groups of the bebop era. They are still more scarce in our own times for the same, economic reasons. As such, an undertaking like this, led by primary composer Fergus Quill, is a true labour of love, of spiritual adventure and big fun, a joyful blast of collective noise’.

The New Atomic was recorded over three days, its forty-minute duration culled from some five hours of recordings – more of a box set than an album – and the result is quite remarkable.

‘J Surfing on the Sun’ kicks things off with a nine-minute journey that one might reasonably call quintessential film score stuff – think movie soundtracks from the 60s and 70s with big action. You could almost play this over the video of ‘Sabotage’ by The Beastie Boys – only it’s got swing, it’s got groove, and it’s got… not necessarily narrative, but changes in tempo and instrumentation which could readily correspond with different scenes and the telling of a story, culminating in a frenetic finale. It packs crazy horns and cadent keys and thrills and spills galore. Sure, it’s jazz, but it’s no ponderous chin-stroking shit – this is lively stuff to get down to.

If ‘Theme from “The New Atomic”’ goes avant-garde and disjointed in places, and space-age ambient in others, their cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Love Sick’ is tight, focused, and marks a complete contrast to the rest of the album – it’s overtly structured, and sedate in pace, but boasts some Pearl and Dean kind of blasts (that’s a reference that’ll only make sense to a certain demographic, but hey), and side two goes all out on the groove with ‘Do the Right Thing’, which again brings sturdy beats and a solid groove. And from hereon in, things only get more rambunctious and bold and expansive and wide-ranging, until we arrive at the final song, ‘ I Shall Not Be Moved’ an arrangement of the traditional song, which I’d always believed was ‘We’ rather than ‘I’. Essentially an acapella ensemble performance to begin, the coming together of voices articulating peaceful protest is intensely moving, and never more pertinent. It’s powerful in its simplicity and directness, and serves as a reminder that resistance is by no means futile: we need more of this, and a lot less lobbing of projectiles and burning of vehicles.

The New Atomic is every bit as explosive as the cover art suggests.

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AD Ozium – In the Style of Dead Sparrows

Posted: 10 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Saccharine Underground – 9th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

I like my shit weird and experimental, and so it is that AD Ozium’s In the Style of Dead Sparrows is both weird and experimental, and needless to say I like it – but with the caveat that listening to it is an experience akin to being dragged through an near-endless nightmare, and every time you think you’ve woken up, you discover that you’re simply in another level of this multi-faceted anxiety dream.

The pitch is that ‘In the Style of Dead Sparrows is the latest transmission from the outer edge of instrumental music – a fractured, hallucinatory convergence of freak folk textures and no wave dissonance that dissolves the boundary between sound and psyche. Created by Washington D.C.-based solo musician Jeremy Moore (Zabus, Zero Swann, Bell Barrow) under the name AD Ozium, the album operates at the intersection of freak folk, no wave, avant-garde drone and experimental instrumental music.’

But this barely scratches the lumpy, irregular, alien, fog-covered surface of this album. The first composition, ‘Lifespring’ is exemplary in its exploratory nature. It begins subtly, some desert rock twang in a drift of breeze and warping ambience. With tweets and yawns, it feels as if the tape is stretched in places, and there’s a crackle and hiss reminiscent of that old four-track tape noise and plunging synth rumbles. Discord builds as the sound swells, unsettlingly. It continues in this way for the first six minutes or so, until the nerve-jangling tension and suspense breaks into a brief but thunderous rupture.

The ten-minute ‘Tender Loving Seed’ is swampy, straggly, churny, a mangled mess of broken-sounding country guitar and fractured electronics, not so much a whistle of feedback as the sound of circuitry melting amidst a swell of distortion. It sounds like fucked-up flamenco, it sounds like dialling through radio stations and managing to tune into none of them, it sounds like a cerebral spasm. It’s a slow unwinding of discordant chaos.

I’ll take a stab that ‘Whore of Sound’ is perhaps a reference to ‘Whorle of Sound’ by Throbbing Gristle, which appeared on their First Annual Report, and was subsequently reprised in a radically altered but altogether more brutal form as Walls of Sound on DOA: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle. Certainly, the sonic parallels are apparent: this is seven minutes of gnarly noise which swells to head-shredding intensity with hints of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.

‘Faith is a Hole’ brings new layers of discomfort, the overloading low frequencies creating mic distortion and the most hellish vibrations, making for a long seven and a quarter minutes, before ‘Portents of the Terminal Mind’ ripples and reverberates a whirlpool of the wrongest confusion.

Confusion, contusion… ‘The Nazarene Distortion’ is gentle at first, but again, discord and chaos and blasting lasers reign… and all the while, there is a background rumble, a tape his that never stops. The background noise at times reminds me of Rudimentary Peni’s Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric – not because its similar in musical terms, but that endless, nagging background sound gnaws away at your ears and your brain. It’s not the most abrasive or attacking nine minutes of noise, but it’s a heavy slog of the most difficult atonality. It’s stomach-lurchingly messy. At times, you just want it all to stop.

This is challenging. It’s woozy, head-spinning. It simply sounds wrong. It’s not some Beefheart-style cacophony. It’s darker, the lo-fi leanings and atonality only amplifying the tension. Drones and buzzes, hums and fleeting phases are interspersed with annihilative blasts of noise, and the guitar notes simply echo out into the void.

In the Style of Dead Sparrows isn’t simply weird or experimental – it’s harsh and abrasive, and it will assail your intestines and hollow you out.

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Light Vortex – Aurora In Georgian Bay

Posted: 5 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Mortality Tables – 8th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

So much music, and only one pair of ears with which to listen to it… and similarly, one pair of hands to write about it. For years, I yearned – albeit half-jokingly – to clone myself, but now realise that doing so would likely only compound my problem, creating a situation where more availability would create more demand, and this would be very much a concession to the commodification of art – in all forms – whereby everything is considered merely ‘content’ and that a conveyor-belt churn of new content is the route to ‘engagement’. And this is absolutely fucking horrible. It’s dehumanising.

Shortly before I quit my dayjob as a complaints auditor for a multinational financial corporation earlier this year, we had been directed to use CoPilot to write our segments of the monthly report we produced to circulate amongst management. The directive was to get AI to write it, and then ‘sense check’ it against out audit results for the month. My colleagues were raring to go, and raced to embrace this: they didn’t enjoy writing up the monthly report on PowerPoint. I can’t say I loved it either, but I have degrees in English and had eight years’ experience in complaint auditing. The report was the one thing in the role where I had scope to not only flex my linguistic skills to pitch the tone of the report, but also to use my brain to analyse and comment on the otherwise fairly tick-box exercise of auditing. This is a circuitous route to my denouncing AI, and the reason why, when doubtless many ‘content creators’ would deploy AI to help crank out reviews at a far faster rate, I steadfastly refuse, and will always write my own reviews – albeit sometimes a bit rushed, a bit rambling, and with more typos than I’m anywhere near comfortable.

Reading the loner notes while listening to Aurora In Georgian Bay by Light Vortex reminds me precisely why this is.

The album’s title ‘was sourced from a 1931 painting by English-Canadian artist J.E.H. MacDonald (1873-1932)’, and we learn that ‘With thick and evocative brushstrokes, MacDonald’s painting depicted a view across Georgian Bay from Pointe au Baril in Ontario. Framed by wavering trees, the focal point of MacDonald’s painting was the phenomenon of fleeting, undulating shapes in the sky above the bay, illuminating the scene with an alien green-blue-grey hue.’

The notes go on to explain, ‘We hear a parallel to this in the eleven pieces of electronic music collated by Chris Moore on this album. Each track feels like it is vividly capturing the same refracted light that caught MacDonald’s attention, where sounds, sequences and subtle rhythms are encouraged to collide inquisitively with each other… Moore’s nuanced and detailed approach to electronic composition mirrors MacDonald’s abstraction of the natural world.’

These are connections of the type which can only be made by the human mind – instinctively, intuitively, by subconscious associations, by joining dots which exist through experience and knowledge. In short, life, in all of its organic richness, strangeness, and diversity.

To my eye, MacDonald’s painting evokes a soundscape that’s loose in structure and borders on ambience. Not so for Chris Moore on the strength of these compositions, which straddle the realms of early synth works in the vein of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, and later – but still comparatively old-school in the timeline of music – electronic work from the 1970s, like Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and Oxygene by Jean Michelle Jarre. In short, it’s emblematic of the juncture where wibbling analogue ambience evolves beyond experimentation centred around what the instruments could do. But of course, my response to this is based entirely on my personal experience and musical exposure. My knowledge is incomplete, and spontaneous. But it is my own.

This is also very much true of Moore’s compositions here. The man and the machine. The man manipulating the machine – and not vice versa, or the man replaced by the machine.

I very much get why there was – and remains – a fear of technological evolution, and why, in the 80s and 90s, Thee Musician’s Union were so opposed to drum machines: they felt the machines would render drummers obsolete. They didn’t, just as home taping didn’t kill music. Streaming, on the other hand, just may. And similarly, previous technological advances have been about the artist using the technology to create something new – whereas AI sidelines the artist to plagiarise from the entire history of creative work. To create is human: it’s the very essence of the human condition – to convey something through the process of creation, for fellow humans to respond to on an emotional level, a human level.

Aurora In Georgian Bay is far from emotionally direct: instead, what it conveys, obliquely, is a partially abstract sonic response to a partially abstract painterly work: both are deeply immersed in tone and texture, albeit in widely disparate media. It’s through such creative interaction and intermedia dialogues that we come to make sense of the world around us, and to make sense of ourselves, our thought processes. You simply cannot substitute or recreate that.

For the most part, Aurora In Georgian Bay is gentle, supple, rippling, and ultimately soothing. But it’s rich in nuance and detail and range. And it tells you nothing specific: it’s all there for you to decipher, to interpret, to project, to experience on a unique creative level. The door is open…

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Oren Ambarchi & Will Guthrie – Cold Shoulder

Posted: 2 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Futura Resistenza – 9th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

23 minutes is, of course, about the most music that it’s possible to fit on one side of vinyl without risking loss of fidelity, but the number 23 is also the locus of the so-called ’23 enigma’ popularised by William S. Burroughs, which suggests that the number 23 appears with unusual frequency in various contexts and may have a larger, hidden significance. Of course it’s likely a coincidence, but the fact that Cold Shoulder contains two pieces, each just over 23 minutes in duration, and thus occupying a side of the LP is undeniably an instance of the recurrence of the number 23. Did they compose the works specifically to the end of fitting as much music onto each side, or were they edited to fit for the vinyl pressing? Perhaps you need to have been at the show to know – for Cold Shoulder is a document of a live performance, recorded live in Berlin in late 2024.

Ambarchi and Guthrie have been collaborating for more than twenty years now (maybe even 23, who knows?), and Cold Shoulder showcases an evolved level of intuition: as their bio summarises, ‘Their musical dialogue, which previously moved through abstraction and volatile electro-acoustic experimentation, now unfolds with relaxed confidence, melding drifting Leslie tones, shimmering percussion, and fluid pulses that emerge and dissolve’, adding ‘It’s a document of experience; music that feels freer, more direct, perhaps quietly fearless’.

Constructed using layers of drones which hover and hum, trilling tones which stretch out over expansive minutes with barely minimal shift, subtly melodic elements gradually reveal themselves. Ambarchi’s guitar doesn’t sound like a guitar for the most part, as he coaxes and teases the subtlest of ambient strains of feedback and quivering sustain from his instrument, and Guthrie’s percussion is restrained beyond restraint, consisting primarily or the most delicate cymbal work, and the most occasional muted punctuatory thuds. Around ten minutes into the first part – ‘This Cold Shoulder’, some misty forms emerge, a vague rhythm, and organ-like drones, an evolving atmosphere that swirls skywards, a melting together of space-rock and ambient jazz. Notes warp and time twists, as the percussion becomes more complex and more prominent, yet still subtle, restrained. Further on, there is a slow, stuttering wind-down, during which the sounds become increasingly fractured and hazy.

The second part, ‘That Cold Shoulder’ finds Ambarchi’s feedback drones splitting into shuddering whines which call to mind Metal Machine Music, but gradually folds into a more gentle interlacing of quavering notes, while the drumming, still muted, gathers pace if not volume. Time simply hangs in suspension at this point… and gradually flakes into pieces, along with any semblance of structure.

It’s a wonderful experience to simply lose oneself in this ever-transitioning, eternally-shifting work, which ultimately comes to drape the listener’s ears with mellow tones, concluding with a segment which evokes something between space and the sounds of a tropical forest at dusk. But none of it explains the bizarre George Michael portrait on the cover…

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Papillon du Nuit – Musetta

Posted: 30 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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26th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Although they may have seemingly risen out of nowhere a couple of years or so ago, Papillon du Nuit, the ever evolving, ever-expanding musical project revolving around Stephen Kennedy, alongside Mika, Steve, and Karen (who between them cover vocals, cello, grand piano, guitars, keyboards, and percussion) is a coming together of individuals who have been on and around the ‘goth’ and adjacent scene in the north for some considerable time, to form a loose collective. Having debuted in October 2024 with ‘Scarlet’, they’ve built a body of work through a succession of singles – eight in all. Most acts would have simply compiled said singles to assemble an album – but not Papillon du Nuit, and certainly not Stephen Kennedy – because he likes to do things the hard way. The proper way. And because his roots lie in that 80s goth era where bands like The Sisters of Mercy grew their fanbase through a series of ever-evolving single releases but saw the album as a different medium, a means of creating a specific, thematically unified document. As it happens, Musetta sits somewhere between the compilation and standalone document, plucking a selection of those previous singles and placing them amidst the new songs, meaning that of the album’s nine tracks, five have been previously released, although sitting in the context of an album they feel different somehow. And as much as Papillon du Nuit embrace some elements of goth – or perhaps, more accurately, the gothic (think brooding atmosphere, haunting imagery, a sense of drama) – this is a project which goes far beyond genre, with strong leanings towards neoclassical, chamber pop, the theatrical, even the operatic.

As they explain, ‘The album is named after Musetta, one of the major characters in the opera La Boheme, who is enshrined with all the qualities, and all the follies, that make us who we are. Many of the songs here explore a mythical, almost mystical journey, with life displayed more as an inevitably straight path, rather than something circular. The songs are not about death, but many of them lead there’. Some may mock with a ‘pretentious, moi?’, but Musetta is a work which is fully committed to art, and therefore sweeps pretence aside in being the real deal. That Steve Whitfield (The Cure / The Mission) produced, and co-wrote some of the tracks is nothing if not proof of pedigree, as well as their commitment to delivering an album which goes to great lengths to realise strong intent.

Heavy breathing, a panting even. Tension. Suspense. Then comes the panicked whisper: ‘is it dark, or am I blind?’ It has a decidedly Beckettean feel to it. A piano begins to reverberate. This is ‘Jude.’ As a single, it arrived as a stark and curious hybrid of poetry, theatre, and folk with a prog-rock leaning and a sense of the epic. In a revised context as an album opener, it feels very much like an introduction, a passage into a vast musical world. ‘Pilgrim’s Arc’, the most recent single, released in October, is driving, dynamic, tempest of a composition, and makes for a stark contrast arriving immediately after. Immediately, it’s apparent that there’s no small consideration been given to the album’s flow and shifts in mood and pace, and even this early, themes of time and mortality emerge.

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The first of the unreleased, album-specific songs, ‘Natalie’, follows, and it’s cinematic, widescreen-even, with its string-soaked chorus, again building to a spectacular finale. It’s no criticism to say it sounds like an album track: it’s magnificently executed, and offers some respite from the experimental intensity of the songs which precede it, and the cello-forward ‘A Sea Within An Ocean’ is the work of a band spreading out and settling, stretching their limbs and simply composing to make music, free from the (self-made) pressure to record a single in a day, or whatever their previous process was. It feels looser, more relaxed, and the result is a rolling, hypnotic wave of a song.

‘Cello Poem’ – at a mere two and three-quarter minutes – feels like more of a narrative bridge than a song in its own right, and the spoken word segue links single cuts ‘Amber’ and ‘Ariadne’ – and does so quite effectively, in truth. It does, however, keep death as its focus. And I suppose this is the core of the matter. As they say, ‘The songs are not about death, but many of them lead there’. How many of the great plays, novels, or poems aren’t about death, at least in some way? Death is, after all, the only certainty in life.

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Where Musetta differs from other albums where death is a preoccupation or a focus is that this is an album which carries a weight. It’s in no way frivolous or posturing, it doesn’t take death simply as a motif: it’s a soul-felt meditation on the end of life. No glorification, no stylisation, but a philosophical contemplation. It’s this which makes Musetta so impactful. Not only is youth wasted on the young, but life is wasted on the living, by and large. That is to say, it’s hard to appreciate what you have until it’s gone, or slipping away, and while so much goth – and metal, and so much music of many styles, for that matter – is preoccupied with death in a conceptual way, there comes a point where it comes all to near, all too real, and here it gets scary – rather than a game of lofting skulls and a flamboyant delivery. Shit does get real, and we all have to face the reality of mortality. And at this point, it’s not cool, it’s not dramatic, it simply becomes a heavy reality. We start by losing grandparents, and parents, and often, in between, friends and peers. And when it’s your peers, you start to worry. And if you don’t, you probably should.

Musetta is packed with heavy moments – not so much sonically, but emotionally, philosophically – and it’s woven with a fabric rich in literary allusions and diverse stylistic influences. ‘Visionary’ is a word I’m cautious in applying to anything, particularly anything contemporary – but ambitious and accomplished, wide-ranging, powerful, and moving… Musetta is all of these things, and more.

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Album Cover

Argonaut – Interrupted

Posted: 29 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Criminal Records – 12th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s a pretty bold move to open an album with a slow-paced and pretty bleak-sounding song which is more about dolorous atmosphere than chorus or hook. But then, Argonaut’s latest offering is pretty bold – albeit in an understated sort of a way. That likely sounds oxymoronic, so let me unpack it a bit.

After something of a purple patch, with the prolific spate of post-lockdown output which, over the course of a year and a bit and a new song each month saw the development of open-ended album Songs from the Black Hat (which ended up with a total of twenty tracks, with the inclusion of a couple of remixes), Argonaut were forced to make a change of pace. Life has a way of doing that – and events also resulted in a change of focus. The result is Interrupted – an album two years in the making, and by far the darkest and most introspective set of songs they’ve released. It’s not that the London DIY trio have always skirted darkness or introspection, but historically, it’s been balanced by lighter, poppier indie tunes. Now, though, they’ve embraced what one may call the therapeutic benefits of creativity, channelling – and coming to terms with – real-life issues and even trauma through those outlets.

As the accompanying notes lay things out quite plainly, Interrupted offers ‘Ten songs from the past year’s abyss, documenting breakdown, burnout, dementia, depression, memory, hope and healing’. This in itself is bold. Again and again, the conversation is ‘we need to talk about these things’, but the moment we do, there’s a sort of collective wince in society, on social media, among our friends even. We’re still not societally conditioned to deal with the difficult stuff. I can speak from experience here: following the loss of my wife at the age of 44, and finding myself as a single parent, I’ve had enough ‘well, I could be worse’ type responses to articulations of struggle to fill a book. And now, while witnessing the mental and physical decline of one of my parents, I’m finding a similar reluctance among friends to engage on a meaningful level on the subject.

Thankfully, there are always artists who are – not necessarily willing, but perhaps more compelled – to pour all of this into their work, perhaps because those in immediate proximity are found wonting when it comes to conversation, meaning that creative channels are the only channels available. The Twilight Sad’s latest album, The Long Goodbye is perhaps the most harrowing thing I’ve heard in years, but James Graham’s dealing with the loss of his mother to dementia through the songs is powerful beyond belief.

Interrupted, too, confronts real-life anguish. And so, after some digression, we return to that opening track. ‘We’re Not Hungry Anymore’ is a remarkable hybrid of jangly indie and post-grunge – the heavily chorused guitar carrying hints of Soundgarden’s ‘Black Hole Sun’, but mournful strings bring a different shade of melancholy, and Lorna’s vocal somehow manages to be cutesie and scared, giving vibes of Alison Shaw of Cranes. It culminates in a monumental crescendo.

Lead single ‘Leaves’ – which lands towards the end of the album – is similarly bleak, particularly Cure-esque and direct in its addressing emotional distress, here specifically on the topic of dementia. As Lorna writes on the single’s video, “I was thinking about the moon cycle and the new moon and wanted to incorporate that feeling into the music. The lyrics are about somebody who is getting older and their mind is starting to deteriorate. They can remember the past more than the present. I had the image of being lost in the woods and trapped inside their memories. It’s quite a personal song.”

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And in the personal lies the universal, the relatable. The last few times I’ve seen my mother, she’s talked mostly about her school days and her job. She’s 79, and has nothing much to talk about, and actually seems to recall very little, from any time since. She gets lost going to the village shop, despite having lived in the same village for a good twenty-five years. So yes, this resonates, and increasingly, friends – or friends of friends – tell of relatives – no longer just grandparents, but parents suffering a painful mental unravelling.

‘Hats Off’ lands in the region of Daisy Chainsaw remixed by The Cure, with a bassline that’s got the vibe of ‘Let’s Go to Bed’ while casting a nod to the niggly guitar bit in Prince’s ‘Kiss’ which fits with the post-punk pop funk vibe which goes some way to break the tension, and ‘I’m Not Getting Up After This’ is the perfect summary of a depressive episode, the encapsulation of both physical and mental exhaustion. ‘Sugarfree’ is one of the songs closest to what we’re familiar with from Argonaut, with Nathan’s gravelly, weary-sounding monotone providing a magnificent contrast to Lorna’s sweet, flighty tones, but something about it feels leaden, weighted – not in a lethargic way, but as if pulled by an emotional drag. ‘This Means Something, This is Important’, released a year ago while the album was still evolving, is another of the more upbeat, fizzy indie moments we’re used to, and ‘Unpredictable’ showcases their irrepressible pop penchant. The final track, ‘Rewind’ is heavy, Siouxsue and The Banshees gone sluge – it makes for a hard-hitting, climactic  finale.

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Interrupted is often dark, bleak, intense, and incredibly sad, but still packs its fair share of poppy punk tunes to provide some balance. It’s a difficult album, and rightly so. It’s not meant to be easy listening. It’s taut, its pop moments propelled by a thunking bass and motorik grooves. It’s also an album with many depths. It’s perhaps not an album we’d have expected from Argonaut, and it’s likely not an album they themselves expected, or would have wanted to make. But it’s emotionally honest, and that is bold. It’s also probably their strongest release yet.

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Argonaut, Interrupted Album_ Front

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