Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

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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The Dwarves – JENKEM

Posted: 27 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Greedy Media – 5th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Fuck me, a new album by The Dwarves? They’ve now been going fully forty years. How? How is Blag Dahlia even still alive? They may have reined things in around the turn of the millennium, but no act this controversial, this wild, this excessive has a right to still be here after all this time. But we should be grateful that they are. The 80s were very different times, and while being perverse, gruesome, antagonistic, and all the rest for its own sake is a good thing – and G.G. Allin style shock for the sake of causing offence, disgust, or revulsion was never big or clever, and that we’ve moved on is a good thing… but. The danger is that we’ve come to a point where challenging artistic expression can be too readily conflated with misogyny or other discriminatory practices. No question, it’s a fine line, but confrontational art, at its best, challenges us to confront not only what’s socially acceptable but also our own boundaries and prejudices. Moreover, right now, is fringe art which is ugly and repulsive any more ugly and repulsive than mainstream discourse in politics or social media?

Unless it’s expounding ideologies of hate, is it perhaps not a function of art to test the boundaries still, as was always the case? The very purpose of punk was to raise a middle finger to the establishment, to be offensive to cultured sensibilities. Punk was rebellion. Somewhere along the way, something’s been lost. In truth, much was lost early on, when many punk acts signed to major labels in ’77 and ’78, but the spirit of punk remained, but underground. Now, much of what passes as punk is pathetically tame. Sure, Green Day gave us American Idiot, and used a major label platform to bring us their social and political critiques, but they were essentially no more than Clash copyists and fairly mild in their expostulations in real terms. The extent to which one can call the work of The Dwarves art is debatable, but it’s unquestionably punk in ethos.

The band which gave us gore, nudity, and an actual dwarf on the cover of their 1990 album Blood, Guts & Pussy (which packed twelve songs into just shy of thirteen minutes), and whose guitarist HeWhoCannotBeNamed performs live wearing a jockstrap at most, do what they’ve always done here: short, fast, abrasive punk songs about drugs and death and drugs and more drugs. The longest of the album’s fourteen songs is two minutes and two seconds long (‘Damned if I Do’, one of the album’s most accessible, catchy, and commercial songs, which packs in verses, choruses and a guitar solo); and the rest sit around the minute and a half mark.

And while PC is still not a concern for Dwarves, opener ‘Confused’ takes a balanced approach to gender confusion, touching on hypermasculinity within its squalling minute and eight seconds. ‘We Are The Scene’ melts together The Dead Kennedys and hardcore with some unexpected melody while flexing muscles.

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‘I’m Dead’ (which brings a heavy hint of The Ramones) and ‘I Wish You Were Dead’ seem to offer common thematic ground, albeit from different sides of the fence, and ‘Bad Drugs’ (a poppy tune about prescription drugs like Adderall), ‘Drug Lust’, ‘Too Messed Up’ and ‘Psychosis Tripping’ are all self-explanatory in their focus and frenzy, and much of this hopped-up set sits between The Dead Kennedys and Black Flack. It’s the quintessence of old-school punk, fast and furious, but with melodies packed and stacked, fun takes priority over shock or offence.

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Mick Harris & Martyn Bates – Murder Ballads [Incest Songs]

Posted: 21 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Sub Rosa – 15th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Mick Harris may have left Napalm Death some thirty-five years ago, but it’s still for his work with them – and his coining of the term ‘grindcore’ – that he’s largely known. There are, of course, far worse things one could be known for, particularly as this meant that he featured on the band’s seminal debut album, Scum. While having participated in numerous projects in the years since, Scorn will forever be an enduring standout in cult circles, but beyond this, Harris has explored far further-flung corners of the musical spectrum on many occasions with comparatively little recognition, with dark atmospherics having been his primary focus for a good number of years now.

The fact that this is the third instalment of Murder Ballads, recorded in collaboration with Martyn Bates and released on estimable Sub Rosa label in Belgium – which has released albums by William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Test Dept, Oren Ambarchi, David Toop, Bill Laswell, Asian Dub Foundation… the list goes on – is a measure of how Harris has transitioned to what one might call more ‘arty’ territories, which may sound snobby or poncey to some, but let’s focus on the work at hand – at least, in due course.

Although murder ballads are likely most commonly associated with Nick Cave in popular culture, they have a long cultural heritage, with roots in the folk history of Scandinavia, England, and lowland Scotland reaching back as far as the 1750s. The entire premise of murder ballads is bleak and grim, and Harris and Bates remain true to this principle here, on an album which is mercilessly dark and lugubrious.

There’s no avoiding the fact that the subtitle brings an element of discomfort. We’re in a strange place right now, culturally, in that half of the world – or maybe that’s just half of the US and those in the UK who for inexplicable reason who describe themselves as ‘patriots’ while also being fans of Donald Trump – seem to think that paedophilia is just fine, and in many states, marrying cousins is similarly just fine. Similarly, incest porn and step-sibling porn is all the rage. Why? What is wrong with people? But then, history is built on tales of incest, going right back to Greek mythology. This is no more than an observation, and to note that as a species, we’ve been warped for the entirety of our existence. That discussion is an entire thesis in itself, though.

Murder Ballads [Incest Songs] is a long way from Peter Sotos territory. But what it is, is four ominously-shaded longform compositions which are uncomfortable and uneasy. As they pitch it, ‘Incest Songs is the final chapter of the Murder Ballads trilogy, and its most fully realized expression. Where Drift and Passages explored the post-isolationist frame through voice and single instrument, this third volume dispenses with that approach entirely, opening instead onto a more labyrinthine sonic architecture – one built from overlapping, saturating, blurring voices, all of them Martyn Bates’.

Bates does indeed prove to be versatile, and capable of conjuring the most moving vocal evocations. ‘The Bonny Hind’ is essentially a folk song, a shanty, even, at heart, but the lilting vocal, which would work as readily acapella as against conventional instrumentation – flute, or fiddle, for example – takes on a more ominous shade when pitched against groaning, shape-shifting drones. The result is unsettling, and would sit within the soundtrack of a folk horror movie in the way a warped, discordant rendition of a nursery rhyme would in more mainstream projects.

‘Sheaf and Knife’ is notable for its sparse nature. Bates’ voice is practically in your ear – and this ism no small feat of the production. Whispers, echoes, and reverberations echo around, and it’s not immediately apparent that most of this is Bates, the wind and the air, and the dank, low drones which define this album. ‘The Two Brothers’ – a seventeen-minute monster of a composition – drifts into moments of space-age spin, flanged swirl and fractal details turning a textured sonic nebula behind the vulnerable vocals – and the narrative said vocals deliver is chilling, a tale of a stabbing, whereby the narrator washes the blood off and goes about his business. Or something. While the lyrics sometimes trail away in swathes of reverb the auditory experience is gripping in itself. This is the sound of heavy fog, and of silent decomposition. This leads us to the album’s final cut, ‘Edward’, extending beyond seventeen and a half minutes is magnificently haunting. At times so sparse as to be barely there, it’s a trawl into the darkest of spaces, suffocating, claustrophobic. Bates croons and quavers with a detachment which accentuates the sense of disconnection. There’s something in the way he delivers the words, against sparse, eerie, near-ambient backdrops of difficult drones, that is quite chilling: calm, soft, psychopathic. Enjoy, but watch your back.

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Abrasive Trees – Light Remaining

Posted: 20 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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29th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Abrasive Trees’ evolution continues with the arrival of Light Remaining. Over the last seven years, they’ve released a steady stream of EPs, a compilation album gathering material from the early EPs, a live album, and an hour-long drone album recorded by the project’s core member, Matthew Rochford during lockdown. While the lineups have been markedly different, expanding and contracting along the way, there has always been a sense of continuity, a commonality across their catalogue (beyond Rochford himself), and that’s an attention to detail, and a keen awareness of atmosphere, and of balance. Light Remaining, however, is their first full-length studio work conceived as such and recorded as a band.

The single releases, ‘Carved Skull’ and ‘Tao to Earth’ set a certain expectation and tone for the album – dark, tense, layered, and unashamedly arty, even literary in their leanings. And this is very much what Light Remaining gives us – a work that’s sonically immersive, engaging, but also contemplative, cerebral. There’s much to absorb.

With a spoken word introduction delivered over minimal instrumentation, ‘No Solace’ draws the listener in gently – you may even find yourself leaning in, ear cocked to the poetry – before the fireworks begin, an explosive sustained crescendo of rolling drums and soaring, searing guitars, amidst which Rochford maintains a near-monotone delivery amidst the ever-building surge of chaos. It’s difficult to distinguish whether this is a display of serenity or the paralysis of shock. ‘Star Sapphire’ brings contrasting, conflicting tones, textures, and moods, with some pleasant, shoegazey, post-rock chime and jangle paired with some dark, driving distorted chords, perfectly illustrating the attention to detail – and dynamics – mentioned earlier.

There’s something of the feel of Fields of the Nephilim at their most lugubrious and atmospheric to ‘Flickering Flame’ – think ‘Vet for the Insane’, perhaps – before it slowly grows in density and fogginess, and it flows into the rolling swell and surge of ‘Carved Skull’.

If the title suggests something of a slow fade, a diminishing time – and while I may well be overreaching in my interpretation – the very phrase, with its implications of a setting sun feels weighty and weighted, and to carry connotations of an eternal night, the light fading on a dying planet. And this feels like the mood which hangs over the album – a sense of the finite, of impending doom, even. It’s oblique, it’s indirect, but it nags away in the shadows of a work which is certainly darker than it is light. Yes, the light remaining is limited, and the shadows loom ever more darkly.

It’s on the final composition, ‘I Didn’t Mean to Hurt You’ that everything comes together. It’s nearly eleven minutes long, and they make full use of that time to gradually develop the mood, from an understated, picked guitar, rippling in reverb, slowly adding the layers and increasing the volume and density and drums and strings add more and more, picking up pace over time. It’s just shy of the midpoint that it really begins to race forward, and the adrenaline builds in line with the pace and intensity. And finally – finally – the levee breaks, leading out with a slow, deliberate trudging riff topped with a solo from the stars.

Light Remaining feels like the release Abrasive Trees have been building up to since their inception. It’s a sustained work of remarkable detail, nuance, but also density and force. Everything is perfectly realised. It’s huge. Sonically, conceptually, in terms of ambition and execution, the production… this is a peak, a new pinnacle.

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Wheelchair Sports Camp – oh imperfecta

Posted: 17 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Alternative Tentacles – 15th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Well, you can’t complain a band’s name is in bad taste when one of its member is, as their own website puts it, ‘a wheelchair-using, profanely queer and tiny rapper, with a very distinctly high-pitched sense of humor’. And instead of politely skirting the whole disability – because people are, even now, funny, awkward, uncomfortable about these things – WSC shove it right in your face. No shame, no embarrassment – not that there should be, of course, but these guys pretty much shit all over propriety and political correctness, in a way that simply doesn’t tend to happen anymore.

Anti-PC ‘comedy’ artistes, the likes of Roy “Chubby” Brown and Kevin Bloody Wilson are adored by the kind of cunts vote Reform and bemoan the fact that you can’t say anything racist anymore should rightly be criticised and deplatformed, given that their ‘humour’ is based on derision and mockery, punching down to use a popular current phrase. Wheelchair Sports Camp, however, invert that exploitation and reclaim the ground that’s rightfully their in the most uncompromising and wilfully tasteless of manners.

Oh Imperfecta sees the hip-hop duo go punk – and it’s not only being released on Alternative Tentacles, but features guest vocals by Jello Biafra, alongside a host of other guests. And this is punk at its most unapologetically trashy, thrashy, bursts of noise and scratchy guitars pitched against explosive beats and grinding synths. There’s nothing subtle about this, and nor is there intended to be. Single cut ‘Eat Meat’ is exemplary: a simple riff, simple and repetitive lyrics, Kalyn Rose Heffernan’s squeaky vocals possessing a childlike quality –the lyrics not so much. She sounds, at times, like an evil Gremlin, cackling away and raising a middle finger to the world. This is what empowerment looks and sounds like: this is the very definition of rebellion, of not giving a fuck.

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‘DENIM ft. RAREBYR$’ (only one of four of sixteen songs on the album which breaks the three-minute barrier) sees Heffernan and her ‘gimp’ Greggy (drums) revisiting their hip-hop roots, and ‘on HOLD ft. Junia-T’ is an exercise in bleak, minimal hip-hop which delves into dark and experimental territory: both are quite a contrast with primitive punk of ‘DEAD ft. Jello Biafra + Olivia Jean’ – and then there are the interludes, which feature snippets of dialogue and what appear to be answerphone messages. With ‘no stopping NO STANDING ft. Junia-T’ introducing a busy jazz element, oh imperfecta is an album which is a wild and varied ride.

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Melanculia – post mortem

Posted: 16 May 2026 in Reviews, Albums
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15th May 2026 – noot moon records

Christopher Nosnibor

The term ‘post mortem’ has come to bare a number of meanings, not least of all the connotations of autopsy, but ultimately, it boils down to being something after the fact, specifically, after death, as the phrase implies. I suppose what it is that happens after death does vary between individuals, but it doesn’t necessarily mean being carved up.

By way of context, Melanculia is the solo project of Nino Sable, front man of goth act Aeon Sable, and the release of post mortem marks the first new album under the Melanculia name since 2018’s Seventh Circle. The accompanying notes inform that ‘The album expands further into a melancholic palette shaped by Nino’s strong sense of post-punk melodicism, while also drawing on dark psychedelia and indie-folk textures.’ And there’s more: Sable says that ‘Freed from the constraints of collaboration and compromise, the album focuses on a more direct and personal approach, centred on acoustic guitar, haunting synths, and sharply focused lyrics that cut to the bone: fragile and unfiltered.’

If I were collaborator or bandmate, I might take this statement with a pang of annoyance, or feel it to be a slight sleight, but as I’m not, I can take it at face value, intending that for all the fun of collaboration, it’s empowering to cut loose and fly free every now and again.

And, indeed, with the freedom to explore any and all directions, that’s exactly what Sable does here: the fourteen songs on post mortem are varied, not only stylistically, but in terms of mood and emotional range.

post mortem’s first song is something of a sad song: ‘Dark Days’ blends acoustic guitar and sweeping retro synths to strong effect, and that effect is downbeat and melancholy. The first song sounds like an album closer, and starting on a downer with a slow fade is a bit of a risky way to start an album, but when that’s pretty much par for the course, what else are you going to do? This set of songs is very much set on the downbeat, the wistful, the melancholy, brimming with reflection and gloomy nostalgia. ‘The Tower’ steps up into another level of theatricality, and over the course if fourteen songs – which does make for a long album – post mortem dredges the depths of the soul.

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It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what it does or how it registers: post mortem finds Melanculia strolling quite confidently around the territories of alt-rock and post-punk, while also incorporating folk elements – repetitive chord sequences thrummed out on acoustic guitar may be simple, but utterly gripping, and never more so than on the haunting ‘Runaways’. The folksiness goes a bit pirate folk in places, but ‘The Healer’ drips emotion and brings mid-tempo theatrics propelled by a metronomic and insistent mechanised beat with a vintage snare sound that cuts through and hits hard. ‘Emptiness’ drips heavy emotive swooning, as Sable croons in a quivering Pete Murphy inspired intonation, ‘I wish you were dead now’. No doubt there’s someone in all of our lives that this sentiment applies to.

Standing in the centre of the album like a towering monolith, the seven minute epic that is ‘We Are Only Human’. Hearing the words, laced with a grace and ache, ‘I’m only human, so mall, insignificant’ against a backdrop of rolling piano played in waltz-time is unexpectedly impactful, and also reminds me of another song I simply can’t place. It doesn’t matter: what matters is that the way the atmosphere builds.

There are echoes of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’ about the reverb-soaked sadness of ‘Confessions’, and ‘Sabiaoa’ scrapes the dark terrains of the whispering undulations that creep underground.

It’s perhaps fair to say that in terms of instrumentation and musical style, post mortem explores a narrow space in microcosmic detail. This is their two inches of ivory, if you will. Consequently, it’s an album which benefits spending time with, uncovering the details and the delicate differences. In capturing moods and atmospheres, post mortem is highly accomplished, filling every moment with a sense of poignancy, a swooning sadness.

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Kreng – Wormhole

Posted: 5 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Miasmah – 7th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

“What does a trip towards another world sound like? We’re about to find out. The master of tension, melancholy, and the deranged is back after a long period working in the worlds of theatre and cinema. Last seen on Miasmah with the grief stricken The Summoner, Kreng now returns with Wormhole, following closer in the footsteps of the cult classics L’Autopsie Phénoménale de Dieu and Grimoire.”

This is how we’re introduced to the first new album from Kreng in a decade, and Wormhole is appropriately titled. Immediately, the listener is drawn into a hinterland of suspense and ominous tension, a path beset by ever thickening trees and a creeping mist. You feel an urge to retreat, but as early as the second composition, the dark, jittery ‘Nachtzweet’, with dank creaking sounds and dissonant piano notes which are the pure quintessence of ‘eerie’, you find you’re incapable of turning back. The only way is forward, further into the forest – it doesn’t seem to be enchanted, but something isn’t right either: something is lurking, and it feels menacing, sinister, dangerous. Your heart’s in your mouth, and you’re no longer in control of your decisions and all you can do is creep onwards, down the wormhole, riven with trepidation.

It’s like the soundtrack to a film, but it’s hard to imagine that the visuals could be anywhere near as unsettling as this accompaniment. In the same way that films are rarely as scary as books, because films render and thus create boundaries when it comes to expressing The Terrible Thing, the monster, the ghost, the object of fear, the mind’s capacity to experience fear goes far beyond the visual. As such, a strong soundtrack has the capacity to heighten the fear factor of a movie. But the soundtrack alone, when the only visuals are those conjured in the mind’s eye… the scope is without boundaries. And these compositions distil the very essence of fear, of dread.

Many of the titles offer little by way of clues as to their meaning, or the scenes they would accompany if this were a film. ‘Cepheid’ is an American molecular diagnostics company, and what’s so scary about that? You may well ask. It also happens to be a pulsating star, which changes not only in brightness, but also diameter and temperature, too, which is in keeping with the space journey theme of the album’s title and other tracks, such as ‘Vacuum’.

The piano-led ‘Entropy’ is a soaring choral work, albeit one that elicits thoughts of death and afterlife. And if ‘To Yield’ is soothing, and allows the listener time and space to recover their breath and the heart to return to a more normal rate, the aforementioned ‘Vacuum’ is five and a half minutes of suffocating fear, and ‘Donker’ is an extended exercise in orientation-twisting, brain-bending torture.

In places conventionally ‘filmic’, with strings and piano taking the lead, there are extended passages of creeping dark ambience, the sonic origins of which are unclear, adding to the unease of the pieces – because so much fear stems from the unknown, the unseen, the inexplicable. Sounds of unknown and inexplicable origin are inherently disturbing: if you know that wail is from an owl, you can compartmentalise it, accept that it’s an owl, and move on. When you don’t know what that haunting sound it… it gives you the willies.

Wormhole is creepy, unsettling. It chills more than it thrills, and instils a deep discomfort. Close your eyes and breathe slowly. Feel the fear. Embrace it.

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A Forest of Stars – Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface

Posted: 4 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Prophecy Productions – 8th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

I seem to be on something of an inadvertent black metal trip this bank holiday weekend, and, peculiarly, one devoted to black metal forged on this small island, for following my review of Hellripper’s Coronach – black metal that’s staunch in its Scottishness – we have Prophecy Productions pitching the new album from West Yorkshire (Leeds, of course, where else) act A Forest of Stars as being uniquely British in their branding.

It’s tempting to unpack the importance of national identities here, particularly at a time when ‘British’ identity – at home, far more than away – carries some toxic connotations, and the majority of Scots are keen to claim independence from the government of the United Kingdom – in short, to become dis-united, but this is such complex and boggy terrain that there simply isn’t the time or space, even if it were appropriate here. And so I will return to the seemingly flippant word selection concerning ‘British branding’, for while – as is a central trope of black metal – A Forest of Stars’ album titles are strewn with corpses, death, and decay (their debut was entitled, perhaps somewhat oxymoronically, The Corpse of Rebirth, while their last was called Grave Mounds and Grave Mistakes, which sounds probably more humorous in its punning wordplay than intended), Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface sounds like corporate speak. If a there was multinational corporation that dominated the industry of funeral directors, Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface could well be the title of a report for the executive committee. Or perhaps Pure Cremation have already written it and had that meeting concerning their strategy in the event of another pandemic, replete with an array of graphs and graphics, pie charts and flow charts, costings and projections. Because capitalism exploits everything there is to exploit.

As such, the language of capitalism sits very much at odds not only with a metal band, but a band so immersed in art and poetry, whose biography goes to significant effort to point out that ‘in his recitative mode, vocalist Curse is even reminiscent of electro poet Anne Clark – after a steady diet of prescription drugs and rusty nails. On the other hand, his singing voice evokes memories of a young Martin Walkyier. The impressive command of the English language by that great metal bard, his plentiful plays on words and subtle multi-layered meanings also have a place in the poetic lyrics of A FOREST OF STARS – yet in different, often far more neo-dadaist ways, in which tiny twists of spelling can have surprisingly dark effects’ (suggesting, at the same time, that the wordplay of Grave Mounds and Grave Mistakes was entirely intentional after all).

The regular release of the album contains six songs, the shortest of which is the opener, ‘Ascension of the Clowns’ at a hefty nine minutes, and with the last two stretching beyond the fifteen-minute mark. The deluxe edition adds three more tracks – by most standards, an additional EP, or even an album of bonus material.

‘Ascension of the Clowns’ is grand and theatrical: Curse brings the metal fury, but emotes and enunciates, his words not only audible but clear above the spacious guitar work – which, over the course of the album’s expansive compositions – are accompanied by an array of instruments from piano to violin, as well as acoustic guitar. There’s a strong orchestral leaning – not to mention folk elements – to incredibly ambitious work, and it’s hard to fault the musicianship or arrangements, although the instrumentation is often dialled down to accompany the vocals, rather than the elements merging to create a sonic whole.

There are obvious reasons for this: Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface is as much like a musical as it is a metal album. Without wishing to sound in any way mocking, one can almost picture Curse lofting a skull and affecting his most dramatic Hamlet-inspired gushings as he proclaims in the most thespy rendition of anguish, “Shit of that shit! The enshitenment!” on ‘Street Level Vertigo’. Yes, he knows his words and wordplay, and clearly revels in the way words reverberate and resonate and rub against one another to conjure layers of meaning and heightened drama.

‘Mechanically Separated Logic’ references the processes of the meat industry, applied to the psychology of late capitalism, and while the instrumentation is subtlety detailed and softly picked for the most part, only bursting into cathedrals of sound in places, again, the vocals are pure theatre, bold, exaggerated, and it’s hard to know quite how to take it, to deduce how serious this preposterously excessive style is. But even assuming there is a knowingness, a joyful revelling in the absurdity of all of this, it feels more like a work to respected and admired rather than enjoyed. No, that’s not entirely accurate: it’s enjoyable, even entertaining, particularly with its folk flourishes and revelling in the excremental, but it’s enjoyable as a performance, rather than as a set of songs which resonate on an emotional level.

AA

AA

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Hellripper – Coronach

Posted: 3 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Century Media – 27th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Pentagram-shaped goat heads adorn Hellripper’s website and Bandcamp. “All hail the goat” is a band slogan of sorts, and is emblazoned on the body of the compact disc, which depicts a goat in an approximation of a lion rampant stance, thus combining James McBain’s strongly Scottish identity (the album comes in ‘Wild Thistle’ pink, ‘Saltaire’ blue, ;’Highland Mist’ grey and ‘Black Cuillin’ vinyl editions’ and Baphomet, adopted as something of a mascot within the black metal community since the dawn of the genre with Venom’s Black Metal in 1982, and Bathory’s genre-defining eponymous debut in ’84. there’s a giant goat forged from mist and cloud on the moody, mountainous cover art, too.

The ‘one-man black/speed metal band formed by Scottish musician James McBain in 2014’ has been crowned ‘Scotland’s King of the arcane mosh’ by Metal Hammer magazine, with a style which is very much rooted in 80s black metal, and, as the Hellripper website states, ‘heavily inspired by witchcraft and the supernatural, Hellripper is also deeply rooted in its Scottish origins, using the landscape and historical events as a backdrop for its lyrics and imagery’.

Coronach is Hellripper’s fourth full-length album, and features eight riff-ripping songs with a total run time of forty-four solo-centric minutes. The instant ‘Hunderprest’ powers in at a hundred miles an hour, McBain is straight in with the flamboyant fretwork, and some of it is just wildly excessive. ‘Less is more’ is not a motto Hellripper abide by. But the riffs themselves are killer, and she snarling, rasping vocals may be of the genre, but add to the gnarliness of the dark whirlwinds which blast through each and every song. The pace is relentlessly fast and furious and the style cohesive throughout.

That said, as much as I say that this is ‘of the genre’, Coronach does show ambition and awareness when it comes to composition and arrangement: ‘The Art of Resurrection’ starts with a delicate, atmospheric piano passage, while the title track includes Sir Walter Scott’s poem of the same title (Scott was Scottish) and bagpipes (of course).

‘Baobhan Sith (Waltz of the Damned)’, the first of the album’s two bona fide epics, with a span of six and a half minutes, rounds of the first half, and with the fancy fretwork reined in (a bit, at least) in favour of driving riffery, it’s a powerful, pounding beast of a tune, while the title track, which draws the curtain on the album, is a towering, monumental nine-minute monster which goes all-out anthemic and which flies the flag of tartan black metal with pride.

AA

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Trowser Carrier + Fern – Helping Old Ladies Cross The Road

Posted: 1 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 1st May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Trowser Carrier – formerly of Leeds and now of Värmland, Sweden – is a genre unto himself, being, to my knowledge the sole exponent of polite harsh noise on the planet. And if that seems like an oxymoron, that’s entirely the point: 2013’s A Flower for My Hoonoo (reissued in expanded form in 2023) offered up musings on cups of tea and tablecloths and all manner of English manners against backdrops of raw, skull-shattering abrasive noise.

For this release (I won’t suggest, as music journos so often do, that it’s long-awaited, as I doubt more than five people have noticed the time between Trowser Carrier releases), TC has paired up with fellow Värmland resident Fern (whose error was released by Dret Skivor a couple of years ago).

The compositions are considerably longer than on the previous releases by either artist, with Helping Old Ladies Cross The Road containing four new compositions, each four to nine minutes in length, plus a thirteen-minute remix courtesy of horse funeral.

It’s the title track which lifts the curtain on this characteristically quirky set, and it seems that Fern’s input has tempered the harsh noise of Trowser Carrier, replacing blanket distortion and abrasion with muffled, exploratory, experimental electronica, which swims casually between space-age weirdness, semi-ambient Krautrock, and sci-fi drones reminiscent of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. TC’s vocals are low in the mix and masked and mangled by distortion and a host of other effects, barely discernible and wholly indecipherable amidst layers of reverb and tremolo. It all sound quite polite and considerate in the delivery, though.

‘Lovely show pillows’ is a work of dank, dark ambience which is unnerving, unsettling. The lyrics are completely beyond unravelling, the voice serving more as another instrument in the slow swirl of sound, but the title speaks for itself, as is also the case on ‘Nearly clean? No really clean!’ a slow drift of cloudlike ambience with submerged vocals which likely references a TV advert from the 80s or perhaps early 90s, the specifics of which elude me. It sounds like a disjointed message beaming in via satellite from a space mission circa 1970, crackling through space and time against a backdrop of whale song. Maybe I need to clean my ears: perhaps they’re only nearly clean. But then a barrage of noise like a thunder storm breaking hits with the arrival of ‘The smell of a lawn at dawn’. This is, of course, peak absurdism, and precisely what one would expect from the label, and in particular Trowser Carrier, whose objective is essentially to take the piss out of harsh noise and power electronics and industrial ambient and all the rest, while exploiting the form with a commendable aptitude.

Horse funeral’s remix of ‘TC + Fern’ appears to meld down the album in its entirety to a single seething morass of undifferentiated slow-moving sonic gloop. Here, any vocals are boiled down and simmered to mere bubbles in a broiling broth, and the track eventually evaporates to nothing.

What to make of this? Well, it’s not designed to meet conventional musical standards. Quite the opposite, in fact. But Helping Old Ladies Cross The Road sees Trowser Carrier + Fern belongs to a territory all of its own, dismantling the tropes and forms of the genres to which the album belongs. It would be commercial suicide if commercial potential was an issue. As it is, it’s simply a magnificent example of obstinate perversity – and good noise.

AA

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