Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

Remote Viewing – State Violence

Posted: 22 August 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 18th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Remote Viewing’s second album, Modern Addictions (2023) was a hypercharged, uncompromising beast of an album. This came as no real surprise, given that, as their bio reminds us, ‘Remote Viewing are formed from the ashes of Palehorse, consisting of current members of Million Dead, Sly & The Family Drone, and Hands Up Who Wants To Die’. Sure, when most people hear the word ‘supergroup’ they think of Hollywood Vampires, or Audioslave, or, I dunno, The Travelling Wilburys. They’re ‘super’ by virtue of big names coming together, but their output has a tendency to be underwhelming, because there tend to be super egos cancelling one another out and stifling any spark. But a supergroup at this level – a coming together of musicians of quite different stripes, but all with something different to contribute – in my experience, brings a different kind of energy. Perhaps it comes from the sense that they need to prove themselves, but equally, from the thrill of collaboration. This is the thing with collaboration: sometimes it gels, others it doesn’t. Modern Addictions proved that Remote Viewing gelled, coalescing into a colossal guitar-driven powerhouse.

Imagine my frustration at only being able to be in one place at a time when I pitched up at The Brudenell to see Mogwai to discover Remote Viewing were supporting Humanfly in the other room.

State Violence is pitched as ‘Their most direct statement yet… an unapologetic reflection on the increasing levels of injustice, social division, extreme wealth and human atrocities we are seeing the world over’.

Direct statements – certainly credible ones – have been in short supply in recent years from the political classes, and worse still, criticism of their actions – and inactions – have been subject to increasingly harsh penalties. While one genocide has been televised in real-time around the globe, it’s been all too easy for people to fail to even appreciate the state of things in Sudan, and to shrug off the war in and around Iran as being a distant thing. Here in the UK in particular, there’s a sense of collective smugness that we’re ok because we’re not there, and we don’t have to contend with ICE either, and it’s from that state of bubble that we conveniently overlook that to criticise the state of Israel using the wrong terminology could see you lose your job or even imprisoned. A portion of the populace has been distracted with finger-pointing at immigrants as the reason their lives are shit. Meanwhile, peaceful protest in support of a direct action group has been outlawed.

This is the point at which State Violence arrives, and hits the spot, and does so by driving straight to the heart of a very British way of living.

‘#makemoneymakelovemakemoney’ kicks off – literally – in a rabid squall of dingy guitar accompanied by churning bass and a raving vocal performance, a raw-throated scream. A hybrid of sludge, black-hued metal, and noise rock, there are some blankly nihilist passages which call to mind Kowloon Walled City – but when they slam the pedals on, the overdrive is a speaker-ripping blast. Opening an album with a six-minute mid-pace trudge that makes the skin crawl is inspired: it’s a move that will grab those who are on the market for a challenge, and send the rest running after a minute or so – if that.

‘Retrain as a Swan’, the album’s lead single is one of the least single-like singles you’ll hear all year. It’s great, but it’s bereft of hooks or an obvious road in, and is, instead, a gut-churning sonic assault. The title, incidentally, was the lead line on a poster / flyer / meme which proffered a parodic take on training and recruitment advertisements, and highlights just how typically British State Violence is in its outlook and humour. Yes, humour. Remote Viewing remind that rage doesn’t have to be without humour, and that if anything – and again, this is a uniquely British trait – the more abstract or self-deprecating, or sarcastic, the humour, the better.

The sludgy squall of ‘Disrespect the Arts’ appears to be a raging attack on the way that not only funding for the arts has been stripped (something also in a state of advancement in the US) and the teaching of art and music cut from school syllabi and courses in the arts – including those in literature – dropped from university programmes, while creative jobs are being canned in favour of fucking AI, which is killing the planet but benefits billionaires. Go figure. ‘HUMAN RIGHTS’ is just straight-up, slowed-down and sludgy, trudging, pounding, relentless, Godflesh heavy. It’s like the heels of heavy boots pounding on your chest, knocking the air out repeatedly until you have no breath, and feel blacked out and lifeless.

The nine-minute ‘Accidental Holiday’ marks quite a contrast, exploring spacious, post-rock territory for the first three minutes, before the riff powers in, and then… POW! All the rage explodes here. If it’s not one of the sludgiest, most brutal, slugging doom riff blasts you’ve heard this year, you haven’t actually heard it. But at the same time, it alludes to post-metal and neoprog, and the guitar textures and the spaces are remarkably well calculated: it’s so clearly apparent that there’s a rare musical intuition between these performers that however dark and gnarly State Violence gets, it’s still exhilarating.

But it’s the two-and-a-half-minute closer ‘Birds of the Feather is on in 7 minutes’ which really encapsulates what State Violence is all about, in that is encapsulates the absurd disconnect between the backdrop to life, and actual life as lived in Britain. It manifests as a delicate, slightly warping, droning sliver of post-rock ambience, and its difference from the rest of the album is significant. That seven minutes is time to make a cuppa and fetch the digestives before settling down to some crap TV. “I don’t watch the news, me, it’s too depressing,” people say. I say, “know your enemy”. But who needs news channels to pump state-sponsored propaganda when they get fed rage bait shit while scrolling social media and watching Love Island? State Violence is more about them than for them, but for those who need a visceral soundtrack that screams back from the void, Remote Viewing have delivered it.

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Perverts In White Shirts – CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories

Posted: 18 August 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Misanthropic Agenda – 4th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

As titles go, this is one of those which is closer to an explanatory essay than a mere title. My last encounter with Perverts In White Shirts was four years ago, on the release of Meaning What Exactly? The tracks were lengthy, but the album was short¸ at least competitively. In contrast, CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories is an absolute monster: making a departure from the four longform pieces on Meaning What Exactly? presents twenty-eight individual pieces which find Nathalie Dreier and Dave Phillips plunge into some particularly heavy territory, and not without personal weight, either. I shall quote from the accompanying notes:

Rooted in Nathalie’s isolated upbringing in the controversial Children of God cult, the album draws on fragments of this group’s music, alongside songs and texts from other fanatic movements and gurus. Working with this source material, the anarchic, tongue-in-cheek

Perverts in White Shirts transmogrify, decontextualize, and reimagine melodies and words previously steeped in ideology, isolation, and indoctrination.

Before I start, I would like you to consider the time investment that reviewing an album that’s some two hours long demands, particularly when the final track runs for nearly half an hour. And from the outset, it’s a challenging work. ‘Truth’ warps and twists, and while ‘Come to Mommmy’ is, on the surface, a work of slow, psychedelic folk, it soon becomes apparent that this is the sound of dysfunction, and as we’re carried on through the album, the warped weirdness of the CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories reveals itself.

They describe the album as ‘a two-hour cringe-pop journey of disarming, catchy tunes’.

It’s not. It is two hours long, but it’s more a hybrid of dark ambience, samplism, and William Burroughs-style audio cut-ups. And it’s a headfuck. No, it’s more than that. In places, it’s not just disorientating, but nausea-inducing. It sounds, and feels, deeply wrong, and no more so than when it’s at its poppiest, its mellowest, its most accessible. Something at the heart of this album is deeply disturbing, in the horror movie sense.

Shouting and chanting and heavy reverb collide with ominous, tingling electronica, and dolorous low-end bass drones which border on dungeon synth. ‘Love is the Only Weapon’ is exemplary, and deeply uncomfortable. ‘dedication to the tackling of the beast’ pitches a processed, almost robotic vocal, the words abrim with religious connotations, against a low rumbling electronic bass.

‘Never Forever’ is stark and sparse, almost dubby, a work of minimal dance even, but there are horror movie hints to the vocals which reverberate dissonantly, hauntingly, around the rattling beats and slow, exploratory bass, which resonates… and then out of nowhere, the half-minute long ‘The Answer’ explodes in an industrial blast which is nothing short of explosive. In contrast, ‘A Change’ is a low-tempo crawler that’s rich in atmosphere, and positively eerie, its whispered vocal bordering on the subliminal. Against this is the euphoric ‘Love’. But that euphoria feels like the result of manipulation, and not because of the power of the suggestion from the notes. Listening to the warping, wefting, twisting otherness of CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories is an uncomfortable experience, which has nothing to do with spirituality and everything to do with the fact that humans are fucking weird. Apart from in Pet Sematary, how many scary hauntings can you list from other species? Where are all the demonic cats, the spirit dogs and rabbits? Brion Gysin said that ‘man is a bad animal’, and it’s hard to argue.

Similarly, CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories is a horrible album. It trawls through terrain that’s unplotted, and doesn’t stop at the waymarkers where there are, well, anything. The duration is a slog. You crawl your way to the end and just want to lie down. Sure, it’s psychedelic, but mostly it’s torture.

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machiner – motion waves

Posted: 12 August 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Butterfly Effect Records – 7th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s always the north, isn’t it? Sure, The Cure and Bauhaus and Siouxsie all originated down south, but it’s always been the North of England that’s been the true heartland of all things dark and gritty, and, well, goth. Reading – somewhat belatedly – Lol Tolhurst’s roundly-lauded tome on the topic, one thing that shines through is his being struck by the north / south divide, and how places like Manchester in the late 70s displayed a far more pronounced level of deprivation. It is, indeed, grim up north, and the reason that Leeds was the true spawning ground of the goth scene in the early 80s is in many ways self-evident.

History has a habit of repeating itself, and for all the talk of the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ a few years back, it’s still grim up north, and there are numerous parallels to the late 70s and early 80s when it comes to life in England post-Brexit.

machiner list among their influences Nine Inch Nails, New Order and Depeche Mode, and state that their objective is to ‘transform emotional vulnerability into something expansive and cinematic’. And they’re from Hartlepool in County Durham. While for some, County Durham will likely connote the cathedral, the university, and cobbled streets of the city itself, but beyond this, the once industrial county, where mining was its primary source of employment, there is a very different, and far less idyllic picture. And its in this context that we come to machiner, a band who balance elegance and a sense of the epic in what one might call the classical sense, with the dinge and deprivation of much of the region.

Over the course of the eight songs on motion waves, machiner weave some deftly-crafted slices of expansive, dreamy alternative rock, the soaring guitars interlaced with layers of synth, and while the results are neither overtly dark or heavy, there are undercurrents of brooding tension. And what’s more, the melodic, cinematic nature of the music makes for an accessible vehicle for altogether bleaker lyrics. Take these lines from ‘ivory skies’, for example:

low life in the hall outside my door

and a girl cries in the bedroom just below

last night I heard her head crack off the wall

then a silence like I’ve never heard before

well this is England…this is now

And sadly, this is life now. By way of a brief detour, but for necessary context, it’s a grim statistic that instances of domestic violence spike when there is international football being played. Womensaid quote research which found that cases of domestic abuse increased by 38% when England lost a match and 26% when they won or drew. The response of the Reform party – who run Durham County Council – was to post a video cheering England on to prevent domestic violence. This is England, and this is now. And these are shit times.

The seven-minute ‘dark age’ is a magnificently poised, almost prog-leaning composition, and the piano-led ‘the sound of disappearing’ rolls past on a soft drift which is not only gentle, but truly pretty. And herein we arrive at the essence of machiner: as much as they detail the grimy, gritty realities, they’re looking towards escape routes and better futures. motion waves is the sound of a way out of a thorny thicket. ‘iceburn’ in particular soars skywards, and the easy ‘cast me in amber’ – which again extends to almost six and a half minutes – brings a strong New Order vibe, and pairs it with some nagging electronica laced with heavy hints of shoegaze: in short, it’s perhaps the ultimate assimilation of the elements which make up the textured sonic amalgamation of machiner’s dynamic style.

‘ever over’, which reminds very much of Oceansize, brings things to a strong and solid conclusion, and it makes for a dextrous conclusion to a magnificent album, one which brims with texture, dynamic energy, and a sense of movement. Bold… and beautiful.

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tejploopare – gråkråka

Posted: 7 August 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 7th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

How do I know it’s Bandcamp Friday? Is it because I’ve received in the region of fifty emails by midday for new releases? Well, yes, there is that. But ultimately, it’s the fact that there’s a new release on Swedish microlabel dret skivor. This month’s is a radio-friendly unit shifter available to download and as a CD in a limited edition of two copies.

With uncharacteristically voluble notes accompanying it, we find the work described as ‘A chance meeting between winged and un-winged and captured hooded crow monologue.’ It would be impossible not to infer some element of reference to the 1979 debut album by Nurse With Wound, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella, which in turn was taken from Lautréamont’s The Songs of Maldoror, a work which sits within the broader oeuvre of Surrealism. All of this serves to present a comprehensible intertext given what dret skivor and its artists are all about – which, to boil it down to less academic terms, is ‘weird shit’.

Tejploopare add, ‘We thank our avian masters for the source material and Remo de Vico for his programming skills in creating the time-stretcher Loom that has been used in the creation of this piece’.

But if you’re expecting birdsong, or even something inspired by Hitchcock’s The Birds, think again. Gråkråka is just one fifteen-minute track which, regardless of its source material, manifests as one extended echo-heavy swirling drone, as much akin to the sound of a giant millstone grinding against another from the depths of a huge cavern, or the sound of a million bats taking flight from a cave with the audio slowed by maybe three hundred percent. Admittedly, I’ve never really listened to crows in conversation, and was unaware – or had forgotten – that they have the capacity to mimic the sounds of other birds, animals, and machinery’, according to learnbirdwatching.com. While the veracity of this is debatable, it is understood and accepted that crows are capable of advanced and highly sophisticated communication, using a range of techniques.

But let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and take on face value that gråkråka is simply the sound of crows, manipulated to a greater or lesser extent to forge a churning, whirring, multi-textural sonic experience. It’s not a drone per se, so much as a rumbling eddy, an endless whistle, and a slow grind, all at once, and these all shift around in tone and the level to which they sit to the fore over the track’s duration. At times, the upper buzzes and hums, the higher frequency fizz, makes my inner ears itchy, and make me feel a palpable relief that I don’t suffer tinnitus, but am coming to the opinion that perhaps a certain level of hearing loss may not be such a bad thing for the avoidance of sonic torture at certain frequencies. If only I hadn’t been so bloody sensible wearing earplugs to gigs this last twenty years, eh?

Gråkråka is not a work of harsh noise: it’s not even overtly noisy. But it is one of those aural explorations which is designed to inflict discomfort. And in that, it succeeds. By the mid-point, it’s attained a quire specific level of torturousness, and while it does pull back from this for a time, what replaces that scouring blast is a quivering ominous rumble, which again swells and replicates the sensation of some unseen fear growing closer: put another way, it’s the soundtrack to a nightmare, to a horror without words or boldly manifestation, simply a psychological attack which goes on, and on, twisting to a trebly roar akin to a demon rasping suicidal ideations into your ear during the final five minutes.

It’s not actually a criticism when I express the view that gråkråka feels like a long fifteen minutes. It’s not intended to be one of those soft ambient drifts where half an hour simply evaporates. Quite the opposite: this is an album that’s raison d’aitre is to seed discomfort and make you squirm from beginning to end. And it does.

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Dymna Lotva – Vyraj

Posted: 5 August 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Prophecy Productions – 7th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Earlier this year, we received news that Belarus metal band Dymna Lotva were in some bother when some of their music videos were declared by a court in their home country to constitute ‘extremist materials’. As vocalist Katsiaryna “Nokt Aeon” Mankevich explained at the time, “This means that fans from our home country, who liked, reposted or commented on these videos in the past are now facing a real risk to disappear into a prison. The rule of law does not apply in Belarus. Just one like under a video that has only now been designated as ‘extremist material’ might mean time in jail”.

Having fled the country, they’ve continued to work, and work hard, and are now unveiling their fourth full-length album to the world, following a succession of killer singles, including ‘The Boat of Despair’ , featuring Aaron Stainthorpe, formerly of My Dying Bride.

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And now, on the eve of the new album’s release, Mankevich has been charged with ‘extremist activity’, ‘financing terrorism’, and three more criminal charges in her home country. The Investigative Committee of the Sovietsky District of Minsk officially opened a case against Mankevich, who lives in exile in Poland, in June. She has now been summoned to appear in the Minsk City Court for a hearing on August 14th.

Mankevich explains how this has come about, and remains defiant, writing ‘It is clearly connected to my participation in protests against the regime and to my support for Ukraine. To me, it feels even somewhat flattering that this regime is still keeping an eye on us six years after the protests and five years after I was forced to leave Belarus. This confirms that I am on the right path and also provides me with a strong motivation to keep going. Please do not worry about me. Poland has granted me international protection status because of such political persecution. As a result of this trial, Belarus could seize all my properties still remaining in the country. Well, spending my money on creating music turned out to be a great idea after all. And to the Investigative Committee of the Sovietsky District of Minsk I say: Kiss my extremist ass!’

Some say that politics has no place in music or the arts. Those people are ignoramuses. Even as far back as Shakespeare, art has been the vehicle by which political commentary – and dissent – has been disseminated, often via coded or allegorical means. And this context is essential in understanding the band, what they stand for, and why. And, within this context, the arrival of Vyraj is an achievement which is nothing short of phenomenal.

Dymna Lotva are staunch in their rebellious, dissident stance: as their bio states, ‘their name means “Swamp in Smoke”, which relates to the atrocities surrounding the burned villages of Paliessie, which has endured bloody massacres and brutal conflict in the past. Their lyrics are often based on Belarusian tales filled with accounts of sorrow gleaned from historical archives, folklore, and new horrors that are committed in their home country at the present’.

Black metal is clearly an appropriate medium for all of this, but they describe Vyraj as ‘a musical kaleidoscope’, a work which pushes far in myriad stylistic directions, and it’s not an album built around protest and anger, but an exploration of what they call ‘Belarusian ethno-astronomy,’ explaining that ‘in Slavonic legends, the starry sky is associated both with the afterlife and with journeys, which becomes closely intertwined with the musicians’ personal experience of forced emigration’.

The album itself delivers on everything it promises, and more. The first track, ‘Zory’ begins gently before sliding into an almost Swans-like hypnotic groove, before finally the black metal blast powers in. But there’s a twist: the demonic howls and thunderous drums are paired with a sense of expanse that offers hints of prog bombast and symphonic glory. incredibly, it not only works, but is a complete rush.

‘Veha’, which clocks in at over seven minutes, is a multi-faceted epic in every sense, with some dainty chiming notes offering a melodic delicacy which contrasts significantly with the blistering guitars and throat-ripping vocals, finally yielding to a softer closing passage which borders on the ambient.

The aforementioned ‘The Boat of Despair’, which bears one of only two titles in English, is a definite standout, not least of all because it represents such a stylistic shift, introducing hunts of post-metal alongside hints of Amenra, and offers so much emotional depth.

It’s the range and dynamics of Vyraj which make it such a gripping listen, as you find yourself wondering what the next twist or turn will be, and amidst the flaming fury, there are moments or transcendental beauty which are truly elevating. There are still plenty of rabid, raving black metal blastout passages on offer here, and when they go all out, Dymna Lotva really do go all out with face-melting ferocity. But ‘Niamah Darohi’, with its sweeping operatic vocal contrasting with a hellish howl, a rolling piano paired with shuddering rapidfire kick drum is exemplary of the album’s immense range and the remarkable vision when it comes not only to the songwriting, but its execution.

The closer, the eight-minute ‘Return My Coffin Home’ is the very definition of ‘epic’, and reminds us that this may be the only way they will ever return home, at least as long as the current regime is in place. That they have produced such a remarkably detailed, intricate, and impactful work against all the odds is testament to the artistic spirit. Long may it continue to represent the instinct for survival. Whatever happens next, with Vyraj, Dymna Lotva have determined their legacy as innovators within the sphere of black metal.

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Ran Slavin – Hyper Basic

Posted: 2 August 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Nocturnal Rainbow Recordings – 31st July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The title of Ran Slavin’s latest does, for all the world, sound like some slangy diss.

“I’m getting skibidi rizz.”

“Bruh’s hyper basic.”

“I can’t even.”

“Bruh.”

It’s been a while since I’ve penned any dialogue in a creative context, and it also transpires that it isn’t actually some slangy diss, but precisely what it is remains unclear, and the accompanying notes do little to solidify where we’re at here, focusing on informing us what the album isn’t, and what it doesn’t do, instead of shedding light on its actual objective:

‘Neither functional nor ambient, the album occupies a shifting territory where abstraction and physicality remain in constant negotiation – a deconstructed club language suspended between pressure, atmosphere, and perceptual displacement… Rather than offering release, Hyper Basic inhabits a state of suspension, where signals dissolve into beats, reduction folds into excess, and movement unfolds as much in the mind as on the floor.’

And so, from what I can discern, it doesn’t occupy any particular space, but hovers and ambulates in some ‘between’ space.

The ‘hyper’ seems to relate more to the schizoid energy which ripples through the album’s eight ridiculously hectic compositions. The first of these, bearing the title ‘Ritual Decay’ would, superficially’ suggest some snarling back metal grind, but what we get is some sparse electro groove, and ‘Static Ritual’ is infinitely more Gilles Peterson than John Peel, if you catch my drift. Still, while it may not be entirely my bag, I’d take Gilles Peterson over Jordan Peterson, or, for that matter, Gilles de Rais any day. And we shall move on.

It’s all pretty chilled, but for some reason, I personally find this kind of stuff impossibly tense. When the beats hit, it’s not that I fear bring grooved away, as much I wonder what will happen next.

This is very much a work steeped in the tropes of 90s and early 00s dance music – or, perhaps, more accurately, the sound of more underground club culture. Despite the insistent beats and vocal samples which drift in and out, Hyper Basic doesn’t even for one moment deploy the formula of the monotonous mainstream nightclub thud-thud-thud-thud. So that’s another thing it isn’t – a work of mainstream dance. Rather than glowstick territory, this is chin-stroking territory, dance music you don’t actually dance to, but reflect on, dissect, muse on the dynamics, the tones, the details of the beats, and the vibrations. The arrangements are sparse, and there’s space and separation between the beats and the low-key bass tracks.

There are moments when the introverted shuffles break out into all-out groove euphoria, as on the rushing bomp ‘n’ stop of ‘No’, which builds over the course of almost eleven minutes, but many of the tracks just flick and flutter along while whispers reverberate in the background. On ‘Beta Phase’ the beats turn harder, a thwocking metallic bin lid of a snare cuts through a woozy, rolling bass that’s dizzyingly dense and it’s anything but comfortable – although I suspect many would love it. A looped vocal snippet bobs to the surface here and there, too. ‘Found Luxury’ fires up a snarling, serrated bass which owes more to rock than dance, and it drives through a drifting wash of synths and samples amidst a rather conflict-filled semi-ambient concoction.

As with much of Ran Slavin’s work, Hyper Basic is hard to place, and just as hard to critique, largely because it doesn’t stay in one place long enough to get a handle on what’s happening. There are elements I just can’t get on board with, while accepting it’s a matter of taste, but it’s impossible to deny that Ran Slavin has a knack for bringing a unique slant to the dancier end of electronic music, and that Hyper Basic is anything but.

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Lawrence English – The Rest Is My Ghost

Posted: 30 July 2026 in Reviews, Albums
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Room40 – 7th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Lawrence English is an artist who invariably creates works imbued with insight and purpose, with concept and theoretical grounding in the contemplative, academic sense. I had the good fortune to interview him by email some years ago, which proved to be not only illuminating, but exhilarating on a personal level when he wrote insightfully and knowledgeably of William S. Burroughs and the cut-up technique. I very much get the impression he spends as much time considering his work as he does creating it, in the physical sense.

That interview, sadly, is long gone, along with the site which published it. This is true of many interviews, reviews, and indeed, works of fiction which I had published online through the years, and I’m not sure they exist on hard drives anymore either so far down the line. Back in the late 90s and early 00s, we were sold the dream that The Internet would be the archive of everything. The idea went that if it existed, however niche, you could find it online, and this was essentially the precis for Warren Ellis’ 2007 novel Crooked Little Vein. This was also the time of MySpace and what felt like a new world, full of potential. And then the corporations took over and it all turned to shit. I daresay others have a different perspective, but this is mine. And of course, Ellis turned out to be another sleazy male shitbag and overnight saw his outstanding career sunk by his own actions. But I miss those days when the Internet was exciting, anarchic, and not dominated by AI and bots or riven with social and political engineering and so on.

And this is where we arrive at The Rest Is My Ghost, and Lawrence’s notes on the album:

‘Nostalgia is not an ideology, though in this moment, we could be mistaken for thinking it might be just that. Over the past years, the idea of nostalgia has been filtered through various political and technological lenses and has become a tool used for forgetting, rather than remembering. Instead of embracing histories’ complexities and inconsistencies, this version of nostalgia seeks only singular recollection. This contemporary phenomenon of nostalgia has become a methodology at best, and a weapon at worst, used to erode the past and project forward a collapsed and unimaginably sanitised version of things, places, and ways of being from former times. It’s this projection that sees it playing a mounting role in a social pathology associated with reducing the imagined possibilities of future.

‘The Rest Is My Ghost is a record that interrogates the manifestations of this reductive futuring and celebrates those that have tried (and failed), and those who continue to push back against decayed and revisionist positions. It’s a record that considers the weaponisation of nostalgia for the purposes of cloaking possible futures.’

These observations are on point. The far-right parties in the UK – in particular Reform and its adherents are largely basing their campaigns on nostalgia. But not even real nostalgia. They hark back go a golden age that never was with dewy-eyed yearning for a completely glossed reimagining of the 1950s, whereby kids cycled to school down cobbled streets, and bidding the milkman, who is whistling cheerily, a good morning, and dad does off to work in his tweed tie while mum goes to the village store and buys freshly baked bread and eggs laid on the local farm. And NONE OF THIS HAPPENED. This is probably why the Facebook pages in support of Nigel Farage and espousing this worldview are bursting with bollocks AI mages of London busses and phone boxes and cardboard cutout people.

We still had rationing until 1954, some nine years after the second world war ended – although by this time, we were living in the grip of the Cold War and fear of nuclear annihilation. A golden age indeed.

On The Rest Is My Ghost, Lawrence English conjures many rich, immersive atmospheres, many of which evoke nostalgic echoes of myriad shades. ‘大’ opens the album with a crashing gong and eerie wraiths and swirling eddies of sound which slowly give way to tectonic crashes and earth-shattering bursts of sound which connote a collapse of civilisation, and, indeed, the planet. It’s heavy, and it’s hard to breathe while surrounded by this rib-crushing, oxygen-bereft swirl of sound.

As much as ‘Acid Nostalgia’ makes an obvious nod to a particular moment in time, there is both humour and serious comment to be unravelled here. It’s something I noticed in my thirties: peers would bemoan how there had been no decent music released since they were twenty-one or so. This was patently untrue: what they were actually saying is that they switched off after they left college or university and got jobs, started families, and disengaged. Their rave days, their festival days, were their life pinnacle. They associated these experiences of their youth with freedom and a lack of responsibility, and found themselves unable to separate their ageing and becoming entrenched in adulthood, the 9-5 and all that shit, with the times themselves.

There’s no escaping or denying that things have a unique buzz when they’re new, and in your teens the senses are heightened, and you can spend the rest of your life failing to recapture that initial rush. But some of these sad fucks… it’s like their lives ended at eighteen or so, and by the time they hit thirty they’re embittered.

Echoes and layers and dark ambient forced define The Rest Is My Ghost. ‘Sodium Vapour Halo’ (remember when street lights weren’t white LEDs? Remember the sodium haze?) presents a howling wall of sound, a sound that screams anxiety, that swirls all around and grips your very being and shakes it. Ah, ‘Aerial Cable’… it’s a subtler, but no less wry commentary which stands alongside South Park’s ‘Member Berries’ episode. Nostalgia is big business, but one which very much traps people into an idealised misremembrance of the past – and keep them buying anniversary reissues of the albums they had on tape or whatever when they were in school.

By the time we arrive at ‘Hack’, we find ourselves worn out and exhausted as we trudge through drifting sand dunes of sound.

The Rest Is My Ghost is not a representation of the all-pervasive nostalgia trip that keeps the people docile – or angry, as they rage about wanting their country back, idealising a time before immigrants took over (which would, of course, predate the Roman Empire). As English positions it, it’s an interrogation – and in intense one, which responds to the ugly side of the wave of nostalgia which is sweeping through contemporary culture. It also feels like a response, and one which doesn’t shy from confrontation. While so much of this nostalgia appears to stem not so much from a love of the part but a fear of the future, so The Rest Is My Ghost encapsulates a certain sense of anxiety over the prospect that we fail to make progress in a meaningful and constructive way. This is a dark album for dark times. Without words, The Rest Is My Ghost not only conveys so much, but provokes so much thought and speaks on so many levels, making it an essential work.

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Elektrikill – Küntzpiracy

Posted: 20 July 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Evol Music Group – 26th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Over on this side of the pond, in the UK, we have plenty to beef about, and more than enough to worry about, too. But while we see endless footage of war in Ukraine, Gaza, and the whole of the Middle East as the US and Iran wrestle their way through the most futile war, we’re in a petty sheltered place, and as much as we may reel in horror over news of the latest high school massacre and laugh at Donald Trump’s daily meltdowns, we do so from a position of relative safety. However hard we continue to lumber into a state of total surveillance, however emboldened the racists become thanks to the rising right, however rapidly our government are eroding our right to protest, favouring perpetrators of genocide over those who speak in opposition to it, there’s still no danger of some masked ICE psycho pulling your car over and demanding your papers before shooting you in the head. Our politicians may nearly all be slippery, deceptive careerists who accept ‘donations’ from individuals and companies with vested interests, but we’re not led by a demented narcissist who’s openly professed to being a wannabe dictator. In short, I don’t think we fully grasp what it’s like to live in America right now.

Elektrikill’s founder, Steve Vil, says of Küntzpiracy – a title that’s both a fairly lame pun and a bit of cliché, but gets a pass because America and an approximation of a Butthole Surfers reference – “Basically it’s my most political album touching on themes of government corruption and half of this country’s loss of humanity while claiming it’s all in the name of Jesus. That pisses me off. I also call out closeted government officials in ‘The Scream’. Look, guys, just be gay instead of crashing Grindr any time you meet in large groups. I do give the listener a break from the political stuff. ‘Vampire Blond’, for example, is about a vampire drag queen.”

There’s a fair bit to unpack here, and he makes a number of valid points. It’s not the whole of America. In fact, it’s a slender majority backing the MAGA madness. Unfortunately, they’ve voted to facilitate an insane power grab, meaning that while there are a fair few who aren’t happy with the direction things have been taking lately, tough shot: you could have seen it coming, so this is on you. And this also involves the most overtly racist, homophobic administration in memory – but as with anything which involves hypermasculinity, what the world outside sees is massive repressed gayness. Yeah, we’re looking at you, Andrew Tate, with your no-bollocks swimming trunks and purple satin blouse, and the culture you espouse. What utterly fucked-up times we live in.

‘Thrum’ makes for a dark, dense start to the album, throbbing bass dominating, the distorted monotone vocals low in the mix as extraneous squalls of electronic noise burst all around, and ‘S(t)imulation’ keeps things dark with some hefty tribal percussion battering away through a murky wall of sound – although the choruses break out with a genuine hook driven by a pumping beat and punchy snare. It’s like leaping from Coil to late 80s Ministry, but it works, and the aforementioned ‘Vampire Blond’ swings into classic electrogoth / technoindustrial territory, and I could chuck a raft of touchstones in here – and that’s no bad thing. they clearly know what they’re doing, and where they’re positioning themselves, and do it well.

‘The Scream’ is again a bit Ministry circa The Land of Rape and Honey, and perhaps a bit KMFDM, and more broadly, a bit Wax Trax! Hardly innovative, but the delivery is top-notch. The beats slam hard.

Landing at the album’s midpoint the piano-led ‘A Chill in the Air’ is both expansive and claustrophobic, and slowing the tempo to explore a more brooding atmospheric, it’s well placed, ahead of full-throttle rager ‘Monoshift’ which brings the industrial aggression pumped to the max. Indeed, the second half of the album is harder, faster, and the altogether synthier ‘My Salvation’ rhymes ‘my salvation’ with ‘masturbation’ in a style reminiscent of early Revolting Cocks.

Stylistically, Electrikill don’t really break any new ground, but Küntzpiracy is intense, angry, and relentless, the aggro and the tempo picking up noticeably in the second half, with ‘Manifesto’ delivering a power finish. With Küntzpiracy, Elektrikill bring the fury and bring the force – and the political ire. This is very much an album of the now, and it hits hard.

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Emmaleen Tangleweed – The Weaving

Posted: 20 July 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 3st1 July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

“This album is kind of a collage of all the books I was reading and my impressions of the general emotions swimming in the collective experience, as well as personal stories I’ve picked up along the way.” So says Emmaleen Tangleweed of her new album, The Weaving, which was recorded in September 2025 ‘in a log cabin in Swartvlei (“black lake”), Western Cape, South Africa’. The liner notes describe it as ‘a collection of gothic folk and blues ballads tinged with hypnotic magic realism’.

The first song, ‘The Hours’ is likely, then, to be a direct reference to Michael Cunningham’s 1998 Pulitzer-winning novel – which in turn was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway. It’s a wonderfully earthy slice of dark, primitive blues, rendered all the more potent by the rich patina of Tangleweed’s voice. In the recent Six of the Best feature for Aural Aggravation, she cited Black Pudding by Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood as an influence, citing ‘an archetypal timelessness’, and this is what very much comes through here, perhaps with a hint of PJ Harvey in the mix, too. There’s nothing complex – or even innovative – about it, but blues isn’t about complexity or innovation, it’s about feeling, about soul. And this is something The Weaving brings in spades.

‘Silent Killer’ could be a hundred years old, but it could also be an outtake from Rid of Me. Emmaleen sings from her gut, and with guts, too, and plays with a perfect feel for the swing required to bring the songs to life. There’s a bit of fuzz on the low strings which gives a vintage, analogue feel to the production. This is also true of the sepia-toned ‘Strangeling Angel’, which very much replicates the feel of those early twentieth century blues legends and those altogether more obscure.

The introduction of cello on ‘Blind Faith’ is done subtly, but adds depth to the otherwise sparse arrangement, and for the most part, everything hangs on her voice and acoustic guitar. Perhaps because of this, there’s a palpable intimacy and immediacy about The Weaving, capturing as it does the sensation of being in a small room as the songs are performed live. ‘Never Ending History’ is almost a crawl, and she drawls the lyrics low and slow, and something strange happens with time as it slips back. one can almost envisage grainy black and white photographs accompanying it.

Most of the songs are in the five-minute region and she fills the space with a rare tension. ‘Ask the Dust’ is another song which makes a direct reference, this time to John Fante’s 1939 novel set in The Great Depression, and shit, it’s bleak. ‘Is there anyone out there’ she asks against images of ‘the burnt out rust’ and a monotonous, repetitive riff reminiscent of Michael Gira at his most lugubrious. It’s here that is becomes most apparent that it’s possible to be heavy without distortion or volume, and that weight comes from the heart. You can hear her fingers hitting the strings on ‘Ask the Dust’, in a way that has the same feel as striking dry earth with a pick. It’s not entertainment, but labour, and The Weaving finds Tangleweed dredging deep. There’s no showing on the doll where this music touches: it’s somewhere deep inside, subconscious, subliminal. And herein lies its power – it’s something that’s affecting on an almost cellular or biological level, resonating with experiences of past lives or something. You feel it in a way that’s impossible to explain. But feel it, you do.

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Colin Webster / Balázs Pándi / Matt Cargill – Chewed Up And Spat Out

Posted: 13 July 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Raw Tonk Records – 15th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

I’m late to the party with this one. Can I pretend it’s fashionably late, rather than simply tardy? I’m going to say yes, since the event actually took place in 2019 and it’s taken till now to make its way into the world, but let’s focus on the fact that this is, indeed, one hell of a party.

Chewed Up And Spat Out was recorded in a one-off session in London. Hungarian master drummer Balázs Pándi (Merzbow, Thurston Moore, Mats Gustafsson etc.) was in town for a few days and contacted saxophonist Colin Webster (Sex Swing, Dead Neanderthals etc..) who suggested adding Matt Cargill (Sly & The Family Drone) to the session on electronics. And if that lineup isn’t enough, the whole thing was recorded and mixed by Tim Cedar of Part Chimp, who knows a thing or two about noise.

We’re deep in wild jazz experimentalism here, and this is apparent from the groans and honks of saxophone which warp and drone amidst a simmering cacophony of rolling drums – not so much a rhythm as a gathering storm. The electronic elements are subtle at first, a few bleeps and twitters of treble pass here and there while a low drone hums almost subliminally on the first track, ‘To Arise from Sleep’. But the drone mutates into a thick, throbbing pulsation which gargles like a digital didgeridoo on ‘Chewed Up’, while the percussion is more subtle, predominantly manifesting as clattering rim shots initially and the sax is similarly restrained, simmering under until it finally cuts loose. At over eight and a half minutes, counterpart ‘Spat Out’ is something of an endurance test, and works backwards, starting with a crescendo before lurching stop-start blasts of noise which almost approximate a riff give way to a prolonged freeform spasm.

Not only does it have the best title, but ‘Money Shitter’ is peak freak, one of those crazed cacophonous jazz monsters that starts like its ending and ends like its starting and never goes anywhere but at the same time flies in all directions simultaneously. It sounds like unplanned, unco-ordinated chaos – and perhaps it is – but the thing to remember is that it’s supposed to sound like that, and they manage to navigate a succession of explosive crescendos interspersed with subtler, more ponderous passages, and in combination, they interrogate the interplay between the instruments, the tones, the textures, the dynamics. The final piece, ‘Blot’, sees them inspect these sonic relationships in a more granular detail, ponderously pushing through a succession of peaks and troughs for almost twelve minutes. Here, the abrasive intensity is tempered in favour of atmosphere – although the mid-point finds Webster wringing some prolonged bleats over rolling, fluid beats, building to a frenzied extended crescendo and a slow collapse.

There’s a lot of movement on Chewed Up And Spat Out, an album which conveys not only great energy, but a physicality and kineticism – which does, ultimately, leave you feeling as the title tells it. This is the good shit, and by the conclusion, it’s fair to say that from a listening perspective, it does what it says on the proverbial tin.

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