Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

The Pixel Sky – A Sense of Danger

Posted: 24 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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29th October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Hungarian-born vocalist, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Áron Siegler has been busy of late. Hot on the heels of the Glitching Sky EP – and I mean HOT, with a mere three weeks’ gap – The Pixel Rain drop their debut album, A Sense of Danger.

It seems that for him, like many of a creative bent, the current state of affairs, globally and domestically has not only instilled a sense of danger, but a sense of urgency. At the time of writing, the UK government has just taken down a number of its sites online due to a cyber security threat, but has added a new ‘survival’ page with a list of essential items it recommends every household has in stock in the event of war, a more extensive cyber attack, or extreme weather disrupting supply chains – including water and electricity. If we learned one thing from the pandemic, it’s that telling an entire population not to panic while giving guidance such as this is pretty much guaranteed to create just that.

This climate of fear and suspense, the sense that we’re perpetually on the cusp of something seismic provides a large part of the drive behind A Sense of Danger, of which Siegler says,

“The main theme was the anxiety about how our society is edging closer to its collapse through politics, social media or climate catastrophes, but there were more personal topics as well simultaneously about toxic relationships, jealousy and a haunting past. Both ‘storylines’ ended up connecting with each other and found their inevitable end by the end of the album, which became surprisingly bittersweet even to myself.”

The musical inspiration for the album is the two-part structure of New Order’s Brotherhood, and he approached the writing process with the idea of giving the record two complementary halves, using the distinction between darker and more uplifting electronic sounds as a loose creative framework rather than a rigid stylistic division. The result, we’re told ‘is a cohesive collection of eight songs that moves through varying shades of tension, urgency, melancholy and melodic warmth’.

Four of the album’s eight songs featured on the Glitching Sky EP, although interestingly, while three of the EP tracks appear in the first half, ‘The Glitching Sky’ is placed as the album’s penultimate track.

This means that EP track ‘Sacrifice’, which raises the curtain on the album, sweeps in with a mix of grandeur and tension. When covering the EP, I described it as an ‘anthem’, and placing it up front makes for a bold, attention-grabbing opening, and the expansive, cinematic ‘Last’ follows, pitching bleak imagery against a thumping dance beat and widescreen guitars and sweeping synths. The production is immense.

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The first of the previously unreleased tracks, ‘All the Lovers’ drives in hard and fast, with some cybergoth / techno drum machine and bubbling bass action. At this point, industrial-tinged goth that takes cues from early NIN and later Depeche Mode has been done and done and done, meaning the field is crowded, and while it might not be the most gripping of the album’s tracks, the quality of the songwriting and the production once again stand out here. The title track closes the first half in grand and ambitious style, with expansive layers of synth once again going wide over a rumbling bass. Here, Siegler’s vocal sounds at it most tense, capturing that anxiety and paranoia which defines the album’s focus – and at the same time, coming closest to a delivery reminiscent of Dave Gahan’s soulful baritone.

The second half certainly feels lighter, more poppy: the rolling tom sweeps which pan through ‘Danse Macabre’ are evocative of arena rock, and the song breaks out into a buoyant Europop bopalong. It sets the tone, and while it certainly fulfils the rubric of the album of two halves, the second, in its more dance-orientated vibes, feels like something of a let-down. Tension and release in itself is often a good thing, but this is feels more like jetting off on a beach holiday in Spain and forgetting all the shit back home. And yes, ‘Pieces of Love’ goes full New Order in the break toward the end.

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I always found New Order disappointing – not simply in the wake of their flight as Joy Division, but for the trajectory they took after their dark and tentative debut, Movement. I feel rather the same way about this album. Hearing ‘Glitching Sky’ in this context, it does sound like a euphoric dance reimagining of New Order’s ‘Temptation’. Thankfully, – I suppose – the last song, ‘All Night Long’ isn’t a cover of the Lionel Ritchie song. But it is a mid-tempo electro-ballad, and anticlimactic in comparison to the promise of the where we started. It is certainly an album of two halves.

The Pixel Rain (Áron Siegler) by Evelina Klimova (Landscape 03) web

Photo: Evalina Klimva

Ministry – Hate to Go (Take Out Or Delivery)

Posted: 23 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Cleopatra Records – 30th October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s hard to process the fact that at this moment in time, we are as far from 1985 and 1985 as from the end of the second world war. Similarly, it’s true that what might be considered ‘late-era’ Ministry has been in existence for longer than what one could call their main career. It’s been an interesting journey, from a largely forgettable synth-pop debut in ‘83, through a hardening sound as showcased on Twitch three years later, before things got really interesting and properly ugly with third album, The Land of Rape and Honey in 1988. Psalm 69 blasted them from being a cult act to a global force, arguably the definitive industrial metal act. They were on MTV with videos featuring William S. Burroughs. Although Filth Pig charted higher in many territories, and was a particularly, dark, heavy, and bleak affair, it was not a big seller, and everything since has been a case of diminishing returns, and not just in commercial terms. Not that they’ve ever been a particularly commercial band, despite major-label backing for some twenty years.

And while it’s true that Al Jourgensen has become increasingly fixated on blasting successive US presidents and their governments – particularly the Republican ones – one has to give credit where it’s due. It’s a worthy mission, and there’s a fair chance that he’d have called it a day sooner if he’d not had so much to rage about. He called it a day in 2013, only to return five years later with Donald Trump firmly in his sights in place of George W. Bush. The Bush years felt like an all-time low in US politics at the time…

And now we find the world at war, half the world on fire and the other half flooded, and wake up each morning wondering if it’s actually still here or if AI has ended it while we’ve been asleep. Small wonder Jourgensen had to have one last word on the state of everything. Sadly, it seems they’ve gone down the AI route for the videos, which is disappointing, particularly given the political context.

Singles ‘We Hate’ and ‘Singularity’ were promising enough: on the one hand, fairly standard fare for later-era Ministry in sonic and stylistic terms, but solid in terms of quality, and the album goes straight in heavy with ‘Crickets’. The guitars border on nu-metal, hitting like slabs of concrete, but the distorted vocals, samples, and driving percussion, all represent the Ministry hallmarks that go all the way back to songs like ‘Thieves’ – only here, there’s stab at a huge anthemic chorus. ‘Voices of Hate’ in many ways reprises ‘Hero’ from Psalm 69, with the speed metal thrash of Mötörhead, and while it’s solid enough, it feels rather predictable. This could serve as a summary for much of the album. It sounds like a Ministry album. Sludgy, metallic guitars grind away against relentless percussion, and there are samples galore. In fact, the samples take precedence over the vocals for the most part, and much of the supposed ‘commentary’ is represented by soundbite snippets of newscasts and the like.

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While sampling exploded in the early 80s with the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire being early adopters of emerging technologies which facilitated (affordable) tape loops and the like, and hop-hop acts quickly took up and ran with it, it wasn’t until the late 80s and early 90s that samples became commonplace in a rock or metal context, and Ministry were at the forefront there. Thirty years (and more) on, it feels formulaic. ‘Delete’ starts out sounding like it might take a more experimental direction, but ultimately reprises parts of the backing for ‘TV Song’ before presenting a collage of samples against a dirty, low-slung-riff. The vocals are blazing with rage, but only partially intelligible. ‘We Hate’ adds a dash of glam to the chugging wall of grey fury, but not a lot else. The same is true of CD-only bonus cut ‘The White Man Lied’: it’s got some glammy swing and quite some groove behind it.

The six-and-a-half-minute ‘Grifter’ slows the pace and marks a welcome textural shift, too. It’s by no means one of Ministry’s best cuts, but its placement in the middle of the album makes it stands out, and there are Trump samples galore. All well and good, but snippets of Trump’s worst moments are added to social media on a daily basic. Every press conference, every rally, every post on ‘Truth’ social gives us more insane babble from his rapidly unravelling sociopathic narcissistic mind. Do we really need to hear any more of this demented shit? Maybe we do: the media has normalised his cracked rambling. And what Ministry do here is remind us that this is insane. And it IS insane. How the fuck have we reached this point where a dribbling, shitting, dementia-ridden dictator is the most powerful person on the planet? I say person, but at this point, he’s slipped beneath even being human. And still his supporters clap like seals at his every vapid statement, and proponents of the far right here in the UK lap up his endless shit and proclaim that following his lead is the way forward. The worst of it is that most of us don’t only feel powerless, but we are powerless when it comes to turning the tide, because we’re battling against billionaires and bots – funded by the billionaires. AI manipulation is rife, and we’re all fucked.

Someone I’m ‘friends’ with on Facebook spent a good few months posting AI images of herself and band they like, before announcing that they’d been made redundant, their job having been replaced by AI. Fast forward a few weeks, and they tell the world how, after searching and applying for new jobs with no success, they’re using AI to search for and apply for jobs for them. And this is where we’re at. No wonder Jourgensen felt the need to unleash another salvo of blasting fury at the world. Hate To Go is by no means the best Ministry album, or even an album that sounds like a definitive sign-off. It sounds more like a work of business as usual. But perhaps that’s to miss the point – or it is the point. What I’m trying to say is that while Hate To Go is the band’s official last statement, it’s one which shows an understanding that their work will never be done as long as capitalism reigns – a sentiment articulated on ‘Singularity’. This track seems to summarise the album’s purpose – to document the end of times, to place a marker in history where Al and co can say ‘we told you so, and we give u-p telling you now’.

Penultimate track ‘Burned Out’ is one of the album’s strongest, a driving nihilistic assault that finally sees Ministry hitting the mark in brutal fashion and harking back to Filth Pig.

Closer ‘We’re Still Here’ features Paul Barker, and with its electro-driven intro also represents a late return to form as well as an unexpected expansion on the usual sound, unleashing a choir for the finale. I’m not sure I love it, but credit due for a late left-turn.

So where does this leave us? Who knows? Is this even the final final album by Ministry? Maybe we should ask this again in another five years. In the scheme of the Ministry oeuvre, Hate To Go is nothing special, and in many ways adds little to their corpus. But at the same time, it feels like an album that had to be made.

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Matt Rösner – Lost Meridians

Posted: 16 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 16th October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Writing on Lost Meridians, Jonathan Wilson observes that ‘traditional instrumentation is manipulated, twisted, stretched and weaved into endless webs. Recorded with whatever was at hand, like a phone or single mic, these short and sharp moments have been pushed far beyond their original convention. Sparkling highs and low sub sonics seem to linger throughout asking more questions than offering answers,’ adding ‘this is music to pause to, this is music to slow down to, this is music to dream to… But mostly, this is music to remind us that sometimes the unexplained things around us are just as important as the things inside us’.

The unexplained has – at least for those of us who are a certain age – connotations of The X Files, but also, to an extent, Tales of the Unexpected, and The Twilight Zone, resurrected post-millennium.

Now, some of the things – at least where the titles are concerned – on Lost Meridians are quire easily explained, not least of all the first composition, ‘Mountains, standing steadfast’. It’s gentle, slow, contemplative, hazy, and in many ways reflects, in sonic form, the experience of gazing up at peaks, partly obscured by cloud, in a moment of calm.

Each autumn, I make a trip with my daughter to the Lake District. We stay in a cottage on the shore of Windermere. The cottage has a private jetty, and we scattered some of my wife’s ashes there the first year we went. Looking across the water towards the ridge on the far shore, and, behind that, Coniston Old Man, I have felt that sense of stillness that comes from being in nature, and also the sense of insignificance. The mountains, the lakes, were here millennia before us, and will remain for millennia after. We’re just passing through, and all we can really do is make the most of the time we have, however brief – and for some, it’s briefer than others. I find comfort and solace in the fact she knew and loved this magnificent landscape, and we shared time in it, as a family, and that consequently, our daughter feels a deep attachment to these surroundings, too.

‘At First Light’ features almost unfiltered folk elements, with a gently-strummed classical guitar standing in the foreground against a vague, eddying background, which at times tapers off to nearly nothing, while the immense, nebular drift of ‘A Vastness, unresolved’ mirrors the connotations evoked by the title perfectly. Indeed, we exist as dots within a vastness that’s beyond comprehension, and as such can never be resolved.

‘Across a line’ consists of two parts, the first of which chimes and rings but briefly before fading out to be replaced by a droning roar – heavy rain? a waterfall? wind? static? – which in turn fades beneath a soft watercolour wash of sound, and it’s remarkably soothing. The pairing of the final two pieces, ‘Fractures in Silence’ and the title track, are each six and a half minutes in length. The former takes the form of a long, slow undulation, which sounds in some respects like the dying wheeze of a broken church organ, culminating in what sounds something like an elongated cymbal crash and frozen-frame electronic glitch. The latter gradually fades in, a low, rumbling hum which hangs like a dense, churning sonic cloud.

Over the course of the album’s forty-one minutes, Rösner creates some richly atmospheric moments, the elements interwoven into a magnificently textured tapestry.

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AD Ozium – Body Without Organs

Posted: 14 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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15th October 2026

AD Ozium is the musical vehicle for multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Moore, based in Washington DC – a vehicle for what he describes as ‘a fractured, hallucinatory convergence of freak folk textures, dark ambient, and no wave dissonance.’ That’s a lot to digest, just on paper. What’s more, this second album, which follows just four months after In The Style Of Dead Sparrows, ‘confronts themes of dehumanization, economic exploitation,

revenge, and systemic collapse. It argues that dehumanization functions as a gateway to sustained, trans-generational cruelty, and that societies built upon the denial of another’s humanity ultimately cultivate the conditions for their own destruction.’

That’s a pretty bleak proposal, but we live in bleak times – potentially the bleakest of all times. The last few decades have seen an ever-widening wealth gap. But the propensity for conspicuous consumption and status symbols which defines the 80s pale in comparison to where we are now. Billionaires simply didn’t exist then: now they’re a class. And instead of aspiring to owning yachts, these uber-rich fuckers – who each individually could eradicate world poverty and still be richer than anyone else can really conceive – choose to send rockets into space, not in the interest of expanding human knowledge, but in the sole interest of self-interest. Space travel is the Rolex and Hummer for the mid-2020s. Meanwhile, as we burn through ever diminishing supplies of fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate and the seas are rising more quickly than ever, it feels like we’re accelerating towards a cliff that has no bottom, just an abyss of incomprehensible proportions.

We live in a sick society, with an ageing population. And it’s that ageing population who seem determined to ruin any possible future for future generations. What the fuck happened? Where is the humanity? What happened to the adage ‘you can’t take it with you’? Now, it seems that the mega-wealthy and the boomers – I refuse to use to term ‘elites’ here, because they have no claim to superiority – have set a course for total annihilation and are determined to take the rest of us with them.

So yes, I feel passionately about the positioning of this album. And the fact it’s landed so soon after its predecessor indicates a sense of urgency where Moore is concerned. There’s a palpable sense that he’s doing this because he feels driven, is motivated by a compulsion to act in the only way he knows, the only way he can control.

The title, Body Without Organs hints at a deep-seated sense of detachment, and this translates into the sonic experience: as I said, it’s a lot to digest just on paper. As a listening experience… well, it does feel like the slow – but rapidly accelerating – end of everything. A stentorious baritone vocal rings out through a clamorous clatter of churning discord on the album’s second track, ‘Acceleration’, on which, contradictorily, time slows to a doomy crawl. One might call it industrial goth, or gothic industrial: it’s dark and has all the hallmarks of sepulchral drama, against a dingy backdrop or gnarly metal-griding and wailing moorland wintering ambient noise. Moore sounds as if he’s lost and wandering, not just in a barren landscape / soundscape, but in a psychological desert. New sonic ruptures burst unexpectedly, only adding to the sense of discomfort.

‘Thug Bait’ is a dirgy, purgatorial crawl through subterranean depths: the vocals are low in the mix and swathed in reverb, swimming through a dank swamp, dense enough to drown in.

The production values are positively black metal: Body Without Organs sounds like it as recorded on a Walkman positioned in the room next door on a well-used tape. But it wouldn’t work any other way. The heavy, soul-dragging atmosphere, which is so integral to the experience, simply couldn’t come from a nice clean, crisp recording made in a plush digital studio. ‘Curse of 39’ is a particularly woozy, abstract piece, whereby Moore’s vocals float amidst a slow drift of slow-building tide of flotsam and debris, and ‘Space of Flows’ is a fractured, dissonant wail. And the debris is strewn across this album – the debris and wreckage of human existence. Body Without Organs is the sound societal collapse and the slow dawning of the reality of what this means.

Shit only gets weirder as the album progresses., with grinding earthworks and tectonic ruptures churning and dredging away, spun across slow-drifting sonic clouds and warping. There’s a mesh of static which drapes itself over ‘Capitulation’, while at the same time untuned guitars twang and unravel with a complete disregard for musicality or structure. ‘The Illusion of Completeness’ borders on the surreal, as guitars scrabble against notes like elastic bands and so much rumbling ambience and lurching noise. The seven-minute ‘Most Beloved’ is dark folk and quite nasty noise, and again, Moore’s voice floats around vampirically, like the very essence of of doom, to be afraid of.

The experience of listening to Body Without Organs is not an easy one: it slowly drags the listener down into murky waters and a troubled headspace, one where confusion and dissonance reign. It’s great, it’s powerful – but it’s probably not for everyone.

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Ritual Error – Terminal with Benefits

Posted: 11 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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25th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Two years on from their debut, Dial in the Ghost, London noisemongers Ritual Error are cack with an album which they threaten ‘takes the band in a meaner, more angular, direction’, defined by ‘Abrasive bass, shrill guitars, frantic and precise drumming, everything sounds like it’s gonna fall apart. And for the sickos: howled lyrics about sexual alien abductions, an island state obsessed with 12-foot immigrants, and booking agents who turn themselves into tattoos to please their clients. Plus, a shit tonne of JG Ballard references!’

As a huge Ballard fan myself, this only adds to the appeal. The thing that’s struck me about his writing in recent years – particularly his later works – is that it’s only grown in relevance. The rise of the flag shaggers last year – ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ as the racist shitheads behind festooning every lamppost with national flags branded it – compelled me to revisit Ballard’s final novel Kingdom Come. Published in 2006 – yes, twenty years ago – it’s study of rising fascism in the context of rampant consumerism and materialistic boredom felt like reading news reportage as much as a novel.

It’s an inescapable fact that we live in the weirdest, scariest, and darkest of times, and I’ve suggested before that the making of noise is perhaps one of the last rational methods of dealing with the world as it now is, and Ritual Error seem to fully embrace this idea on Terminal with Benefits.

The jerky, jolty, lurchy ‘songs’ are interspersed with brief interludes, untitled passages mere seconds in duration, plus the five-minute parenthetical ‘instrumental’ which sits in the middle of the album. Yes, Terminal with Benefits embraces all of the difficult bends in the roads, the awkwardness and the resistance. I begin to wonder if there are even any benefits to the terminal status of our societal decline.

‘Tapeworm’ is a gnarly mess of distortion and anguish, and lunges into Shellac territory in no time. Great! But also ‘woah!’ This is some gnarly, heavy shit, an abrasive blast of discord. ‘Hung Up On a Clown’ is a lurching, psychotic blast of disorientated confusion, staggering hither and thither and calling to mind Leeds’ finest, Blacklisters.

Noise rock has been around for a while now, but you know you’re hearing the best of it when it makes your stomach lurch and you feel a bit queasy and vaguely dizzy, and perhaps even a bit stressed and a sense of bewilderment closes in from different angles. With the looping guitar parts and surrounding racket, the sense of overwhelm and anxiety arrives early while listening to Terminal with Benefits.

‘Domestic Pattern’ is a truly jolting assault which stars a bit juddery, then goes totally askew. And it only gets messier. And messy is the word. This is one fucked-up shit moras of noise, with slanted skewed guitars – not metallic or distorted, but clean and trebly.

‘Family Plot’ is Shellac amped up to the point of queasiness, and reminiscent of a slew of gnarly 90s acts, and the swaggering swing of ‘(Instrumental)’ (which isn’t an instrumental at all) hits hard. The same is true of this album as a whole, a work of noise rock par excellence.

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September Song – The Perfect View

Posted: 8 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Sons of Art – 18th October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been four years since September Song released Two Miles Out. That album, they say, rather like its predecessor, The Arrogance of Time ‘started off reflecting more on global events, but ended up introspective once again’. A lot has happened in the last four years. Having crawled out of the pandemic, the world is now a place of constant turmoil, with wars raging all around the globe, climate change threatening our food supplies and our very ways of life, and then there’s AI… It’s in this context, John Douglass writes, that ‘The Perfect View continues along the same pattern with the deeply personal intertwined with the wider world. It’s full of frustration and anger at humanity’s inability to look after our ‘beautiful world’ whilst always trying to remain optimistic.’

To realise these eleven songs, the core duo of John Douglass (harmony and spoken vocals, acoustic and electric guitar) and Steve Hogg (lead and harmony vocals) are joined with a veritable roll-call of musicians – no fewer than fifteen contributors are credited, bringing an array of talents from drums and percussion, and bass, to saxophone, pedal steel, Portuguese guitar, flugelhorn, flute, and mandolin. For all that, the arrangements balance lusciousness and layering, with an apparent ease and simplicity. They describe themselves as ‘alternative pop’, but this feels inadequate for conveying the span of the styles on offer here, with elements of folk and indie spun through tunes which are, in places, fairly straightforward radio-friendly rock. And while most of the songs have an uptempo, upbeat, easygoing vibe, the lyrics are often altogether darker.

‘I Cry For You’ sounds pretty chipper, until you hear Hogg deliver the lines ‘You shit on my dreams, destroy everything / I cry for you.’ It’s quite the juxtaposition of content and form. Likewise ‘Hey John’, which brings a lightly jazzy flavour proceedings, and features in the second chorus, ‘Hey John, so you’re doing well / But what the fucking hell is it all about John’, after painting a pretty dark scene in the opening verse:

I saw 24 people on the floor, they were lying on the ground

The mothers, the freaks, the children, I like them around

Don’t step on the microphone, it’s lying on the floor

I was quite unwell for a while but I think I’m better now

It shook me up, it let me down, made me feel, like running aground

There’s a dip during the second half, where by the seven-minute ‘One Good Summer’ slides rather too comfortably into smooth jazz territory. There’s no small irony in the fact that the most overtly commercial song on the album is also the weakest, followed by the honky-tonky ‘All Alone’.

John Douglass’ lyrics are a clear strength, and take different forms: while given to the use of rhyming couplets with a meter which is as clear on the page as when sung, he’s equally prone to more prose-like forms, and even presenting short narratives and quite visual vignettes. The details contained in the narrative of ‘Pray for Me’ are keenly observed, depicting, among other things, morning anxiety and ageing. The album’s closer, ‘Beautiful World’ refers back to the lyrics of ‘Pray for Me’, providing a neat thematic bookending.

As such, there’s considerably more going on when you start to dig into the songs, and things aren’t nearly as jaunty as they initially sound.

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Lustmord Lombardo – The Pulse Of Atoms

Posted: 7 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Ipecac Recordings – 2nd October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Who had a collaboration between drumming legend Dave Lombardo with dark ambient / industrial demigod Lustmord on their bingo cards for 2026? No? Me neither, but then I didn’t have the US attacking Iran or an outbreak of the plague in Russia, either, so maybe my finger isn’t as much on the pulse as I thought.

This coming together has been simmering for a fair while, after all: they met backstage at a Fantômas show, introduced by mutual friend Buzz Osborne, around the time that Lustmord and Melvins released their collaborative album. That was released in 2004. It’s certainly been some time in the offing, then.

While Lombardo has enjoyed a 40-year career playing with Slayer, Misfits, Mr. Bungle, Suicidal Tendencies, and Testament among others, Lustmord’s modus operandi has largely been as a collaborator, with nearly as many albums produced with other artists as as a solo artist since he first appeared on the industrial scene with his eponymous debut in 1981.

It’s perhaps partly because of the sprawling – and lengthy – careers of the artists involved that The Pulse Of Atoms is a work that proves hard to place. It’s certainly a hell of a departure for Lombardo, given that this is, first and foremost, a dank, ominous ambient work, on which only one of the seven compositions runs short of the six-minute mark. The drums are very much a part of the texture and the atmosphere, rather than a driving or dominant force. It’s interesting to observe how a drummer whose field is metal and rock – however broadly applied – sits in a work which is explicitly neither rock nor metal, and moreover, is largely unstructured, formless, even.

“One thing about an album like this is that you can’t really point it out as being part of any specific genre or hopefully any specific period,” Lustmord explains. “Is it from last year? Is it from 10 years ago, is it from 20 years ago, is it from 5 years in the future? It’s trying to create something that has its own sound, not tapping into whatever musical language or history you’re familiar with. It goes way, way further back. This is the sound of planets dying or of stars being born. It’s about a bigger picture. It’s the sound of the birth of the universe and the death of the universe; it’s not rock and roll.” It most certainly is not, and this is very much the heart of the album’s power.

The first piece, ‘An Eternal Presence Part I: Unknown’ begins as a murky and unsettling rumble, and it’s fully two minutes before the percussion arrives. And when it does, it’s a rolling, tribal thrum. It is rhythmic, but the thunderous beats emerge from a deep, dark sonic swamp, amidst hints of Nordic forest paganism, and stop and start and feel as tentative as they do aggressive. Counterpart ‘An Eternal Presence Part II: Relentless’ lives up to its title with truly thunderous percussion, which rolls and rumbles with a rare intensity, before sliding into the grey gloop of ‘Paleomagnetic Resonance’, a dark ambient piece which drifts, formless, creepy, a slow-moving unsettling expanse of sound which drifts like fog and conjures a vision of a barren wasteland. It hums and drones and rumbles and suddenly, three minutes in, aggressive drumming crashes in and heavy drones glide down sonorously… the weight is palpable.

We crawl from the glacial desert that is ‘Beyond the Vast Cold Waste’ trepidatious, tremulous, into an apocalyptic world. Explosions ricochet in the distance. It feels like the world is ending. The experience is unsettling, but unshocking: we all knew the end was nigh. Didn’t we? This sounds and feels like the end of days. It’s suffocatingly dense. The weigh presses down on the shoulders and the back of the neck.

Like ‘An Eternal Presence’, ‘The Desolate Shore’ also spans two parts with a combined time of almost fifteen minutes. It’s here that we finally find a sense of true rhythm and groove, and Lombardo delivers driving dynamism against a swirling vortex of dark noise. The experience is like being sucked into a vacuum. It’s genuinely scary – like a warzone, like the collapse of civilisation, like the end of time. The final track, ‘The Abyssal Deep’ is ten minutes of the most desolate, disturbing ambience you’ll hear all year. It will suck the life out of you through its density alone.

This album feels less like a collaboration and more like a collision of musical colossi from very different spheres. And it’s immense, and intense.

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Emma Ruth Rundle – These Killing Times

Posted: 28 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Errant Child – 18th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

These Killing Times is Emma Ruth Rundle’s sixth studio album. It’s released on her own Errant Child label, and it’s a bold work.

As we learn from the accompanying notes, it weas ‘written as she watched from afar the devastating effects of yet another climate disaster unfold in early 2025, Emma reflected on the roots of the systemic issues that filter directly into so many catastrophic global events, and made a conscious choice to reach towards making a hopeful record. Where outside forces tempted her to turn inwards, towards isolation and hopelessness, she instead reached outwards to create a record that acknowledges pain, but offers both community and resilience in response.’

I keep thinking, and saying this – as much as anything in an attempt to process the information: the word is on fire. The world is at war. Just because World War 3 has not been declared doesn’t change the fact that with Russia vs Ukraine, The US vs Iran and the spread around the Middle East, not to mention the fringe involvement of the UK and other NATO allies in supposedly ‘defensive’ moves, and civil wars in Sudan and Myanmar, the globe is pretty hot right now. I omit Israel’s assault on Gaza and the West Bank from this list because the disproportionate imbalance disqualifies this as a war, and I shall move on from there because this is ultimately an album review, but the points and distinctions need to be made, and are fitting in context of the album’s title and inspiration. Also, when I say that the world is on fire… this is no exaggeration.

There is a sense that doing your recycling and so in is but pissing in the wind, but you have to play your part, right?

On These Killing Times, Emma Ruth Rundle takes her time in exploring her themes: all bar two f the album’s tracks extend beyond the five-minute mark, and the lilting piano of the first song, ‘Powerless’ makes for a song which is more uplifting than the title suggests. But powerless is how I’ve felt these last few months. Weak, defeated, drained, as if there was nothing I could do. But I digress: from behind the rippling notes and layered vocals blast powerful riffs which are quintessential grunge. And the way she chews her words… is glorious. It speaks of a social awkwardness, a self-conscious contradiction that balances the desire to be heard with an embarrassment of being heard too clearly. This was, of course, the dichotomy which lay at the heart of grunge, and was a particular contradiction which lay at the heart of Nirvana: the words mattered, but it was too much to sing the words with clarity.

‘God’s Picture’ is a slow-builder, whereby layers build as does the song’s power. By the end, It’s simply enormous. ‘Anvil’ is, meanwhile, subtle in its approach but, in the chorus, as heavy as the title suggests. Her vocals venture skywards with an almost folky quality towards the end of the song, but it’s the turbulence of the build which has the most impact. ‘Catherine Wheel’ spins with a rare energy, her vocal soaring and spiralling skyward.

Stripping things back, which she does – albeit infrequently – for ‘Don’t Delay Heven’ Rundle becomes most open in revealing her vulnerable side, and ‘Enough’, too is both sparse but heavy, and the intensity of the final two minutes is phenomenal, a brain—melting swirl.

These Killing Times is almost schizophrenic in the way it flicks between ponderous folk and mega riffs, but that’s it’s success, ultimately. What an album.

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Sly & The Family Drone – With Love

Posted: 25 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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28th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Time has a habit of evaporating, and life has a tendency to obstruct plans, and so it is that the latest offering from twisted jazz weirdos, with the slightly slushy, smushy loved-up Clintons Cards connotations of its title was intended to land on Valentine’s Day. Oh well, it’s perhaps for the best. I’m picturing a scene where a couple are enjoying a romantic evening in, a candlelit dinner with some nice food, a glass of wine, and after maybe a Rom-Com they’re getting in the mood, but instead of Barry White or something smooth and sultry, one of them says “I know just the thing. There’s this new album by Sly and the Family Drone…” Fuck knows how the scene ends, but it’s certainly not with the blissful soft-focus union of an 80s romance – more likely indescribably carnage, likely unspeakable gore, probably even at least one death.

As ever, most of the titles are random or otherwise inexplicable, although I’m sure they have their reasons, but unusually, the crazy puns and wordplay are largely absent, suggesting perhaps a newfound seriousness – although that seems unlikely. And what of ‘Cloth Control’, the album’s final piece? There’s probably something wrong with me that I’d leap to ‘touching cloth’, but from a band with songs with titles like ‘Handed Cack’ and ‘Sunken Disorderly’

‘Psychic Surgery’ begins innocuously enough, although, being Sly and the Family Drone, it’s more dark atmospheric sax and swampy drone with a reverb-soaked abb and flow, than it is smooth, seductive sax: there’s a noirish hint to the opening minutes, before supernatural skitters begin to creep in at a low level, and the percussion begins to clatter with unsettling irregularity – but increasing urgency – a couple of minutes in. It conveys the sense of a gathering storm, and noise begins to swell… but it passes without breaking. However, any sense of relief is but brief, as things get weirder and more tense with the more electronic ‘The Guts of Albion’. It starts with a murky, muffled-sounding pulsation, and a metallic clatter that calls to mind Neubauten or Test Dept. It’s against this tense backdrop, with heavy hints of another growing tempest, that the sax arrives – and this time, it is actually pretty smooth. I mean, it’s hardly 80s Tina Turner, or Dave Brubeck for that matter, but it’s by no means disagreeable. But as the beats build, and the sonorous drone sustains, so sax becomes more fragmented and the tension grows, and around halfway through the track’s seven and a half minutes, a plateau is attained, and you feel a shift as static and distortion creep in… and finally, it hits like a tidal wave. It’s the perfect release.

As a title, ‘Over the Rainbow’ instantly calls to mind the song from The Wizard of Oz. A ballad, but one flavoured with hope and optimism for another place, a brighter future. But while that motif is actually present, it’s distorted and stretched and played against a backdrop of three and a half minutes of crackling distortion: it’s more like hearing a lullaby or the tinkling of a child’s music box when it appears on the soundtrack to a horror movie. The context shifts, and something light and innocent becomes something dark and ominous. And here, we feel that disconnect, that discomforting disjointedness. Here, it’s quite subtle, but in some respects, that renders it all the more unsettling.

‘In The Oils’ goes for the low, heavy drone – and you feel it in our gut, a slow churn. There are some vocals swimming low in the mix, and there are moments where if feels like listening to Throbbing Gristle where the speaker’s submerged in a domestic aquarium. Plus, the final three minutes bring more drumwork than anyone would ever need in a lifetime. It’s not beats, it’s an explosion. But it feels good, because yes, finally, we get it: a climactic, pummelling blast of tribal drums and a rising drone that feels more like a jet engine warming up for take-off. It’s a climax which is a mind-bending crescendo that feels like the end of days.

The last track, ‘Cloth Control’ is built on a slow, rolling drone and reverberating, echo-swamped sax hum and grinding electronics which lead the listener into an otherworldly space of abstraction and strangeness. And what’s strangest of all is that feels like a different album with every play, and different layers, different aspects, reveal themselves.

Overall, the percussion is much less prominent on With Love than on many previous releases, but the abstract jazz meanderings and overall sense of musical exploration is significantly greater than ever. The only thing that’s really predictable about Sly and the Family Drone is their unpredictability, and With Love ventures into new realms of weirdness.

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Bombstrap – Big Enemy

Posted: 24 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Tartarus Records – 2nd October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometimes, and album comes crashing in and you feel its impact hard. It’s not so much an album as a massive detonation. A work that redefines its genre. An album that blows the top off our head.

Big Enemy by Bombstrap is that album. It’s s throbbing, gnarly, primitive punk album. So what’ s special about that? Bombstrap are special, in presenting a skin-peeling, furious rage what hurts. It’s not in any way refined or pretty, it’s raw and gritty and it’s real.

According to their bio, they were ‘born inside Rotterdam’s anarchist Poortgebouw community in 2025’and ‘have quickly established themselves as one of the most uncompromising new names in underground hardcore. Split between Manchester and Rotterdam, the four piece channels nihilism, black alchemy, and ultraviolence into a feral sound that owes as much to No Trend and Total Abuse as it does to a complete rejection of authority and conformity’.

They describe Big Enemy as ‘a blast of caustic, explosive hardcore delivered with ruthless precision’, and add that ‘Fueled by nihilism and anarchic conviction, the album is a sonic bullet aimed squarely at the heart of a corrupt society, uncompromising, abrasive, and impossible to ignore’. It’s hard to argue.

On the album’s second track, ‘Master Alchemist’, they step up and turn everything up to the max, and there’s no letup from hereon in. This is an album that grazes and cuts hard. Some of the bruising, raging noise belongs to the spirit of the early 90s – not just grunge, but riot grrl – but equally, Bombstrap belong the domain of hardcore punk and noise rock, and Big Enemy s a rabid and positively feral scream. This is an angry, explosive work. Every track is killer – and a pure distillation of nihilistic punk rage. ‘Machhiavellianism’ is, like half of the tracks on Big Enemy, well short of two minutes long – in fact, it’s only a second over one minute – and in that time they bring punk energy and a hundred miles an hour. There’s more than a dash of The Dead Kennedys to ‘Bakhmut’, and the final track, ‘Poppy Seeds’ is manic and packs a swaggering rock ‘n’ roll riff.

Big Enemy isn’t just a metaphorical ‘fuck you’ to the big enemy in all its forms – big government, corporations, billionaires, and all the rest, but a literal one, with a raging, exasperated ‘fuck you’ being a common refrain across the album’s ten tracks. And too right: sometimes, there are no other words that do the job, and all there is, is to scream out the most primal of invective. Big Enemy is Bombstrap telling it like it is. No bullshit, no pretence, Bombstrap are the real deal.

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