Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

.SYS Machine – Parts Unknown

Posted: 16 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Glitchmode Recordings – 10th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

.SYS Machine’s third album is the first to be released through the Glitchmode Recordings imprint, home to Dave McAnally’s main project, Derision Cult, among notable names. And on Parts Unknown, .SYS Machine continue to expand their sonic palette, while still maintaining close connections with influences like Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails, but also Peter Gabriel and Porcupine Tree.

One thing which is key to .SYS Machine’s work is its proximity to the present: McAnally draws on his environment and events in real-time, and while previous album Graceful Isolation was the ‘lockdown’ album, Parts Unknown is, as they put it, a work which ‘reflects on navigating an age of uncertainty—both spiritually and technologically—touching on themes of recovery, loss, and the uneasy process of entering new phases of life.’ And once again, ‘the album also features guest vocal contributions from Kimberly Kornmeier of Bow Ever Down on two tracks, adding a dynamic that recalls the atmospheric interplay heard in artists like Garbage and Portishead’.

These are unquestionably daunting times: the world is at war – not all fighting the same war, but the point stands – and while many are joyfully embracing AI as an assistant, a creator of amusing artwork, a companion, or a therapist, just as many are fearful for their livelihoods. The future has never looked so uncertain, our places in the world as individuals so precarious.

‘Everyday just feels like the gravity’s gone’, is the refrain on the album’s first song, ‘Gravity’ – and it’s not about being serious. There is a sense of being cut loose from the planet, spinning free from all that is known.

Single release ‘Fading’, one of the Kimberly Kornmeier vocal leads, is altogether slower and more overtly reflective in tone – almost a trip-hop ballad, whereby the standard electronic backing, with its twitchy beats, is augmented with guitar. ‘Are you lost in yourself / I think you’re fading away’, she sings, sounding lost in herself, too. And perhaps the message really is that we’re all lost, but many don’t even realise – or have the time or headspace to reflect long enough to realise. It’s perhaps fitting that at a time when the world seems to be spinning at a faster pace, and waking each morning brings with it a combination relief at still being alive and the anxiety over what may have happened overnight and what the coming day may hold, that Parts Unknown manifests as a slower, sparser-sounding work, which steps back and creates space and time for contemplation. ‘Home’, the second Kornmeier cut is, in contrast, quite possibly the album’s poppiest, and more than justifies the Garbage references.

‘Resonance’ touches on the contradictions of life in the present: ‘I can see the future it’s not certain everything’s just fine / Maybe if we wait just longer everything will be alright’. We tell ourselves, perhaps even convince ourselves everything’s fine, but ultimately, it’s just a hope, wishful thinking that it will be. Because without hope, what have we actually got?

The expansive ‘Collapse’ is, contrary to its title, the expansive sound of hope as sweeping, cinematic synths soar over a delicate acoustic guitar, while the final track, ‘Closure’, leaves us in a more ponderous place, mining a strong seam of Depeche Mode / NIN electro-led instrumentation which blossoms into a powerful, uplifting finale. But is it the sound of true hope, or simply a desire to convince that hope still exists? And where does the line lie between hope and delusion? These are questions to mull while absorbing the details of Parts Unknown. Unknown and unknowable, none of us knows what’s around the corner. With Parts Unknown, .SYS Machine prompt contemplation with some well crafted soundscapes and neatly-tempered beats.

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Abigail Snail – Rad Berms

Posted: 15 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Romac Puncture Repairs – 17th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

While Rad Berms is Abigail Snail’s debut release, the musicians behind the name have a notable pedigree, and between them, drummer Will Glaser and guitarist Stef Kett (aka Stef Ketteringham) have numerous credits on record – and for Rad Berms, they’ve joined by ‘master reed player’ James Allsopp, who gets pretty much everywhere. And for this debut release, Abigail Snail’s promise ‘avant-rock, improv, and experimental soul groove into an adventurous collection of tender, boundary-pushing songs’.

After the gentlest of intros, the first track, ‘Show Breaking to Waves’ slowly derails before the arrival of the vocals. The vibe is rather Crooked Rain Crooked Rain era Pavement, only wonkier and significantly jazzier, particularly in the percussion. The instrumentation is sparse, the feel a shade folky… then ‘Soul Berm’, the first of the ‘Berms’ crashes in, wonky, scratchy, discordant. Counterpart ‘Space Berm’ sounds like a noisy tuning up / tuning down outtake, a chaotic interlude of jarring noise rock propelled by a jazz percussion break.

I remember reading a review of Trumans Water in the early 90s describing them as ‘the real Pavement’. Well, I think it was Trumans Water and not Archers of Loaf. AoL were kinda tame indie: Trumans Water were demented and truly off-kilter, taking the lo-fi slacker thing to a level that incorporated the weirdness of Captain Beefheart, down to the sounding like they were playing different songs in different keys and tempos, but all at the same time. This is a circuitous detour to arrive at the conclusion that Abigail Snail call to mind – well, my kind, which is a vault of disorganised musical files and recollections – Trumans Water, only even further out and significantly jazzier.

I appreciate that with every sentence, I’m probably alienating another ten per cent of potential listeners here. It’s probably for the best. Rad Berms is as niche as it is crazy, and it’s better to shed the ones who won’t dig it early on and save everyone the hassle of rubbing the wrong way.

A deranged howl of ‘Goooooood grief / That’s one batshit brief / Good Lord / How much shit can one chick hoard?’ delivered atop clanging, angular guitar that’s pure Shellac announces the arrival of single cut ‘Good Grief’, a raw, riotous blast of jazz and math-rock melded together. They explore a host of genre forms across Rad Berms, but manage to incorporate some jazziness into most of them.

‘Attach Bayonets’ lands in the middle of the album and brings with it a mellow psychedelic / desert rock feel, like a slacker retake of America’s ‘Horse with No Name’, only with bongos and woodwind – and no obvious hook. But you get the idea. Hopefully. It’s kinda trippy, primarily acoustic, and at times quite discordant. Laden with melody and harmonies, ‘Stay Rad’ is mellow, too, a quintessential slice of slacker indie with a dash of 60s psychedelia. There’s daftness in abundance here, and at times it does seem as if they’re just testing us as listeners while they dick about showing off their technical prowess and simply demonstrating their capacity to make music that doesn’t conform to any convention, and the fact they’re too cool for choruses, or even structure anyone can follow. ‘Yikes Bikes’ and ‘Bitchin’ Chords’ in particular feel indulgent, albeit in quite different ways. But why not? There was a time when bands would say in interviews that they made music for themselves, and it was a bonus if anyone else liked it. It became a cliché, and of course most of them were lying. But now? Who makes music to get rich and famous? Some, for sure, but the majority appreciate now that it’s not going to happen, so they may as well make music to please themselves – which is precisely what Abigail Snail are doing here. There’s no way you could accuse these guys of being predictable or lacking range.

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King Midas – Blanco

Posted: 13 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Fysisk Format – 17th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

King Midas’ seventh studio album is the follow-up to their 2013 Norwegian Grammy-winning album Rosso. Thirteen years is quite the gap, although such spans between albums seem rather less unusual now than in times past. In the 90s, the five-year gap between The Stone Roses eponymous debut and The Second Coming was painted by the press as being longer than an eternity, but the last few years have seen acts return after absences of a quarter century or more. The fact is that many artists find themselves mired in life and in dayjobs, because it’s hard to make a living from music alone, and regular work and raising families aren’t compatible with creative work, and especially not with touring. And so it is that Blanco arrives more than thirty years after their first EP, From the Pipeline, in 1994, and notably, they report that the band ‘still consists of founding members Ando Woltmann and Per Vigmostad who share production credit for Blanco’.

According to the duo, ‘Blanco is an album about emptiness, partly inspired by Belgian cold wave music from the early 1980s, by the noise cancellation in BMW models from 2023/24, by New Age as a concept, by the novel Lanzarote by French author Michel Houellebecq, by Rod Stewart on his way home from a party in the wee hours and by yuppie Scandinavian businessmen in all forms’.

This seems like a curious array of inspirations, and I can only comment with any real knowledge on Michel Houellebecq’s typically bleak and anticlimactic novel and Rod Stewart, whose 80s work haunts me on account of childhood memories if my mother dancing to awful, awful songs ‘Baby Jane’ and Atlantic Crossing still got played far more often than was healthy. But then, I was also exposed to dangerous levels of Phil Collins and Tina Turner, which probably indirectly explains my immersing myself in writers like Houellebecq, who I arrived at on the publication of Whatever, which was described by Tibor Fischer as ‘L’Etranger for the info generation’.

According to their bio, ‘Blanco marks a brand new start for King Midas – a tabula rasa, a blank slate – where all methodology, instrumentation, composition and production are untried ground, and all paths have been trodden anew’.

‘Sunrise’ is a drifting sprawl of muiltitracked autotuned vocals which quiver and warble over some expansive, semi-ambient synths. It’s novel and vaguely entertaining, but you hope to dog that the album gets better, and mercifully, it does, conjuring expanses of quite claustrophobic, beat-driven electronica.

As an exploration of emptiness, it works well: the vocals are largely sampled and / or looped, creating an atmosphere of detachment, human sounds without the human presence, while the instrumentation is minimal in its arrangement. There’s no comfort to be found here, no human warmth, just stark monotony, beats that thud on, and on, and on… I never really took to dance music because it felt… impersonal, is perhaps the word which summarises the experience. And that’s despite being a fan of late 80s and early 90s electronic industrial music. Anyway. Blanco seems to take those elements and turn a mirror on them. It is repetitive, impersonal, monotonous… and that’s the comment. And there are flickers where there’s a near-silent acknowledgement. ‘Look’ brings a strongly eighties feel, and things fall into place around the BMW comments with ‘Blaupunkt’. A friend of mine bought an 80s BMW in the early 90s and thought he was flash as hell with his aircon and bangin’ stereo, although we’d be freezing our tits off while he burned fuel at an alarming rate with the aircon on and the stereo sounded shit. I’ve digressed again, but this is what happens with albums which are largely instrumental, and ‘Blaupunkt’ sounds like Kraftwerk nabbing bits of Ennio Morricone and chucking in a bit of New Order circa Movement. It’s pretty cool, and also hypnotic, but also intense.

The eight-and-a-half-minute closer, ‘Infinite Sadeness’ is slow, deliberate, expansive, the pulsating beats which define the album as a whole replaced by altogether sparser, more minimal, and subtler percussion, and with the introduction of flute it adds a new dimension to the sound.

Blanco is varied, and takes some time to come around to. The indefinable absence is affecting, and reverberates around these taut compositions, which emanate a sense of emptiness, assimilating all aspects of its dominant theme. But patience is the key. It’s as a whole that Blanco works.

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Gintas K – Merzmania

Posted: 12 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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gk. rec. – 30th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

There’s a clue in the album’s title as to what Gintas K’s latest musical venture is about, and while neither Merzmania nor anything else in Gintas K’s catalogue comes close to the harsh noise of Masami Akita, there are clear connections and parallels between the two artists, in particular the prodigious output, and their propensity for taking experimentation to its absolute limit. Oh, and the occasional pun. Merzmania very much seems to echo Merzbow’s revelling in self-referential ‘Merz’ prefixes with album titles like Merzbeat, Merzdub, Merzbear, and Merzbuddha. It’s by no means an homage or stylistic lift, but a simple and seemingly sincere acknowledgement of a thread of influence. But anyone familiar with the work of Gintas K will already be aware that he is a unique presence within the field of experimental electronic-based audio works.

As he explains regarding this release, ‘Merzmania is electroacoustic live electronics pieces made using my own instrument made from a computer, Plogue Bidule software & midi controller assigned to VST plugins. All software parameters controlled, altered live in real time during performance using knobs & sliders of midi controller attached to VST plugins parameters. Performance made from synthesized sounds. Merzmania is a piece connecting classical music skills with today’s noise music (slight allusion to noise icon – Merzbow). Merzmania’s main playing method is real time interaction with the computer which I am using on all my live compositions’.

The tech stuff goes over my head, if I’m honest – but I’m more interested in the output than the input, and Merzmania provides 75 minutes of sonic mayhem. From swarming, skittering microtones which crowd in a dizzy delirium, through warping drones and groans, fairground organ sounds, and the occasional subaquatic detonation, it’s all going on, and often simultaneously, as is very much the case with the first piece, the 9:41 ‘merzmania#1 main’. Five minutes in and my head is spinning and I’m experiencing a huge anxiety spike and a sense of being overwhelmed. ‘Mania’ is very much the word here.

‘merzmania#2’ is the sound of a thousand digital hornets clustering around a dial-up modem struggling to connect – for nearly eight minutes, while ‘merzmania#3 dreaming’ makes you wonder what kind of dreams this guy has. It’s by no means nightmarish, but the rush of discord very much instils the sensation of rising panic, the palpitations of an anxiety dream. There’s something that fleetingly resembles a break from some drum ‘n’ bass, and again, the fact that there’s so much going on, all at once is… headspinning. And I mean… holy shit. Just when you think it couldn’t get any wilder, any more frenzied, any more overloading or intense… Gintas K manages to take it up not just another notch, but another two or three.

‘merzmania#5 slow’ does offer some respite from the insanity, but its syncopated toots and scratches and hums and crunches are far from soothing, and the space becomes increasingly sonically crowded as it progresses. The stereo panning is nothing sort of brain-melting, and nowhere more so than on ‘merzmania#6’, tinkling chirps and motorised hums and drones, the sound of a piano being played by a dozen cats while an engine revs… the hum of the power lines…

While employing much of the same technology and largely the same performance techniques of previous releases, something about Merzmania feels like a step forward for Gintas K. It’s hard to pinpoint precisely what, but that’s likely because my head is swimming with a tonal assault. But also, it is different: many of the sounds are more piano-like, more overtly ‘keyboardy’, in place of the bubbling froth which dominated many of his past works.

There’s distortion and fizzing static and pure noise on ‘merzmania#8 spare’, and ‘merzmania#10 hum’ essentially speaks for itself. And even with all of the live demos posted on his YouTube channel, just how Gintas K conjures this wild mash-up is difficult to assimilate. Because, but really, how…? It’s a lot to process. Life, the world, everything, really. And this latest Gintas K album does not help. But if it wasn’t this, something else would assault the senses, in other ways. Gintas K’s work will never offer a diversion or escape, but it does provide a different kind of mental overload. The final track, the second ‘slow’ is very much more gentle in the main, a tinkling taking the lead, but some roars like the revving of a motorbike overtaking, and explosive noise obliterating the finale.

Merzmania finds Gintas K at his experimental best, and pushing beyond the parameters set out on previous works, which were in themselves boundary-pushing. This, then, is the outer limits… but there’s a sense that he’ll still go on from here, too.

AA

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Abel Autopsy – uunder

Posted: 6 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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20th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

With his debut release, Abel Autopsy makes his ambition clear, announcing that uunder is envisioned as a journey within a three-part series, with the next two releases in the series being overr and outt, and promising ‘dark, melancholic, shapeshifting worlds that slide between light and shadow’. Although the inconsistency of the double letters on this first release from those projected to follow disturbs my sense of necessary balance, I can close my mind to it while opening my ears and concentrating on the music.

The nine tracks take the form of layered, atmospheric synth-dominated compositions, and Abel Autopsy sets out the context for these thereal works, which evoke haunting (super)natural landscapes by electronic means.

“This started in my youth – pulling apart various musical instruments (battery powered) while in the woods of Appalachia. There was an eerie, ethereal vibe almost like something ‘other’ in the wilderness with me. That permeates through all of the songs and is woven in the mental tapestry throughout. This album is an exercise in capturing that – the balance between light and shadow, feeling another ‘presence’ with you that is not entirely from here.”

The vocals on ‘ghostride’ are muffled, indistinct, the words – if there actually are any – indecipherable, serving more as another instrument than anything else. The pieces are bold, sweeping, cinematic, the ambient tendencies given form by solid mechanised beats which are up in the mix. ‘unfound’ and ‘gates’ land in the space between later Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails, the latter also spinning in dance tropes and the haunting monasterial sounds of Enigma music.

He is very partial to the big thunderclap blast when making a change in key or tempo, or simply stepping up the drama – perhaps excessively so, as there are moments when things do feel a bit formulaic – something compounded by the comparative uniformity of the track durations, which are all within the range of 3:01 and 3:37 (three of the nine have a run time of 3:37).

‘mycenae’ tweaks the template to accentuate the contrasts between light and dark and thanks to a super-full, extra-low bass, goes darker than anywhere else on the album, and the crackling static which fizzes through the introduction of the heavier, more distorted ‘nihill’, which concludes the set, brings a sense of decay and a doomy finality.

There are some neat ideas spread across uunder, and the execution is similarly neat, with a clear attention to detail. More variety, particularly in terms of tempo and dynamics would likely create greater impact, but it’s a promising start, and it will be interesting to see how Abel Autopsy evolves over the next instalments of the trilogy.

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Melvins with Napalm Death – Savage Imperial Death March

Posted: 5 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Ipecac Recordings – 10th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

What better pairing could there possibly be than the gods of grindcore paired with the supreme lords of sludge? It’s hard to think of one. They’ve toured together under the Imperial Death March banner in 2016 and 2025, but this is their first release together – and it’s not a split album, but a truly collaborative work, featuring members of both bands. It was recorded at the Melvins’ Los Angeles studio, with Buzz Osborne (vocals/guitar) and Dale Crover (drums) joined by Napalm Death’s Barney Greenway (vocals), Shane Embury (bass), and John Cooke (guitar).

And as advance single releases ‘Tossing Coins into the Fountain of Fuck’ and ‘Rip the God’ forewarned, so it is that Savage Imperial Death March is one absolute fucking beast of an album. It’s ‘Tossing Coins’ that kicks it off, a rabid overload of guitar mayhem, grindy riffery and wild guitar breaks underpinned by dingy riffs, all played at breakneck speed. Greenway gives guttural growls all the way and it’s nothing short of a sonic blitzkrieg. It’s very much a positive to summarise it as being a sum of the parts.

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The nine and a half minute ‘Some Kind of Antichrist’ is much more Melvins – with the weight of Bullhead, but as if the 33rpm album was being played at 45: thick, megalithic, speaker splitting riffs, but on Red Bull, and Buzzo’s hyper vocal countered by Greenway’s salivating growl. It’s a wild, filthy mess, and it goes on, and on, and it’s fucking fantastic – even when, or especially when, it goes weird about four minutes in. because weird is, good, and Melvins are good at being weird. Sometimes, they’re not quite so good at being weird, as the Prick and the ‘Cowboy’ single attest, but like they give a fuck. Melvins have always pleased themselves, and that’s reason enough to love them, if not necessarily all of their releases. You could hardly call Napalm Death crowd pleasers, either, and their lineup’s as been as evolutionary as their sound.

‘Awful Handwriting’ is a brief experimental electro-led interlude that’s daft and noisy in equal measure, and stands in total contrast to the grungey post-metal crossover of ‘Nine Days of Rain’ which immediately follows. Credit where it’s due, this album brings some stylistic surprises which sound like neither band, let alone what you’d expect from the two combined, and this is very much one of those songs.

After the sludge-grunge of ‘Rip the God’ which marks the start of the album’s second half and is very much on the side of the Melvins’ style, there’s a rush into the fast and furious, and while it’s wild and heavy and full-on and loud, it’s also fun, and entirely serious, it is not. With operatic vocals and bold, cinematic synths, ‘Comparison is the Thief of Joy’ leans very much toward the experimental side, while the final track, ‘Death Hour’ just goes all out of the riffery and guitar overload, with raving raw-throated vocals courtesy of Greenway sitting alongside Buzzo giving it his most Ozzy, before once again, shit gets weird. It’s as if they can’t help themselves. Ach, we’ve done some riffs, let’s fuck shit up and go weird… yeah, man. And why not? Neither band has anything to prove after all this time. And now it’s time to embrace the strange… but the keyboard riff from Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ played limply at the end…? That might be a step too far.

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Christine Plays Viola – F.I.V.E. Fear Increases Violent Emotions

Posted: 4 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Much as the whole ‘sounds like’ and ‘for fans of’ thing has become a standard shortcut which is, all too often, reductive and plays into the algorithmic feeding of artists by streaming platforms, it can be useful, at least when the references are accurate. Sometimes, a misrepresentative comparison can come to define an act’s entire career. I can’t be the only one who investigated Interpol because of the endless comparisons to Joy Division – and while I quickly grew to love Interpol, they’re as much like Joy Division as Suede are The Smiths. Sometimes these disparities are the result of poor journalism or sloppy PR, others they’re the consequence of a band’s own lack of self-awareness, confusing the input from their influences with what their music actually sounds like. Nevertheless, when a band is pitches as being ‘for fans of Faith or Disintegration-era Cure, and Closer-era Joy Division’, the connotations of glacial synth-orientated bleakness suggest they’re worth investigating.

And so I arrive at F.I.V.E. Fear Increases Violent Emotions (released in January), by Italian dark / new wave band Christine Plays Viola via the album’s fourth single, ‘Desolate Moments’ – in an example of an old-school promo cycle, where a single or two in advance would hype the album, and a trailing single or two would sustain momentum and (hopefully) grab some people who’d missed the initial build-up and release. This one’s had a long run-up, with ‘Jackie’s Curse’ surfacing way back in 2024.

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‘Desolate Moments’ is a spacious slow-builder, and fulfils the promise of some cold synths, the brooding vocals paired with some rolling percussion and throbbing bass. In many respects, it’s a quintessential slice of modern goth, in the vein of Corpus Delicti, with some hints of Depeche Mode swirling around in the mix. That’s not all that’s swirling around: the video, which is designed to replicate their live performance, finds the band members partially obscured by billowing smoke, clearly taking cues from The Sisters of Mercy’s seminal stage shows.

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It turns out that ‘Desolate Moments’ is representative of the album, too, certainly in terms of quality (one thing about old-school promo before the advent of the Internet is that you’d often rush to buy an album based on the lead single, only to find that it was the only decent track, and that the rest of the album was turd… this was particularly prevalent in the ‘80s, but I’d venture that Depeche Mode’s Ultra would have been better whittled down to an EP of the singles). And it’s an album that radiates darkness and classic goth vibes and sounds.

Opener ‘Sprout of Disharmony’ is nothing short of an instant classic in the vein of Rosetta Stone and Susperia, with spindly guitar work, sturdy on-the-beat bass grooves and metronomic percussion, and with a seven-minute run time, it certainly qualifies as epic. ‘My Redemption’, released as a single six months ago goes darker, more overtly electro, and brings in elements of industrial while still reflecting the goth sound of the late 90s and the turn of the millennium, and packing some strong hooks, too.

There’s a keen sense of theatre about Christine Plays Viola’s sound: they’re certainly not afraid to go big and play up the drama with finesse. ‘Confession’ lands with a sense of urgency, and is again driven by bold tribal beats reminiscent of vintage acts like Danse Society and Skeletal Family, while ‘There’s No Going Back’ swerves into early Nine Inch Nails territory, only more overtly gothy. While operating around elements taken from some well-established blueprints, Christine Plays Viola manage to offer no shortage of variety on F.I.V.E., the jittery ‘Black Noise’ changing tack halfway through, and the seven-and-three-quarter-minute ‘The Crypt of Mystery’ explores altogether more expansive territory which teeters on the progressive.

As an album, F.I.V.E. feels like a big work: it may only contain ten songs, but a fair few run well over the five minute mark, and the variety is indicative of the scale of the band’s ambition to articulate and explore the theme of ‘fear not as weakness, but as a force that shapes who we become’ in multi-faceted detail. And they succeed in their objective, with some great songs, too.

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Stine Janvin / Morten Joh – Or Gare: Funeral Procession Music from Ryfylke, Norway

Posted: 4 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Futura Resistenza  – 24th Match 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Well, it is Good Friday, so it seems an appropriate time to settle down with a large whisky and some candles to engage with an album of funeral procession music from Ryfylke, Norway. And as the title suggests, this is actually what this collaborative album contains:

Rooted in the bygone custom of ‘Liksong’ (literally ‘corpse song’) that was once sung by small groups of singers who guided rural funeral processions, Janvin and Joh tap into its uncanny, unbearably slow intervallic structures, reanimating the practice as a kind of ancient electronic microtonal devotional music. Voices and vocal effects, synths and melodic percussion seep into the cracks between major and minor, and the whole thing carries the creaking weight of ceremony, yet glows with an otherworldly modernity, as if a forgotten liturgy had been retuned for a dimly humming chapel of circuits.

The duo, with Janvin on vocals and electronics and Joh on synths, tape machines, and percussion, also enlisted Lucy Railton (cello) and Jules Reidy (electric guitar).

The nine tracks present a remarkably structured, linear funeral journey – and while the premise of the album is already most uncommonly literal, so is the linear structure, which begins with ‘Leaving Home’ and concludes with ‘Postlude’, which it arrives at via ‘Pasing neighbours’, ‘Before the burial site’, ‘By the grave’, ‘Lowering the coffing’, and ‘Processing grief’, among other almost instructional titles.

The pieces them selves are quite minimal in their arrangements: drones, hums and haunting, folk-inspired vocals, bathed in reverb and surrounded by echo come together to create soundscapes which are haunting, and, at times, other-wordly. ‘Pasing Neighbours’ is a slice of detached, rippling electronica, which on the surface couldn’t be further removed from ancient Nordic rituals… and yet Janvin and John succeed in subtly manipulating the sounds to conjure something which reaches deep into the psyche with its rippling dissonance.

There’s a gravity to this album which underlies the twisting, processed electronic experimentalism which is befitting of the subject and the context, and while ‘Passing neighbours’ does amalgamate shoegaze with robotix 80s electro, it doesn’t feel disrespectful to the source.

‘Rest – Bordvers’ which features Jules Reidy) is a sliver of ghostly folk which sounds like spirits ascending over an early Silver Jews outtake, and ‘Before the burial site – Jeg Raader Eder Alle’ is a heavily processed, almost space-age reindentation of a folk incantation – but it’s the haunting, eight-minute ‘By the grave – Akk, Mon Jeg Staar I Naade’ which really grips the attention with its ghostly wails and insistent pulsations and expansive, arcing drones. The dronerous ‘Lowering the coffin’ features vintage spacemuzak ripples and reverberating ululations contrasts sharply with ‘Processing grief’, which begins hymn-like, before swiftly transitioning to shuffling, fractal synthiness reminiscent of Tangerine Dream.

One suspects that in this modernisation, in this translation, something has been lost. But at the same time, this interpretation serves to keep an ancient heritage alive. And this is the sound of dark woodland, of glaciers, of spartan spaces – ice-dusted woodland. Often, it’;s trult beautiful, and this is nbowhere more clear on ‘Acceptance – Kom, Menneske, At Skue Mig!’, another piece which is more than seven minutes in duration.

The final track, ‘Postlude’ is gentle, and even alludes to a brighter future on the horizon. For mem it feels a little soon, although there s no use of timescale by which to orientate oneself available in the immediate entrance of the accommodation.

Having spent the last three years processing – and documenting – grief following the loss of my wife, Or Gare: Funeral Procession Music from Ryfylke, Norway is a difficult album to approach on a personal level. But there are times in this expansive, exploratory work, that death, in all its suffering, has been muted and spun into niceness – if not a palatable, packageable sound.

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MESH – The Truth Doesn’t Matter

Posted: 27 March 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Dependent Records – 27th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Now in their thirty-fifth year, MESH have always unapologetic in the way their music reflects and incorporates their influences, spanning Yazoo, Depeche Mode, Giorgio Moroder, Massive Attack, and Depeche Mode. It’s the latter that seems to cast the longest shadow over their latest offering – an album brimming with uptempo anthems propelled by driving beats, urgent synth bass grooves and busy sweeping lead lines.

In this context, it’s often all too easy to get swept along on the tide of electric energy and skim over the lyrical content, which is considerably darker, as the title reflects. As they summarise, ‘This is the age of post-factual lies…’ and as they grapple with difficult times, there’s ‘a dark undertone that occasionally seeps into their new songs’. There’s a feeling that anyone who isn’t affected by the current state of the world is either ignorant or in denial, and for those operating within the arts or any creative fields, I would question how it’s possible to create without these external conditions filtering into the work. And how can anything not be political right now? Time was – not so long ago – when a lack of acceptance or belief in official versions of events was the domain of fringe conspiracy theory. Now governments blatantly lie to our faces: Israel are adamant that every death in Gaza was a member of Hamas, or otherwise a ‘human shield’, the USA insist that they’ve won the war with Iran and have decimated their nuclear capabilities which were likely to destroy the entire Western world tomorrow, and the UK government insists it’s in no way involved or even complicit in any of this. Meanwhile, there’s nothing to see in the Epstein files. Right.

For all that, there’s a lot of emphasis on relationships and the like. Timeless issues, which cut to the core of the human condition, but not necessarily hitting the heart of the zeitgeist. But it’s impossible to be contemporary and timeless, I guess.

On The Truth Doesn’t Matter, MESH are straight out of the traps with a brace of back-to-back anthems, before arriving at the slower ‘I Lost a Friend Today’, which conveys a deep, painful sincerity – but at the same time it emotes with the dramatic flourishes that only a band with gothier leanings could pull off. But then the buoyant disco beat and skittering, soaring synths of ‘Trying to Save You’ somewhat undermine the sentiment. The same is true of ‘I Bleed Through You’, on which some heavy words are diminished by a poppy disco backing.

‘Kill Us With Silence’ follows the same template, but the dark shades are overtones rather than undercurrents: the gothier leanings work well here, as do the more experimental shades of the sample-soaked ‘1031030’, which has a read 80s vintage feel to it.

MESH are definitely at their best when they go dark, and when they go experimental. Single cut ‘This World’ straddles the different aspects of the album, and as such, is arguably the single song which most accurately represents what The Truth Doesn’t Matter. The same is true of ‘Exile’: it’s a belting dark pop tune, but it’s a bit too Erasure to really reach those emotional depths.

There’s no lack of quality or consistency here in terms of songwriting or production, so the only issue is its stylistic focus, or lack of, and just how poppy it is for an album which aims to venture into dark domains. But sixteen tracks is a lot, especially when the majority are four or even five minutes long. The Truth Doesn’t Matter, but focus does, and while it’s not a bad album, trimming it down and concentrating on the theme of its title would have likely made for a more focused album, and one with greater impact.

AA

AA

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Rayan Haïdar – Cities burn as we dream of a return

Posted: 26 March 2026 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Dragon’s Eye Recordings – 20th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The sad fact is that many of us have become somewhat numbed by the endless live rolling news of war in recent years. It’s easy to do when smoke and rubble and statistics are standard. In some ways, COVID – or more specifically, the media coverage of the pandemic – prepared us for it, by keeping us in isolation with only the TV and Internet to connect us to the outside world. As the numbers kept ticking up, as the number of deaths grew, so did our panic, but equally, so did our sense of distance. Unless we had directly lost a friend or relative, it wasn’t quite real.

And now, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the genocide in Gaza – it’s not a war – and its escalation to surrounding areas, plus in recent weeks Iran and the whole middle east exploding, our shock and alarm gradually becomes mutes by overexposure and – worse – for many, a lack of concern over something that’s so distant. There’s annoyance at rising prices, particularly of fuel, but little more: people go about their lives as normal and don’t give too much thought to what life must be like for the people living in these places – or how it must be to have friends and family in constant fear for their lives, what it must be like for those who have fled to witness the scenes and the news reports, and likely see a huge disparity between the versions.

Cities burn as we dream of a return gives pause for thought and to reflect on these things. He’s a Beirut-born, Paris-based multi-instrumentalist, and the album is described as ‘a profound meditation on displacement, longing, and the impossible distance between memory and its aftermath’.

As the accompanying notes detail, ‘The album began as home recordings in 2024 — fragments inspired by Beirut and the quiet melancholy that had always permeated Haïdar’s childhood place. Shortly after beginning work, the aggression against Lebanon escalated, and Haïdar found themselves in the surreal position of documenting their relationship to home while watching that same place be destroyed from afar. The recordings became inseparable from the violence unfolding in real time, each track absorbing the grief and anger of witnessing loved ones continually hurt with no ability to intervene.

‘As Haïdar entered 2025, they continued recording, carrying more grief and anger than when they had begun. What emerged is not simply an album about a place, but about the way we carry our homes and the people we love within us—how they become part of our interior landscape regardless of physical distance or destruction.’

In context, what’s perhaps surprising about Cities burn as we dream of a return is just how gentle it is. Each piece takes the form of a masterfully spun cloud of abstract ambience, the layers and textures twisting and merging and separating, a constant flux, as distant samples echo through the mists.

The tone does, however, shift somewhat as the album progresses. Although indistinct, the samples appear to convey a narrative of increasing anxiety, as do the titles. The title track’s serenity is broken by the sound of panicked voices, while ‘On people we once met and places we once saw’ is imbued with a heavy air of melancholy beneath its soft flow. With it comes the realisation that many of those people and many of those places either no longer exist, or are otherwise altered beyond recognition. Everything changes, everyone changes, but the difference between growth and progress over time, and absolute destruction is beyond compare.

‘At dusk, looking down’ draws the album to a close with an achingly haunting atmosphere and a sense of loss that’s difficult to define but nevertheless inescapable. The album’s six pieces are subtle, gentle, and comparatively sparse, and much of the emotion they convey is indirect and implied. Cities burn as we dream of a return is nuanced and contemplative, and quietly moving.

AA

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