Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

Halshug – Sort Sind

Posted: 9 October 2016 in Albums
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Southern Lord – 30th September 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark, and Halshug are the band to soundrack everything that’s rotten, bleak and uncomfortable in their native country. From the pleading, agonised screams and tears of a man being tortured, to the last howl of feedback, Sort Sind is a merciless and brutal album. Beneath the deluge of power chords, a mess of overdriven, serrated metal churn, the welter of thunderous, hell-for-leather drumming and dense, chugging bass, there are actual hooks and choruses to be found – but not many, and this statement should not be read that this is by any means a pop album, or that’s it’s accessible or easy going. It really isn’t.

The vocals sound as if they’ve been cloned from Lemmy’s DNA, and this hoarse-throated roar leads the power trio through nine abrasive tracks. The Mötörhead comparison carries into the music, too: like Mötörhead, Halshug (trans. ‘decapitate’) combine punk and metal to create something harder, heavier, faster and more attacking, without resorting to the clichés of either genre.

The album’s title translates as ‘Dark Mind’, and the themes of substance abuse, parental neglect and growing up in deprived areas of Denmark dominate the album. With track names translate to ‘Scum’, ‘Violence’, ‘Defeat’ and ‘Lonesome Death’, it’s a fitting title for an album fuelled by rage and frustration, delivered with an energy that’s pure catharsis.

Recorded live, produced and mixed at Ballade Studios in Copenhagen by Lasse Ballade, who also produced and mixed Blodets Bånd, Sort Sind is bursting with rawness and immediacy the music demands.

 

Halshug

Claire M Singer – Solas

Posted: 7 October 2016 in Albums
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Touch – TO:101

James Wells

It’s perhaps due to the formulaic nature of television dramas that a certain type of orchestral music has become almost a signifier for rolling countryside, and people in bouffy dresses and full skirts or frock coats and hats riding horses, brawling in taverns and battling high seas, or otherwise taking the and bidding one another ‘good day’. Such pieces are then played, ad infinitum, on commercial classical radio as exemplars of contemporary classical music. It’s by no means the fault of the composers or musicians: it’s inevitable in the arts that commissions and funded projects will determine the outlets of their work.

The medium isn’t always the message, though, and while the pieces featured here are largely products of specific commissions, Claire M Singer’s work retains a strong focus on her own compositional interests: (quote from press). Imposing strings, bold and evocative sweep and arc through ‘A Different Place,’ as rousing percussion drums a rolling, thunderous tattoo. ‘Ceo’ is an altogether sparser composition which casts a more gloomy atmosphere, and the title track is an extended meditation on the album’s theme (‘Solas’ translates as ‘light’ from the Gaelic) and Singer’s instruments of choice. The organ’s majestic grandeur is very much brought to the fore, and resonates on a deep, subconscious level.

The slow-building sweep of ‘Eilean’ is gentle yet at the same time subtly stirring, flowing into the humming swell of the solo organ piece of ‘Wrangham’. Disc two contains just one track, ‘The Molendiner’, co-commissioned by Glasgow art gallery The Civic Room and Union Chapel, London, which spans twenty-six minutes. Centred around ‘the precise control of wind though the pipes’ of the organ, it utilises various organ types to create a vast sonic expanse, which hangs, drawing out an immense mid-tone humming drone. This probably doesn’t sound like the greatest advocation, but trust me, it’s subtly powerful, and as a whole, Solas is a moving collection of works.

 

Claire M Singer - Solas

The Pop Group – Honeymoon on Mars

Posted: 4 October 2016 in Albums
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Freaks R Us – 28th October 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometime, somewhere, I read an interview with either one of the members of Throbbing Gristle or Suicide, which hours of research have resulted in endless dead-ends, who said words to the effect that it you stick around long enough, even the most outsider bands come to be appreciated and regarded. This was in the years before the pre-reformation age, in which bands who were moderately successful first time around have earned major payola pedalling the nostalgia circuit without feeling the need to flex any kind of creative muscles. Old-school punk bands, 80s pop and 90s indie bands are all guilty of this, and I’ve no time for their nostalgia schtick.

The Pop Group, having called it a day in 1981, didn’t stick around to watch their legacy grow. But in their absence, which lasted until 2010, the retrospective appreciation of their two albums definitely grew and they earned the reputation as a seminal act of the post-punk era, and listening to them now (something that’s altogether easier to do since the recent reissues) it’s not hard to hear why: they still sound radical and far out after all this time. It wasn’t until 2015 that they actually graced us with new material, and Citizen Zombie’s largely positive yet still mixed reviews showed that they remain a band out of time, even in an era when you might think they’ve been assimilated, processed and accommodated.

Remarkably, given that it’s a phase-two difficult second album for a band who formed almost forty years ago, Honeymoon on Mars represents something of a jump for the band, in that it’s even less accessible and, at the same time, even fucking better. The grafting dub/funk grooves which define the band’s sound, and always have, are still present, and Mark Stewart’s vocals are manic as ever: there’s nothing for longstanding fans to worry about there. But the band fully explore their experimental bent here, making for a challenging and, in places, disorientating work, which is uncomfortable, dissonant and often weird. In short, it’s a proper Pop Group album, without a single hint of sell-out.

It opens with ‘Instant Halo’, a track built around stop/start guitars so choppy they could overturn a cruise ship. ‘I’m going on a desperate journey’, Mark Stewart howls spasmodically. ‘Pure Ones’ sounds like a drug-fuelled collaboration between David Bowie and Gang of Four. ‘Days Like These’ is a full-on weird-out, echo-riddled vocals bouncing in all directions over a low, low, trolling dubby bass. ‘Who bought your silence / who enslaved your mind?’ Mark wheezes over a tense groove on the wired early 90’s Fall meets Talking Heads with both on steroids ‘Zipperface’, proving they’ve lost none of their confrontational, socio-political edge.

Observing the grim parallels with England 2016 and England in the early years of Thatcher may not be particularly revelatory, but it’s pertinent: these are dark ties, politically, socially, and culturally, and we are, undoubtedly witnessing the emergence of a true new wave of New Wave (not some pastiche of New Wave as was heralded in the early 90s under the NWONW music-press orchestrated hype). And spearheading this resurgence of bleak music for bleak times, the progenitors of the first movement have suddenly become as relevant as they ever were. And at the front of the line, you’ll find The Pop Group. Honeymoon on Mars is a vital, energetic, splenetic, and essential album of our times.

 

Pop Group - Honeymoon-On-Mars-Cover

Neurosis – Fires Within Fires

Posted: 2 October 2016 in Albums
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Neurot Recordings – 23rd September 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

This is not an album to take lightly, or one that can be absorbed in a single listening session. In fact, this review has taken the best part of a fortnight to assemble, because there’s a lot to process, a lot to chew on, and a lot to digest. Neurosis always take their time, and have never been a band to go for the instant hook, and Fires Within Fires is a slow-burning monster. The fact that they’re heralding this as the album which has been three decades in the making makes it clear that this is the album the band feel they’ve spent their entire careers building up to, the culmination of everything they’ve done, the apogee of their creative achievements. It’s an immense expectation to set for any band, but Neurosis are one of the few acts who can genuinely claim to have broken new ground in the metal genre. They’ve not only broken ground in huge clods, but ploughed a singular furrow as deep as the Grand Canyon.

So, Fires Within Fires. It may only contain five tracks, but it’s big. Weighty, hefty, and still forty minutes in duration despite the short track listing. And for all that, it may also fall short of expectation. It’s not a bad album, of course it isn’t. It’s a Neurosis album. Neurosis don’t make bad albums, or weak albums. But herein lies the issue. For the entirety of their career, Neurosis have forged a solitary path of sounding like Neurosis. But needless to say, they’ve also spawned countless imitators. Some of those imitators have now caught up. The slow-burning, organic, subterranean rage has become something of a leitmotif within the domain of progressive metal. But Fires Within Fires lacks the vital signs of progress.

When the volume – and the vocals – crash in, four minutes into opener ‘Bending Light’ it’s nothing short of devastating. But the rest of the album fails to really capitalise, and there’s very much as sense that despite the promise of Fires Within Fires being an album ‘three decades in the making’ and ‘a testament both to the history and future of Neurosis’, it’s a rather safe, and ultimately formulaic work. The tracks are overly long and don’t really go anywhere. The lengthy quiet passages don’t really build anticipation for the bursts of noise, which aren’t as explosive as perhaps they could, or should be, and it feels like they’re simply treading water and content to coast with a Neurosis-by-numbers set. The heavy grain that makes the best of Neurosis isn’t conveyed in the production, either as they plod through some sludgy riffs.

Fires Within Fires still drubs the majority of albums released in any genre this year so far, as a Neurosis album always will. But it is really quite dull in places, and is, particularly by their own standards, predictable, and consequently, it fails to engage. There’s an absence of frisson, of real rage, of real fire at the heart of it all. Sad as it is to say, ‘three decades in the making’ effectively translates as ‘three decades honing the template’.

 

Neurosis - Fires Within Fires

Ingar Zach – Le Stanze

Posted: 28 September 2016 in Albums
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SOFA – SOFA552 – 7th October 2016

James Wells

Le Stanze is Ingar Zach’s fifth solo album. His previous works have explored the potentials of percussion and electronic sources for the basis of his compositions, and Le Stanze sees him continue to expand in this field. ‘Groundbreaking’ is a word which is used in reference to many artists, often somewhat spuriously: in Zach’s case, it’s entirely apposite. While many of the sounds are overtly percussive in origin, it’s where Zach takes the sounds which renders Le Stanze such a fascinating album.

A flurry of sticks against skin is followed by silence. The silence is as important as the sound: Zach understands contrast and dynamics. He also understands range: single thuds at an infinite range of timbres contrast with chimes and jangles, scrapes and long-decaying echoes. A mesmeric heartbeat-paced thud underpins a sustained clamour of tinkling chimes like an alarm bell. Long, low notes loom beneath, almost subsonic, almost subliminal.

On ‘Il Battito Del Vichingo’, a battery of tribal percussion builds to a polyrhythmic frenzy. It contrasts with the drifting ambience of ‘L’inno Dell’ Oscurita’ and again with the shifting, sharp-edged metallic ibrationss of ‘E Soplitudine’, which slowly builds a long, sonorous drilling hum. In places, it’s almost unbearable in its tonal intensity, frequencies which assault the aural receptors and scrape at the soft matter within the cranial cavity.

Not only is it an intriguing listen, but on Le Stanze, Zach brings a magic, a mystery, to the act of making music, the process.

 

Ingar Zach

Nadja – The Stone is Not Hit by the Sun, Nor Carved With a Knife

Posted: 27 September 2016 in Albums
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Gizeh Records – GZH70 –4th November 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Aiden Baker’s name features on a staggering number of releases, and while Nadja – the duo consisting of Baker and bassist Leah Buckareff – may only be one of many side-projects, the discography they’ve amassed since 2003 is substantial, to say the least. On The Stone is Not Hit by the Sun, Nor Carved With a Knife, they offer three immense ambient doom tracks which make for a welcome addition to that discography.

‘The Stone’ opens the album with a deep, slow bass. A delicate guitar is soon obliterated in a deluge of overdrive. Over the course of the track’s imposing twenty-two minutes, they build a pounding groove, the drum machine and bass in combination emphasising the heavy rhythms. Baker’s vocals are low in the mix, and with the textured, picked guitar chords, they straddle the grinding abrasion of Godflesh and the majestic shoegaze of Jesu. The contrast between the mechanical, industrial drum sound and the rich, organic sound of the guitar is integral to the sound, while the space between the notes is a core aspect of the composition: the stop / start mid-section of ‘The Stone’ jars the senses.

‘The Sun’ provides the album’s colossal, megalithic centrepiece. It takes its time to rise, and a steady, soft, meandering clean guitar and gentle, reverb-heavy vocal owes more to psychedelia and shoegaze than ambient or doom. But there’s a simmering tension that builds slowly but surely. The textures and tones gradually transition from clean to distorted, before drifting out into an extended ambient segment. Yawning drones roll and rumble: these are vast expanses of sound, twisting out toward an infinite horizon. And when the guitar and bass return, it’s with an even greater, more crushing force. The drums are distant, partially submerged by the snarling, thunderous bass and immense guitar which carries the listener on am oceanic expanse of sound.

A subtle, amorphous drone hovers atmospherically through the final track,’ Knife’. Arguably the album’s most ‘pure’ ambient passage, it’s hushed, mellow, almost soporific and marks a real contrast with the previous two tracks. There’s a part of me that, on first hearing, found ‘Knife’ a shade disappointing in context of the album as a whole: ‘The Stone’ and ‘The Sun’ set a certain expectation that, at some point, devastatingly heavy, thunderous bass, crashing drums and cinematic drone guitar will hit like a landslide, but it simply doesn’t happen. However, on reflection – and this is an album which requires much reflection – it’s a well-judged change of form. In confounding expectation on the final track, Nadja show that they’re not tied to formula.

In exploring the contrasts of volume, texture and mood, The Stone is Not Hit by the Sun, Nor Carved With a Knife is a more considered and ultimately rewarding work.

 

Nadja - The Stone is Not Hit

Okkultokrati – Raspberry Dawn

Posted: 25 September 2016 in Albums
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Southern Lord – 30th September 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s a new release on Southern Lord. What more do you need to know? I mean, it’s not going to be some delicate chamber pop or winsome indie effort, is it? Hurry on by if you’re on the market for some chilled-out glitchtronica or ambient, or indeed anything that isn’t ball-bustingly nasty… right? Well, almost. With Okkultokrati’s new album, Raspberry Dawn, the label with a reputation based on its commitment to gnarly, guitar-based brutality takes a break from business as usual to offer something rather different – although it’s still by no means commercial, accessible, or easy listening.

Pitched as being ‘weird, wired and quite possibly the holy grail for those looking for radical rock reinvention and new sensations in the current era’, Raspberry Dawn promises an amalgam of ‘classic 70’s riffing, snotty punk, and brash old school metal, inventively mixed with pulses and spikes of dark wave and ice cold, psychedelic repetition.’

In truth, it’s oftentimes a pretty ‘what the fuck?’ kind of album: ‘World Peace’ is a four-chord punk stomper at heart, but with piston-pumping drums, black metal vocals and all sorts else, not least of all some doomy synths, thrown in. It’s kinda like a mash-up of the Sex Pistols and The Damned in their ‘gothic’ phase with Quorthon on vocal duties. There are changes in tempo and eardrum-busting leaps in volume, too. What DO you make of such a mess of stuff? Christ – or Satan -only knows what’s going on with the title track, a punching punky-pub rocker at heart, it also tips a nod to the old-school speed-metal of Mötörhead Frenzied, fucked-up fun, t’s probably the most straightforward track on the album, even when a piano enters the mix in the final bars.

It’s experimental, but not in the conventional sense: aside from the dark ambient passage at the start of ‘We Love You, which starts out as a darkwave electro groover before rupturing into a psychotic industrial/metal reimagining of The Psychedelic Furs, Raspberry Dawn is very much centred around solid, square 4/4 rhythms played at high speed and fairly standard chord sequences knocked out on overdriven guitars. The snarling vocals in themselves aren’t all that unusual. But that doesn’t make it ordinary.

‘Suspension’ is a lurid, hypnotic opiate haze of a nightmarish dreamscape, woozy and uncomfortable. The psychotic psychobilly attack of ‘Hard to Please, Easy to Kill’ is a snarling synth-driven beast with a throbbing bassline, and ‘Hidden Future’ is a snarling black metal Big Black squall.

There’s a lot going on. A lot going on. You need to concentrate to appreciate.

 

Okkultokrati

Soft Grid – Corolla

Posted: 24 September 2016 in Albums
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Antime – Antime#018 – 14th October 2016

James Wells

There’s something perversely apt about the fact that members of Soft Grid, Jana Sotzko and Theresa Stroetges (ala Golden Disko Ship) met in an abandoned hospital ward. The album begins with the slow, dense electro-throb of ‘Herzog on a Bus’. Hefty percussion underpins looping, layered vocals. From the mechanised murk emerges a rolling, picked guitar line, delicate and tranquil. Harmonies play a major part in the album’s overall focus and form: while there are huge ruptures of noise and bursts of dynamic drum and guitar, in places reminiscent of latter-day Swans, it’s the vocal harmonies which really captivate and provide the focal point.

The twelve-minute ‘Minus Planet’ provides the album’s towering centrepiece, with a mellow electronic pulsation reminiscent of Tangerine Dream breaking out into a surging crescendo before taking a sharp turn around the mid-point and swelling into a The stripped-back and downbeat ‘Two Barrels of Oil’ is low, slow and haunting, a sparse bassline providing the backing to near acapella vocals. The final track, ‘Corolla’ has elements of folktronica and flamenco, and again, through a kaleidoscopic Krautrock transition, the sound builds to a shimmering crescendo.

Corolla is the sound of a band who take the progressive ethos rather than the vintage 70s sound, and actually make music that’s forward-facing and inventive.

 

Soft Grid - Corolla

The Strange Walls – …Won’t Last

Posted: 23 September 2016 in Albums
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Alrealon Musique – ALRN072 – 31st October 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

New York underground act The Strange Walls aren’t conformists or readily categorised: previous releases have been called shoegaze, darkwave, post punk, art punk, experimental, outsider. I’m not even sure what ‘outsider’ is supposed to sound like, but they’re big into their pseudonyms, thus cultivating an air of mystery around the band and their music. Emerging from an ever shifting lineup, core trio of the class of 2016, consisting of Jon V. Worthley, Dan Drogenous and Regna Yates, assisted by Jimmy Ayatollah and John Spreaders have whipped up something appropriately esoteric and wide-ranging for this release.

More significantly, …Won’t Last straddles many genres and yet subscribes wholly to none. A slow, ominous echoey bassline rent with shrieking, ghostly incidentals provide the musical backing to Regina’s vocal, which sings a vaguely familiar melody. But then it’s straight into a squalling lo-fi post-punk racket reminiscent of The Jesus and Mary Chain and A Place to Bury Strangers crossed with The Pop Group. It’s hard on the ears, and the contrast is almost schizophrenic. When an album’s tracks are as diverse as this, spanning psychedelia and folk and sometimes incorporating elements of at least two or three within a single song, it’s inevitable that some tracks will appeal more than others, and this is something which is wholly subjective. Yet the fact that there are some clear standout tracks is an objective observation, and the sequencing of the tracks accentuates this fact. The bleak electro sound of ‘In Time’ combines steely synths with a dash of dark pop sensibility which calls to mind early 80s Cure, and with its primitive, distant drum sound and reverb-soaked synth oscillations, ‘White’ lands somewhere between Cocteau Twins and Silver Apples, and these tracks inevitably sound stronger against the softer, less structured folky strummers. ‘Snow Day’ leans heavily on early New Order, while ‘Yawdons’ fulfils the criteria for obligatory droning experimental piece.

The ramshackle production equally works both for and against the album as a whole. Being better suited to some tracks than others, at times adding space and partially obscured sonic depths, at other simply sounding messy. The result, then, is an album that’s a bit hit and miss. Not bad, and in places brilliant, but a few tracks that will likely become skippers after a while.

 

The Strange Walls

The Stargazer’s Assistant – Remoteness Of Light

Posted: 21 September 2016 in Albums
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House Of Mythology – 26th August 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

So, House of Mythology released two albums simultaneously in August, and having exhausted myself dissecting the David Tibet / Youth collaboration, Create Christ, Sailor Boy under the Hypnopazūzu moniker, it’s taken me a while to steel myself for this.

It’s important to be clear that this is a very different kind of album, the three (or four*) long-form tracks manifesting as darkly ambient instrumental works, which build layers of dissonance and feedback over textured drones and rumbling lower frequencies. While flickers of pan-cultural influence emerge from the thrumming layers of sound, Remoteness Of Light is entirely devoid of any of the trappings of pseudomystical bullshit.

And while ‘Agents of Altitude builds layers of sound which unsettle and unnerve, ‘World of Amphibia’ which follows, is altogether more sparse and delicate, and corresponds more obviously with the nots which accompany the album and situate it in the deep submarine world, which remain every bit as intriguing and unknown as outer space.

In describing the journey of a deep-sea dive (‘Dive a kilometre into the ocean and you leave all surface illumination behind… Descend another ten and luminous forms flicker and burst through the endless black’), The Stargazer’s Assistant contextualise Remoteness Of Light. Of course, the tribal drumming and whining pipes aren’t a literal representation of the underwater experience, but they convey the strangeness of the deep-sea world and the excitement of the decent.

Moreover, there are essentially three areas which offer endless fascination, but have been wholly inadequately explored: space, the oceans, and the human mind. Remoteness Of Light delves into, and connects with, all of these:

The droning, sonorous and subtly rhythmic sonic turnings of the title track are, at times, so quiet and careful as to be barely present, but as ever, dark and unexpected, and it builds o a wheezing, whining, moaning undulation of sound, with a long, slow playout of heavy, echo-drenched percussion and a log-tapering drone. Credit where it’s due: this s sonically and texturally interesting. With a lot going on, it conforms to no specific gene, but engages the listener in unexpected ways, and the varied textures and shades of light and dark unquestionably have the capacity to tweak at the psyche.

* Track 4, ‘Birth of Decay’, is a live recording only available on the double vinyl edition, or as a download for people ordering directly from the House of Mythology web site. It wasn’t included in the digital review copy we received, so it might be awesome or utterly shit, but if it’s on a par with the rest of the album, it should be pretty good.

 

Outside_8

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