Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

Ministry – Trax! Rarities

Posted: 6 December 2016 in Albums
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Cleopatra Records – 9th December 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Why? Why, Al, Why? I ask as a huge ministry fan, and also as someone who has a lot of respect and admiration for what Cleopatra Records do. I practically wore the magnetism off my copy of Christian Death’s Decomposition of Violets album in my teens. I’m not averse to dredging through the archives and giving long hours to the appreciation of murky live recordings from the early 80s, either: my copy of The Cure’s Concert and Curiosity was played until it stretched, and the number of Sisters of Mercy bootlegs, many of quite dubious quality, that I played to death and still own is testament to my obsessive bent and borderline insanity.

This release is undoubtedly of historical interest. But given Al Jourgensen’s (rightful) disavowal of the early Ministry releases, this feels like a shameful barrel-scraping exercise. It’s pretty much unanimously accepted as fact that Ministry only started to become worthwhile with Twitch.

The first four tracks which occupy side one of the double album were recorded live in Detroit in 1982. With some reedy lead synths, dry bass synths and chorused guitars, they sound like A Flock of Seagulls. Only not as polished. With a shouty, punk vocal and drum style, it’s a pretty ragged affair, the sneering, snarling Johnny Rotten style vocals echo into the abyss while the synths are almost buried at times. Even overlooking the mix – the recording quality isn’t that bad – it still all sounds pretty naff – although the material is, on balance, better than anything on With Sympathy. In context, it makes sense: Jourgensen penned much of the material which went onto Twitch and was already working on edgier sounding material before the release of With Sympathy in 1983, but the record label weren’t interested. Still, ‘Love Change’ sounds like The Human League covering ‘Funky Down’. Edgy it isn’t.

The ’82 and ’83 demos are unadulterated synthpop tunes and are very much of their era. ‘Game is Over’ casts some shades of grey with hints of Killing Joke and The Cure, but then, it’s perhaps easy to forget that the tone of much commercial rock and pop was darker than we’re accustomed to now: even acts like Howard Jones and Mr Mister had a certain dark streak to their music and lyrics. Ah, different times. ‘Let’s Be Happy’ is a bouncy goth disco track. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it, but it’s still difficult to reconcile with the band Ministry would subsequently become, and the less said about ‘Wait’ the better.

‘I See Red’ sounds more like Twitch: built around a thumping EBM groove, heavy electro percussion and processed vocals. Likewise, the heavily percussive, bass-driven ‘Self-Annoyed’ represents the sound of Wax Trax! in the mid to late 80s, and is immediately more recognisable as Ministry/related.

And while this is billed as a Ministry release, the myriad offshoots and side projects have produced some corking tunes through the years, so to find some of them represented here is actually a cause for celebration. That said, it’s not hard to appreciate why the unreleased Revolting Cocks cut, ‘Fish in Cold Water, failed to see the light of day before now. It may pack the sleazy disco grind of their Bigsexyland era material, but comes on like a mad mash-up of Talking Heads, U2, Bowie, and Harold Faltermeyer. ‘Drums Along the Carbide’ is way better. But then, you already know it, as a different version featured on the debut album under the title ‘Union Carbide’. Still calling to mind the attack of ‘Beers, Steers and Queers’, the battering-ram drums and scraping feedback providing a welcome cranial cleanse.

Dub versions of ‘Supernaut’ (released as 1,000 Homo DJs) and the Pailhead track ‘Don’t Stand in Line’ feel like too much filler however awesomely full-on the drum sound is, and the ‘banned version’ of ‘(Let’s Get) Physical’ doesn’t sound any different, and it would take a fair bit of time with an ear twisted to the vocals to determine any differences or the reason why it was banned.

The PTP track, ‘Show Me Your Spine’ is disappointing: it’s got a good beat, but isn’t a patch on the monotone psychopathic technoid groove of ‘Rubber Glove Seduction’, and again, it’s apparent as to why it failed to make an official release at the time.

In all, it’s rather a mixed bag. The majority of the material has curiosity value, but this is very much one for the fans. Even then, I’d recommend sticking to the albums released during the band’s lifetime, including those of the various side-projects.

Ministry_-_Trax!_Rarities_(cover)

Gnaw Their Tongues – Hymns For The Broken, Swollen and Silent

Posted: 5 December 2016 in Albums
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Consouling Sounds – 9th December 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Listening to Gnaw Their Tongues always feels like a dubious pleasure, something that’s almost masochistic. You listen to GNT to channel dark energy, to release bad vibes, for the letting of anguish and pain and anger, for an experience akin to a sonic exorcism. You don’t listen to a GNT album to feel better about life and the world, to lift the spirits. In keeping with Mories’ myriad previous releases under the Gnaw their Tongues and various other monikers, Hymns For The Broken, Swollen and Silent is an album for venting, or when feeling the need for some pugilistic self-flagellation.

Structurally, there is a certain narrative thread which is possible to interpret fromt e tracks and their sequencing. Sonically, this is the sound of hell: Hymns For The Broken, Swollen and Silent is the soundtrack of existence in purgatory.

Woozy, near subsonic bass dominates, while above, impenetrable demonic screams and below, almost submerged, drums like machine gun fire rattle at 250bpm. It’s an unholy racket. ‘Your Kingdom Shrouded in Blood’ brings a vast, cinematic expansiveness to the sound. The drums roll like thunder and crash like tsunami, reverberating through immense canyons, and monastic voices send wordless invocations to the heavens. It’s pompous and bombastic and it works magnificently, as if soundtracking the preface to a climactic battle of mythological proportions, a combat between good and evil where the two sides each summon their ultimate deities.

‘Silent Burned Atrocities’ ratchets up the pain, marrying extreme sounds at extreme volume to extreme tempos, barrages of rapid-fire beats from deep within the morass of noise, snippets of dialogue emerge, to be engulfed in a wall of noise and screams of anguish. ‘Hymns For The Broken, Swollen and Silent’ ventures into the territory occupied by Sunn O))) on Monoliths and Dimensions. The dronesome doom and the creeping fear chords are bathed in a quasi-religious light. Here, with sampled vocals floating in and out between the monumental, crushing beats the sound takes on a different perspective on eternal darkness. But dark it is, and there is no hope of finding hope here. ‘I Have Clad the Pillar in the Flayed Skins’ sounds like a black metal remix of early Swans, a punishing cacophony of noise that’s every bit as torturous as the scene the title conveys. These are the spoils of battle, and there is rejoicing in the bloody scene of victory.

The final track, ‘Our Mouths Ridden with Worms’ is the subterranean song of the dead, the defeated. It’s a dank, dark, lugubrious trudge of a track. Perhaps death is not defeat, but victory: to live in a world where this is the sound of living is a bleak prospect.

Hymns For The Broken, Swollen and Silent is not fun. It is not pleasant. It is not enjoyable. It’s dark, and darker still. It’s oppressive, and terrifying. It’s classic Gnaw Their Tongues.

Gnaw Their Tongues - Hymns

Martyrdöd – List

Posted: 4 December 2016 in Albums
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Southern Lord – 25th November 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Anyone who’s been awaiting Martyrdöd’s pop covers album is going to be immensely disappointed by List. However, anyone else who’s on the market for a proper gnarly Martyrdöd album is likely to be happy enough with List. That said, it does mark a clear progression from previous outings. List is very much a more refined work, but of course, these things are relative. Every song still hits at three hundred miles an hour. The drums are still relentless, pounding. The bass is still a snarling throb, partly submerged beneath a messy mas of treble. It’s still as brutal as hell. But there’s a greater sense of focus, and the sound is clearer.

The title track introduces an almost Celtic lead guitar motif and a huge sense of bombast to the full-throttle thrashabout that lies beneath It’s a remarkably structured, and, even more remarkably, melody-focused track, but the demonic vocal snarl is still ever-present and ever terrifying.

‘Över på ett stick’ slows things down and takes on an amost anthemic, stadium rock quality, before ‘Harmagedon’ brings things back to familiar, snarling, dark crust territory. ‘Drömtid’ goes all folk / Metallica by way of an interlude, but it is just an interlude: the barrage that is ‘Intervention’ proves once again that they’ve not got soft, but have simply developed their appreciation of dynamics, texture and range, and it’s reflected in ‘Intervention’, which exploits, if not loud / quiet dynamics, then loud / louder / punishing dynamics and with a degree of intricacy and detail that’s impressive on a technical scale. Rather than diminish the impact, it heightens it.

Martyrdod - List

Jos Smolders – Nowhere: Exercises in Modular Synthesis and Field Recording

Posted: 3 December 2016 in Albums
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Crónica – 10th January 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

In the sphere of experimental and what one may reasonably term ‘fringe’ music, there is something of a propensity for descriptive titles. I’m quite a fan of these kinds of titles. Picking up Exercises in Modular Synthesis and Field Recording, I have a reasonable idea of what to expect. Granted, there’s no detail as to how these elements manifest sonically, I know I’m not going to get black metal or orchestral pop.

Smolders likens his process to that of the calligrapher, working with speed and precision. Operating with minimal interference or reworking once the process is under way, he is, he says, guided by the flow and the ‘here’ and ‘now’.

‘Incident at Ras Oumlil’ is constructed primarily from long, low rumbling drones interspersed with clicks and fizzy bursts of static. Voices rise; the words inaudible, but the tones of the clamourous crowd conveys a sense of agitation. Introducing an element of wordplay which reminds us that even nowhere is somewhere and is located temporally in time and space even if not geographically, ‘NowHere’ approximates the sounds of engines; trains and planes and whistling lasers. It’s evocative of something, but something so vague as to be an empty vessel from which echoes notions of travel, departure, passing through. We’re here, now, but where is here and when is now? Counterpart and companion piece, ‘NoWhere’ is barely there for the most part, with delicate chimes and rings hovering on the fringes of audibility, gradually building in its tonal range and density. The seventeen-minute ‘Up, Up and Back to 1982’ deals in sonic abstractions, shimmery analogue bleeps and twitters flit through a composition which transitions through a succession of seemingly independent segments.

These are sparsely arranged pieces, with emphasis on tone, texture and above all, space. Wibbly oscillations funnel between screeding noise, feedback and distortion. Slow, atmospheric swirls drift blankly against a backdrop off hums and crackles. At times manifesting as a sound which approximates little more than the rumble of a vinyl groove, at others bursting with sound on sound, Nowhere is attentively executed with a rare precision, navigating a route through a succession of temporo-spatial zones which linger long in the mind.

 

Jos Smolders - Nowhere

Reinier Van Houdt – Paths of the Errant Gaze

Posted: 30 November 2016 in Albums
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Hallow Ground – HG1606 – 28th October 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Reiner Van Houdt presents an interesting proposition: a classically-trained pianist who’s worked with John Cage and Luc Ferrari, he also plays in Current 93 and has worked in collaboration with Nick Cave, John Zorn and Antony Hegarty. The fact this release is on the Hallow Ground label should perhaps give an indication that this is no soft neoclassical effort – although I’m in no way criticising neoclassical music here: I’m simply saying that this dos not sit within the field, and is harder, harsher, heavier, at least in places. There are no neat melodic structures to be found on Paths of the Errant Gaze, and no instrumentation which sits within the classical bracket: this is very much an electronic album.

On the face of it, there isn’t much to this. Paths of the Errant Gaze is an album which is extremely quiet, sparse, minimal, and the detail – and the quantity of source material involved in its creation – are not immediately apparent. Just as Burroughs and Gysin theorised on the power of ‘The Third Mind’ through the act of collaboration, so Van Houdt believes the act of recording creates a ‘third ear’. And so it is that Van Houdt built Paths of the Errant Gaze from myriad recordings gathered from a near-infinite array of locations.

‘The Fabric of Loss’ creeps ominously, scraping strings like creaking doors echo in the still air as dust motes descend silently, ‘Orphic Asylum’ introduces the first semblance of rhythms, murky, clanking, developing to extended bursts of bass-end noise and a thumping, trudging beat which plots treacherously through an unnervingly dark sonic labyrinth. Even when near-silence encroaches, there remains a dark, oppressive atmosphere in the air. Sparse piano notes and a Scott Walker-esque vocal emerge briefly from the dense sonic fog on TR 5, but neither does much to orientate or ground the listener.

There is no indication of the sounds captured by Van Houdt being your common or garden field recordings – in fact, the ‘everyday objects, situations and moments’ which Van Houdt records obsessively are all but lost amidst the process of forming a sonic melange. Nor does Van Houdt utilise these soundpieces in a conventional way: one does not get a sense of Paths of the Errant Gaze existing as a collage work. Paths of the Errant Gaze is not a work which is encumbered by a sense of pretence, and nor does its theoretical or conceptual framework impinge unduly on the end product.

The ten-minute ‘Transfinite Spectre’ is an all-out sonic assault worthy of Merzbow, as laser-guided blasts crackle and fizz, top-end treble drilling directly into the brain through the ear to create maximum discomfort.

 

Reinier Van Houdt - Paths of the Errant Gaze

Crippled Black Phoenix – Bronze

Posted: 29 November 2016 in Albums
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Season of Mist – 4th November 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Bronze is the sixth album by Crippled Black Phoenix, the current musical vehicle for Justin Greaves, who has a remarkable CV which features Iron Monkey, Electric Wizard, The Varukers, and Earth 2 referencing drone supergroup Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine. They’ve spent a good few years mining a fresh seam of dark progressive music, and Bronze is an album which qualifies unreservedly for the label of ‘epic’.

As the pre-release blurb helpfully points out, ‘Bronze consists primarily of copper, but it is the inclusion of other metals and non-metals that gives this alloy its specific characteristics. Ever since mankind discovered the secret of its making thousands of years ago, the golden and shining bronze has changed the course of history, spawned destruction and war, yet also been crafted into desired objects of extreme beauty.’

And so it is that the first track, the expansive organ-style synth-soaked instrumental ‘Dead Imperial Bastard’ opens the album with a darkly funereal instrumental. ‘Deviant Burials’ locks into some solid riffing which contrasts with some surprisingly easy-going vocals, and the contrast between melody and driving guitars calls to mind Queens of the Stone Age in their poppier moments, before veering off into more overtly progressive territories with some expansive post-metal dynamics.

‘Rotten Memories’ is the album’s shortest track, and offers something approximating a dark pop song, albeit in the vein of the piano-led power ballad beloved during the 80s. it is, of course, but an interlude before the immense ‘Champions of Disturbance (pt 1 & 2)’, which segue together to form a nine-minute epic. It’s prog, for sure, but in the post-Oceansize sense, a sinewy, riff-led behemoth. ‘Goodbye Then’ brings wistful melancholia, which contrasts with the psych-tinged hard rock of ‘Turn to Stone’, and it’s clear that on this outing, Greaves has brought a whole host of stylistic elements to the party to produce an album that’s got range and depth and which brings emotional evocativeness as well as cinematicism and bombast.

The emotional depth is no fabrication: Greaves recently ‘went public’ about his personal fight against severe depression, and as the press release notes, ‘for him, not letting the “black dog” devour you is a big message mixed within his songs.

That doesn’t mean that Bronze is an easy or entirely uplifting album. In fact, it’s an album of remarkable range, and an album which is often awkward and emotionally bleak. While downtempo epics like ‘Losing a Winning Battle’ bring an expansive, progtastic darkness, what really shines through with ‘Bronze’ is its immense range, as well as its scope and ambition, which is matched by its ambition and production, this is a big album and perfectly executed.

crippled-black-phoenix-bronze

 

Ghédalia Tazartès, Pawel Romanczuk, Andrzej Zaleski – Carp’s Head

Posted: 26 November 2016 in Albums
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Monotype Rec – MONOLP018 – 14th November 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

However broad one’s mind and tastes, there will inevitably be some artists who will baffle, bewilder and leave one somewhat dazed. Carp’s Head, a collaboration between Ghédalia Tazartès, Pawel Romanczuk, and Andrzej Zaleski is one of those releases. So much so, that my first reaction was one of borderline horror, a recoiling, an internal cry of ‘what the hell is this?’

‘Danse Inverse’ begins with a bleep. Minimal electro? Nope. A grizzled yet semi-operatic yellering starts up, almost simultaneous with a strolling bass, wonkily-played and a woozy accordion. Tazartès whoops and grunts, growls and emotes wildly like a drunken French opera singer impersonating Tom Waits, while the cacophonous musical backing veers and weaves all over. The weirdness only continues and as the album progresses, taking the listener on a bizarre journey around the globe and as observed through the eyes of three madmen. ‘You’ll Be Wise’ comes on like Scott Walker on acid, while the quietly crooning ‘Zither Song’ is sparse and eerily haunting in a mystical, dream-like way. ‘Orient Calling’ marks a continental shift in terms of the musical inspirations and influences, a droning sitar accompanies Tazartès’ yodelling ululations and low, chesty quaverings.

The album’s centrepiece is the nine-minute epic ‘Wolves and Birds’, a bleak and disorientating expanse of dark ambience. The wordless vocalisations convey a sense of lack, of absence, as they float, wailing and disembodied through the sonic wastelands. There’s plenty of weirdness on the other side of the bridge, too, with tweeting, trilling pipe notes and scratchy layers of sound by turns tickling and teasing the listener’s senses.

Jazz percussion breaks out unexpectedly at various points, bringing an odd and somewhat incongruous swing to proceedings. With its ‘Trout Mask’ connotations and overt otherness, Carp’s Head is many things: it is, in fact, remarkably focused and feels extremely cohesive in its order, less experimental and more built on musical intuition between the players. I’m not sure I recommend it, or if so, to whom, but there’s no question that it’s interesting or different.

 

Carps Head

worriedaboutsatan – Blank Tape

Posted: 24 November 2016 in Albums
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This Is It Forever – TIIF031 – 25th November 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

I’ve long been a fan of worriedaboutsatan: on their emergence in 2006, their, a hybrid of ambient and low-key dance music, fused with a rare focus on dynamics, positioned them as purveyors of some kind of electronic post-rock. No-one else was doing anything quite like it. With couple of EPs and an album under their belts, the duo – Gavin Miler and Thomas Ragsdale – morphed into the more overtly techno Ghosting Season. Returning but briefly with a single in 2010, it wasn’t until last year’s second album proper that they really made their return. Now it seems that while marking their tenth anniversary, they’re making up for lost time. And still no one else is doing anything quite like what they’re doing.

Opener ‘A Way Out’ immediately trips against expectations, beginning with tweeting birdsong n chiming piano notes which build anticipation of a slow-building piece that blossoms as layers emerge fluidly. Instead, it ends swiftly an abruptly, with the beat-driven trancey electronica of ‘The Violent Sequence’ taking things in a radically different direction. It’s anything but violent, at least on the surface, but as is often the case with worriedabotsatan’s layered, nuanced arrangements, there’s something menacing hiding beneath the surface.

‘This Restless Wing’ introduces vocals to the mix, courtesy of the gliding falsetto of Vincent Cavanagh of Anathema. If the idea of the wilfully low-key duo going all-out for the big-name collaboration as a lure to the album seems incongruous, it’d worth bearing in mind they’ve previously been featured on various TV shows, and, more recently, the immensely acclaimed Adam Curtis documentary, HyperNormalisation. In other words, nothing is beyond the realms of worriedaboutsatan. And nor should it be: these guys are masters of stealth, and Blank Tape is an album which wears many cloaks.

‘Forward into Night’ approaches almost invisibly, building a dense, murky atmosphere. The ticking cymbals create a tension, while the sparse beats are subdued, and ‘Lament’, a collaboration with Bristol electro duo Face+Heel, is haunting, ethereal. The album’s second track to feature vocals, it’s sparse and understated, and Sinead McMillan brings something unique to the song’s dynamics. The filmic qualities of the piano-led title track are undeniable and it’s a compelling piece which contrasts with the bubbling synths of the closer, ‘From a Dead Man… Part 2’ which plays out the album and drives it home with a return to pulsing beats, undulating sub-bass and rippling synth motifs.

Blank Tape is still distinctly worriedaboutsatan, but also marks quite something of a departure from its predecessor, Even Temper. It’s a lot less beaty, for a start, and a lot less bassy. The samples are virtually non-existent. Moreover, while it’s still richly textured, the textures here are smoother, the frequencies less geared toward eliciting an unprovoked physical reaction. It’s perhaps the sparsest and most minimal work they’ve created to date, but it’s highly detailed and if anything, its subtlety represents a new advancement and refinement of their approach to music-making.

Blank Tape is by no means an immediate album. It’s an album to absorb, ponder and reflect on, and which yields more with repeat listens. It’s certainly not an album made for TV, but these are strange times. This is the instrumental soundtrack to those times, and the next few years will surely see TV being made for this music. Blank Tape will likely see the band achieve the world domination they deserve by subliminal means.

 

ALBUM COVER

Hey Colossus – Dedicated to Uri Klangers

Posted: 23 November 2016 in Albums
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MIE – 2nd December 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

 

I was pretty late to the party with Hey Colossus, being introduced by way of their seventh album, 2011’s mighty RRR. In my review at the time, I commented on the album’s diversity, noting that ‘“Teased from the Nest” drifts like a zephyr in the Colorado Desert, and “The Drang” crunches, bucks and grunts, laden with sludgy guitars with an extra layer of treble squall. It’s a fair sumary of the band’s divergent styles, and  both of those cuts feature on this fourteen-track retrospective (that’s one more track than the original cassette release in 2013, of which some  copies exist).

The press release sets the scene, and to quote seems instructive here: “In 2015 Hey Colossus released two albums on Rocket Recordings, In Black and Gold in February and Radio Static High in October. Dedicated to Uri Klangers is a look back. It’s best summed up by the 3000 words that can be found on the inner sleeve of the record, the tale begins: “The 2xLP comp that’s in your hands now was initially released on cassette by S.O.U.L for our 10th anniversary show, September 2013, about 50 tapes were made and sold on the night. We thought a BEST OF would be hilarious. We were average at that show and I’m being generous. I’d give us 5.5/10. A shame. Hacker Farm and Helm also played. It was at The Sebright Arms in London, somewhere out East…..”

This encapsulates the band’s self-effacing an anti-commercialist position perfectly. They’re outsiders, largely by choice, and that’s precisely why they’re so great. That, and the fact they’ve got some belting tunes, if you like it loud and abrasive, that is.

For those unfamiliar with the band, Hey Colossus make a serious racket, and they get right down to it on this ‘first ten years’ compilation, which draws from their myriad releases which have appeared on a host of different labels (although Riot Season and Rocket have been particularly kind). The throbbing, squalling racket of ‘War Crows’ from 2008’s Happy Birthday starts it all off. It’s an uncompromising, trebly din. ‘How to Tell the Time with Jesus’ showcases the diametric opposite side of the band: a ten-minute avant-Krautrock epic built around a looping bassline and motoric drum, it’s a droning psychedelic behemoth. It’s the first of four tracks which extend past the ten-minute mark, in contrast to explosive blasts like ‘I Am the Chiswich Strangler’, which clock in at under two, but more than compensate in blistering intensity and pace.

Following on from ‘How to Tell the Time’, ‘The Drang’ also brings the contrast. I’d forgotten just how fucking raw it was, how unproduced, what a monstrous mess of feedback and sludge. There’s a song in here? Some semblance of a rhythm? Chords?

The churning sprawl of ‘Eurogrumble PTII’ from Dominant Male (2010) draws together their squalling noise tendencies with their experimental and Krautrock leanings to produce a headsplitting kaleidoscope of feedback, and ‘Drug Widow’ is just one of the nastiest, noisiest, grungiest grinds you’re likely to hear: like Tad only heavier, sweatier, grimier and gnarlier, it’s a raging beast of a track.

‘Hot Grave’ is another chug-heavy heft of grunge rock with some bizarre twists, and is one of the tracks which perhaps gives the best indication of the birth of Hey Colossus offshoot band Henry Blacker, not least of all on account of the mangled vocals.

‘Witchfinder General Hospital’ sits alongside ‘Pope Long Haul III’ for That Fucking Tank-like wordplay titles, and this fifteen-minute behemoth is the album’s motoric centrepiece, and if acts like Hookworms spring to mind by way of a comparson, then fair enough, although a collision of Hawkwind and Dr Mix is perhaps closer to the mark when referencing this thumping monster on which squealing analogue synths shriek over something approximating The Sisters of Mercy covering ‘Sister Ray’ circa 1983.

‘Wait Your Turn’ is a doomy, sludgy, and pretty scary-sounding black metal mess: when Hey Colossus get dark, they go seriously fucking dark. This is, of course, one of the reason they’ve remained a very much underground / cult proposition: they refuse to confirm to any one style, and they’re often given to making the most unpalatably dark noise, without any concession to prettying up the sound for the benefit of a potentially wider audience.

In attempting to research the chronology nd the origins of the individual tracks, I found myself foundering, and again the press release explains why: “Included are one or two tunes from all the HC albums released 2003-2013, it also includes the Witchfinder General Hospital track (only 100 pressed on 12”). All vinyl versions of the albums from this era are long gone. The discography is a bit of a mess now, the band doesn’t fully know and the Discogs site is not much help – godspeed anyone trying to buy all the back cat.

And as much as Dedicated to Uri Klangers may be a prompt to explore the back catalogue in more detail – and righty so – it’s also a perfect summation of their output to this point. Challenging yet rewarding and as noisy as fuck, it’s niche alright, but it’s also a document of everything a cult band should be.

 

Hey Colossus - Dedicated_to_Uri_Klangers_Front_Cover

The Wedding Present – Going, Going…

Posted: 18 November 2016 in Albums
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Happy Happy Birthday To Me Records – 18th November 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

I’ve been a fan of The Wedding Present for a long time. That said, I did rather lose track of their output at some point. It happens. For some reason, I felt that they’d somehow become mired in a template-based middle-ground. Nevertheless, one of the things I always admired about the band was their ability to constantly reinvent themselves while still sounding like The Wedding Present. Going, Going… released in Europe in September and now receiving a US release, is a perfect exemplar of the way in which they achieve this: it’s an immense 20-track double album, full of overtly Wedding Present songs and songs that explore a host of different forms.

The dense guitar trudge which drives the post-rock instrumental of ‘Kittery’, the opening track on Going, Going… does not sound like The Wedding Present to my ears. But it is compelling. ‘Greenland’ features a female radio voice reading out co-ordinates over a thundering drum beat and very little else. It sounds more like Shellac than The Wedding Present. And yet, as a slow-building rumble of noise builds in the background before the track fades out slowly without anything actually happening, it shouldn’t come as a surprise: The Wedding Present called in Steve Albini to rework breakthrough single ‘Brassneck’ from their 1989 album Bizarro¸ and he ‘recorded’ one of their biggest albums, Seamonsters in 1991. The Wedding Present also covered Pavement long before Pavement were cool – before anyone had even heard of them, in fact.

In some respects, given David Gedge’s longstanding interest in the obscure and his impressively long career spent cultivating a distinctive sound has paved the way for tis radical departure. Because, while words like ‘workmanlike’ and ‘jangling’ have long been associated with the band, they’ve always been more than their critical reception, and have long gone out of their way to do something outlandish or perverse – like a single a month for a year. Put another way, The Wedding Present have always espoused the indie aesthetic on the absolute sense, in that they’ve always indulged their contrary side because, well, simply, they can.

With a haunting, wordless, female vocal and soaring post-rock guitar sound, ‘Marblehead’ is a far cry from the twangy, three-chord thrashabouts that are the band’s trademark, and the string-soaked, piano-led chamber orchestra piece that is ‘Sprague’ finds Gedge lead his crew – not to mention their fans – further from familiar territory.

It’s not until the fifth track, ‘Two Bridges’ that we get a song that showcases Gedge’s familiar gruff northern tones amidst a choppy guitar attack. It’s a thick, rough and ready and in many ways primitive indie tune that could only come from one band, even when it lumbers off on an extended riffy workout after a couple of minutes. What we can take from this is that while The Wedding Present can sound like pretty much anything, no-one else can make songs that sound like The Wedding Present. There are plenty of thumping guitar tunes – more carved from the hefty riff-driven template of Seamonsters and beyond than their jangly indie early years – and they’re decent tunes. ‘Bear’ is one of several classic examples of the Pixies-like grungers which exploit the quiet/loud dynamic. Lumbering riffs about, driving the lurching alt-pop of ‘Fifty-six’ and the all-out stomp of ‘Emporia’, which is pretty heavy and fires up a roaring guitar racket while retaining a keen sense of melody.

‘Secretary’ brings some jangle, but also a fuckload of noise all bound up with a post-punk sensibility and a jarring angularity that’s unexpectedly exhilarating, while ‘Bells’ is a standout by virtue of simply being a great song with a cracking melodic hook.

Who would have thought that some 30 years into their career, The Wedding Present of all bands, would produce something as ambitious and as impressive as this? If anything, rather than being an exercise in indulgence for the band and a drag for the listener, Going, Going… is as strong as anything The Wedding Present have ever released, and the longer format finds Gedge really going all-out to try new sounds and shapes. It’s also an album which reveals a band really concentrating on tight and varied songwriting, and when paired with a focus on tone and dynamics it makes for an unexpectedly great record.

 

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