Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

Buñuel – Mansuetude

Posted: 11 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Overdrive/SKiN GRAFT – 15th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

When it comes to writing about bands who clearly function as a collective unit, it usually feels wrong to focus on any one member. But Eugene S Robinson is someone who stands out, not only in his singularity as a member of any band he plays with but within the alternative scene more broadly. The fact of the matter is that there aren’t many suit-wearing, bespectacled black men in noise rock, and this is a man who has blazed trails and then some. Famously founding Oxbow in 1988 as a means of recording his ‘suicide note’ before departing the band this year due to “the weight of irreconcilable differences, none of them aesthetic or musical.” It’s perhaps an understatement to remark that this is a man who has carved a unique path in music, and Mansuetude marks something of a shift for Buñuel following the trilogy of albums comprising A Resting Place for Strangers, The Easy Way Out and Killers Like Us.

Mansuetude is a whole lot more direct, less experimental, than any of its predecessors.

The album comes in hard: ‘Who Missed Me’ crashes in with an ear-shredding squall of feedback and distortion – that bass! And you’re swimming in noise before the crunching riff slams in… and then there’s the beat and… fuck. It’s too much! It’s brutal, launching between frenetic hardcore and pure mania. By the end, it feels like three songs playing at once and I’ve got heartburn before it collapses into a simmering afterburn. And then the blistering mathy blast of single cut ‘Drug Burn’ roars in with the deranged, lurching intensity of the Jesus Lizard at their fiercest.

There is absolutely no let-up: ‘Class’ is led by a big, dirty bass and hits with a density which hit around the solar plexus.

Just two songs in, you feel punch-drunk, breathless, weak at the knees. And they’re only just getting warmed up.

‘Movement No. 201 broods and skulks in a sea of reverb, and offers brief respite and alludes the kind of spoken word /experimental pieces on previous albums, but the explosions of noise hurt. ‘Bleat’ gets bassier, dirtier, heavier, more suffocating., the warped and twisted layering of the vocals intensifying the experience, the sensation of everything closing in.

It’s the relentlessly thunderous percussion that dominates ‘A Killing on the Beach’, but then the guitars roar in like jet engines and holy shit. Again, the multi-layered vocals raining in from all sides sting like the tasers referred to in the lyrics and everything is fizzling and sizzling in the most intense way. And then they crash in with ‘Leather bar’: it’s s seven-and-a-half-minute monster, a droning colossus and a true megalith of a track. As much as it recalls Sunn O))), I’m reminded of a personal favourite, ‘Guitars of the Oceanic Undergrowth’ by Honolulu Mountain Daffodils. It culminates in a thick wall of distorted guitars, the kind you can simply bask in. It borders on the brutality of Swans circa ’86. It’s harsh, it’s heavy it’s punishing.

The high-paced alt-rock, hardcore-flavoured frenzy that is ‘High. Speed. Chase’ is heavy and puns at a hundred miles an hour, and ‘Fixer’ is a tempest of raw energy, bleeding into the sub-two-minute gut-churner that is he blistering hardcore grind of ‘Trash’. ‘Pimp’ collides punishing repletion with skull-crushing weight, while the last track, the six-minute ‘A Room in Berlin’ finally brings an experimental edge and a spoken-word element to the soundtrack to a nuclear winter, with the most harrowing effect.

Everything about Mansuetude is dense, dark, and raging. It’s relentless in its ferocity, its raging intensity, an album that never lets up and is truly punishing at any pace. It’s an outstanding album, but it hurts.

AA

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The Giraffes – Cigarette

Posted: 8 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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27th September 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

They’re pitched as being for fans of, among others, the Jesus Lizard, QOTSA, Earthless, King Gizzard and Lizard Wizard, Fu Manchu, Daughters, and Beak, and their influences are listed as Dick Dale, Black Sabbath, Queens of the Stone Age, David Bowie, Ennio Morricone, Scott Walker, Pink Floyd, Fear, Erkin Koray, and Minute Men. And for those familiar with the band, the fact that Cigarette is their first album in five years is likely to be a cause of excitement.

Citing Daughters has become somewhat tarnished lately, in the wake of allegations against singer Alexis Marshall, which saw the band halting activity and him dropped by this label., but then, there likely a lot of people who aren’t aware of this, and moreover, it seems that even convictions and out of court settlements are no obstacle to becoming president of the United States, so perhaps a lot of people aren’t especially concerned by such things.

I’m not sure what The Giraffes have been up to for the last five years, or how they’ve managed to avoid my radar for the entirety of their career – after all, they formed back in the 90s, and released their debut album in ’98, with Cigarette being their eighth. But this is something that happens a lot: there are simply so many acts out there, it’s impossible to be aware of all of them. But we’re here now.

Some may say that five years is a long time to cook up just seven songs, but quality beats quantity, and Cigarette is solid and consistent in the quality stakes. There’s an abundance of drawling, stoner swagger. If ‘baby Pictures’ makes for a gentle start, they slam on the gas and go pedal-to-the-metal on the riffarola of ‘Pipes’, before ‘Limping Horse’ goes all out on the blues-driven scuzzy rock ‘n’ roll.

‘Dead Bird’ brings the requisite slow-tempo acoustic mid-album breather, and in doing so brings an almost folksy aspect to proceedings, while also strongly reminiscent of Alice in Chains in the harmonies.

Revisiting politically-charged single cut ‘Million Year Old Song’ in context of the album, and realising grimly how much can change in just a few weeks, it clicks that I’m reminded a little of Rollins Band with its sinewy lead guitar work and rant blasting over a low-slung groove.

It closes off with aa couple of six-minute epic sluggers, with ‘The Shot’ starting out with a delicate slow-burn but builds, snaking, smoking, and spun with a dash of flamenco and a swirl of drama into a writing monster of a track, before ‘Lazarus’ provides a worthy finale, with its atmospheric, almost post-rock epic intro that leads into a sultry strut that underlies a contemplation on death delivered in a gritty, Mark Lanegan-esque growl.

There’s a solid, vintage feel to Cigarette – which is to say it’s by no means ground-breaking, but while bands like this were ubiquitous in the ‘90s, now, they’re not so much. It’s not only nostalgia that means I miss them; there’s a place for this kind of chunky, dependable rock ‘n’ roll with a whiff of attitude and the perspiration of graft, and Cigarette is ultimately satisfying.

AA

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Maja Osojnik – Doorways

Posted: 8 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Mamka Records – 15th November 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

It feels like a while since we heard from Maja Osojnik – and, I suppose it has: her debut solo album, Let Them Grow, comprising work composed and recorded between 2013 and 2015, was released in early 2016: we’re now near the end of 2024, and a lot has happened in the last eight years.

Life… and we’ll spare another retread of the pandemic ‘lost years’. Along the way, Maja has founded her own record label, created and exhibited visual artworks, and produced some collaborative audio works, notably DRUCK with Anthony Pateras.

But the time between Let Them Grow and Doorways is significant in terms of the album’s inspiration and purpose. We learn that ‘Doorways was born from a longing to escape the city and everyday life – and the problematically fast pace thereof, a pace of production that accelerates the erosion of attention. In seeking to arrive in a quiet place, to linger there with an observational unprejudiced eros, to become completely aware of being alive. In line with Pauline Oliveros’ practice of deep listening, Maja Osojnik’s album explores the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious nature of listening. It raises the question: How attentively do we perceive, recognise and internalise the ever-changing (aural) environment?’

It’s a question few likely ponder, although one that I have found myself contemplating in recent years. It began with the first lockdown. I used to travel to work – a twenty-five minute walk, followed by a further half-hour bus journey – with my earphones firmly wedged in my ears, desperate to ensure the noise of everything and everyone was blocked out by music, and I craved my own space. But then, suddenly, I felt the need on my daily hour’s walk, to hear nature – and it’s true, my paranoia peaked to a level that meant I felt the need to have my eyes and ears open and be aware of anyone in the vicinity, when people were much scarcer in the street. But this reconnecting with the sounds of birds, the wind in the trees became more than simply a lockdown hobby. And while, it seems, ‘The Great Pause’ – something only some got to experience or enjoy – gave way to ‘The Great Return’ and ‘The Great Acceleration’ Maja Osojnik has been motivated to seek peace and space, and instead of yielding to any pressures – real or perceived – to produce endlessly, she has chosen to explore time, and space, and allow herself to draw long, slow breaths, and to absorb the details of her surroundings. And it is this different focus which has informed Doorways.

While essentially consisting of two compositions – ‘Doorways #9’ and ‘Blende #1’ – each with a running time of over twenty minutes, and corresponding with a side of an LP, for digital release purposes, each piece has been segmented into five movements or fragmentary length. This may seem to run contra to the idea of reclaiming headspace from the current climate of the truncated attention span endemic in Westers society, but it does reflect the collaging approach to sound Osojnik has taken in assembling a broad range of field recordings, along with the input of woodwind and strings. As the accompanying notes point out, ‘It’s about active listening – what the artist Maja Osojnik calls cinema for the ears – an interactive game with one’s own self. The compositions invite the listener to hear them deeply; they function like a rotary dial, bringing extremely sensitive changes into focus. By constantly readjusting the focal point, they create new relationships between the electronically generated sounds, instruments and field recordings.’

And yes, it’s a timely and necessary reminder not only about the way we close ourselves off to the world, but how music is often something which simply floats around in the background while you’re doing other stuff, and how listening habits have changed: the majority now listen to an endless shuffle stream on Spotify. Simply typing that sentence plunges me into a state of despair.

In its collaging approach to composition, Doorways has, in a sense, inbuilt the shuffle into its structure – but at the same time, it is best experienced as an album, as intended. Doorways is not a bunch of songs, penned as singles, lobbed together to make an ‘album’: Doorways is very much an album album. It’s also a very good one.

‘Doorways #9’ bring with haunting disquiet and glitches and trips, backward surges and traced of feedback. It’s meant to be skin-crawlingly uncomfortable, and it is, as insectoid scrapes and scuttles.

The first five minutes of ‘Doorways #9’, in its cave-dripping tension, builds anxiety, and it’s only when birdsong develops that there evolves a sense of levity. But the tone grows increasingly dark, and there are increasing obtrusive spikes in jarring organ, and a sense of menace hangs heavy in the atmosphere. ‘Doorways #9’ is in some respects a dark ambient work, in that it’s unsettling, uncomfortable and free of percussion, and as such drifts from one moody, uncomfortable segment to the next. Suddenly, unexpectedly, in the last three minutes, things plunge deeper into darkness, as there’s a churning noise and a sense of falling… down… things take on a nightmarish quality, and the experience is dizzying, gut-churning and it would work well as a piece off a horror soundtrack. Perhaps one day it will be incorporated in one.

‘Blende #1’ grinds, scrapes, and skitters through an array of tones and textures. And it goes on… and one, twisting, turning, droning, scraping, and churning. There’s some avant-jazz in the distance. It’s pleasant, but mournful.

This is not an easy, or immediate, album. We all need time, and to take and make time. Along way, Osojnik leaves us haunted an incurring . It’s a spacious, and low—key but cheering experience.

Maja Osojnik has created an album that’s dark, and difficult, but which creates space for slow contemplation and reflection and it’s no vague criticism to report that Doorways is ‘nice’. It’s much more besides: intriguing, it draws you in, and pulls you in different direction. It’s an album, alright.

AA

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Vamberator – Age of Loneliness

Posted: 5 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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1st November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Imagine having your album release scheduled many months in advance only to find the release date crashed by The Cure’s first album in sixteen years. Imagine you’re not only an act likely to appeal to Cure fans, but your act features a former long-serving member of The Cure. This is the true story of Vamberator, the duo consisting of Jem Tayle, formerly of Shelleyan Orphan, and Boris Williams, Cure drummer from 1984 to 1994, and sometime contributor also to Shelleyan Orphan.

The album’s title is telling and possesses a certain resonance. Much has already been written on the contradictory impact of social media, and the idea that while we’ve never been more connected, we’ve never felt more isolated. Scrolling through endless snaps of people’s holidays, parties, nights out is a hollowing experience, and one that’s anything but inclusive. Of course, you want to be pleased and happy for these people sharing their experiences as they live their best lives, as is the parlance, but inside, you’re being eaten away as you’re confronted with your own mundane, grey existence.

If anything, the pandemic heightened the agony for many: half the population was basking in being work-free, spending days baking bread and discovering new hobbies and bingeing on Netflix, while the other half was battling their way into work, or juggling work and home schooling, or simply trapped indoors on their own – or worse. Virtual drinks via webcam and group WhatsApps and streaming gigs were poor substitutes for the real thing.

And now we’re supposedly back to normal, but it feels as if something has been lost, and possibly lost forever. Our lives have become more distant, more disparate. In my own experience, it simply seems harder to co-ordinate meeting with people, and while some people seem to be so busy with their social lives it’s a wonder they can remember what the interiors of their own homes look like, their busyness leaves some off us at home, disconnected for weeks at a time. I am not alone in being alone: for many, the creeping sense if isolation and loneliness weighs heavier than ever before. This is truly The Age of Loneliness.

I’ve begin with the digression in order to contextualise the point at which I arrive at this album, having spent the last few days – like a lot of people – immersed in the melancholia of the new Cure album, having not seen proper daylight for the best part of a week and struggling against the urge to hibernate.

The single release ‘Sleep the Giant of Sleeps’, which came out in the summer, showcased an energetic embracing of myriad firms, and I myself described it as ‘a mega-hybrid of alt-rock, post-punk, and psyche.’ It set a level of expectation for the album and despite being born from a place of comparative darkness, the spark of experimentation and joy of creating illuminates the recesses of Age of Loneliness.

‘I Used to be Lou Reed’ kicks the album off in a flurry of strings and takes flight with a quite poppy flavour. It’s got horns and string and synths bursting all over, and there’s a slick funk groove which emerges after a minute or so… but despite being there, there, and everywhere, from James Bond to crooning 90s indie all in the space of five minutes, nothing feels forced or corny. Wish-era Cure meets Pulp might not sound like the ultimate pitch, but prepare to be pleasantly surprised.

Shades of negativity colour songs with titles like ‘I Need Contact’ and the title track, as well as ‘I Don’t Want to Cut the Grass’, a paean to lethargy which drifts and lilts like a Kraftwerk piece, but with the drollness of late Sparks. ‘Pilgrim’ brings tints of Beatles-esque twanging and some Eastern shades alongside elements of psychedelia. With loping rhythms and layered instrumentation, the title track slips into a groove worthy of late 80s Wax Trax releases then swerves unexpectedly. ‘I Need Contact’ is a sparse piano-led ballad, and its simplicity in itself is affecting. ‘Creature in My House’ begins haunting and ominous, before swinging into an electropop glam stomp which shouldn’t work, but does. This is true of much of Age of Loneliness.

Being predictable is not an accusation one could level at Vamberator: Age of Loneliness is ambitious, and bold. Sometimes it goes over the top, but it’s forgivable, because instead of playing it safe, as musicians of their experience often do, Tayle and Williams have tested their limits here, and they’ve emerged victorious.

AA

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Fibonacci Drone Organ – the higher the monkey climbs, the more you see of his arse

Posted: 2 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 1st November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Procter’s been at it again. The only artist I know who can go on tour and play under different guides doing different music – or ‘music’ – depending on the booking. Not that anything he does is commercial or has any kind of mass appeal: it comes down the question of if you’re on the market for harsh noise or something a bit gentler. And how he’s back from one of his excursions, here we have new studio work, which clearly didn’t make the merch table – released in a limited physical edition of just three hand-painted CDs.

One might wonder just how far it might be possible to push the concept of Fibonacci Drone Organ, but since the mathematical Fibonacci sequence is endless, so it would seem are the limits of this project. This particular outing, with a title inspired by Ken Loach, does mark something of a departure for FDO, being less droney and more barrelling bassy murky noise. It’s also more overtly political – nothing new for Dave Procter, but usually something reserved for his other projects.

‘Disenchanted with the state of the fucking world? You’re not alone’ he writes. ‘This is a synthesised reflection of the current state of my brain. I hope it brings you some peace.’

How much peace one can expect from longform tracks entitled ‘war war death death’ and ‘american client state’ it’s hard to really know, but I for one can relate to Proctor finding solace in the cathartic release of creating dense noise. Because there comes a point where words are not enough: indeed, there are no words. In fact, I derive some comfort – small as it is – from this release. It does indicate that the state of Dave’s brain isn’t the best, but with the US election looming and the very real possibility that Trump could become president again, I can’t help but feel a combination of gloom and outright terror. In recent months, as the war in Ukraine has rumbled on, and the hell on earth in Gaza has escalated, and escalated, and escalated, and Israel’s nauseating genocidal mission continues to be funded by the West, it’s felt like a growing weight in the atmosphere. I’ve found myself tense and on edge. Everything is wrong. ‘I find no peace,’ as Thomas Wyatt wrote.

It feels as if the world was waiting for the pandemic to pass, and as if during the successive lockdowns, world leaders were simmering, festering, building their fury to unleash the moment restrictions were listed. Recent years have been painful, and as Procter’s brief notes indicate, there are many of us who are struggling, powerless, as our governments continue to push the line of Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’. No-one would deny that right, but no rational person would agree that a death toll of almost 44,000 – with many tens of thousands of women and children, not to mention other civilians in that figure – is proportional, or merely self-defence. While news outlets do report these figures – which are, it has to be said – beyond nauseating – there is no compassion in the reporting. Deaths are but numbers, the words ‘humanitarian crisis’ but words. The images of smoke and dust and devastation are horrifying, but to actually be in the midst of it, with no safe places to go, as schools and hospitals are targeted, is beyond imagination.

It’s in this context that Procter has created two grey, grating, heaving and ugly tracks, one fifteen minutes in duration, the other over twenty-three.

‘war war death death’ is bleak, and dense. There’s the heavy whip of helicopter blades at the hesitant start of the track, which gradually emerges as a long, wheezing, churning drone, resembling the rumble at the low end of the mechanical grind of the first Suicide album. And this is pretty much all there is. And from this minimal piece emerges a sense of desolation, particularly as the end, which concludes with just rumbling static – and nothing. Devastation. Dust. Annihilation.

‘american client state’ is again, heavy a serrated edged, humming drone that hovers, panning and circulating like a malevolent drone. It’s pitched in the range that really gets under your skin and penetrates the skull, not in an exhilarating way, but instead slowly wears down the spirit, dissolving any sense of motivation. The monotone hum seems to somehow articulate, in ways that words cannot, the sense of powerless I personally feel, and suspect others do, too. There’s something empty in the monotony, not to mention a squirming discomfiture. What can we do?

All digital sales money from this release will go to the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, and while it may be a drop in the ocean, and while what needs to happen is for aid to actually be allowed to be delivered – something which will require an intervention which is long overdue – something, anything, is better than nothing.

Often, there’s a droll humour to Dave Procter’s work, but apart from the title, the higher the monkey climbs, the more you see of his arse is a bleak work, and a depressingly droney as it gets. But it provides an outlet, an expression through which to focus that release, and reminds us that we must hope against hope for better ahead.

AA

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Howie Reeve and Friends – Leaf in Fog

Posted: 1 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Innis Orr / UR Audio Visual / Redwig / Bar Marfil – 1st November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Glasgow’s Howie Reeve could never be accused of being predictable, or dull. His musical output is eclectic, experimental, and more than that, it’s often spontaneous, energetic, and in-the-moment. His last release, in 2022, was a set of songs created with his (then) ten-year-old son. Before that, there was a live recording of Chassons (that’s Cathy Heyden on alto sax, practice chanter, tin whistle, and Howie Reeve on electric bass) performing at Le Maquis de Varielles, a document which captures ‘Both of us grabbing whatever else is to hand and occasionally ululating.’ This time around, there’s a whole host of accomplices doing more or less the same to lead the listener on a wild ride. Indeed, Leaf in Fog finds Reeve working with a substantial number of friends in order to realise this ambitious and wide-ranging work.

The title – and cover art – carries connotations of the natural world, perhaps a sense of drifting autumnal melancholy, but the actuality is something altogether more jagged, dissonant, tense and disorientation. There is an earthiness to the songs and their performance, but it’s rent with the kind of twists and spasms that tear the fabric like a psychotic episode.

‘Microscopic Liberties’ starts out – and concludes – as a work of ramshackle lo-fi acoustic folk that’s not quite folk but not quite anything else one could pin down as belonging to a specific genre either. In between, there are blasts of howling noise and slanting guitar slaloming askew across a wandering bass groove. There are moments where it goes a bit Pavement, others more They Might be Giants… and it’s only two and a half minutes long. ‘Water Catalyst’ follows immediately, and tosses in elements of prog, neofolk, medieval minstrel folk and jazz.

‘Apotrope’ may be but an interlude with a running time of a minute and twenty seconds, but it’s a sharp honk of straining horn, a fragment of dissonant jazz swirling in an ambience of voices and then some sing-song poetical narrative… it’s hard to keep up. The compositions, the song structures, border on the schizophrenic, or the aural equivalent of Tourette’s, but instead of being unable to hold back the ticks and sputter ‘tits, fuck, cunt, wank’, Reeve can’t leave a song to just drift along comfortably, and it’s always just a matter of time before spasmodic bursts of all hell break loose.

From among chaos, occasionally, moments of quite affecting musicality emerge: the pick and strum opening of ‘Shop Window’ is whimsical and at the same time somehow sad, and continues to be so even when chaos and discord and bleeps and whistles collide like a speeding juggernaut travelling in the wrong carriageway, obliterating the acoustic serenity. ‘Evidence’ begins subtle, slow, a dolorous bass trudging through lugubrious strings and a sparse, simple clip-clop rhythm. The vocals veer between light and lilting and wide-eyed and tense as the instrumentation switches and slides through a succession of unpredictable transitions, before ‘Trouser Tugger’ goes full Trumans Water, but with a more muted, bedsit indie feel, leaving you dazed and bewildered at the end of its clanging, jolting three minutes.

The songs on Leaf in Fog are predominantly folk songs at heart, and the core elements expose moments which are often quite touching and pluck at emotions which are just beyond reach, beyond articulation, obscured, perhaps, by fog, but equally obscured by fret buzz and crackles and crazed strings and horns and an endless array of additions and interruptions.

It would be impossible to pretend that Leaf in Fog is in any way immediate or especially accessible, and the truth is it’s likely simply too much for many. Like Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, there’s so much going on its dizzying and difficult, and requires a lot of focus, and energy, to listen to. But Reeve – with more than a little help from his friends – has conjured a bold work, brimming with charm and mysticism, imagination and madness. Venture into the fog and explore, but do tread carefully.

AA

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New Skeletal Faces – Until The Night

Posted: 31 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Peaceville – 1st November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

The claim that ‘New Skeletal Faces cast their own black light onto the long dormant corpse of Death Rock, shattering the mirror of modern Heavy Metal into fragments that reflect back a fresh new take on this form of music with an energised & outlandish conviction’ is a bold one. Ominous, menacing, perhaps, or deluded and deranged?

California may be known for its sun and sand, but it has a long history or dark currents which run contra to its popular image, perhaps most notably Charles Manson’s Family being based in The Golden State – which in turn drew Trent Reznor for the recording of The Downward Spiral. In between, Christian Death spawned the proto-goth / nascent death rock sound which, while evolving in parallel to the scene in the north of England, was unique and distinct, and the early eighties saw California home to a thriving hardcore punk scene. I suppose that wherever there is affluence and clean-cut TV slickness, there is bound to be rebellion, a counterculture which stands at odds with it all. No doubt some of these factors drew New Skeletal Faces to California for the recording of Until The Night, the follow-up to 2019’s Celestial Disease.

They proffer an ‘effortless blending of the spirits of old; with the seductive & spellbinding gothic prowess of bands such as Christian Death fused with the raw unbridled energy of early Swedish black metal legend, Bathory to create a bold new statement of intent, in stark contrast to the often overly-refined polish of contemporary metal. Until the Night is, as a result, something more akin to listening to the 1980’s Sunset Strip in an alternate universe from hell.’ For good measure, and to really clarify their position, there’s a cover of Bathory’s ‘Raise The Dead’.

In all, it’s apparent this is destined to be dark from the outset. Across the album’s eight tracks, they paint everything darker shades of black with densely-woven layers of sound. The guitars, while overdriven, are reverby, and quite smooth, and while the riffs take their cues from black metal, there are some overtly gothy licks, and the atmosphere is very much reminiscent of Only Theatre of Pain but with the dial cranked a few notches further over into the ‘metal’ domain for the most part. Then again, the title track, with its thunderous tribal percussion, spindly guitar laced with flange and chorus, and thumping bassline, encapsulates the sound of goth circa 1985, only with shouty vocals which belong more to the hardcore sound of the same time.

Titles such as ‘Ossuary Lust’, ‘Wombs’, and ‘Pagan War’ are fully invested in the trappings of gnarly metal and its themes, but ‘Zeitgeist Suicide’ reflects a self-awareness which may not be immediately obvious.

As I touched on in my recent review of Vessel’s cover of ‘Body and Soul’ by The Sisters of Mercy, while there is a clear interface between goth and metal – even if it does tend to be primarily a one-way street, which finds metal fans embracing goth bands, in particular The Sisters of Mercy and Fields of the Nephilim – its rare to encounter a particularly successful merging of the genres. In the main, goth-metal is cliché and cack. Despite appearances, Until The Night is neither, and is perhaps the most potently-realised stylistic synergy since The End of Mirrors by Alaric in 2016.

AA

Chiming guitars swirl around relentless, barrelling beats on ‘Wombs’, before ‘Zeitgeist Suicide’ leads with a weaving bassline and some fizzy, treble-dominated guitar, and they go at it hard and fast. ‘Enchantment of my Inner Coldness’ brings together vintage goth with a vocal performance that evokes the spirit of Public Image Limited, and in doing so, succeeds in sounding – and feeling – both expansive and claustrophobic at the same time.

Until The Night scratches and drives its way – all the way – to the Bathory cover which drawn the curtain down on this dark, fiery, and furious album. It may well alienate goths, metalheads, and post-punk fans alike, but it feels very much like their loss, being an album strong on songs and confident in its own identity in the way it positions itself uniquely across the genres.

AA

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Vessel – The Somnifer

Posted: 25 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Majestic Mountain Records – 1st November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It was the single release of their cover of The Sisters of Mercy’s ‘Body and Soul’ which brought me to this album. I’ll not retread the ground I covered in my review of aforementioned cover, other than to note that I was uncommonly impressed by the band’s spin on the track, and shall instead pick up on the point that I was intrigued as to precisely how a cover would fit into the art of a concept album.

In a sense, I find myself back in the 80s, when – before it was possible to stream an album online or otherwise hear it without owning it, unless a mate passed you a tape recorded from their copy – one purchased an album on the strength of a single heard on the radio. It was not all that uncommon that the single was absolutely in no way representative, and you’d feel somewhat duped. Imagine buying Faith by The Cure in the basis of ‘Primary’, for example. You may not necessarily feel duped, but you’d probably struggle to reconcile the single and album experiences, assuming you could lift yourself off the floor to do anything at all by the end of the album. But then, oftentimes – because you probably only bought an album a month, on vinyl or cassette, you’d play it enough times to come to appreciate it anyway. This simply doesn’t happen anymore, and what’s more, the art of the album is one which is criminally undervalued. That isn’t to say I feel in any way duped by The Somnifer: it’s simply that the single, while obviously the most accessible and attention-grabbing track, is not entirely representative.

Taking pause for a moment, there’s that term – ‘concept album’ – which creates immediate obstacles; it can be perceived as self-indulgent, overblown, conceited, arty in the way that implies a superiority, or even just plain wanky. You can largely blame prog for that, but there have been plenty of excessive concept albums in other genres, particularly metal. But I’m not here to prejudge: I am genuinely curious, especially as the single showed considerable promise. So, first things first: what is the concept?

As they set it out, ‘The album captures the different mental stages one can pass through, from feelings of self-empowerment to existential dread. The Somnifer takes listeners on a journey that blends the drama of classic doom (Candlemass, Cathedral), cosmic psych explorations (All Them Witches, King Buffalo), and the aggression of hardcore and crossover scenes, with the timeless instrumental journey of classic heavy metal.’

The title track certainly builds atmosphere, and it’s the kind of brooding, heavy-timbred tones which call to mind Neurosis, interlaced with a hint of the gothic, which draws the listener into the album. The guitar sound is clean, but rich, and earthy, gradually shifting towards a thicker, overdriven sound, but there’s lots of space and separation. This paves the way for the haunting ‘Draining the Labyrinth’, which takes some time before really going all-out on the riffery before ploughing into ‘Rapid Eye Movement’, the first track to really feature vocals prominently. With ethereal backing vocals floating in to balance the almost speechified spoken-word delivery atop a Sabbathesque riff, it’s an interesting blend of elements.

‘Eat The Day’ comes on like Melvins aping Sabbath with an overloading blast of thick, mid-rangey guitar, before the rippling instrumental ‘Delta Waves’ brings softness and respite, starting out a bit Pink Floyd before growing gradually more intense in its playing. ‘Recurring Nightmare’ slams in out of nowhere, snarling, downtuned doom riffing, churning power chords and darkness, replete with dramatic, theatrical vocals and searing lead guitar work. One of the album’s heaviest pieces, is brings the intensity of the sense of being trapped in a nightmare, the repetitive guitar motif recreating that terrifying sense of déjà vu.

In terms of concept, it works well: instead of pursuing some artificially-imposed narrative arc, The Somnifer explores the way in which moods and emotional responses can manifest as rapid and unexpected transitions, which aren’t always provoked by obvious triggers.

‘Image Rehearsal Reaction’ is a towering monolith of a track, a colossal ten-minute stoner/doom exploration that suddenly hits turbo at the mid-point, blasting fierily forward while the guitar solo runs wild. This is where they’re at their most ‘trad 70s metal’ of anywhere on the album, which is impressively diverse, something which the ‘concept’ allows for.

The album in fact closes with ‘Body and Soul’. It’s incongruous in many ways, but it oddly works to conclude a varied and yet consistent and quality album.

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Sly and the Family Drone – Moon is Doom Backwards

Posted: 18 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 15th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

They’ve been around for a while now, but as yet, there hasn’t been another act quite like Sly and The Family Drone. They’re one of those acts that straddle so many different boundaries and function on so many different levels, they’re impossible to pigeonhole and impossible to pin down. They make serious art delivered with a quirky, tongue-in-cheek sense of humour, and their live performances are celebrations of community and whacky while simultaneously being genius performance art improvisations. I’m by no means being superior when I suggest that a lot of people simply won’t ‘get’ them, and it’s obvious as to why they’re very much a cult thing. But that they’ve managed to sustain a career operating on a DIY basis, booking their own tours, etc., for well over a decade is testament to both the appreciation there is for them on a cult level, and to their sheer persistence and insanity. And their last release was a lathe-cut album containing a single twenty-minute jazz odyssey released via The Quietus.

Moon is Doom Backwards – a wheeze of a title which is factually inaccurate, and of course they know it – is a classic example of the absurd humour which is integral to their being, and it’s a joy to see that they’ve come together with Human Worth, a label I’ve filled many a virtual column inch praising, for this release. And because it’s on Human Worth, a portion of the proceeds from this release are going to charity.

The album, we learn, was recorded ‘exactly three years ago at Larkins Farm’. That’s quite a lag, but this does often seem to be the case when it comes to homing works of avant-jazz noise-drone. They describe it as ‘a patient, stalking, lurking thing. A properly noir thing, as notable for its long stretches of quiet atmosphere as it is for its pummeling skronk. Sly’s is a strange sort of quietude, though. A “drums heard through the wall”, “disquieting electrical hum” kind of quiet. An “eavesdropping PI”, “solo sax on rooftop” sort of quiet. An attention-grabbing kind of quiet so engrossing that, when our fave neo-jazz wrecking crew actually gets to wrecking – and they still wreck real good – we’re caught off guard, wrong-footed, defenseless. We get run the hell over by The Family Drone’s quintet of bulldozers.’

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who’s been acquainted with them for any period of time. Because whatever one expects from Sly and the Family Drone, they’ll probably deliver, but simply not in the way one expects it.

Containing seven pieces, mostly around the three-to-five-minute mark, Moon is Doom Backwards is more conventionally ‘albumy’ – whatever conventional means when it comes to any format now. And there is, indeed, a lot of quiet on this album, much hush. There are many segments where not a lot happens, or simply a solo sax rings out into a slow-blowing wind of reverb.

‘Glistening Benevolence’ is underpinned by a mesmeric, tribal beat and crooning sax and wiffle of woodwind, at least until the percussion rises into storm-like crashes and the percussion surges around the mid-point, before it tapers, and then splashes to a halt. And then there is quiet, for quite some time, until the drums blast back and there is a sound like an elephant braying in pain. So far, so Sly. It’s pummelling percussion and frenzied honks and toots, parping and tooting in all directions which blast from the speakers on single cut and shortest track ‘Going In’, after which darkness descends. The inexplicably-titled ‘Cuban Funeral Sandwich’ has too much percussion and it too overtly jazzy to be ambient, but it’s a low-key, meandering piece that feels far too improvised to qualify as a composition and it certainly brings the atmosphere – a dark, oppressive one, which gradually builds and horns hoot like ship’s horns and clattering cans rattle with increasing urgency – before another abrupt halt.

If ‘Joyless Austere Post-war Biscuits’ may seemingly allude to some kind of Hovis-like cobbled-street and open-fire nostalgia, the actuality is altogether darker, as more sax flies into the sky on an upward spiral of infinite echo and the drums – building, building, to a crazed frenzy, but at a distance – create a palpitation-inducing tension, before ‘The Relentless Veneration of Bees’ – something which really should be a thing, along with the outlawing of pesticides – wanders absent-mindedly into an arena or ambient jazz, where the drums hang around in the distance somewhere.

There are shooting stars and percussive breakdowns amidst truly tempestuously frenzies jazz experimentation, and ‘Guilty Splinters’ is the perfect soundtrack to this. The closer, ‘Ankle Length Gloves’ is perhaps the most unstructured and uncomfortable of all here: amidst wheezes and drones, it’s the sound of creaking floors and subdued wailing utterances… and nothing but a buffeting breeze.

Moon is Doom Backwards is certainly their sparsest, most atmospheric, and least percussion-heavy album to date, but it really explores in detail and depth the relationship of dynamics, and pushes out into new territories. And while it’s still jazz, it’s jazz exploded, fragmented, dissected, and reimagined.

AA

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Shrimp – Brine Shrimp

Posted: 15 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Panurus Productions – 24th August 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

I take heart from discovering that Panurus Productions are as far behind on their PR as I am on my emails and messages. Even if it weren’t for the relentless flow of submissions – I’m looking at an inundation of around fifty a day, via email, messenger, and all the rest, even drops of CDs through the letterbox – there’s still that matter of… life. It consumes all of your time, and it wears you down. It’s an endurance test. Just living is a full-time job. No, it’s more than that. It’s exhausting, draining, it saps your very soul. On a personal level, just the day to day is too much at times for reading emails and listening to submissions. Throw in a dayjob, life and a single parent, and bereavement on top, and simply opening all the email submissions become too much. So arriving at the most recent Shrimp album around two months after its release, I feel ok about that – and by ok, I mean pleasantly calm, which is a rare sensation in the main.

Fucking hell. It’s a monster. It packs four tracks, the shortest of which clocks in at just under twenty five minutes. It’s more than a monster. It’s a skull-crushing leviathan. It will leave feeling week and so drained. It makes predecessor Mantis Shrimp sound like Barry Manilow.

They promise ‘a sprawling mass of free-form guitar, vocals (an associated miscellanea), effects and percussion’, whereby ‘the listener is thrown about the room with the sound, as the initial dirge collapses into a frantic scramble of activity, glitch and movement as the various pincers and claws dart out from the sonic mass. The sound field shifts as elements are isolated or the entire band is channelled through the snare, sometimes in line with the music and others completely of its own accord. Not even the platform you are listening from is stable.

‘Hidden Life’, with a running time of forty-one and a half minutes is an album in its own right. And it’s dropping tempo mood-slumping jazz with stutter percussion, at least at first. Before long, a slow-driving riff grinds in, and shortly after, it slumps into a drone and a feedback wail, while snarling, gnarling, teeth-gnashing, demented vocals rave dementedly amidst a tempestuous cacophony of… of what, precisely? Cacophonous noise. Everything is a collision, a mess, every second is pulled and pummelled, and it’s like The Necks on acid, only with chronic roar and an endless raging blast bursting every whichway, amidst howls of feedback.

Then you realise that this is only the first track and you’re already physically and mentally exhausted. You are absolutely on your knees here, battered, bruised, ruined by the noise, and still the frenzied furore continues.

There’s mellow, trippy, almost jazz vibe which lifts the curtain on ‘Leaf-like Appendages’, another epic track – but then they’re all epic, all challenging. ‘Maximum Sanity’ brings maximum pain and derangement, as howls and sputters from the very bowels of the very depths squall in anguish. James Watts has a rare talent for creating the most chthonic tones

Brine Shrimp trills and shrills, quills and spins in so many directions. It’s not only a mess of chaos, but a truly wild, and at times hellish, mess of chaos. It’s heavy, and it hurts. It’s Shrimp erupting like the Godzilla of the crustacean world: a monster in every way.

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