Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

Unit:187 – KillCure

Posted: 22 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Metropolis Records – 6th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Heralding the arrival of their first new music since 2010 (discounting the 2012 remix album, Transfusion), Unit:187 slapped down ‘Dick’ by way of a single, and gave cause for me to prick up my ears.

Their bio explains the ad reason for the extended hiatus:

Founded in 1994, Vancouver’s Unit:187 forged a name for itself with a crushing mix of industrial and metal. After the passing of founding member Tod Law in 2015 & taking time to process the loss, Unit:187 now honours his legacy with KillCure – finishing the songs the band wrote with Tod before his death, as well as new music.

It’s a difficult – and seemingly all-too-common dilemma for bands: what to do when a founding member and key player dies? There is no right or wrong thing to do: for some, their passing equates to the death of the band, for others, pressing on is a way to honour their memory. And fans react to these decisions differently, too: the return of Linkin Park with Emily Armstrong fronting in place of the late Chester Bennington is a perfect example of how divisive these things can be.

Former backing singer Kerry Vink-Peterson has stepped up to front Unit:187, which feels like something of a natural move forward, and when they state that some songs on KillCure are ‘finishing the songs the band wrote with Tod before his death’, that means that his contributions remain intact, and he’s credited on the album. In bringing past and present together in this way, KillCure stands as a transitional album, and in some ways feels like the episodes of Dr Who where the Doctor regenerates.

It’s by no means some maudlin, sentiment-filled baton-passing effort, though. Oh no. KillCure is an album which blasts forth with fist-pumping energy to declare that Unit:187 are undefeated and as fierce as ever. ‘Glamhammer’ swings in with some toppy guitar harmonics, sirens blaring over a juddering synth grind and pumping industrial-strength beat, coming together for a groove-laden swagger, breaking out into a monster chorus with snarling vocals and big power chords. It’s one of those tunes that just grabs you by the throat, and it strongly reminiscent of PIG in the mid-nineties, circa Sinsation and Wrecked.

It sets the template for the album nicely. As much as KillCure is rooted in that milieu of Wax Trax! and KMFDM, Unit:187 dial down the hyperactive aggrotech aspects to deliver something that feels somehow more considered, perhaps owing to the favouring of lower, more conventional ‘rock’ tempos and the guitars having a less processed feel, but it’s dark and aggressive, and ‘Dick’ is exemplary, proving itself as a worthy choice of lead single.

Landing in the middle of the album or what would be the end of side one on an old-school vinyl album release, the brooding – and perhaps appropriately-titled – ‘New Beginning’ slows things down, but amps up the sleaze and grind with some scuzzed-out guitar ripping its way over a stomping beat amidst fizzing electronics.

The second half is straight-up solid: samples abound amidst dense guitars and everything meshes into a relentlessly gritty chug-driven industrial grind. But there’s a certain theatricality to it, a knowingness that’s unstated, understated, but unmistakeably present, and it’s nowhere more apparent than on the raging in-yer-face muscle-flexing of ‘Overrun’.

Concluding the album the title track, with a duel-vocal performance, feels like the perfect summary of where Unit:187 are at, and the perfect intersection between the Tod Law and Kerry Vink-Peterson eras.

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Ludvig Cimbrelius – Here

Posted: 21 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Sound In Silence – 5th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Ludvig Cimbrelius has been around for some considerable time now, and the label bio outlines how the Swedish musician – now based in Turkey – has, for over a decade, been producing music ranging from ambient and modern classical to deep electronic and minimal dub techno, under his own name and many different aliases such as Eternell, Purl, Illuvia, and others. His latest offering incorporates sound sources such as ‘calm acoustic piano, ethereal vocal spheres, atmospheric electric guitars and field recordings’

Despite containing only six tracks, Here has a running time of almost fifty minutes. These are expansive, contemplative works, and offer more than a hint of neoclassical gentility. Hearing ‘Left But Never Left’ is a wonderfully calming experience. It’s true, of course, that any individual’s response to anything musical or otherwise creative is entirely personal, but Cimbrelius transcends the layers of atmosphere between floating adrift and arriving in layers of mist and haze. The notes flow with space in between, and this space provides a lull in which to exhale, and to reflect. This piece, at just under four minutes in length, is just a prelude to the immersive soundscapes which follow.

‘When Warm Tears Fell from the Sky’ is a composition of the kind of ambience which evokes the soft wash of diluted watercolours spreading on paper to conjure, as if by some form of magic, a sky, a sea, fields, with just a few simple brush strokes, whereby the effect is greater than the input, at least to the eye. This is the sound of currents in the air, of mist, of cloud drifting, evaporating, reforming, changing shape as it moves through the sky.

The fourteen-minute ‘These Flames I Gently Let’ encapsulates the essence of the album in its entirety within its parameters. It begins with lilting, light-as-air piano and gradually melts into a soft swash which includes what sounds like rainfall and wordless vocalisations which slowly run into the broad flow of non-specific sound which slowly slips from being the focus of your attention into the background. It is, in this sense ambient in its purest form, falling into the background. ‘Lost in the Mists at Dawn’ is the soundtrack to the narrative vignette contained in the title: haunting, evocative, it conjures the scene in your imagination without actually saying anything, and its power lies within the depths of its wispy vagueness.

The execution of Here is magnificent. The tracks trickle into one another imperceptibly, creating a seamless sonic flow. The layers are interwoven so as to meld into a finely-textured gauze, and everything is so smooth, so soothing and soporific.

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Tout – Fourth

Posted: 20 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Trestle Records – 18th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Tout isn’t a seedy guy flogging – or trying to buy, at a cut-price – tickets outside a gig, but a band which, on this, their fourth album (bet you never guessed that) brings together aspects of contemporary classical, jazz and ambient, in addition to the ‘folk and new age traditions’ which influence their previous works. It follows and extends the trajectory of their previous albums, sequentially numbered with the exception of their last Live, released in 2017.

It’s certainly a lot to toss in together, and with no fewer than ten musicians contributing to this release, the compositions certainly afford a considerable amount of layering and offer much to process. Even after a few listens, I’m still digesting and on the fence as to whether the combined elements are appealing or not.

Jazz comes in almost infinite flavours, and it’s not the ‘nice’ jazz to which the cliché of the listener sporting a goatee and cardigan applies which is the strain that tantalises my taste buds – but Tout do sit perilously close to this at times. At others… they’re truly sublime.

One of their habits is to title the tracks – instrumental pieces, all – in such a was as read in sequence, they form a poem, although on Fourth, it ends abruptly, despite the full stop making it clear that this is no accidental cliffhanger.

I rob the rich to feed the poor

Which hardly is a sin

A widow ne’er knocked at my door

But what I let her in

So blame me not for what I’ve done

I don’t deserve your curses

And if for any cause I’m hung.

‘I rob the rich to feed the poor’ makes for an expansive, atmospheric start to the album, slow-swelling cymbals and understated percussion hover in the background while delicate sonic waves rise and fall, while smooth saxophone echoes out atop it all, growing increasingly excited toward the climactic finish.

It’s broad-brushed, sweeping synths and soft strings which provide the backdrop to ‘Which hardly is a sin’, where a strolling bass stumbles and stutters from time to time. ‘A widow ne’er knocked at my door’ marks something of a change in tone, with sparse acoustic guitar mournful strings bringing an altogether folkier feel in contrast to the jazz vibes. At the same time, it’s reminiscent of some of the post-rock which was all the rage circa 2005.

‘So blame me not for what I’ve done’ is truly magnificent: a minimal, piano-centred piece, it’s haunting and melancholy and leaves you feeling somewhat hollowed and bereft, and it’s apparent that – to my ears, at least – the less overtly jazz works are the superior ones on the album. Admittedly, that’s a matter of taste, but, objectively, Tout seem at their most inventive and creatively enthused when venturing into these different territories.

The album ends as abruptly as the poem it spins: one moment, ‘And if for any cause I’m hung.’ after a subtle, sedate start, is jazzing along, the bass strolling and ambling – and then suddenly it isn’t, petering out, unresolved. Et c’est tout. It’s well played, both literally and figuratively.

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Aidan Baker / Han-earl Park / Katharina Schmidt – Thoughts Of Trio

Posted: 16 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 6th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

The ever-prolific Aidan Baker has been a frequent and recurrent feature on the pages of Aural Aggravation since its inception in 2016, and I’ve been listening to, and covering, his works since a fair few years earlier. He’s an artist who never fails to intrigue, and his manifold collaborations see him revealing new aspects to his creativity.

This three-way collaboration was, according to the accompanying notes, ‘recorded live at Morphine Raum in Berlin, Germany on February 21, 2024 by Canadian guitarist Aidan Baker, Korean-American guitarist Han-earl Park, & German drummer/percussionist Katharina Schmidt. The group brings together their respective, disparate musical backgrounds to explore the intersections of ambient music, improvisational (free) jazz, and musique-concrète.’

It’s worth noting just how many live releases of collaborations there seem to have been released recently: in fact, only yesterday I was delving into the dynamics of the latest offering by CEL. This may be a ‘cost-of-living’ matter, in part: economic circumstances really aren’t favouring anyone who isn’t two-homes-and-at-least-one-cruise-a-year rich, and this is a global issue, whereby post-pandemic the disparity between the wealthy and the rest has increased exponentially (a word I’m mindful of tossing about being aware of its actual meaning), and it’s never been a tougher time to be a musician, unless you’re Taylor Swift, or Ed Shearan or Elton John or Coldplay… you get the idea. And it’s certainly not (only) because of the shit streaming revenues paid (or not) by Spotify. Studio time is expensive: getting together for intercontinental collaborations is expensive… and when it comes to it, it’s not always easy, or even possible, to recreate the energy, the frisson, the immediacy of a live performance in the studio.

And so here was have Thoughts Of Trio, which captures a set from the start of the year, mastered as eight segments, simply titled sequentially ‘TOTone’ to ‘TOTeight’. The arrangements are often sparse, and combine nagging, regular repetitions with erratic irreglularities: ‘TOTone’ sounds like a pulsating wave or a slow alarm simultaneous with a game of ping-pong and some urban foxes foraging through bin bags. I mean, it doesn’t really sound quite like that, but the different elements belong to different places, and while it does work, it does not feel like a composition in any conventional sense. And this is very much the form of the album: there are no overt structures, there is no sense of cohesion or linearity.

But where Thoughts Of Trio evades the pitfall of being a discordant disaster is in just how they somehow keep things together, with an absorbing, if loose, sense of rhythm, which is both absorbing and bewildering, but, however subtly, ever-present. ‘TOTthree’ features springing guitar twangs and lurching grumbles, but a distinct sense of almost abstract rhythm. Clanking rattles and slow-bending, woozy drones hover and slowly wilt, with scrapes and subterranean bumps and nudges unpredictably rising and falling.

There’s no obvious shape to any of this, but amidst a set of pieces which are five or six minutes long, the eighteen-and-a-half-minute ‘TOTseven’ stands out a dominant track on the album, although one suspects that for those who were actually there, it was difficult to differentiate the pieces, which tend to bleed into one another. It rumbles and hums, tense and dense, simmering, without ever breaking through the tension that holds down the surface.

There’s little to no audience noise, no applause in the interludes or intersections, which works well in terms of the overall listening experience, but means that this doesn’t sound or feel like a live album. That’s by no means a criticism, and again illustrates how live recordings can replace studio recordings for so artists. This simply doesn’t sound or feel like a live recording, and that’s not only due to the lack of audience noise, but the way everything flows.

For all of the discord, the twists and knots and disparities, Thoughts Of Trio comes together somehow. While it’s is by no means overtly, jazz, Thoughts Of Trio sits between jazz and ambient, with an experimental / avant-garde. Ultimately, it does its own thing.

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CEL – Five minutes to self-destruct

Posted: 15 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Gagarin Records – 6th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

You might be hard-pressed to call CEL a supergroup, but Felix Kubin has been creating sound here, there, and everywhere for a long time now, and Five minutes to self-destruct is definitely a coming together of established creative forces, containing as it does five recordings of live tracks performed by longstanding Kubin and longstanding collaborator Hubert Zemler, remixed by Warsaw sound engineer Jan Wroński.

And the thing about creative collaborations is that they often rely on spontaneity, immediacy, the frisson between the individuals in proximity, feeding off one another in the moment. And so it is here, as the accompanying notes set out: ‘The expressiveness of these recordings is evident not only in their unbridled live energy, which can hardly be reproduced in the studio, but also in a musical nervousness that sets itself apart from the current wellness folklore of the modular community. The pieces gather in their DNA the paranoid plasma of cultural unease, chaos and upheaval.’

To make a small sidestep, we hear endless decrees that employees need to return to the office in order to foster the spirit of collaboration and all the rest. We know that this is bollocks, and is simply about working the instruments of control. Collaboration and the coalescence of energy for creative ends is not something which cannot be forced, and it happens, regardless of distance, time, and space, given the right connection and chemistry. Hearing the performances on Five minutes to self-destruct, it’s immediately apparent that this is not something that could ever be created by desire or will alone.

As the accompanying bio notes, ‘The expressiveness of these recordings is evident not only in their unbridled live energy, which can hardly be reproduced in the studio, but also in a musical nervousness that sets itself apart from the current wellness folklore of the modular community. The pieces gather in their DNA the paranoid plasma of cultural unease, chaos and upheaval.’

The title track ‘Five minutes to self-destruct’ is a quote from Michael Crichton’s sci-fi classic The Andromeda Strain, which describes a research team’s fight for survival against an accidentally triggered self-destruct mechanism, underpinned by trigger impulses and increasing panic.

My own experience of the modular community may not be on quite the same scale or the same higher circles as theirs, but it does feel primarily the domain of the middle-class, middle-aged white male these days, and there’s a certain air of ease and the satisfaction of hobbyism about it. Needless to say, not so here. There’s a tension that runs throughout the entirety of the release. ‘Krakenwaltz’ cartwheels and loops in jittery circles, head-spinning rhythmic cycles with no small degree of attack, with some sharp, aggressive snare sounds and a frenetic, frantic undercurrent which grows increasingly disorientating over its near-six-minute duration.

‘Eskalacja’ is dominated by hectic percussion and a whirl of fairground bleeps and toots running in ever-tighter concentric circles. It some respects, it calls to mind the frenzied looping and wild, vaguely manic excesses of early Foetus 12” singles, seeing just how far they can push the concept, and themselves in the creation of hyperactive sound.

The seven-minute ‘Blauer Dunst’ which sits as the album’s centrepiece marks a distinct shift in tone and texture, a rumbling dark ambient piece that invites comparisons to some of the more abstract works of Throbbing Gristle. It predates the rest of the set by almost four years, having been recorded in October 2020.

It’s back to more upbeat, stomping percussion-led synth work on the DAF-like ‘Neustart Generation’ – but don’t mistake upbeat for uplifting: it clatters and bangs with a clipped, regimented, Germanic feel, and the grooves are taut and tense, and it’s simmering tension which crackles beneath the lumping, shuffling, organic rhythms which underpin the sparse, tetchy title track. A couple of minutes in, a loping percussive cycle breaks out and the repetition of this and the dominant synth motif, amidst a swell of extraneous sounds – samples, sirens – makes this one of those tracks where you can feel your blood pressure increasing as it progresses and the pace quickens to a blur. It ends before reaching the point of inducing an aneurysm, and the assurance to the applauding audience, “We’re still alive, it’s ok,” at the fae injects some unexpected humour to proceedings.

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Codespeaker – Scavenger

Posted: 9 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Ripcord Records – 8th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Codespeaker are a post-metal band from Edinburgh, which their press release describes as ‘Scotland’s sombre capital’. Of all things, I’d never really considered it to be a sombre place, and I’ve been a fair few times – then again, having lived in Glasgow for four years, I am aware of just how bleak the long Scottish winters are. Further north by latitude than Moscow and separated from the Arctic Ocean by only more water, things can be pretty grim and the nights can feel like weeks.

They promise an ‘atmospheric, dark, and heavy post-metal sound’ with ‘thunderous drums and colossal guitars reminiscent of titanic bands like Neurosis and Cult of Luna’, on an album which ‘marks a new chapter for Codespeaker… [a] massive-sounding record [which] offers a towering and immersive experience, ebbing and flowing between hypnotic, mammoth-sized riffs and intense vocals, while also embracing atmospheric and contemplative moments.’

Having had no television for three months after a storm took down the aerial during my time in Glasgow, again, this does seem to represent the bleakness of those long, long nights which seem to stretch from 2pm to 9:30am, as well as articulating the state of the world right now. It’s at war. It’s on fire. It’s fucked up. It’s scary. Scavenger picks it way through the fragments and scraps, the mess of confusion and roars to the sky, an unbridled utterance of raw anguish.

They’re straight in with the thunder on the first song, the six-minute ‘Usud’ and the weight only grows on the roaring blast that is ‘Signum’. The drums are half-submerged by the thick wall of overdriven guitar when they’re in full-on riff mode, and the force is something else, a sonic tsunami. When they break it down to quieter passages, it feels like a lull in a storm, but more than that, they reveal an altogether more reflective aspect, and while they do so, they brood hard and their knack for introspective atmospherics is matched by their technical skills – both the musicianship and composition is deft. And they prove themselves to be masters of the build-up, too: to continue with the storm analogy, the mid-section of ‘Recission’ is exemplary, as if the winds gradually begin to build before suddenly, bam! You’re hit by a torrential downpour driven by a ninety-mile-per-hour gust. The beginning of ‘Karst’ again shows that they’re capable of moments of magnificent poise and calm, before gradually building… and building… it’s a while before they let fly with all the riffs, all the pedals, all the volume, and the impact is devastating.

Instrumentally, ‘Hetacomb’ calls to mind segments of Amenra’s Mass VI, the soft picking giving way to a bone-crunching chug, while ‘Samsa’, the album’s shortest track, coming n at under four minutes, is also perhaps the most brutal. ‘Enso’ sprawls over almost seven minutes of blistering savagery, an exorcism of pain and a tempest of catharsis. They’ve got yet more up their collective sleeves: the final track, ‘Verte’ is a work of magnificent, alternating dreamy shoegaze segments, with volcanic metal eruptions which hit with a bowel-quaking force.

All told, Scavenger is pretty special – equally emotive and high impact, this is intelligent, articulate, and monumentally heavy. I suppose you might say it’s the perfect equilibrium between deft and heft.

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Killer Couture – Everything Is Normal

Posted: 5 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Transylvanian Recordings – 31st October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

The title is, sadly, true. Somehow, recent years have ‘normalised’ everything, but not least the worst and most cuntish behaviour. Men being sleazy shits is just so normal that ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’ is an election-winning slogan, and a majority – however slim – in the US is ok with electing a convicted felon to the most powerful political position in the world. Somehow, billionaires have been normalised. Genocide has been normalised. These things have just become the backdrop to the every day. Many of us simply reel at this realisation.

But instead of reeling, we need to react. And if we ourselves find ourselves unable, it’s at least something to find there are other out there who are able to articulate on our behalfs. Enter Killer Couture, with their third album.

Gothface celebrate Everything Is Normal as being ‘Not overproduced; just back-to-basics angry, editorial of society style late 80’s/early-90’s music; the kind of stuff you could expect from Skinny Puppy’s and Ministry’s DGAF approach in the 80’s’. The band themselves describe it as ‘a 40-minute violent outburst of pent-up energy, challenging the concept that there ever was a status quo to begin with, the people who feel the need to try and uphold the illusion, and exploring the psychic maelstrom of living in the true chaotic reality beneath the mask.’

From a muffled cacophony of discord and a patchwork of samples emerges the first pulsating beat and blasting riff, from which ruptures forth squalling guitar and the intensity builds as the collage of snippety bits layers up to an unbearable level… and then ‘Terrible Purpose’ barrels in, the guitars thick and fat and dirty, overloading but with that digitally crisp edge, and as much as Ministry and Skinny Puppy so come to mind, while the speaker cone-shredding distortion hits like a two-footed flying kick to the chest, I’m thrown into recollections of early Pitch Shifter, of the searing industrial metal abrasion of Godflesh. The bass snarls, the percussion is simply devastating, and this is proper, full-tilt. If you need more comparisons, and more contemporary ones, I’d be placing this alongside Uniform for its uncompromising, full-on raw industrial attack.

Hot on its heels, the title track is a relentless percussive blast which propels a mess of noise, guitars set to stun, vocals set to rabid punk rage.

The guitars on ‘Teeth’ come on like a wall of sheet metal. If the refrain ‘I’d like to break your teeth’ lack subtlety, it achieves the desired impact. Everything Is Normal is not about subtlety or nuance: it’s about expunging that raw, brutal rage, it’s about catharsis, it’s about venting the fury, and Killer Couture are simply splitting their skins and breaking open their craniums with it.

‘KCMF’ brings another level of overload, the bass crunching and guitars churning and squalling against a relentless mechanised beat, and this is some furious, high-octane adrenalized noise shit. ‘Bastards’ speaks – or rather hollers – for itself, and ‘Composite Opposite’ is as gnarly as hell.

Everything Is Normal is one of the few self-professed ‘industrial’ albums I’ve heard of late which isn’t some Pretty Hate Machine lift, and isn’t essentially an electropop album with a dash of distortion. Killer Couture deliver on their promises with an album that’s brutal and uncompromising, heavy, and properly noisy.

‘Bad Waves’ brings things to a close, combining a certain shoegaze element with the hypnotic throb of suicide, and calls to mind The Sisters of |Mercy’s legendary live renditions of ‘Ghostrider’ circa 1984, often segued into ‘Sister Ray’ and / or ‘Louie Louie’ with the same relentless beat. And yes, my only complaint is that at 4’59”, it simply isn’t long enough by half. But then, the best songs always leave you wanting more, and despite Everything Is Normal being truly punishing album, a little more wouldn’t hurt that much… probably.

It’s important – and now sadly necessary – to distinguish between the red-faced outrage of those perpetuating hate and raging against all things supposedly ‘woke’ and those who are calling out the injustices, who are willing to stand up and point out that we need to be woke, that if you have an issue with antifa, you’re pro-fa, and you’re the problem.

Killer Couture are the voice of anger, the conduit of rage, and Everything Is Normal is precisely the album we need right now.

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Nomad Tree – I: Awakening The Ancestors

Posted: 4 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 29th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Creativity can have immensely therapeutic effects. The psychology behind it is likely complex, if it’s even fully understood, but immersing oneself in something creative, be it music, writing, or visual arts seems to uncoil the mind in ways nothing else can quite manage.

With I: Awakening The Ancestors, described as ‘a profound journey through sound, blending experimental folk, noise, and shamanic practices’, Stuart Chalmers, under the moniker of Nomad Tree, presents ‘the culmination of an 18-month exploration from burn-out and self-doubt to discovering a new voice. Using feedback techniques, contact mics on frame/bass drums, amplified dulcimers, gongs, and percussion made from natural materials, the album creates a dark, hypnotic soundscape. Recorded in unique locations like Cathedral Cave and Luds Church, the tracks evoke a sense of ancient connection to the land and spiritual practice. It’s a cathartic release aimed at healing and altered states of consciousness’.

And so it is in Chalmers’ case, perhaps, that the creative process, paired with reconnecting in some way with nature, and with places which inspire a sense of ancient history, a time before religion as it now exists, before civilisation as we know it, even, has provided a sense of escape from the all-pervasive shit of the now.

I: Awakening The Ancestors consists of three longform pieces, each over ten minutes long, and these are compositions laden with dense atmosphere. ‘On Sorcerous Wings Take Flight’ is so dense as to be oppressive: heavy, thunderous percussion rings out across barren moorland and reverberates around thick forests. Winds blow and the very earth moans and mumbles. Darkness creeps ever closer, growing ever heavier. There is a sense of a presence, but, at the same time, the absence of anything which feels overtly human is conspicuous. Although the track’s evocation is ancient mists, my mind takes me to a most contemporary on-line discussion around the hypothetical question ‘If you were alone in the woods, would you rather encounter a bear or a man?’ It’s a talking point around women’s safety, but in the last year I have taken to going on ever-longer walks in a quest to be in nature, but away from people. As Brion Gysin said, ‘man is a bad animal’, and as unnerving as the unknown and the unseeable may be, the prospect of encountering other people is considerably scarier.

‘Seeking Through Deepest Fears’ careens into dark space with droning, melancholic string sounds, wheezing, rumbling, polytonal tension and low, slow-building layers, to which primitive percussion eventually joins. There’s an oddly psychedelic sheen to this piece as it settles into a hypnotic groove overlayed with what sounds like scrawling, scraping walls of feedback, and it lands somewhere between Black Angels and latter-day Swans in terms of the listening experience: intense, almost overwhelming, but also uplifting on account of the complete immersion it engenders.

If the liner notes imply a sense of progression, a narrative arc, or any sort of linearity, the actuality of I: Awakening The Ancestors confounds that expectation in its merciless gloom. With tribal beats bashing away, hard, ‘Amongst Forest Spirits Or Wild Beasts’ conjures a sense of tapping into something elemental. It eventually tapers away to silence amidst a clamour of chimes, leaving a sense of emptiness, and much to reflect on.

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Spineless – Dysphonia

Posted: 3 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Submersion Records – 1st November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Once again, I’m playing catch-up. There isn’t only new music released faster than I can even read my emails, but great new music at that. It’s important to stress this. There’s so much grumbling about how there’s nothing new or interesting being released anymore, and the media is bursting with articles on how bands are dying a death because the charts are solid with solo artists and it’s impossible to finance a tour as a band in the current climate, and that’s if there are any venues given that grassroots venues are closing at such an alarming rate, and it’s true, bands are simply not a feature of the commercial charts anymore, the music industry is messed up, streaming platforms like Spotify exist to deliver the precise opposite of trickle-down economics by funnelling revenue from streams for probably 90 per cent of acts up to the major league acts, and venues are in crisis. But anyone who visits these pages with any kind of frequency will be aware that there is an immense wealth of new music being released every single week – it’s just not easy to know where to find it.

When I embarked on my journey from the Top 40 to the underground, in the late 80s and early 90s, there was Melody Maker, Sounds, The NME (to an extent), and John Peel. Annie Nightingale’s request show would air all kinds of non-mainstream stuff directly after the top 40 singles chart on Radio 1 in the late 80s. Hell, even the overenthusiastic snivelling sycophant Zane Lowe would play some interesting stuff. Now, 6Music is pretty much it, and it is not the same. This is the scenic route to why I’m a month behind on covering new releases.

Dysphonia by Spineless is… powerful.

‘Justice’ arrives on a thick, monotonous bass blast and shuddering guitars, at first calling to mind Swans but then swerving into a space that’s both more metal and more atmospheric.

Cited influences which range from Godflesh to Chelsea Wolfe are clearly apparent, as powerful vocals, often ethereal, but at times demonic, top punishing industrial trudges dominated by sparse riffs, just a couple of chords hammered with skull-crushing brutality. ‘Disease’ is exemplary, bringing together a commanding vocal which positively soars, and a punishing, relentless riff adorned with squalls of feedback, with everything pinned together with a snare drum that simply takes the top off your head.

Single cut ‘Me’, showcased here not so long ago, is altogether more atmospheric, emotive, moving, but there are surging currents of noise running throughout, and the piano-based ‘You’ offers a counterpart piece which sees Spineless venture toward the realms of anthemic balladry. It’s quite a departure from the majority of the album, and seems to be mastered differently, too, which makes it a standout for a range of reasons. ‘To the Core’ plunges back to guitar-driven darkness, epic post-metal par excellence.

In another time, despite its weight, its, at times, brutal heft, the popper moments of Dysphonia would have likely won it mainstream airplay, and would have seen Spineless pitched alongside the likes of Evanescence and Linkin Park – not that they’re nu-metal or gothic metal, but because the songwriting is of a standard, and because they have TUNES as well as bold riffs. ‘Where Am I’ brings some stuttering beats and brooding piano, and there’s so much depth to absorb with Dysphonia. ‘Your Drama’ is soulful and industrial, detailed and delicate… and then it ends heavy. And I mean heavy.

‘NOZZ’ is nothing short of a sonic explosion, and it not remotely commercial, and all the better for it. It’s an absolute beast, a raging tempest of overload. Time was you’d buy an album based on the singles, only to find the singles completely unrepresentative. It’s true that the singles from Dysphonia showcase the more accessible end of things, but as a whole, it’s a magnificent set of songs, which really do cross boundaries and explore different spaces.

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Rupert Lally – Interzones

Posted: 30 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Mortality Tables – 29th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Because life experience creates linguistic associations, for me, it’s impossible to see or hear the word ‘interzone’ without immediately thinking of William S. Burroughs. The title of a collection of short stories and ‘routines’ penned in the mid-1950s, Interzone was the working title of the seminal breakthrough novel Naked Lunch (1959), and the collection, published in 1990 consists of segments which failed to make the final cut. The pieces were written while Burroughs was living in Tangier, something of a haven for expat writers, including, perhaps most notably, Paul Bowles, but also polyartist and true inventor of the cut-up method, Brion Gyson. Burroughs described the city as an ‘interzone’, and it was indeed both an ‘international zone’, as the portmanteau implies, and a space between zones, outside of any single culture or jurisdiction, its administration divided between the US, French, Spanish, and English sectors, where ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted’. Of course, there are numerous other connotations, but this is what I’m bringing in terms of prececeptional baggage to this.

The accompanying notes certainly indicate that the album’s content holds up to these parallel positions: ‘Like its name implies, these are place of transiency. Intermediate places. In-between locations. Melting pots of different people and different ideas, constantly evolving as one thing collides with another, and another, and another.’

The album was initially recorded in 2022 as a solo work, but subsequently scrapped and rerecorded with a different collaborator on each composition. Collaborations do tend to bring out different aspects of an artist, and it should therefore be of no surprise that this suite of nine pieces, recorded between 2022 and 2024 in Switzerland, England, Luxembourg, France and Zimbabwe, is eclectic in its take on electronica.

As the bookending pieces, ‘Entry Visa’ and ‘Exit Visa’ indicate, travel, movement, and transition, are the key themes here. But this is not some pan-cultural pick ‘n’ mix grab-bag, and instead creates an experience which replicates the disorientation of travel. It’s difficult to articulate just how this sonic patchwork works, or quite how the experience feels. It’s not as if it lurches from techno to grunge, to opera, to thrash, and in this respect Lally’s works represent his ‘two inches of ivory’, so to speak. But within the realm of electronica, Interzones covers substantial ground.

‘Play Position’, featuring Salford Electronics, is a sample-packed exploratory work with a prominent beat, which contrasts considerably with the near-ambience of ‘A Stealth Approach’, featuring Scanner; contrasting further, Simon Fisher Turner brings a sort of drawling space-age country aspect to ‘Calmer’, before things take a spin toward out-and-out trance on the title track, and Karen Vogt’s airy, soft vocals on ‘Running Circles’ pull the album gently into hypnotic shoegaze territory. The album continues on this trajectory, sliding deeper into dark, gothy electropop with ‘Ripples’.

The insistent beat and overtly dance style of ‘Exit Visa’ makes for an unexpected change in direction – despite the fact that, by this point, nothing should be truly unexpected. The effect, however, is disorientating, and you find yourself wondering how you came from A to B over the duration of the album. It’s testament to both Lally’s compositional skills and his selection of contributors – as well as the album’s sequencing – that somehow, it flows and the transitions themselves are seamless, which only heightens the sense of moving between spaces with no real sense of how it came to pass. Vitally, Interzones is a subtly detailed work, with hidden depths and moments of genuine beauty.

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