Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

Burning Motherfuckers – An Ki

Posted: 3 September 2023 in Albums
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Hærverk Industrier – 25th August 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Having a memorable name counts of a lot – as does having one that stands out at the top of Google searches. How many times have you had conversations where one of you has been struggling to think of the name of… that band… that band… You know, the one with… they did an album…. They supported… clicking fingers, scratching heads, gesticulating. Nah. And the acts that are simply untraceable, particularly those with banal single-word monikers. It’s like they didn’t think about the practicalities when picking a name – or they simply have no interest in being found, which is commercial suicide before they’ve even started.

This is not an accusation which can be levelled at this Oslo-based noise rock duo, who follow up their 2012 self-titled 12” EP on Handmade Records and self-released 2017 cassette This Century with their new album An Ki, which is being released by Hærverk Industrier and promises ‘Four tracks of extreme dynamics, density and intensity, resulting in an almost claustrophobic chaos of sheer rock ‘n’ roll ecstasy (sic)’. Burning Motherfuckers is neither forgettable nor hard to find.

The same is true of their music, in terms of its being memorable at lease. An Ki is an album which contains just four tracks, but ‘Lost It’ is a beast which clocks in at ten and a half minutes, and the title track is over twenty minutes long, making this a monster that runs for over forty minutes of feedback-strewn riffery. It’s a noisy mess of a record, and truly glorious in the most cacophonous and challenging way. ‘Difficult’ music, when it’s harsh and loud and discordant, isn’t simply something you can step on from. It’s hard to describe, but it’s disruptive, physically, and mentally. Such turbulence disrupts the mindflow and makes waves around the organs.

‘Eilert’ builds and builds and builds and it takes the very idea of building to a ludicrous level, up, and up, and up… what do you do with this? The form is very much 90s underground alternative, and this manic racket calls to mind the likes of Terminal Cheesecake – but then again, the driving guitars and thrashing drums of ‘Lost It’ are quite reminiscent of That Fucking Tank – arguably one of the greatest noise duos ever, and an act who really pushed the parameters not only of noise rock, but of the two-piece format to the max. And Burning Motherfuckers… woah, do these bastards make a racket. ‘Lost It’ hurts; the tempestuous assault of everything all at once is not comfortable. But it’s more than that: the vocals are deranged, demented, and this is brain-splitting, cracked, something else, an unapologetic mess of noise.

‘Unless It’s Trees’ is a real departure and stands apart from the rest of the album: a soft, almost folky indie piece, it’s largely bass-driven and it’s uncomfortable but gentle at the same time.

And then there’s the title track. Fuck, and fuck, and fuck. It’s a monster in every sense, taking the mutant form of an eternal guitar drone and mangling noise which builds while discordant vocals melt and burn among a riotous racket.

It’s not neat or tidy, it’s not even ordered or organised. But it’s not conventionally noisy or messy: this is something else. It’s a new level of mangled noise and it’s difficult, awkward, It hurts, and it feels like taking a kicking and being hit around the head with a plank. These motherfuckers sure know how to make music with impact.

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KEN mode – VOID

Posted: 31 August 2023 in Albums
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Artoffact Records – 22nd September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

VOID always seems like the most appropriate title for a counterpart to a release called NULL: it was, indeed, the title for a brace of EPs released by Foetus in the early 00s as companions to the album Gash.

But with this, the title is more than simply an extension of a theme in terms of title. As the accompanying notes explain, ‘VOID, the companion piece to last year’s NULL LP, has a decidedly more melancholy and disappointed aesthetic than its predecessor. Featuring 8 new tracks recorded and produced throughout the fall and winter of 2021 by Andrew Schneider, mastered by Carl Saff, with artwork and layouts by the band’s longtime collaborator Randy Ortiz.’

Despite now marking twenty-four years of squalling noise, tenth full-length Loved (2018) found the band hitting new peaks of intensity and gaining newfound traction, and not just because of the vaguely disturbing cover. Combining weight and ferocity, their back catalogue straddles the abyss between The Jesus Lizard and Swans. It’s fair to say, then, that KEN mode are hardly celebrated as a party band, and writing in Decibel Magazine, Shane Mehling summarises the diptych of NULL and VOID as “It’s like the first record is you fighting, and this one is you losing”.

It’s a pretty accurate summary. That is to say, VOID is pretty fucking bleak, harrowing even. ‘The Shrike’ makes for a tense and tempestuous opening, where everything blasts out all at once before sinewy guitars twist and entwine like a contraction of the intestines with the pain of food poisoning before successive deluges of noise assail the senses. The tension draws the sinews so taut as to burn, and a mere four minutes in you feel the anguish rising through the gut and your throat tightening.

Single cut ‘These Wires’ is almost accessible, a sedate intro building the tension before the levee breaks on the lung-bursting anguish. It’s eight minutes of blank fury, raging nihilism that doesn’t necessarily make you feel better. The stab at catharsis feels blunted. Confined, entrapped. It’s tense, and you feel your heartrate well. VOID is so, so, dense, the music low and churning the

Comparisons are few and largely futile in the face of this, but it’s Kowloon Walled City’s bleak, desolate forms. The disappointment emanates from every chord, every pained syllable. Life… yes, it tears you up and it crushes you.

‘We’re Small Enough’ runs in ever-tightening circles around a repetitive bass groove motif, and become wound more tightly with every loop, and then ‘I Cannot’ crashes in and it’s like you can feel the band throwing themselves headline against lead-lined walls in desperate and futile attempts to escape. Escape what? Life… ‘A Reluctance of Being’ encapsulates that sense of struggle, the weight of simply existing some days. And yet just when you think you can’t do it, and don’t think you can even get up on a morning, you do, because you simply do, and then you get through another day, and then the next. It’s like wading through treacle, but what else are you going to do? I say ‘you’ in the hope that in redirecting the personal the universal it will take on a wider resonance. But for every ‘you’, I mean me. But you know that. And this track is the most gut-wrenching brutal.

Previous single ‘He Was a Good Man, He Was a Taxpayer’ is another slow, brutal slice of pain. Another shining example of what no-one would likely consider a single, it’s a crawling slogger spanning five monolithic minutes of bludgeoning noise, angry, grey, dark, dense, relentless. VOID is the soundtrack to staring into the void, while contemplating the practicalities and the future. Is there even a future? What if I step off here? What am I looking at, what am I facing? Is there really nothing? Probably not, and we need to accept that perhaps the end is the end.

VOID stands on the edge and looks down. Perhaps this is it. Perhaps there is more. VOID doesn’t offer hope, but it does provide a backdrop to your existential crisis while leaving you gasping for air.

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I Am Low – Úma

Posted: 30 August 2023 in Albums
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Majestic Mountain Records – 29th September 2023

James Wells

One day, I’ll see a press release or bio for a stoner rock back that doesn’t reference Queens of the Stone Age. But I don’t expect that will be any time soon. They are, of course, the only band of the genre to have graced the mainstream singles and album charts around the globe, so it’s a handy touchstone for reviewers whose experience is limited to the mainstream and likely a useful reference for radio folks who operate a more limited sphere of reference for the benefit of listeners who tend not to really explore beyond, well, their back garden.… but how many who are seriously into the style hold QOTSA as their benchmark? I’m not knocking them in the slightest, because I very much dig their shit – but the best-known and most commercially successful exponents of any genre are rarely the choice of those with a deeper knowledge and appreciation. It’s the same as picking the Pistols as the definitive punk band or Oasis as the quintessential indie act.

‘Gunman’ crunches in with a gritty riff, and it’s gritty riffs that dominate the album – as they should, of course. There’s something about the production… the bass is ultra-low, almost subliminal, and there’s a lot of space and separation; the quieter moments find the guitars switch to clean, and ripple and echo, not seductively, but compellingly, absorbingly forging texture and atmosphere.

They go slow early, with the second song, ‘Dead Space’ going deep from its chiming, hypnotic intro via its lumbering riffage and evoking hot nights and open skies while bringing both heavy psychedelia and mellow melody to proceedings.

The songs alternate between the slow and reflective and monster rifffery, but even then, it’s the riffs which stick in the mind: ‘Ruins’ and the Soundgarden-esque ‘Pigs’ drive hard and fast, while ‘Wake’ is driven by rolling drums and chunky bass, the harmonies and brooding grind inviting comparisons to Alice in Chains in places.

The nine tracks on Úma strike a neat balance between melodic and meaty, hitting a sweet spot that feels just right, with ballsy riffs and tunage meeting in the middle to make for a solid album.

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David Colohan – Sargasso Sky

Posted: 29 August 2023 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 28th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The Sargasso Sea is a unique place on earth: situated within the Atlantic ocean, it is the only sea without a land boundary – a sea within an ocean, in other words – its borders defined by sea currents. Its name is derived from to the vast ‘sea’ of free-floating seaweed called Sargassum which occupies the space, and it’s an ecosystem like no other, the aquatic equivalent of the Amazon. And yet its existence appears to be considerably less well-known, despite the success of Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which has been adapted for film, stage, TV, and radio and has been lauded as a pivotal work of postcolonial feminism. And it’s this book which I think of when I hear the word ‘sargasso’ – although clearly, it has absolutely no bearing on this album. What even is a sargasso sky?

The liner notes paint the scene, where ‘A sargasso sky shimmers above a twilit American shoreline, slipping in & out of time. Via a way slowed down take on jazz fusion, limpid pools catch its reflection, ebbing & flowing with the soon to come stars… The cover images taken at Marblehead, Massachusetts depict something of the aura of an area that H.P. Lovecraft considered life-changing. Step into the sea & sky….’

There are many layers, then, to this release, which extend far beyond the surface of the music itself. But when it comes to the music, Colohan presents ten pieces, all comparatively concise (only four extend beyond the five-minute mark, and none reach beyond eight), and the form is ambient yet structured, with rippling washes of synth gliding over the mellow mists of sound which float invisibly through the air. Despite its title casting its eye above the horizon to the sky, parts of this album is given to a preoccupation with the water, still, as exemplified by titles such as ‘Sacred Teeming Waters’ and ‘Longshore Drift’.

Whereas much ambient music is formless, abstract, the instrumentation vague, on Sargasso Sky, David Colohan offers musical works with structure, and with the implementation of identifiable instruments.

‘Longshore Drift’ is led by sparse piano, backed by a sliding, bulbous synth bass that’s extremely eighties in sound, and elsewhere on the album, long resonant voices dominate, from flute to organ. These are clearly synth voices, sounds conjured digitally in response to creative needs but also evolving technology facilitating new music. There are some bold drones which surge and swash on ‘Anoint’, and ‘Summers Old as Stars’ brings late 70s and early 80s synth stylings to the fore, with hints of Tubular Bells and Vangelis, and the myriad music of this era which remained anonymous. But for all that, Sargasso Sky is subtle and it’s still not overtly electro for the most part, and it’s not of the prog persuasion either. But what is it? Certainly, there are parts which do very much pursue progressive forms, and Sargasso Sky is very much an exploratory work: spacious, undefined by limits of composition or instrumentation.

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Mission to the Sun – Sophia Oscillations

Posted: 28 August 2023 in Albums
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Felte FLT-089 – 14th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Mission to the Sun is Chris Samuels of Ritual Howls fame (synths, samples, programming) and Kirill Slavin (vocals/lyrics), and comes recommended for fans of Wolf Eyes, Moin, Throbbing Gristle, Coil, The Legendary Pink Dots, Drew McDowall, Suicide, Cabaret Voltaire, etc.

Sophia Oscillations is their second album, and it pitched as ‘an immersive journey through the dark corners of post-industrial music’, whereby ‘The Detroit based duo continues the sonic exploration started on their debut album Cleansed by Fire, while delving deeper into themes of isolation and lost communication. Christopher Samuels’ synths, samples and rhythmic programming is accented by Kirill Slavin’s haunting vocal delivery as the listener receives intersperse audio recordings from the outer reaches of inner space.’ This may seem an unusual angle of approach given their chosen moniker, but the one place hotter than the sun or the earth’s core is the core of what it is to be human. We still understand space better than we understand the deep sea, and the deep sea better than we understand the human mind. There is much scope for exploration in every sphere.

William Burroughs famously described ‘Scottish Beat’ writer Alexander Trocchi as a ‘cosmonaut of inner space’, although he also applied the label to himself, stating ‘In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.’

This is an appropriate context for the eight compositions which make up Sophia Oscillations, which are essentislly beatless but strongly rhythmic in form. If they belong to the lineage of the avant-garde and the industrial music of the late 70s, it equally draws on a host of other, more contemporary threads in order to forge something quite different and ultimately new.

‘Drowning’ surges and pulses, rippling waves washing over a slow-treading bassline which wanders up and down, stepping somewhere between DAF and The Cure’s Carnage Visors while the vocals whisper and wheeze low in the mix, a stealthy monotone that’s both tense and detached. Whistles of feedback strain from the speakers and wrap themselves around the whole drifting expanse. Things take a turn for the abrasive on the title track, with machine-gun blasts of noise cutting through grainy swathes of bleak ambience, gradually fracturing and fragmenting quite uncomfortably.

There are hints of medievalism and classical on ‘Censor Sickness’, but they’re melted into a dark murk of muttered voices and unsettling atmospherics, and the combination is quite unsettling and far from comfortable: if anything, it’s queasy, and the minimal yet noisy ‘Unborn’ pushes this to another level: stark, metallic, robotic electronica, it has an 80s dystopian feel which again calls to mind DAF and Cabaret Voltaire. The late 70s and early 80s were exciting because musicians with limited means – and ability – were finding ways of using emerging, and increasingly affordable – technology to make music which represented the world in which they found themselves. As such, the emergence of experimental electronic music and industrial music was born out of a collision of multiple factors, none of which will ever recur, and for this reason can never be recreated.

Mission to the Sun aren’t attempting to recreate history here, but instead, Sophia Oscillations finds them processing history through their own filters. ‘Attrition’ brings together post-rock and crunching industrial electronica with a dash of Gary Numan and more detached spoken-word vocals, and it’s a hybrid that isn’t easy to process, because it all feels so alienating. But then, articulating alienation always does.

The churning grind of ‘Cornerstone’ sounds like the intro to something by Big Black, but instead of Roland kicking in, alongside a relentless bass, it just grinds on and on, and it’s dark and messy. Once again, Slavin’s voice is half-buried in the mix: it’s difficult to decipher the words, and his voice hovers, blank, flat, vaguely Dalek-like, in the vein of Dr Mix, but less harsh.

Sophia Oscillations is a challenging album. Yes, it’s unsettling, bleak, stark sparse, but the hardest part is the fact it doesn’t confirm to any one genre, it doesn’t follow any obvious or specific form, and it’s not the fact that it’s unsettling and difficult to find a place for it that’s the issue, but the fact it keeps you tense and on edge for its duration. But, perhaps even more than that is the fact it feels removed from anything human. But it’s not so far removed as to be alien. The brain simply isn’t equipped to process the inhuman– or the near-human-but-not-quite, the uncanny, the unheimlich. Because we recognise it, and yet we don’t. Sophia Oscillations brings the challenge right in front of your face. Sit back, draw breath, process. This isn’t an easy ride.

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Sodomisery – Mazzaroth

Posted: 23 August 2023 in Albums
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Testimony Records – 8th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

‘We are living in troubled times and it is hardly surprising that this is reflected in any form of art including music. On Mazzaroth, Sodomisery have spun a dark lyrical yarn about mental illness in society, religion, and the struggle of the individual, which is running like a red thread through their sophomore full-length. The Swedish melodic death four-piece are underlining their loosely conceptual approach with a remarkable musical evolution’, says the bio which accompanies this album.

There’s no misery like Sodomisery. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. For reasons I haven’t explored, while society has progressed – and I do mean this broadly and generally, being most aware of the fact that homosexuality and many things more widely accepted remain not only illegal but subject to severe punishments in a large number of countries – the word ‘sodomy’ carries brutal connotations which continue to hold currency in the circles of the

blackest of metal and industrial and power electronics. It’s true that Whitehouse’s Erector (with its blatantly unsubtle ‘cock’ cover) was released in 1981 and things have moved on a bit since then, but how much? Many of these bands are, as far as I can discern, less concerned with contemporary perceptions of anal penetration, whereby in permissive western society, it’s generally accepted regardless of sex or sexuality, and in pornography, it’s more or less considered essential, and more preoccupied with the harsh, perverse connotations of the writings of The Marquis de Sade – one of the few writers whose work still has the capacity to truly shock. And in this context, sodomy connotes the worst of sexual tortures, the infliction of pain, a statement of the ultimate power dynamics. It all seems appropriate given the band’s objectives.

This album had an interesting evolution, too: ‘When all the new tracks were written and pre-produced, SODOMISERY decided to create two versions of the album. One mix included keyboards and orchestration, while the other version had no such additions. After an extensive period of deliberation and many listening sessions, the Swedes decided that the new dimension and cinematic feeling added by the keyboards was exactly what their songs needed.’

Without hearing the two versions side by side, I’m in no position to comment, but the fact of the matter is that the keyboards certainly have not transformed this into some twiddly prog-rock effort: instead said keyboards are low in the mix but serve to fill out the sound with elongated droning tones against the relentless, thunderous fury of frantic fretwork and double-pedal drumwork that’s faster than the eye or ear can process.

There are some moments of such tunefulness that one has to take pause and breathe for a moment. We’re not just talking clean vocals or tuneful; there are moments, albeit brief, of outright pop sandwiched between the furious rage and overloading distortion. But rather than diminish the album’s power, I find myself respecting the band all the more. To have a softer breakdown in a song is one thing: to be so unashamedly clean and crisp and tuneful is bold.

‘Delusion’ balances all of the various elements nicely, coming together to forge a blasting yet grand and graceful dirty monster of a track which even packs in a heroic guitar solo near the end. Juvenile snickering ensues here with ‘A Storm Without Wind’, and I know it’s not funny and the delivery is entirely serious. Not least of all the lung-ripping bass that prefaces the throat-ripping vocals which snarl over guitars which alternate between old samples and snippets stolen from the present.

It feels scary, like being left alone on a platform and staring into the abyss. Any minute and it could retreat, and leave you falling into the void, and on the evidence here, you’d incinerate in seconds. Ultimately, we’re all scared. Mazzaroth is a worthy soundtrack to that fear.

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She Spread Sorrow – Orchid Seeds

Posted: 21 August 2023 in Albums
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The Helen Scarsdale Agency – 4th August 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

She Spread Sorrow is the musical vehicle for Italian artist Alice Kundalini, and over the course of a number of releases, the majority via Coldspring, she has explored a minimal industrial style, stark yet dense, and characterised by an eerie, whispered vocal delivery.

As the accompanying notes explain, ‘Orchid Seeds was originally published as part of the instantly out of print On Corrosion – a 10 cassette anthology from 2019 that was housed in a handcrafted wooden box and featuring full albums from Kleistwahr, Neutral, Pinkcourtesyphone, Alice Kemp, She Spread Sorrow, G*Park, Relay For Death, Francisco Meirino, Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, and Himukalt. The collection also stood as the 50th release for The Helen Scarsdale Agency, an imprint founded in 2003 and dedicated to post-industrial research, recombinant noise, surrealist demolition, existential vacancy and then some.’

Four years on, it finally gets a standalone release, both digitally and on vinyl.

Kundalini states that the album, “is about 5 different women of my family. Each track is about one of them with their difficult story and strengths. My family is totally destroyed now, no relation between anyone, but in the past there was a strong tradition of women with

interesting personalities.”

And even by the standards of She Spread Sorrow, Orchid Seeds is stark and eerie, dark and unsettling. The reverby, robotic vocals that whisper and moan over the sparse backing of ‘The Solitude in the Giant House’ may set the tone, and with a vintage drum machine thudding and clopping in the background, it has that late 70s vibe – somewhere between Young Marble Giants and cabaret Voltaire.

Things twist into darker territory with ‘Star’ as strains of feedback and grating, serrated synth ripples fizz and crackle beneath her gasping monotone vocal. This is much more reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle. It makes for a tense eight minutes: so often, when acts capable of producing great and heartstopping noise show such restraint as to keep it minimal yet audibly straining, the effect is amplified. This is one such composition; you find yourself moving to the edge of your seat, limbs tensing, waiting for something that never comes.

While the songs are about different people, ‘She Didn’t Care’ and ‘Queen of Guilt’ show opposite aspects of a theme, and perhaps provide some insight into the dynamic of the familial relationships and why they collapsed. The former is built around a stammering beat and hovering, hesitant synthesized organ hum; the sound and overall performance is primitive, immediate, while in contrast, the latter is dominated by a slow, heavy beat defined by a thunderous, reverberating snare, over which a simple synth wanders as echoed vocals drift, fuzzed and breathy and way off in the distance. The effect is some king of industrial dub, and it’s unsettling but not altogether unpleasant, perhaps because it contains stripped-back elements of common pop and dub tropes and so its oddness is countered by a certain stylistic familiarity.

The fifth and final track, ‘The Fortune of Others’, builds through serrated oscillations to grind away for what feels like a slow-throbbing eternity of electronic claustrophobia. It’s important to bear in mind the context: this is an album that’s equal parts narrative and concept, and the execution really pushes the concept to the fore, building the atmospheres of moments missed.

Without more detail – and let’s face it, more detail would likely be unsettling, even potentially traumatic – it’s impossible to determine the full extent of the meaning and also the pain behind the title. But for better or worse, the prospect of taking a firm grasp on the album seems to grow ever further away as it progresses. There is something magnificently and also frustratingly elusive about Orchid Seeds, and however deep you delve, however long you seek it, one suspects it will remain eternally beyond grasp.

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Torpor – Abscission

Posted: 11 August 2023 in Albums
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Human Worth – 15th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It may not be apparent from my review output, bur I am uncomfortably familiar with experiencing torpor. That weight that descends like a cloak and simply loving is as much as you can manage, and in no time, half an hour, an hour has elapsed, and… what? Where does the time go? Where does your life go? For many of us, work eats our lives, as does just doing whatever it takes to keep afloat and on top of things. I will admit to being less familiar with abscission, which I had to look up to find that it’s ‘the shedding of various parts of an organism, such as a plant dropping a leaf, fruit, flower, or seed. In zoology, abscission is the intentional shedding of a body part, such as the shedding of a claw, husk, or the autotomy of a tail to evade a predator,’ according to Wikipedia.

I get the sense from listening to Abscission that this shedding is rather more metaphorical, and that the album is more of a work of catharsis, shedding skins and layers of shit, of unwanted emotions, to feel lighter, to emerge somehow freer, less encumbered by emotional baggage. But this is also something else. More than merely a shedding of dead skin, the experience of listening to Abscission is closer to tearing the skin from your body, the flesh from your bones to escape your corporeal being. Bloody, brutal, unspeakable pain.

On Abscission, Torpor bring the weight, the crushing weight that drags you down at every limb, your spine, your guts, your heart. The first track, ‘Interior Gestures’ is pure leaden punishment. It starts with megalithic raging, guitars like slabs of basalt, the guttural vocals growling and snarling beneath it all, before shifting into a dark yet graceful expanse, and for a moment, you can breathe, and feel a radiant energy. There’s something about slow, heavy music which is, in some instances, uplifting, and Torpor’s gentler passages are truly magnificent, delicate, elegant, even.

‘As Shadows Follow Body’ has a few delicate moments, but for the most part, it’s simply devastating. If the likes of Neurosis and Amenra are perhaps obvious touchstones, where Torpor stand apart is that they make both bands sound like PWL era Kylie. This goes beyond heavy. When everything is churning low and slow, you feel your muscles wilt and body sag. It’s how you perhaps imagine being hit by a truck, or the implosion of a submarine where the intense pressure simply collapses your body. I may be alone or in a very small minority in imagining these things, but sometimes, articulating the experience of particularly intense music requires something of a stretch when it comes to articulation, and most similes and metaphors simply fall a long way short.

I can’t decide – perhaps because my brain is melting – if it’s appropriate or ironic that listening to Torpor should induce torpor. I’m feeling numb, weary, my back and libs ache, likely from spending hours observing bad posture practices during my dayjob before returning to the same position to sift take care of life admin and review submissions. And listening to Abscission only seems to accentuate my aches, because listening to it feels like carrying a heavy load, for miles, in intense heat.

‘Accidei’ locks into a grinding repetition that’s reminiscent of early Swans or Godflesh, and crawls sluggish and sludgishly, before the album’s shortest song, ‘carbon’ ploughs into the depths and tears the ground apart.

‘Island of Abandonment doesn’t so much plunge new depths of heavy, as sound like the real-time death of an underworld god. It does pick up the pace around the midpoint, building to a sustained crescendo that feels like a typhoon. By the end of its enormous eleven-minute assault, I find myself at a loss. I’ve been covering heavy music for a long time, and have spent it developing my descriptive vocabulary. But words fall short, so short, in the face of this. This is another world. Enter it at your peril.

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Heroin – Discography

Posted: 8 August 2023 in Albums
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Southern Lord – 28th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Southern Lord are at it again, with an archival release of a cult hardcore act whose legacy is larger than its output, following the BL’AST and Neon Christ releases. It’s truly a joy to see the label move beyond its immediate back garden of drone and doom to use the platform its created to showcase the bands without which it likely wouldn’t exist. Originally released for Record Store Day, this second issue comes on vinyl and digital formats, it’s a comprehensive retrospective, which contains ‘all of the out of print 7”s and 12”s, compilation tracks, as well as the session the band recorded at the infamous Inner Ear Studios in Washington, DC, and never heard before unreleased songs.’

Existing for only four years, releasing just eighteen songs in that time, they’d called it a day before most people even heard of them. Like so many short-lived bands, their impact and influence only began to spread posthumously. There’s something genuinely cool about this, with bonus point for not having reformed, staying true to the original hardcore ethos.

As the accompanying notes observe, ‘the fact that the band’s entire output plus unreleased material, numbering thirty songs in all, fits – quite comfortably – on a double LP speaks for itself in many ways. Yes, this is hardcore, and you know the score: fast, furious, faster, more furious.’

Listening to Discography, it’s not pretty, and some of the recordings are pretty ropey. And ropey isn’t just ok, it’s good. It’s raw, it’s real. If it’s clean and polished, it ain’t hardcore.

This is indeed fast and furious, and utterly brutal, and triumph of bass and raging guitar-driven noise, The thing that’s hard to assimilate for me, being the age I am, is that 1993 was thirty years ago. Hardcore exploded in the mid-80s and was still in its heyday early 90s, parallel with the emerging grunge scene. Nirvana’s Bleach espoused the same values. And listening to Discography, what’s remarkable is the sound. It’s no-fi, it’s dirty, it’s gnarly. With the exception of perhaps black metal and crust punk, there aren’t really any other genres that hold such low production values in such high esteem. The gnarlier, the more authentic. And this is gnarly alight. Some of the tracks are barely above four-track portastudio tape quality. But too look at the context: four-track cassette portastudios were still hugely popular until the mi-late 90s. The world has changed beyond recognition in the last thirty years, meaning that recordings from the late 80s and early 90s feel like they’re nor not so much a lifetime, but another world.

Of the thirty tracks here, only three extend beyond three minutes. And yet, within these concise packaged of noise and fury, they somehow find room for some gentle, even borderline experimental passages. Heroin had range, and texture. But of course, first and foremost, they had fury and they had fire, and they had rage and volume. And Discography is essential listening.

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Slighter – The Futile Engine

Posted: 6 August 2023 in Albums
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Brutal Resonance / Confusion Inc. –21st July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

One thing I find – often – is that I keep encountering acts who have been going for quite literally decades without my having the slightest knowledge of their existence. This is a source of frustration: after all, I like to think I not only have my ear to the ground – so to speak – when it comes to emerging artists, but that I am pretty well connected with labels and PR. But then, so much of the music industry, it seems, is about luck and change encounters, and being at the right place at the right time. That, and the fact that existing in underground circles for a decade or more doesn’t mean that the chance of rising up toward the light is anywhere near remotely assured.

And so it is that I have been blissfully unaware of Slighter – the solo moniker of Colin C., who it appears, according to the bio, ‘has been fine-tuning the future of electronic music since kickstarting his music in Mid City Los Angeles in the early 2000s… Creating from a unique vantage point, he was involved in collaborations for various Metropolis Records releases and Cleopatra Records compilations, in addition to Slighter releases via his own Confusion Inc. imprint.’

‘How?’ I ask myself, and again, ‘how?’ I’m not only a fan and follower of these labels, but frequently get sent releases for review. I’ve mentioned perhaps a few times now – or more – how Cleopatra tapes were an integral part of my introduction to goth, and subsequently, Metropolis have been the outlet for some of my favourite more industrial-leaning acta like PIG, who I’ve been a fan of since they supported Nine Inch Nails on The Downward Spiral tour back in 1994. It might have wiped me bang in the middle of my A-Level exams, but fuck, the trip to Wolverhampton was worth it.

This is apposite. It seems almost impossible to discuss anything in the bracket of contemporary industrial without recourse to either Niner Inch Nails or Ministry, depending on whether the music is of an electronic or metal persuasion. It wasn’t always this way: from the 70s and through the 80s, industrial was a different beast, but circa 88 or thereabouts, something happened. It’s hard to really pinpoint what that something was, but it definitely happened.

And so it is that Slighter’s latest, The Futile Engine, is some strong work, which sits in the post-NIN industrial bracket, while owning a certain debt to 80s Wax Trax!. ‘Introspection Illusion’ announces its arrival with a squall of noise, a scream of electronica, and some muffled, subterranean vocal whisperings which are dark and unsettling… and then the machinery grinds into action and things really get heavy, and in no time we’re submerged in a throbbing barrage of noise, driven by a thudding industrial disco beat.

‘Pulling Me Under’ is more obvious brooding industrial dance with whirling synths and mangled, menacing vocals pitched against pounding beats. This sets the tone for the album as a whole: ‘Have No Fear’ is dark and sparse, a mechanised beat pulsating in the background against menacing close-mic vocals and we’re deep in PHM terrain here. In contrast, ‘Nostalgia Hysteria’ launches headlong into trance territory, tweaking the 505 in a full-on Josh Wink style.

They plunge deep into dark waters with the more experimental ‘Memory Corruptor’, but so much of The Futile Engine is simply dance music with some darker edges that it’s hard to really engage with. And the trouble I have with so much dance music is that it feels cold, clinical, impersonal. Perhaps it was the lack of drugs that mean I never got 90s rave or techno. But this doesn’t gain more appeal with time, and that’s a fact.

The Futile Engine has its moments, for sure, its execution is pure perfection, and the album displays a knack for insistent beats… but it’s exhausting. Unless you’re seeking relentless beat torture, you probably won’t dig this.

AA

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