Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

Elektrikill – Küntzpiracy

Posted: 20 July 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Evol Music Group – 26th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Over on this side of the pond, in the UK, we have plenty to beef about, and more than enough to worry about, too. But while we see endless footage of war in Ukraine, Gaza, and the whole of the Middle East as the US and Iran wrestle their way through the most futile war, we’re in a petty sheltered place, and as much as we may reel in horror over news of the latest high school massacre and laugh at Donald Trump’s daily meltdowns, we do so from a position of relative safety. However hard we continue to lumber into a state of total surveillance, however emboldened the racists become thanks to the rising right, however rapidly our government are eroding our right to protest, favouring perpetrators of genocide over those who speak in opposition to it, there’s still no danger of some masked ICE psycho pulling your car over and demanding your papers before shooting you in the head. Our politicians may nearly all be slippery, deceptive careerists who accept ‘donations’ from individuals and companies with vested interests, but we’re not led by a demented narcissist who’s openly professed to being a wannabe dictator. In short, I don’t think we fully grasp what it’s like to live in America right now.

Elektrikill’s founder, Steve Vil, says of Küntzpiracy – a title that’s both a fairly lame pun and a bit of cliché, but gets a pass because America and an approximation of a Butthole Surfers reference – “Basically it’s my most political album touching on themes of government corruption and half of this country’s loss of humanity while claiming it’s all in the name of Jesus. That pisses me off. I also call out closeted government officials in ‘The Scream’. Look, guys, just be gay instead of crashing Grindr any time you meet in large groups. I do give the listener a break from the political stuff. ‘Vampire Blond’, for example, is about a vampire drag queen.”

There’s a fair bit to unpack here, and he makes a number of valid points. It’s not the whole of America. In fact, it’s a slender majority backing the MAGA madness. Unfortunately, they’ve voted to facilitate an insane power grab, meaning that while there are a fair few who aren’t happy with the direction things have been taking lately, tough shot: you could have seen it coming, so this is on you. And this also involves the most overtly racist, homophobic administration in memory – but as with anything which involves hypermasculinity, what the world outside sees is massive repressed gayness. Yeah, we’re looking at you, Andrew Tate, with your no-bollocks swimming trunks and purple satin blouse, and the culture you espouse. What utterly fucked-up times we live in.

‘Thrum’ makes for a dark, dense start to the album, throbbing bass dominating, the distorted monotone vocals low in the mix as extraneous squalls of electronic noise burst all around, and ‘S(t)imulation’ keeps things dark with some hefty tribal percussion battering away through a murky wall of sound – although the choruses break out with a genuine hook driven by a pumping beat and punchy snare. It’s like leaping from Coil to late 80s Ministry, but it works, and the aforementioned ‘Vampire Blond’ swings into classic electrogoth / technoindustrial territory, and I could chuck a raft of touchstones in here – and that’s no bad thing. they clearly know what they’re doing, and where they’re positioning themselves, and do it well.

‘The Scream’ is again a bit Ministry circa The Land of Rape and Honey, and perhaps a bit KMFDM, and more broadly, a bit Wax Trax! Hardly innovative, but the delivery is top-notch. The beats slam hard.

Landing at the album’s midpoint the piano-led ‘A Chill in the Air’ is both expansive and claustrophobic, and slowing the tempo to explore a more brooding atmospheric, it’s well placed, ahead of full-throttle rager ‘Monoshift’ which brings the industrial aggression pumped to the max. Indeed, the second half of the album is harder, faster, and the altogether synthier ‘My Salvation’ rhymes ‘my salvation’ with ‘masturbation’ in a style reminiscent of early Revolting Cocks.

Stylistically, Electrikill don’t really break any new ground, but Küntzpiracy is intense, angry, and relentless, the aggro and the tempo picking up noticeably in the second half, with ‘Manifesto’ delivering a power finish. With Küntzpiracy, Elektrikill bring the fury and bring the force – and the political ire. This is very much an album of the now, and it hits hard.

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Emmaleen Tangleweed – The Weaving

Posted: 20 July 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 3st1 July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

“This album is kind of a collage of all the books I was reading and my impressions of the general emotions swimming in the collective experience, as well as personal stories I’ve picked up along the way.” So says Emmaleen Tangleweed of her new album, The Weaving, which was recorded in September 2025 ‘in a log cabin in Swartvlei (“black lake”), Western Cape, South Africa’. The liner notes describe it as ‘a collection of gothic folk and blues ballads tinged with hypnotic magic realism’.

The first song, ‘The Hours’ is likely, then, to be a direct reference to Michael Cunningham’s 1998 Pulitzer-winning novel – which in turn was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway. It’s a wonderfully earthy slice of dark, primitive blues, rendered all the more potent by the rich patina of Tangleweed’s voice. In the recent Six of the Best feature for Aural Aggravation, she cited Black Pudding by Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood as an influence, citing ‘an archetypal timelessness’, and this is what very much comes through here, perhaps with a hint of PJ Harvey in the mix, too. There’s nothing complex – or even innovative – about it, but blues isn’t about complexity or innovation, it’s about feeling, about soul. And this is something The Weaving brings in spades.

‘Silent Killer’ could be a hundred years old, but it could also be an outtake from Rid of Me. Emmaleen sings from her gut, and with guts, too, and plays with a perfect feel for the swing required to bring the songs to life. There’s a bit of fuzz on the low strings which gives a vintage, analogue feel to the production. This is also true of the sepia-toned ‘Strangeling Angel’, which very much replicates the feel of those early twentieth century blues legends and those altogether more obscure.

The introduction of cello on ‘Blind Faith’ is done subtly, but adds depth to the otherwise sparse arrangement, and for the most part, everything hangs on her voice and acoustic guitar. Perhaps because of this, there’s a palpable intimacy and immediacy about The Weaving, capturing as it does the sensation of being in a small room as the songs are performed live. ‘Never Ending History’ is almost a crawl, and she drawls the lyrics low and slow, and something strange happens with time as it slips back. one can almost envisage grainy black and white photographs accompanying it.

Most of the songs are in the five-minute region and she fills the space with a rare tension. ‘Ask the Dust’ is another song which makes a direct reference, this time to John Fante’s 1939 novel set in The Great Depression, and shit, it’s bleak. ‘Is there anyone out there’ she asks against images of ‘the burnt out rust’ and a monotonous, repetitive riff reminiscent of Michael Gira at his most lugubrious. It’s here that is becomes most apparent that it’s possible to be heavy without distortion or volume, and that weight comes from the heart. You can hear her fingers hitting the strings on ‘Ask the Dust’, in a way that has the same feel as striking dry earth with a pick. It’s not entertainment, but labour, and The Weaving finds Tangleweed dredging deep. There’s no showing on the doll where this music touches: it’s somewhere deep inside, subconscious, subliminal. And herein lies its power – it’s something that’s affecting on an almost cellular or biological level, resonating with experiences of past lives or something. You feel it in a way that’s impossible to explain. But feel it, you do.

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Colin Webster / Balázs Pándi / Matt Cargill – Chewed Up And Spat Out

Posted: 13 July 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Raw Tonk Records – 15th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

I’m late to the party with this one. Can I pretend it’s fashionably late, rather than simply tardy? I’m going to say yes, since the event actually took place in 2019 and it’s taken till now to make its way into the world, but let’s focus on the fact that this is, indeed, one hell of a party.

Chewed Up And Spat Out was recorded in a one-off session in London. Hungarian master drummer Balázs Pándi (Merzbow, Thurston Moore, Mats Gustafsson etc.) was in town for a few days and contacted saxophonist Colin Webster (Sex Swing, Dead Neanderthals etc..) who suggested adding Matt Cargill (Sly & The Family Drone) to the session on electronics. And if that lineup isn’t enough, the whole thing was recorded and mixed by Tim Cedar of Part Chimp, who knows a thing or two about noise.

We’re deep in wild jazz experimentalism here, and this is apparent from the groans and honks of saxophone which warp and drone amidst a simmering cacophony of rolling drums – not so much a rhythm as a gathering storm. The electronic elements are subtle at first, a few bleeps and twitters of treble pass here and there while a low drone hums almost subliminally on the first track, ‘To Arise from Sleep’. But the drone mutates into a thick, throbbing pulsation which gargles like a digital didgeridoo on ‘Chewed Up’, while the percussion is more subtle, predominantly manifesting as clattering rim shots initially and the sax is similarly restrained, simmering under until it finally cuts loose. At over eight and a half minutes, counterpart ‘Spat Out’ is something of an endurance test, and works backwards, starting with a crescendo before lurching stop-start blasts of noise which almost approximate a riff give way to a prolonged freeform spasm.

Not only does it have the best title, but ‘Money Shitter’ is peak freak, one of those crazed cacophonous jazz monsters that starts like its ending and ends like its starting and never goes anywhere but at the same time flies in all directions simultaneously. It sounds like unplanned, unco-ordinated chaos – and perhaps it is – but the thing to remember is that it’s supposed to sound like that, and they manage to navigate a succession of explosive crescendos interspersed with subtler, more ponderous passages, and in combination, they interrogate the interplay between the instruments, the tones, the textures, the dynamics. The final piece, ‘Blot’, sees them inspect these sonic relationships in a more granular detail, ponderously pushing through a succession of peaks and troughs for almost twelve minutes. Here, the abrasive intensity is tempered in favour of atmosphere – although the mid-point finds Webster wringing some prolonged bleats over rolling, fluid beats, building to a frenzied extended crescendo and a slow collapse.

There’s a lot of movement on Chewed Up And Spat Out, an album which conveys not only great energy, but a physicality and kineticism – which does, ultimately, leave you feeling as the title tells it. This is the good shit, and by the conclusion, it’s fair to say that from a listening perspective, it does what it says on the proverbial tin.

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Gintas K – Sugar Noizy

Posted: 13 July 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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zeromoon – 1st July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Gintas K’s relentless release schedule (Discogs lists a whopping 70 albums credited to him since 1999) continues with his second album of 2026, recorded, again, live, with no overdubs, ‘using computer, midi keyboard & controller.’ And while this album contains a not insubstantial seventeen pieces, there are a fair few which are barely over a minute in duration, meaning that it clocks in at under an hour, making it significantly shorter than Merzmania, released in March, with its seventy-five minute run time.

The title implies either sweet but harsh, or the brain froth of a surfeit of sucrose. This being Gintas K, it’s actually both, simultaneously. Sugar Noizy is by no means a radical departure from the vast majority of his work over the last decade, and that’s all to the good. Arguably, he’s emerging as Lithuania’s bubbly, glitchy answer to Merzbow, in that his sound is by no means as harsh, but he very much has a distinctive sound and style.

If anything, Sugar Noizy is rather more sparse and minimal than many previous releases. ‘geras noise ss’ is constructed around subdued trills of feedback, and it has that low-key, subdued, even vaguely muffled feel of ‘Never Forget Death’ by Whitehouse’ – minus the shrill, mangled vocals – but claustrophobic, quietly intense.

As ever, Gintas K’s work sounds like circuitry collapsing into a foamy, frothy meltdown, and amidst the bubbles and bleeps, a chaotic cacophony of dripping, glooping squelches and squiggles, Sugar Noizy is a hyperactive work that’s essentially intended to overwhelm. And it does. Even when it slows to an infrequent drip, you find yourself on edge, wondering what’s next. And when it comes to ‘letas noiz zem’, the answer is a mangled morass of fractured, stuttering distortion that sounds like your speakers are breaking.

Some of the shorter ‘interlude’ tracks are truly wild: ‘minutinis’ may be a minute long, but it’s fried, a complete frenzy, and there are a lot of moments – often extremely brief – which sound watery, and slow digital darkness drips amidst the freakout of dark, digital violence as the segments and elements intersect.

Like the majority of Gintas K’s works, Sugar Noizy is a discombobulating barrage of wibbles, dribbles, whirs and buzzes, fragmented shards and dying drones, often all at the same time – making for a nice addition to his ever-expanding catalogue.

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Valentin Silvestrov – Moments Of Silvertones, Evgeny Gromov

Posted: 10 July 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Kyiv Dispatch – 17th July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

For those of us who have never lived through war – domestically, that is – it’s hard to imagine what life is like. Living in the UK, I have the privilege of not having experienced it: both of my parent were born at the end of the second world war and lived under rationing as children, but they didn’t grow up living in fear of bombs falling. And while I look out into my back yard and see the brick and concrete bomb shelter which I use to brew beer, it’s beyond my conception to imagine what it must have been like to live in a time where I would actually have to take refuge in it, although the part of York where I live – or nearby – was bombed in 1942, with numerous some 94 people killed and 238 injured by some 84 tonnes of bombs, dropped in just 90 minutes.

But the fact is that life goes on – because it has to. And art is still made – because what else are artists to do? The title of this release is a little confusing, but the text which accompanies this release, which is particularly powerful, and speaks of the effects of war on the citizens of those countries stricken by war sheds some light on the questions of artistic ownership. It also highlights the fact that wars are waged by governments, not the people. and so we learn how ‘In 2022, with war in Ukraine raging, the composer Valentin Silvestrov was forced, at the age of 85, to flee Kyiv, abandoning his home studio. Silvestrov is one of the leading figures of the Ukrainian musical avant garde, active from the early 1960s onward and for Evgeny Gromov, Ukrainian pianist, researcher and curator, his forced departure was a tragedy, his absence keenly and personally felt’.

The notes go on to explain how this prompted him ‘to hasten the release of this double album, on which Gromov performs key piano works by Silvestrov, from his early, modernist period to his later, more beautifully accessible pieces. The sense of urgency is not just because Silvestrov is approaching ninety years old but also out of the daily sense of mortality felt by all those living in Kyiv. Hence also the founding of the Kyiv Dispatch label in 2022, dedicated to showcasing the full spectrum of Ukrainian new music. Both artistic and existential immediacy underpin the album, as Evgeny Gromov explains: “A great deal of Silvestrov’s music simply does not exist in sound. It exists as scores, as reputation, as a name but not as a lived, performed body of work. There is still no real tradition of its performance. For decades I have been working with this music across its full range, from the early avant-garde works to the later Bagatelles. In a sense, I am its performing extension. And at a certain point it became obvious: if this is not played now, systematically, insistently, it will remain absent.’

This is significant. How much art, how much thought, is lost in time due to an absence of documentation? This, then, is more than a matter of the impacts of war, but also a question of legacy, and of ephemerality.

Recorded in just four days, Moments Of Silvertones is Gromov’s urgent, even desperate, attempt to capture and document the work of Valentin Silvestrov, and we are all fortunate that he has. ‘Five Piano Pieces 1961’ is dramatic – essentially neoclassical in style, in places playful, in others feeling more moody, while ‘Triad 1962’ is very much more geared toward the delicate side, but again revealing a levity which counterbalances the shade.

The expansive ‘Piano Sonata No 2’- extending to almost sixteen minutes in duration, is a magnificently balanced work, and entertaining, playing with the tropes of jazz and minimalism as well as classical music with some bold hits resonating as hard as falling down a flight of stair, and evoking the spirit of silent movies – although it’s a fair way from Laurel and Hardy. Because it’s as a bygone age, and as much as we may wish to remember it fondly… we are increasingly drawn by nostalgia, as we cling with ever-increasing desperation to a past which felt to much better, so much easier, but, despite its focus on compositions from the 1960 (in its first half, at least), while also being devoted to preserving the more recent past (the ‘Bagatelles, Op.’ pieces dating from 2003-2006), Moments Of Silvertones is ultimately a collection of pieces which are delicate and soothing. And despite the conditions of its recording, nothing could be further removed from war or its soundtracking. This is what it means to be human. Moments Of Silvertones is an album hat needs to be heard as a reminder of this – and also because it’s an example of magnificently poised composition and beautiful musicianship.

AA

Valentin Silvestrov – Moments of Silvertones, Evgeny Gromov digital cover

Sun Ra ǀ Merzbow – Strange City

Posted: 8 July 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Reviews
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Cold Spring – 26th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

This release is something of a curio, in the sense that it’s a collaboration between two of the most famously prolific recording artists of recent times – Sun Ra recorded over 100 full-length albums, comprising well over 1000 songs prior to his death in 1993 at the age of 79, while Merzbow, active since 1979, has released in excess of 500 albums to date. However, this collaboration occurred posthumously for Sun Ra, and it’s worth quoting the context as given by the label, Cold Spring here:

Officially licensed from Irwin Chusid, who oversees the catalogue of the late Afrofuturist artist/composer/bandleader Sun Ra, Cold Spring negotiated rare and unreleased tracks from the Sun Ra archive to be remixed and treated by Masami Akita (aka Merzbow). The tracks incorporate the jazz power of Sun Ra with the brutal excess of the Japanese noise artist Merzbow.

Originally released by Cold Spring a decade ago and long sold out, the music was spread across vinyl and CD, with completely different music on each format. The tracks have now been collected together for the first time, using the original master tapes and presented in the order intended (the vinyl format dictated the order due to optimal sound quality restraints).

Included for the first time on any release is a bonus two minute track entitled ‘Granular Jazz Part 5’, a special composition created for ‘Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone’, a weekly radio show on BBC 6 Music in the UK. It was broadcast ahead of Merzbow’s live concert at the FAC251 venue in Manchester in September 2016.

There are obviously practical reasons why the different formats featured different track listings on the original release, although these things can prove frustrating for fans finding themselves faced with the dilemma of missing material or forking out for multiple formats. This ‘complete’ reissue has the added incentive of an unreleased track, and while it’s only a couple of minutes of unreleased music, it does round off what is unquestionably a monster release – the six pieces having a combined run time of a massive 104 minutes.

So, to begin with a brief content comparison, the contents of the original CD – the 32-minute ‘Livid Sun Loop’ and ‘Granular Jazz Part 2’ (34 minutes long) makes up the corresponding first disc here, while the 2016 vinyl contained ‘Granular Jazz’ parts 1, 3, and 4. Chances are that some will still be dissatisfied that the CD tracks still haven’t made it onto vinyl, but you can’t please all the people all of the time, and as much as I’m a fan of vinyl myself, the longform nature of the compositions does seem well-suited to CD.

As for the contents of this ten-year expanded reissue… it’s no criticism or complaint to comment that it very much sounds like what you’d expect. ‘Livid Sun Loop’ encapsulates the album in its entirety in the first few minutes – shrieking horns flying in all directions against an apocalyptic churn of cement-mixer noise with the treble cranked to the max, feedback and flayed circuitry exploding like fireworks on New Year’s Eve. A squall of treble, scraping, screaming, like a Brillo pad scouring away at the inside of your skull. There are prolonged segments which are pure Merzbow, shredding digital noise, but then, suddenly, amidst the blitzkrieg, there are honking horns and random toots which pop through the raging wall. The track is a truly relentless assault, and brutally harsh. The frequencies very much favour the top-end, with howls and hisses of tinnitus-inducing quality tearing from the speakers with not so much as a second’s let-up. Every time you think that this must – must! – be the limit, Merzbow does the Merzbow thing of finding new frequencies with which to cause injury. Oh yes: this hurts. But what else did you expect? Some cozy club vibes, a bit of mellow sax and piano? Right. Merzbow brings the harshest head-shredding hell.

Twenty minutes in, there’s a segment that sounds like everything is breaking – not just the gear, I mean it sounds like a field recording of the collapse of civilisation, the absolute end of the world as we know it. And it just goes on. And on. What have I done to deserve this? What has anyone done to deserve this? Actually, perhaps this is the answer to the UK’s issues in the penal system. Being forced to listen to this a couple of times may be a viable altern alternative to shorter custodial sentences. But here I am, listening with great interest and even with a degree of perverse pleasure – although after half an hour, I will admit that I’m wilting somewhat, and not just because it’s 30C with 70% humidity in my office at 9pm. This is nothing short of punishment: it hurts. And it ain’t very jazzy. It’s a mangled mess of skin-peeling, face-melting horror.

But if ‘Livid Sun Loop’ makes for a long and challenging half hour, you’d better buckle in and brace yourself for the endurance test of all endurance tests. To dissipate any doubt, I am a big fan of noise, and enjoy basking in blistering waves of aural annihilation. And Strange City is special in its vision and scope, and its sheer enormity. There are fleeting flickers of strolling double bass which pep through the wild bleepery, woozy drones and sheet metal shredding.

‘Granular Jazz Part 1’ yawns and snarls, bibbles and bleeps and pulses and creaks and swashes and swinges its way through just shy of eighteen minutes of existential anxiety, but it’s simply a prelude to part 2. The slow fade-in and trickling digital cacophony is simply a lure, creating the illusion of listenability. And it does take some time to build. But, of course, build it does. A quarter of an hour in, and it’s reached a sustained crescendo or chaos that’s dense enough to crush your skull. The jazz quota is ratcheted up, too, and the result is something else. Finding the words for this is a challenger, but I’m starting to feel that it’s not words I need, but an ambulance.

Strange City is… intense. In large parts, it feel like Merzbo is the dominant party in this mash-up (which is essentially what it is), and at its best, Strange City makes for a fitting posthumous release for Sun Ra. But from whichever able ou approach it, Strange City is one serious blast of noise. Killer all the way.

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Mortem – Mørketid

Posted: 30 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Peaceville – 3rd July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometimes, you just need some metal, and the heavier and more extreme the better. This is something I only realised quite some way into adulthood. Perhaps it’s – at least in part – because the only metal I was exposed to as a youth in the 80s was chart or otherwise popular stuff like Iron Maiden, which struck me as corny and excessively widdly. It wasn’t until I started listening to John Peel in the 90s that I heard anything really fucking brutal, and grindcore proved to be a gateway of sorts. But even after that, so much metal felt a bit tame and rather like it was trying to hard to be menacing. It’s only through further exposure in my capacity as a reviewer that I’ve come to appreciate the myriad shades of metal and its cathartic qualities, particularly in a live setting.

I can immerse myself in ambience as a means of escape as happily as anyone, and often do. The tranquil, immersive experience is often soothing and transportative, even meditative and soporific. But there are times when a furious, guitar-driven blast of nihilism is what’s required. And with Mørketid, that’s precisely what Mortem deliver.

Although formed in 1989, amidst the most nascent bubblings of the swamp that would spawn the infamous Norwegian black metal scene, their first demo being produced by Euronymous and Dead of Mayhem, but they fizzled out fast, and it wasn’t until 2019 that they reconvened and recorded their debut album Ravnsvart. They could never be praised for striking while the iron’s hot, so to speak, but to toss another cliché, good things come to those who wait, and after nearly seven years of waiting, Mørketid has no weak spots whatsoever, with eight searing, lacerating sonic assaults that hit with an unrepentant fury.

It’s the six-minute title track that bursts in, all guns blazing, to announce the album’s arrival, after a dark ambient instrumental intro that makes way for thousand-miles-per-hour guitar and drums, rasping vocals and some rather playful but simultaneously sinister keyboard work. It’s quintessential black metal, but with a broader sonic vision and some tidier production. This is to the album’s benefit: there’s an abundance of vision on display, and it would be a shame to lose the detail to production that makes it sound like it was recorded from the next room on a 90s phone. That isn’t to say it’s overproduced – far from it. On Mørketid, everything is cranked up to eleven and it hits with all the force the music deserves.

The driving, dynamic ‘Skyggeånd’ is – in the main – slower in comparison to the majority of the album, and its seven-and-a-half-minute expanse is rich in atmosphere and strong on power, which makes for an album standout.

For the most part, Mørketid is simply relentless, double-pedal drumming and a blanket of overdriven chords provide a backdrop to vocals ripped from Satan’s very own larynx. It’s dark and it rages, hard. One could have readily forgiven and accepted an album of template-based black metal from Mortem given their back-story – but instead, Mørketid is an album that ventures forth in the most unexpected of directions. Sure, it’s black metal all the way, and that’s quire as it should be. But Mortem bring something more. And that more is the detail and compositional skills that make Mørketid a cut above.

AA

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Darkthrone – Pre-Historic Metal

Posted: 29 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Peaceville – 8th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The arrival of Pre-Historic Metal marks forty years of Fenriz and Nocturno Culto’s musical collaboration, initially as Black Death, the album’s back cover proudly boasting ‘No metronome since 1987’. The images which accompany the lyrics in the CD’s booklet depict damp logs, thick, verdant moss, and the centrepiece is a misty shot of what appears to be the remains of a stone circle – or just a rocky clearing – in a forest, where the band are lurking, shadowy figures in the background. It’s all a fair indication – or forewarning – of what Pre-Historic Metal, an album pitched as ‘the new studio album of primitive metal from the Norse cavemen’ is all about.

As Fenriz himself proclaims of the title’s symbolic origin, “Prehistoric is a loose term. I just figure it’s our VIBE, our take on things and it’s more a statement that we use old style to create something new”. It sets their stall out nicely, and prepares the listener for precisely what Darkthrone deliver, which is, quite simply, forty-one minutes of relentless, riff-driven metal.

There are twists and turns galore during each and every song, opener ‘They Found one of My Graves’ packing in some well-placed breakdowns and flourishes into its five and a quarter minutes, wedging these moments tight between the thunderous overdrive and gnarly guttural vocals, drawing together elements of Black Metal and Thrash in a completely natural fashion. The title is a hell-for-leather blast of blistering overload, which suddenly becomes a doomy pagan ritual, the commanding vocals booming through cavernous reverb amidst a chthonic growl of barbarically brutal guitar.

The seven-minute ‘Siberian Thaw’ takes the basic principles of a grunge riff and slows it to a glacial crawl, adding some Sabbath-influenced doom drone to its sludgy trudgery. And yes, they do the thing of picking up the pace to that of a solid headbang before bringing the riff back slow and low and denser than before. It’s a tried and tested template, and they play it to perfection, spinning a meandering prog mid-section before blasting in with the pulverizing grind segment that makes you go ‘hell yes!’ before, of course, finally, going back to the starting point.

The album’s second six-minute epic, ‘The Dry Wells of Hell’ plays out a delicate, atmospheric intro, and strikes a more theatrical stance all round, pitching some bold, soaring vocal melodic moments amidst the demonic snarling and the vibe is unmistakably and unashamedly vintage. But the joy of Pre-Historic Metal is that it’s not specifically one thing or another, but a curated catalogue of metal. And they don’t put a foot wrong.

Sure, if you’ve listened to enough metal, you’ve heard it all before, in various permutations, but that’s the point. Pre-Historic Metal is about execution rather than innovation, and every single riff lands in a way that absolutely hits the spot.

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melondruie – Sound of Rain

Posted: 28 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 3rd July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Despite our reputation, it’s not just us Brits who have a weather fixation, and the fact of the matter is, the weather has a baring on our daily lives, perhaps more than many of us even recognise – and that’s without considering the effects of weather events on the likes of transport and food production. On a primal, human level, weather conditions affect our moods, and even our health.

I myself recorded a longform piece, ‘January Can’t Last Forever’ from a bleak place in early 2023, when weeks of rain had caused widespread flooding locally, and a few particularly heavy downpours overwhelmed the guttering at the front of the house. Those weeks, in the darkest days of winter, felt like a lifetime, and it was all I could do to get through it by reminding myself that these things do pass, eventually. April and May of this year saw rain most days, too, although I’m writing this as sweat pours off me at the tail end of the second heatwave of 2026, during which a couple of brief thunderstorms have only contributed to ramping up the already suffocating levels of humidity.

As such, there’s a particular relatability, on a personal level, with the inspiration for melondruie’s Sound of Rain: the Seattleite’s latest work of minimalist ambient electronical was ‘made in the spring of 2025 during various rainy days’. As the liner notes explain, ‘The record frames rain as a calming, almost therapeutic force – masking the noise and tension of human life with a steady, immersive sonic wash’, with ‘a focus on texture, atmosphere, and subtle emotional resonance.’

There’s a certain playfulness about some of the compositions: ‘Washed Away’ bounces and ripples with something of a lightness, and the rhythmic nature of the notes interplay through patterns which shift gradually and with a liquid ease.

Despite the angry and negative connotations of titles like ‘Red Mist’ and ‘Destroyed Again’, the heavier, darker undercurrents of rumbling bass and wraith-like howls which resemble thin, chilling winds are counterbalanced by soft sounds which seem to connote the relief of shafts of light breaking through the cloud cover, or a vague hint of a rainbow. Consequently, and album which could have been rendered relentlessly bleak, gloomy, oppressive, is anything but.

On Sound of Rain, melondruie explores the interplay between gentle textures, with smooth, gliding drones interacting and interpolating with rippling, bubbling layers. ‘Falsehoods’, the final track, expands on this territory with the gush of a torrent to begin, gradually tapering from a current of sweeping tension towards something altogether calmer.

The rhythmic cadences of the pieces give them a sense of movement, of flow, even a kind of groove at times, which draws the listener in and holds the attention in a way which is rare – in my experience – for an ambient work. The conception and execution is inspired, and while the extent to which it evokes rainy days will vary according to one’s own experience and perception, Sound of Rain cannot fail to inspire reflection and contemplation.

AA

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Conflux Coldwell – Echolalia

Posted: 25 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Bulletdodge – 26th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Since first presenting work under the Conflux Coldwell moniker in 2013, Leeds-based sound architect and explorer Michael C Coldwell has used this particular vehicle to venture forth through different environments of an external nature, often with field recordings providing an integral element. As such, while maintaining a focus on aspects of hauntology, Echolalia marks something departure in terms of its inspirations and themes, primarily in just how personal it is, particularly in comparison to his previous offering, Shadows and Simulacra which dug deep into the dark domains of AI and the absence of any human soul therein. This time, the explorations are focused very much on interior environments.

As the accompanying notes explain, ‘Echolalia explores the notion of internal “ghosts” — the lingering traces that inhabit the mind. Sparked by his daughter’s autism diagnosis earlier this year, and his sister’s AuDHD diagnosis the year before, Coldwell was prompted to reflect on his own neurodivergence. The result is a deeply personal and introspective work that interrogates how these experiences have shaped his creative process, his unique perception of the world, and his enduring fascination with machines and hauntology’.

Something I’ve noticed, quite acutely, in the last few years, is just how many people I know – particularly on social media, where I’ve evolved a substantial network of creatives in all types of media – are receiving diagnoses of autism, ADHD, and various other neurodivergences in adulthood. Many are in the fifty-plus demographic. And so many of them relay that so much makes sense with this information. It isn’t, then, that there’s more autism, more neurodivergence, but simply that we have finally got better at diagnosing it. There remains, however, some way to go in terms of accommodating it. But this observation has set me thinking of late, that, given the way creatively-minded individuals gravitate toward one another – taking my virtual social circle as an example – perhaps neurodiversity is directly correspondent with creativity? I’m merely touching the edge of a discussion here, nudging an idea out into world… but artists are renowned for being misfits, a bit weird, prone to many of the traits associated with neurodivergence, and it may explain why some people – neurotypical ones – are content with working the nine to five, watching some TV and then going to bed at 10pm, while the creatives can’t settle and feel unfulfilled, and are instead compelled to stay up till the small hours doing stuff.

The ten pieces on Echolalia are tense, intense, and hit the listener from all angles simultaneously. And in doing so, Coldwell not only captures, but replicates that sense of overstimulation, of excessive input.

‘Complex Machines’ arrives in a fizz and crackle of distortion, wibbling synths and a sampled voiceover from what sounds like an educational or instructive film about the use of computers in school, before disembodied voices drift over some ominous drones. The number 23 emerges from the reverberating haze. It has the hallmarks of being from the soundtrack to a sci-fi technodystopia, but the fact of the matter is that this is where we are. Our education system is in crisis, and kids are increasingly suffering from an ever-diminishing attention span on account of the ubiquitous bombardment of myriad media. This is magnified significantly for those with ADHD and AuDHD, whose brains are already crammed and overcrowded, who find simply existing in the world an overwhelming experience.

‘Homeworld’ may or may not be a reference to Harry Harrisons’s 1980 novel, the first instalment of the To the Stars trilogy, but skittery synths and muttery vocal loops combine to create a tension that isn’t resolved by the end of the piece, which instead gives way to the crackling static and stammering electronic primitivism of ‘Pattern Glare’, with its aural allusions to Throbbing Gristle and Suicide, and also its near-infinite reverb. It’s eerie, unsettling, and it makes you feel nervous. Well, it makes me feel nervous, anyway.

It’s true that I feel nervous often, but something about Echolalia is truly nail-biting. ‘Dysthtythmia’ – a condition which covers a broad spectrum of irregular heartbeats – returns to lifted segments of speech to round off the first side of physical release, and as neat as this feels in terms of closing a loop, it equally feels like revisiting a trigger point.

The second half of the album is yet harder to process, a collage of synths and voices layering ever faster and ever deeper and ever more complex in their combination, the flickering shimmer of ‘Five Wing Four’ being exemplary. There is simply too much to take I in at once, and Coldwell knows this, because this is the soundtrack to assimilation and processing. ‘Left hand, right eye…’ My wife used to get so angry when driving: it was my job to navigate and I would forever confuse left and right. Having a PhD in English bears no relation to my suffering LRC (Left–right confusion) which apparently affects nearly 10% of the male population. But what it does go to show is that brains are strange and unpredictable. And ‘strange and unpredictable’ is ultimately a fair summary of Echolalia, too.

AA

Conflux Coldwell 2026

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