Posts Tagged ‘bleak’

Bedsit – Dead Bands

Posted: 28 January 2023 in Singles and EPs
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
1

26th January 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The Hull scene has been simmering nicely for some time, and it’s a great advertisement for deprivation and off-the-track locations being melting posts for dark underground creativity.

We may have bid farewell to Chambers and Cannibal Animal, but Hull continues to throw up a wealth of dark and noisy bands, and while Low Hummer have been making some serious headway, along with BDRMM, there’s no shortage of acts emerging behind them, with Besdit making rapid progress recently.

The name is a fair summary. Anyone who as ever endured bedsit living will relate to the claustrophobic sensation of confined living. Bedsits -appropriately – carry connotations of meagreness, of low-budget gloom, and Bedsit really do convey that sense of claustrophobia.

The four-piece’s latest offering, ‘Dead Bands’, is the lead and title track from their upcoming EP, which follows up on 2020’s Pocket Toy EP. It’s a step up from the lo-fi grunge metal production of its predecessor, and sees the band consolidated on that blueprint, leaping from rough diamonds ready for development to something lean and mean, and dense and taut and truly outstanding.

It’s not just the production: the composition, the playing, the vocals, the lot – they’ve not sold out and gone super-slick by any means, but ‘Dead Bands’ is a dark, dense amalgamation of post-punk and grunge, and while it may be a celebration of bands gone before, it sounds pretty bleak in its mid-tempo, bass-driven way, paired with baritone vocals that border on the gothic. It’s a combination of the sound of 1985 and the sound of 1993 and it’s dark and its heavy, but it’s magnificently realised with some killer riffage and some blistering, blustery guitars squall and scream their way to the end.

There’s no joy to be found here, but it’s a glorious exercise in dark nihilism that has to be my single of the year so far.

AA

AA

Houses of Worship – Migration OST

Posted: 13 December 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Midira Records – 25th November 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

This album is, as the title suggests, a soundtrack work. Although released under the moniker Houses of Worship, it’s essentially the second album by Thisquietarmy x Hellenica.

The summer of 2020 saw Eric Quach (thisquietarmy) and Jim Demos (Hellenica) come together to record a collaborative album, which emerged as Houses of Worship, described as ‘an epic work of experimental industrial ambient, is an ode to dying buildings and the unwelcome gentrification of neighborhoods’.

This, the follow-up, came about after they ‘played their first concerts in the streets of Montreal from inside of a cube truck. These performances were filmed and recorded to produce "TQAXHLNKA: MIGRATION,” a twenty-two-minute experimental art documentary and an accompanying soundtrack. The film simulated the cautionary tale of what the Montreal arts and music scene could look like in a post-pandemic world. As the title suggests, it reflects the highly concerning exodus of artists constantly being divided and pushed out further from their community.’

At twenty-two minutes in duration, it’s a minute short of the magic spot, but this is a magnificently atmospheric work that goes beyond dark ambience and ventures into the vastly cinematic, space-drifting expansiveness that transports the listener beyond the terrestrial domain.

The album contains more audio than the film’s running time, and drags the listener through a bleak journey which articulates via the medium of sound the themes and scenes which preoccupy the duo, who explain, ‘With the current struggles linked to the pandemic restrictions, we have seen the acceleration of the gentrification process in neighborhoods where the heart of these activities takes place. As a result, a multitude of venues, studios and artistic spaces – places used for exchanging ideas with our peers and building communities meant to inspire and nurture our souls had to shut down.’

The tone is dark, the textures industrial, yet tinged with echo-heavy melancholy, a combination of anger, emptiness, and sadness. The soaring drones inspire a certain elevation, while the gritty grind is the sound of construction, regeneration. Gentrification is the face of capitalism eating itself; having run out of new ideas, it’s simply fallen into a cycle of recreation and rehashing. Upscaling, upwhatevering, it’s all about selling the new version of the same od shit at a higher price to the same saturated market. When will enough ever be enough?

Meanwhile, capitalism follows the former tropes of the avant-garde, destroying to rebuild, and Migration is the soundtrack to that.

There are lots of drones, lots of dolorous tones, lots of scraping, sinewy mid-range and gravel-grabbing, churning lower spectrum sounds, as well a haunting piano and infinite empty space. The titles paint the picture in themselves, and it’s dark, smoggy, sulphurous. ‘Total Waste Management’; ‘Polytethylene Terephthalate’; ‘Oil Terminal Tank Farm’ are all evocative of stark industrial scenes.

‘Industrial Estate Bird’s-Eye’ is a haunting wail, presumably of a theremin – over a low, throbbing drone that’s reminiscent of Suicide, and elsewhere, the duo conjure thick, billowing clouds of doom that sound like Sunn O))) behind a power station, as dense rumbles ripple forth. The twelve-and-a-half-minute finale, ‘Throbbing Magnetics’ fulfils the promise of its title, a bucking beast of claustrophobic, crushing gloom, and you feel yourself dragged into the sludge of that relentless, interminable cycle of collapse and construct.

It’s an accomplished work, but a depressing one, and listening places to the fore the abject nature of late capitalism, and the fact that any attempt to save the planet is futile in the face of the onslaught of bulldozers. Redevelopment has nothing to do with environment, only profit, and hard as you might rebel, as strongly as you may protest, you’re powerless against the big money. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s the sad truth. Houses of Worship recognise this. They may hope for better, but Migration is not a protest record, but the sound of grim acceptance.

AA

a3486628679_10

Shrine Of Reflection – Child of the World

Posted: 10 December 2022 in Singles and EPs
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

25th November 2022

James Wells

Time marches on, and here we are almost midway through December still catching up with November releases, this time with Polish ‘dark rock’ duo Shrine Of Reflection.

There’s a great temptation to split hairs and that argue that surely the dark rock tag is goths pretending not to be goth, but that would be unjust, as this six-and-a-half-minute sonic adventure is more post-rock than anything, but there are also hints of prog and bleak neofolk vibes emanating from the murky tones, where a sparse, spindly lead line drifts over a slow, deliberate thunder-like beat that plods away like a heavy heart, before it blossoms into colour at the midpoint into an expansive, cinematic sweep.

The blurbage summarises that “‘Child Of The World’ is a song inspired by the movie, Interstellar. It’s about the misery of a human being who is trapped on planet Earth and who is unable to discover the truth of the universe’s nature despite the fact of being its child. All this person can do is just simply stare at the sky and dream.”

That sense of entrapment is relatable, but more than this, the vocals become increasingly cracked and desperate as the song progresses, before the slow-building crescendo takes over, finally tapering off into muffled samples that leave you looking into the emptiness, and wondering.

a2629310432_10

Watch: ‘A Void’ by Neon Funeral

Posted: 8 December 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Hardcore darkwave band, Neon Funeral recently unveiled their latest single and video, ‘A Void’.

The song deals with escaping a life of drugs and societal pressures; avoiding it but not wanting to talk about it. It’s about someone being tortured by their addictions and demons. The instrumentals emit an overall sound that is darker and a range that is more dynamic than on previous releases. They just flow in the direction of the layered guitars that take over during the fadeout.

The video concept was one that finds the band’s front man, Randy waking up while experiencing hallucinations of a dark cult-like figure. He joins a strange cult doing strange rituals while initiating other members unwillingly. The video opens questions of societal pressures and about not being able to escape one’s mind and the darker paths of life.

The fire pit represents passion and a rebirth of his life. At the end you see all the people wearing masks in a row essentially giving into the cult like Randy gives into his fear. But they gain strength through the darkness at the end. particularly in the last scene when Randy grabs the light bulb to essentially say that he darkens his own light.

So the themes of the song and video are fear, spirituality, rebirth, strength and passion. 

Watch the video here:

AA

Neon Funeral US live dates:

1.6.23 Richmond, VA @ Fallout
1.7.23 Washington DC @ The Runaway
1.8.23 Philadelphia, PA @ Century

7f4b1381-9db5-fcab-b0f1-4e09b14e53b0

Watch: ‘For Horror Eats the Light’ by Fvnerals

Posted: 13 November 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1

FVNERALS have released a video clip for the track ‘For Horror Eats the Light’, which is the first single taken from the dark doom duo’s forthcoming new album Let the Earth Be Silent, which has been scheduled for release on February 3, 2023.

FVNERALS comment: “The track ‘For Horror Eats the Light’ is a lament about giving up all sense of hope, embracing the absence of light and a forced return to barren lands through devastation”, guitarist Syd Scarlet explains. “The song is about contemplating our lives coming to an end while accepting that nothing can save us and nothing should. It was written to include several movements that each mirror an emotional stage. The title of the song was inspired by a quote from Thomas Ligotti: ‘Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness’.”

Tiffany Ström adds: “The video was created by Simona Noreik, an amazing artist with whom we had previously collaborated on our live visuals”, the singer and bass player writes. “Simona’s artistic vision really complemented the apocalyptic nature of our song perfectly and she managed to portray desolation, extinction and nothingness with grace.”

Watch the video here:

AA

zYbnsRdQ

Dystopian Future Movies – War of the Ether

Posted: 12 November 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Septaphonic Records – 7th October 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

While Dystopian Future Movies’ ‘difficult’ second album, Inviolate, took a full three years to land after debut Time, their third, War of the Ether crashed in after just over two, and it’s an immense sonic documents that the Nottingham trio have compiled in this time.

Back in the spring of 2020, I wrote of Inviolate that ‘Everything about Inviolate is bigger, bolder, more pronounced and yet more nuanced, shaper and more keenly felt and articulated. And every corner of the album is imbued with a sense of enormity, both sonic and emotional: Inviolate feels major-scale, from the driving riffs to the heartfelt human intensity.’ That amplification is again true of War of the Ether. Dystopian Future Moves’ previous releases amply demonstrate a band with both an interest in and a knack for the cinematographic, the dramatic, so it stands to reason that they should extend these focal elements here.

This time around they’ve drawn inspiration from little-reported but truly horrifying events which took place at the former Catholic-run Tuam Mother and Baby Home in songwriter Caroline Cawley’s native Ireland, where 796 skeletons found in the grounds after suspicions were raised by a local historian in 2012. As the press release explains, ‘to hide the shame of pregnancy outside of wedlock, women were sent to homes like this all over the country – forcibly separated from their mothers, many of the children died in infancy due to neglect, and some were trafficked for adoption to the US. The country is still dealing with the fallout from these discoveries.’

War of the Ether is not a joyful record. It is, however, a record with real depth, and imbued with real emotion, as well as an aching sense of tragedy. And, as has been established as Dystopian Future Movies’ signature style, it’s an album which balances riffs and restraint, and is built on atmosphere and menace. They promise an album that ‘explores a wide range of genres from prog and shoegaze to doom-metal, noise-rock and folk,’ and don’t disappoint.

DFM 3 Portrait Photo 2000px WEBSIZE

War of the Ether opens – somewhat daringly – with the ten-minute spoken word crawler that is ‘She From Up the Drombán Hill’. For the most part, it’s sparse and spare, tingling guitars gently rippling behind the narrative – but there are bursts off noise, and it swells and grows and when it kicks in, it kicks in hard with piledriving riffage. The dynamics absolutely blow you away – exactly as intended. ‘Critical mass’ is appropriately titles, starting out with a haunting, echoed clean guitar and delicate drums rolling in the distance as a backdrop to Cawley’s aching, melodic vocal as it stretches and soars, and ‘The veneer’ is a magnificent slow-burner that builds to a shimmering sustained crescendo which unusually fades at the end. Against the weight of the subject matter and brooding instrumentation, it feels somewhat frivolous to focus on a fade, but it serves to highlight the many ways DFM are outside trends and exist in their own space. This is never more apparent than on the dreamy but serrated buzzing shoegaze of the title track.

For all its darkness, War of the Ether is a remarkably accessible album – not on account of its myriad hooks and killer choruses, but because it is simply so strong on melody and so utterly captivating. And because, as they demonstrate admirably on ‘No Matter’, the album’s shortest and most overtly structured song – they do have a real knack for snagging the listener with the combination of tunefulness and megalithic riffery. And then, the final track, the eight-and-a-half-minute ‘A Decent Class of Girl’ brings together all aspects of the album in a powerful accumulation of sedate, strolling psychedelia and climactic crescendos that optimise the impact of both.

Magical, majestic, and immensely widescreen, the scope of War of the Ether is simply breathtaking, and leaves you feeling stunned. Awesome in the literal sense.

AA

DFM 3 Album Cover Artwork 1500px

Listen: ‘It’s The Hope That Kills You’ EP by KRATE

Posted: 4 October 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

Electro-industrial band KRATE is back and once again teams up with a number of incredible talents on their fourth endeavor, It’s The Hope That Kills You.

The general theme of this release is hopelessness. No matter how hard you try, in the end nothing else matters as all matter is destined to die. Your prayers will be lost while you watch the horizon sink. There is no one to blame but us. We reach for the needle and ask ourselves one last time, "Where do we go from here?" Absolutely nowhere.

Songs like the hard-hitting title track featuring Anatoly Grinberg (Dead Voices On Air) & drummer Dan Milligan (The Joy Thieves). Other tracks feature members of Bow Ever Down, Slighter, Liquid Black Goo and Numbered Men.

Five tracks of electro – industrial spanning the full  spectrum of what this subgenre encompasses; from nightmarish beat-driven to heavy orchestral/industrial. The Hope That Kills You is available now on all digital platforms including Bandcamp. Listen to it in full here:

AA

KRATE was born in late 2017 when Chris Shortt (VERIN) and Roland Zwaga (Acidrodent, Construct) began discussing a collaboration.

The initial concept was to compose a dark ambient project between the two. After the first stems were exchanged, however, they both quickly agreed that a rhythmic element would be required to augment the sounds thus far created, leading to the abandonment of the original ambient goal.

Dark electro/industrial beats were submerged in deep cavernous, rumbling structures that were later complemented by an ever growing roster of collaborators.

As the songs originate from the input of such a varied group of artists, the music virtually spreads itself across the entire spectrum of electronic music, all the while managing to craft a cohesive and singularly focused sound.

a2479620855_10

Pound Land – Pound Land Plus

Posted: 25 June 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Cruel Nature Records – 24th June 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Hot on the heels of second album Can’t Be Arsed, Cruel Nature have repackaged the eponymous debut from the Manchester makers of ‘kitchen sink punk for the 21st century with a whole side’s worth of remixes from both previous releases – including two pretty radical reworkings of snarling single cut ‘Brain Driver’.

First, to revisit the debut – it’s a primitive, noisy document of disaffection. Adam Stone’s drawling, sneering vocal style is vintage punk, less about holding a tune as conveying attitude, and from the off they set the tone with the seven-minute ‘Food Chain’. A thick, dirty bass grinds out just a couple of notes over a plodding drum while Stone vomits vitriol. If ever a track encapsulated the monotonous drudgery of existing in Boris Johnson’s Britain, this is it. Most of the songs churn away for around seven minutes, but if you’re wondering just how far a band can push low, slow, trudging bass repeating the same simple motif atop a plodding beat, then the answer lies in ‘Half Priced Chickens’ – and the answer is just shy of fourteen minutes. This quarter-hour slog is a gloomy, dark, monotonous trudge: the kick drum sounds like a wet lump of wood, and the sneering shoutiness is replaced by a blank monotone spoken word, and in combination, they create an oppressive sonic fug. The scenes depicted are mundane. Words drift in and out – mobility scooters, office, boyfriend, cough mixture, cheese pasty – and these objects assume bleak resonance as you ask yourself, ‘is this it? Is this life?’ and the answer is there, slumped, devoid of energy, eyelids half closed: yes, this is life. And this is as good as it gets. And it’s fucking endless. Until it ends, in a swampy morass of slow decayed distortion and noise.

The final track, ‘Bunker’ locks into an uptempo groove, but while the drums rattle and bounce away, the mood remains tense, equal parts The Fall and Uniform. As the track progresses, so the anguish builds, and the effect is cumulative Stone hollers roughly about world war as feedback wails and the bass and drums just batter on, and on. Same old, same old…

There’s nothing pretty about Pound Land – the band or the album – and this is a good thing: they deal with the gritty reality of living in shit times. Pound Land articulates the languorous torpor of demotivation, of waking daily to feel the aching anguish of being beaten by life, every minute of every day. Sonically, it’s a long, long way from early Swans, but the density and oppression are very much shared aspects.

By the end of the five tracks, you’re absolutely harrowed and drained.

The remixes are a nice addition, though. The Ruffians on the Train Remix of ‘Brain Driver’ ventures into swampy, almost avant-jazz / trip-hop territory, before kicking into gnarly space-rock swirl. The drums are crisp but overloading, while the bass is pure punishment. Where remixes for most other bands are either dancier or more ambient or whatever, this set – with three of the six from R.O.D., these are primarily exercises in accentuating the gnarliness of the originals, with everything simply sounding even heavier, more crushing.

Pound Land is the real soundtrack to the now. They may have to change their name to Tenner Land before the year’s out the way things are going, so you’d be wise to bag this while you can, and hunker down before things get really tough…

AA

cover

Dark Worship – Flesh Of A Saint

Posted: 24 February 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Tartarus Records – 25 February 2022

James Wells

Dark Worship came together in what they describe as ‘the bleak and unsettling landscape of the post-industrial American Midwest’ and is less of a band and more of a collective of musicians from various bands, co-ordinated by J. Meyers (Axioma, Aureae Crucis). They pitch their sound as dark, and it is, but this is a different kind of dark: Flesh of a Saint has the murky lo-fi production values of black metal, which serves the bleak atmospherics well, but it’s not metal, and nor is it dark ambient or tethered to any specific or clear genre.

The two-and-a-half-minute shock of ‘We’ve Always Been Here’ begins as an ominous drone before erupting into swampy grunge spewed from Satan’s sphincter: there’s a nagging guitar riff half-submerged in the mix, and a thudding kick drum stammering out a beat that’s on the brink of a panic attack, and it only gets dingier from hereon in.

There may only be six tracks with a total running time of just over twenty minutes, but over its duration, Dark Worship live up to their name: punishing percussion hammers and clatters before giving way to doomy, funeral synth drones to provide the backing to harsh, shouted vocals on ‘Culling Song’, and it evokes the mangled noise of Prurient. It’s heavy listening. ‘Hollow Body’ brings a rasping vocal, the empty rasp of the walking dead, grating from a purgatorial pit shaped by a pulsating low-end throb.

If the final ‘Well of Light’ sounds redemptive, the light at the end of the tunnel, think again: it’s more like being sucked into the vortex after the last drops of energy have been sapped from your limbs and you hang, lifeless, waiting for the end. Oblivion can’t come too soon. Worship the dark.

AA

821847

OMNIBAEL – Rain Soaks the Earth Where They Lie

Posted: 1 February 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , ,
1

28th January 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

So I’ve been bigging up OMNIBAEL from the outset – not because I’m acquainted – that cuts no ice with me as a critic, and if I don’t dig the music, I’m not going to back it for anything – but because I really rate what they’re doing. And what they’re doing is… well, they’re not entirely sure. OMNIBAEL are on a voyage of discovery, and they’re inviting you – and me – and all of us – along for the ride. They have no idea where it’s headed or where it will end, and that’s a large part of the appeal. So much supposedly ‘experimental’ music is scripted and scored. Rain Soaks the Earth Where They Lie is an experiment within a long-term experiment.

Each release to date has been a document of an evolution, and their debut album roper is no exception. Twittering feedback gives way to ripping riffage that’s distorted to fuck on opener ‘Mind is a Mess’ that’s the gnarliest of black metal melted into the darkest pits of burning torture, a missive from a purgatorial inferno.

I may have written on this album elsewhere, including some abstract liner notes that capture its essence, but I haven’t previously reflected in detail on the listening experience. It’s not pleasant, but it is intense, and it is, in the same way as it is with listening to Uniform, or The Body, a full-on body slam. It’s not easy, it’s not comfortable, and it’s a physical experience – one that’s like taking a kicking from a gang. Drums hammer in like boots reining in on the ribcage, and there’s absolutely no fucking mercy across the album’s nine tracks.

The churning murk of the eight-plus minute ‘Last Days’ is pure Throbbing Gristle, and this is dark, gnarly, nasty. ‘The Repetition’ starts with a mess of overlayed tape loops that’s very much reminiscent of the Burroughs / Gysin tape loops that so influenced Cabaret Voltaire in the early days, and after a moment of crackling electronica that strays into Whitehouse / Merzbow territory, it plunges deep into torturous melting industrial metal, a dingy mess so dark and so charred as to be corrosive to the organs. It ccu88ulminates in punishing screeds of howling feedback atop thunderous percussion that hammers like thunder. There are some deeply fucked-up vocals low-down in the mix, too.

It’s not pleasant, and listening to this breeds tension upon tension, you feel your muscles tense and your head grow tight at the temples and the back of the cranium. If the dank and gloomy ethereal ambience of ‘Rung Keep’ evokes swimming underwater, it equally feels like the soundtrack to drowning slowly, and there really are no breaks on this album: despite its sonic and textural variety, it’s heavy all the way. ‘Sound of the WW2 Story’ may be a brief interlude with some soft ambience akin to the swafting of a jellyfish, but it’s still dense, tense, and oppressive, and offers but two minutes breathing before the thundering punishment of ‘Flowering backwards’, which callas to mind Swans circa 1986 and early Godflesh in dub form. The volume, the power, the force, all combine to create something utterly cruising.

Listening to Rain Soaks the Earth Where They Lie is hard. It’s a brutal nihilism I’ve been craving and welcome unreservedly; it articulates the fact that life is pain. But the pain is without letup. Rain Soaks the Earth Where They Lie is uncomfortable, painful, and very, very necessary.

Om

Older Entries