Posts Tagged ‘Cruel Nature Recordings’

Pound Land – Mugged

Posted: 15 April 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature – 26th April 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Just as their album was smashing the charts and the band were riding the crest of the wave, the shit hit the fan for The Last Dinner Party over a quote about how “People don’t want to listen to postpunk and hear about the cost of living crisis any more.” Of course, it was taken out of context, and all the rest, but I’ve got no truck with any kind of critique from a bunch of boarding school poshos: of course they can peddle theatrical escapism, because they’ve spent their entire lives in a Gatsby-like whirl of posh frocks and soirees. The name is a bit of a giveaway: only people of a certain position in the social strata ‘do’ dinner parties, dahling, no doubt sharing culinary delights discovered while trotting the globe on their gap yahh. Meanwhile, half the country is at the point where it struggles to afford a McDonald’s, let alone gastropub grub.

It might sound counterintuitive to those so far removed from the reality endured by the majority – the Jeremy Cunts and Rachel Johnsons of the world who reckon £100K a year isn’t much – but music that reflects the grim realities of life are what people do want. Life juggling work and parenting while struggling to make ends meet can be not only stressful, but isolating, and so music which speaks of the harsh realities serves as a reminder that you are not alone. It’s relatable in the way that soaps are for many.

As an aside, I saw a post from a (virtual) friend on Facebook recently commenting that every time they visited Manchester, it pissed it down, and it so happens that this is my experience also. It’s small wonder, then, that Pound Land are such miserable mofos, and again, contrast this by way of a band name with The Last Dinner Party. This is an act that’s gritty and glum and telling it like it is. And you know how it is – and how bad it is – when stuff in Poundland, the shop, costs £1.50, £2, even a fiver. Back in the 90s, you could got to Kwik save and get a tin of No Frills baked beans for 3p and a loaf of bred for 19p.

It’s perhaps because of just how far downhill and how fast it’s happening – in real time – that with Mugged, Pound Land have delivered their most brutally blunt and utterly squalid set to date.

‘Living in Pound Land’ is a brief blast of an intro, atonal shouty pink with some wild parping jazz tossed in, and it hints at what’s to come: ‘Spawn of Thatcher’ is dirty, disdainful, spitting and snarling vocals hit with a grunt and a sneer amidst a cacophony of jazziness held together by a saw-toothed bass grind.

There are hints of The Fall in the mix, a dash of the raging fury of Uniform, too.

As ‘Flies’ evidences, they’re not all one hundred percent serious: against a pounding drum machine reminiscent of Big Black and a bowel-tensing bass, we get a yelping pseudo-John Lydon vocal going on about flies in his underpants.

The nine-minute ‘Power to the People’ is the album’s centrepiece, literally and figuratively. A slow, groaning behemoth, it thuds and grinds away for nine and a half minutes, coming on like ‘Albatross’ for the 2020s (That’s PiL, not Fleetwood Mac) mixed with a Fall cut circa ‘Slates’ played at half speed, its grinding repetition emerging more at the Swans end of the spectrum. It’s ugly, it’s unpretentious. ‘Power to the people! Make everything equal!’ slides down to a rabid howl of ‘be happy with what you’ve got’, exposing the lie of meritocracy and social mobility. The album’s second ten-minute monster, ‘Shish Doner Mix Apocalypse’ is a brutal shredder – like much of the rest of the album, only longer.

Contextually, one might be inclines to position Pound Land somewhere alongside Sleaford Mods and Benefits, but they’re a very different proposition – sociopolitical, yes, but more overtly rock in musical terms, mashing up punk, post-punk, krautrock and noise rock. And then there’s that manic jazz streak.

The snarling racket of single cut ‘Pistol Shrimp’ is both representative, and as nice as it gets. That is to say, Mugged is not nice: in fact, it’s harrowing, gnarly, overtly unpleasant. But it is also entirely necessary.

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VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: ‘Pistol Shrimp’ by Pound Land

Posted: 26 February 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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We love a bit of Pound Land here at Aural Aggravation, so we’re particularly proud to be able to break some news and present an exclusive in the form of the video for ‘Pistol Shrimp’ waaaay ahead of the release of the forthcoming album.

Following 2023’s critically-acclaimed album Violence, Pound Land return with Mugged which despite being their 7th album release, is their first to have been fully recorded in an actual studio.

Recorded live in one intense day at Tremolo Studios, Stoke-on-Trent (UK), Mugged is a 48-minute whirl of raw frustration, kitchen-sink surrealism and filthy noise-punk sludge, soundtracking vitriolic stream of consciousness societal observations.

It’s also the first album to fully feature the full Pound Land band that many experienced on last year’s UK tour: Founding duo Nick Harris and Adam Stone, along with Rich Lamell on bass, Steve Taylor on drums and Jo Stone on sax. Additionally on this album, Jase Kester of Omnibadger/Omnibael joins on electronics.

Check it here:

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Nnja Riot – Violet Fields

Posted: 25 February 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Recordings – 23rd February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Nnja Riot is the solo project of Lisa McKendrick, who also happens to be one half of experimental electronic noise duo Isn’tses, with Tim Drage, who makes serious noise as Cementemental.

It’s a small world, especially in circles of noise and experimental electronics, and so it is that a few years ago, I paired with Tim for a one-off collaborative set in London at the bottom of a bill curated by Human Worth, with the mighty Modern Technology headlining. I lost my hearing in one ear before the set due to some congestion, and by the end, I’d lost my voice, too. Somewhere along the way, I’m convinced I’ve crossed paths with Isn’tses, too, but can’t find the evidence at this moment in time.

Anyway, my needless digression brings me to the point of observation that their individual projects are quite different from one another, and their collaborative output. This is ultimately a good thing, because while algorithms which have seemingly replaced the music press in making recommendations of the ‘if you liked listening to this, you’ll like this’ ilk, it ain’t necessarily so. Because algorithms don’t understand art, or the fact that an artist’s output may be widely varied.

And so it is that as Nnja Riot, Lisa takes a much more songwriterly approach to things, and Violet Fields contains seven songs which can be described broadly as stark industrial electropop. ‘Horror Heart’ brings all of the elements in together to raise the curtains on the album: understated verses, with a thumping heartbeat bass beneath a delicate vocal bathed in reverb, are suddenly blown away in a wave of noise and monotone robotics with whipcracking synthetic snares cutting through the murk with some harsh treble.

‘The Evolve’ is a low, slow, dark pulsating grind which swells to a blistering ruckus of bubbling, broiling eruption of glitching electronic froth, and things get mangled fast and hard. Nnja Riot is indeed an appropriate moniker: the noise grows and takes over by stealth, as if from nowhere: one minute things are pretty mellow, the next, it’s all going off and you’re being carried away on a sonic tidal wave.

The album’s longest track, ‘Dark Assassination’, stretches beyond the seven-minute mark, and with a stuttering, beat hammering like a palpating heart in a state of fibrillation against the ribcage, it’s creates a muscle-tightening tension which is uncomfortable. The vocals are disconcerting, sounding as they do detached, off-key, non-melodic. Desperate drones bend and warp in the background, adding layers of dissonance and discomfort.

Everywhere across Violet Fields, there are subtle but essential incidental details, little lines of melody which ripple and fade. The title track is hazy, sedated, spaced-out, with melodic elements juxtaposed with swerving sci-fi noise which threatens to drown out the erratic beats and she cuts loose to another level of intensity with the vocal delivery: fuzzed with distortion, there’s a outflowing from the innermost which pours into the swirling wash of multi-faceted noise.

Violet Fields crackles and fizzes, often promising structures which crumble and evaporate and leave the listener feeling a little lost, grasping for something uncertain and just beyond reach. It’s this sense of vagueness which remains after the grainy ‘Musical Fix’ and the ephemeral drift of ‘Slow Release’, a mere fragment of a song which carries a spiritual richness on a ritual drumbeat before fading. There’s a sense that hearing Violet Fields and fully grasping it are not one and the same, and it feels that however long one spends engaging with it, there will always be depths and layers of implicit meaning that exist beyond the realms of conception. You wave a feeble hand, desperate to clutch and cling, but it’s gone. It’s gone.

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Madrelarva – Tierra de Silencio

Posted: 18 December 2023 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Recordings – 24th November 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Spanish electronic musician Julio Tornero has been producing minimal techno, IDM and experimental music since 2015. He’s one of those people who has a million different projects and as many different pseudonyms, also recording as Dark Tibet, Oceanic Alpha Axis, Sequences Binaires, with his work published by a multitude of labels including Fmur, Intellitronic Bubble, Detriti, Phantasma Disques.

I never cease to be amazed by artists who simply effuse and froth with creative output: how do they do it? How do they have the time, let alone the headspace? Given the economics of art in the 21st century, the likelihood of a life on the further recesses of obscurity in the most obscure of genres could provide a living seems improbable, but then to have the capacity to produce art after the slog of a day-job seems almost superhuman. And this, this is not just some easy, off-the-cuff, going-through-the-motions half-arsed toss-off.

Tierra de Silencio is pitched as ‘A homage to the formative years and evolution of electronic music’, with nods to Nurse With Wound and other progenitors of that nascent industrial sound, which was born primarily out of a spirit of experimentalism, and a desire to be different, facilitated as it was by emerging technology.

It’s perhaps hard to really assimilate now how the late 70s and early 80s witnessed a technology explosion, which not only witnessed the advent of new synths and drum machines, but saw them become available on a low-budget, mass-market basis. But while many bought them up and started making synth pop, some oddballs did what oddballs always to and decided to push the kit as hard as they could. And some of the results were utterly deranged. Tape loops and all kinds of messing yielded results with varying degrees of listenability, from Throbbing Gristle to NWW to Foetus and Cabaret Voltaire.

With only four tracks, this is one of those albums which would lend itself to an extravagant 2×12” release, with a track per side, since these are very much longform works, with ‘Duermevela’ stretching out beyond seventeen minutes, and the title track lasting more than a quarter of an hour. But if the expectation is for a set of compositions which are primitive, difficult, and in some way steeped in nostalgia for that early 80s noise, this isn’t that album. Despite the analogue feel, Tierra de Silencio finds Tornero exploring the spirit of the period, rather than striving to recreate the sound.

The first track, ‘Metamorph’ splashes in at the dancier end of the spectrum with some hard groove vibes. Fast, urgent, flickery, and glittery, it’s a shimmering curtain of electronica which ripples over a driving, dynamic beat that doesn’t let up. It’s got heavy hints of DAF, but it’s still not without a taste of Yello or Chris and Cosey. And it keeps on going for eleven and a half minutes. In time, the beat peters out and we’re left in a whirlpool of fizzing electronics.

The aforementioned ‘Duermevela,’ the album’s second track, draws on 70s electronica, with endless bubbling, rippling synths and incursions of altogether harsher sounds. Blasts of dark noise deluge over the bleak explosions of dankness. The beats are busy, and also metrononomic, and the effect is mesmerising.

Something dazzles for a moment. Then the lights flicker. What is this? This is likely panic. Negatividad Absoluta binks, bonks, bleeps and tweets, and the atmosphere is 70s sci-fi, something on the cusp of strangeness, jarring, alien, robotic. There are crunches and fizzes, crackles of distortion, and top-end tones ping back and forth like ping-pong.

Tierra de Silencio is very much an album which pushes an experimental vibe, while maxing out on what feels now like more contemporary dance tropes, largely on account of the rippling synths and glooping repetition. But it also incorporates elements of Kraftwerk and early Human League in its deployment of those vintage synth sounds and layerings. It’s an intriguing and entertaining work, and it passes hypnotically in what feels like no time at all.

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Look To The North – A Shadow Homeland

Posted: 10 December 2023 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Recordings – 24th November 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The brief accompanying biography tells us that ‘Look To The North is the ‘dronefolk’ duo comprising David Colohan (United Bible Studies, Raising Holy Sparks) and Zachary Corsa (Nonconnah, Lost Trail)’, and that ‘Recorded in 2021, A Shadow Homeland is 4 tracks of atmospheric other-worldly introspection; melancholic ambience interspersed with sparse piano, spoken word and field-recordings, creating an immersive transcendental twilit experience.

We’re immediately in with what initially sounds like some form of narrative, and joining as we do seemingly in the middle of it, it’s difficult to orientate oneself in terms of context. Soon, soft droning tones drift in like mist and rings out heraldic over the hills and draping the woodlands with string-like sounds amidst images of clouds and nature, interlaced with spiritual abstractions rich in poeticism, but their meanings obscure. The title of this first composition, ‘Disintegrating Consoles And Cartridges’, has a ‘found sound’ connotation, a suggestion of decaying histories and lost origins, and in time, distant voices mutter almost imperceptibly while piano notes roll in and out. Increasingly I find sparse piano notes which are allowed to resonate conjure the saddest and most bereft of emotional sensations, and by the end of eight minutes, I find myself feeling empty, heavy of heart, and pining for something lost – something I can’t quite recall beyond a vague sensation, like the occasional pang of pining for childhood or people and places left long behind, the melancholia of hazy reminiscences which creep at the fringes of a fugue-like memory.

‘The Water That Shattered Their Image’ feels darker at the start, Not necessarily ominous, but there are grainy textures scratching lower in the layers of sound, elongated whisps and broad sonic washes, and they bring a certain discordance and discomfiture. Human voices mingle into wolf-like howls, baying, crazed, before growing hushed, as if in anticipation of the album’s dominating finale, the seventeen-and-a-half-minute ‘An Amulet For The Flux Of Blood’. Here, the piano is very much the central instrument, but surrounded by layers of organ and organic-sounding drones. These sounds coalesce to create a haunting yet smoothly tranquil atmosphere.

To suggest that it seems to share more in common with post-rock than any form of folk is perhaps to pick pedantically at irrelevant details, but I mention this because these genre distinctions have a tendency to set certain expectations. But as elegiac pastoral works, infused with subtle elements of collaging and experimentation, the pieces which make up A Shadow Homeland certainly don’t disappoint, and indeed, confound any expectations one may have. Mood-wise, I’m left feeling uncertain; neither uplifted now downcast, but somewhere in a strange place and a sensation of something missing. It’s neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but remarkable that such understated instrumental works can resonate in such a deep and complex way.

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Clara Engel – Sanguinaria

Posted: 2 July 2023 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 30th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Less than a year on from Their Invisible Hands, and just nine months after Undergrowth, Clara Engel serves up Sanguinaria. The all-too-common ‘returns with simply isn’t appropriate here, since it implies absence, and Engel’s rate of output hasn’t only been consistent, but if anything has accelerated lately, with this being their eighth release since Hatching Under the Stars in April 2020.

The advent of streaming has unquestionably changed the face of the music industry, and it seems to be broadly accepted that the change is most certainly not in the favour of artists, with Spotify CEO suggesting that if artists want to achieve more streams and therefore more royalties, they need to be producing more content, and more regularly, famously telling Music Ally that it’s “not enough” for artists to release music “every three to four years” and that they ought to maintain “continuous engagement with their fans.”

This speaks volumes about his view of music – that it’s not art, but a commodity. And of course, his interest in artists cranking out product on a conveyor-belt is quite clearly in the profit it generates for his company and him personally, not those who produce it. It also shows a complete lack of understanding of the creative process: try writing and recording material while being continuously engaged. Moreover, many creative types aren’t extroverts by nature, and aren’t disposed to sharing endless videos and vlogs and updates on their time in the studio. And do audiences really want or need that anyway? We don’t necessarily need to feel like we know the artist or have a ‘chummy’ or direct connection with them: we just want the music and prefer a bit of mystery and distance.

In the 60s and 70s, it was commonplace for artists to prelease an album every six months, and there’s a very good reason this practise stopped: it simply wasn’t sustainable, and it was invariably the artists who suffered rather than the labels who effectively owned them.

But where I’m going with this is that every artist is different, and the creative process is a personal and individual thing, and sometimes artists experience huge creative flurries, while at others they may experience creative slumps. Clara Engel is clearly experiencing a flurry of late, and the remarkable thing about it is that they’re producing work not only in quantity, but of a remarkable quality.

If in terms of output, more may be more, the stark arrangements of Sanguinaria abundantly evidence that less is very much more in most cases. There is a beautiful achingness which pervades every moment of the album’s downbeat folk contemplations.

The songs on Sanguinaria are sparely-arranged and it’s Engel’s voice which is to the fore, at least in term of the mix. ‘The sky is huge, and the sea is green’, they sing in the reflective refrain of ‘Sing in Our Chains’, and it’s an evocative pastoral feel that nags at you and makes you feel… sad, haunted, makes you look inside yourself. You may not necessarily feel comfortable in doing so, but this is only one of several reasons why it’s worth spending time with Sanguinaria.

Although a solo album and a minimal one at that, Engel – a multi-instrumentalist who plays a fascinating array of instruments here, notably, according to the liner notes, ‘electric cigar box guitar, acoustic guitar, talharpa, gudok, cajón, wooden trunk with soft mallets, tongue drum, melodica’ – is accompanied by a number of contributing musicians who add subtle detail and essential texture and depth. The picked strings and sad-sounding violin forge a mournful dark folk sound on ‘Poisonous Fruit’ and it calls to mind Dark Captain, a band I still miss and feel were criminally underrated. ‘I Died Again’ is so simple, so melancholy, so human, it’s impossible not to be moved by it: Engel’s vocal is rich, but uncomplicated.

‘Extasis Boogie’ introduces percussion for the first time, with hand drums quietly bopping behind an understated guitar, while the lap steel drones on ‘A Silver Thread’ add a weight to the slow sadness that drips from every note.

These are songs which are carefully crafted, considered, and feel so natural and rich; there’s no hint of their having been rushed or being partially-evolved. As such, Sanguinaria feels like an album that connects the feelings behind its creation and the final output.

Engel’s soul is bare on this finely-poised and thoughtful album, and perhaps because of, rather than ins spite of, its minimalism, it’s a gripping work.

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Watch: ‘From Fiery Tongues’ by Basalt Shrine

Posted: 21 July 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Basalt Shrine are the Filipino doom/post-metal super quartet of Bobby Legaspi (Surrogate Prey, Malicious Birth), Rallye Ibanez (Ex-Religious Nightmare, Surrogate Prey) and Ronaldo and Ronnel Vivo (Dagtum, The Insektlife Cycle, Abanglupa, Imperial Airwaves, Ex-Hateure).

‘From Fiery Tongues’ is their debut album. It’s heavy. Really heavy.

It’s so heavy, we all had to take a lie-down instead of writing the planned review. While we pick ourselves up, listen to this:

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Benbow-Strssy – ‘Split’

Posted: 13 March 2022 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 11th March 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

This is something that the CD or digital release simply cannot really do justice to as a full, multi-faceted, multi-sensory experience: the split LP. And while I’m more of a fan of vinyl and cassette, this most certainly does the job: you have to turn the thing over. It is truly an album of two halves. In this case, half Benbow, and half Strssy. And while some split releases simply stick two artists back to back – and there’s nothing wrong with that – Benbow and Strssy have history.

As the biographical notes detail, they first met ‘in a basement café in Lausanne, Switzerland just before the first sliced loaf was presented at the World’s Fair. Benbow had just finished a tour of the Alps with wandering trapeze troupe, NORMAL MAN while Strssy had taken a well-earned sabbatical from conjoined mime act, DIET PILLS. Over the following years they exchanged correspondence and encouragement as they independently began making experimental electronic music’. This split release, then, is pitched as ‘a celebration of this journey’.

Benbow’s eight cuts make for a hell of a journey in their own right. The tone is far from celebratory: it’s dark, claustrophobic, driven by dense beats and even denser atmosphere. Short, fragmentary snippets that straddle the space between sketched ideas and something more fully realised, all bar two are under three minutes in duration, but pack in a lot. Broadly, Benbow explores the tropes of minimalist, dark-hip hop, with thwacking solid beats and phat bass that gnaws at the gut with simple repetitive motifs or only three of four notes. It’s kinda heavy, and the effect is cumulative.

‘Slowly’ grinds, chugs, and churns away, the bass thick and gnarly amidst a swirl of reverberating synth oscillations that emulate the nagging call of a siren toward the end. Benbow’s final track, ‘Two’ marks quite a shift, with strings galore and an altogether lighter mood.

Strssy similarly trades in contrasts and juxtapositions. ‘Off a Watering Can’ starts out gentle, but when the beat kicks in, it’s pretty bloody heavy, and the mood changes significantly. It’s no longer chillout, ambience, but dense and tense, and layers of noise build exponentially to incorporate shrill whistles of modular synth abuse. ‘Deep Interior’ is all the twitch and bleep against dank, rumbling caverns of sound and then, from nowhere, it’s more rapid and relentless wails like a misfiring smoke alarm, only with a squeaky toy embedded in the circuitry. On a bad day, I’d likely find this seriously fucking annoying, but in a balanced and objective mood, it’s possible to give kudos to the way in which Strssy incorporates dance elements into a more freeform approach to electronic music which also incorporates industrial and ambient leanings. ‘Bath Night’ is a thumping industrial melting pot that’s more like drowning slowly than floating serenely, while ‘A Beautiful Brown Catalogue’ is all about the bowels with its booming bass frequencies, plus additional wild trumpet action. It’s got that late 80s wax Trax! vibe, but with a more experimental twist, and it pinches the brain.

Paired, Benbow and Strssy make for a formidable duo, a tag-team of hard-hitting genre-splicing, slow-groove bashing behemoths.

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Pound Land – Can’t Be Arsed

Posted: 24 February 2022 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Recordings – 11th March 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Following on from their eponymous debut, Pound Land – the duo consisting of vocalist/lyricist Adam Stone (Future Bomb/Holy Ghost People/frequent collaborator with Dead Sea Apes) and multi-instrumentalist Nick Harris (Reverends of Destruction/ ex-Dead Sea Apes) return with what they describe as ‘eight tracks of post-industrial post-hardcore dead-pan misery – a ‘kitchen-sink’ punk for the 21st century’.

The album title isn’t one that’s likely to see Pound Land crashing the charts, and it’s one that runs the risk of drawing easy criticism, if its contents doesn’t hit the mark for some. But then, it’s a double-bluff, because ant critic who criticises the band for sounding like they can’t be arsed clearly can’t be arsed to critique with any effort.

They slap in straight away with the blunt and subtle as a brick ‘Twatted’, and it’s a six-minute barrage of top-endy guitar racket, a simple chord sequence put through the wringer after a succession of pedals with distortion and reverb and maybe a hint of flange. The lead guitar is sinewy, a snaking twang of treble and it’s so, so raw. A primitive drum machine sound thwacks away and Stone mumbles the expletive-laden lyrics in a northern drawl: ‘You know what I’m fucking saying, mate? Everyone’s a fucking twat, mate.’ It’s raw and it’s real. The production values are bargain basement and then some, and around the mid-point they come on full Fall circa 1983 as they bludgeon away at their wonky guitar racket.

‘Brain Driver’ is a dingy mess of seething, writing no-wave and industrial racket by way of a backing to a monotone vocal performance, and this time it’s six-and-a-half minutes of dirge-like scrapings and discomfort, but they’re just warming up for the album’s thirteen-minute centrepiece, ‘Tony Ex-Miner’. It’s a sparse, grating synth effort, like Suicide without the rhythm. It’s an atonal droning expanse of bleakness that saps your very soul. This is a reason to appreciate it, in case you’re wondering. A sampled narrative about Margaret Thatcher is almost, but not fully, audible.

The sneering grunge squall of ‘Tapeworm’ follows more conventional punk/rock structures; drums, bass, guitar come together to grind out a thunderous wall of noise, and it’s early Head of David that comes to mind as they slowly tug your entrails out and squeeze the mess of guts as they spill. There is nothing pretty or pleasant about this, not the dingy murk of the title track or the dislocated electronic dissonance of the disorientating slur of ‘Total Control’, that sounds like Stone retaining control of his bowels and bladder is no small feat. ‘I look after my mind’, he drones, detached, alone on the dark.

The compositions, such as they are, are sketchy, minimal, and there’s little to cling to by way of melody: instead, Pound Land drag you through city back alleys clogged with litter, smeared dog shit and the puddled piss of street drinkers – mate. The subject matter may be kitchen sink, but the atmosphere is abject and apocalyptic. It’s an album for out times. You’re not supposed to like it.

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EXCLUSIVE STREAM: Cronies – ‘Cronies’

Posted: 23 August 2021 in Previews and Editorial, Recommended Streams and Videos, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Recordings – 27th August 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Grunge isn’t dead. Not by a long way. Although, the trouble with grunge is that even at its height, most of the bands weren’t that impressive, and the ones who were achieved the widest success were the weakest, most accessible of the crop. Without the polished and ultimately marketable Nevermind, Nirvana would have never achieved global domination, although both Bleach and In Utero were, and remain, far superior albums, while the like of Tad and Mudhoney are the true sound of grunge, and capture the gritty, sweaty toil of blue collar labour channelled into aural catharsis. These bands never set out to change the world, but to vent their frustrations and ultimately their sense of powerlessness through music.

Perhaps it’s an age thing, but being in sixth form when grunge exploded it felt like not only an exciting time for music, but that this was a wave of music that actually spoke both to and for my generation at the time. In a way I feel rather sorry for the Millennials and Gen Z; the blandness of contemporary music speaks of nothing but surface. Even when addressing genuine issues, there feels like not only an absence of depth, but an absence of real emotion, of soul. Perhaps it’s just that the mainstream industry, represented by the mainstream charts, dominated by mainstream artists on major labels is simply giving the entirety of its focus on monetising slick sonic wallpaper. It seems odd that generations so riven with pain and angst (and who can blame them?) should find solace in this kind of anodyne slop. It can’t just be the numbing effects of antidepressants: something is clearly awry. Small wonder, then, that some delve into their parents’ collections in order to find music that contains what’s missing for them.

New York’s Cronies formed in June 2020 by brothers Jack and Sam Carillo, the press pitch describes the project as ‘the creative offspring of Covid and isolation’. Creative is the word: having pulled in a couple of mates to render this a full band, they’ve already banged out a brace of Eps in the last year ahead of this, their eponymous debut, which Cruel Nature are releasing on another Bandcamp Friday, with Proceeds going to charity.

It’s a bowel-shaking bass note that strikes first, and the sustain is something. And then in lurches a grimy guitar that’s welded to a stumbling rhythm section – and it’s heavy. Then the drawling vocal rips into a fill-throated roar that’s pure Cobain. These guys have taken the relentless battery of Bleach and the nihilistic squall of In Utero as their template, with a dash of thrash and some of the grimy heft of Tad in the mix (‘Slush Fund’ even leans on the riff from Tad’s ‘Behemoth’ but chicks in some stun synths and some manic hollering that’s more reminiscent of The Jesus Lizard), and ‘A Slippery Slope’ throws all of these in at once, along with a sudden change of pace and direction two-thirds of the way in. On ‘Ritchie from Lebanon’ they build a massively dense bulk of noise, the guitars and bass churning, overloading at great volume.

What Cronies have that their peers lack – well, there are many things, if we’re analysing (and of course we are: that’s the purpose of music criticism). But first and foremost, it’s raw passion and energy. There’s nothing slick or ultra-processed about this: Cronies are unashamedly ragged, and really embrace the grunge ethic of the time when most of the bands from Nirvana to Mudhoney were still on labels like Sub Pop. It’s perhaps because of the band’s origins – confined, trapped – that the songs on Cronies teem and seethe with abject frustration. Sometimes, words simply cannot articulate those feelings, and all there is to do is scream and unleash howls of feedback instead of neat chords. And this is what Cronies do, and this is why they speak to us: it’s accepting the limitations of articulation and unleashing a primal howl. It’s powerful because it’s real.

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