Posts Tagged ‘dark’

The Martyr – My Friends Look Funny

Posted: 23 March 2023 in Singles and EPs
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21st February 2023

There’s some debate as to whether or not they really ‘get’ ‘goth’ Stateside, favouring more vampire / horror cliché stylings to anything that defined the disparate ‘movement’ as it emerged from the bleak urban sprawls of England in the early 80s as a darker strand of post-punk. Admittedly, the fans were always the ones with the greater shared affinity rather than the first wave of bands, none of whom recognised the ‘goth’ tag and the ones still going still don’t to this day, but still, quite how or when it morphed into genre let alone a stereotype is unclear.

The Martyr’s sound is certainly rooted more in the UK post-punk sound than anything else – brittle guitars and a thudding drum machine call to mind Alien Sex Fiend, and all crunched into just two minutes and thirty-eight seconds – but at the same draws on dark electropop and dance elements – a dash of Depeche Mode, a hint of dark disco – to create something that’s both spiky and danceable.

Lyrically, it’s serious but at the same time isn’t too serious, and it’s certainly not corny or cliché, and if ‘My Friends Look Funny’ employs a number of common stylistic trappings of the hi—NRG dance end of contemporary goth, it’s different enough to be worth a listen.

Watch: ‘Abyss Perihelion Transit’ by Dødheimsgard

Posted: 16 March 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Following the announcement of their forthcoming album Dødheimsgard return with their exceptional first single ‘Abyss Perihelion Transit’. The ten minutes plus track weaves a sombre tapestry incorporating elements of multiple sub genres in the world of Extreme Metal and thematically tackles ideas of epistemological dualism.

Regarding the single Vicotnik had the following to say:

“The whole album revolves subjectively around perception, experience, psychology, objective/subjective reality vs external pressure, tropes, taboos, the laws of motion/causality which influences one’s life. The subjective perception of reality vs the objective causal effects of reality and how they are bound interact. Epistemological dualism.”

Vicotnik continues:

“I guess mental health, or rather instead of health, let’s call it mental condition is a big topic on this record. Not as in a complaining way, or as a good or bad notion, but rather a subject’s study of his own psychology (en)during everything.

Like the ambiguity of Being. What is Being? Is it a meta-physical stratum of subjective emotionally fuelled notions or is Being just explaining a physical object that is, therefore being. Epistemologically I guess these lyrics dwell a lot on naïve realism vs representational realism. Cognitivism vs behaviourism, and then bringing it all to an artist context obviously. So, it is experiential renditioning, not solution driven.”

Accompanying the single is a video and single cover art from visionary artist Costin Chiorenau who brings the disparate and incredibly solemn existence of ‘Black Medium Current’s first single to life. Working together both the song and the video evolve over the course of the ten-minute run time to create something truly visionary both in a sonic and visual context. Costin elaborates on the video below:

“I’ve been following Dødheimsgard for 20 years now, and the genius of Vicotnik always captured my highest focus, being at the same time a huge inspiration, both musically and aesthetically. I always perceived Dødheimsgard being more as an artistic movement than a black metal band, another aspect which excites my creativity and I feel fulfilled that I could express all this passion through the ‘Abyss Perihelion Transit’ art video and single cover.”

He continues: “When I first heard it, I felt that void left behind by the desperation of the root-sense of old structures of perception. That void, which shakes the black matter foundation every time when manifestations tuned with and born in the past overleap the fresh sight of the present which fights hard to penetrate the dense walls of repetition. The main characters of this movie are the absence created by the vanishing old, the observer in search of a new fitting cloth of identity for its avatar and the desperate need of giving shape to the yet-not assimilated nor understood living new.

Secondary characters are different types of glitches in the matrix between self-imposed reality and the golden mean dream state, measuring systems for various types of space found between the layers of perception and the omnipresent shadow. These characters are interfering one with another in a multiverse of contrasts between defined and undefined, forming a brick-dust flavoured whole, at times exotic, at times smoked in bitter nihil. These characters are also the topics spoken but the energy of this song, by the voice of now and I consider the proper ones to be dissected through art.”

Watch the video here:

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AGLO – Into the Maze

Posted: 16 February 2023 in Albums
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Gutter Prince Cabal – 16th February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

There aren’t many guitar-based genres of music where one-man bands are particularly commonplace. Of course, I’m not talking about folk or acoustic-based music, but the kind of music where, on listening, you’d expect a full band. Industrial is something of an exception because early exponents like JG Thirlwell – aka Foetus – developed through the use of tape loops and studio experimentation, and the same is also true of later exponents like Nine Inch Nails, with Trent Reznor’s studio-based project evolving from being largely synthetic into a live proposition.

But black / death metal are genres unto themselves. One might joke that it’s because most of the people who make this kind of stuff have no mates or are too antisocial to form bands, although it may not be much of a joke. Either way, Melbourne-based Aaron Osborne is one of those one-man operations, handling all aspects of writing and playing to create the sound of several. And what a sound it is. If you want dark, dense, and sludgy, with bowel-loosening guttural vocals, then you’re in luck.

Into the Maze – a twenty-seven minute album – or mini-album – actually comprises two new songs plus four cuts previously released as the Collector EP.

You don’t listen to this stuff to be uplifted – but you do dive into it for escape, and Into the Maze brings that cathartic release.

The title track is monster slab of downtuned darkness. There are some guitar screeches which emerge from the relentless trudge that call to mind Fudge Tunnel, but this is denser, slower, doomier, and somehow less organic-feeling, like early Pitch Shifter but with live drums, and passing a nod to how they take ‘the swagger and groove of Entombed’s Wolverine Blues and infuse it with the tar-thick pull of doom’. But against Wolverine Blues, it’s half the pace and the lyrics are unintelligible grunts, so it’s very much an example of taking an influence and steering it in a different direction. And this is a good thing. The production is perfectly dingy and oppressive, and over the course of just short of half an hour it really grinds you down in just the way it should. In all, it’s pretty bloody brutal. I dig.

Oh, and that’s one hell of a logo.

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Johnathan|Christian – Strip Me EP

Posted: 11 February 2023 in Singles and EPs
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31st January 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It might sound daft now, but seeing Depeche Mode perform ‘Stripped’ on Top of the Pops in 1986 felt like something risqué. It was a family show, after all, and I was ten years old. It wasn’t your average pop subject matter, and even at that age, I was aware that this was a bit dark and sleazy. It’s not just that I’m now forty-seven years of age, but times have most definitely changed. It isn’t that sex is necessarily more mainstream now – as a kid I’d see my grandad’s copy of The Sun whenever I visited, and Page 3 calendars were commonplace décor in offices and places – but the slant is different. Whereas Duran Duran’s ‘Girls on Film’ video was simply something you wouldn’t see, but Cardi B’s ‘WAP’ wasn’t the only song to have gone stratospheric in recent years which was hyper-explicit on every level.

‘Strip Me’, the lead song from the latest EP from Johnathan|Christian harks back to the mid 80s, both sonically and in terms of how it feels simply ‘a bit naughty’ and ‘a shade raunchy’ rather than full on porny – and besides, it’s more of a metaphor here than anything literal or kinky. It’s a cracking tune, a mid-tempo string-soaked slow-burner that’s as much Kylie’s ‘Confide in Me’ as it is anything by Depeche Mode, and it’s a quality dark pop song.

‘Sway Back’ brings some swing, and ‘This Too’ crunches Disintegration era Cure with Depeche Mode circa 86 to create a slick and expansive song that conveys an emotional depth beyond mere words.

Strip Me is an EP of two halves, with a remix of each of the three tracks following on. And if you’re going to do the remix thing, it probably pays to get some notable names on the mixes – and Johnathan|Christian achieve that with Ministry’s John Bechdel, EBM legend Leæther Strip, and Steven Archer (Stone Burner/Ego Likeness) all pitching in.

Of the three, ‘Strip Me’ still stands as the standout, but the other two are nicely done, with Leæther Strip delivering a dark disco stomper. Solid stuff all round.

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FVNERALS – Let the Earth Be Silent

Posted: 7 February 2023 in Albums
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Prophecy Productions – 3rd February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

When I decided to strike out and create Aural Aggravation, the premise – at least in my head – was that I would write whatever I liked about whatever I liked, although the more detailed version of that was that I would pen essay-length reviews instead of the usual sub-three-hundred-word summaries that were, I suppose, about volume rather than depth. Equally, the idea at the time, back in 2016, was that it would be a vehicle by which to explore my relationship with music as much as the music itself. I haven’t always maintained this approach since: sometimes I’ve kicked out pieces simply chasing hits as the site has grown in its readership; others I’ve simply not felt like going deeper. And ultimately, I’ve thought ‘fuck it, my site, my platform’, and I have to say I’m comfortable with that. The quality of my writing is variable, and my typing and proofing even more so, but that’s part and parcel of keeping it real and with a view to the bigger picture that reviewing has to be – for me – about how I feel about the music I’m writing about. Because music isn’t something to simply be dissected clinically, assessed on technical merit. People listen to music because of the way it affects them, not because they’re on a battle of the bands panel critiquing like they’re judging Strictly.

You’d think that when things are unspeakably bleak and I’m facing struggles of a magnitude I find almost impossible to face, let alone articulate, the last thing I would want to do is wrap myself in a blanket of suffocatingly dark music, and that the last thing I could bear to listen to while in the process of arranging a funeral is anything by a band called FVNERALS.

But then psychology is complex.

I write to neutralise, to create distance. If it’s on the page, it’s not me, or my experience, it’s simply words. When I fell and broke my ribs some years back, I tore open the palm of my hand on landing. In shock, the first thing I did on arrival home wasn’t to clean the grit out and sterilize the bloody mess, but to photograph it. My wife asked why the hell I did that. It was a fair question. I hate blood, it makes me feel queasy, dizzy, faint. If it’s my own. A photograph of blood doesn’t bother me. So the photograph created separation. It was a hand, not my hand. If it had been my hand, I’d have probably passed out. A hand is just a picture, it’s just TV, like a movie.

I do not feel as if I am living in my own life right now. It doesn’t seem real. Having suffered a bereavement – expected, but at the same time unexpected – solace emerges from unexpected places. I’m not seeking comfort, and have no interest in exploring where I am on the journey of the five stages of bereavement. I am stepping back, and assessing the scene. It is not my life. And this is the soundtrack to my surveillance.

‘Darkness. FVNERALS have created an album that turns the emptiness of the void and the depth of the abyss into sound with their third full-length "Let the Earth Be Silent". The duo gives sonic shape to the silence of extinction that humankind brings to all life on earth and itself. Depression, isolation, and the despair that this existence brings ooze out of every note’.

Lead single and the album’s opening track, ‘Ashen Era’ sets the tone and is representative of the heavy, harrowing furrow the album ploughs, with warping, disorientating noise and disembodied vocals circulating in a mist around thunderous but muffled percussion. It’s all-immersive, dark, dense, and listening to it feels like being buried alive, but at the same time transcendental.

A crashing gong heralds the opening of the scene that is ‘Horror Eats the Light’, released back in November as a single. It’s a bass-dominated exercise in heavy, droning doom and ethereality.

The album’s song titles really do speak for the album as a whole: ‘Annihilation’, Yearning’, ‘Barren’. This is bleak and harrowing stuff. ‘Yearning’ begins brittle, before exploding into a landslide of crushing guitars bearing down. The beats – crashing a light year apar, paired with bass notes landing like detonations event minute or so, this is heavy, but a different kind of heavy.

‘Yearning’ pitches that kind of Swand circa ‘86 crawling dirginess with crushing weight paired with a sepulchral glooming ambience, while the album’s last track, ‘Barren,’ lives up to its title, presenting eight-and-a-half minutes of crushing gloom with ethereal vocals which ascend heavenwards like angels on a zephyr.

Let the Earth Be Silent feels like the final shudders of a dying planet, the collapsing death throes of eternity. It’s a vast and at times quite overwhelming experience. The sound is immense and there’s something of a ceremonial feel about parts of it, but elsewhere it simply feels like the outpourings of grief and is hard to listen to under any circumstances. It chokes you up. There’s something final and ultimately funereal about the droning organ that hovers out to the end, and it leaves you to reflect on the idea – the end. It’s beyond comprehension. But on Let the Earth Be Silent, FVNERALS have created an album that paves the way towards acceptance.

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Watch: ‘Unholy (Witch Haus Version)’ by SINthetik Messiah

Posted: 29 January 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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When industrial bass artist, Bug Gigabyte heard TikTok star, Kamarah Rae’s ‘a cappella’ rendition of Sam Smith’s ‘Unholy’ with her lyrical re-write, he immediately felt inspired. He wanted to write a full track sampling her vocals while adding his own. So….. he did. 

“When I first heard her version, it inspired me to continue the story and emotion of what she is talking about in the track. I wanted to express the emotions of her lyrics through the music, to bring her idea deeper down the "rabbit hole. This is my tribute to all the female witches in the world, much love goddesses”. – Bug Gigabyte

You can only find the track on SoundCloud, YouTube and as a free download on Bandcamp.

Check it here:

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Bedsit – Dead Bands

Posted: 28 January 2023 in Singles and EPs
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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.

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Akustikkoppler – Alles Muß Raus

Posted: 27 January 2023 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

The third – or fourth, depending on your source – album by electronic duo Akustikkoppler, is a work of starkness, of austerity, and a collision of vintage and contemporary, and quite the contrasting experience.

The cover looks like a photo I may have taken from my daily wanderings. I’m not saying it’s a good cover or a bad cover, this is merely an observation. The duo would likely say the same about the cover itself. It’s a snapshot that speaks for itself of the nature off people in our all-waste capitalist society.

I feel an almost inevitable shiver of nostalgia listening to this, despite the fact that the album’s style and sound predate my musical awareness. Instead, it makes me feel a nostalgic tug for my teens, when I was introduced to all of the weird and wonderful, experimental and starkly harsh music that had emerged in the late 70s and early 80s, to which Alles Muß Raus demonstrates a clear lineage.

As the blurb explains, ‘Inspired by the rough commercial industrial surroundings of Schusters Studio back then in Hamburg, Alles Muß Raus was produced on vintage and modern equipment. The two artists combine past and future to a sparkling, shimmering darkness.’ And industrial it is – not in the Ministry sense, but in the spirit of the early innovators utilising primitive synths, drum machines, and tape loops. And it ignites a spark of excitement, in that even now, this kind of music doesn’t sit comfortably with anything in the sphere of ‘normal’ music. The nostalgia, then, is in remembering how hearing TG, Test Department, DAF, et al for the first time completely changed my world, and my concept of what ‘music’ could be.

The analogue drum machines, mixed to recreate the sound of the late 70s and early 80s with a dominant synthetic snare is a defining feature. The first track, ‘Entrümpelung’ is a head-cracking, gut-smashing sub-bass groove that’s anything but vintage and pulls you in before the bass-driven churn of ‘Mitnahmequalität’ steps boldly into grinding, bass-led Throbbing Gristle-influenced industrial. In contrast, ‘Mittenmang’ is almost playful, with tempo changes and some d‘n’b rapidfire drumming bouncing alongside some busy, bloopy electronica. One of the shorter tracks, ‘Horses And Carriages Burn’ hints in the direction of The Cure’s ‘Carnage Visors’ while recreating the spirit of ‘Pornography’.

Entirely instrumental and assimilating so many disparate elements, despite some insistent grooves and accessible, melodic ,moments, Alles Muß Raus certainly isn’t a pop album, but contains many elements of electropop, even if the shade is turned down to twelve. While Kraftwerk may be an obvious touchstone, the vibe that radiates from Alles Muß Raus is much more DAF, with insistent, snare-driven beats driving relentlessly to define the sound and structure of a varied and meticulously arranged set.

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Sleep Kicks – Words in Vain

Posted: 25 January 2023 in Singles and EPs
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3rd February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Aural Aggro regulars Sleep Kicks make a welcome return with their latest offering, ‘Words in Vain’. With a rumbling bassline and busy, effects-heavy guitars that soar tremulously, the opening bars of ‘Words in Vain’ smashes together The Fall’s take on ‘Jerusalem’ and Editors’ ‘Bullets’ – cathedrals of sound underpinned by an earthy thud, and this is one of those expansive, gut-pulling new-wave revival tunes in the vein of the early 2000s – think Interpol, Editors, White Lies – and it’s taut and evocative. There’s an emotional depth to the vocals, but there’s more than that: everything feels tightly packed and tense. And I can’t deny that I’m a sucker for that.

What is it about the post-punk template that endures? Why do these goth-tinged tunes have so much bite? It’s not simply nostalgia: hell, I was hardly born when this sound emerged in the late 70s and early 80s, and suspect that the turn of the millennium crop – the revivalists – were inspired by listening to their parents’ collections. And what goes around comes around, meaning the new bands emerging, in their twenties, have likely discovered the noughties revivalists via their own parents. But why do these cycles emerge?

I can’t help but suspect thee socio-political landscape has a fair bit to do with it. Rocketing inflation – not to mention strikes, droughts, and floods – mean parallels to the 70s are being drawn in the media, and for obvious and justified reasons. Social and economic troughs bring frustration, despondency, despair – and music which reflects that mood.

As troughs go, this is a deep one; we’re looking as escalating war and nuclear threat – same as in the early 80s – insane inflation and mass deprivation – with extreme climate, flooding, etc., etc, on top. People can’t afford to exist, let alone to live. And when things hit the bottom, art invariably rises to reflect the mood and present the voice of the zeitgeist.

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Listen: ‘Nostromo’ by Rabbit Junk

Posted: 1 January 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Taken from their album ‘Apocalypse For Beginners’, Rabbit Junk have released ‘Nostromo’ as a taster of their bold technoindustrial/electropop/metal crossover sound.

Rabbit Junk draws subtle parallels between the challenges facing our species as a whole and the challenges facing our own personal lives. These challenges are characterized as foreseeable and yet tragically unavoidable. As such, the album communicates the fatalism and frustration of modernity alongside the lack of control we often feel over our own lives.

The album’s lead track “Stone Cold" (Feat. Amelia Arsenic) exemplifies Rabbit Junk’s willingness to take risks and defy genre norms. “Stone Cold” is a gender-fluid and genre-mashing anthem with an infectious sing-a-long chorus. The song featuries lyrics in both German and English delivered by masculine and feminine vocal textures floating over a mélange of punk, drum & bass, metal, and hip hop.

Other standout tracks include “Nostromo”, a sci-fi influenced art-metal meets synthwave track which is quickly becoming a fan favorite, and “Love Is Hell”, a decidedly danceable and gritty homage to everyone’s broken hearts.

Check it here:

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