Industrial metal band Our Frankenstein has just unleashed their new video for the single, ‘Illuminate’.
‘Illuminate’ is a song about finding the light that can exist in a barren and hopeless wasteland while building a better future for yourself. It’s about forging forward and discovering the strength in yourself to move on past a difficult time in your life.
‘Illuminate’ is available on all major streaming platforms including Bandcamp.
Watch the video here:
AA
23rd June 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
Talk about moving fast: as their bio details, ‘The Bleak Assembly was formed in July, 2022. Two weeks after its inception, the first EP, We Become Strangers was unveiled. The Bleak Assembly’s meaning takes inspiration from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House – the ‘Bleak Assembly’ being the chain of people in the story whose lives are destroyed by the promise of wealth.” This seems a fitting parable for modern times, and show how we never, ever learn from history.
Comprising Michael Smith (all Instruments) and Kimberly (from Bow Ever Down), they continues to create at pace (ugh – I hang my head at having written such a corporate phrase in a review… but, phraseology notwithstanding, it’s true), and followed up their debut EP with the ‘Alibi’ single in February of 2023, and now they present Strangers Among Strangers. The goal of this EP, says Michael Smith was to “try a different sound. Bands seem to fall into a certain sound after a while, so if that should happen to us. I wanted to open it up to a more electronic sound to give us more room in the future.”
They have pedigree and experience, having between them shared stages with the likes of Assemblage 23, Razed in Black & Switchblade Symphony with their own individual projects, and it’s unusual to see them declare up-front that The Bleak Assembly will likely remain strictly a studio project. But why not? Sometimes the creative process evolves organically and feels like it needs to have that live outlet, while at other times, recordings simply don’t lend themselves to being replicated live. And then there are logistics, not to mention economics. The latter is a very real factor in determining how artists operate now. Funny (not) how the cost of everything has gone up apart from wages and the fees paid to artists.
But this sounds like a studio project, also. And that’s no criticism, and no bad thing. Oftentimes you’ll find bands striving – and failing – to capture the energy of their live performances in the studio. It’s often the case that they developed out of playing live and that’s the platform on which they’re familiar and on which they thrive. And fair play to them: but other acts evolved in the studio and are detrimented by distance, while others simply don’t feel comfortable as live entities and feel they simply cannot replicate their studio works in a live setting. Whatever the case with The Bleak Assembly, they’ve clearly found a method which works for them, facilitating a rapid stream of material.
With Strangers Among Strangers, The Bleak Assembly, who clearly have something of a fixation on strangers and the unheimlich have crafted a crisply-manufactured piece of electropop, and while it’s got some strong gothy / darkwave elements, there’s a lot of Midge Ure era Ultravox and Violator-era Depeche Mode in the mix here, as is immediately apparent on ‘A Night Like This’ (which isn’t a Cure cover).
Strangers Among Strangers is solidly electro-based and packs some real energy. It’s synthy and it’s dark – and nevermore dark than on ‘Ready to Die’, where Kimberley faces straight out into the abyss and confronts the ageing process and, ultimately, the end, against a backdrop of swirling chorus-soaked guitar that’s pure 1985. ‘Remains’ is similarly bleak on the lyrical front, and these songs channel a lot of anguish. It may well be that they’re common tropes in the field of goth and darkwave, but the delivery is gripping, as well as keenly melodic. There’s something of a shift on the EP’s second half, moving to a more guitar-driven sound, but the throbbing synth bass and cracking vintage drum machine snare keep everything coherent and push the songs along with a tight, punchy feel. There’s much to like.
AA
Gizeh Records – 30th June 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
In this sense, Bleaklow is a rather different proposition, and in some respects, the instrumentation is a significant factor in the shape of the sound, with Claire contributing ‘Voice, Nord Electro, Yamaha PSS-170, field recordings, Moog Taurus’, and Richard contributing ‘Electric gtr, drones, field recordings, Yahama PSS-170, Moog Taurus’. But by the same token, there is something about anything Richard Knox does which has something of a signature – not a signature sound as such, more of a signature feel, which comes from the kind of wispy ambience and dense atmospherics.
The overall effect of Bleaklow’s debut, Glume, is mellow, amorphous washes of cloud-like sounds drifting softly on invisible air currents, but there are moments where the textures are coarser, more abrasive, and these provide vital contrast. ‘Husk’ scrapes in with a wash of distorted guitar before tapering tones supple piano and vocals, layered to a choral effect surge and swell.
Claire’s voice by turns evokes Kate Bush and Cranes, haunting, ethereal, and as much as this sits in the post-rock bracket from which Richard and Gizeh emerged back in the early 00s (the label put out not only the The Heritage, the debut mini album by Her Name is Calla, but Knox also put out a super-limited CD of ‘Condor and River’ in a crazy corrugated card sleeve, as well as Arrivals, the debut album by worriedaboutsatan, wrapped in a chunk of blown vinyl wallpaper, which looks and feels amazing but is a real bugger to store… but I digress) it also very much harks back to 90s shoegaze, with a heavy debt to Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine, but then again, it’s impossible to listen to this without recourse to The Cocteau Twins. If this sounds like a catalogue of touchstones, it’s testament to how deftly they draw on myriad elements and whip them into a sonic souffle with the texture of candyfloss – not that this is particularly sweet, but it is lighter than a feather, lighter than air. And nowadays, the packaging is a little less DIY, but still very much focused on sustainability: the packaging for Glume is a recycled cocoa-card sleeve, whereby the ‘recycled card is made from 40% Post Consumer Waste and 15% natural fibres (by-products derived from the food processing industry which would otherwise go to landfill.) Turning a waste product into a natural, GMO free, raw material derived from nuts, fruits etc, resulting in distinctive colour shades’. It’s not just commendable, environmentally: it taps into the physicality of a releasing music and rendering the physical release a work of art rather than a commodity of plastic in plastic.
Everything on Glume happens at a sedate pace, and everything melts slowly together. The chances are that at some point, you’ve sat, stood, or even laid on the grass and simply looked at the sky and watched the clouds slowly shifting shape, rabbits and elephants becoming elongated and increasingly deformed, until they’re no longer rabbits or elephants, but abstract shapes stretching and fading to formlessness. The songs on Glume are by absolutely no means formless, but the sounds are like mist and the structures are supple. It’s a magnificently realised work: textured, detailed, nuanced.
It may not be bleak, but it’s dark, and it’s got detail. Bask in it.
AA
It is with great honour that we inform you that Glasgow-based duo HANGING FREUD join hands with the Belgian label Spleen+ (division of Alfa Matrix) for the release of their 7th studio album Worship!
‘Falling Tooth’ is the first song from the album, and evokes the band’s influences ranging from post punk, ethereal, synthgaze, cold wave, ambient pop or yet experimental electronica.
Paula’s vocals are dark, haunting, almost glacial, her enunciation is both plaintive and full of echoing fragile grace. While the cinematic music warps them all in a melancholic ethereal cocoon made of mechanical funeral melodies, icy minimal sequences and suffocating synth atmospheres.
Listen here:
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Suburban Spell Records – 23rd June 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
The pitch, which recommends Suburban Spell as being for fans of OMD, Boy Harsher, The KVB, Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, The Cars, Rational Youth, piqued my curiosity, rather more than it did my interest. We’re clearly in retro synth territory here, but then there seems to be something of a glut of artists falling into this bracket right now. It can’t all be nostalgia: most of the current crop of artists emulating the late 70s and early 80s weren’t even born before the 90s or even the turn of the millennium. Some of it I suspect is kids discovering their parents’ music collections, while equally, per perhaps more so, it’s a sign of the times we live in. It’s hard to really explain in depth or detail precisely why nostalgia depresses me, but it does, and ersatz nostalgia several fold.
Suburban Spell, however, require less exploration or explanation: this is the solo project of Peter Endall, who was a member of Schizo Scherzo, who were, according to his bio, active in ‘the heady days of Melbourne’s 80’s music scene, playing alongside the likes of The Eurythmics, Pseudo Echo, Real Life and Fergal Sharky.’ These are names to conjure with, names to reflect on.
So when I read that Suburban Spell ‘combines the austere beauty of Kraftwerk, 80’s melodic sensibilities, driving rhythms and some noisy grind thrown in for good measure. Influenced by the heyday of new wave and 70’s-80’s electronica, this music carries the beautiful imprints of such artists as Ultravox, OMD, Visage, Jean-Michel Jarre, The Cars, Gary Numan and New Order’, it makes sense. This is the music of the era which is coded into his generational DNA. Not that I really get much sense of Ultravox, OMD, or Visage from the five tracks on offer here. But… they’re good.
The songs on the Falling Down EP are both much darker and much more sophisticated than those on Schizo Scherzo’s Back to Back EP – but then, that was 1985, and technology has evolved and people mature and evolve also.
The title track is the opener, and while it’s very much 80s in its stylings, it’s contemporary in its production. It’s driven by a pulsating synth and beat dominated by a whip-cracking Akai snare, while Endall delivers a vocal smoothed by reverb and EQ balancing. But it’s the echoey bass break, that evokes the spirit of New Order and Disintegration-era Cure that really makes this a winning groove.
‘Salvation Army’ explores deeper atmospherics through a starker musical backdrop before ’12 Causes of Pain’ thuds in with some hard dancefloor-friendly trance-pop. The looping pulsations cast a nod to Dionna Summer’s classic ‘I Feel Love’ – a song that feels like it belongs to the 80s, but was actually released in 1977 – and the vocals and rippling synth overlays are pure Kratwerk. It’s easy to forget that the sounds so commonly associated with the 80s actually came from the late 70s, but there’s always a lag between decades: s, too. songs from the early 90s can so easily be mistaken from the late 80s, too.
I’ve spent a huge chunk of my evening trying to figure out which 80s track ‘Natural Science’ reminds me of, and while I can’t quite pinpoint it, Depeche Mode’s ‘Enjoy the Silence’ is as closed as I can get, although it equally brings strong vibes of Howard Jones and the like.
The six-minute closer, ‘Side Car’ goes all out for spacious, atmospheric, and ambient, twisting into post-rock territory with the breaking out of a reverby guitar. Against a swirling synth backdrop with a slow, ponderous bass and shimmering textures, before fading to quiet in a wonderful fuzz of ambience.
Falling Down has much going for it: so much so, that by the end of the set, it’s more pick-me-up than falling down.
AA
AA
7th July 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
When it comes to band names, metal is one of those genres that has a unique way of throwing out monikers that mean you know it’s a metal band just from the name – unless, of course, you can’t read it because of the unintelligible spiky logo, in which case you absolutely know what to expect without even knowing the name. Indian deathgrind act are a quintessential example. Just look at that cover! It’s all the thorns – and it encapsulates the listening experience perfectly. Yes, it’s sharp, it’s a set of songs that snags and tears at your skin and your psyche.
Fifteen years into their career, Carnal is their third album, and if it sounds like that’s perhaps slow progress, the eight brutal cuts on here suggest that the time goes into compressing everything down to its tightest, densest form, honing it to the point at which its mass and velocity is absolutely optimal.
With the exception of the six-minute epic closer and the forty-one second blast of mid-album track ‘Insidious’, the songs range between around three-and-a-half and four minutes – and they pack everything into these compact sonic slabs. They don’t do fiddly, twiddly stuff, and there are no squealy notes or solos, apart from on ‘Bodysnatcher’ where they work -and wank – all the frets in a frenzy: this is music which sounds like it’s the output of a car-crusher – compacted, mangled, brutally fucked and as dense and weighty as it gets.
The album’s themes are clear from the song titles, with opener ‘Son of Sam’ setting the tone, ahead of ‘Bind Torture Kill’, ‘Body Snatcher’, and ‘Alter of Putridity’, which, like the font and everything else, pretty much speak for themselves. They’re well into their serial killer shit, but as I observed just the other day, this stuff is mainstream now. Pouring over mass murder and serial killing is no longer the domain of trenchcoat-wearing loners who aspire to wreak their own revenge on this cruel world; it’s David Tennent on ITV scoring eleven million viewers per episode.
That doesn’t mean that this kind of brutal tempestuous racket is mainstream, but people can no longer judge the work of a band like Gutlsit as sick or perverse when their subject matter is primetime. We’re all murder junkies.
‘The Killing Joke’ opens with a sample from an interview with notorious sadistic serial killer John Wayne Gacey (who makes Son of Sam with his seven victims look like a mere hobbyist), saying ‘The dead won’t bother you. It’s the living you gotta worry about’. Gracey may have been somewhat flippant in his remarks, but he had something of a point.
Gutslit sound neither dead nor living, their grating attacks sounding more like the undead on EST, a least vocally, and they go all out to deliver punishing intensity on a satanic level. It’s a churning mass of guitars that grinds at your guts as beats blast so fast as to blur to a flickering rattling sound rather than form an overtly structured rhythm. The obligatory guttural vocals growl and snarl, switching between styles fast and often between growl and barks, coughs and vomiting streams of vowels. It’s frenzied, demonic, furious. It sounds murderous, it sounds brutal, disturbed and disturbing.
‘Primeval’ is slow in terms of chords, but countered by a thunderous rush of beats, which renders it disorientating, harsh, and high on impact, and as a whole Carnal is pretty nasty – just as intended.
AA
German synthpop artist, Meersein has introduced their new single, ‘Haunting’; a hauntingly beautiful song with a ghostly melody that lingers in the atmosphere.
Meersein sings about the memories of a love that is impossible to forget. The chorus is an earworm that will stick with you long after the song is over, capturing the feeling of being trapped in a love that taunts and lures you in, with nowhere to hide.
‘Haunting’ is a must-listen for anyone who has ever been haunted by a love that just won’t let go.
Watch the video here:
AA
The nostalgic sound of the 80s returns with a modern twist. The solo artist Meersein presents a Depeche Mode aesthetic with unique, contemporary elements. His debut single "Speechless" was released in June 2022, but he has been establishing himself on the darkwave scene since October 2021.
With his own radio show and new music reviews, he has established his channel as the ultimate darkwave resource.
This multidimensional artist is not only an experienced musician and dynamic live performer, but also a passionate new wave enthusiast. His infectious passion for multiple aspects of music is evident in his releases.
13th June 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
This. It’s a statement in itself. It’s simple, direct, to the point. It might indicate the image of a finger pointing down at the thing in question, like some kind of cartoon graphic or meme in the making – but there’s no need for it, or anything else. ‘This’ requires no qualification: it simply is. Self-contained. Precise. And this… well, this is 13x
It’s been a while since we last heard from ‘Multi instrumentalist transgirl’ 13x, who melted our brains good and proper in 2019 with antiscene. And it’s been a while because reasons, as the notes which accompany This outline: ‘Recorded over a 3 year period, this difficult release was made at the start of lockdown, and remained unfinished until now. Dealing with topics such as racism, transphobia, disingenuine people, the Government, abuse, loss and isolation, it goes from manic, crushing noize to quieter, more sombre tracks.’
Many, even most, of us, have endured some truly awful times these last three years, but it’s fair to say that some have endured more and worse shit than others. This is a document of some of the aforementioned shit of the notes, and the track titles encapsulate the mood and / or sentiment pretty neatly.
The first track, ‘TERFkilla’ is largely sparse and minimal in terms of both sound and arrangement, as a dissonant synth bleeps over a stuttering beat and low, droney bass. But shrill noise breaks over the top and the anger crackles within the cloud of abrasive noise. ‘fukt’ is, well, fukt, a sprawling mess of grinding synths and scratches, and some murky snippets of vocals with something of a hip-hop feel, and they sound sampled but appear to not be. They’re so cut and mangled, that when twisting and stammering against a backdrop of a shuffling drum loop and some low-end distortion it’s hard to know what the hell is going on – and it works.
There are plenty of samples woven into the fabric of This, and from an eclectic range of sources, ranging from Nirvana to a 60s interview with a catatonic schizophrenic, via a BLM interview after George Floyd was brutally murdered and Kate Winslett from Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.
‘Fucking cunts’ is the looped refrain from the stomping aggrotech beast that is ‘Cistem Error vx.02’ – the most accessible and danceable track on the album, and simultaneously the most hard-hitting, while ‘brOkEnhEddz’ encapsulates the entirety of the album in just five minutes. Warped, woozy, it’s fractured and dark, whirring electronics and stuttering beats – but it builds and finds a groove, and from the chaos emerges something magnificent, an expansive, driving slab of dark synth pop.
I still find it unfathomable that we live in a world where vast swathes of society proclaim themselves to be anti-woke: if you’re anti-woke, you’re expressly pro-racist, pro-misogynist, pro-homophobic, pro-abuse, pro-anything that’s cunty. But then, we live in a world where vast swathes of people subscribe to Donald Trump’s view that ‘antifa’ is the enemy. But if you’re anti-antifa, you’re expressly pro-fa. There is something gravely wrong with this picture. ‘Truth Against Fascism’ and ‘The System Is Wrong (For George)’ are in effect a diptych of thematically-linked compositions. The former is a bleak mid-tempo trudge through mangled circuitry that reminds of the synapse-twisting impossibility of engaging in meaningful, rational discussion with right-wing shits who harp on about ‘stopping the boats’ and so on, while the latter has a gentler, more contemplative tone, laced with a wistful melancholy.
It’s this melancholy, expanded deeper into an aching sadness, which drapes itself all over both ‘Neeko’ and the album’s final track, the twelve-and-a-half-minute ‘Wintercutz’. I’m reminded vaguely of The Cure’s ‘Carnage Visors’ soundtrack from 1981, perhaps primarily because of the rolling drums of ‘Neeko’ and the expansive atmosphere which permeates both pieces. But there’s something special here: you can almost taste the nostalgia, and after the aggressive, angry start, there’s a sense that by the end of This, there is some sense of peace, acceptance, and a looking to the horizon in the hope of… something.
There’s often a significant disparity between the lived experience and its articulation in any medium: such is our wiring that even the most accomplished and attuned artists spend lifetimes striving to find the method that best suits them in their quest to convey what’s in their head to an audience who exists outside of their head. Sometimes, it’s not even about the audience: sometimes, the creation of art is a process by which to make sense of and deal with all of it. By purging the shit from the mind into something constructive and creative, however unappealing it may be to the masses, and there’s a strong sense that This is as much about purging and process as it is about communicating. But what This achieves is, in fact, both. This speaks without words, and says much, while at the same time, leaving substantial room for the listener to pour their own experience and frames of reference into the shifting sonic spaces. Over the course of ten pieces, This achieves a considerable amount: This has range. And This, while drawing on a host of elements from different places, sounds quite unlike anything else. This is This.
AA
Their debut extended-play release, the ‘PLAYTEST’ EP finds the Yorkshire noiseniks delivering 5 tracks of ferocious, Doomsday-baiting post-punk ripe for our times. From the cataclysmic Dune-inspired ‘Spice King’, to the slithering gothic-rock stylings of ‘Wee Van Bee’, or the intense industrial clamour of ‘Smother’; the band make their mark with a dark, brooding collection of songs that meld the gothic and euphoric with invigorating results.
Opening this Pandora’s box is the pulse-quickening ‘Fractured’, which is also out now. A song about dual-identities and the dawning realisation of deception when it’s been staring you in the face, lead vocalist Jamie explains of the track: “’Fractured’ channels the complicated relationship of having a double-life paraded right in front of your eyes, understanding its insidiousness but ultimately fearing the fire of confrontation.”
Listen here:
AA
Young God Records – 23rd June 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
Swans are back – again. This is no surprise: they released – as has become standard form – a limited edition demos CD, Is There Really A Mind? through the website as a fundraiser to pay for the album’s recording and release. All ten of the songs which appeared there have made it to the finished album, but, more often than not, in aa rather different form. Unusually, though, the bare-bones demos didn’t all start life as brief acoustic sketches which expanded to twenty-minute sprawlers exploding with extended crescendos: the shapes of the songs were realised early on, and in several cases, the final versions are actually shorter than the drafts. And while Gira hinted at a seismic shift following the gargantuan blow-out of The Glowing Man, heralding the arrival of a new era with Leaving Meaning – and it’s true that the shape of the band has been very different, not least of all with mainstay Norman Westberg and Thor Harris both stepping back to being contributors rather than a core members, Kristof Hahn remains – Swans remains very much ultimately Gira’s vehicle. And so it is that for all of the changes, The Beggar is clearly very much a Swans album, and sits comfortably in the domain of their body of work.
There does very much seem to be an arc when it comes to Swans releases, rather than any rapid shifts, particularly since their 2010 comeback, My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, whereby the songs grew incrementally longer and more sprawling and the crescendos more drawn out, fewer, and further apart. And so it is that The Beggar follows the more minimal sound of Leaving Meaning, and, like its predecessor, it’s a comparatively succinct statement, at least by Swans standards in the last decade – at least, discounting ‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’, an album-length track which is absent from the album, and occupies the majority of disc two on the CD. This track is, in some ways, contentious: does it even belong on the album, or should it have been released as a standalone work? The album minus ‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’ is still an expansive work, but has a certain flow and sense of existing as a cohesive document. And so it feels like there are almost two different albums here:
As the album’s ‘taster’ tune, the twitchy, trippy, eternally-undulating ‘Paradise is Mine’ indicated, Gira’s compositions on The Beggar are constructed around heavy repetition. This is to be expected: it’s been Gira’s style since day one. The first song, ‘The Parasite’, strips right back to nothing around the mid-point to find Gira acappella, imploring ‘come to me, feed on me’ in a menacing low-throated rasp. And as Gira questions ‘is there really a mind?’ in the psychedelic droning loops of ‘Paradise is Mine’ the tension increases and you start to feel dizzy. and perhaps a little nauseous. This pit-of-the-stomach churn is something that Swans have long been masters of, although quite how it manifests has changed over time: back in the days of Filth, Cop, and Greed, it was sheer force. More recently, it was woozy, nagging repetitions that lurch like a boat on a bobbing tide.
‘Los Angeles: City of Death’ returns to the style and form of The Great Annihilator – a three-minutes hard-punching gloom folk song. After the previous incarnation’s ever-longer workouts, it’s an absolute revelation, and a joy to be reminded that despite the work of the last decade or so, Gira can still write tight songs that you can actually get a grip on and really get into. ‘Unforming’ is a soft country drone, which finds Gira crooning cavernously over slide guitar, and it’s reminiscent of some of the more tranquil moments of Children of God.
‘I’m a shithead unforgiven… I’m an insect in your bedclothes…’ Gira drones on the ten-minute title track. For all of the artistic progress and evolution over the decades, Gira is still chained to the tropes of self-loathing and the darkest, most self-destructive introspection, and this is dolorous, doomy, and bleak …and then about four minutes in, the drums crash in and the sound thickens and they plug into one of those nagging grooves that simply immerses you and carries you upwards on a surge of sound. ‘My love for you will never end’, Gira moans, ever the subjugate, before the vocals conclude with an anguished, wordless strangled gargle as the riff kicks back in and swells to a monumental scale seemingly from nowhere.
‘No More of This’ is mellow and almost uplifting, both sonically and in its message – at least until near the end, when Gira reels off a list of farewells, and as much as ‘Ebbing’ seems to be about drowning, it’s a sliver of sunny-sounding psychedelic folk. And then ‘The Memorious’ hits that dizzying swirl of repetition that feels like a kind of torture. It’s hard to really articulate just how there can be music that makes you want to puke because it’s so woozy, wibbly. It’s the sonic equivalent of watching Performance. You don’t need to take a trip to take a trip.
‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’ represents a massive detour that does and doesn’t sit within the flow of the album. It’s either the penultimate track, or an appendix, depending the format of your choice. However you approach it, this is drone on an epic scale. Five minutes into ‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’, which starts out a trickle, with a robotic female spoken word narrative, everything just goes off – mostly drums, but also noise. When this tapers away, we’re left with the sound of sirens, ominous drones, and then after some hypnotic droning, there’s another monster surge, a nagging guitar motif riding atop a thumping beat and heavy swell of drone. It soon crackles into a grand wheeze of electronica, And a detonating wall of noise, and at the end, it all collapses. Around the eighteen-minute mark it really hits a heavy groove and blows you away.
The Beggar is certainly not the kind of heavy of Swans early releases, but it’s still heavy. It may not possess the sledgehammer force of the original. It’s beyond strong.
Once again, Swans have produced an album that’s more than an album, more than anything.
AA
Aural Aggravation 