Posts Tagged ‘Death’

Spotlights – Alchemy For The Dead

Posted: 18 April 2023 in Albums
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Ipecac Recordings – 28th April 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

As their bio explains most succinctly, ‘Spotlights occupy the space between a push-and-pull of jarring metallic catharsis and sweeping distortion. Even as either side vies for supremacy, neither extreme ever completely tightens its grip, allowing waves of melodic vocals and expressive sonic sorcery to breathe in the middle. This deft balancing act has enabled the trio—husband-and-wife Mario Quintero [guitar, vocals, keys] and Sarah Quintero [bass, vocals] joined by Chris Enriquez [drums]—to carve a singular lane. Armed with an uncanny ability to wield darkness or light, the trio’s fourth full-length offering, Alchemy for the Dead [Ipecac Recordings], finds them exploring something we all face, yet few embrace…’

Expanding on this, Mario explains the album’s overarching theme, which the title alludes to: “One of the major parts of our lives, is the fact we’re all going to die,” he says “Most people are terrified of it, some people learn to look forward to it, and some see it as a way out of their misery. Various cultures view it differently. There isn’t necessarily a story to the album as a whole, but each song deals with the theme of death. It could be fantasy such as bringing a loved one back to life or darker moments like suicide and deep depression.”

It’s a fact that, at least in Western culture, death remains perhaps the last taboo, something of which even the dying tend not to talk about, not properly.

It was back in 2018 that I first encountered Spotlights: their cover of ‘Faith’ by The Cure from their Hanging by Faith EP was an instant grab. This was a band that really ‘got’ the atmospherics of the track and captured the essence of what, for many, myself included, remains as an untouchable trilogy of albums, 17 Seconds, Faith, and Pornography.

Alchemy For The Dead doesn’t sound like any Cure album specifically, but still takes cues in terms of weighty atmosphere. Following a gentle introduction that borders on dark synth pop, it’s not long before the blasting power chords crash in, thick and dark and heavy. And the thick, processed bass on ‘Sunset Burial’ blends with a rippling guitar that’s richly evocative and reminiscent of Oceansise at their best. But when they break into monolithic crescendos of distortion, I’m reminded more of the likes of Amenra, of BIG ¦ BRAVE.

There are some extravagant guitar breaks, but somehow, they’re as forgivable as the more processed prog passages, which in the hands of any other band would likely sound pretentious: Spotlights sound emotionally engaged and sincere without pomp or excessive theatricality: this isn’t something that’s easy to define, not least of all because it’s such a fine line when weighing up musical that’s so reliant on technical proficiency and very much ‘produced’. And the production is very much integral here: the arrangements require this level of separation and clarity. But this is where it’s important to distinguish between production and overproduction, and it’s testament to Mario’s skills at the desk that he’s realised the band’s vision so well. The bass really dominates the sound, which is so thick, rich, and textured, and also explores a broad dynamic range: the quiet passages are delicate, the loud ones as explosive as a detonation at a quarry.

Similarly while the songs tend to stretch beyond the five-minute mark, there’s nothing that feels indulgent or overlong here. ‘Repeat the Silence’ builds on a simple repeated sequence almost reminiscent of Swans’ compositions, but thunders into a bold, grungy chorus that’s more Soundgarden.

The album’s shortest song, the three-and-a-half-minute ‘Ballad in the Mirror’ is also the most overtly commercial, a straight-up quiet/loud grunge blast, and the riffage is colossal.

‘Crawling Towards the Light’ marries monster riffage with Joy Division-esque synths, and somewhere between Movement-era New Order and Smashing Pumpkins, but rendered distinctive by the propulsive drumming which drives the track which builds to a roaring climax.

The seven-minute title track is sparse and suffocating. It has a nostalgic quality that’s hard to define, and it’s perhaps something that’s only likely to punch the gut of nineties teens in this specific way, but it’s understated and emotive, and then the guitars crash in and it’s fucking immense and… well, what a way to conclude an album.

Alchemy For The Dead is a huge work, an album that draws its own parameters and digs new trenches around genre definitions before bulldozing them to the ground with riffs. Complex, detailed, and unique, Alchemy For The Dead is something special.

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The Funeral March – Persephone

Posted: 29 March 2023 in Singles and EPs
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17th March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

This new EP from the bleakly-monikered The Funeral March is described as offering five tracks which ‘whisper of dreams, murmur of despair, cry out in madness, and reflect on hope and loss’, inspired by the Greek queen of the Underworld, Persephone, reflecting on the ‘transition between death and rebirth’.

We’re deep into the realms of heavy concept here, and such weighty topics warrant weighty music. The Funeral March certainly do themselves and their subject matter justice here.

It begins with pounding percussion and heavily effects-laden bass and guitars. I’m instantly reminded of Pornography-era Cure. It’s dense, heavy, intense. Hell, the first time I heard that album I could hardly breathe. It’s liked having your ribs stood on. The first time I heard music so suffocating was on being passed a tape of The Sisters of Mercy’s First and Last and Always and I was still indifferent to The Cure. It was Pornography that really hit me.

It’s that seem that The Funeral March are mining here. With that tumultuous drumming paired with a thick, thunderous bass, and the dark, murky theatricality of early Christian Death – completed with a dark and dirty production that sits between early 80s goth demo and black metal dirt – it’s a compelling and intense listening experience, with ‘Two As One’ proving particularly hellish in its claustrophobic density and ‘Kiss Me’ channelling the synth drone of ‘A Strange Day’ and doomy atmospheric of ‘Siamese Twins’.

The atmospheric ‘Nite Nite’ brings synths to the fore over the trebly mesh of guitar, providing variety of tone and texture not to mention a classic 80s feel, and drenched in reverb, J. Whiteaker’s vocals sound lost as if trapped between two worlds.

The final track, ‘Wasted Moon’, is again driven by a supremely thick bass and trudging beat that echoes beneath the murk. Whiteaker sounds desperate and anguished and you feel the pangs of panic rising.

Listening to Persephone is like being wrapped in a carpet and tossed in a car boot to be buried – not that I have first-hand experience of this, but it’s how I imagine the experience – and that sense of panic and entrapment, of feeling lost and alone is palpable, is real. It leaves you feeling tense, and hollowed out, emotionally drained. Powerful music isn’t about making you feel good, it’s about making you feel. Persephone is powerful and drives straight to the heart.

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Matt Elliott – The End Of Days

Posted: 20 March 2023 in Albums
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Ici d’ailleurs – 31st March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Matt Elliott, since breaking out from the Third Eye Blind moniker, has maintained a fairly steady flow of output, with an album every three years or so, with this being his ninth.

Farewell To All We Know (2020) and The Calm Before (2016) were just the most recent, with the former bring a dark, lugubrious affair: the title carried connotations of facing finality, something that doesn’t really sit comfortably in Western culture outside of the realms of art – and it seems that death has become an even greater taboo in recent years, with anything which references death, and particularly suicide – requiring a trigger warning.

Given that suicide is the single most common cause of death in males under the age of forty-five in the UK and a high on the tables in the US and many other countries, and that death is the sole inevitability in life, I feel it’s something to be faced up to, not shied away from. It may be a contentious view, but we don’t get to choose whether to leave the room in real life, so why in art? Perhaps bringing these subjects out into the open – in the same way as mental health has finally become accepted as being something we can discuss – would render them less triggering. Herein lies something of a contradiction, in that we now discuss mental health, but not the effects or consequences. And have we really broken the barrier on mental heath? I often hear or see people saying they’re not having a good day or week because ‘mental health’. It’s progress, in that historically people would have rather said they had the shits than were struggling – but there’s further to go, especially if we’re to be sure that ‘mental health’ doesn’t become the new ‘upset stomach’ that gets a pass from disclosing what’s really wrong. Not because prying is to be encouraged, but there’s talking and there’s talking, and if we’re really going to talk about mental health, then shutting a conversation down by using the phrase isn’t going to make that happen.

The press release suggests that Farewell To All We Know was ‘a harbinger of the collapsological crisis that was COVID 19. What can be built when everything is down, when everything has crumbled, ideals and beliefs, a sense of commonality and community?’ Of the new album, it poses further questions: ‘What is left when you are without words? What is left? Death, perhaps, but also life… What is left? A form of awe that dulls? An enthusiasm that dries up? A curiosity that no longer makes sense?’

As the title suggests, with The End Of Days, Elliott once again has his focus placed firmly on finality. And just fifteen minutes surveying the news suggests that we really are living at the end of days: plague, natural disasters… it’s not a question of if, but when, and how? Will climate change bring about the end of days for humanity, or will we wipe ourselves out with nuclear apocalypse before we reach that point?

‘All life’s wasted time’, he intimates on the title track which opens this delicate six-song suite – a sparse acoustic folk tune that has a lilting quality that’s easy on the ear. It sounds like he could be singing this sitting in a rocking chair by the fire, but brings a tear to the eye as he articulates the parental worries many of us – myself most acutely – feel.

And even all the smiles on children’s faces bring you pain

When you think of what they’ll face

And if they’ll even come of age

A world resigned to flame

Because we’ve burned it all away

You – I – feel so helpless. Turning down the heating, turning off the lights – you tell yourself you’re saving the environment, but you’re only making your life more difficult while industrial complexes around the globe churn out more pollution in a minute than any household will in a lifetime.

‘We need to wind time back to the eighteenth century before the industrial revolution and show them now’, my daughter told me over dinner this evening. She’s eleven, and she’s right, and I feel the anguish flow through me as the horns swell in a rising tide of warped brass atop the flamenco guitar in the closing minutes of this ten-minute epic.

It’s not the last, either. ‘Healing A Wound Will Often Begin with a Bruise’ is over eight minutes in length, and ‘Flowers for Bea’ is an immense twelve and a half. ‘Song of Consolation’ sits between folk and neoclassical and is achingly beautiful, but offers little consolation. Because what consolation is there?

Incorporating jazz and baroque, The End Of Days feels less darkly oppressive than its predecessor, sliding perhaps into bleak resignation to provide the soundtrack to the drinks in the basement bar on the last night on earth. Yes, tonight we’re going to party like it’s goodbye forever. This is the album to which to clink glasses and hug and cry and share final gratitude for those who have been there for us, made our lives worth living as we swallow hard and brace ourselves for the inevitable.

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Watch: ‘2072’ by Kety Fusco

Posted: 6 February 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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‘2072’ is the new single from Kety Fusco’s album The Harp, Chapter I, due for release on 3 March 2023. The composition of this track is based on a live granulation of Kety’s electric harp, combined with drone sounds created with a pulsating massager on the soundbox of the 47-string classical harp, and vocal reminiscences emitted by Kety with scratchy screams inside the harp soundboard, which decorate this post- classical sound.

On the single & accompanying video, Kety says, “On 13 January 2072 I will die: this video is a reminder of what it was. My melody will accompany me in my passing, reminding me that the world was beautiful before I arrived. I did not love the world I was living in and that is why he did not allow me to stay any longer. Forests precede civilizations, deserts follow them. It’s not my phrase, but I like it”.

All sounds on ‘2072’ are produced by an 80-kilo wooden harp, a carbon electric harp and live electronic manipulation. Kety Fusco and the harp met when she was six years old, and they have never left each other since. After years of studying and perfecting with the classical harp, Kety embarked on an exploration of non-traditional harp sounds, made from objects such as hairpins, scotch tape, wax, stones, hairpins, and so she says: "The harp was born in the 7th century, when the air was different, the tastes and experiences had nothing to do with today’s world and to this day I cannot think that there is no evolution: that is why I am designing a new harp instrument, it will still be the same, but contemporary and everyone will have the opportunity to approach it; in the meantime, welcome to THE HARP”.

Kety Fusco launches new album The Harp, Chapter I at London’s prestigious Royal Albert Hall on 3rd March 2023.

Watch ‘2072’ here:

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Ensanguinate – Eldritch Anatomy

Posted: 8 September 2022 in Albums
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Emanzipation Productions – 2nd September 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

From a certain perspective, all aspect of life can be seen to exist as one vast intertext, whereby everything connects and intersects with something, everything, else, by some devious and circuitous route. So the title of Ensanguinate’s debut long player actually makes me think of The Sisters of Mercy, whose singer, Andrew Eldritch, devised the band’s ‘head-and-star’ logo by ripping off one of the illustrations from Grey’s Anatomy – the medical textbook, not the television series. And of course, an inescapable aspect of life, which diagrams for dissection plainly remind us in the most clinical of fashions, is the inevitability of death.

I’ve sat myself down in my office to compose this review under circumstances very few would have predicted only this morning, whereby here, in Britain at least, this morning has become an evening of mourning with blanket coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. I need to simply switch off from all of it, what will likely be the start of a month of commentary, with endless shots of palace gates and cavalcades while the rest of the world is on pause.

The best escape always lies in something completely different, and in strange or difficult times, pure catharsis invariably tends to be the best remedy. Ensanguinate are the very essence of catharsis, distilled to optimum potency. Their bio describes the band as ‘Slovenia’s putrid entry into the death metal grimoire of old. Leaning heavily on the genre’s occult beginnings, the band stands out by distilling Possessed, Morbid Angel, and Grotesque into a searing death/thrash assault that deviates from today’s run-of-the-mill death metal’.

The tiles are great, and speak for themselves, with the likes of ‘Cadaver Synod’, ‘Perdition’s Crown’, ‘Lowermost Baptisms’, and, my favourite, Gaping Maws of Cerberus’ perfectly summarising the music itself – snarling, subterranean, satanic guttural utterances barked against a fast and furious backdrop of guitars charred and blackened like burnt offerings strewn around the opening to the pits of hell.

The hell-for-leather riffing and frenetic drumming is all-out from the first bar, with ‘Hunted’ packing in the darkest, dirtiest sonic carnage into under four minutes, and still shoehorning in a truly frenzied guitar solo.

Ensanguinate really do work the epic solo, and while there’s a certain element of genre cliché and absurdity about it, this kind of gnarly metal is the only context where solos aren’t only excusable, but one hundred percent necessary, essential even. The slower intro on ‘Ghoul Presence’ lumbers into showy, almost symphonic territory, before it goes all-out obliterative pace and raw-throated growling.

Eldritch Anatomy is the sound of a band revelling in excess, with everything louder than everything else, and everything is dank, murky and dripping with the dirtiest distortion. It’s full-fledged filth, bowel-shaking nastiness dragged up from satanic swamps that steam so hard you can picture the sweat running down the walls as the band whip themselves into a furious frenzy.

The album’s final track, the seven-minute ‘Vile Grace’ begins altogether more delicately, with some gracefully picked clean but chorused guitar before the power chords crash in hard and slow and build to a thunderous chug. It’s hard and heavy and offers a condensed rendition of all of the album’s main elements, albeit at half the pace and so with added weight and sledgehammer impact. In doing so, it rounds off an album that has it all in terms of texture and dynamics, and delivers every note with an unstinting ferocity that’s admirable.

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Watch: ‘Comfortably Dumb’ by Katapult

Posted: 20 August 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Melodeath-infused thrash metal gang Katapult has dropped ‘Comfortably Dumb,’ the second single of their upcoming debut album, Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes. An explosive banger, “Comfortably Dumb” slams the hypocrisy of accepting the meat industry.

“Tracking the vocals for Dumb was such a blast,” states Johan Norström, vocals. “All songs prior to this I had tracked all by my lonesome, but for ‘Dumb’ we tried out software that allowed us to stream high quality audio in real time, directly from the DAW. Having Florian on the other side really pushed me to try stuff I didn’t even know I had in the arsenal which ended up really cool,” informs Norström.

“What a hate anthem,” states Florian Moritz, Guitars. “The feeling you get is ‘Fuck everything and especially you!’ and I fucking love it. It’s a hateful Punk Song that’s just meant to get your juices flowing,” says Moritz.

Check the video here:

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Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes is slated to come out on 25 November 2022 via Discouraged Records digitally and on digipak CD.

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Jana Irmert – What Happens At Night

Posted: 11 May 2022 in Albums
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Fabrique Records – 29th April 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

On her latest project, Jana Irmert shrinks the focus of her thoughts and her music on the microcosmic – although that certainly doesn’t extend to the microtonal. What Happens At Night is an intensely-focused work that places the lens onto textures and tones, and an examination of the relationship between the physical and the cerebral. You may call it a celebration of overthinking, but ‘philosophical’ feels a more appropriate term for her musical meditation on life and death – specifically death and beyond, the part of the life journey no-one has ever reported on and will, one assumes, be forever unknown and unknowable.

The liner notes set out the granular nature of the album’s composition: ‘Like layers of sediment, sounds are being pushed up from underneath, floating away or sinking back to the bottom. At the core of the album lies a question: What will be left of us? While Earth melts, we go on. But eventually, there will be a point in the future where all that will be left of humanity is a thin layer of rock. While this may seem like a deeply gloomy prospect, it also carries a great deal of comfort: the reminder that we are only a small particle in a vast system so big that we can never fully grasp’.

This is the limitation we all live with: the inability to comprehend life without us, what it would be like to not exist. Much of it’s ego, but perhaps it’s also a preprogramed limitation. Everything is dust, and once we pass, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we become desert, and nothing changes: the world goes on… and on. And that’s a disheartening prospect; for the majority, our legacy won’t extend beyond our lifetimes, and the world at large is unaware of our existence while we’re here, let alone likely to experience any ripples in our wake. But even the world will be finite, ultimately. It will be swallowed by the sun in supernova. But none of us will be here to report on it by then.

What Happens At Night is dark and stark, and with just four tracks and a running time of less than half an hour, it’s perhaps technically only an EP, but feels like an album in every respect.

There’s a dolorous chime of a bell and a shrieking anguish of tortured spirits trailing like comets fading through the sky at the start of the album’s first piece, ‘Particles’, and everything simply floats and drifts. It’s ambient in the conventional sense: it’s background, you don’t really pay close attention while it’s playing, but it does subtly slant the mood.

‘Ashes’ is but a drifting fragment between the megalithic pieces on either side: it’s barely three minutes in duration. If ‘Dust is the Rust of Time’ is sparse it’s also dense, and a sedated heartbeat pulses uncomfortably throughout, amidst shuddering, gasping breaths of panic. You feel the anxiety at the passing of time; what have you achieved, and what will be your legacy? How will you be remembered in a world without you? It’s a tense, dense, gloomy sound, and you come to realise you are nothing, you’re simply here to go, and one day you will be but dust. Deal with it. And yet… It’s not a question of there being something more beyond, as such. And yet… ‘Stratum’ closes, and it’s the splash of waves and the quiet roar of a buffeting wind and the slow sound of the dust settling as incrementally, life returns to earth in slow, sedimentary layers, and each layer fossilises a period in time for all eternity. You may be dust, you may be forgotten, but in some form, are eternal in the earth.

Irmert articulates nothing specifically or directly here, but instead, What Happens At Night provides a sonic backdrop which invites contemplation.

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Watch: ‘Closer than Ever Before’ by Eric Oberto

Posted: 7 March 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Musician and actor, Eric Oberto has just unveiled his new video and single release for the song, Closer Than Ever Before. The song appears in the forthcoming Hollywood theatrical film, Malibu Horror Story due out in late 2022.

‘Closer Than Ever Before’ paints the dark picture of a man running from himself and racing against his own mortality. While being stalked by “Death” himself, he encounters memories from his past and startling entities that chase him closer to that final closing door.

The music video for ‘Closer Than Ever Before’ will mark the second collaboration between Eric Oberto and Erik Gustafson of the band, Adoration Destroyed!

Both Eric and Erik co-directed the music video shoot. Eric Oberto also took on the role of Producer with the invaluable help of Video Shoot Production Manager, Micha Marie Stevens. Erik Gustafson Cinematography brilliantly handled all of the post-production and editing work. Watch the video here:

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