Poland’s pioneering and leading progressive rock band Riverside finally return with a new studio album entitled ID.Entity, to be released via longtime international partners InsideOutMusic on January 20th, 2023.
The band have also revealed first single ‘I’m Done With You’ which you can check out here:
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Emma Ruth Rundle’s lauded new album Engine of Hell is stark, intimate, and unflinching. For anyone that’s endured trauma and grief, there’s a beautiful solace in hearing Rundle articulate and humanise that particular type of pain not only with her words, but with her particular mysterious language of melody and timbre. The album captures a moment where a masterful songwriter strips away all flourishes and embellishments in order to make every note and word hit with maximum impact, leaving little to hide behind.
Just off the heels of its release, Rundle has unveiled another stunning and self-directed video for Engine of Hell’s ‘The Company’. The visual was made on the Isle of Skye.
Rundle reveals, “I dreamed this visual poem about innocence of the spirit, sadness and the dark deceiver I spend my life trying to run from. Or is it a friendly entity? What does it mean? Upon waking – I acquired the equipment and made a plan to film it. I enlisted the help of my dear friend, Blake Armstrong, who helped shoot and plays part in the video as well. It was edited by Brandon Kahn. Written, directed and shot by me.”
Watch the video here:
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Photo Credit: Cintamani Calise
After a painfully long and undeliberate break, Toundra return from the isolation of their homes to present their new album Hex, which is set for release via InsideOutMusic on January 14th, 2022.
Toundra practically disappeared when the world stopped in March 2020. The outbreak of this global pandemic caught them loading their van to present their last reference in Europe so far: “Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari”. After presenting it in Madrid, Zaragoza and Barcelona, on the same Monday that they returned to their daily jobs, the band decided to cancel their umpteenth European tour. Things looked bad. What happened next, we all know, and it is too hackneyed and serious a matter to be dealt with in a record press release.
Toundra returned to their homes. This time divided between the band’s native city of Madrid and the Cantabrian coast, where two of its members settled just before the squares and streets were empty. The distance and the difficult situation did not make them relax and sit by idly. If Toundra have shown one thing since their formation in 2007, it is the band’s hyperactivity and the need to keep moving forward, looking ahead and not at their shoelaces.
The band members bought the necessary equipment to be able to set up small and indecent studios in their homes and began to send ideas for new songs in a chaotic way at first. Without knowing very well where they were going or knowing very well what they might find. In the summer of 2020, the band began meeting in Madrid again to review the material that had been sent. The composition sessions were accompanied by constant talks about where to go with this eighth studio album (if we count “For those still living”, the album that was released by that side project called Exquirla).
The band states:
“Writing each new Toundra album means doing a job to find each other as a band. From our most innocent early days we have been self-righteous enough to take every step that we have taken as a band too seriously maybe. Every time we think about writing new albums we even suffer for it. This album means a job in which the four of us have rediscovered what we wanted to do without really knowing how we did it. The ideas were coming up in a chaotic way during the first months until little by little we saw how everything was being arranged in various notebooks and on the blackboard of our premises. Finally, the extreme cruelty that we can see around us (closer and closer) served as a catalyst to be able to give order to a lot of ideas, songs and, ultimately, to this new album. We are looking forward to finally presenting it to the fans now.
The composition work led them to finish the demos for their new album “HEX”, under the always faithful sight of Raúl Rodríguez, in May 2021. The next step was to trust Sati García again, who transferred them to Cal Pau studios again. (Vilafranca del Penedés, Barcelona) and Ultramarinos Costa Brava (Sant Feliu de Guixols, Girona) to record the seven cuts of this new album. Seven cuts that actually make up five songs. On July 30, 2021, the band obtained a new master’s degree and Mr. García could finally sleep peacefully. “HEX” will be released on January 14th, 2022 via InsideOutMusic. See the new album artwork here:
Today, “El Odio. Part I” is released as the first single from Toundra’s new album Hex. It is the first of three singles that will later form one long piece of music. For the video of “El odio. Parte I” the band collaborated with Asturian director Jorge Carbajales. Watch the video here:
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2nd March 2020
Christopher Nosnibor
The follow up to 2017’s Time finds the emotive avant-rock guitar quartet moving further into cinematic territory while exploring an expanding range of forms. Everything contained in their previous releases is very much present on the seven songs that make up Inviolate, only so much more in every sense. Everything about Inviolate is bigger, bolder, more pronounced and yet more nuanced, shaper and more keenly felt and articulated. And every corner of the album is imbued with a sense of enormity, both sonic and emotional: Inviolate feels major-scale, from the driving riffs to the heartfelt human intensity.
‘Countenance’, which has been a standout of their recent live sets, kick-starts the album with a short blast of overdriven guitar that hits like a punch in the mouth, before immediately pulling back into a soft, post-rock chime. And so it goes: rapidly alternating between tempestuous bursts of gut-busting overdrive propelled by thunderous percussion and lacework of heart-rending delicacy. Chopping back and forth, it’s almost schizophrenic, and it’s impossible to settle into, and instead, the listener is drawn into an emotional maelstrom articulated through the medium of sound.
Things get darkly hypnotic on the slow-burning ‘Wreckage’, the guitars wrap serpentine around a slow-twisting bass with alternating hypnotism and jarring angularity, and it’s only near the end that the tension breaks in a searing blast of twisted chords, and then they go spiralling off into a jolting sonic cataclysm, it’s with some heavy prog leanings that call to mind early Oceansize. Meanwhile ‘Rules’ is a slow, spaced-out affair that crashes somewhere between shoegaze and grunge. Indeed, placing Dystopian Future Movies in terms of genre is nigh on impossible: the landslide guitar assaults aren’t remotely sludgy, and so they’re leagues away from the stone/doom vogue, and the softer, interweaving passages and crescendos aren’t twee post-rock or even post-metal, although they exploit the quiet / loud dynamics of grunge and the sustained crescendos characteristic of post-rock. And yet I’m reminded fleetingly of a number of bands – all lesser-known, misfit acts from the 90s – The God Machine, Eight Storey Window, Milk.
Writing on their performance in Leeds supporting Jo Quail last September, I wrote that ‘Their allure is not in the volume or force, but the threat, as if they’ve got a lot in reserve, simmering beneath the surface.’ This is very much true of Inviolate: there’s a lot of detail, a lot of texture, hints of psychedelia and some deep shoegaze as the guitars cascade kaleidoscopically in shimmering sheets of sound. It’s also very much about contrast. But also, on numerous occasions, they come good on that threat, delivering moments of explosive noise. Throughout, the strongest contrast lies in Caroline Cawley’s voice: it’s graceful, melodic, and there’s a soulful folksy feel to it, and even a certain hint of poppiness. Hers is certainly not an overtly ‘rock’ vocal style – post-rock, maybe – and certainly not grungey or remotely metal, and in eschewing any gnarly backing vocals, DFM place a firm distance between themselves and their infinite more metal peers. In fact, they place a distance between themselves and any other band, and utilise Cawley’s magnificently melodic tones to wander some softly rippling sonic waters and darker undercurrents, with ‘All the Light’ heavy on shadow.
‘Black-Cloaked’ has everything: a soft, melodic verse shaped by delicate, clean, chorus-dappled guitar that explodes into the most driving of riffs, before the soaring shoegaze sonic blizzard of ‘Ten Years’, a tidal wave of kaleidoscopic guitar shimmering to the close of an album that simply feels immense, and also really quite special.
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Southern Lord – 24th August 2018
James Wells
According to their biography, Jesus Piece ‘have left craters in their path over recent years, quickly developing a reputation as one of the heaviest, most uncompromising acts both on record and on the stage. With the brutal grooves of Y2K-era metallic hardcore at the core, the band also incorporates elements of noise, ominous tones, and haunting atmospheres into their dynamic songwriting.’
‘Lucid’ batters its way out to herald the album’s arrival: rapid pedal-work on the kick drum powers the cutty, hard-edged guitar. Its brutal, regimented, industrial, grinding like early Godflesh, but with snarled, guttural vocals spitting and howling nihilistic dismantlements of personal struggle and loss, racism, police brutality, and social and political injustice.
They distil all of these violent emotions and unspeakabe rage into short explosive packages: the majority of the songs on here are under three minutes. ‘Punish’ brings a sinewy, spectral lead guitar to twist its way over the grinding churn of the rhythm section, hinting at the dynamics of early Pitchshifter.
When they do slow things down, as on the stripped-back ‘In the Silence’ where the bass wanders and weaves a murky path and haunting chorused guitar notes rise from the swamp quite unexpectedly to create an unsettling atmosphere, the impact remains undiminished, and for the most part, it’s the heavy pummelling that defines Only Self.
The album concludes with an immense shift in style and sound in the form of a pair of contrasting but complimentary atmospheric pieces titled by number only: ‘I’ something of a monastic, ritual ambience to it, as voices echo in the mist before the doomy guitars break through in a slow landslide on ‘II’.
With such variations and deviations from the template of howling aggression and blind fury, Only Self stands apart from so many albums of its ilk, and reveal Jesus Piece to be capable of more than just endless anger – although they’ve got the rage in spades, and bring it to devastating effect on what is one hell of a debut.
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Aural Aggravation 