Posts Tagged ‘eponymous album’

Cavesnake – Cavesnake

Posted: 21 December 2021 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 3rd December 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Cruel Nature’s release schedule for December is heavily snake-orientated, with Cavesnake’s eponymous album emerging on the same day as Mitternacht’s The Snake, although the two serpents are very different beasts.

For Cavesnake, the bio informs us that ‘Oxgoat and Sikander Louse came together through a shared love of ugly, blown out Black Metal, achingly beautiful ambient soundscapes, and deep space horror’, and that ‘They use the interstitial zone of Cavesnake to explore themes of loss, emptiness, ontological insecurity and the righteous acceptance of the impending apocalypse.’

It’s seriously fucking dark from the opening, with creeping fear chords and dark ambience drifting slowly across the horizon.

Cavesnake record straight to tape and through a rigorous process of layering, drenching samples in reverb, re-amping guitar drones through monstrous cabinets, they force their music to hang listlessly in a void space akin to an event horizon. And dark it is: ‘Pseudohalo’ may only be four minutes in duration, but it’s a bleak and oppressive opener, although it’s nothing to the whiplash black metal mudslide of ‘Bloodless Weapon’. This is murky, dark, heavy. It growls and grinds and churns and burns, and shrieks howling screeds of sonic lesions, an aural excoriation that scrapes and drones for almost nine minutes.

The ten-minute ‘Posture in Defeat’ is a swirling back hole, a deep, dark eddy of slow collapse, the pretty mid-frequency glimmers rent by earth-shattering sonic donations like planets colliding, while ‘Vipers Dance’ which stretches and twists a full twelve minutes is serpentine, dark, ominous, bleak. Without an explicit context, it’s for the listener to place and utilise this listening experience to suit their experiences, and for the most part, for me, I find myself nervous, anxious, uncertain, as every composition is dark, oppressive, the sound of impending doom. It’s thick, swirling, a dense swirling vortex of airlessness from which there seems to bee no escape as it envelopes your entire being. You simply cannot breathe; all you want to do is breathe. The snake is constricting now, your ribs and lungs are tight. Please…

The final track, ‘Fleshware’, offers no respite, a churning grind and whisper or multi-layered noise that offers no breaks, no moments of calm, only increased tension. It scrapes and screeds and snarls and growls, and near the end, a distorted, impenetrable voice speaks, rasping the album to a close.

It’s pretty heavy, and so intense. Prepare to be bitten.

AA

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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.

AA

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Cunts – Cunts

Posted: 30 October 2019 in Albums
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Ipecac Recordings – 1st November 2019

You could look at this from two different angles: one – some people never grow up. Two – some people never sell out. Cunts’ eponymous debut is the product of both simultaneously. The ‘snarling LA-based punk band’ features guitarist Michael Crain (Dead Cross/Retox) and singer Matt Cronk (Qui), with drummer Kevin Avery (Retox/Planet B), bass player Keith Hendriksen (Virginia Reed) and guitar player Sterling Riley (Hepa.Titus).

So they all have other projects, and so the fact Cunts will never achieve radio play or mainstream attention simply by virtue of being Cunts isn’t an issue. Then again, their other projects won’t achieve major-league success and radio play either, despite not being graced with a media-blackout moniker, meaning that none of them has anything to lose or gain here. So yeah, fuck it: Cunts are keeping it real and keeping it antagonistic, and forget being cynical, they’re doing this for the right reasons: they’ve got the rage. Rage used to be for the young, descending into the impotent bitterness of the cliché grumpy old man. But times have changed. Older, wiser, more furious and better equipped to articulate that rage, Cunts represent the new generation of over-40s who, rather than mellowing and settling into midlife, have all the anger and need to vent or suffer an aneurysm. These are the worst of times, and we live in a divided world.

This is proper old-school gnarly US hardcore punk shit, played at a hundred miles an hour, and if song titles like ‘Ass to Grind’ and ‘He’s a Lady’ carry distinctly un-PC connotations, the lyrics reveal the band as being on the right side of consideration for difference. They’re not afraid to venture into Unsane gore territory, but shock tactics aren’t entirely without merit in a desensitized society. There’s noting subtle about an of this, least of all the over art.

‘Goin’ Out West’ gets a bit Ministry, but with glammy / goth overtones to its thudding stomp, while a number of the frenzied thrashabouts, like ‘Fail at Failure’, clocking in at 1’46”, and the 1’ 26” ‘Seagulls’ bear hints of Dead Kennedys, while ‘For the Greater Good’ lunges messily into Unsane territory, and there are a fair few tracks that clock in well under three minutes, with the longest song on the album being just 4’08” and no other songs being much over three-and-a-half minutes.

Cunts is fiery, shouty, fast and furious with the emphasis on the furious. Primally raw and brutally uncompromising, it’s harsh but vital, and punk at its best.

You could look at this from two different angles: one – some people never grow up. Two – some people never sell out. Cunts’ eponymous debut is the product of both simultaneously. The ‘snarling LA-based punk band’ features guitarist Michael Crain (Dead Cross/Retox) and singer Matt Cronk (Qui), with drummer Kevin Avery (Retox/Planet B), bass player Keith Hendriksen (Virginia Reed) and guitar player Sterling Riley (Hepa.Titus).

So they all have other projects, and so the fact Cunts will never achieve radio play or mainstream attention simply by virtue of being Cunts isn’t an issue. Then again, their other projects won’t achieve major-league success and radio play either, despite not being graced with a media-blackout moniker, meaning that none of them has anything to lose or gain here. So yeah, fuck it: Cunts are keeping it real and keeping it antagonistic, and forget being cynical, they’re doing this for the right reasons: they’ve got the rage. Rage used to be for the young, descending into the impotent bitterness of the cliché grumpy old man. But times have changed. Older, wiser, more furious and better equipped to articulate that rage, Cunts represent the new generation of over-40s who, rather than mellowing and settling into midlife, have all the anger and need to vent or suffer an aneurysm. These are the worst of times, and we live in a divided world.

This is proper old-school gnarly US hardcore punk shit, played at a hundred miles an hour, and if song titles like ‘Ass to Grind’ and ‘He’s a Lady’ carry distinctly un-PC connotations, the lyrics reveal the band as being on the right side of consideration for difference. They’re not afraid to venture into Unsane gore territory, but shock tactics aren’t entirely without merit in a desensitized society. There’s noting subtle about an of this, least of all the over art.

‘Goin’ Out West’ gets a bit Ministry, but with glammy / goth overtones to its thudding stomp, while a number of the frenzied thrashabouts, like ‘Fail at Failure’, clocking in at 1’46”, and the 1’ 26” ‘Seagulls’ bear hints of Dead Kennedys, while ‘For the Greater Good’ lunges messily into Unsane territory, and there are a fair few tracks that clock in well under three minutes, with the longest song on the album being just 4’08” and no other songs being much over three-and-a-half minutes.

Cunts is fiery, shouty, fast and furious with the emphasis on the furious. Primally raw and brutally uncompromising, it’s harsh but vital, and punk at its best.

AAA

Cunts