Posts Tagged ‘Folk’

A.L. Lacey – Lesson

Posted: 6 December 2023 in Albums
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Human Worth – 8th December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s only a bit of a brag – and a collateral one, at that – to say I’ve followed the Human Worth label since its inception. There’s a contextual reason to mention it, namely that while I’ve long raved about their being consistent in their selection of all things noisy, Human Worth isn’t a label with a ‘house’ style devoted to any one strain of music of an overdriven guitar nature. One need look no further than then recently-released angular indie noise-rock hybrid of Beige palace’s Making Sounds for Andy for evidence of that. It’s most definitely an ‘alternative’ record, in that it’s a million miles from the mainstream, but it’s not particularly noisy.

A. L. Lacey’s mid-bill placing on the label’s recent eight-act extravaganza in Leeds was an inspired one, as her graceful tunes provided the perfect respite from predominantly noisy guitar-based acts, and her performance set my level of anticipation for her album, Lesson.

It’s a landmark release for both Alice and Human Worth: having long established herself as a contributor to numerous acts in her locale of Bristol, Alice explains how “there was a frustrating sense of unfinished business. In that, my piano parts and ideas were being restricted to someone else’s’ vision – a vision which was often ‘less is more’ – a tasteful afterthought… A huge part of this project therefore became the need to challenge myself and to see what I could achieve or lessons I could learn, if I did things my own way – a bit of a journey towards autonomy – a predominant theme in most of my songs, along with finding purpose from confusion, and strength in your weaknesses.”

Lesson, then, is Lacey’s statement of identity, as she steps out from the shadows of other people’s work to present herself and her own musical ideas. And what’s striking is just how eclectic the album’s nine songs are.

‘Sewn’ opens up with rolling piano propelled by a vintage drum machine sound that’s pure late 70s/early 80s. But if this evokes the lo-fi sparseness and simplicity of Young Marble Giants, her vocals, swathed in reverb and strong yet delicate, are equal parts folk and shoegaze. And yet for all these elements, Lacey creates a maximal expansiveness with minimal instrumentalism. With swells of energy, it’s a soaring, uplifting piece, which hooks the listener immediately into the unique world she conjures with her magical fingers and tuneful voice.

It paves the way for eight further slices of creatively crafted musicality that combines elements of neoclassical, folk, and experimentalism. ‘Complaint’ is exemplary: the instrumentation is sparse, subtle, a soft wash of thrumming, droning synths underpinned by an insistent but understated beat. Incidental sounds weave in and out, creating depth, while Lacey’s multi-tracked voice is simultaneously trad folky and otherworldly.

There’s an energy and pace to many of the songs on Lesson which are far from the kind of bland, plodding fare common to many singer-songwriter types: ‘Memo’ may be but a brief note, but has the vintage pop vibes of Stereolab as it breezes on through and makes its mark. Elsewhere, the title track is wistful, swooning, without being remotely twee, and ‘Home’ brings post-rock dramatics to the proceedings. Bold yet understated, ‘Paper’ is worthy of all the airplay, and would sit comfortably on soundtracks and being performed at arena shows alike, being accessible, easy on the ear, hooky, emotive, and –

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Perhaps because she’s been doing this for a lot longer than the arrival of a debut would imply, Alice’s accomplishment as both a musician and a composer shine through every moment of this spellbinding collection of songs: the attention to detail the nuances of the playing and the production only accentuate the multi-faceted qualities of her songwriting and performance. It all adds up to a uniquely special album.

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Mari Boine – Gula Gula – H​ø​r Stamm​ø​drenes Stemme

Posted: 5 December 2023 in Albums
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By Norse Music – 1st December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

First released in 1989, Gula Gula was Mari Boine’s second album proved to be her breakthrough, earning her a Norwegian Grammy award and providing the gateway to a career which continues over thirty years later as an international voice for the Sámi peoples. The album, originally self-released, would later come to the attention of Peter Gabriel, who would release it worldwide on his label Real World Records in 1993. But 1993 was twenty years ago already, and there are many – including myself – who will be unacquainted with this album, or even Boine’s work. This reissue comes with the added bonus of two previously unreleased tracks from the Gula Gula studio sessions which were only recently discovered.

That the songs of Gula Gula are primarily sung in the Northern Sámi language is both unusual and significant, being key to what her bio described as ‘the fight of preserving the culture of the Norwegian Sami people and the natural world. Two matters that lie close to Mari’s heart and are still threatened to this day. The indigenous people have a wisdom that says that the earth is our mother, and if she is harmed, we are harming ourselves.’

These feel more salient now than ever, as we witness the effects of global climate change and a world riven with cultural conflicts whereby dominant cultures continue to oppress and obliterate older, indigenous cultures in the name of ‘progress’ – as if the most brutal applications of capitalism are the only way. This album’s reissue happens to land in the same week that Israel resumed its onslaught to decimate the whole of Gaza in the name of defending itself against a minority terrorist organisation, while the UK government slammed down some truly brutal plans to slash immigration under the premise of benefiting the economy. This determination to stamp out difference is diabolical, but somehow accepted as reasonable by many. But in taking such destructive paths, it should be apparent that the harm goes far deeper and wider than the claimed intent. Similarly, those who vent their ire against the likes of Just Stop Oil and XR for employing methods which are disruptive and argue that these methods turn people off from their message are missing the point that a) non-disruptive protest hasn’t achieved anything like enough b) there should be no debate when it comes to their message. What they’re objecting to, then, ultimately, is that these protesters are trying to force them to face uncomfortable truths. The saddest fact is that those objecting to the protests don’t give a fuck and just want to get on with driving their SUVs to the McDonald’s drive-thru.

So, at the heart of Mari Boine’s songs is a certain tension which may not always be immediately apparent from their melodic musicality, especially if you’re not fluent in Northern Sámi. For that, you can be forgiven, and whether or not you’re versant in the sociopolitical aspects of their context, it’s easy to appreciate the music on a more superficial level.

The songs of Gula Gula are quite simply arranged, and are, fundamentally, manifestations of folk music. But while the instrumentation is predominantly acoustic, and serves to provide a backing to Mari’s voice, which while always melodic, shows at times a stirring degree of ferocity and passion, as on ‘Vilges Suola’ while the piano-led ‘Eadnán Bákti’ is a soft ballad. ‘It Šat Duolmma Mu’ brings both raw power and some intricate musicianship melded to a thumping subterranean groove.

‘Oppskrift for Herrefolk’ (‘Recipe for a Master Race’) finds Mari singing in Norwegian on the album’s most overtly political song. Musically, it marks something of a departure, too, with a screeching 80s rock guitar solo slicing through the trilling folksiness. It’s almost as if it’s there to reinforce a point. And it works. It’s worth considering for a moment that there are places where such a song could lead to arrest, and worse. This isn’t to say that the Sámi have it easy, but to highlight the fact that these struggles are real and often go widely unreported, unacknowledged, the voices unheard.

Whether taken in, or out, of context, Gula Gula is an enchanting and powerful album.

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Golden Vampire Experience – Polaris

Posted: 8 October 2023 in Albums
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Erototox Decodings

Christopher Nosnibor

Internationally, Kristof Hahn is best known as a member of Swans since their return in 2010, contributing electric guitar to My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky and everything since (he was briefly a Swan in the late 80s and early 90s, becoming a touring member for The Burning World and appearing on White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and subsequently joining Gira’s Angels of Light. A lot has happened since then: My Father Will Guide Me was only forty-four minutes in total, whereas now they’ve evolved to have single tracks of that duration, and Hahn’s contribution on recent albums and tours has been lap steel. Witnessing his action on the last tour, while standing so close to him I could actually see the mud spattered around the ankles of his jeans, the significance of his contribution to the immense walls of noise the band create is clearly apparent. I’ve also been vaguely amuse by just how neat and dapper his presentation is, producing a comb to slick his hair back following particularly strenuous crescendos – although I also witnessed him taking said comb to the strings of his instrument in Leeds to yield some particularly unholy noise from an instrument more commonly associated with laid-back twangin’ country tunes.

What’s perhaps less widely known is that Kristof has enjoyed a lengthy career in music before joining Swans, as both a solo artist and a member of rockabilly garage acts The Legendary Golden Vampires, founded in 1981, and The Nirvana Devils (circa 1984). It’s with the former he’s back flexing his creative muscles despite an intense touring schedule with Swans.

Here, the Berlin-based core duo of filmmaker Olaf Kraemer (vox) and Kristof Hahn (guitars, organ, harmonica), reunited for the first time in many years, are joined by Thomas Wydler (drums), Achim Färber (also drums), and Chandra Shukla (sitar), to cook up a collection of ten songs.

The style is understated, country-leaning, occasionally folksy, with an underlying melancholy hue, with ‘Wohin Du Gehst’ crossing the language barrier to convey a low-level ache of sadness in its tone. Kraemer’s vocals are husky, almost croony, with hints of Mark Lanegan, and suit the low-key compositions well, conveying emotion and world-wearinness and a certain sense of sagacity, which is nowhere more apparent than on ‘White Horse Blues’.

If the reverby guitars of their Husker Dü’s ‘She Floated Away’ channels Chris Isaak, the song’s incongruously jaunty twist is in the vein of fellow German duo St Michael Front, while ‘The Rain’ is sparse and hypnotic and wouldn’t sound out of place on True Detective. The melancholy Leonard Cohen-esque ‘Sad Song’ speaks for itself, quite literally, self-referentially returning to the hook ‘this is such a sad song / and I sing it just for you’.

Discussing the songwriting ‘craft’ on an album feels pretentious and a bit wanky, but making songs this sparse – but also this layered – is a true example of crafting. Having mentioned Leonard Cohen previously, one thing that’s often overlooked is just how many incidental details there are on many of Cohen’s songs: The Songs of Leonard Cohen in particular is , on the face of it, acoustic guitar and voice, but there’s much more happening in the background, coming in and out of the mix, and this is something that comes through in attentive listening to Polaris. It’s subtle, keeping the overall sound quite minimal, but the attention to detail is what really makes it special.

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Grails – The Burden of Hope (reissue)

Posted: 25 September 2023 in Albums
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Neurot Recordings – 29th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

I’m finding myself on something of a Neurot trip this week, following my fervent frothing over the mighty new album by Great Falls. As if to prove that the label has been putting out outstanding records for a very long time (and with unstinting singularity, presenting a broad stylistic range, too: this is anything but heavy), twenty years on from its original release, Grails’ debut is getting a reissue. While the nice coloured vinyl pressings (in ‘Coke bottle clear’ and ‘beer’ hues) aren’t necessarily for everyone, the release does afford a timely opportunity to reflect on the debut release of a band who have gone on to forge a significant and varied career, with their latest album – number eight – being released next month.

Steve Von Till’s comments about hearing the demo for the album, on which the offer of’ the release was made, reminds us of the musical landscape of the time in 2002: ‘Most instrumental music at the time was trying to emulate Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Mogwai, but this was different. This seemed to have elements from more diverse sources that I loved such as Dirty Three, Comus, Richard Thompson, and Neil Young, not to mention, who in hell would dare to cover Sun City Girls?’

There was a lot of instrumental post rock around, and while there was a wealth of great bands around, locally as well as nationally and internationally, it’s fair to say that a large proportion of it was much of a muchness, with myriad explorations of chiming guitars and slow-building crescendos.

The prominence of acoustic guitars, softly picked and strummed, and rather unconventional use of violin creates an unusual dynamic on these compositions, which tend to be sparse in arrangement and with considerable space between both the instruments and the individual notes, and the crescendos are few and far between – the first doesn’t arrive until over halfway through the third track, the slow, meandering ‘The Deed’, when the swell of guitar pushes upward through yawning strings and finally the full drum kit crashes in. But the impact is less from whacking on the gain on the instruments, but the musicians utilising the dynamics of playing, and the simple equation that playing harder is louder. Against the prevailing tide of pedal boards as big as drum risers packed with effects, this stands out as being not only very different, but bold, the emphasis on the tones and timbres of the instruments in unadulterated form, the sounds the result of technique.

The soft piano of ‘In the Beginning’, when paired with picked guitar has an almost pastoral feel; the heavy smack of a drum feels incongruous before a soft yet almost clumsy waltz emerges briefly, and structurally, the pieces seem to belong more to jazz than anything else, although ‘Space Prophet Dogon’ (the Sun City Girls cover) draws together elements of Celtic-influenced folk and psychedelia, and goes for a long toe-tapping groove over a crescendo by way of an extended climax. It takes a certain courage to fly in the face of fashion in such an obtuse fashion, as well as to play in such an intimate way that you can hear the sweep of a finger across a fret, where natural reverberations become as integral to the sound as the notes themselves. This is nowhere more apparent than on the hyperpsarce intro of ‘Broken Ballad’, a sedate almost country-tinged tune and one of the album’s more conventionally-shaped pieces. The slowly-unfurling ‘White Flag’ shares a certain common ground with later releases by Earth: slow, spacious, revolving around a simple, picked guitar motif, but it does swing into an exhilarating full band finale that’s different again.

Closer ‘Canyon Hymn,’ presumably a reference to Laurel Canyon, the name of the and when they recorded the demos which would become The Burden of Hope, is by no means an anthem or a theme, but encapsulates all aspects of the album’s range within a soothing five minutes. If the title, The Burden of Hope, implies a certain weight of responsibility, the music it contains sees that hope take wings. Twenty years on, The Burden of Hope sounds uplifting, and still fresh.

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Me Lost Me – RPG

Posted: 9 July 2023 in Albums
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Upset The Rhythm – 7th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Personal confession: I’ve had a tough few months. No, I don’t really want to talk about it, but the name of Newcastle-based artist Jayne Dent’s musical vehicle is one which resonates – because the fact is, it’s easy to lose sight of yourself, especially when under stress, especially when under pressure, especially when dealing with difficult circumstances.

Yes: me lost me, albeit briefly, meaning the moniker s relatable. But you have to get lost to get found, and without fail, at least in my experience, music has a remarkable capacity to have a positive effect on one’s mental state.

If old favourites may offer solace, discovering new music can often prove cleansing, as you approach it fresh and without association, and because you’re engaging and exploring instead of retriggering recollections as with music that’s familiar (I find listening to music I know well is only half-listening while my fills the gaps, and I suppose that’s part of the appeal: it’s easier and less demanding when you know every word and exactly what’s coming next, than grappling with something, and familiarity is comforting. But the challenge of the new seems to run through different neural pathways, and in paying attention to something, your focus turns to that something instead of idly looping over those forefront throughs you’re seeking respite from.

I suppose it’s the same reason people enjoy and become rather obsessed with Role-Playing Games, or RPG: they offer an escapism that the passivity of TV or movies don’t. While I’m not a fan myself – having reluctantly dabbled with Dungeons and Dragons, I found it slow and contrived and it simply didn’t grip me – but I get it. I get it. What I get more is the tension which runs through this album, the fourth from Me Lost Me, which started out as a tentative solo project before subsequently expanding to a collective. What I get are the themes, as set out on the accompanying notes:

‘Hauntological in part, RPG is concerned with tales and with time – are we running out of it? Does insomnia cause a time loop? Do the pressures of masculinity prevent progress? Jayne Dent asks these questions and more on RPG, her homage to worldbuilding and the story as an artform, calling back to those oral traditions around a campfire, as well as modern day video games – bringing folk music into the present day as she does so.’

It certainly feels as if we’re running out of time, and an exponentially-accelerating pace. We’re recording the hottest global temperatures on record and are looking like going the way of the dinosaurs not long after the whole of Lincolnshire – our largest county for domestic agriculture, which sits several feet below sea level – is reclaimed by the waves, turning Boston and its stump into the Atlantis of the 21st Century, yet our government is more preoccupied with ‘stopping the boats’ and painting over murals that might look a bit ‘too welcoming’ to asylum-seeking children than stopping oil and fracking. Once again, as I type, I’m hot and flustered and short on breath. In this context, ‘Heat’, released a few weeks ago, hits the mark. We’re on a collision course with the end of days. RPG explores – in its own way – this end of days anxiety.

‘What things have you seen in real life and thought that’s not real, that’s like a video game?’ Those are the words of the sample which open the album, on the hypnotic collage that is ‘Real World’. It got me thinking: what have I seen? Truth is, simply turning on the news seems unreal these days: every day there’s something that makes you think ‘you couldn’t make this shit up.’

‘Festive Day’ exploits traditional folk instrumentation with spartan strings, plucked and scraped, and drones, and there’s an ‘old’ vibe to it, particularly with Dent’s lilting vocals, which occasionally soar magnificently as she sings of sand and sea. ‘Mirie it is While Summer I Last’ is pure folk, an acapella round of traditional-sounding folk that would be perfectly as home on a Steeleye Span album, and instrumentation on ‘The God of Stuck Time’ is minimal – but there are warping electronics and contemporary issues strewn through the lyrics, not least of all in the refrain of. ‘Checking in again / Checking Out’. It speaks of the world we live in.

Where RPG succeeds is in that is doesn’t moor itself to any one form or period: ancient an modern, sparse folk and fractured electronica alternate and sometimes collide: ‘The Oldest Trees Hold the Earth’ is magnificent in its simplicity, its earthiness, and Jayne’s voice is magnificent. It evokes the spirituality of the centuries when alone or with minimal accompaniment, but when backed by electronica or more jazz-leaning backing, it also works, as an instrument and as a carrier for the words, which cover considerable ground, both ancient and modern.

RPG sounds pretty, but it’s serious and it’s quite dark in places – but it also traces the contours of landscapes past and present with a lightness of touch that’s uplifting. With so much texture, detail, and atmosphere, this is an album that’s subtly moving, and there isn’t a moment that’s predictable here as it veers between folk, electronica, ambient, and abstract noise. Lose yourself in it.

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Guerrilla Miner – Sounds from Underground

Posted: 20 June 2023 in Albums
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skoghall rekordings – 19th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

This was originally released some time ago, and now it’s getting a digital release and a CD reprint once the last of the old stock is gone, and it’s the first release on Dave Procter’s new label, skoghall rekordings, which he’s set up to home non-noise material which doesn’t sit comfortably with the remit of his Dret Skivor label. If I didn’t know better, I’d think this guy had mastered cloning, given the release and touring schedule of his myriad musical projects, the range of which is vast – although it’s fair to say that anything involving words will be a politically-charged vehicle for reminding us how shit governments, right-wingers and tabloid media are, and how capitalism shafts the workers without whom there would be no wealth for the elite. And so it is with Sounds from Underground.

‘Justice for the 95’ say the notes accompanying this release, some of the proceeds of which are being donated to the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign.

Memories are short, even among those who live through momentous events in recent history, and the miner’s strike of 1984-85 was one of those. It wasn’t simply a strike like we’re seeing with… most sectors right now, in what feels almost like a replay off the early 80s… the handling of the strikes was tantamount to civil war, the (Tory) government against the workers and the unions. The 95 then, refers to the 95 arrested at the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’ in South Yorkshire in June 1984, but all charges were dropped. As the BBC reports, ‘Police confronted pickets outside a coking plant in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, in what the miners said was a military-style operation to attack them… Former miner Kevin Horne said: “We were only striking for the right to work.”’

This is by no means the first musical work which focuses on the miner’s strikes: Test Department’s 1985 LP Shoulder to Shoulder, with South Wales Striking Miners’ Choir was released as a fundraiser, while ‘Statement’ from 1986’s The Unacceptable Face of Freedom is centred around a recorded statement detailing the brutality of the policing of the picket lines: ‘25 pickets… 150 policemen… I was dragged off to this van… another one had me in a headlock… I thought I was going to black out…’ It’s a harrowing account, and one which seems as relevant now as ever given the current government’s expansion of police powers, promoting greater use of stop and search, and the police’s ‘management’ of events like Sarah Everard’s vigil. It’s all too reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange.

As the accompanying notes outline, ‘This LP documents coal mining in all its forms – the pride of the job, the struggles of the job and the occasional deaths because of the job. A lot of my family were coal miners and most of them died from lung disease before their time.’

Yes, the miners got fucked every which way, and while the twelve acoustic-based songs on Sounds from Underground may not be as visceral or hard-hitting as some of Test Department’s works, they’re truly heartfelt. And that registers, emotionally.

While ‘Fiddler’s Ferry’ is a simple and wistful song that would perhaps class a s a sad protest song, the super-sparse ‘Macgregor th’ butcher’ is heartaching in its mood and the simple narrative. Similarly, ‘At the Face’ is simple and tells of the everyday realities of mining life – and the physical toll on those men who grafted and grafted, until death. It would be easy to romanticise the northern accent and barely-held melodies, but the fact is, it works because it’s real, and ultimately sounds like The Wedding Present covering Billy Bragg, if you need a comparison.

‘Me, A Picket Line’ and ‘Horse’s Arse’ are straight-up spoken word pieces, and perhaps the album’s most affecting tracks, because they’re so direct, the latter in particular, echoing as it does the narrative of Test Department’s ‘Statement’. But ‘Horse’s Arse’ references 2016, and you realise, nothing changes, and while sometimes things are reported and there is outcry and uproar, so often, events are ignored out of existence, and the narrative becomes skewed, rigged. But mention that and you’re a conspiracy nut, of course – more often than not dismissed by the conspiracy nuts. ‘Tory Twat’ is self-explanatory, and getting straight to the point.

And this is perhaps where we can see how Guerrilla Miner and Test Department share common ground, beyond subject matter: as much as they’re both political – because this is political, and it’s impossible to avoid or deny that this has a heavily political aspect – they’re both ultimately concerned with the human aspects of the miners’ strikes, and this in turn reminds us that the current strikes, too, are about people and their livelihoods. You will see reported, time and again, the government vilifying the striking workers for the disruptive impact of their industrial action. But any a striking worker will tell you that striking is a last resort, the only way to be heard when all avenues have failed, and if strikes are disruptive to consumers, they’re even more so to those striking. And it’s rarely simply over pay, but also conditions: and at the heart of it all lies capitalist exploitation, and such exploitation shortens and destroys lives, placing profit before people. And this is what really hurts.

Sounds from Underground is direct, real, human, affecting and ultimately sad. Listen, learn, and do everything within our power to stop history from repeating again, and again.

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Weekend Recovery – Esoteric

Posted: 8 June 2023 in Albums
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Criminal Records – 9th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It may just be something I muse over, but there’s a question of what level is a band’s ceiling – at what point the potential they seem to offer meets with the reality of the fanbase they actually manage to build. Weekend Recover are one of those bands who have long seemed to have hovered on the cusp of breaking through without ever quite going over the line. These things are 10% songs and quality, and 90% luck. So many great bands never reach the audience they deserve. Graft will get you do far, but it’s more about being in the right place at the right time than anything else. Weekend Recovery graft life fuck, and seem determined to make their luck.

The thing with Weekend Recovery is that, while they do have a relatively small but seriously hardcore faithful fanbase, they’ve been prone to change their sound and lineup as often as Lori changes her hair. The stylistic changes are likely consequence of the band’s inner turbulence as much as anything else, but artistically, this is a positive thing: they never stay still, never settle into a comfortable rut, and are always challenging themselves. But the downside to this is that a lot of music listeners are averse to change and like bands to give them something familiar, more of the same. Yes, they like to pigeonhole. Since female-fronted is not a genre, what are they, exactly, apart from a guitar band?

It seemed like they’d already been around forever by the time of the release of their debut album in 2018, having evolved from Katy Perry meets Paramour poppy alt-rock into an altogether grittier, rawer, trashy punk act in the process. Their signing to Criminal Records marked the next step in their reaching a wider audience, garnering more airplay and a busy live schedule found them not only playing to fuller venues, but also scoring support slots with the likes of Starcrawler. The fact they’ve already sold nine of the ten test press vinyl copies at a hundred quid a pop a week before release speaks for itself, at least in terms of their fans’ dedication. But what about building a broader base?

Stepping up venue size to headline The Corporation in their (current) hometown of Sheffield just before Christmas, followed by a sold out show at The Leadmill probably answers the question, at least in part, and having landed themselves on global playlists on Apple, Deezer and YouTube has no doubt been a factor.

Esoteric answers the question in full. It is not more of the same, not least of all with Lori’s greater use of spoken / sprechgesang passages, but does feel like less of a leap from its predecessor, at least in musical terms. That’s probably attributable largely to the fact that this has been their longest-standing lineup in memory, and the fact Dan and Callum make for an outstandingly solid rhythm section. Having a secure home on Criminal Records no doubt also helps. That doesn’t mean that Esoteric is a ‘safe’ record, a blanket and slippers affair, but it’s the sound of a band who have finally found some stability and have been able to concentrate on the job of writing and recording songs instead of juggling a load of distracting peripheral shit like ‘crap, we need to find a bassist’.

There are things I’m unsure of here: the album’s title being a leading one. Meaning ‘obscure’, and commonly referring to specialist, even secret, knowledge only understood by a few, what are they saying here? It’s a title I’d likely associate with some mystical drone or doom band rather than an uptempo rock trio. Is there something subliminal hidden in the lyrics or in the album’s very grooves? I don’t get any great sense of any of this from songs like ‘In the Crowd’, with lines like ‘We’re going in the crowd / it’s getting very loud’. It’s one of those songs that while it may – does – work live with some crowd buzz and energy to drive it along, recorded and out of context, it just sounds rather lame, not to mention pretty daft. It’s an affliction that troubles any bands when they reach a certain status, namely the point at which band life detaches them from real life, and so band life becomes the subject of the songs, with the effect being that in an instant, they stop speaking to and for us, and instead for themselves only. And when a band who articulated what you felt stop doing that, you’re left bereft. And then there all of the woo-hoo choruses and line-fillers. It’s something I see and hear increasingly, so perhaps that’s an aspect of contemporary songwriting I’m not down with, and an indication that Weekend Recovery are bang on the zeitgeist. Perhaps that’s why they’re getting more radio play.

Esoteric balances the grungy, guitar-driven style with the slick, radio-friendly alt-rock of their early years, and kicks off with lead single cut ‘Chemtrails’. Again, there are questions. Growing up, I knew them as vapour trails, before learning the term ‘contrails’. And then they became a source of anxiety as a popular theme on ‘the Internets’ before Lana Del Rey solidified things with her seventh album, Chemtrails over the Country Club. But this is a song about confusion and overload: ‘the waves are slowly sending me insane’ Lori hollers over a choppy instrumental backing that straddles punk and new wave. What to believe in? Who to believe? The world in which we find ourselves is enough to drive anyone insane, and insanity is the only sane response to an insane world.

The production is definitely their smoothest yet, and it’s very clear: the guitar is dense, but it’s backed off and is very much mid-rangey and there’s a lot less bitey distortion, and this is evidenced in the rerecorded version of ‘No Guts All the Glory’. This is, without doubt, the song that will likely be their anthem: it’s catchy, it’s ballsy, it’s tight, you can sing along and mosh to it, and it’s got broad relatability. But then there’s no shortage of meaty tunes along the way: ‘Dangerous’ brings urgent post-punk of an early 80s vintage with hints of Siouxsie and the Banshees to the party, while ‘I Don’t Like You Anyway’ pairs a low-slung bass and pummelling drum with some sinewy guitars and a stomping chorus, and there’s an offhand sneer to the verse that’s next-level nonchalance. Then there’s ‘The Knife’ which is one of those anthems of hurt that people can relate to and invest in, and if ‘Her’ is, on the face of it, a folksy ballad, it’s a fair bit more than that if you tune into the lyrics.

And perhaps this, this is the secret wisdom: the secret to unlocking the potential that’s been there all along. The songs on Esoteric feel more evolved, more fully formed, and the switches between melodic hooks and bursts of anger and energy give them an exciting dynamic. For all of the poppiness, there’s some real darkness, and some weight, too. The songwriting across the set is more consistent, too, and when bolstered by the production, it all seems to have really come together here.

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Watch: ‘Older Than The Gods’ by Hexvessel

Posted: 26 May 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Finland’s Hexvessel return on 22nd September (Svart Records) with their sixth album, Polar Veil, a cold, metallic hymn to the Sub Arctic North. Haunted by primal forest spirits, Mat “Kvohst” McNerney summons the ghosts of his past in a jaw-dropping, unheard-of rebirth of style and sound. At once unmistakably Hexvessel, Polar Veil is also steeped in the nocturnal atmosphere of McNerney’s past, churned in the cauldron of Black Metal, Ritual Folk Psychedelia and Doom Rock, and echoing with shivering Gothic undertones.

From their inception in 2009, Hexvessel, created by Mat McNerney as what he described to Decibel Magazine as “a free spiritual journey and a musical odyssey with no boundaries”, have captivated audiences and listeners with their evolution.

Holed up in a home-made studio in his log cabin during the winter of 2022, McNerney drew on all the fundamental elements of his music career as a shamanic shapeshifter, with only the isolation of nature’s solitude as inspiration. Painting an aura with Polar Veil which resonates with solitary reflection and themes of personal spiritual transcendence, Hexvessel’s new album is a bold statement from an artist who continues to reinvent and explore nature mysticism through music.

“Nature represents freedom, darkness and the call of the wild. Black Metal has always been at the borders of my sound and playing, at the heart of everything I do. Tradition, nature, ritual, mythology, mysticism and philosophy, along with clashing and jarring chords have always been synonymous with Hexvessel. It was natural with Polar Veil, finally now as we reach the zenith of the journey, that these influences surface to the human ear, and with the freezing cold guitar sound that the climate here demands.”

A track such as ‘Crepuscular Creatures’, with unhinged, discordant guitar chords, as bassist Ville Hakonen’s hand snakes up and down the frets, is at the more avant-garde end of the album. Long term drummer Jukka Rämänen thundering the toms like never before, as McNerney croons Scott Walker-esque lyrics, somewhere between Edith Södergran and Ted Hughes.

Whereas ‘Listen To The River’ with its ominous M.R James/Folk Horror lyrics of perilous environmental warning, featuring Ben Chisholm main collaborator and multi-instrumentalist with Chelsea Wolfe on lush, haunting keys and strings, could have appeared on Hexvessel’s sophomore album No Holier Temple, albeit with a sound of that era, progressing out of Folk.

Polar Veil features Nameless Void from Negative Plane, performing the guitar solo on the song ‘Ring’ and on ‘Older Than The Gods’, Okoi from Bølzer provides guest vocals. At first an unlikely partnership but one that makes total sense as the album deepens, and threads can be drawn that reveal the place Polar Veil is coming from.

On the process of recording Polar Veil, McNerney explains:

“I built a studio at home in the log hut on our field, surrounded by large trees, called Pine Hill, to escape from everything and everyone. Polar Veil is what a spiritual home sounds like.”

When the components of the medicine are familiar but brewed in a completely novel concoction, the resulting side effects can be deliriously intoxicating. Peer behind this Polar Veil for a breath of fresh tundra air with the video for Hexvessel’s new single ‘Older Than The Gods’. Watch it here:

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Watch: ‘Festive Day’ by Me Lost Me

Posted: 26 April 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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ME LOST ME shares the video for ‘Festive Day’, from her upcoming album, RPG (due 7th July via Upset The Rhythm). A selection of dates in support of Richard Dawson throughout May have also been announced, more details below.

Songwriter Jayne Dent comments on the track;

“’Festive Day’ is a song about being overcome by intense sensory experiences, of nature, the elements and desire. It’s inspired by spending a midsummer festival in Denmark, when the huge bonfires lit along the coast stayed alight through torrential rain and dense sea fog, which left a massive sensory impression on me. It’s about the coming together of all these elemental forces, feeling connected to this seasonal ritual, and connecting it to the English folk traditions around the same time of year, explored in May carols and similar songs, which often celebrate desire, lust and love alongside celebrations of nature and the land. The music video is an overload of artefacts, it’s fast paced and intense in terms of the editing but I wanted to contrast the emotional intensity of the song by framing it almost as an archive or museum of the future, that is documenting folk traditions and trying to reconstruct them and understand them, but missing that vital emotional component. I worked with folk musician and dancer Mark Insley, who choreographed a dance in the Cotswold Morris tradition, to be featured as part of the music video, and made handkerchiefs in the Morris style featuring elemental symbols.”

Watch the video here:

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A prolific writer, ME LOST ME has released two crowdfunded albums: Arcana (2018) and The Good Noise (2020), which was included in Electronic Sound Magazine’s Album of the Year list. These in addition to her latest EP The Circle Dance (2021), which was described as “her most textural and sonically adventurous music to date” by NARC Magazine, and an extensive touring schedule around the UK DIY scene, has won her unique sound much support across the musical spectrum. Dent has notably performed live for BBC Radio 3’s After Dark Festival and as part of the 2022 BBC Proms alongside Spell Songs, Royal Northern Sinfonia and the Voices of the Rivers Edge Choir. She recently received the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Composers and was 2020-2021 Artist in Residence at Sage Gateshead.

ME LOST ME LIVE DATES:
03/05 – The Gate Arts Centre, Cardiff, UK w/ Richard Dawson – tickets

04/05 – St George’s Bristol, Bristol, UK w/ Richard Dawson – tickets

05/05 – Barbican, London, UK w/ Richard Dawson – tickets

06/05 – The Bradshaw Hall, Birmingham Conservatoire, UK w/ Richard Dawson – tickets

07/06 – London – EartH Theatre w/ Xiu Xiu

30/06 – Hyper Inverter Festival, Ulverston, UK

15/07 – The Lubber Fiend, Newcastle, UK (ALBUM LAUNCH)

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Photo credit: Amelia Read Photography

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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