Posts Tagged ‘Heavy’

Watch: ‘The Killing Joke’ by Gutslit

Posted: 19 June 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Indian deathgrinders Gutslit will release their anticipated third full-length, Carnal, on 7 July physically (vinyl, CD) and digitally.

In their over 15-year journey, Gutslit has transcended their status as a mere household name in the Indian metal scene to a global force to be reckoned with, showcasing their technical prowess and brutal riffs on two critically acclaimed full-length albums. The Mumbai-based quartet has embarked on independent tours globally and left audiences in awe with their intense live performances. Their meteoric rise has been further validated by the endorsements they have received from some of the world’s top musical instrument brands, cementing their status as a highly professional and internationally acclaimed band.

Gutslit’s untamed musical prowess, razor-sharp precision, and blisteringly fast songs earned them the distinction of being hailed as the finest and filthiest band in the Indian metal scene. Their formidable sound is a testament to their versatility in adapting various styles of death metal and grindcore, which is showcased by their pulverizing riffs, pummeling blasts, vicious bass grooves, and horrendous gutturals. The intent has always been to push the boundaries of the extreme metal genre.

Gutslit’s latest offering, Carnal, is an explosive follow-up to their 2017 album Amputheatre. With eight crushing numbers, the album showcases the band’s evolution in sound, smoldering and surging with violent energy. The album was mixed and mastered by Mark Lewis (The Black Dahlia Murder, Whitechapel) and produced by Prateek Rajagopal (The Book of Boba Fett, Creed 3), with artwork by Kidsquidy. Notably, Carnal marks the return of Aditya Barve (Skewered in the Sewer) on vocals and features guest vocals by Julien Truchan (Benighted) on the track “Bind Torture Kill.”

Ahead of the album, they’ve released a video for ther track ‘The Killing Joke’. Watch it here:

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Divide and Dissolve – Systemic

Posted: 16 June 2023 in Albums
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Invada Records – 30th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

You know what? This never gets tired. I started reviewing live stuff in the 90s, but it wasn’t until 2008 I started receiving albums for review. Receiving albums ahead of release was a big deal back then: it made me feel somehow special. Advance promos probably meant something more then, on reflection. They would be, more likely than not., a single CD – or even a single-track CD – and my objective would be to get my review out ahead of, well, as many people as possible. It wasn’t so much about generating buzz as feeling a buzz.

I miss the steady drip of CDs and vinyl through the letterbox, although am coming to accept that space is an issue here, and if the endless bombardment of emails with downloads and streams sometimes – often – feels overwhelming, with up to fifty review submissions a day, when I clock a release I’ve been getting excited about well before time, the buzz still hits.

The way albums are released now isn’t quite the same, either: time was when there would be a single or two ahead of release, there’d be reviews and then the album would arrive and you’d have to buy it to hear it. Now, singles aren’t really singles and half the album’s been released on various streaming platforms along with a bunch of lyric videos and ‘visualisers’ (that’s one for another time). But having only slipped out a couple of tracks in a relatively low-key fashion in April and May, this landing in my inbox to download ahead of release, gave me a genuine buzz.

Gas Lit, released in 2021, was a powerful, album on so many levels. As they put it, the album was their ‘fight for Indigenous Sovereignty, Black and Indigenous Liberation, Water, Earth, and Indigenous land given back.’. The Australian duo make music with meaning, and do so with passion and sonic force.

How often do we hear recently that the failings were systemic? Systemic failings in the NHS led to deaths, and systemic failings in the schooling system resulted in kids committing suicide, systemic failings in vetting and so on has resulted in a culture of racism and misogyny in the MET police… daily, we hear or read news about systemic issues. And we know, we know the system is fucked. Not merely flawed: fucked.

And on fourth album Systemic, Divide and Dissolve examine ‘the systems that intrinsically bind us and calls for a system that facilitates life for everyone. It’s a message that fits with the band’s core intention: to make music that honours their ancestors and Indigenous land, to oppose white supremacy, and to work towards a future of Black and Indigenous liberation.’

“This music is an acknowledgement of the dispossession that occurs due to colonial violence,” says Takiaya Reed, saxophonist and guitarist in Divide and Dissolve. “The goal of the colonial project is to separate Indigenous people from their culture, their life force, their community and their traditions. The album is in direct opposition to this.”

Divide and Dissolve represent a people for whom the system hasn’t failed: it was always pitched against them, and succeeded in stripping Indigenous people of everything. What kind of system is it where this brutal debasement is a success? A capitalist one, of course.

Systemic certainly isn’t a flimsy pop record, then. But it is inherently listenable and does unashamedly incorporate pop elements, and this dynamic only serves to heighten its sonic power.

‘Want’ lulls us into a false sense of tranquillity, a looping motif pulsating over grand drones: it’s quite pleasant, even. And then ‘Blood Quantum’ hits: after a delicate, supple chamber-pop intro, the guitars crash in and it’s like a tidal wave. It’s a slow-stomping riff that grinds hard, and the textures are thick and rich.

The setup is simple, and the guitar and drum combo has become increasingly popular in recent years – but for all of its limitations, it also has considerable versatility, and Divide and Dissolve exploit and push those parameters by exploring the interplay between the two instruments when played slow and heavy and at high volume. And so it is that without words, their songs convey so much.

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Photo by Yatri Niehaus

There’s almost something of a Duane Eddy / Western twang to ‘Simulacra’ before it explodes in a thrashing flurry of distortion and pummelling percussion. But for all the sludge-laden noise of ‘Reproach’, there is a grace and beauty about it, too, and this is what differentiates Divide and Dissolve from their myriad ‘heavy’ contemporaries: they imbue their songs with a palpable emotional depth. ‘Indignation’ begins with trilling woodwind, and possesses a wistful, aching jazz vibe before the thunderous deluge of guitar and drums heaps in. Featuring a spoken word recital from Minori Sanchez-Fung, ‘Kindgom of Fear’ is the only one of the album’s nine tracks to feature vocals: it’s a more minimal musical work which allows the words to stand to the fore, supplementing them with atmosphere and adding further variety and contrast to the album, notably ahead of the ragged riffery of ‘Omnipotent’.

The tranquil strings of ‘Desire’ provide the perfect bookend to stand opposite ‘Want’, and their synonymity is highlighted in this way. To want, to desire, something – something back – seems reasonable, should not need so much fight… but while there is the need to fight, Divide and Dissolve make protest music. It may not be protest music in the way many of us recognise it, but slogans and punk and folk are tired and worn, and on Systemic, Divide and Dissolve speak in their own strong and powerful way.

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Antania – Lividity

Posted: 12 June 2023 in Albums
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9th June 2023

Christopher Noosnibor

The fascination with true crime has exploded in the last decade, and it’s hard to know what to make of it. Some true crime documentaries, like Making a Murderer and even The Staircase (the 2018 one, that is) have been hard-hitting and ultimately compelling. But then the dramatisations of not only The Staircase, but also David Tennant playing Dennis Nilsen, feel like perhaps a step too far into the macabre serial killer revelry that saw bands like Whitehouse vilified in the 80s. At some point, serial killers and all the dark gruesome shit that historically was the domain of weirdos and outcasts shot into the mainstream.

It’s a curious contradiction. While America is immersed in an existential crisis over the right to bear arms, quite literally hundreds of children and teens – and teachers – have been shot dead already this year – and bearing in mind it’s only early June it’s beyond terrifying. The anguish of killings is almost unspeakable… and yet it’s now great TV. What does that say about our society? As the accompanying notes explain, ‘The songs on Lividity were written right from true crime stories, Each song represents a true story of murder and violence as the Antania duo find their inspiration from real events.’

But then, this doesn’t have to be about sensationalism: the title of Antania’s album is pure Law and Order, and we could reasonably trace a lineage back to Ed McBain’s novels of the 60s, which saw pulp pave the way for the birth of the procedural crime novel.

And with this release, they promise a set that ‘mixes a “doom bass” sound with acid metal, for a ‘a slow, rhythmic bass-heavy release’. And that is precisely what they deliver, with ten tracks of rapid-fire drums and gnarly darkness bashing through mangled samples and snarling, swampy synths.

The samples on the first song, ‘3 Days’ are culled from recordings of Angela Simpson, who openly admitted to the torture, murder, and dismemberment of her wheelchair-bound victim: “I beat him to death… I killed him and cut him up,” Simpson told 3TV in a jailhouse interview shortly after her arrest in 2009. Hot on its dingy heels lands ‘Antania’, and it’s got that back metal sound to it, grainy, gritty, as if recorded on a 90s Walkman from the room next door.

This kind of production makes sense at times, but at others – at least for me – it doesn’t so much. Yes, to obfuscate the details creates an intrigue, and imbues the recordings with a quite literal obscurity. But if Bathory created a gnarly template that ploughed the deepest subterranean depths to drag the burning coals of Satan’s soul from the bowels of hell, most of those who followed in their grim wake have simply mined the seems of unlistenability.

The heavily processed vocals on here, which are so OTT cliché ‘scary’ that they actually emerge on the other side to be genuinely scary, are paired with swampy synths and creepy extranea. There are even some riffs happening here, as on the churning grind of ‘Angels and Demons’. It’s utterly fucked up and tormented, the sound of a soul in torture. There’s o clear indication, however, of what each of the individual tracks were inspired by. It’s a shame, because although Lividity is about the blacker than black atmosphere., given the context, it would be interesting to know whose vocal samples occupy the various songs, and which cases the songs are inspired by. I daresay there are clues for the hardcore true crime fanatics, but the rest of us would like to feel included, too.

That said, there aren’t many points of entry into what is a difficult and utterly brutal album. Every track feel like the soundtrack to the goriest, bloodiest, most brutal murder ever. Every track feels loser, slower darker, heavier, gnarlier.

‘August’ plunges yet deeper, darker depths, and Lividity just keeps on getting nastier and nastier. From whichever perspective you view it, it’s not a pleasant album: as the songs succeed one another you feel the life slowly ebbing from you, as one by one they pound away without mercy. You will it to stop, but no: Antania keep on bludgeoning away until you’re beaten, your head lolling with exhaustion.

As I felt myself being battered, tortured, by this most brutal racket, I felt myself sag, and also recalled the earlier days of the internet – specifically, the discovery of sites like gruesome.com where you could find a full reel of film of pics taken by a couple who had dismembered the body of the woman’s husband and posed the body parts to show him picking his nose and the like.

There’s little need for crime fiction when true crime is this sick, and Antania provide the perfect soundtrack to this gruesome shit.

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Listen: ‘Land Lord’ by Godflesh

Posted: 31 May 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Godflesh share new track "LAND LORD" from their forthcoming album, PURGE. It’s a track which spirals out in pent-up rage from the first second, distorting and mutating 90’s drum and bass through the Godflesh filter.

About the track Justin comments, “’LAND LORD’ references ownership, entitlement and the objectification of human beings, as practised by almost anyone who wields power.”

Listen to ‘Land Lord’ here:

With the highly anticipated new album PURGE, Godflesh brings a whole host of new dirges and laments. Amongst the many layers of dirt, PURGE mangles 90s hip hop grooves and puts them through the Godflesh filter to create something futuristic in style – and utterly unique.

Both minimal and maximal, Godflesh deliver alien grooves that swing whilst also retaining the psychedelic, bad trip edge with layer upon layer of filth and heaviness – that Godflesh have always been known for. This is, and always has been, feel-bad music.

The title alone – PURGE – references directly how songwriter and creator Justin K. Broadrick utilises Godflesh’s music as a temporary relief from his diagnosed autism and PTSD. It’s the next stage in a journey he has been on since he began creating music, feeling alone and like an outsider in any scene or group, from childhood through to adulthood.

The music of Godflesh gives Broadrick the means to express a lifetime of feeling misunderstood and overwhelmed by hyper-sensitivity. The band is the vehicle to provide some sense of catharsis and transcendence; a way of communicating overload, as well as the constant disenchantment at the human condition, and man’s abuse of power and the systems that chain us.

PURGE references the cycle of horror that man always has and always will put us through; those in positions of power revel in the infliction of pain and horror upon individuals – in the name of their religion, their power, their money, their flags…

PURGE is out on 9th June.

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Boris & Uniform – Bright New Disease

Posted: 24 May 2023 in Albums
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Sacred Bones – 16th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

They’re the first to admit that this pairing may seem like an unusual one, having first teamed up for a US tour in 2019: as the bio notes, ‘Sure, both bands harness the power of big, blown-out riffs, but Boris’s rock heroics, lysergic sprawl, and monolithic sludge summon a different energy than Uniform’s mechanized bombardments and frenzied assaults.’ But often the most exciting and unexpected results emerge when pairing contrasts rather than sameness. Put two drone bands together, you can predict the outcome will be amplified drone; sludge with sludge equals more sludge, and industrial matched with industrial is unlikely to yield any great surprises. Yes, pairing like with like makes sense, it’s safe, there’s an intuition and interplay that comes from familiarity with the territory and the form, and fans will likely be happy being served a double helping of what they like.

But neither Boris nor Uniform are acts who are overly concerned with appeasement: that isn’t to say they don’t care about their fans, but more that they both trust their fan bases to be broad-minded and accommodating of the idea that creative fulfilment is integral to their existence. Even those more casually acquainted with their respective catalogues will recognise that both Boris and Uniform are driven, not by the desire to entertain, but to follow their creative instincts. The way these manifest musically are very different, but in this context, the parallels become more apparent, and it also becomes easier to understand their mutual appreciation for one another. And neither act is new to the spirit of collaboration, with Boris having have collaborated with the likes of Sunn O))), Merzbow, and Keiji Haino, and Uniform having previously released a blistering collision with The Body back in 2018, as well as remixes with Zombi more recently.

It will be news to no-one that this is big on riffs, that it’s loud and heavy, but this is a collaboration like no other: ordinarily, artists will bring their ‘thing’ to the table, and the songs will represent the meeting in the middle ground. This isn’t so much the case on Bright New Disease: the two acts are given equal billing and play evenly to their strengths and stylistic methodologies: but don’t necessarily play ‘together’ in the conventional sense. But when did either Boris or Uniform do ‘conventional’?

The album’s first track, ‘You are the Beginning’, aired online a few weeks ago, is the perfect combination of the two bands’ individual sounds: hard, heavy, the blistering harsh industrial intensity of Uniform, angular, antagonistic, crackling with the punk-tinged rage of Michael Berden, suddenly melts into a wild blitz of fretwork which paves the way for a monster thrash workout. Even the tone and texture shifts from harsh treble to murky mid-range, and it feels like a song of two halves. Quite unexpectedly, it works. When you weight up the value of any collaboration the question is always ‘is it different from or better than their independent works?’ Bright New Disease throws a curveball in that it’s a yes and a no at the same time, and that’s the genius of it.

The explosive ‘Weaponized Grief’ is a sub-two-minute blast of feedback and fury, and another thing which is notable about Bright New Disease is just how short the songs are. While there are a couple over four minutes and the finale, ‘Not Surprised’ does just creep over five minutes, the majority are significantly shorter, and condense a lot into those brief times, too.

‘No’ goes all-out grindcore / thrash in a two-and-a-half- minute flurry of churning guitars, but at the same time there’s something vaguely Spinal Tap – or Melvins –about its overblown excesses, and this may be a short album, but it’s high impact, and that’s true of much of the album: they slam down riff after riff with relish. ‘Endless Death Agony’ brings together the boldest excess of Boris with the most brutal attacks of Uniform, with a shrieking guitar solo fading out ahead of a most punishing riff with more solo mania blistering and melting on top, before the megalithic slow grind of ‘Not Surprised’ drags its way through the pits of hell.

Apart from the gloomy atmospheric suspense of the intro to ‘The Look is a Flame’ there really isn’t much respite on Bright New Disease. It’s harsh, heavy, relentless, by turns sludgy and slow, or otherwise frantic, frenetic, explosive – and packed with surprises, from the murky ambience of ‘The Sinners of Hell’ to the bubbling electronica of ‘Narcotic Shadow’ that sounds more like DAF collaborating with A-Ha and the straight-up glam pop of ‘A Man from the Earth’. Never could I have anticipated describing anything involving Uniform as ‘glam pop’. But then they kill it hard with ‘Endless Death Agony’, which is some brutal shit. Bright New Disease is everything all at once: it’s often punishing, sometimes spectacularly theatrical, and (almost) always heavy, but it’s smartly realised and expounds the importance of identity as both bands showcase and celebrate theirs in triumphant tandem.

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Listen: ‘A Future to Fear II’ by Xasthur

Posted: 24 May 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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XASTHUR unveil the next sinister single, ‘A Future to Fear II’, taken from the forthcoming double-album Inevitably Dark, which is set up for release on June 23, 2023.
The stylistically highly diverse American outfit instigated by multi-instrumentalist Scott Conner has created a kaleidoscopic double-album that is ranging from acid folk to black metal.

A visualizer of the eerie track ‘A Future to Fear II’ is available here:

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There is hardly a more fitting title for the new XASTHUR compositions than "Inevitably Dark". Darkness is the element that holds all the tracks together despite the fact that they are expressed in a multitude of genres, which even includes black metal. This time. Be warned: this album is neither meant as a return to black metal of mastermind Scott Conner, even though he does this time, nor a guarantee that it will happen again next time – although, he might. Maybe.

This monolith of musical darkness that is balefully towering in the shape of a monumental XASTHUR double album has been made from sonic granite. Like the intrusive igneous type of rock, it is coarse-grained, composed from different minerals that have formed from magma erupting to the surface from infernal depths, and has a high content of metal oxides that do not always show at a superficial glance.

Instead of quartz, alkali feldspar, and other types of rock, Conner has used black metal, dark ambient, acid folk, doomgrass, and other genres to express what he has seen and felt, as well as a way to find his own sound or style at a point in time – for example when he was without a steady home and often living in hotels or cars. His insights into the underbelly of the American dream are reflected in the lyrics of "Inevitably Dark", which are there even though there is no singing on the album. Conner is taking a look into the minds of the mentally ill. The puzzle of people that he encountered on the road and that might be homeless because they are ill, or whose minds shattered when they lost their homes.

Documenting what he has heard and seen, Conner recorded all the tracks of "Inevitably Dark" live and by himself, which might make it sound coarse to modern ears, but it is just the grit and stain of unfiltered reality. His way is the old hard way of a live sound and not the fake glitter of a perfectly polished product. XASTHUR are sounding exactly as the mastermind has envisioned his album to be: real.

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Xasthur by Lukasz Jaszak

Swans – The Beggar

Posted: 22 May 2023 in Albums
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Young God Records – 23rd June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Swans are back – again. This is no surprise: they released – as has become standard form – a limited edition demos CD, Is There Really A Mind? through the website as a fundraiser to pay for the album’s recording and release. All ten of the songs which appeared there have made it to the finished album, but, more often than not, in aa rather different form. Unusually, though, the bare-bones demos didn’t all start life as brief acoustic sketches which expanded to twenty-minute sprawlers exploding with extended crescendos: the shapes of the songs were realised early on, and in several cases, the final versions are actually shorter than the drafts. And while Gira hinted at a seismic shift following the gargantuan blow-out of The Glowing Man, heralding the arrival of a new era with Leaving Meaning – and it’s true that the shape of the band has been very different, not least of all with mainstay Norman Westberg and Thor Harris both stepping back to being contributors rather than a core members, Kristof Hahn remains – Swans remains very much ultimately Gira’s vehicle. And so it is that for all of the changes, The Beggar is clearly very much a Swans album, and sits comfortably in the domain of their body of work.

There does very much seem to be an arc when it comes to Swans releases, rather than any rapid shifts, particularly since their 2010 comeback, My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, whereby the songs grew incrementally longer and more sprawling and the crescendos more drawn out, fewer, and further apart. And so it is that The Beggar follows the more minimal sound of Leaving Meaning, and, like its predecessor, it’s a comparatively succinct statement, at least by Swans standards in the last decade – at least, discounting ‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’, an album-length track which is absent from the album, and occupies the majority of disc two on the CD. This track is, in some ways, contentious: does it even belong on the album, or should it have been released as a standalone work? The album minus ‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’ is still an expansive work, but has a certain flow and sense of existing as a cohesive document. And so it feels like there are almost two different albums here:

As the album’s ‘taster’ tune, the twitchy, trippy, eternally-undulating ‘Paradise is Mine’ indicated, Gira’s compositions on The Beggar are constructed around heavy repetition. This is to be expected: it’s been Gira’s style since day one. The first song, ‘The Parasite’, strips right back to nothing around the mid-point to find Gira acappella, imploring ‘come to me, feed on me’ in a menacing low-throated rasp. And as Gira questions ‘is there really a mind?’ in the psychedelic droning loops of ‘Paradise is Mine’ the tension increases and you start to feel dizzy. and perhaps a little nauseous. This pit-of-the-stomach churn is something that Swans have long been masters of, although quite how it manifests has changed over time: back in the days of Filth, Cop, and Greed, it was sheer force. More recently, it was woozy, nagging repetitions that lurch like a boat on a bobbing tide.

‘Los Angeles: City of Death’ returns to the style and form of The Great Annihilator – a three-minutes hard-punching gloom folk song. After the previous incarnation’s ever-longer workouts, it’s an absolute revelation, and a joy to be reminded that despite the work of the last decade or so, Gira can still write tight songs that you can actually get a grip on and really get into. ‘Unforming’ is a soft country drone, which finds Gira crooning cavernously over slide guitar, and it’s reminiscent of some of the more tranquil moments of Children of God.

‘I’m a shithead unforgiven… I’m an insect in your bedclothes…’ Gira drones on the ten-minute title track. For all of the artistic progress and evolution over the decades, Gira is still chained to the tropes of self-loathing and the darkest, most self-destructive introspection, and this is dolorous, doomy, and bleak …and then about four minutes in, the drums crash in and the sound thickens and they plug into one of those nagging grooves that simply immerses you and carries you upwards on a surge of sound. ‘My love for you will never end’, Gira moans, ever the subjugate, before the vocals conclude with an anguished, wordless strangled gargle as the riff kicks back in and swells to a monumental scale seemingly from nowhere.

‘No More of This’ is mellow and almost uplifting, both sonically and in its message – at least until near the end, when Gira reels off a list of farewells, and as much as ‘Ebbing’ seems to be about drowning, it’s a sliver of sunny-sounding psychedelic folk. And then ‘The Memorious’ hits that dizzying swirl of repetition that feels like a kind of torture. It’s hard to really articulate just how there can be music that makes you want to puke because it’s so woozy, wibbly. It’s the sonic equivalent of watching Performance. You don’t need to take a trip to take a trip.

‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’ represents a massive detour that does and doesn’t sit within the flow of the album. It’s either the penultimate track, or an appendix, depending the format of your choice. However you approach it, this is drone on an epic scale. Five minutes into ‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’, which starts out a trickle, with a robotic female spoken word narrative, everything just goes off – mostly drums, but also noise. When this tapers away, we’re left with the sound of sirens, ominous drones, and then after some hypnotic droning, there’s another monster surge, a nagging guitar motif riding atop a thumping beat and heavy swell of drone. It soon crackles into a grand wheeze of electronica, And a detonating wall of noise, and at the end, it all collapses. Around the eighteen-minute mark it really hits a heavy groove and blows you away.

The Beggar is certainly not the kind of heavy of Swans early releases, but it’s still heavy. It may not possess the sledgehammer force of the original. It’s beyond strong.

Once again, Swans have produced an album that’s more than an album, more than anything.

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Khanate – To Be Cruel

Posted: 20 May 2023 in Albums
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Sacred Bones – 19th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been fourteen years since there was new music from Khanate, the experimental doom outfit featuring members of Sunn O))), OLD, and Blind Idiot God. It’s perhaps not surprising that my social media feeds have been bursting with the news of the surprise arrival of their fifth album on digital platforms ahead of a physical release next month– and because it landed from nowhere overnight, you couldn’t say it was eagerly anticipated, but it’s got a lot of people excited.

As you would expect, given the members’ main projects, and the previous Khanate releases, To Be Cruel is an absolute monster, with just three tracks spanning a full hour. You don’t tune in to Khanate for snappy pop tunes.

The first chord hits like an atomic bomb, blasting from the speakers with such force it’s almost enough to floor you, and rising from the sustain, crackling synth notes, then another sonic detonation that’s so hard and loud it hurts. Many of the tones and tropes of To Be Cruel are heavily redolent of the crushing doom drone of Sunn O))), but as the first piece, ‘Like a Poisoned Dog’ abundantly evidences, Khanate are different. This difference may be less apparent to the casual listener, but the stop/start power chords and skewed, sinewy shards of feedback are cut from a different sonic cloth, and if Sunn O))) are renowned for their indebtedness to Earth, there are elements woven in here which seem to owe more to early Swans, and while I wouldn’t necessarily want to speculate on whether the album’s title is some kind of response to Swans’ 2014 album To Be Kind, there is some kind of contextual interface here, in that both acts are pushing parameters within a longform song format.

And then there are the vocals: it’s a good seven minutes before Alan Dubin makes his first contribution: the song takes another swerve, the blistering blast simmers down and as he howls and roars, the feel is a cross between the darkest of mangled metal and brutal hardcore. And his manic screams are powerful and affecting. He sounds troubled, but in a way that conveys the kind of tortured mental suffering that’s common to many: it’s a primal howl of rage ad anguish that we struggle to unleash, and so to hear this is to feel emotions channelled by proxy, and as much as it hurts, it’s a release.

‘It Wants to Fly’ takes it to the next level, presenting almost twenty-two minutes of pain. The guitar is slow, crushing, punishing. What can you say? It hurts. It’s also minimal in arrangement but maximal in volume: this is first-gear BPM, with decimating feedback between the crushing chords. At the same time, it’s doomy and ominous as well as raging, making for a powerful cocktail of weight and raw emotion. There is no question that Khanate bring both.

And so it is that the album’s third and final track, the twenty-minute title track, is twenty minutes of low drone and tortured screaming that sounds like a breakdown captured on tape as Dubin yelps and screams about spiders against a sparse backing of a distant rumble and clanging guitar. ‘Look! In the closet!’ he shrieks in what sounds like abject terror. You dare not look. You don’t even want to hide under the bed: you just want to leave the house. The composition takes its time, it hums and drones, and in time, it hits and it hurts, and in some way you wish you could be Dublin, you want this release to have a channel into the unhinged. But you’re stuck on the outside, an observer to what sounds like either the ultimate catharsis or mental disintegration.

Ground down to nothing beyond and anguished screams and squalling feedback, this is bare bones, the sound of desperation. It isn’t pleasant, and there is simply no room to breathe: this is dark, dense torturous, and it’s exactly what fans have been waiting fourteen years for.

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GLYTSH – V.H.S

Posted: 11 May 2023 in Singles and EPs
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4th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been a few months since we last heard from London based industrial/alternative rock duo GLYTSH, who made some waves with their first single releases – and rightly so, because they were absolute bangers: their cover on Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Closer’ on hinted at the original material that was to follow, with both ‘(Hard)core memory’ and ‘SAV@Ge’ kicking serious arse. They’ve been busy in the meantime, landing a live slot supporting Tom Saint in June as part of the publicity for their upcoming debut EP, which ‘V.H.S.’ gives us a flavour of.

‘V.H.S.’ – that’s ‘Vulgar Holy Spirit’ – is pitched as ‘loud, proud and kind of a sombre love song’, which Jennifer Diehl – who now goes by the pseudonym of Luna Blake when she’s in Glytsch mode – expands on as being “about a lost relationship trying to be resurrected… It’s a dark romantic tale 2.0 with a Frankenstein flavour and could be seen as the sequel to our second single – ‘Hard(core) Memory’”.

It’s another slice of savvy songwriting that does so much all at once, starting out like some clean, crisp ‘alternative’ pop – the kind of electro-goth that pretends to be menacing but really isn’t – before going absolutely raging wild, demonic screaming with a barrage of noise exploding white hot and devastating. There’s a really thick swampy low-end and the production is dense and dirty – and it’s a real asset in realising the song’s full impact potential, because it very much accentuates the sense of volume, with the drums being pushed down beneath the speaker shredding guitar… and the guitar is a wall of sheet metal and it’s a riffy as fuck and properly heavy…and yet, somehow, there are glimpses of melody, a keen chorus that breaks out from the demonic rage of the verses, which returns us to the point where we’re forced to consider that there is a keen pop element to their songs. How can it be? And how can it all happen in two and a half minutes?

There’s no time to think or dissect it: it’s hard to take in what’s going on. It’s a blur, a blitzkrieg, an in-out smash-and-grab, fast, furious, violent and so well executed.

In the wake of Nu Metal and Marilyn Manson – who rose in on the tattered mesh coattails of Trent Reznor who brought the kind of niche noisy shit that was the domain of Wax Trax! and strictly underground to a huge global audience and then took it up several notches, aggro stuff has become quite normalised, not to mention predictable – but Glytsch bring something new and unique, and it’s not just that they’re female. They present a new hybrid, and a new level of ferocity that’s absolutely terrifying.

They’re racking up radio plays already, and they’ve got world class quality howling from every pore.

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Photo Credit: Ulrich von Trier

Aidan Baker – Engenderine

Posted: 9 May 2023 in Albums
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Midira Records – 5th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Aidan Baker is one of those artists whose output is almost impossible to keep pace with – but the more remarkable thing is that for all of this hyperproductivity, the standard of work is of an unstinting quality. Recorded between 2020 and 2022, Engenderine – a double CD – lands almost simultaneously with Trio Not Trio, the first in a series of five albums on Gizeh Records, and just as Baker is gearing up for a tour with Nadja, the ‘ambient doom / dreamsludge, / metalgaze’ duo he is one half of.

To pause for breath for a moment, it’s worth stepping back and running through the context of this, which is worth quoting:

‘The neologism ‘engenderine’ comes from Lydia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan, a futuristic/dystopian/cli-fi retelling of the Joan of Arc story, and describes beings partially composed of pure energy capable of manipulating matter who, amongst a largely devolved human population, might be considered post-gender and a new evolutionary step.

‘Other song titles come from phrases and images from Tricia Sullivan’s duology Double Vision and Sound Mind, surrealistic fantasies about the nature of reality and perception and, like The Book of Joan, the possibilities of manipulating those.

‘Musically, the songs on Engenderine began as a series of slowly evolving ambient guitar loops – a bed layer of reality, so to speak – over which were layered bass, drums, and organ parts. These instrumental additions – the trappings of perception, signifiers, metaphorically speaking, our attempts to codify perception – incorporate traditional rock structures and progressions but are stripped down to a sort of somnambulant minimalism that might encourage introspection, a meditative background, uneasy listening, as much as they demand attention.’

It really is extremely uneasy listening. It’s perhaps as well it is, for the larger part, ‘background’, because the two CDs, while only containing eight tracks in all, span almost ninety minutes. We’re not quite in Sunn O))) or latter-day Swans territory, but still…

The first track, ‘Baby Dragon Slaughter’ pitches a long, unchanging organ drone note against a growling doom guitar and stop-start percussion which crashes hard. It’s hypnotic, paralysing, and I can imagine some might toss in a Doors comparison, but that’s only on account of the organ and the slightly trippy vibe, because it’s not only nothing like The Doors, but infinitely better.

If you want comparisons – because pretty much everyone seems to work on the premise that everything sounds like something else and recommendations – mostly algorithmic and based on purchases or streams, depending on the platform, Engenderine sits in the low, slow, doom-drone bracket of Sunn O))) and Earth 2. And this is indeed some ultra-low frequency shit. The first track on Disc 2, ‘Resurrection of the Child Army’ features some melodic, trilling pipe sounds around seven minutes into its nine-and-three-quarter-minutes gloomy, thick humming drone, is something you feel as much as you hear, and it resonates through the intestines and vibrates eternally.

The bass on ‘Calabi Yau Manifestations’ is pure dub, floor-shakingly dense, dark, minimal but quiveringly heavy, and it dominates the erratic drum clatters and rumbling roar of a drone that sounds like a jet engine warming up several miles away. Having experienced jet engines nearby, trust me., this is a good thing, but the rumble is unsettling. And then there’s ‘Dorvay’, which seems to take its cues from The Cure circa Pornography, with its hefty percussion dominating the sound.

Engenderine isn’t an album for a track-by-track, blow-by-blow critique: the tracks melt into one another and it’s an album that needs to be experienced as an album – and in context, that’s a continuous droning hum of murky noise without any clear sense of shape or form.

The second disc feels lower, slower, darker and more difficult: the erratic jazz drum-work on ‘Fear Sculptures’ is difficult to digest and assimilate – but then again, so is Engenderine as a whole. It’s just so much dark and difficult droning to chew on that it leaves you feeling low on energy, sapped, physically and mentally. But this isn’t about entertainment, and artistically, Engenderine is an outstanding exploratory / concept work.

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