Posts Tagged ‘Industrial’

Vessel – Body and Soul

Posted: 17 October 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Majestic Mountain Records – 10th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

The Sisters of Mercy have a long history of unexpected covers, and a not only that, but of really ‘making them their own’, as you’ll hear TV talent show judges froth at contestants. Notably, among their B-sides, BBC sessions and live sets, they’ve covered Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’, ‘Emma’ by Hot Chocolate, ‘Gimme Shelter’ by The Rolling Stones, and Kylie’s ‘Confide in Me’. All great songs, all completely Sistersified, irreverent, but in no way sacrilegious.

When it comes to other bands covering The Sisters (obviously, I’m not meaning tribute acts here, a topic I’d perhaps rather avoid right now)… it tends to be metal bands doing pretty predictable and incredibly straight, faithful renditions, cranking up the distortion and giving the vocals some growl. Paradise Lost’s well-known rendition of ‘Walk Away’ is exemplary, in that it really brings precisely nothing. For this, I have to hand it to Lambchop for their stripped-back country rendition of ‘This Corrosion’, which succeeds in making the wildly bombastic epic something completely different, while still retaining something of its core essence. Such achievements are rare.

So here we come to this take on The Sisters’ 1984 single, ‘Body and Soul’: the band’s first release on Warners and their first recording in a 48-track studio. It was also, notably, the first to feature Wayne Hussey, and marked a radical shift from its predecessor, the seething alternative dancefloor monster and arguably definitive single, ‘Temple of Love’.

Critics and fans alike seemed rather underwhelmed at the time, and while it was a fixture of their live sets though ’84 and ’85, it’s not had many airings since their live comeback in 1990. And yet, for me, it’s a song which holds a unique pull which is hard to describe. The cascading lead guitar line, lacing its way across a busy, detailed, yet still nagging and repetitive bassline, and Eldritch going for a more melodic vocal style makes it something of an anomaly in the Sisters’ catalogue. It also contrasts with the rest of the tracks on the 12”: ‘Train’ is a blinder, murky, urgent, echoey and strung out, while ‘Afterhours’ is a truly unique classic, and the 48-track rerecording of ‘Body Electric’ is strong. In this context, I can appreciate why Vessel may have been drawn to the song.

Credit where it’s due, they’ve made a really decent fist of it, too. Sure, they’ve kind of metalized it a bit, but not in a way that’s big on cliché. And it’s not a completely blueprint copy with just a bit more distortion and growl, either. They’ve slowed it down a bit, and in doing so, succeeded in emphasising the guitar detail to good effect. If anything, this comes on more like Godflesh than any generic goth / metal, the thick, sludgy bass trudges along while the guitar rings harmonic, controlled feedback. The drum machine – an essential component here – follows the pattern of the original, but slowed and with more space and reverb, again, Godflesh and early Pitch Shifter come to mind. The vocals are gravelly, but not overtly metal and work well, especially with the harmonies in the chorus.

It does perhaps seem curious that this should be culled form a concept album but as the band explain, “It’s interesting that a cover song was able to fit the narrative of a concept album so well. I’m a huge fan of The Sisters Of Mercy, and was listening while working from home and taking breaks between writing for the new album when ‘Body And Soul’ spoke to me so directly. It was saying exactly what I needed to hear, what I wanted to say, and that was how the story of The Somnifer ends.”

For context, we learn that ‘Musically, The Somnifer merges the epic drama of Candlemass and Cathedral, the cosmic psychedelia of All Them Witches and King Buffalo, and the aggression of hardcore and crossover scenes, all tied together with the timeless spirit of classic heavy metal.’

It may well be interesting to hear this within that wider setting, but for now, as a standalone – and I write as a huge Sisters fan – that this is, for me, one of the best Sisters covers I’ve heard. The cover art is a nice tribute to one of the Sisters’ best sleeves, too.

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Red Lorry Yellow Lorry – Driving Black EP

Posted: 7 October 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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COP International – 6th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

What a year this is proving to be for bands who have lain dormant, at least on the studio front, for quite literally decades. And when it comes to Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, it really has been a long time. The last Lorries release was an ultra-limited gig-only affair back in 2015, with just 50 copies pressed for Leeds in the August and 100 for Valencia the following month. Said EP featured two new songs, ‘Safe as Houses’ and ‘Piece of my Mind’, which were listed as being from the ‘forthcoming album Strange Kind of Paradise’. Time passed, and it really didn’t look like the album would ever see the light of day. But now, this official EP presages its arrival in February 2025, some thirty-three years since they called it a day with Blasting Off (1992).

The Lorries always stood apart from their contemporaries: whereas the Leeds post-punk scene of the early 80s clearly favoured black in every possible way, the band’s guitar sound was steely grey and like scraping metal, and paired with murky bass and relentless percussion, they forged an industrial clang that, was the perfect mirror to both the landscape and the times. Chris Reed’s baritone was less theatrical and more gnarly and angry-sounding than your archetypal goths which would follow. Fans will already know and appreciate all of this, but with so much history – and so much time having passed – some context is worthwhile, especially for those unfamiliar.

During their 80s heyday, they built a catalogue of outstanding 12” releases, with some of their best cuts not on the albums, and with Driving Black, they’ve added another. It contains six tracks, with two mixes of the title track – I gather the original will feature on the album – long with a mix of the as-yet-unreleased ‘Chickenfeed’. ‘Safe as Houses’ and ‘Piece of my Mind’ finally get to be heard – and owned – by more than 150 people, and hearing them again in this context reminds me of the buzz I got when first heard them almost a decade ago: they’re unmistakably RLYL, and if they’re more in the vein of the material on Blow and Blasting Off, the one thing that’s remained consistent throughout the band’s entire career is their sonic density, that claustrophobic, concrete-heavy heft, with ‘Piece of Mind’ being a solid mid-tempo chugger and a grower at the same time. It seems that the two tracks from the 2015 EP didn’t make the album cut – but this can be seen as good news, if they have material of this quality going spare. The same is true of ‘Living With Spiders’, a frenzied track which has spindly guitars crawling and scratching all over it. It would be a standout, but the consistency of quality across the EP means it’s one more cracking tune.

The strangest thing is how time – or our perception of time – seems to become evermore distorted. Perhaps some of it’s an age thing, but… I remember at the time, The Sisters of Mercy’s release of Floodland was hailed not only as the rebirth it was – stylistically and in terms of commercial success – but as a huge comeback after a great absence. But Floodland arrived only just over two years after First and Last and Always. Even more remarkably, I seem to recall the release of Crawling Mantra under the name The Lorries that same year was considered something of a comeback and a departure, even though Paint Your Wagon was released only the year before. The world seemingly lost the plot when The Stone Roses delivered The Second Coming after a five-year gap (and they really needn’t have bothered). And now, while Daniel Ek is advocating the production of ‘content’ on a constant basis, we have bands putting out their first new material in an eternity, and rather than having forgotten about them, fans are fervent – and rightly so.

Chris Reed’s reuniting with David ‘Wolfie’ Wolfenden – Leeds alumni who first appeared with Expelaires in 1979 along with one Craig Adams, who would do a stint as a member of The Mission’s touring lineup – is most welcome, because they’re simply a great pairing, and this is nowhere more apparent than on lead track ‘Driving Black’, which is vintage Lorries, kicking off with urgent, driving drums, before the throb of bass and rhythm guitar and a sinewy lead guitar, sharp and taut as a tripwire cut in and casts a thread right back to their earliest work in terms of style and structure.

The parallels between now and the 80s are uncomfortable; we may have ditched a Conservative government, but workers are still feeling the pinch, and global tensions are off the scale. That the BBC’s apocalyptic movie Threads is getting only its fourth screening – to mark its fortieth anniversary – feels worryingly relevant. And so it is that Red Lorry Yellow Lorry still sound essential and contemporary is equally testament to their songwriting and delivery, and the bleak times in which we find ourselves. Putting the social and political backdrop to one side, the Driving Black EP is an absolute triumph. There are no half-measures, nothing is weak or half-arsed, and it’s – remarkably – as if they’ve never been away.

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Watch: ‘Devil Inside feat. En Esch’ by Me And My Nightmare

Posted: 6 October 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Former LORDS OF ACID vocalist, Mea Fisher is back unleashing the inner demon with her new single featuring En Esch (Slick Idiot, <PIG>, Pigface, ex-KMFDM). ‘Devil Inside’ is a twisted and delicious siren-like song where distorted guitar riffs, metallic percussion, and dystopian synth bring deep, dark fantasies to life. Written originally by Mea and strictly made for Lords of Acid, she has refined and transformed the song into a creation that is distinctively hers. Its heavy metal elements fused with a trance-inducing dance beat truly sell the feeling of traversing through the underworld’s hottest night out. Méa easily takes charge—her spellbinding vocals whispering temptation and commanding attention in the same breath. “There’s a hunger that lies,” she admits, “and you hold the key.”

Mesmerizingly, Méa calls fans to follow her and “take a bite of forbidden.” En Esch’s guttural, gruff backing vocals light the whole thing aflame. Danny Lohner (Nine Inch Nails) also lends his guitars to the track.  The seductive, Luciferian qualities of ‘Devil Inside’ compel listeners to close their eyes, lose themselves to the beat, and indulge in their deepest desires.

Check the video here:

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Foldhead – Beserk Pinball Machine / Quasar Delirium

Posted: 5 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Having just effused over the benefits of Bandcamp Friday, as well as wrestled with the overwhelming volume of notifications and review submissions, this one lands as the kind f curveball only the likes of Foldhead are likely to deliver, in that this is by no means a new release. Beserk Pinball Machine / Quasar Delirium was in fact first released back in 2021, as something of an archival recording: ‘Recorded in 2015 for a tape label that ceased to exist prior to the intended release date. The 25 copies that had been made were distributed at the Experimental Yorkshire festival which took place at Hebden Bridge Trades Club on 21 July 2018’ And now the Bandcamp page has been refreshed, with ‘two new mixes + a new piece.’

I’m not sure if ‘beserk’ is an intentional variant of ‘berserk’, but I’m going to assume it is. The etymology of the word ‘berserk’ is quite fascinating. The word itself means ‘out of control with anger or excitement; wild or frenzied’, but its origin lies in the reverence the Saxons held for bears. ‘Berserk’ translates as ‘bear shirt’, and berserkers were the warriors placed at the front of a battle formation: their job was to chew their shields, gnash their jaws and foam at the mouth like frenzied bears in order to share the shit out of their opponents before the charge.

This release is every bit as scary and unpredictable as a frenzied bear, and certainly inflicts a bear-like mauling on the senses, being particularly brutal on the ears, and on the lower intestines for that matter.

The opener and lead track, ‘Beserk Pinball Machine’ is an absolute noise monster. There are – sort of – vocals in the mix, but they’re distorted and largely buried beneath a deluge of mangled noise, churning distortion and feedback all mixed together to forge the nastiest mess of trebly sonic ruination. It’s just shy of fifteen minutes shattering, explosive, convulsive digital meltdown which makes Merzbow sound mellow, and Kenji Siratoi supremely calm in comparison. Paul Whatshisface, having previously been a member of Smell & Quim and Swing Jugend – as well as occasional noise duo …(something) ruined has had a long career operating in harsh noise circles, and this is both noisy and almost unspeakably harsh. The noise frenzy ends abruptly, but there’s a spell of low-level hum at the end which offers some respite, however much the not-silence nags.

‘Quasar Delirium’ is appropriately titled: another quarter of an hour of brain-melting, tinnitus-inducing noise squall. Only this has more fizz, more squeal, more laser bleeps, more treble, and more feedback, more melting circuitry, all against a backdrop of churning cement-mixer grind, washing machine spin-cycle metallic reverberations. The experience is how I imagine standing next to a massive propeller engine without ear defenders, while a Star Wars type laser-gun battle takes place all around – while buildings explode and collapse all around, and there is nowhere to hide.

The concept of remixes in this context is rather amusing, and ‘Machine Pinball Bezerk’ and ‘Delirium Pulsar’ are more about fucking shit up even harder than remixing in the more conventional sense. ‘Machine Pinball Bezerk’ sounds like an atomic bomb: it’s noise on the scale of the scene in Threads where the buildings are decimated by a wall of white-hot flame. It’s a scene that seems to last an eternity despite being maybe five minutes at most. The fifteen minutes of ‘Machine Pinball Bezerk’ feels like a lifetime and you can almost feel the tinnitus coming on after just five minutes, while your brain melts and trickles out of your ear.

‘Delerium Machines’ delivers more of the same, the most pulverising, excruciating blasting racket. It hurts, and the overall experience is disorientating: an hour and a quarter of the most abrasive, churning noise imaginable. It’s not Harsh Noise Wall, but there’s not much variety, either, meaning that this release is a relentless assault that will likely leave you wilted, drained by the end – and that’s assuming you can still hear.

AA

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BLOOM – Pooch

Posted: 22 September 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Kalamine Records – 14th September 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Whether it be solo works ranging from ambience to classical, or collaborations running the full gamut in the electronic field, Deborah Fialkiewicz’s output in recent years has been nothing short of prodigious, and spanning as many forms as her work does, there is never a dull moment. This latest work, under the POOCH moniker, in collaboration with Dan Dolby (Bassist in Mastiff, Noisemonger in Catafalque and Sulphur Nurse) is no exception. It offers a set of eight dark, stark electronic compositions which owe a considerable debt to early industrial and electronic works, bringing a combination of dark atmospherics and nagging beats. Although entirely instrumental, we’re in the kind of territory occupied by the likes of Cabaret Voltaire, Test Dept, and Chris and Cosey’s Trance.

As an opener, ‘Hades’ is as dark and subterranean as the title would suggest, a bleak, murky pulsation squelching around and leading the listener down, down, down. It serves as something of a primer, a mood-setter, but doesn’t fully prepare one for the altogether steelier, starker, more rhythmic and percussion-driven pieces which follow.

The title track pairs a dense, dirty bass with clattering, metallic percussion which assails the mind like a concerted assault with the contents of a cutlery drawer, and it bashes away relentlessly for four and a half minutes straight. On paper, it might not sound much, but as an experience, it’s pretty hard-hitting. Built around short, clipped repetitions, it creates a suffocatingly claustrophobic aural space. The word ‘pooch’ evokes a cuddly companion, something friendly, but there’s nothing cuddly or friendly about this, a listening experience closer to being whipped with a chain than fussing a canine buddy.

Each composition bears a one-word title (‘GameBoy’ being a forced blend-word (it doesn’t really qualify as a portmanteau) in order to maintain the theme. Funtime bit-tunes are bent with glitches and warping drifts of darkness here, before things begin to slide further into beat-orientated minimal techno.

The steady beat which dominates and defined the spartan ‘Quazar’ is almost soporific: the track assumes something of a background position as it clicks along nonchalantly, with a low, unshifting drone hovering just around the level of register. Nothing happens. It doesn’t need to. And while the thunder which heralds the arrival of ‘Midnite’ might initially serve as an alert, the piece soon melts into abstraction. The final track, ‘Stimpy’ may be missing Ren, but hits hard, built around a strong, thudding beat and looped electronic undulations.

For all of its cuddly connotations, Pooch is a pretty dark album. To my mind – and it could be to my mind alone – music which is heavily beat-orientated and instrumental feels impersonal somehow, and I find it somewhat disorientating, disconnecting, alien. And so it is that the pounding beats of Pooch leave me feeling somewhat dazed, detached, even dizzy. But it’s impossible to deny the detail, the quality of the execution, or the fact that this is an outstanding work.

AA

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Uniform – Nightmare City

Posted: 21 September 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Well, this one landed unexpectedly. It’s a welcome arrival, although taking a second hit of material from Uniform’s latest and quite possibly most brutal and challenging album to date does feel like an exercise in Masochism. It’s also a superb example of alternative marketing, landing this alternative version of American Standard less than a month after the album’s release, on digital and tape formats.

Context, from Uniform’s bandcamp: ‘A companion piece to American Standard, Nightmare City is essentially the same record devoid of the rock elements. By removing the presence of traditional instruments, the synths, lap steel, and pianos that sit beneath the surface of the proper album are allowed room to breathe and speak for themselves. The end result straddles the worlds of Basic Channel influenced dub, Tangerine Dream inspired soundscapes, and brutal death industrial.’

It’s a bold move, befitting of Uniform, a band who have relentlessly pushed themselves to explore ever-wider horizons, switching from their original drum-machine driven raw industrial noise to adopting live drumming, undertaking a number of collaborative projects with the likes of The Body and Boris, and especially befitting of this album, where Michael Berdan tore away the last vestiges of artistic separation to rip off his skin and purge the rawest emotions stemming from his dealing with Bulimia.

Nightmare City is another step towards stripping away the layers and presenting the naked self. ‘The bedrock of American Standard stands upon the Nightmare City. It’s not the happiest of all places, but understanding the landscape yields its own rewards,’ they write alongside the Bandcamp release.

One thing about being in a band – even if there are only two of you – is that there’s somewhere to hide, somewhere to transfer the focus. Hell, even performing solo, if there’s noise, there’s something take shelter behind. I’ve always thought that solo acoustic and spoken word performers were the bravest: there is simply no place to hide, and nothing to blur or mask any fuck-ups. Nightmare City isn’t quite solo acoustic, but it is seriously minimal.

Removing the ‘rock’ elements to reveal the bare bones of the songs shows the inner workings of Uniform, and they’re unexpected, to say the least. One would expect them to build up from the elements of drums bass, guitar. But this leads us on a different journey.

Punishing riffs and pulverising percussion, rather than supple layers and swirling instrumental ambience. As the band put it, ‘Although the finished product stands as a culmination of cohesive sounds, the individual threads that weave songs together often provide necessary nuance and exposition all of their own. Each isolated stem might be part of a greater story, but the whole cannot stand as intended without a complex series of seemingly disparate elements.’

Hearing the swirl of these ‘seemingly disparate elements’ feels like hearing the ghost in the machine, a haunting, eerie, ethereal echo, which barely seems to correspond with the structured framework of the final versions of the songs. One might almost consider this a palimpsest, an album beneath the album, submerged by process of layering and erasure. The tracks are – and I shouldn’t be surprised, but still I find I am – completely unrecognisable. Instead of being the punishing beast the album version is, ‘American Standard’ sounds more like one of the epic instrumental segments of recent SWANS works. There’s a muffled thud like a heartbeat on ‘This is Not a Prayer’ which possesses something of a womb-like quality, while ‘Clemency’ feels like a moment caught between heaven and hell, soundtracking the struggle of being pulled between the two in some purgatorial space as ceremonial drums hammer out a doomy passageway and spluttering vocals spew raw anguish.

In common with American Standard is the darkness which looms large, the tension, the suffocating gloom, the discomfort which dominates, and hearing this spectral echo of the album brings a fresh understanding and appreciation of the process and the depth of layering and everything that goes into their material. ‘Permanent Embrace’, too, sounds both like an ascent to the light and a sepulchral sigh, a funereal scene in which the grave suddenly opens like a sinkhole sucking everything down into the bowels of the earth.

Nightmare City is appropriately titled: it is a truly hellish, tortuous listening experience – but at the same time quite remarkable. Uniform, in their quest to do something different, to push themselves and in refusing to conform to genre conventions, continually find new ways to articulate the pain of the human condition.

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The Royal Ritual – Pleasure Hides Your Needs

Posted: 19 September 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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24th May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Welcome… to The Royal Ritual! I simply felt the urge to open with that. It felt necessary, if only to me. But if you can’t please yourself…

In my case it’s something of a belated welcome, having been aware of the act and its founder, David Lawrie for quite some time, but having only recently come around to the actual music, with my introduction being their recent show in York. There’s something to be said for hearing a band live first, without knowing the songs, rather than the other way around: if they can grab you in that twenty minutes or half an hour, when you’re not necessarily primed to absorb songs and details, then there’s a strong chance they’ve won a fan, provided the recordings are up to scratch.

Where The Royal Ritual really stand out live is with the use of live guitar, which brings the benefit of not only an immediacy and human aspect to the predominantly digital music, but an additional body on stage, which creates not only a visual balance but a greater sense of movement.

Recorded, these elements are less essential, and the songs here are clearly the product of extreme focus and a meticulous attention to detail. When I wrote in my review of the York show that The Royal Ritual sound ‘produced’, I observed that ‘their approach to production owes more to the methods of Trent Reznor as pioneered in the early 90s on Broken and The Downward Spiral, balancing gritty live guitars with synths and fucked-up distortion and harnessing their tempestuousness in a way that creates a balanced yet abrasive sound.’ And so it is on record, also.

Pleasure Hides Your Needs is The Royal Ritual’s second full-length release, following MARTYRS in 2022. A lot has happened, and much has changed since then, and the project, born in lockdown, has evolved significantly – as have many of us. Life is different now: that’s a fact.

We learn that ‘Pleasure Hides Your Needs sees David contemplate his own life and experiences, adopting a distinctive, more personal tone than the expansive and outgoing approach of MARTYRS: “Pleasure Hides Your Needs is much more introspective when compared to the social and political commentary of MARTYRS,” says David. “For me, it is about the closing of three distinct chapters of my life. Finding the common threads through each of those chapters in order to represent them sonically, and in a consistent way, was a really interesting challenge – if at times quite emotionally exhausting.”

Life is exhausting, in every way, but there’s a tense energy to Pleasure Hides Your Needs. It builds from the instrumental intro piece, ‘Shadow Self’, where crashing waves erupt from soft ripples, dark rumbles and inaudible muttering contrast with chimes, before ‘Vantage Point’ opens a broad sonic vista paired with a solid kick drum beat. Just as it’s leaning into the proggier end of alternative rock, a gritty guitar kicks in and the mood immediately turns darker.

‘Fifteen 14’ lands as an unexpectedly pop tune, with a solid chorus, which softens the arrival of the album’s nine-and-a-half-minute centrepiece, ‘Sinner Gambler Fugitive’, which really does run the gamut for range, a sonic and emotional rollercoaster. It’s ‘Modes of Violence; that goes full industrial, with a metallic smash of a snare and snarling bass providing the backdrop or Lawrie’s wrought vocal as he wrestles with a veritable tempest of emotion, before he hollows himself on the bleak, minimal title track.

The album as a whole is more geared toward tension than release, always simmering but rarely bursting the floodgates. Muted isn’t the word: it’s more a case of clenching tightly to maintain a grip of control for fear of what may erupt otherwise.

Pleasure Hides Your Needs is dark and exploratory, but still eminently listenable. As The Royal Ritual evolves its sounds and expands its horizons, there remains much potential to explore myriad paths in the future, and recent touring will likely serve to open new avenues of exploration.

AA

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PIG – Feast of Agony

Posted: 14 September 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Metropolis Records – 27th September 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Hot on the sweaty trotters of Red Room, released in May, the Lord of Lard, Raymond Watts has managed to mine fresh truffles for a whole new EP ahead of embarking on an extensive tour of the US, which so happens to take its name from the first track on said EP, ‘Heroin for the Damned’. The fact that this isn’t a set of remixes

The title alone is glorious, and you can almost feel the relish with which Watts conjured up the phrase, wicked, perverse, dark, and equally ostentatious and grand, evoking an image within the realms of The Last Supper but with an S&M slant as the participants dine on an orgy of gore… or something. When it comes to relishing the richness of language and delighting in deliciously devilish wordplay and alliteration, sifting through PIG’s catalogue for titles and lyrics (there’s a suitably extravagant book containing all of them just out) provides abundant evidence that Watts really gets kicks from it.

It’s also clear he is absolutely loving the whole self-styled industrial rock-god posturing, hamming it up in leather and mesh, and simply the whole music-making thing, perhaps more than at any point in his career. Instead of being awkward about self-promotion, he’s fully embracing its absurdity, and in a genre that’s largely dominated by serious, angry people, PIG stand out as being rather less po-faced, and altogether more fun than your average industrial act. I’m not sure I’ve seen Al Jourgensen or Trent Reznor posting pics on Facebook hugging their pooches.

That doesn’t mean that the music is any less serious. Watts and his various collaborators really know how to bring a crunching riff and a stonking beat, and, occasionally, having taken early cues from the legendary JG Thirlwell, spin in some bombastic strings and grand orchestral strikes. And Feast of Agony is dark, heavy, intense, and marks a strong return to the more experimental 90s work following a pursuit of an altogether glammier sound of late.

‘Heroin for the Damned’ – the opium of the people for the 21st Century, perhaps – starts low, slow, and sinister, Watts’ vocal a croak amidst a dank electronic swamp before a steady riff, laden with grit, grinds in, rubbing hard against a lowdown pulsating synth groove. It’s a bit NIN circa The Downward Spiral, but equally it’s quintessentially 90s PIG, and lands a monster chorus that combines the raging roar of Sinsation and the grainy grooves of Praise the Lard with gushing gospel grandeur – something that really dominates the final track, the Jim Davies remix of ‘Baptise, Bless, Bleed.’ Piano and bold orchestral sweeps meld with stark synths and crunching guitars on ‘Fallout’, before Watts comes on like Bowie on the slow-paced anthemic ‘Comedown’, while the verses of ‘Hand of Mercy’ owe more to Prince.

It’s a PIG release and therefore it’s a pure [serial killer] thriller, alright – but even within the now-expansive catalogue, Feast of Agony is a strong entry.

AA

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History of Guns – Drug Castle / Survive the Night – short film

Posted: 5 September 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

It was in my early teens that I discovered goth, and Mick Mercer’s Gothic Rock Black Book was something of an early bible for me. Mercer has built a career on being a huge authority on the genre, and things in the post-punk sphere. So the fact that the latest release from History of Guns – a ‘maverick’ industrial act from Hertfordshire leads with a quote from Mercer, describing them as “by far, the most inventive UK band to have got their hands caught in the Industrial threshing machine,” is quite a strong sell. The strongest sell, of course, are the wares themselves, and highlighting just how unfettered by convention History of Guns are is the fact that Drug Castle isn’t just another video single, another lyric video, another ‘vizualizer’ (thank fuck). No, this is, they explain, ‘a short film for one of the more experimental parts of their latest album, Half Light, in which they take their instruments to the beach, and experiment with different audio and emotional frequencies, in an effort to contact beings from another world.’

If this sounds utterly deranged, the context counts for a lot, and to provide this, I shall quote at length:

‘Drug Castle was the nickname given to a facility in England where they used to conduct experimental, often unethical psychological procedures during the 60s and 70s. No one’s quite sure of its exact location, other than it was near the sea, and some of the sessions happened out on the beach. Different psychologists and psychiatrists could effectively book it out, and then take patients or unwitting volunteers down there for however long, and do whatever they liked. There are stories from people who received really helpful, life-changing treatment there, but it’s probably more famous for the awful horror stories and reports of extreme abuse and deaths. Apparently, there was very liberal use of experimental drugs and techniques, hence the nickname. One of the experimental treatments was called Frequency Therapy which involved using sonic frequencies to match or harmonise with emotional frequencies, which would cause a third frequency to be created which caused some quite profound healing and bizarre experiences. One survivor of a group of a group reported making contact with alien creatures.’

Sourcing information about ‘Drug Castle’ is virtually impossible, but then, that’s hardly surprising given the nature of the operation. We know that the CIA’s operation MK Ultra ran from 1953 well into the 1970s – but there’s also a lot we don’t know. This is how conspiracy theories are born – though the known existence of government conspiracies. While most of the documents relating to MK Ultra were destroyed, those which survived and were declassified, despite heavy redactions, contained staggering and truly terrifying revelations.

‘Staggering and truly terrifying’ happen to be fitting descriptors for this dark, challenging audiovisual excursion. Scaping, droning, groaning, tectonic-plate-shifting heavy industrial churns and grinding metallic noise and dissonance provide the sonic backdrop to a menacing spoken-word piece. The vocals layer upon on another and the experience grows increasingly uncomfortable. Strings swirl and build, but what may, done differently, be a soothing experience, creates nothing but tension.

The guys looks like they’re participating on some ritual as they sit, cross-legged, on a beach. That beach becomes the location of a washed-up emptiness further on, and then transition to acoustic-led neofolk-tinged darkness in the later parts of thee tune a dramatically alters the trajectory of this work. The pleasantry of the surroundings transition to unsettling territory.

It’s quite apparent that History of Guns have gone way, way deep into their excavations in shaping dark domains of Drug Castle. Dark and uncomfortable, this is remarkable art.

You can see it all here:

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Don’t Try – The Bible Study Group Massacre

Posted: 31 August 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Buzzhowl Records – 27th September 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Once again, following the release of a four-way split showcasing local talent a few months ago, Stoke proves the be the spawning ground of more off-kilter noisy noise, this time from no-wave duo Don’t Try with their second EP. As an additional point of note, and also something of a recommendation / hype point, the EP’s artwork is courtesy of Dan Holloway, of USA Nails/Eurosuite/Dead Arms fame, who worked with the band previously on their 2018 single ‘JWAFJ’. To accompany the release, Dan has also realised a video in his own inimitable style.

Like ‘JWAFJ’, their first EP, Elvis Is Dead was released in 2018, meaning it’s been a full six years since they last released anything, suggesting that on the output stakes at least, they’ve been living up to the band’s name.

Lead track ‘my grazed knee’ with its gritty yet poppy synths and urgent, determined beats isn’t actually a million miles from the sound of The Eurosuite. It reminds us of the proximity of new wave to punk, and the reasons why new wave and post-punk are essentially interchangeable terms. And while punk did, undoubtedly, spawn some great tunes (I’d perhaps contend less great bands, in that many punk acts, with a few notable exceptions like The Ruts and Adverts, produced only one or two outstanding or even memorable sings, and were unable to deliver the entirety of a solid album, let alone a career), it was post-punk where things got interesting, after things had evolved from three-chord stomps. If punk was predominantly pissed-off, railing against boredom and just off the rails, what followed explored a greater emotional range, and was more articulate, both musically and lyrically. For all its rebellion and antagonism toward conventions and norms, punk very quickly established its own conventions and norms: post-punk broke down those definitions to explore in myriad different directions, fragmenting and evolving into countless new genres.

It’s been a long time since the advent of both punk and new wave now, and in theory, any contemporary exponent of either is liable to tie themselves to certain tropes. But contemporary punk bands, more often than not, seem to be so limited in their scope, whereas many current acts who align themselves with post punk / new wave offer a broader range – even the ones who have been lazily lumped into the bracket of Joy Division imitators. I mention this as I discovered both Interpol and Editors because they were constantly being compared to Joy Division, and while I came to like both bands very much, my first reaction was dismay laced with disappointment over how unlike Joy Division either act sounded.

And so, circuitously, we arrive back with Don’t Try. ‘my grazed knee,’ as I was starting to say before I embarked on my obligatory and epic detour, is a fuzzy, low-fi keyboard-driven cut that boasts a monstrous throbber of a grindy synth bass groove that lands between Suicide and Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘Nag Nag Nag.’ But it’s a lot harder, harsher, noiser, more aggressive, more antagonised. Punkier? I suppose it’s representative of the point at which that nascent industrial sound began to evolve, but there’s also a manic hardcore edge to it, which is more apparent on the harsh assault of ‘climax in the imax’. Here, everything is ratcheted up in its volume and intensity, there’s a clattering metallic snare sound that crashes like a bin lid through the song’s duration, and about two-thirds in, it sounds like someone’s started up a drill and it all suddenly goes slower and heavier and you start to feel like things are getting dark and tense. This is very much a positive, in case you’re wondering.

There’s a clear trajectory to this EP, a sonic evolution which moved forward with each track, and things turn full-on industrial on the third track, ‘ritual’, which manifests are a monstrous, relentless rhythmic pounding reminiscent of mid-80s SWANS and the heavy grind of Godflesh. The crazed, anguished vocals are howled, yelped, drawled, hinting at the manic howl of the Jesus Lizard (and so, equally, Blacklisters). After hitting what feels like a locked groove around the mid-point, everything explodes and the track – and EP – climaxes in a slamming wall of ear-blasting noise. None of it’s pretty. All of it’s good.

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