Posts Tagged ‘instrumental’

DuChamp – The Wild Joy

Posted: 20 July 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Torto Editions / Ramble Records / Atena Records – 25th July 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

DuChamp (certainly not to be confused with the seminal avant-gardist Marcel Duchamp) is a Berlin-based artist, and for this release, is the product of ‘a journey of development, research, and refinement of a deeply personal voice’, their chosen selection of instruments is listed as ‘baritone guitar, voice, organ, synths, bouzuki, electronics, incredible stubbornness.’

The baritone guitar is not a common instrument, but oner which sounds quite unlike any other guitar in terms of its tonality. Its application here is in providing the core to elongated sonorous drones on the five compositions on The Wild Joy. It’s a title I take to be somewhat ironic, for despite the resplendent flora which graces the album’s cover, the title of the first piece, ‘Sine proprio’ translates, depending on your choice of reference source, as ‘without property’, ‘without possession’, or ‘poverty’. Whether or not this is a reference to a physical or spiritual poverty isn’t apparent, but what this nine-and-a-half minute dronescape does possess is a wealth of texture as the layers build and vibrate against one another.

‘The Shape of Time’ is very much constructed around contrasts; a whining, scraping drone nags the conscious level of listening, while a low, rumbling bassy resonance lingers way below, and it’s something you feel as much as hear. In the space between, incidentals drift in and out. In the distance, gongs chime and fade slowly, and the disparity between their timing and that of the pulsating throb which has begun to build is disorientating, unsettling.

‘Epithalamion’ marks a dramatic shift – in every way, starting with the change of instrumentation, and by no means ending with the change of approach, with a wild, undisciplined key-bashing crescendo occupying the first couple of minutes, before giving way to a wheezing sound like an organ on the brink of expiry. With its origins in the classical age, an epithalamium is a poem written specifically for the bride on the way to her marital chamber. This, however, sounds more like a piano being pushed down six flights of stairs, before a ghastly gasp sputters along interminably for the remainder of the duration. I pity the bride this was penned for.

Things are different again on ‘Fulaxos’: there, the baritone guitar comes into its own and to the fore, played conventionally, a picked, rolling motif that’s brooding, even doomy provides the starting point for a piece which gradually unfurls toward a place of light and optimism. The final track, which is also the title track, brings us almost full-circle, but there’s a levity to this extended, delicate dronescape, and the soaring vocal only accentuates this sense of elevation.

The joy may be somewhat subdued overall, but it’s there, on what is, ultimately, an accomplished, multi-faceted work.

AA

a3734767457_10

loscil – Lake Fire

Posted: 5 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

Kranky – 2nd May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Landscapes, in all their forms, have always been significant in the inspiration for loscil works. Scott Morgan is an artist who seems sensitive to his surroundings, and also responsive to them when it comes to the creative process.

This is true of many artists, of course, and any artist who isn’t in some way influenced by their surroundings and the things which happen around them are… largely incomprehensible to me on a personal level. It simply seems unnatural to create art in a void, detached from experience. I’m not advocating that all art should be grounded in the here and now, or even in reality, but even the most imaginative of scenarios require an element of grounding in order to be credible. The most wildly-imagined sci-fi and fantasy only work when there’s a demonstration of an understanding of human character, or how dialogue works, and so on.

The misty, murky shadings of the cover are replicated in sonic form on ‘Arrhythmia’, the first of the album’s nine compositions. Where are indecipherable whispers eddying behind the piano notes, which gradually blur into a watercolour wash, and a slow pulsing tide slowly rises, only to fall and resurface and fall again.

Interweaving layers create an aural latticework on ‘Bell Flame’, the different tempos of the rippling waves merge together effortlessly to create a shimmering, ever-shifting fabric that’s soft, almost translucent. These supple, subtle ambient works are far from abstract, although their forms are vague to distinguish, and single release ‘Candling’, it so proves, is exemplary of the album’s finely-balanced layerings and contrasts.

With ‘Sparks’ preceding ‘Ash Clouds’, one might be tempted to perceive some form of narrative, or at least a linearity in their pairing: the two six-minute pieces drift invisibly from one to the next, although ‘Ash Clouds’ is heavier, darker, an elongated drone providing one of the album’s moodiest, most oppressive pieces. ‘Flutter’ is appropriately titles, and warps and bends in a somewhat disorientating, disconcerting fashion, creating an effect not dissimilar from the room-spin of inebriation, while the title track concludes the album with a lot of very little, as long, low droning notes hang heavy. It’s pure desolation, and yet… there is something which rises upwards other than smoke and flame – a gasping breath and the sound of a thousand souls transported in vapour.

There are beats on this album, but they’re almost subliminal, a heartbeat underneath the mix, and provide a sense of orientation like fence posts visible through fog or low cloud on a barren moor. More often than not, though, the rhythms come from the interactions between the different elements as they meet and then separate once again. The abstract nature of the work somehow compels the listener to not only fill the blank spaces with their own sensory and emotional input, but also to visualise in the mind’s eye what they may look like. As such, Lake Fire, while largely tranquil, sedate, and even soothing in parts, is stimulating, and to more than just the ears.

AA

a2277207601_10

Gintas K – Atmosfera

Posted: 2 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

9th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

With his latest offering, Gintas K promises a work of ‘ambience, electroacoustical micromelodies and noise played and record live without overdub.’ That he is so relentlessly active is perhaps one of the reasons its possible for him to create such wild improvised works on a first-take basis – which in turns means it’s possible to crank out new releases at such a staggering rate.

The first of the seven sequentially-numbered pieces is eleven and a half minutes in duration, and begins as a barely audible drip, a tiny trickling sound at the fringe of perception. Instantly I find myself on edge: it’s a sound I’ve become increasingly and acutely aware of in recent days, as the shower in my bathroom – only an internal stud wall away from my office where I listen and write – has progressed from a slow and infrequent drip to a full, continuous dribble, a nagging, torturous sound which has led me to place the shower head in the bath in order to mute it. There’s something of a liquid, and sometimes foamy, frothy sound to many of Gintas’ works, and Atmosphera begins with all the promise of being another one of these. And, indeed, as the drip and trickle increases in rate to become a gurgling stream, there is a sense of growing volume – in terms of liquid, rather than sonically. But a sparse piano rings out over the babbling stream, and as the piece progresses, creaks and bleeps and bumps and strange warps in the very fabric of time and space disrupt the flow. And yet, as the abstract interruptions and distractions become increasingly frequent and ever-more alien, sometimes extending to washes of fizzing distortion, and even fill-on frenzies of chaotic noise, echoing drips and splashes, like water falling from above into the lake at the bottom of a heigh-vaulted cavern, and reverberating piano notes remain at the core of this bewildering sonic collage.

There is a certain sense of evolution as the pieces run into one another: by Atmosphera #3, there is a sense of ambience blended with dissonance, and slow pulsations merge with the brooding and often melancholic piano lines, and these elements certainly contrast with the organic yet equally turbulent, almost artificial grunts and gurgles. Atmosphera #5 is the sound of lasers set to stun, with robotic squawks and a relentless whistle of feedback that hits right at the tinnitus pitch and congeal into concoction of wrongness, like a stew with a bunch of ingredients that should never be combined.

The album winds down gradually, sparse piano notes and a soft trickling liquid flow slowly descending, falling, and fading away…

Something about listening to Atmosfera is like watching a large fish tank. Just as the fish flit blithely and without any attention to the world beyond their own, darting here and there without any predictable linear path, so Atmosfera doesn’t follow a linear flow – and is all the better for it.

AA

a2258515655_10

Watch: ‘Mars On A Half Moon Rising’ by Knox Chandler

Posted: 21 April 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

‘Mars On A Half Moon Rising’ is the first video from The Sound, the solo debut of much-travelled musician / producer / arranger / painter Knox Chandler. This project is a musical / visual memoir depicting the shift in his surroundings from the urban to the rural, specifically the Connecticut shoreline off the Long Island Sound and the impact of this dramatic change of environment on his consciousness and the art-work that leads to.

At The Sound’s core is Chandler’s “Soundribbon” style of meditative, powerfully cinematic instrumental performance on guitar, accompanied by upright bass and percussion which comprises the audio component of the release. The visual portion is a book of paintings, photographs, sketches and written meditations, interpreting nature through technology. The blending of these mediums is Knox’s attempt to make the diaristic intent of his music explicit. The Sound is being released on Knox’s new label Blue Elastic on May 30. The album is available on digital download and on streaming platforms on its own, or the book comes with a download code. I hope you’ll consider covering Knox with an interview, feature, news story or album review.

Knox Chandler’s career has spanned for over four decades including long stints as a member of The Psychedelic Furs, Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Cyndi Lauper band, extraordinary experiences in recording and performing live around the world. Chandler’s also performed, recorded, arranged and produced, working with acts such as REM, Depeche Mode, Grace Jones, Marianne Faithful, Natalie Merchant, Tricky, The Creatures, Dave Gahan Paper Monsters and The Golden Palominos etc.

Knox spent a decade residing in Berlin, Germany, while he explored sound-scaping. He developed a technique he calls “Soundribbons”, which he recorded and performed in its own right as well as applying it to different genres and mediums . He composed, recorded, toured, produced, and wrote string arrangements for Herbert Grönemeyer, Jesper Munk, Pure Reason Revolution,The Still, TAU, Miss Kenichi and the Sun, Mars William’s Albert Ayler Xmas, Rita Redshoes, Them There, The Night, etc. While living in Germany received a Post Graduate certification in education and was the head of the guitar department at BIMM College.

AA

Knox Chandler

Desiccated Corpse – Desiccated Corpse

Posted: 19 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Dret Skivor – 4th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

This latest release on Swedish microlabel devoted to the most underground of underground music, Dret Skivor, may be form an act we’ve not heard of before, but something about it has all the hallmarks of the eternally prolific Dave Procter all over it. The man behind Legion of Swine (noisy) and Fibonacci Drone Organ (droney) and myriad other projects and collaborations – some occasional, some one-off – has a distinctive North of England drollness and a penchant for pissing about making noise of all shades, after all.

Released on CD in a hand-painted edition of just two, the notes on the Bandcamp page for the release are typically minimal: ‘Is it dungeon synth? Is it just spooky music? Is there torture afoot?’ I would say I will be the judge of that, but dungeon synth is a genre I’m yet to fully get to grips with, although it does for all the world seem as if it’s a genre distinction that’s come to be applied to spooky music, and seems to have grown in both popularity and usage comparatively recently, despite its roots going back rather further.

The cover art doesn’t give much – anything away, and in fact, I might have hoped for something more… graphic. But perhaps less is more here. However, the titles of the two tracks –‘the shithouses’ shithouse’ and ‘the festering flesh of the neoliberal’ are classic Procter and could as easily be titles for poems by Dale Prudent, another of his alter-egos.

The first begins with a swelling thrum of what sounds like a chorus of voices, possibly some monastic indentation, layered and looped and multitracked to create a torturous cacophony. For the first twenty, thirty, forty seconds, you wait for a change to come, for something to happen. After a minute that expectation is diminishing, and by the three-minute mark it’s impossible to be certain if there really are keyboard stabs swirling in the mix in the midst of it all, or if your ears and mind are deceiving you and you’re losing the plot. For some reason, I’m reminded of the Paris catacombs – not because it’s actually creepy, but because, just as seeing rows and rows of bones stacked up for quite literally miles becomes both overwhelming and desensitising after a time, so hearing the same sound bubbling away for ten minutes is pretty much guaranteed to fuck with your head. Near the eight-minute mark, there are most definitely additional layers of buzzing drone and there are some tonal slips and slows, like listening to a tape that’s become stretched or is slipping on its spool, but by this time your brain’s already half-melted, and I find myself contemplating the fact that while visiting the catacombs on a sixth-form art trip, one of my fellow students accepted the challenge to lick a skull for eight Francs – which was about a quid at the time. I was less appalled by the fact it was a human skull than the fact the bones looked dusty and mossy, and had probably been touched by even more unwashed hands than the handle of the gents lavs at a busy gig venue.

And so we arrive at the twenty-two-minute ‘the festering flesh of the neoliberal’. It begins with a distant clattering percussion – like someone bashing a car bonnet with a broken fence post heard from a quarter of a mile away, but with a gauze of reverb, as if echoing from the other side of a valley – or, put another way, like listening to early Test Dept through your neighbour’s wall – while a pulsing, pulsating electronic beat, like a palpating heartbeat, thuds erratically beneath it. And that’s pretty much it. But there are leaps and lurches in volume, and the cumulative effect of this monotonous loop is brain-bending. There are gradual shifts, and seemingly from nowhere rises a will of croaks and groans which grow in intensity, and it may well be an auditory confusion, but regardless, the experience is unsettling. Twenty-two minutes is a long time to listen to a continuous rumbling babble that sounds like droning ululations and a barrage of didgeridoos all sustaining a note, simultaneously, for all time.

Is it dungeon synth? Probably not. Is it spooky? Not really. It is torturous? Without doubt. This is a tough listen, with dark babbling repetitions rendered more challenging by the cruelly long track durations. The torture afoot is right here.

AA

a2009823040_10

Watch: ‘Candling’ by Loscil

Posted: 17 April 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

Today, celebrated electronic composer Loscil shares the video for ‘Candling’, taken from his forthcoming album release, Lake Fire (kranky, 2nd May).

‘Candling’ is one of Lake Fire‘s nine tracks offering ash-laden sonics that mine the tension within the cycle of destruction and rejuvenation.

AA

Loscil will perform the following live dates:

May 1, 2025, SFU – Vancouver, CA  SOLD OUT
Sep 4, 2025, Extreme Chill – Reykjavik, IS
Sep 8, 2025, Silent Green, Berlin, DE  tickets
Sep 10, 2025, Botanique, Brussels, BE 
Sep 12, 2025, Casa Montjuic, Barcelona, ES  tickets
Sep 16, 2025, Rich Mix, London, UK  tickets
Sep 18, 2025, Ostre, Bergen, NO  tickets
Sep 20, 2025, OSA Festival, Gdansk, PL

Lake Fire is the result of a disjointed creative process. Originally conceived as a suite for electronics and ensemble, most of the original compositions were deserted, save for Ash Clouds, featuring James Meager on double bass. The remaining tracks were reshaped and remixed, built anew out of the remnants of the abandoned work. The result is a phoenix, an album burnt to the ground only to be reassembled out of its cinders. Fragments of the original lurk beneath a densely overpainted canvas of sound.

Infused into the resulting rearrangements are impressions from a road trip into the mountains marking a personal half-century milestone, surrounded by the ominous proximity of wildfires and dense smoke; celebrating life while the world burns. The album’s title comes from the striking irony that forest fires are often named after regional lakes – perhaps subconsciously referencing ancient lore. The cover photos were taken from this same trip, while sitting in a rowboat staring into the grey abyss of an opposing mountainside outside of Revelstoke, BC, obfuscated by smoke from a nearby lake fire.

AA

3_loscil_ferry25_nocredit-99045103cf04513c

thisquietarmy – Langue Hybride

Posted: 15 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

18th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Eric Quach has been making music – or perhaps more accurately sculpting sound on the fringes of music – as thisquietarmy for over twenty years, amassing a substantial body of work as a solo artist, with an expanded band lineup, and with various collaborations, the most recent being Cîme, his second with Tom Malmendier

We learn that Langue Hybride was written and arranged in less than 4 weeks during thisquietarmy’s music residency at Centre d’Expérimentation Musical (CEM) in the region of Saguenay—Lac-St-Jean, Québec.

The album consists of five longform tracks, which range from seven and a half to sixteen minutes in duration. It’s the shortest work, ‘Les Rayons Cosmiques’ which lifts the curtain the album, with droning, dolorous strings and distant, delicate percussion conjuring evocative atmospherics, coloured with both a simmering tension and an underlying sense of sadness, which, while hard to define, is palpable. Around the midpoint, that distant percussion builds to stand front and centre and a groove emergers, suddenly and unexpectedly, and the whole feel changes towards something that’s a cinematic hybrid of folk and space rock.

‘Respirer l’instabilité’ crashes into altogether darker territory, a gloomy, doomy trudge of slow, deliberate drumming and a low, grinding bass, over which discordant sonic mayhem plays out. After a lull of calm around the mid-point, a pulsating rhythm merges, and things evolve into a strolling wig-out with some strong jazz-funk leanings and already, a pattern is beginning to emerge in terms of compositional structure, in that around halfway, the trajectory shifts, and the piece ends in a completely different place from the one in which it started.

This is confirmed by the pivot which takes place around five minutes into the third track. Reminiscent of latter-day Swans, ‘Les radicaux libres’ is woozy and weird, expansive and haunting, and begins to pick up pace and volume six minutes in, building to a bursting sustained crescendo that’s both hypnotic and tense, and if ‘Organismes en aérobiose’ starts out soothing, the sound of dappled sun through leaves on a summer’s day, it transitions to a fist-waving stomper and concludes as a skyward-facing surge of sonic exultation, via the detour of a post-rock tidal wave, while fifteen-minute closer ‘Solastalgie impalpable’ rides a wave of thick riffage and strings reminiscent of the long play-out on ‘Layla’ – only this is arguably more successful, as it always felt like an epic and overlong anti-climax in the wake of that guitar-line. True to form, ‘Solastalgie impalpable’ does make a shift, tapering into some elongated swirling drones which reverberate and rattle the ribs and taunt the senses, before suddenly bursting into life with a driving rock riff by way of a climactic finale.

Langue Hybride is a wild ride, and while claims for acts producing ‘genre-defying’ works are not just tedious and predictable but usually completely spurious, there’s no neat way of categorising this schizophrenic hybrid, where each track is a work of two halves, presenting almost oppositional styles and characteristics .But this stylistic polarity makes for exciting – if challenging – listening: given that the only thing that’s predictable is that each piece will fly in a different direction at some point, there’s no way one could call this album predictable. The vision – and its execution – are superb, and with Langue Hybride, thisquietarmy offer something which is quite different, and rather special.

AA

a1481414249_10

Watch: ‘Grief’ by Divide and Dissolve

Posted: 25 March 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

Helmed by Black and Cherokee composer and multi-instrumentalist Takiaya Reed, Divide and Dissolve will release their new album, Insatiable, on April 18 via Bella Union.

The 10 track album run the gamut of doom metal – from the ear-splitting depths of lead single ‘Monolithic’, to contemplative, softer moments on the aptly titled song ‘Grief’, released today. Like all of Divide and Dissolve’s music, Insatiable is almost entirely instrumental.

While the album’s sheer grandiosity represents an evolution in Divide and Dissolve’s sound, it also marks the very first time that Takiaya has ever lent vocals to a D//D song. On ’Grief’ her distorted voice echoes atop a vibrating bass tone, repeating the lyrics: “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do/ I’m so lonely without you.” Takiaya explains, “The voice is such a mysterious  instrument. This album feels different, and I wanted to honour that”.

The director of the music video, Sepi Mashiahof, adds; “The music video for ‘Grief’ is an ode to the feelings of empowerment, resistance, and sadness that Divide and Dissolve weaves into our bodies. It’s an expressionist diary made up of dissonant and revelatory memories. Grief eclipses everything around us, innocuously lingering in the functional movements of our daily lives, then aggressively literal in the reflective silence behind our eyes. Grief is inherent to our existence, knowing that a better world exists for all of us and its potential is boundless, yet we’re made to suffer the atrocities of greed and exploitation instead. We can honor Grief as a passage of life, but we must resist the forces that impose it as a numbness to injustice.”

AA

Divide and Dissolve live dates (so far):

18-05-2025 Desertfest London – London
30-08-2025 Supersonic Festival – Birmingham

AA

Screenshot2025-03-25145553-99079e0b6d03cf3c

Photo credit: Brandon McClain @eathumans

Deborah Fialkiewicz – Genetic Radio i.d

Posted: 24 March 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

17th March 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Deborah Fialkiewicz has been busy again, recording and releasing her latest offering in a compressed timeframe. Deborah Fialkiewicz is a low-key and predominantly ambient set, comprising twelve sparse, minimal works which rumble and eddy around the lower reaches of the conscious mind.

There are beats, but they’re way off in the background, as is the rest of everything. The restraint shown on ‘summer mantra’ is impressive: it’s the musical equivalent of holding your breath for five minutes. ‘the lief’ is rather more structured, centred around a descending motif which tinkles and chimes mellifluously, guiding the listener down a delicate path which leads to a murky morass of unsettling sonic experimental in the vein of Throbbing Gristle. The crackling static and muffled, impenetrable verbal mutterings of the ominous title track is exemplary, and it makes for uncomfortable listening. A hovering, quavering, UFO-drone hangs over words which are indecipherable, as if spoken from the other side of a thin wall – but their tone is menacing, and everything about this tense experience feels uncomfortable.

The circular, rippling waves of ‘star lady’ offer some respite, but it still arrives with strong hints of Throbbing Gristle circa Twenty Jazz Funk Greats and Chris and Cosey’s Trace, but also alludes to both Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. Thinks take a turn for the darker on the swarming drone of ‘Corpus’, which feels angry, abrasive, serrated edges buzzing attackingly, a thick rippling dominating like a helicopter directly overhead. In the present time, I can’t help but feel twitch and vaguely paranoid hearing this, even as it descends into a lurching, swampy nothing, because ‘bloodchild’ goes full churning assault, an echo-heavy wall of noise that cranks the oscillators this way and that, churning the guts and shredding the brain in a squall of resistor-driven frequency frenzy.

‘norther star’ is particularly mellow, as well as particularly tied to vintage beats and rippling repetitions, a work that’ simultaneously claustrophobic and intense. Synth notes hover and drift like mist before the next relentless, bubbling, groove. ‘widershin; is static, a locked-in ripping of a groove. And then there is the thirteen-minute ‘timeslip’, which marks an unexpected shift towards that domain of screaming electronic noise. The fact I found myself zooning out to the thirteen-minute monster mix of ambience and noise that is ‘timeslip’ is testament to the track’s immense, immersive expansions which massage and distract the mind.

Genetic Radio i.d delves deep into the electronica of the late 70s and early 80s, embracing the points of intersection between ambient and industrial, early Krautrock and BBC Radiophonic Workshop, while at times venturing into the domain of noisemongers like Prurient. It’s a harsh, heavy, extraneous incursion into the quietude of daily living, and it’s a sonically gripping and ultimately strong work which stretches in several direction simultaneously.

AA

AA

a1096582352_10

Then Comes Silence – Boxed

Posted: 13 February 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Metropolis Records – 21st February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

If one nation really loves its rock and it’s goth stuff, it’s Germany, and there are a fair few UK bands who, while they fair ok at home, are absolutely massive in Germany: the fact The Sisters of Mercy have continued to headline major festivals there well into the 00s, while at home, apart from Reading in ’91, they’ve never really featured in festival lineups gives a fair indication of the difference. So it should be of no surprise that it’s in Germany that Swedish post-punk/goth act Then Comes Silence grew their fanbase first in Germany, before expanding across mainland Europe after sharing stages with artists such as A Place To Bury Strangers, Chameleons and Fields Of The Nephilim.

Boxed should probably have been retitled Unboxed for this edition, being a digital reissue of tracks included in a limited and long-sold-out box set edition of their 2022 album Hunger, Consisting of two songs in Spanish, two instrumentals, two remixes and one outtake from that album, its reissue lands coincidental with the completion of a US tour in support of their seventh album, Trickery, released last year.

As one may expect from the summary, it’s more of a mixed bag of novel odds and ends than a serious or coherent EP release, and the presence of the songs sung in Spanish remind me of when The Wedding Present released ‘Pourquoi Es Tu Devenue Si Raisonnable?’, a French-language recording of ‘Why Are You Being So Reasonable Now?’ Sung in Gedge’s flat, Leeds accent, it sounds like… The Wedding Present, of course, and I’m sceptical about the translation given just how nearly the lyrics fit the melody.

Anyway. Boxed. The Spanish language versions of ‘Dias y Años’ and ‘Cebo’ are solid, but obviously don’t really bring much to the table, especially for the non-Spanish speakers – beyond a novel spin, that is. But make no mistake the ultra-percussive, stony goth groove of ‘Cebo’ (or ‘Worm’, as it is titled in English) is a killer cut in any language.

The first instrumental, ‘Spökenas Intåg (Walk-In)’, which in fact lifts the curtain on the release, is a somewhat spooky, atmospheric composition, imbued with filmic qualities, and it would sit comfortably on the soundtrack of a movie or maybe even a docudrama about a serial killer or something.

‘We Only Have So Long’ is a thrusting, energetic, guitar-driven song, packing groove and force into two and a half minutes, and while its offcut status is because of how it doesn’t really sit in the framework of the album, it might have made a standalone single, because, why not? It’s certainly not weak.

Although remixes rarely mark an improvement on the original – although there are notable exceptions – the H Zombie Remix of ‘Blood Runs Cold’ does at least bring something different.

The final track – amd second of the instrumentals – ‘Skuggornas Intåg’ bookends the EP and strives to give it some kind of cohesion, some kind of shape, being a clear counterpart to ‘Spökenas Intåg’. It’s atmospheric but inconsequential, and does feel rather like a space-filler or odd-end outro.

Ultimately, this release is simply what it is: a reissue of some bonus cuts for the benefit of the fans who missed out on the limited version of the album. It’ll no doubt make for a tidy addition for the new fans they accumulated on the tour, too, and it’s decent – but by no means their most essential offering.

AA

629423

Older Entries
Newer Entries