introspective | Aural Aggravation

Posts Tagged ‘introspective’

Aidan Baker – & You Still Fall In

Posted: 26 March 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: & You Still Fall In, Acoustic, Aidan Baker, Album Review, Ambient, Atmospheric, Experimental, Gizeh Records, Hypnodrone Ensemble, introspective, Nadja, Noplace Trio, Solo, Sparse, Tavare, Textured

Gizeh Records – 28th March 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

I sometimes wonder if Aidan Baker has secretly mastered cloning, since he has seemingly pursued multiple careers simultaneously. He’s been active for some time, it’s true, but even the compressed version of his bio makes for quite the read:

As a member of Nadja, Hypnodrone Ensemble, Noplace Trio, Tavare and a host of other projects and solo endeavours, Baker’s prolific output remains vital as he continues to explore a vast terrain of sounds and genres across a 30 year musical career.

His latest work, & You Still Fall In, we learn, was recorded at Baker’s home studio in Berlin, and ‘hints at the mood and songcraft of the likes of Midwife, Hood, Stina Nordenstam and Movietone. The album is a compelling listen, stripped down to mostly electric guitar and vocals and moving at a distinctly glacial pace. The intimacy of the hushed tones and muted textures lean into a dark, hypnotic and gentle stillness that lingers in the air…’

That fact that this is a truly solo work, with Baker taking care of guitar, bass, drum machine, and vocals is perhaps key to its low-key, introspective atmosphere. Intimate is the word: on the title track which raises the curtain on this soporific sequence of compositions, the acoustic guitar strum hovers to a drone, wavering in volume, seeming to drift, seeming to warp, to fade, you can hear fingertips swiping on strings between frets, and Baker’s vocal is but a mumble; you hear sound, but the words don’t fall free to clarity.

‘Drowning Not Waving’ blends rumbling bass distortions with glitching drum machine and an air of uneasiness: the experience is every inch the struggle the title suggests. And that title… the phrase may have become a popular adaptation of the line from Stevie Smith’s 1957 poem and a metaphor for depression, but to momentarily reflect on the actuality of this all-too -common experience is to recognise the extent to which we, as a society, still – STILL – fail to identify a person in crisis. ‘Cheer up, it might never happen’, we hear often. But it does happen. Even well-meaning friends will diminish the spasms of crisis with ‘well, my life’s shit or probably worse, actually’ type responses. And each such response is like a hand on the head, pushing down. And yes, I speak from experience, and not so long ago I was out for a walk in an attempt to find some tranquillity, some headspace, some time with my thoughts. A dog, off lead, ran up to me and began barking and hassling. Its owners called it back and then groused at me for my failure to smile and thank them. “Ooh, someone’s lost their smile,” the guy said loudly, purposefully so that I could hear. No fucking shit. But you know nothing about my life. My wife died recently and I am not in the mood for being hassled by dogs, and I owe you twats nothing, least of all a smile. I continued on my way without a word, let alone a smile, and there was no point in waving. I was simply drowning. The moral? People may have stuff going on you know nothing about, so don’t be a twat. And anger is only a few degrees along from depression. Music has a boundless capacity to inspire the most unexpected responses.

Things stray into even more minimal, lo-fi territory with ‘You Say You Can See Inside Me’, which captures the spirit of Silver Jews and the soul of some of Michael Gira’s solo recordings. It’s muffled, droning, barely there, even. And yet, somehow, its sparsity accentuates its emotional intensity. There’s almost a confessional feel to this, but it’s a confession so mumbled, either through shame, embarrassment, or plain unwillingness.

On the surface, & You Still Fall In is a gentle work, defined by mellow, picked acoustic guitar and vocals so chilled as to be barely awake – but everything lies beneath the surface. And the surface isn’t as tranquil as all that: ‘When The Waves They Parted’ may be defined by a rippling surge but there’s discomfort beneath the ebb, and the reverb-soaked crunch of ‘Still Cold from the Rain’ is bleak and lugubrious.

Although presented as two separate pieces, ‘Thin Film Interface’ is a continuous thirteen-minute expanse of murky ambience with lead guitar work which soars and echoes over a shifting sonic mist. It hovers in the background, yet simultaneously alters the texture and colour of the air, relaxing but with an unresolved tension beneath.

& You Still Fall In is a difficult album to place – but why should that be necessity? A lot happens, an at the same time, it doesn’t. & You Still Fall In is sparse, drifting between acoustic and altogether simpler acoustic instrumentation. But instead of dissecting the details or reasoning, I’m going to point to the album, and simply say ‘listen to this’. Because it’s simply incredible.

Listen: ‘In Your Night’ by Eye

Posted: 29 February 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
Tags: dark, Dark Light, electro, Eye, In Your Night, introspective, Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard, melodic, New Heavy Sounds, single stream

EYE – the new band from Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard (MWWB) singer-songwriter/musician Jessica Ball – has announced the arrival of their eagerly awaited debut album, ‘Dark Light’ set for release on 26th April via New Heavy Sounds (Shooting Daggers, MWWB, Blacklab)

"These songs have been many years in the making… Some of these ideas were crafted before MWWB, this is something I’ve always wanted to do. Over the last couple of years, I’ve spent some time on finishing and crafting these ideas and pieces of music into songs. Some were snippets of lyrics from my early twenties which reflect on what seems like a different person. I think it’s quite poetic how it’s all come together now.

I was also encouraged after finding musicians who understood the vision and style I was trying to achieve, and of course my experience of being in MWWB. I’m a guitarist above all, and I loved reconnecting with guitar again. It feels like all my influences and favourite styles have come together in this album. Shoegaze, doom, folk, dream pop… It’s a real mix bag but as a whole, it represents many different stages of my life and tells a story.

The album ultimately is quite introspective yet lyrically loose enough to be open to interpretation – I’ve always been a fan of songs that seem to perfectly slot into the situation I’m experiencing and not too specific to one person’s experience… I think that comes across in this album.”

Jessica relocated from Wrexham to join her new partner, veteran Welsh musician Gid Goundrey (Gulp, Ghostlawns, Martin Carr), in Cardiff just as the pandemic era dawned. Confined to their small Grangetown flat, they quite naturally began making music together.

Having earned acclaim and a fervent fan following for her role in MWWB, Ball took the opportunity to compose songs that were all her own – nuanced, lyrical, and hypnotically distinctive.

Triggered in part by the existential dread looming outside as well as the sudden ill health of her dear friend, MWWB guitarist Paul “Dave” Davies, then fighting for life after a Covid-related stroke.

With Goundrey on drums (for the first time in his musical career) and joined by keyboardist Johnny TK, Eye experimented with sounds to match Ball’s melodic songs, traversing a diverse spectrum of dark folk, dreampop, IDM and psychedelic doom, to create sometimes heavy and foreboding drones, alongside spare but still richly textured sonics.

The result is their debut album ‘Dark Light’. An intensely atmospheric fusion of emotionally charged songcraft and inspired sonic energy. The clue is in the album’s paradoxical title. Chilling and even bleak melodies with arrangements daringly and deliberately stripped down and minimal. Revealing a kinship with sonic bed-fellows Mazzy Star, Chelsea Wolfe or even Portishead, which can be heard on first single ‘In Your Night’. Jessica comments,

"Our first release ‘In Your Night’ represents Eye musically, conceptually and lyrically and I’m proud for this to be the first song that everyone hears from us… Light and dark, night and day, quiet and loud is the running theme throughout this song and album as a whole. Whether you’re up close to a song, or listening to the album as a whole, these themes will be ever present throughout. We’re playing around with these two extremes sonically and what these represent emotionally and mentally. I feel that nothing takes you on a journey more effectively than a good build up, or something happening unexpectedly, much like real life. We are just the eye that witnesses it all."

Listen to ‘In Your Night’ here:

Eamon the Destroyer – We’ll be Piranhas

Posted: 1 November 2023 in Albums
Tags: Album Review, Captain Cook, Drone, Eamon the Destroyer, introspective, odd, spooky, Strange, surreal, We’ll be Piranhas

Bearsuit Records – 31st October 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Just a little over two years since the idiosyncratically-monikered Eamon the Destroyer arrived with his debut single ‘My Drive’, he’s gone from strength to strength – to the extent that his output has erupted, Godzilla-like, expanding and flexing immense musical muscles. Sort of. Because Eamon the Destroyer’s work is, despite the connotations of a raging beast laying waste to entire civilizations with a single roar, incredibly intimate, with tension building from the introspective minimalism of the songs. With the release of the debut album A Small Blue Car and a remix / reworking of said album landing in quick succession, the arrival of We’ll be Piranhas seems swift.

We’ll be Piranhas finds Eamon the Destroyer (any truncation of the name feels wrong: Eamon too casual and to cuddly; the Destroyer simply unrepresentative) pushing the parameters of experimentalism, conjuring the sonic equivalent of the surreal oddness of the album’s cover, which looks like a three-way split-screen of medievalism, Anglo-Saxon fable, and a deranged reimagining of some of Captain Cook’s sketches of newly-discovered species with what appears to be a polar bear resting its chin on a narwhal, while gulls look on and rabbits look away. Or something.

‘The Choirmaster’ is both droney and playful, quirky, and mellow, until it spins off its axis and into a whole other world of spiralling prog and doodling daftness. It certainly packs a lot into five strange and disorientating minutes. Single ‘Rope’ is glitchy, awkward, and feels like it doesn’t belong to anything, and suddenly, it lurches too life with a loping rhythm and fuzzy synths which provide a backdrop to tense, almost strangled vocals, hushed, strained, and gravelly. Not for the first time, I long for a lyric sheet as the scratchy vocals render the words difficult to decipher, but this is perhaps his most vitriolic piece to date; more often than not, Eamon the Destroyer croaks melancholy: here, there’s a fire, and it carried through into the wheezing clatter of ‘Sonny Said’. There’s a moment around the mid-point I get a pang of Seventeen Seconds-era Cure. But it’s fleeting, and nothing is pinpointable, particularly in this swirling maelstrom of a piece.

When it comes to Bearsuit releases, I often find myself using and reusing the word ‘weird’ as a descriptor – mostly because it’s the thing that really defines the label. While the likes of Harrold Nono spin Eastern hues into spirals and spin drifts of experimentalism, We’ll be Piranhas finds ETD really going all-out to try stuff. And the result is brain-bending.

‘Underscoring the Blues’ somehow manages to melt fairground oddness with The Doors and prog and, well, all sorts, to blur into a curious cocktail.

It’s difficult – if not impossible –to listen to this album and feel ‘normal’. It feels like the soundtrack to a dream: one of those weird dreams where familiar places aren’t quite right – the walls of familiar rooms are different, doors and windows are in the wrong place, and continually moving, and you look to make your way out and suddenly the door has vanished. The floor is moving and familiar faces warp and acquire new, alien aspects. You don’t know who you are or what’s going on, but you know that this isn’t what you expected as the sights and sounds of the familiar melt into one another. You feel your sense of time and space begin to crumble. Where am I? What even is this?

It feels like isolation. It feels like… like… like numbness, confusion. You feel your body tense, the backs of the legs growing taut. The title tracks sends everything spinning and whirling every whichway, and there is no easy way to assimilate this, and the same is true of the woozy glitchings of the desolate ‘A Call is Coming’. Ignore the call; decline it. Look inwards. Woah, something isn’t quite right.

We’ll be Piranhas leaves you feeling detached, askance, apart, removed, not quite right. It’s an introspective work delivered from on the cusp. On the cusp of what? It’s hard to say. Perhaps it’s best not to.

Mayshe-Mayshe – Indigo

Posted: 1 November 2022 in Albums
Tags: Album Review, bedroom pop, craft, Dance, Electropop, Groove, Indigo, introspective, Loops, Mayshe-Mayshe, melodic, minimal, Shoegaze, songwriting, Sparse, tunes

11th November 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Yorkshire based Mayshe-Mayshe’s bio references blending ‘dreamy art-pop and electronica with rich storytelling, skittering percussion and infectious melodies’, and how her ‘deceptively simple songwriting – at once universal and deeply personal – incorporates choral vocals, vintage synths and the occasional hairdryer.’

Said hairdryer was observed in a couple of live reviews I’ve penned in recent years, in catching her live in 2016 and 2021, but what always stands out during her performances is just how deftly she combines an array of elements, both stylistic and instrumental. She’s by no means just ‘another’ loop pedal artist, but a musical who judiciously uses the tools available to conjure textured, layered, detailed works which are, at the same time, simple and radiate aa unique sense of – for wont of a better word – naivete. But equally, her capacity for understatement is a defining characteristic. The fact that while playing a number of regional shows to launch Indigo, her second full-length album, her hometown show in York on the release date is in a record shop/café with a capacity of about 30 speaks for itself.

Performing as Mayshe-Mayshe, Alice Rowan presents as not necessarily shy, but introspective, considered, contemplative and as much as immersing her work in reservedness, there’s a certain sparkle of sass and levity in the mix, as titles like ‘You Throw Lemons, We Throw Parties’ from 2019’s Cocoa Smoke indicates.

Indigo is simultaneously simple and complex. As the lyrics to the title track demonstrate, she’s given to exploring emotional depths by balancing the direct and the oblique to create an obfuscating haze. And, in record, the same is true of her compositions.

‘But I Do’ kicks the album off in a style that’s minimal and poppy and kinda urban but at the same time ethereal and shoegazy, with busy fingerdrums and a crystalline distillation of mood that invites solid and favourable comparisons to The XX.

‘Dark Mountain’, released as a single in September, is really rather buoyant, with a bouncy bass and busy lead synth and twitchy urban vocal delivery that’s quite at odds with the tense lyrics and the ‘I’m drowning, downing’ hook which speaks to anxiety and panic. I suppose you might call it a sugar-coated pill, but it showcases Alice’s capacity to pen bleak yet buoyant pop tunes.

In contrast, ‘Moonflood’ is altogether darker yet dreamy, in a Curesque way, while ‘The Colours of Anxiety’, which originally featured on the 2019 Long Division compilation, is looping, lilting, and easy on the ear in a way that brushes over the tension it channels via a stuttering beat akin to a palpating heart. In this way, Mayshe-Mayshe conveys sensation beyond the words, beyond the explicit, and does so beautifully, in the most subtly resonant fashion.

In many ways, ‘Eczema’ speaks for itself, an itch that just won’t go away, sore and raw, uncomfortable and irritating, but presented in a palatable fashion, and ‘How to be Happy’ feels like a conscious attempt to be uplifting – which is it, but there are strong undercurrent which are less joyous. ‘Zachter’ is another previous release, having featured as the lead track on the two-track Zachter EP last year. With its lyrics in German and its instrumentation sparse and gloopy and with a hypnotic minimal dance groove, it’s something of an oddity which sits apart from the rest of the album.

The title track, released as a single only the other week, rounds the album off in a hazy, intricately detailed style. Accessible, and often breezy-sounding and easy on the ear, Indigo is an album that’s rich in depth and complexity. It’s thoughtful and emotive and dark and tense yet still extremely enjoyable. It’s a wonderful thing.