Posts Tagged ‘Mike Vest’

Brain Pills – Faded

Posted: 25 February 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

It might be a stretch to describe Brain Pills as a supergroup, but the various members of this trio all have form, with guitarist Mike Vest being a one-man guitar-driven noise industry and with 11 Paranoias and Bong being among his extensive catalogue of projects – and he’s joined by percussionist Nick Raybould  and Poundland vocalist Adam Stone. It should be no surprise, then, that this is dark, dense, and gnarly.

‘Faded’ offers four and a half minutes of thick, sludgy, trudgery that feels like an eternity – in a good way. It’s reminiscent of early Melvins – think the slow grinding trawls of Gluey Porch Treatments, rarely over three minutes in length but churning the guts low and slow and feeling twice that.

The sound is immense, a mass of distortion, the kind of overloading, all-out speaker-damaging wall of noise that hits you physically.

The heavy effects on the vocals – magnificently low in the mix – adds a brain-bending psychedelic twist to the megalithic sonic landslide, making for punishing, gnarly perfection.

The band are currently looking for a label to release the album which ‘Faded’ is taken from.

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Lush Worker – Sear

Posted: 19 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 25th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Mike Vest’s output continues to be nothing short of staggering. He’s played with a host of bands – great bands at that – Bong, 11Paranoias, Drunk In Hell, Blown Out – to name but four, and Discogs records a total of one hundred and sixty credits, with a hundred and nineteen of them being for instruments and performance.

Sear is the latest album from Vest’s ongoing solo project, Lush Worker. The accompanying notes promise a work ‘Blending smouldering guitar explorations with old-school noise psychedelia,’, and an album which ‘showcases Vest’s signature maximalist guitar sound mixed with heavy riffs and drone-rock atmospherics. A blissful yet intense listening experience.’

With stoner doom merchants Bong, Vest explored, in detail, droning riffs over longform formats: 2018’s Thought And Existence contained just two tracks, each just shy of twenty minutes in duration. Around the same time, Vest released Cruise as Lush Worker, a half-hour long behemoth, and he’s continued to pursue epic soundscapes.

Sear is perhaps the most epic yet.

Momentarily, on noting the title, I thought of the Swans album, which spans a full two hours, and its monumental title track. But a single letter makes all the difference. While a ‘seer’ is one who sees, a visionary, with all of the connotations of spirituality and mysticism, ‘sear’ is to scorch, burn, or to fry meat at a high heat. And over the course of thirty-eight monumental minutes, Vest spins forth guitar work which blisters and peels, the sonic equivalent of white-hot sheet metal. At first, drums thump away, almost submerged as if engulfed by a flow of molten lava. The squalling wall of noise heaves and howls, while sibilant sounds like whispering voices of the dead burst like pockets of has rupturing from the seething sonic miasma.

Long, meandering lead work emerges over time, the most spaced-out trippy solo seeping out over a thick, grainy backdrop of droning overdrive, from which strains of feedback break through, before everything gradually sinks into a swirling soup of feedback and distortion, the rhythm having collapsed.

The experience is somewhat akin to listening to Metal Machine Music and Earth 2 simultaneously, but that’s only an approximation of everything that’s going on here. While there’s no overt structure to Sear, there is a strong sense of ebb and flow, and each time the immense sound tapers off for a time, it gradually rebuilds to a point that seems even denser and more intense than before. Around the twenty minute mark, the percussion is back, and there is later upon layer of yawning drone which swirls into an eternal vortex. And the fact that it does go on for what feels like forever is essential to the fullness of the experience. A burst of this may give a flavour, but ultimately, Sear is designed as a fully immersive work, and indeed, it is.

For all the detail here – there are so, so many layers and textures to this – it’s the immense drone that sucks you in and leaves you staring into space. It’s like the cyclical growing hum of ten thousand didgeridoos, amplified and reverbed, and over time, the sounds seems to bend and twist, and it feels as if your very perception is warping as it slowly melts out of shape.

After half an hour, the drums once again stop, and an eight-minute wind-down begins. It’s another lifetime of slow-shifting blurring shades as darkness gradually descends and silence finally follows.

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Lush Worker – Immunosuppression / Preacher / Cygnus / Consort

Posted: 26 January 2021 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 29th January 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Talk about an ambitious and epic release: Cruel Nature have really gone all out on this one, packaging four – yes, FOUR!!! – Lush Worker albums ‘brought together on a chunky double cassette’. It follows last year’s packaging of three of the 2019 Lush Worker albums as a single cassette, and says ‘hey, why stop at three albums when we can bundle four?’

I mean, it takes some balls to do obscure music on cassette anyway, but this is next level. But then, Cruel Nature have a track record and a clear understanding of their audience and market, with a long line of killer releases in editions of 100 or less that have all sold out by or shortly after the release date. At the time of writing, copies of this extravaganza of solo work by the bewilderingly prodigious Mike Vest (of, among others, Bong, 11Paranoias, Drunk In Hell, Blown Out, Haikai No Ku, and Melting Hand), released as a run of 75 copies, are already running low.

The two cassettes feature an album on each side, and a total of twelve tracks in all. This compendium picks up where its predecessor left off, in filling some gaps from the creative blow-out that was 2019 with Immunosuppression, originally released online in February 2019.

The four tracks from Immunosuppression, which occupy tape one side one, are remarkably varied, despite being developed around heavily echoed guitar, with the emphasis on ambience and space. ‘Powder Relic’ marks a seismic shift from the slow-burning deserts of feedback with a murky squall noise propelled by a drum machine and welded to a throbbing bass and it’s characterised by that lo-fi compression of bedroom demos recorded on a Walkman of old-school cassette four-track and an ambient condenser mic. Then again, ‘Hb1c’ goes super-ambient, spreading formlessly over some ten and a half minutes and sounding like the universe slowly expanding in real-time.

Next, we explore Preacher originally a digital-only self-release, which appeared in November of 2019. Consisting of a brace of swampy paced-out monsters, it’s led by the twenty-minute glooping murk of ‘Zudan’, Metallic scrapes screed and cascade over ponderous bass stroll before it all goes a bit prog and a bit psych, all at the same time, with wiffling drums and rippling waves of synth coalescing with the bass, which switches from stroll-mode to dirty stun somewhere along the line to forge something vaguely motoric. The echoic guitar trip of ‘Suz’, being nine minutes in duration, feels like but an appendix in comparison.

Cygnus was originally released on 7th January 2020, just five weeks previous to Consort, and comprises a trio of longform explorations in the ten to fifteen-minute range, and the tiles alone are clue enough to their sound: ‘Planetary Transit’, ‘Simultaneous Stellar’, ‘Double Star System’ – ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space. Although with distant cymbals crashing like gongs of violence across the galaxies and sensing rippling waves through the cosmic expanse of slow synth washes and elongated guitar drones that manage to convey the experience of surveying a slow-drifting nebula from a station floating free from orbit, the experience is more in the trippy domains of Kubrik’s 2001 than anything else. There are moments where the sound is more of a heavy, trudging drone reminiscent of Earth 2, but distant and vague, and with additional extraneous sounds ebbing and flowing.

And so arriving at side four of the cassette we’re presented with Consort, dominated by the two-part ‘Empress’: ‘Part 1’ is a twenty-minute space-age epyllia, a microcosm of all the immersivity epic ambient soundtracks imaginable. With vodka and low lighting levels after an arduous day of day-job and parenting, I begin to nod off at my keyboard, and I’m reminded, as I feel the last vestiges of alertness trickle from my body, just what an effect music can have on both mind and body. I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt this still, this serene. I know it won’t last, either but this is a rare moment, as ‘Empress Part I’ drifts into ‘Part II’, there is a confluence of calm. As the swirling vortex of a drone of a drone collides against a wash of heavily-reverbed guitar and what even sounds like some free jazz sax, but it’s hard to know what’s all in the blender on this dense, simmering sonic tapestry, it’s a different kind of vista that expands and leads the listener toward the horizon.

Dronesome as this epic four-album set is in its leanings, like its predecessor, it highlights the broad range of styles and sounds that are all part of the Lush Worker oeuvre. It’s pleasing to know there’s plenty more to go at, and likely plenty more to come.

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Lush Worker – Cruise / Uplift / Hb1c MkII

Posted: 19 May 2020 in Albums
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Cruel Nature – CN132 – 25th May 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Mike Vest happens to be in several noisy bands I really, really rate, notably Ozo, Bong, Blown Out, 11Paranoias and Drunk in Hell. And now, while I’m wondering if the guy has somehow mastered cloning and not told anyone, you can add to that staggering list Lush Worker, his solo project.

Cruel Nature, one of two Newcastle-based cassette labels who represent the city’s tight-knit but remarkably prolific and outstandingly strong underground scene, which is a melting pot for all shades or nasty noise and dark metal-orientated music, here serves up a whopping portion of Lush Worker, with three albums bundled onto a limited-edition double cassette spanning nearly two hours of what they describe as ‘heavy shockwave drone and dream guitar noise overload, perfect to bliss out to’.

The first of half a dozen Lush Worker releases from 2019, Cruise was first released digitally last February, and essentially comprises the twenty-eight-minute title track, a long, swirling guitar drone that straddles shoegaze and ambience, with a brace of shorter (sub-two-minute) ‘sample’ tracks, omitted here presumably for space, continuity and purpose. Because while this may be three albums, it may s well be one monster album, and is perhaps best approached as such.

Admittedly, no-one is likely (alright, I’m making a substantial assumption here) to listen to this either an album at a time, or as a whole in a single sitting. Not because it doesn’t flow perfectly as a single-sitting piece, but because even in lockdown, does anyone have that kind of time?

So ‘Cruise’ cruises on, slowly, a spiralling cathedral of guitar that simultaneously drones and soars in a mess of wailing feedback and misshapen chords. There’s some distant beat in the mix, but its submerged beneath an undulating tide of treble.

The five cuts of ‘slow burn guitar’ from the appropriately-titled Uplift, released in October 2019, with the exception of ‘Flatliner’ are all around the nine-minute mark, and are more rhythmic, if not necessarily overtly structured: ‘Sub-Ether’ is a heavily psychedelic shoegaze swirl, centred around a repetitive, cyclical motif overlaid with layer upon layer of FX-soaked overdrive, with the album tapering to an elongated buzzing drone on ‘Frozen Egypt’, where it’s the slow-melting bass trip that makes it.

Somewhere in the haze of dubby desert rock, there’s a soaring experimental psychedelic drone on ‘Slow Zone Design’, and howling lead guitars duel against one another, occasionally colliding in a smash of metallic sparks.

Although presented here out of sequence (and the cassette sequence is different again from the digital release), with Hb1c MkII having been released in May, it makes sense for its two half-hour behemoth efforts to round off this release, mirroring its opening counterpart. However, ‘Hb1c MkII’ is a much mellower piece, a near-ambient drift of echo and delay, the chiming notes floating and fading into a rippling haze, before ‘Sobek 110’ delineates things further, a twenty-eight minute single-note drone at heart, it’s a meditative, medicated, soporific experience.

Collectively, these three albums demonstrate different but connected and complimentary facets of Vests Lush Worker output. Dim the lights and explore.

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