Posts Tagged ‘Noise’

Watch: ‘Milky Max’ by Lip Critic

Posted: 21 February 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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NYC-based electronic punk band LIP CRITIC have detailed their anticipated debut album – Hex Dealer – out 17th May via Partisan Records. To coincide with the announcement, the band has shared the album’s lead single and accompanying music video: ‘Milky Max’.

‘Milky Max’ is a pulverising slab of electronic hardcore. The song’s shapeshifting groove anchors a sound that’s theatrical, captivatingly irreverent, and completely outside so much of modern experimental music. Meanwhile Bret Kaser’s vocal delivery feels like it’s being delivered by a cult leader who has occupied the announcer’s booth at a football stadium and refuses to come out (“All my life I just wanted to live / Now I gotta die just because of what I did”).

The official video for ‘Milky Max’ showcases a fully playable video game inspired by the song and designed by Jesse Natter (brother of Lip Critic drummer Ilan Natter). Direct link to play the video game HERE.

Check the video here:

‘Milky Max’ follows previous singles ‘It’s The Magic’ and ‘The Heart,’ which earned early critical acclaim from NME (“on their way to becoming the next great NYC band”), Paste (“an apocalyptic wasteland of NYC’s best underground punk”), Rolling Stone (‘Songs You Need to Know’), Mary Anne Hobbs on BBC 6 Music, and Matt Wilkinson (“totally essential”).

Produced in collaboration by vocalist Bret Kaser and Connor Kleitz, ‘Hex Dealer’ represents an evolution of the eclectic style that the group began cultivating on earlier projects. Drummers Danny Eberle and Ilan Natter combine breakbeats and pingy snares with heavy cymbal and tom work, creating a singular mixture of classic punk/hardcore and electronic styles. The end result is 12 frantic tracks of postmodern pop for the genreless future. A project of wide-reaching sonic and thematic curiosity, above all ‘Hex Dealer’ is an inquisition into the state of spiritual marketplace and the isolating results of consumption.

Audiences have also already been captured by the sheer energy and undeniable chemistry as they toured the US, sharing stages with IDLES, Screaming Females, and Geese, and made their way across the UK / EU including a stop at the Pitchfork Festival in Paris. Lip Critic will tour extensively behind ‘Hex Dealer’, including stops at SXSW, End Of The Road and further UK dates. UK dates are listed below.

LIP CRITIC – UK TOUR DATES:
13 May – The Louisiana – Bristol, UK
14 May – The Deaf Institute (The Lodge) – Manchester, UK
15 May – The Windmill – London, UK
29 Aug – 01 Sep – End of the Road – UK

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Watch: ‘Change Your God’ by A Place to Bury Strangers – single series and tour dates

Posted: 20 February 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Today, the long-running New York band A Place To Bury Strangers announce the single/video ‘Change Your God’, from their new 7-inch series, The Sevens, via Dedstrange. ‘Change Your God’ appears alongside ‘It Is Time’ in the first instalment of the series, out digitally today and physically this Friday, 23rd February. The Sevens are four 7-inch vinyl records on white vinyl being released each month from now through April. They unveil a treasure trove of previously unreleased tracks from A Place To Bury Strangers’ critically acclaimed sixth album, See Through You. Renowned for their visceral sonic assault and immersive live performances, A Place To Bury Strangers has cemented the end-all-be-all space for over-the-top post-punk/shoegaze destruction. With this special vinyl collection, the band invites listeners to delve deeper into their sonic universe, exploring uncharted territories and hidden gems.

“When looking back at the recordings that were done around the time of See Through You, there were a bunch of great tracks that just captured life back then and really had something incredible going on,” says frontman Oliver Ackerman. “Even though they are a bit raw and a bit personal, I thought it would be a mistake if they didn’t come out. I thought it would be best to go back to my roots and put out a series of 7-inches the way A Place To Bury Strangers started. That strange weird format where the tracks each speak for themselves; no album context to muddy the water. These tracks are such a contrast to the way I am feeling now and the current songs we’ve been working on so slip back into this moment in time.”

Watch the video for ‘Change Your God’ here:

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A Place To Bury Strangers Tour Dates:

Thu 22 Feb – Queens, NY @ TV Eye [The Sevens Release Show]

Thu 21 Mar – Boise, ID @ Treefort Festival [The Sevens Release Show]

Fri 5 Apr – Nijmegen, Netherlands @ Doornroosje $

Sat 6 Apr – Köln, Germany @ Club Volta &

Sun 7 Apr – Karlsruhe, Germany @ P8 &

Tue 9 Apr – Milan, Italy @ ARCI Bellezza &

Wed 10 Apr – Bologna, Italy @ Coco Club &

Thu 11 Apr – Rome, Italy @ Monk &

Fri 12 Apr – Palermo, Italy @ Candelai *

Sat Apr. – Messina, Italy @ Retronouveau †

Mon 15 Apr – Zurich, Switzerland @ Bogen F &

Tue 16 Apr – Bern, Switzerland @ ISC Club *

Wed 17 Apr – Marseille, France @ La Make &

Thu 18 Apr – Toulouse, France @ Le Rex &

Fri 19 Apr – Barcelona, Spain @ Barcelona Psych Fest [The Sevens Release Show]

Sat 20 Apr  – Madrid, Spain @ El Sol *&

Sun 21 Apr – San Sebastián, Spain @ Dabadaba &

Tue 23 Apr – Paris, France @ Petit Bain ^

Wed 24 Apr – Lille, France @ Le Grand Mix ^

Thu 25 Apr – Maastricht, Netherlands @ Muziekgieterij ^

Fri 31 May  – Brooklyn, NY @ TBA [The Sevens Release Show]

Fri 2 Aug – Beleen, Germany @ Krach am Bach

* With Ceremony East Coast

& With Maquina (PT)

^ With Plattenbau (DE)

† With Patriarchy (US)

$ With ERRORR (DE)

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Photo credit: Devon Bristol Shaw

Listen: ‘To Walk a Higher Path’ by The Body & Dis Fig

Posted: 8 February 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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With the release of The Body & Dis Fig’s debut collaborative album Orchards of a Futile Heaven just on the horizon, coming 23rd February, the group share smouldering new single ‘To Walk a Higher Path.’ Heavy without conforming to any of the usual tropes of metal or electronic music, the trio here carve out their own distinctive soundworld, neon-lit scenes slowly unfurling amidst light and shadow. Rippling synthesisers beam out like searchlights scanning the horizon, slowly coalescing into strafing melody and staggered rhythms, with Dis Fig’s vocal vapour trails floating weightless above The Body’s obliterated howls and blasted electronics.

Orchards of a Futile Heaven’s walls of sputtering texture and tectonic booms are soaked in the reverence and melancholy of sacred spaces brought to life by palpable intensity by Chen’s voice. Crafted during a time of personal fragility, the album’s devastating force lies beyond any of the expected noise and abrasive textures typically associated with both The Body & Dis Fig. Suffused with a raw vulnerability and a longing for catharsis, Chen’s voice searches for escape in the midst of oppressive atmospheres as if determined to find relief from guilt.

Following the new single, The Body have also announced a string of U.S. tour dates. The Body & Dis Fig plan to tour throughout the US, UK, and Europe in 2024, with collab tour dates to be announced.

Listen to ‘To Walk a Higher path’ here:

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Legion of Swine – under ytan ligger nåt

Posted: 3 February 2024 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 2nd February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Nostalgia sucks. On so many levels, nostalgia sucks. It’s something which looms a longer, darker shadow over life with ever years that passes, as every memory recedes further into the past until eventually it tips over the horizon, beyond sight, to a distance whereby its very happening takes on a dream-like quality and you begin to question if the even was real or imaginary, a myth which has grown from the creeping spores of hazy recollection.

I was probably ahead of the curve when I began feeling pangs of nostalgia on moving to secondary school in 1987. Nostalgia wasn’t big business then, and didn’t even strike me as something that so many people felt deep pangs of back then, although perhaps shows like The Golden Oldie Picture Show which I would often watch with my parents after coming home from Cubs should have given me a clue as to how adults mire themselves in their past. It was on reaching my thirties when I began to separate from my peers who constantly bemoaned the state of music, now there was no good new music, how it had all turned to shit since they left school.

Today, I took myself for a quiet pint, only to find myself eavesdropping inadvertently on a couple of old bastards complaining how there’s no proper music anymore, how it’s all 70s and 80s bands which headline Glastonbury and it’s all rap like 10-bit and one began spouting on how he saw Dave Grohl’s band, Metallica, on TV and wasn’t into it. Then they raved about Pink Floyd and The Eagles and now awesome they are, and how their songs are ‘minutes, minutes long… And then there’s a guitar solo. And Dire Straits… and how Blondie’s career ended with Parallel Lines, but they did this comeback song, like Duran Duran. I wished I was deaf, and congratulated myself for not being so painfully moored to the past – or so ill-informed.

But for all of this, I feel a pang of sadness on the arrival of a new Legion of Swine release. I miss Dave Procter’s presence in the UK for a start, surely one of Brexit’s biggest losses, at least on the underground music scene. I miss his crazy noise shows, particularly back when he would don a latex pig’s head and lab coat to crank out harsh noise. I have a particularly fond memory of our two collaborations, but especially the room-clearing effort where I yelled like a maniac as he ambulated the venue with a portable speaker emitting screeds of feedback in the middle of the afternoon.

Beyond this particularly personal context, of course, the latest offering from Legion of Swine is by no means a nostalgic work, although it does explore wibbly analogue synth and lasery sounds which hark back to the early 80s, when primitive synths were becoming widely available. But then, it equally passes nods to early Tangerine Dream, and to the bubbling pink noise and synthy waves of Throbbing Gristle early Whitehouse. But, on balance, the listening experience alone does not evoke nostalgia. What the hovering hums do evoke is a sense of awkwardness, if difficulty.

Legion of Swine’s output has never been about commercial success, but noise for the sake of simply making. Art as it should be. It it’s for the benefit of Legion of Swine first and foremost, for whom it’s entertainment. It’s for the benefit of an audience as a secondary concern, and the number of people who are likely to be entertained by this is few. But it’s a storming album, which really explores tones and texture. Consisting of a tow longform tracks each with a running time around twenty minutes, it’s an evolutionary piece, and within each continuous composition, the various segments flow from one to the next.

It reminds us of the fundamental difference between albums made up of ‘songs’ and shorter pieces and longform works, in that the former can contain ideas and concepts in a compartmentalised way, with no necessary correspondence between them, while the latter is a journey, and requires an altogether different level of focus and concentration in order for it to work as such. Gloopy alien soundscapes and long, low, ominous drones are rent with laser blasts and trickling ominous electronics worthy of some vintage sci-fi works, and ‘jag hör röster’ is a lot less overtly noise-orientated than previous Legion of Swine releases and live outings, sitting very much within the domain of dark ambience rather than abrasive noise. But it’s well-executed and with occasional blasts of overloading, needles-into-the-red distorting drone, it’s not as mellow as all that, with skronking feedback and earwax-vibrating buzzing and an array of organ-vibrating oscillations pouring their way into your ears. ‘hör du röster?’ is absolutely head-melting thick, buzzing noise abrasion all the way, a monstrous wall of distorted drone amped up to the absolute max, with surging, sloshing swells of dense analogue noise, and a relentless barrage at that.

Uncomfortable as always, under ytan ligger nåt is one hell of a racket. All hail the Swine!

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Barren Womb – Chemical Tardigrade

Posted: 30 January 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Fucking North Pole Records/Blues For The Red Sun – 16th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

One might think that after Anal Cunt, Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel, Rapeman, Cancer Bats, and Dying Fetus, all of the band manes people would find problematic had been exhausted, or otherwise people would have grown immune to blunt shock tactics. Yet it seems that Nordic heavy noise rockers Barren Womb have found a moniker capable of touching a nerve for its poor taste. I’m by no means about to invoke wokeism here, but we do seem to have witnessed an enhanced level of sensitivity in resent years. I can’t ever criticise anyone for calling out of sexism, racism, double standards, or general cuntiness, and wince when I see many of the predominantly right-wing wankers defending ‘free speech’ as a right to be offensive, racially, homophobically, or demeaning the poor or the disabled. But being overtly offensive simply because? Shock still has its place and its merits, and I’m more shocked that people are still shocked than by the shock itself. On balance, Barren Womb likely sits more in the ‘crass’ bracket than the overtly offensive, but it’s perhaps not really my call to make, and I’m here primarily to judge the album on its merits.

They’ve been going since 2011, since when they have ‘been raising both eyebrows and hell with their minimalist approach, earsplitting volume and defiant experimentation’, although it’s only recently that they’ve registered on my radar ahead of the release of fourth album Lizard Lounge, ‘a bombastic slab of modern noise rock in the vein of Daughters, Metz and Viagra Boys, to critical acclaim through Loyal Blood Records in 2020’ – I said of it that it was ‘wild and loud and absolutely hits the spot.’

Their bio informs us that ‘The duo make efficient use of crude dynamics and the power of the riff to hammer their point across’ and that ‘They have played close to 300 shows in the US and Europe so far, sharing stages with among others Entombed A.D., Voivod, Conan, Nomeansno and Årabrot, and have played festivals like SXSW, by:Larm, Tallinn Music Week, Øya and Pstereo.’ Clearly, then, the name has been no significant obstacle to their reaching an audience – and they’ve once again hit the spot with this effort.

Chemical Tardigrade is an absolute beast of an album. ‘McLembas’ blasts out of the traps an explosion of raging overdriven riff-fuelled fury. The barking vocals are pure fire, screaming a stream of references from the Bible to Fight Club and the guitars are lean, strangled, and sinewy before detonating hard enough to collapse buildings. The power of the drums is a real not-so-secret weapon: they’re up in the mix, but also really thick, and dense, with the kick and snare dominating and the cymbals backed off, the result being a full-on percussive pummelling.

If the feel is raw, rowdy punk, there’s also whole lot more to it than lump-headed fist-pumping choruses ‘Bug Out bag’ is more hardcore than grunge, and blasts into full-throttle punk, and ‘Campfire Chemist’ comes on like Fugazi playing while the studio’s on fire, before the flames lick at their heels and they ratchet up to the screaming mania of early Pulled Apart by Horses.

They’re not without humour, as titles like ‘D-Beatles’ ‘Dung Lung’, and ‘Batchelor of Puppets’ indicate, the latter, as a single cut, stands out, but it’s a ball-busting blast from beginning to end, with D-Beatles being a raging explosion of frenzied crust punk, marking another of many twists and turns in their expansive palette of mangled noise. It’s hard to credit that just two people can produce quite this much racket. ‘High Fructose Napalm Syrup’ is every bit as explosive and crazed as the title suggests, some hefty minor-key power chords lumbering around some frenetic drumming. They save the hardest and heaviest for the end, with ‘Dung Lung’ going all-out at the front end before surging to a melodic and uplifting climax. And for all the fury, all the weight, all the volume, all the intensity, there’s a sense of fun which filters through the entirety of Chemical Tardigrade, which makes the experience ultimately – and unexpectedly – enjoyable.

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Listen: ‘Dissent, Shame’ by The Body & Dis Fig

Posted: 17 January 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Ahead of the release of their debut collaborative album Orchards of a Futile Heaven, out February 23rd, The Body & Dis Fig share potent, affecting new single ‘Dissent, Shame.’

The track’s devastating force lies beyond pure noise or abrasive textures, evoking weighty emotions with a minimalist drone dirge that gradually builds into an enchanting choral passage. Suffused with a raw vulnerability and a longing for catharsis, Dis Fig’s voice searches for escape in the midst of oppressive atmospheres as if determined to find relief from guilt. She elaborates on the track: “It’s about the act of abandonment, and the guilt and shame that comes with it. Running away from something, seemingly towards your own safety, but as your conscience picks you apart the entire way.”

Orchards of a Futile Heaven affirms The Body & Dis Fig as skilled sound sculptors who have an exceptional ability to make deeply affecting music, bracing as it is touching, harrowing as it is awe-inspiring. While sampling has long been essential to each, The Body & Dis Fig deftly meld their differing approaches to sampling and creating extreme sounds until the boundaries are entirely blurred. The group transmute weighty emotions into bristling sonic atmospheres, buoyed by Dis Fig’s ethereal vocals. She elaborates: “I love the balance. You could never connect to just a machine as well as you could a human. Which is why the combination is so potent for me. I don’t want to hide. I think nothing connects you more empathetically than another human’s voice.”

The Body & Dis Fig plan to tour throughout the US, UK, and Europe in 2024. Dates and details incoming soon.

Listen to ‘Dissent, Shame’ here:

The Body & Dis Fig are a natural pair. Each has pioneered instantly recognisable worlds of sound all their own that defy any traditional categorisations or boundaries. The Body, Lee Buford and Chip King, continually challenge any conventional conception of metal, collaborating with myriad artists and from the folk-leanings of their work with BIG|BRAVE to their groundbreaking work with the Assembly of Light Choir to the intensity of their collaborations with OAA or Thou.

Dis Fig, aka Felicia Chen, pushes electronic music into dark extremes, from warped DJ sets to avant production, from being a member of Tianzhuo Chen’s performance-art series TRANCE to being the vocalist with The Bug. The Body and Dis Fig find kinship in reimagining what it means to make “heavy music”. Their debut Orchards of a Futile Heaven is the perfect synthesis of two forces, twisting melodicism and intoxicating rhythms, layering a dense miasma of distortion with intense beats and a soaring voice clawing its way towards absolution.

The two found kinship in their desire to find new avenues to make heavy music that looked beyond tropes of metal and electronic music by merging the two. “I always wanted the heavier stuff but I also didn’t really like heavier guitar music,” says Buford. “None of it really felt quite heavy enough to me. A human can’t be as heavy as a machine.”

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Watch: ‘Moving On’ by Pissed Jeans – Album and Tour Dates Announced

Posted: 8 January 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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What timing! Getting up and starting work on the dayjob in the dark, on a cold, cold morning on what felt like the Mondayest of Mondays ever, my day suddenly took an unexpected upturn on the arrival of the news of an imminent new album from Pissed Jeans – and best of all, a video for the first track to be released from it.

On 1st March 2024, Pissed Jeans will release Half Divorced, their incredible sixth album, on CD/LP/DSPs worldwide from Sub Pop. The band is sharing the official video for indelible lead single “Moving On” from director and frequent collaborator Joe Stakun (“The Bar Is Low,” “Bathroom Laughter,” “Romanticize Me”).

Watch it here:

Pissed Jeans’ Half Divorced is the follow-up to 2017’s Why Love Now, an album that took aim at the mundane discomforts of modern life. The album and its singles received praise from The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, The Guardian, Uncut, Stereogum, and more.

The twelve songs of Half Divorced skewer the tension between youthful optimism and the sobering realities of adulthood. Pissed Jeans’ – Matt Korvette (vocals), Bradley Fry (guitar),  Randy Huth (bass), and Sean McGuinness (drums) – notorious acerbic sense of humor remains sharper than ever as they dismember some of the joys that contemporary adult life has to offer.

Half Divorced includes the previously mentioned “Moving On,” the omnidirectional piss-take “Everywhere Is Bad” (Spoiler alert: “Seattle is soaking wet”), shrinking debt-to-credit ratios in the bracing “Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt,” and the harsh truth-telling in the bruising “Cling to a Poisoned Dream.”

Half Divorced was produced and mixed by Pissed Jeans and Don Godwin and engineered by Mike Petillo at Tonal Park in Takoma Park, Maryland, and mastered by Arthur Rizk (co-producer and mixer for Why Love Now).

Pissed Jeans’ previously announced international tour dates in support of Half Divorced span end of February to April. New shows include Friday, 29th March 29th in Schijndel, NL at the Paaspop Festival. Additional live dates will be announced soon.

Thu, Feb 29 Mississippi Studios, Portland, OR Tickets

Fri. Mar. 01 – Seattle, WA – Madame Lou’s Tickets

Sat. Mar. 02 – Los Angeles, CA – The Echo Tickets

Fri. Mar. 15 – Philadelphia, PA – Underground Arts

Sat. Mar. 16 – Brooklyn, NY – St. Vitus

Fri, 29th March – Schijndel, NL – Paaspop Festival

Sat, 30th March – EartH (AKA Hackney Arts Centre), London, United Kingdom Tickets

Sun, 31st Mar – Manchester Punk Festival, Manchester, United Kingdom Tickets

Tue, 2nd Apr – Stereo, Glasgow, United Kingdom Tickets

Wed, 3rd Apr – Whelan’s, Dublin 2, Ireland Tickets

Thu, 4th Apr – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, United Kingdom Tickets

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Photo credit: Ebru Yildiz

Palmer ++ Procter – what does the fjord say and what do we say in reply?

Posted: 1 December 2023 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 1st December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Yes, that’s fjord, not fox, meaning you won’t find these collaborating sound artists bouncing around the woods dressed as furry animals, making daft, random sounds. Well, you won’t find them bouncing around the woods dressed as furry animals, anyway, although Dave Procter did spend many years performing while wearing a latex pig’s head, but he put a stop to that after David Cameron started turning up at his shows.

This latest collaboration between Martin Palmer and Dave Procter is, in fact, inspired by the site of previous experimental audio tests in 2019, namely the sculpture “what does the fjord say?” in Trondheim harbour. As they tell it in the accompanying notes, ‘Armed with percussive sticks, contact microphones, audio recorders and the occasional toy and synth, they set about a full exploration of the sculpture and their own sonic ideas in and around the sculpture, using created and environmental sounds to answer the question posed by the sculpture. These recordings are Palmer and Procter’s replies.’

The first reply ‘støyende arbeider’ is more of a lecture than a simple reply, with a running time of twenty-one minutes. Consisting of random clatters, crashes, squidges, squelches and shifting hums which ebb and flow amongst an array of incidental intrusions, it’s more of a non-linear rambling explication, and exploration of the rarely-explored recesses of the mind than a cogent conclusion. But then, why should a reply necessarily be an answer. This, then, is a dialogue, a discussion, not an interview constructed around a Q&A format. It’s nothing so formal, and all the more interesting for its being open-ended, evolving organically. There are points at which the thuds, clanks and scrapes grow in their intensity, creating a sense of frustration, as if attempting to unravel a most complex conundrum and finding oneself stuck and annoyed by the fact that there is something just out of reach, something you can’t quite recall. And at times, this is also the listener’s experience. The way to approach this is by giving up on the expectation or hope of coherence, or anything resembling a tune, and yield to the spirit of experimentalism.

‘Moose Cavalry’ and ‘Mock Paloma’ are both significantly shorter pieces, the former being atmospheric and evocative, the animalistic calls conjuring images of beats roaming moorlands in the mist. Plaintive, droning moans and lows transmogrify into warped, pained cries and needling drones. The latter is different again: dark, tense, shrill tones scratch and scrape, flit and fly, reverberating from all directions. It’s unsettling, uncomfortable.

These three compositions are so different from one another, it superficially makes for a somewhat disjointed set, but on deeper reflection, what Palmer and Procter have forged a work which demonstrates how it’s possible, and even desirable, to approach a subject from multiple angles and perspectives. I still don’t know what the fjord says, but I do know that Palmer and Procter have posed some interesting musings in response.

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Jim Haynes – Inauspicious

Posted: 30 November 2023 in Albums
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The Helen Scarsdale Agency – 8th December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s often difficult to keep up with artists’ outputs, especially the super-prolific ones. Jim Haynes not quite make the super-prolific category, but having first written on his work with a review of The Decline Effect back in 2011, I’ve covered three albums between 2017 and 2021 alone. I tend to take a particular interest in albums released through The Helen Scarsdale Agency, which despite sounding rather prim and literary, is a label which has a particular knack for platforming music of an experimental and often difficult and noisy nature.

Haynes’ work has become progressively harsh over time, and the press release for Inauspicious notes that this has been particularly true post-pandemic, while acknowledging the cliché that the pandemic marked a pivotal point for many musicians. Crucially, it notes that ‘The tools for Haynes’ work remain limited: motors, electronics, shortwave radio, found objects, all applied with considerable pressure. Compositionally, Inauspicious is a very rough moire pattern from overlapping elliptical structures that can negate and obfuscate just as easily as they can compound and aggregate. The album surges and collapses upon the two twenty minute chunks of controlled noise that follow an internal logic that snakes from brooding power drones, spectral radio transmission, and an aktionist demolition cast upon metal, glass, and unfortunate wooden objects. Rupture and release. Purge and pulse.’

As such, while the output, and the dynamic may be different, Haynes’ fundamentals remain unchanged, and this matters, in that it demonstrates that more often than not, the end product is not so much dependent on the input and the raw materials, but their application and the process.

Inauspicious features just two compositions, ‘Variant, Number Fourteen’ and ‘Variant, Number Fifteen’, which each run to precisely twenty minutes apiece. It’s a work that’s seemingly designed for a vinyl release, with each piece occupying a side of the LP, and I daresay that the dank ambient rumblings have their greatest impact when rolling from the grooves of a thick chunk of vinyl. Still, it works digitally when played through some decent speakers which afford air to the album’s slow, granular churnings. It’s not that fat into ‘Variant, Number Fourteen’ that it’s built to a brain-shredding blast of drilling noise. Beneath the ear-destroying mesh of treble and shredding abrasion, there are swells and surges of lower-end noise. It’s easy to overlook the slight details in the face of such a wall of abrasion, but it matters. While Haynes is bringing a relentless assault, it’s important to pause by the details, and Inauspicious is abrim with them, although ‘Variant, Number Fourteen’ spins into a restless ancient howl in its final minutes and tapers into a dank rumbling that brings a heavy tension.

‘Variant, Number Fifteen’ brings more of the same: heavy drone, grainy texture, harsh noise, spluttering and droning,  a deep sense of ominous foreboding, only with lower, deeper, more resonant bass, the tone of which drags on the lower abdomen among the swishes and swirls. And then grating mid-range abrasion. It’s hard to know how to react to this truly painful grind. By turns, I feel as if I need to defecate and vomit, although in the end I do neither as I simply clench my stomach during passages of this dark mess.

This is an album that brings noise and it brings pain. It’s a relentless grind and growl, and not for the first time, Jim Haynes has tapped into a sense of awkwardness which really grates and grinds.

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Tote Kinder – No Gene Will Save Us Now

Posted: 25 November 2023 in Albums
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21st November 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s now an established fact that many, if not most listeners make judgements on a song within seconds – to the extent that back in 2014, it was revealed a quarter of Spotify tracks get skipped within the first five seconds. And only thirty seconds or more counts as a stream. I suspect that figure may be even higher now, as attention spans have hardly increased in the last few years. I only speak for myself when I think of the jittery hours where scrolling and skipping has become more of a nervous twitch than social media engagement – although I still refuse to use Spotify, meaning any review request containing only a Spotify link is an instant rejection. It’s one way to filter the fifty-plus daily submissions.

But while I’m likely to give a track more than five seconds, I am prone to making pretty snap decisions when it comes to new music. The chances are the squalling mess of noise that crashlands ‘Overfed’, the opening track on No Gene Will Save Us Now by Greek ‘machine-driven noise rick duo’ Tote Kinder will repel 95% of potential listeners in less then five seconds, because its skronking scrape of slanting, skewed guitar is an instant headache – and the very reason I love it immediately. It’s a shouty, angular mess of – well, everything, and probably the first time I’ve heard anything overtly mathy and a bit Truman’s Water using quite such a barrage of drums right up front. It’s like The Young Gods in collision with Daughters and slams hard between the eyes, and the crunchy bass-led ‘Permanent Damage’ is equally hard-hitting. Taking its guitar cues from Gang of Four, it’s noisy and difficult, despite its leaning towards a groove.

‘Hard to Swallow’ really is, arriving in a shrill blast of power electronics with overloading noise before plunging into darkness and with distorted bass and thudding relentless drums. It’s a hybrid of DAF and PIL, and it’s strong. It doesn’t stop. ‘Die Letzte Weste’ is all thumping beats and grinding bas, again reminiscent of DAF – at least until the blasting guitar noise crunches in, and thereafter, it’s Foetus and KMFDM who spring to mind, but there are others, too. This is some full-spectrum noise.

Tote Kinder are taut tight, poised, in their delivery of churning industrial noise. ‘The Falling Man’ is a sneering, snarling, industrial chug worthy of Filth Pig era ministry, a workout that froths with nihilism. The last couple of tracks don’t exactly offer a mellow finish – and nor should they.

No Gene Will Save Us Now may only contain seven tracks, but they’re all strong and incredibly hard-hitting. – and fittingly reminds us that we are all fucked. Why will people not accept or otherwise recognise this? They just continue as normal, booking their overseas holidays. We are so over. And this album will so break your head.

AA

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