Posts Tagged ‘Noise’

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.

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Legion of Swine – L.H.S.

Posted: 7 October 2023 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 6th October 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been a few months since we’ve heard from Legion of Swine, one of my favourite vehicles for the intensely prolific Dave Procter – because LOS are noisy, abrasive, and unpredictable, and I have fond memories of numerous demented performances and a couple of collaborative sets together. Even when sadly sans pig-head mask, having developed an allergy to latex, the gnarly electronic noise Dave cranks out is messed up and often times hurts.

Dave, and the Swine, are both highly political animals, and once again it’s politics which have spurred him to clack his trotters into activity and snort his disapproval of current affairs.

L.H.S. is accompanied by uncharacteristically expansive liner notes, which prove useful, and so I shall quote in full:

‘This release pays credit to Värmland folk who campaigned to create a better society and are represented by the letter LHS.

L is Selma Lagerlöf who was heavily involved in women’s suffrage and received a Nobel Prize for literature in 1909.

H is for Gerda and Mauritz Hellberg who were central characters in the right to vote campaign.

S is for Torgny Segerstedt who took a stand against the Nazis in his role as editor at Göteborgs Handels- and Sjöfarts-Tidning.

The image used in this release is a reminder of how the free market is way more important than people in some eyes.’

It lays it all out there, and reminds us how failure to learn from history is guaranteed to doom the future. Admittedly, the way things are looking now, we’re doomed one way or another and likely sooner than anticipated due to sheer greed and a refusal to face facts. In the face of this, there’s a part of me that feels as if complaint or resistance is futile, because we’re already fucked. But we need to go down fighting. We need to at least die trying, to know we’re did our best.

L.H.S. is the sound of the fight. It’s a fucking racket, blasting in from the outset with overloading distortion, cutting in and cutting out, a blasting overload that just hurts and is an instant headache. It’s the harshest of electronica which only gets nastier and more intense and insane as it progresses. By three minutes in, it sounds like someone smashing a bin lid connected to a contact mic, recorded on a mobile phone. The treble is high all the way, and the sounds are metallic, distorting, like someone tearing the door off a garage in a gale or something similarly deranged. And deranged it is, from beginning to end.

We’re in Merzbow territory here. And it actually hurts. Ten minutes in, there are some vocals, but they’re impenetrable shrieking derangement, buried in feedback, before things get really gnarly.

L.H.S. is nasty, and I absolutely love it. I suspect most won’t. It’s one to file alongside Whitehouse, Merzbow, and Prurient. It’s brutal, and as niche as fuck, and Dave knows it. Embrace the pain. This is something else.

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Yes Grasshopper – Ghost Dog Pagoda

Posted: 3 October 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Inverted Grim-Mill Recordings – 6th October 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Yes Grasshopper’s ‘Ghost Dog Pagoda’ is the lead single from the forthcoming album of the same name.

Grasshopper? Yes, grasshopper. Not cricket. While on a recent day trip to Berwick Upon Tweed, my daughter was asking about the sounds of the crickets or grasshoppers, and I had to confess I was unaware of the difference, and had to look up the main visual difference is the length of their antennae, and the main biological difference is how they make that distinctive sound.

While I’m still unsure if we were hearing crickets or grasshoppers, it’s clear that despite being in the north-east, we weren’t hearing Yes Grasshopper, as their most informative biography clarifies: ‘Grasshoppers are among what is possibly the most ancient living group of chewing herbivorous insects, dating back to the early Triassic period around 250 million years ago. Those species that make easily heard noises usually do so by rubbing a row of pegs on the hind legs against the forewings, this is known as stridulation. Yes grasshopper formed in 2020 and make noises with a guitar and some drums. Emerging from England’s unforgiving northern coast, this dynamic duo present a wholly unique take on noise rock, with crushing riffs, white water rhythmic twists and barking intertwined vocals making way for heinously catchy hooks.’

As titles go, ‘Ghost Dog Pagoda’ it’s simultaneously visual and abstract. As songs go, it’s absolutely mighty.

The single starts out with a tight picked guitarline, which nags away, before the bass and drums crash in, hard and with the kind of density that feels like a body blow. There’s a moment of pullback to build the tension further before POW!! Fuck!

This isn’t the sound of innocuous insects: it’s the sound of ground-razing devastation. The distorted vocals are way low in the mix, only adding to the impression of monster volume – those smallish gigs where the backline and guitars are so fucking loud the in-house PA simply cannot compete and so the vocals are lost but somehow cut through and the thrill is just beyond words because the sheer sonic impact is beyond words… If you’ve ever experienced this, you will know, and this is the blistering force of ‘Ghost Dog Pagoda’. If you haven’t experienced it, then you need to get out and witness more small-venue live music.

Back to the single, it’s a mess of noise, a full-tilt, all-out sonic assault. The hooks really come in the respite, where the nagging guitar returns, because the rest… it’s a brain-shredding attack. The vocals aren’t only low in the mix, but they’re a frenzied howl blanketed in distortion, and the song’s structure is a long way from a neat verse/chorus alternation. Fuck, it’s impossible to follow, and I have no idea what’s going on from one second to the next. But herein lies its sheer brilliance: ‘Ghost Dog Pagoda’ isn’t pretty, and makes no concession to commercialism or accessibility – not a single one. It hits you, hard, with a wall of abrasive noise, and it’s a beast alright.

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zeitkratzer – Scarlatti

Posted: 14 September 2023 in Albums
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zeitkratzer productions / Karlrecords – 22nd September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

SCARLATTI represents something of a departure for zeitkratzer, the neoclassical collective headed by Reinhold Friedl, master of the prepared piano and a renowned avant-garde composer in his own right. While their performance and recordings usually focus on modern composers and avant-gardists spanning Stockhausen and John Cage via Whitehouse and Lou Reed, with a reinterpretation of Metal Machine Music, here they turn their attention to the altogether more historical figure of Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757). He is best known – although this is relative – for composing some five hundred and fifty-five keyboard sonatas, and his being a progenitor of classical music. But a large portion of his work went unpublished in huis lifetime, and much has only been available sporadically since.

As the notes which accompany the album explain, ‘Little is known about Domenico Scarlatti… His music is, so to speak, left to its own devices: free, cheeky, playful, sonorous, surprising… Harmonically strolling again and again into unforeseen regions, the ear leads, not the theory; and also the fingers get their right: playful and haptic it goes. Scarlatti explained, “since nature has given me ten fingers and my instrument provides employment for all, I see no reason why I should not use all ten of them.”

But Scarlatti does not contain music by Scarlatti. Instead, the six tracks presented here are all composed by Friedl in response to Scarlatti’s work.

As such, this is much a celebration of Scarlatti’s ideas and approach to composition and so the explanation of the process and thinking behind it bears quoting: ‘Freedom, friction and listening pleasure instead of convention: “He knew quite well that he had disregarded all the rules of composition in his piano pieces, but asked whether his deviation from the rules offended the ear? He believes there is almost no other rule than that of not offending the only sense whose object is music – the ear.”

‘Reinhold Friedl applied this principle and composed the music for a choreography by dance company Rubato. Dance music drawn from Scarlatti, who was so inspired by dance music. The material of the piano sonata F-minor K.466 is twisted anew in all its richness, shifted back and forth, declined, frozen, noisified, sound structures extracted, floating. Those who know the sonata, will more than smell it’s [sic] shadows.’

The six pieces are indeed varied, in terms of mood and form. ‘lias’ is booming, droning, woozy, slow discordant jazz, low, slow, and with lengthy pauses. It’s not something anyone can dance to, and rather than light and playful, it feels dark and sombre. This is less true of the altogether sparser, but stealthily atmospheric ‘muget’.

‘pissenlit’ blasts in with churning industrial noise, a snarling blast that lurches and thunders, crashes and pounds withy relentless brutality. It’s clearly as far removed from the music of the seventeenth century as is conceivable, but beside the lilting piano and quivering, droning strings and subsequent stop-start levity of ‘reine des prés’ the sequencing of the pieces serves to highlight Scarlatti’s versatility, if not necessarily his predilection for playfulness. The playfulness manifests differently and unexpectedly here: ‘pissenlit’ is in fact the French word for ‘dandelion’, a plant often associated with a certain element of fun, of lightness, so the fact that this piece is three and a half minutes of gut-punching abrasive noise worthy of Prurient or Consumer Electronics is illustrative of the disparity between expectation and actuality.

Discord and discomfort abounds as drones and strings tangle amongst one another, heaving and wheezing and occasionally offering glorious, sun-hued vistas through the breaks in the widely varied forms, which feel elastic, and as if Friedl and co are stretching the fabric of the material to see just how much it will give. And it turns out, there is a fair bit of room. ‘reine des prés’ explores space, the gaps and pauses between the notes, and feels like a sort of musical cat-and-mouse which would equally work as soundtrack piece, but it has a cartoonish quality which means it’s more Tom and Jerry than anything else. But it is by no means flippant, throwaway. Entertainment is serious business, after all.

‘violette des marais’ brings pomp and drama… while the final track, ‘astis’, is skittish, playful but also frustrating in its hesitant, halting structure.

Scarlatti is interesting, entertaining, and bold, going out on a limb to present such an unconventional interpretation of a historical artist’s career. But this is largely the purpose of zeitkratzer: together, they re-present music, excavating the archives but presenting them through a prism of contemporary and avant-gardism, with jazz leanings but without being jazz in the way most would interpret it. In short, zeitkratzer continue to push and redefine musical boundaries, and long may they do so.

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Kadaitcha – Tramontane

Posted: 9 September 2023 in Albums
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ant-zen – 16th September 2023

Christopher Nosnbor

Four years on from Tar, Ukrainian industrial duo Kadaitcha, consisting of Andrii Kozhukhar and Yurii Samson, have overcome many, many challenges to deliver album number five, in the form of Tramontane.

The tracks which appeared on their limited lathe-cut single last year do not appear here, and this is admirable: singles so often tend to be used as launchpads for albums, and it was particularly common in the 80s and 90s that albums would sell on the basis of a couple of singles, but would have next to no other decent tracks. In the days before streaming, this was something that was easy to get away with, since the only way of hearing the album was by buying it, which you would do based on the singles. But then, the risk could be reduced by taking punts using your half price or free options through Britanna Music, or similar. The advent of streaming hasn’t really improved things, though, because now, at least in mainstream circles, the album is essentially obsolete.

But outside the mainstream, the album is thriving, and artists are pushing the format now that the constraints and limitations of physical formats aren’t necessarily dictatorial in determining duration, and there are infinite options for exploration. The single wasn’t so much of a stop-gap release as a standalone document of a period in time. But the key point here is that Tramontane is very much an album, and a work to be approached as such. The notes which accompany the release are almost hallucinatory – not quite Burroughs cut-ups, but fragmented, non-linear, and they serve to articulate the essence of the music contained here. Stylistically, it’s tight and cogent, and there’s a flow to it, too, which begins with the appropriately-titled ‘Intro’, which is precisely that – a short instrumental intro piece which paves the way for the ten heavyweight cuts which follow. But within that coherence, what Tramontane offers is a work which really goes all-out to disrupt and unsettle.

‘Niello’ draws primarily on the sound and style of earlier industrial music, the electronic pioneers of the late 70s and early 80s, the likes of DAF and Cabaret Voltaire, but with its distorted, menacing vocals, there’s an element of the later evolutions of industrial which emerged in the mid 80s. It seems to be that there are very different understandings of industrial, and while Al Jourgensen may be a huge fan of William Burroughs and the music that formed the body of the first wave of Industrial music, namely Throbbing Gristle and also the wild tape loop works of Foetus and the heavy percussion of Test Dept, it’s industrial metal and harsh post-NIN electronica which have come to become synonymous with industrial latterly.

On Tramontane, Kadaitcha have brought the two forms, old and new, together, and the result is discordant, noisy, difficult. And these are its selling points. It feels like a guided tour through the most challenging aspects of Industrial music through its evolution and history.

‘Knife’ is a sparse, oppressive low-end throb pinned down by a dull, thudding, muffled-sounding beat, over which twitching electrical streams flash and flow while monotone vocals are unsettlingly detached. The percussion really dominates on the tempestuous ‘Liars’ and any and all references to Einstürzende Neubauten are entirely appropriate. It’s a thunderous, dense racket where the low end really stands to the fore, but it’s tame in comparison to the dark ‘Offering’: even when it drives out as a heavy and insistent bass riff, it feels unfinished, undercomposed. Yet therein lies its success: it feels organic, and nothing is overdone.

The mangled noise and droning distorted vocal on ‘Fossil’ is pure Throbbing Gristle, a barrelling barrage of blitzkrieg laser synth bleeps and a whole mess of midrange and lower end distortion and dirt, churning, discordant, the monotone vocals almost buried in the tempest of overloading unpleasantness, and ‘Seeds’ is similarly unpleasant and uncomfortable, everything going all out on overdrive.

It all comes together on ‘Insight’: beginning as a gentle, spacious, mellow post-rock guitar-led piece, it soon erupts into a mess of overload akin to Metal Machine Music, only with drums and sinister vocals. It’s got the lot, and as the album enters its final stages, it seems to consolidate the elements of the previous tracks to punch even harder, with the percussion harder, the grinding morass denser and darker.

Perhaps a reflection of the circumstances in which it was created, perhaps a reflection of the times in the world at large, Tramontane is heavy and at times harrowing. The lyrics may not be decipherable for the most part, but the mood requires no translation or interpretation, and Tramontane will crush your soul.

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Burning Motherfuckers – An Ki

Posted: 3 September 2023 in Albums
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Hærverk Industrier – 25th August 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Having a memorable name counts of a lot – as does having one that stands out at the top of Google searches. How many times have you had conversations where one of you has been struggling to think of the name of… that band… that band… You know, the one with… they did an album…. They supported… clicking fingers, scratching heads, gesticulating. Nah. And the acts that are simply untraceable, particularly those with banal single-word monikers. It’s like they didn’t think about the practicalities when picking a name – or they simply have no interest in being found, which is commercial suicide before they’ve even started.

This is not an accusation which can be levelled at this Oslo-based noise rock duo, who follow up their 2012 self-titled 12” EP on Handmade Records and self-released 2017 cassette This Century with their new album An Ki, which is being released by Hærverk Industrier and promises ‘Four tracks of extreme dynamics, density and intensity, resulting in an almost claustrophobic chaos of sheer rock ‘n’ roll ecstasy (sic)’. Burning Motherfuckers is neither forgettable nor hard to find.

The same is true of their music, in terms of its being memorable at lease. An Ki is an album which contains just four tracks, but ‘Lost It’ is a beast which clocks in at ten and a half minutes, and the title track is over twenty minutes long, making this a monster that runs for over forty minutes of feedback-strewn riffery. It’s a noisy mess of a record, and truly glorious in the most cacophonous and challenging way. ‘Difficult’ music, when it’s harsh and loud and discordant, isn’t simply something you can step on from. It’s hard to describe, but it’s disruptive, physically, and mentally. Such turbulence disrupts the mindflow and makes waves around the organs.

‘Eilert’ builds and builds and builds and it takes the very idea of building to a ludicrous level, up, and up, and up… what do you do with this? The form is very much 90s underground alternative, and this manic racket calls to mind the likes of Terminal Cheesecake – but then again, the driving guitars and thrashing drums of ‘Lost It’ are quite reminiscent of That Fucking Tank – arguably one of the greatest noise duos ever, and an act who really pushed the parameters not only of noise rock, but of the two-piece format to the max. And Burning Motherfuckers… woah, do these bastards make a racket. ‘Lost It’ hurts; the tempestuous assault of everything all at once is not comfortable. But it’s more than that: the vocals are deranged, demented, and this is brain-splitting, cracked, something else, an unapologetic mess of noise.

‘Unless It’s Trees’ is a real departure and stands apart from the rest of the album: a soft, almost folky indie piece, it’s largely bass-driven and it’s uncomfortable but gentle at the same time.

And then there’s the title track. Fuck, and fuck, and fuck. It’s a monster in every sense, taking the mutant form of an eternal guitar drone and mangling noise which builds while discordant vocals melt and burn among a riotous racket.

It’s not neat or tidy, it’s not even ordered or organised. But it’s not conventionally noisy or messy: this is something else. It’s a new level of mangled noise and it’s difficult, awkward, It hurts, and it feels like taking a kicking and being hit around the head with a plank. These motherfuckers sure know how to make music with impact.

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KEN mode – VOID

Posted: 31 August 2023 in Albums
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Artoffact Records – 22nd September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

VOID always seems like the most appropriate title for a counterpart to a release called NULL: it was, indeed, the title for a brace of EPs released by Foetus in the early 00s as companions to the album Gash.

But with this, the title is more than simply an extension of a theme in terms of title. As the accompanying notes explain, ‘VOID, the companion piece to last year’s NULL LP, has a decidedly more melancholy and disappointed aesthetic than its predecessor. Featuring 8 new tracks recorded and produced throughout the fall and winter of 2021 by Andrew Schneider, mastered by Carl Saff, with artwork and layouts by the band’s longtime collaborator Randy Ortiz.’

Despite now marking twenty-four years of squalling noise, tenth full-length Loved (2018) found the band hitting new peaks of intensity and gaining newfound traction, and not just because of the vaguely disturbing cover. Combining weight and ferocity, their back catalogue straddles the abyss between The Jesus Lizard and Swans. It’s fair to say, then, that KEN mode are hardly celebrated as a party band, and writing in Decibel Magazine, Shane Mehling summarises the diptych of NULL and VOID as “It’s like the first record is you fighting, and this one is you losing”.

It’s a pretty accurate summary. That is to say, VOID is pretty fucking bleak, harrowing even. ‘The Shrike’ makes for a tense and tempestuous opening, where everything blasts out all at once before sinewy guitars twist and entwine like a contraction of the intestines with the pain of food poisoning before successive deluges of noise assail the senses. The tension draws the sinews so taut as to burn, and a mere four minutes in you feel the anguish rising through the gut and your throat tightening.

Single cut ‘These Wires’ is almost accessible, a sedate intro building the tension before the levee breaks on the lung-bursting anguish. It’s eight minutes of blank fury, raging nihilism that doesn’t necessarily make you feel better. The stab at catharsis feels blunted. Confined, entrapped. It’s tense, and you feel your heartrate well. VOID is so, so, dense, the music low and churning the

Comparisons are few and largely futile in the face of this, but it’s Kowloon Walled City’s bleak, desolate forms. The disappointment emanates from every chord, every pained syllable. Life… yes, it tears you up and it crushes you.

‘We’re Small Enough’ runs in ever-tightening circles around a repetitive bass groove motif, and become wound more tightly with every loop, and then ‘I Cannot’ crashes in and it’s like you can feel the band throwing themselves headline against lead-lined walls in desperate and futile attempts to escape. Escape what? Life… ‘A Reluctance of Being’ encapsulates that sense of struggle, the weight of simply existing some days. And yet just when you think you can’t do it, and don’t think you can even get up on a morning, you do, because you simply do, and then you get through another day, and then the next. It’s like wading through treacle, but what else are you going to do? I say ‘you’ in the hope that in redirecting the personal the universal it will take on a wider resonance. But for every ‘you’, I mean me. But you know that. And this track is the most gut-wrenching brutal.

Previous single ‘He Was a Good Man, He Was a Taxpayer’ is another slow, brutal slice of pain. Another shining example of what no-one would likely consider a single, it’s a crawling slogger spanning five monolithic minutes of bludgeoning noise, angry, grey, dark, dense, relentless. VOID is the soundtrack to staring into the void, while contemplating the practicalities and the future. Is there even a future? What if I step off here? What am I looking at, what am I facing? Is there really nothing? Probably not, and we need to accept that perhaps the end is the end.

VOID stands on the edge and looks down. Perhaps this is it. Perhaps there is more. VOID doesn’t offer hope, but it does provide a backdrop to your existential crisis while leaving you gasping for air.

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Sly and the Family Drone – Every Knife In This House Is Mine

Posted: 4 August 2023 in Singles and EPs
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The Quietus

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s not that I like to brag, but I’ve been writing about Sly and the Family Drone since 2012, when they blew me away at the Brudenell in Leeds, with a chaotic, percussion-heavy, audience-participation-led performance (and since when my writing has improved and I’ve become a shade more sensitive, perhaps). Witnessing Matt Cargill standing aloft on a stack of amps while surrounded my members of the crowd battering drums distributed by the band was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life, and I was an instant convert. In some respects, I was fortunate to witness it: in a recent interview, Cargill was at pains to stress that it’s one of those spontaneous things: “It doesn’t happen at every gig,” he warns. “And I don’t want it to become a thing that people expect or are disappointed when we don’t do it. There are times I’ve seen people write, ‘Bring your drumsticks!’ I’ve never said that and I don’t want you to do that! If we were doing it every night people would be, like, ‘Oh, fuck off! They’re doing their schtick.’”

It’s this spontaneity and true commitment to improvisation that is a significant part of the band’s appeal. You never know quite what you’re going to get, and there’s a sense that nor do they: it all unfolds in real-time.

Their subsequent releases since my introduction in 2012 have never disappointed, and for me, at least, the best thing about Sly is that they embrace the difference between the live and recorded media. As such the recordings are the recordings, the performances are the performances. Explaining the difference to The Quietus, Cargill says “It was nice to be able to do all that spatial and stereo stuff which we wouldn’t be able to do live,” he says. “Because of mics on drums and stuff, it just doesn’t really work in that way. So we were able to spend a bit of time just working on that and doing some quite weird-sounding drum stuff which I’m really happy with.” The same article also explains, ‘The passages of manipulated drumwork are bookended by the band performing together in full skronking and lumbering flow and, in a move that vaguely echoes the ecstasy of their live sets’ endings, it finishes with a warm and symphonic cacophony of horns. “It’s kind of a pieced together track but I think it works as an entire piece,” reflects Cargill.

They have forged a career – or perhaps eked one, on the breadline, with a cult reputation which exceeds the returns a fringe act can attain in this crappy climate, a climate whereby post-Brexit overseas travel is prohibitive and not just financially – from being far out. Embracing elements of jazz and noise and a whole spectrum beyond, it’s fair to say that this is an act who plough their own furrow, and for that, respect is due, and them some.

This latest release is – as ever – an interesting one. It’s a limited lathe-cut 12” released via The Quietus, a publication with an immense reputation for its championing of the weird and the wonderful, and which perhaps more than any online publication with a significant readership plugs the gap left when Sounds, and then Melody Maker ceased to be. For non-subscribers, it’s available digitally via the usual platforms.  The ones I don’t use or advocate. But I digress. ‘And Every Knife In This House Is Mine’ is Sly at their best.

As a single track – less a composition than an exploration – with a running time of twenty minutes, it’s an EP or an album by some bands’ standards, but what it ultimately is is an immersive experience which sees them make the most of having access to studio facilities to push their sound further in different directions.

It’s a shrill, rippling wave of feedback that pierces the eardrums in the opening seconds which announces its arrival before a tempest of crashing drums, wayward brass and extraneous noise deluges in, and more happens in the first forty seconds of this tune than the entirety of many albums. Shortly after, it settles into a thunderous groove, the rhythm section grindingly heavy while wild horns – Kaz Buckland’s alto sax and James Allsopp’s baritone sax interplay is a back-and-forth that is timed with perfect precision.

There’s a lot of reverb, and a lot of space here. They pull back from the brink of pure chaos and meander through some expansive gentler passages, before, each time, exploding into a wild crescendo. It’s hard to differentiate snarling electronics from barking vocal yelps , and there isn’t a second where there isn’t something happening. It’s impossible to maintain a commentary on this sequentially.

A tumult of noise, bleeps and glitches, bloops and whirls, all fuse to form a wild cacophony, and it’s pure bliss to yield to this sonic tidal wave. But over the course of the track’s twenty minutes, there are constant ebbs and flows, the lower-level churning swashes rendering the louder segments and extended crescendo’s all the more impactful.

Things get decidedly Throbbing Gristle around the midway point, with swampy electronics and groaning low swoons taking things down, disrupted by random clatterings of percussion, before things take a turn for dark around the fifteen minute mark, with drones that sound like a 747 heading towards the ground in a nosedive… and then the climaxes with an extended jazz frenzy, and… woah.

Running through every form and texture, Every Knife In This House Is Mine is both exhilarating and exhausting… and everything you would expect from Sly and the Family Drone, and all that jazz.

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Bug Facer – Triple Death

Posted: 31 July 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Warren Records – 31st July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

There are few things quite as gratifying as seeing one of your own quotes as the lead on a press release. And so it is that Hull noise punks Bug Facer, who I declared were my new favourite band on the release of their debut single, ‘Horsefly’ in Nov ember, praising them for their ‘claustrophobic, pulverising heaviness that leaves you aching’, rage hard on their debut EP.

What are they angry about? Everything and anything: modern life in general. Triple Death may only contain three tracks and have a running time of less than fourteen minutes, but they pack in the fury with a critical mass. The first cut, ‘Eggshell’ sets the tone, and, they say, ‘explores the idea of cycles with no end and how on an existential level we try to apply meaning to struggle.’ This isn’t just noisy shit: it’s noisy shit with some deep thought involved, and ‘Eggshells’ is low and slow, with a hesitant bassline and swirling guitar that swishes around in a gush of treble, and instrumentally it lands somewhere between The Fall and ‘Budd’ by Rapeman, and it’s completed with howling vocals that sound like every syllable is being torn from James Cooper’s lungs. It’s harsh and harrowing and truly the sound of pain leaving the body.

Theirs is an usual setup, with the drummer and bassist contributing vocals alongside co-founder Cooper who plays guitar. I say play: he and second guitarist Josh Burdette torture their instruments, channelling their angst through mangled chords at high volume. Sonically, their approach is unusual, too: they’re not big on riffs or distortion or driving percussion, the popular cornerstones of angry music of many genres: the sound on Triple Death is steely, grey, murky, creating the kind of oppressive sensation I feel listening to Unsane and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry. It makes you feel tense, twisted up and knotted inside.

Picking up the pace with ‘Prod’, which, with the addition of some gurgling synths, steps into a Krautrock groove, before the guitars lunge in and things get messy, the deranged, raw-throated vocals and serpentine guitar lines interweaving in a thicket of discord flay the nerves without mercy. ‘We are all the cattle… We are all the cattle, is the refrain’. And we feel it.

It’s a reworked version of ‘Horsefly’ that closes the EP off, and it’s a cleaner sound that marks the primary difference from the original release of this six-and-a-half-minute trudger of a tune that has the kind of earthy weight of Neurosis. The guitars chime dolorous doom as the bass and drums hammer hard, heavy, relentlessly thudding, so low and slow as to drag your heart down towards your knees.

The clue, I suppose, is in the name. This isn’t just death: it’s triple death, and Triple Death is grim, gloomy, the soundtrack to battling against the tide of shit on shit, when a trip to the seaside is a game of dodge the turds and a tub of butter costs seven fucking quid. When they tell you that inflation is a global issue but the fuel providers and supermarket chains record bumper profits and immense payouts to execs and shareholders while nurses are querying at food banks… fuck this shit. Triple Death is the soundtrack to telling the world, ‘fuck this shit’. One more time: fuck this shit.

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Repo Man – Me Pop Now

Posted: 29 July 2023 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 24th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Cruel Nature keep the good shit coming with this absolute monster of discord courtesy of Repo Man, who are new to me despite their twelve-year existence. According to their bio, ‘

Repo Man emerged in Bristol in 2011, reshaping ‘rock groop’ sturm-und-clang into subnormal forms, son-of-Oldham vocal slurries, oozing free sax splatter and shards of punishing guitar bliss. If you ever freaked to The Fall, Sonic Youth, Swans or Ornette Coleman then Repo may be your ticket to oblivion.’

I’ll admit, the title didn’t entice me, perhaps because it reminded me of the narrative form of the impenetrable and truly awful Chick Palahniuk novel Pygmy. I write that as a huge Palahniuk fan, and despite having found both Pygmy and Adjustment Day to be so dire that I have up fairly early, I’ve devoured everything else h’s written and have the ultimate admiration for the fact that he will try something different with each outing. It’s testament to his creative integrity that he doesn’t simply rehash the same winning formula.

This is also true of Repo Man, presumably named after Alex Cox’s 1984 cult classic movie. Wikipedia describes it as a ‘science fiction black comedy’, and in this context, the band’s fourth genre-smashing noise explosion album makes sense.

We’re eased in gently with a slow, trepidatious atmospheric twang before, thirty seconds in, ‘Back on the Meat’ explodes in a chaotic frenzy of pure mania. It’s all going off all at once, the jolting sinewy guitar mess of The Jesus Lizard and Blacklisters cut against a stuttering percussion. Things stay schizophrenic with ‘Simian’, which is rather more of a hectic math-rock persuasion, the guitars jangling but jarring and the bass kinda groovy, sort of like Gang of Four gone wrong.

How to pitch this? The vocal delivery is sort of spoken word, like John Cooper Clarke on acid, while the musical backing veers all over, from slugging post-metal to avant-garde via mathy post-punk… The first ‘Pop Me Now’ and ‘Me Pop Now’ (the fact there are three of each scattered across the album only adds to the overall bewilderment that this album cooks up in a cauldron of chaos, but also serve as a thread which weaves the album together in a loose sense) are but brief interludes, wedged back-to-back and packing industrial Krautrock oddness and squalls of feedback into a couple of minutes, and then ‘Butter Pump’ bursts in and brings a blast of brash brass, but there’s blustering bass and all sorts happening in this psychotic sonic collision. Me Pop Now is without question the most outré album I’ve had the joy of running into in a while, happily reminding me of the most mental shit of the 90s – I’m talking about the likes of Trumans Water and Terminal Cheesecake. When a friend – younger than me – asked why I thought being the age I was in the 90s was exciting, I went with the obvious response of the way Nirvana and the whole grunge thing changed the face of music. I forgot to mention that reading Melody Maker, I discovered the weirdest of shit, and it was noisy and crackers and nothing like most of what passes for alternative now. Pummelling programmed beats are assaulting my ears as I realise that Repo Man capture that whole off-the-wall musical experience, the likes of which I haven’t had since listening to John Peel in the early 90s. And while I’m not one to harp on about the past – at least not in the sense that ‘music’s been shit since I turned thirty’ whining – Repo Man evoke the spirit of the 90s in their approach.

It’s taken me a while to warm to jazz-flavoured stuff, although I suppose seeing Gallon Drunk on SNUB:TV in the early 90s was the first time I saw how jazz and noise could be fused to powerful effect. I was blown away by the intensity, and it’s that intensity that Repo Man replicate: yes, there’s jazz and art rock and stuff that some might find pretentious all going on, but what stands out is that this is a set of driving rock tunes, albeit of an extremely alternative persuasion.

And how the hell do you fuse ska and jazz – and make it work? It shouldn’t be possible, yet on ‘Sirhan Sirhan’, they achieve it, and then spin off in a skewed manic math-rock direction.

It’s deranged and demented, and impossible to guess the direction they’ll blast in from between one song and the next, but it works, perhaps because the noise leads and the jazz is more of an infusion: ‘Ratsgrave’ and ‘The Blues Lawyer’ are simply a straight up angular noise driven by chunky churning bass with shouty vocals that sit squarely in the territory of Shellac and The Jesus Lizard, with enough chops and changes to induce whiplash as you try to keep up.

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