Posts Tagged ‘Political’

Watch: ‘Cold Case’ by Worst Ones

Posted: 13 June 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Industrial Sludge Metal Band WORST ONES Unleashes New EP Cold Case Against Institutions Carrying Out Cruelty.

Philadelphia’s industrial sludge metallers WORST ONES are ready to come back with a new EP, after releasing the single ‘Vex’ in March this year. The new effort is called ‘Cold Case’ and it is composed by the title-track and a remix version of the same.

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‘Cold Case’ is a searing indictment of power, complicity, and the violence hidden in plain sight. Built on punishing industrial grooves, a 303 bassline, and layers of moody textures and noise scorched guitars, the track hits with a menacing, high energy momentum that channels the raw intensity of Twitch era Ministry and Skinny Puppy, the gritty pulse of Die Warzau, and the impactful aggression of The Prodigy.

Lyrically, it exposes how institutions carry out cruelty with precision while society turns away, pretending not to see the blood on its hands. The phrase “just another cold case” becomes a symbol of willful ignorance, where injustice is not buried because it is unsolvable, but because it is inconvenient. The chorusʼ imagery – “up against the wall / going in for the kill” – evokes violent repression and execution, while the line “every sick and nightmare reason comes to life” suggests how dark motives are brought to the surface and acted upon. Even in the face of horror, the masses “rally in their fervor,” a reference to mob mentality and blind nationalism. Violence is not just permitted; it is ritualized. Power is the culture, and the aftermath is “a feast for vultures.”

But at its heart, ‘Cold Case’ is a protest. It ends not just in defiance with “I wonʼt fall in fear,” but with a warning: “Now you’re sick, their eyes can see it.” The mask has slipped. Itʼs a refusal to be complicit and a demand to confront the truth, even when it burns.

‘Cold Case’ was written and recorded by Drew Ew. Mixed and mastered by Jared Birdseye. Promo Photography by Luz Karolina Sanchez. Live photography by Vinny Barreras. Cover and logo by Drew Ew except “deathmetallogo” by Darren Adcock. Music Video by Drew Ew.

WORST ONES is:

Drew Ew – Vocals, Guitar, Programming

Doppleganga – Drums, Programming

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Watch: ‘Where Do We Go From Here’ by Johnathan|Christian

Posted: 17 May 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Darkwave duo, Johnathan|Christian return with ‘Where Do We Go From Here’—a brooding, cinematic post-election anthem that captures the emotional wreckage of a divided nation. The track opens in hushed reflection (90 BPM) and erupts into a 125 BPM pulse of unrest and reluctant clarity. No slogans. Just aftermath.

The video integrates footage from Maya Deren’s At Land—a woman lies on a beach, disoriented yet unbroken, before rising with quiet resolve. What begins in poetic isolation transforms into documentary collapse: flickering headlines, divided families, shuttered classrooms, and hands reaching—but not always finding. It opens with: “We Still Remain.” It ends with: “WE STILL RISE.”

“We didn’t want spectacle—we wanted aftermath,” says the band. “No fire. No fury. Just a reckoning in the ruins.”

Included in the release are: a 125 BPM DJ Edit for live mixing and DJ sets, and remixes by industrial supergroup, The Joy Thieves and Stoneburner’s Steven Archer. Also included is the track, ‘Fall from Grace’ – a short, ghostly instrumental layered with static and decay; a requiem for what was, and a reflection on what remains.

For fans of Peter Murphy, Human Drama, Laibach, New Order, and politically-driven dance stompers.

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Watch: ‘White Guilt Atrocity Quilt’ lyric video by Leftöver Crack

Posted: 20 April 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Punk legends Leftöver Crack have released their new single, ‘White Guilt Atrocity Quilt’ along with the B-side, ‘Brad Sabbath’.

The band says, “The new song by Leftöver Crack is about the history of white self-proclaimed Americans and the injustice, displacement, genocide, rape, disease, enslavement, human commodification and trafficking, cruelty, brutality, exploitation, broken promises, and vilification of the native Indigenous population, as well as the populations of African countries, for the benefit of the privileged class and rich “elite” whites—who behave no differently than the Europeans that forced them to seek a new world where they could live in peace, practice their religions freely, and avoid paying financial tribute to British royalty, only to demand that the subjugated peoples of this country fatten their own oligarchic coffers and bow down to their own demented dynasties, all while presenting a facade of caring about those destroyed in their scorched wake. ‘Brad Sabbath’ is about the mistakes inherent in following gods and the minced words used to justify so much grisly atrocity.”

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Cromwell Ate A Twix Here / Yol – Fragile / Glassed Ascension

Posted: 27 March 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Strategic Tape Reserve – 21st March 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s certainly been a while since we last heard from Justin Watson, the epically-bearded being who formerly ran the Front & Follow label, but here he has temporarily resurfaced as one half of the absurdly-monikered Cromwell Ate A Twix Here on a split release with underground noise legend YOL, released by Spanish cassette label Strategic Tape Reserve. As such, even before hearing a sound, one can predict that this is destined to be unpopular – by which I mean an ultra-cult release for a microniche audience – or, put simply, the noise scene.

The bio for Cromwell Ate A Twix Here tells us more about what they aren’t than what they are, hammering home that ‘Justin ran Front & Follow and definitely doesn’t now. It’s over. He’s half of MORE REALISTIC GOALS, a third of The Incidental Crack and a quarter of The Watson Marriage Experiment (2006-)’. So in the wake of its brief revival for the charity fundraising Rental Yields series of complications not so long ago, we can be confident that the lid is now firmly nailed onto the coffin of F&F and even Dracula wouldn’t resurrect the label’s activity. But this is how it tends to be with those of a creative bent. They simply can’t not do anything forever. It’s not even an itch: it’s a compulsion. ‘Fragile’ occupies side one, and is eighteen minutes of expansive, filmic music, constructed around quavering, wavering drones, sparse pseudo-strings and soft, supple abstractions by way of an accompaniment to a somewhat surreal spoken-word narrative about… what is it about, exactly? Death, yes, but also a new relationship, interaction… The music fades into the background during the narrative, rising to the fore between passages. David Yates’ delivery is natural, down to earth, friendly, even, and is fitting for a tale which is largely given to quite mundane details before shit gets weird at the end. The audio begins to grow more unsettling, a shade disturbing around the seven-minute mark, and things only get darker thereafter.

And then there is eighteen minutes of Yol, which is pure derangement. Anyone acquainted with his work will be expecting nothing less. It begins with him stuttering and choking in convulsions over a mess of noise about ‘wheel of life, wheel of cheese’, and he yelps and roars, sounding as if he’s utterly possessed or dying, spasmodic ranting overloading over a horrific mesh of feedback and sonically rough terrain. You can practically hear your speakers wilting as the blasts of distortion scratch and scrape and glitch and burst and grind and buzz like so much sputtering, sparking, damaged circuitry. The whole thing is deranged, although it’s no less deranged than Liz Truss’ famous proclamations about cheese or any statement issued by The Whitehouse in recent weeks. He knows this, of course: however insane his work sounds, there are political undercurrents and a certain knowingness to his brand of frenzied avant-gardism, as evidenced on viral cats and dogs (2021).

The fact that this is just short of twenty minutes of a man yelping and barking and seemingly losing the plot before a microphone, and yet making more sense than five minutes spent perusing the news or social media tells us where we are in the world right now.

The two sides of this split release may be very different, but the contrasts are complimentary, and in combination, offer a welcome excursion beyond the everyday madness we’re living through, offering insights into rather more specialist madness instead. But this is artful madness, or good mad, or something. These guys won’t wreck the economy, invade or annexe your country, or fuck you over. They’ll just be over there making some weird noise. I’ll be over there with them, and you’re more than welcome to join us.

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Listen: ‘Safe Routes (single version)’ by Knitting Circle

Posted: 8 March 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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‘Safe Routes’ encourages an end to all arms sales everywhere, and an end to all wars! No borders! 100% of proceeds from Bandcamp sales (after fees) will be donated to Campaign Against Arms Trade.

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Watch: ‘Divide’ by Benefits feat. Shakk

Posted: 4 February 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Well, well… new noise from Benefits as a further taster for the upcoming album – and it’s different again… but it’s also a clear part of the Benefits continuum. Hard-hitting lyrics and noise that you can groove to as well, with some valuable insights intercut for good measure.

From Paris to Palestine we witness the maddest crimes,

Are we living in the saddest times, analyse.

FOR POWER. FOR GREED. FOR OIL. FOR ME.

Watch the video here:

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Killer Couture – Everything Is Normal

Posted: 5 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Transylvanian Recordings – 31st October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

The title is, sadly, true. Somehow, recent years have ‘normalised’ everything, but not least the worst and most cuntish behaviour. Men being sleazy shits is just so normal that ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’ is an election-winning slogan, and a majority – however slim – in the US is ok with electing a convicted felon to the most powerful political position in the world. Somehow, billionaires have been normalised. Genocide has been normalised. These things have just become the backdrop to the every day. Many of us simply reel at this realisation.

But instead of reeling, we need to react. And if we ourselves find ourselves unable, it’s at least something to find there are other out there who are able to articulate on our behalfs. Enter Killer Couture, with their third album.

Gothface celebrate Everything Is Normal as being ‘Not overproduced; just back-to-basics angry, editorial of society style late 80’s/early-90’s music; the kind of stuff you could expect from Skinny Puppy’s and Ministry’s DGAF approach in the 80’s’. The band themselves describe it as ‘a 40-minute violent outburst of pent-up energy, challenging the concept that there ever was a status quo to begin with, the people who feel the need to try and uphold the illusion, and exploring the psychic maelstrom of living in the true chaotic reality beneath the mask.’

From a muffled cacophony of discord and a patchwork of samples emerges the first pulsating beat and blasting riff, from which ruptures forth squalling guitar and the intensity builds as the collage of snippety bits layers up to an unbearable level… and then ‘Terrible Purpose’ barrels in, the guitars thick and fat and dirty, overloading but with that digitally crisp edge, and as much as Ministry and Skinny Puppy so come to mind, while the speaker cone-shredding distortion hits like a two-footed flying kick to the chest, I’m thrown into recollections of early Pitch Shifter, of the searing industrial metal abrasion of Godflesh. The bass snarls, the percussion is simply devastating, and this is proper, full-tilt. If you need more comparisons, and more contemporary ones, I’d be placing this alongside Uniform for its uncompromising, full-on raw industrial attack.

Hot on its heels, the title track is a relentless percussive blast which propels a mess of noise, guitars set to stun, vocals set to rabid punk rage.

The guitars on ‘Teeth’ come on like a wall of sheet metal. If the refrain ‘I’d like to break your teeth’ lack subtlety, it achieves the desired impact. Everything Is Normal is not about subtlety or nuance: it’s about expunging that raw, brutal rage, it’s about catharsis, it’s about venting the fury, and Killer Couture are simply splitting their skins and breaking open their craniums with it.

‘KCMF’ brings another level of overload, the bass crunching and guitars churning and squalling against a relentless mechanised beat, and this is some furious, high-octane adrenalized noise shit. ‘Bastards’ speaks – or rather hollers – for itself, and ‘Composite Opposite’ is as gnarly as hell.

Everything Is Normal is one of the few self-professed ‘industrial’ albums I’ve heard of late which isn’t some Pretty Hate Machine lift, and isn’t essentially an electropop album with a dash of distortion. Killer Couture deliver on their promises with an album that’s brutal and uncompromising, heavy, and properly noisy.

‘Bad Waves’ brings things to a close, combining a certain shoegaze element with the hypnotic throb of suicide, and calls to mind The Sisters of |Mercy’s legendary live renditions of ‘Ghostrider’ circa 1984, often segued into ‘Sister Ray’ and / or ‘Louie Louie’ with the same relentless beat. And yes, my only complaint is that at 4’59”, it simply isn’t long enough by half. But then, the best songs always leave you wanting more, and despite Everything Is Normal being truly punishing album, a little more wouldn’t hurt that much… probably.

It’s important – and now sadly necessary – to distinguish between the red-faced outrage of those perpetuating hate and raging against all things supposedly ‘woke’ and those who are calling out the injustices, who are willing to stand up and point out that we need to be woke, that if you have an issue with antifa, you’re pro-fa, and you’re the problem.

Killer Couture are the voice of anger, the conduit of rage, and Everything Is Normal is precisely the album we need right now.

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LiVES – Let Them Eat Cake

Posted: 13 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Roulette Records – 25th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

As the album’s title suggests, this is a political record. Then again, the single ‘Cancelled’, released a few months back as a lead-up, certainly gave enough of a hint that this was going to be a rage against contemporary society, and the themes of the social media ‘shitshow shower’ and the culture wars and flame-throwing, division and disinformation that has taken over so much of the Internet – a space where we seems spend more time living virtual lives than we do on real life – dominate the lyrics.

The opening lines of ‘What a Way’ neatly encapsulate the band’s angle:

He’s a little nazi with a pop-gun,

Spilling all of his hate onto the forum,

Overcompensating for the fact that,

It’s lonely life

And so it is that these seven sharp cuts (plus a radio edit of ‘Cancelled’) really pick apart just what it is about modern life that s so rubbish. That’s perhaps rather flippant, not to mention reductive of what Let Them Eat Cake is about. It explores numerous aspects of how the world on-line has eroded so much in culture, and how it’s riven with contradictions. On the one hand, the interconnected world of the ‘global village’ Marshall McLuhan first wrote of in Understanding the Media in 1964 has truly come to pass. The world is switched on and connected 24/7, and it’s possible to conduct conversations and business with the other side of the world in real time. News is instantaneous and everywhere. All music – well, hypothetically, and moreover perhaps depending on your tastes – and media are there, instantly, and for free. But on the other hand, as much as there’s a sense of sameness and conformity – same music, same news, same memes, same opinions – and an ever-blander homogeneity, the inhabitants of the global village hate one another’s guts and seem to even derive pleasure from rage, throwing bricks through their neighbours’ windows, keying their cars and burning their houses.

Everyone is shouting louder than the next, ‘look at me, look at me!’ while posting the same generic shit, the same Instagrammable coffee and cake (let them eat it, sure, diabetes is a small price to pay for millions of followers and true ‘influencer’ status, right?), and what’s more there’s simply too much of it. Anxiety, depression, and therapy have become normalised topics as people spill their guts into the world (and the subject of ‘Come Together’), and while yes, it’s good that they’re no longer taboo or shameful, what’s not good is that we’re in this position where these are everyday realities for so many.

Let Them Eat Cake is a snapshot and a critique of all of this.

‘Cancelled’ certainly gets the album off to a fiery, riff-driven start, but it soon becomes clear that LiVES have some considerable capacity for stylistic range. Of course they do: to rail about cultural sameness while doing the same thing on every song would be hypocritical.

The title track has more of a 90s indie vibe, and even goes a bit Manics, a bit Mansun, and a little bit glammy, and ‘Come Together’ has more of an indie vibe, too, but also a theatricality which calls to mind The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, but then ‘What a Way’ cranks up the guitars and hits like a punch in the guts. ‘Already Dead’ and ‘Is This What You Want?’ bring a big stoner-meets Led Zep rock swagger, which contrasts again with the country twang of ‘Hope and Freedom’.

The span of styles makes for an album that never falls to formula or gets predictable, but the lyrical focus ensure it retains that vital cohesion. What really comes across through every song is that this is an album from the heart, born of frustration, disappointment, despondency, irritation, antagonism, that whole gamut of emotions stirred by that feeling of inflammation that everything is so very, very wrong. For all that frustration, disappointment, despondency, irritation, antagonism, Let Them Eat Cake is an album packed with passion, not to mention some corking tunes.

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Hearse Pileup – Realise

Posted: 15 July 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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2nd July 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Unless I’m looking in all the wrong places, one genre you don’t seem to find many emerging acts coming through in is hardcore punk. Reissues of vintage bands – even minor cult acts who were criminally overlooked in their time – are coming (back) to light with releases on Southern Lord and the like, but new true hardcore punk acts are few and far between, with many presenting a more metal

This is raw, fast, gritty, and angry. And political. ‘Realise’ is a fist-pumping roar of rage, positively foaming at the mouth with the fury of betrayal. Told from the position of the punter for whom the penny’s dropping that they’ve been lied to and done over, ‘Realise’ rails against the system and the way in which politics serves politicians rather than the people. As they put it, ‘Writing with the credo “Shit’s fucked – call it out”, the song highlights that politics doesn’t, and cannot, happen only once every five years. Obviously, these guys get it, but it still shocks me that there’s such a thing as working-class Tories. They seem to proliferate in run-down rural areas, places like Lincolnshire, North Yorkshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk. Many of these regions are agricultural, and the (ageing) populations have bought the myth that the migrant workers picking and sorting veg for minimum wage – the same migrant workers who serve them their coffees and also service their health in evermore dilapidated hospitals – are stealing their jobs. Those would be the jobs they’re retired from, and would never have done on account of the pay and conditions being poor. But this is the way of capitalism – blaming the most vulnerable for your own plight while aspiring to higher things and buying into the idea of trickle-down economics is simply pissing on the head of the person on the next rung down because the person on the rung above is pissing on you, and because they’re on the higher rung, it must be right. It is, of course, a complete con. Shit is, indeed, fucked.

The bass-rattling blast of ‘Grindstone,’ which first surfaced a few years ago, finally makes it to an EP, and it perfectly summarises the wearying, dulling, life-robbing effects of drudge labour and the living hell of working all hours and multiple shit jobs to make ends not even meet. ‘I got my nose to the grindstone every day / I’m grinding so hard I grind my face away / I leave blood on the floor wherever I go / If I grind much more I’ll be grinding bone’ paints a visceral picture and take the notion of working one’s finger to the bone to its logical conclusion. This is precisely what proponents of capitalism and governments who support it want. A people too busy killing themselves with work just to stay alive hasn’t the time or the energy to protest, to uprise, to vote. Notably, the main parties all spoke of rewards for ‘hard-working families’, reinforcing the idea that both families and hard work are both normal and desirable goals. This is clearly false: not everyone is suited to family life, and rewards should not be based on one’s level of conformity, and a question I have asked elsewhere is why should work be hard? It should be enough to simply work, to earn a day’s pay, and still have the energy – physical and mental – to have a life outside it. Promoting the idea that hard work is something we should want to spend our lives on is simply another means of oppression. And yes, making art is work: art and culture are essential, and the existence of cave paintings is testament to the fact that the need for art is in our DNA. So fuck the pitch that work has to be long hours grinding out shit earning a pittance to fund the CEO’s multi-million pound package as if it’s somehow noble. It’s not: it’s exploitation, pure and simple.

This brings us to the final cut, ‘We’re All Going to Hell’, is a full-throttle rabble rouser with a strong chorus. It’s simple, direct, unpretentious. Much as I admire poeticism in songwriting, every form has its time and place, and Hearse Pileup are agitators, looking to shake people awake. You might think their fanbase would be young and left-leaning, but so many who have grown up under the last government are prematurely world-weary, dead on their feet, and apathetic to the whole circus. These are the people Hearse Pileup are reaching out to. And for this purpose, they don’t need to be subtle, but instead deliver a sonic slap round the chops. And with this EP, that’s precisely what they deliver.

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LiVES – Cancelled

Posted: 6 July 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Roulette Records – 19th July 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

“I fucking hate how lame we’ve all become” yells Peter Chisholm by way of a hook which is almost guaranteed not to get this single mainstream radio airplay – as if it was ever likely in the first place. But the best music rarely on mainstream radio anyway. Nirvana, Therapy?, RATM breaking the singles charts at a certain point in the early 90s was a revolutionary moment in cultural terms, but ultimately, it was but a brief incursion which represented a mere moment in time, and whatever you may read about grunge taking over the world and breaking down walls, you’d never catch Tad or Mudhoney or Nymphs on the airwaves. This is not how the world works, and you’re never going to hear LiVES on R1 – especially not now.

Much as I loathed that sycophantic blowhard Zane Lowe, his show was pretty much the last bastion of alternative on mainstream radio, and while we do still – fortunately, and for now – have 6Music, it’s not the same, and 6Music really isn’t what it was, either. It’s not simply me being a miserable, nostalgic old sod: we’ve lost something, culturally, and that’s a fact.

But I digress – but not without justification. Because LiVES deserve to be heard, far and wide. ‘Cancelled’ is no right-wing supporting rant or moan about being cancelled. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. So you won’t find LiVES bleating about how right-on acts stole their slots or how being edgy has deprived them of a platform, in the way the likes of Ricky Gervais and John Cleese do, completely, and bewilderingly, without irony.

Chisholm states: “‘Cancelled’ is about my feeling of disenfranchisement of online and political society, my total despondence and hatred of the right AND the left… far right and postmodernism attitudes. They claim to be decent whilst being indecent, tolerant whilst being intolerant… always outraged, self righteous, aggressive, violent…they are swimming in hypocrisy and can’t see it. Meanwhile the real elite destroy the world around us, seemingly unnoticed whilst we fight amongst ourselves. I hate them all!!”

The frankly dismal turnout at this week’s election in the UK is a signifier of massive disinterest in politics as a whole, and Chisholm’s loathing of both sides is commonplace. ‘They’re all as bad as each other’, people moan. It doesn’t help that it’s become increasingly difficult to differentiate between the two, especially where the main parties are concerned. But cause for concern is not that Reform bagged five seats in parliament, but the fact they scored 14% of the vote, evidencing a massive surge in right-wing sentiment in the country.

‘Our final hour is a shitshow shower’ he spits as he calls out the calls out hypocrisy over a monster churning riff as cartoon images of Trump, Johnson, and Farage drift in and out of shape in the accompanying video. And if ‘Cancelled’ is the 2024 howl of disaffected nihilism that marks parallels with 1994, then it should also be seen as an awakening, a call a neglected generation to come together with a single voice and call for something better. And ‘Cancelled’ is nihilistic, and it’s angry. The guitars buzz and grind, and the rhythm section is monster-weighty and it’s the perfect backdrop to a snarling dissection of the world as is and just how hard it is to navigate. I’m drowning…. I’m drowing…’

It’s hard to argue that the right have surged forward, or that they’re a bunch of cunts, and it’s hard to ignore that the left have made a significant shift to the right. It’s also hard to deny, for anyone with ears, that this is a big gutsy riff-driven tune. Dig it.

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