‘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.
Posts Tagged ‘Political’
Listen: ‘Safe Routes (single version)’ by Knitting Circle
Posted: 8 March 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPsTags: alternative, Campaign Against Arms Trade, Charity, Knitting Circle, left, Political, Post-Punk, Protest, Safe Routes (single version), single stream
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Watch: ‘Divide’ by Benefits feat. Shakk
Posted: 4 February 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPsTags: Benefits feat. Shakk, Divide, Interview, Political, promotion, video stream
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, ReviewsTags: Album Review, Brutal, Everything Is Normal, Heavy, Industrial, Killer Couture, Ministry, Noise, Political, Skinny Puppy, Transylvanian Recordings
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, ReviewsTags: Album Review, Alternative Rock, critique, frustration, Grunge, Indie, Let Them Eat Cake, LiVES, Political, social media, Sociopolitical, The Sea
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 EPsTags: aggitation, EP Review, fast, Hardcore, Hearse Pileup, Political, Punk, Realise
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 EPsTags: angry, Cancelled, Grunge, James Morrison, Let Them Eat Cake, LiVES, melodic, Nihilism, Political, Roulette Records, Single Review, Visceral
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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Pound Land – Mugged
Posted: 15 April 2024 in Albums, ReviewsTags: Album Review, Cruel Nature Recordings, dingy, krautrock, Mugged, Omnibadger, Political, Post-Punk, Pound Land, Primitive, Punk, social
Cruel Nature – 26th April 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
Just as their album was smashing the charts and the band were riding the crest of the wave, the shit hit the fan for The Last Dinner Party over a quote about how “People don’t want to listen to postpunk and hear about the cost of living crisis any more.” Of course, it was taken out of context, and all the rest, but I’ve got no truck with any kind of critique from a bunch of boarding school poshos: of course they can peddle theatrical escapism, because they’ve spent their entire lives in a Gatsby-like whirl of posh frocks and soirees. The name is a bit of a giveaway: only people of a certain position in the social strata ‘do’ dinner parties, dahling, no doubt sharing culinary delights discovered while trotting the globe on their gap yahh. Meanwhile, half the country is at the point where it struggles to afford a McDonald’s, let alone gastropub grub.
It might sound counterintuitive to those so far removed from the reality endured by the majority – the Jeremy Cunts and Rachel Johnsons of the world who reckon £100K a year isn’t much – but music that reflects the grim realities of life are what people do want. Life juggling work and parenting while struggling to make ends meet can be not only stressful, but isolating, and so music which speaks of the harsh realities serves as a reminder that you are not alone. It’s relatable in the way that soaps are for many.
As an aside, I saw a post from a (virtual) friend on Facebook recently commenting that every time they visited Manchester, it pissed it down, and it so happens that this is my experience also. It’s small wonder, then, that Pound Land are such miserable mofos, and again, contrast this by way of a band name with The Last Dinner Party. This is an act that’s gritty and glum and telling it like it is. And you know how it is – and how bad it is – when stuff in Poundland, the shop, costs £1.50, £2, even a fiver. Back in the 90s, you could got to Kwik save and get a tin of No Frills baked beans for 3p and a loaf of bred for 19p.
It’s perhaps because of just how far downhill and how fast it’s happening – in real time – that with Mugged, Pound Land have delivered their most brutally blunt and utterly squalid set to date.
‘Living in Pound Land’ is a brief blast of an intro, atonal shouty pink with some wild parping jazz tossed in, and it hints at what’s to come: ‘Spawn of Thatcher’ is dirty, disdainful, spitting and snarling vocals hit with a grunt and a sneer amidst a cacophony of jazziness held together by a saw-toothed bass grind.
There are hints of The Fall in the mix, a dash of the raging fury of Uniform, too.
As ‘Flies’ evidences, they’re not all one hundred percent serious: against a pounding drum machine reminiscent of Big Black and a bowel-tensing bass, we get a yelping pseudo-John Lydon vocal going on about flies in his underpants.
The nine-minute ‘Power to the People’ is the album’s centrepiece, literally and figuratively. A slow, groaning behemoth, it thuds and grinds away for nine and a half minutes, coming on like ‘Albatross’ for the 2020s (That’s PiL, not Fleetwood Mac) mixed with a Fall cut circa ‘Slates’ played at half speed, its grinding repetition emerging more at the Swans end of the spectrum. It’s ugly, it’s unpretentious. ‘Power to the people! Make everything equal!’ slides down to a rabid howl of ‘be happy with what you’ve got’, exposing the lie of meritocracy and social mobility. The album’s second ten-minute monster, ‘Shish Doner Mix Apocalypse’ is a brutal shredder – like much of the rest of the album, only longer.
Contextually, one might be inclines to position Pound Land somewhere alongside Sleaford Mods and Benefits, but they’re a very different proposition – sociopolitical, yes, but more overtly rock in musical terms, mashing up punk, post-punk, krautrock and noise rock. And then there’s that manic jazz streak.
The snarling racket of single cut ‘Pistol Shrimp’ is both representative, and as nice as it gets. That is to say, Mugged is not nice: in fact, it’s harrowing, gnarly, overtly unpleasant. But it is also entirely necessary.
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Ooberfuse – Hard Times ft Snoop Dogg
Posted: 24 December 2023 in Reviews, Singles and EPsTags: datrk, Hard Times ft Snoop Dogg, Hip-Hop, homelessness, narrative, Ooberfuse, Political, Single Review, stark social
1st December 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
I’m aware that there’s a conspicuous absence of rap and hip-hop to be found in my coverage. I suppose that’s largely because it doesn’t really fit the rubric I envisaged for Aural Aggravation when I decided to do my own thing back in 2015. But occasionally I worry that this feels discriminatory, not to mention unjustly dismissive, of a huge swathe of music that could well appeal not only to myself, but visitors to the site. The fact I’ve raved about dälek on more than one occasion not only evidences that I’m not completely hip-hop averse, but also reminds me of the same. Some hip-hop is pretty dark, and also pretty heavy.
Snoop Dogg isn’t a name one commonly associates with dark or heavy, and my interest in this release was in fact piqued by noticing that Ooberfuse are playing a tiny venue in York ten minutes up the road from me here in York next week. How does an act who’s just released single with Snoop come to be doing that? The music industry is screwed, but it’s clear Ooberfuse aren’t doing it for the fame or the glory.
Said single, ‘Hard Times’ represents the best of hip-hop. It is dark, and it is heavy, and comes with a hard social message.
That many people find Christmas a challenging time, and in particular the homeless, is widely documented, but this documentation tends to remain the domain of the further corners of news outlets and adverts from charities. But against a stark, dark musical backing – and this is when hip-hop is absolutely at its best.
The first-person lyrics are direct and powerful, and backed by a shuffling beat and stark piano, it’s a hard-hitting track paired with an equally powerful video. One gets the impression that Snoop’s contribution serves primarily to draw attention – and I say ‘good’. This track needs to be heard and people really need to fucking listen. In a world where we have billionaires, there should be no such thing as poverty.
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Watch: ‘A Ready Defense’ by Feather Trade
Posted: 20 December 2023 in Recommended Streams and VideosTags: A Ready Defense, anthemic, epic, Feather Trade, moving, Political, powerful, social
Well. Bloody hell. If you’re up for a powerful video – one that really hits home and makes you feel strong and wide-ranging emotions – accompanied by a bold, anthemic song, you need this.
No more words are required.
Watch ‘A Ready Defense’ by Feather Trade here:
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Mari Boine – Gula Gula – Hør Stammødrenes Stemme
Posted: 5 December 2023 in AlbumsTags: Album Review, Folk, Gula Gula – Hør Stammødrenes Stemme, Mari Boine, Political, Reissue, Sámi, world music
By Norse Music – 1st December 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
First released in 1989, Gula Gula was Mari Boine’s second album proved to be her breakthrough, earning her a Norwegian Grammy award and providing the gateway to a career which continues over thirty years later as an international voice for the Sámi peoples. The album, originally self-released, would later come to the attention of Peter Gabriel, who would release it worldwide on his label Real World Records in 1993. But 1993 was twenty years ago already, and there are many – including myself – who will be unacquainted with this album, or even Boine’s work. This reissue comes with the added bonus of two previously unreleased tracks from the Gula Gula studio sessions which were only recently discovered.
That the songs of Gula Gula are primarily sung in the Northern Sámi language is both unusual and significant, being key to what her bio described as ‘the fight of preserving the culture of the Norwegian Sami people and the natural world. Two matters that lie close to Mari’s heart and are still threatened to this day. The indigenous people have a wisdom that says that the earth is our mother, and if she is harmed, we are harming ourselves.’
These feel more salient now than ever, as we witness the effects of global climate change and a world riven with cultural conflicts whereby dominant cultures continue to oppress and obliterate older, indigenous cultures in the name of ‘progress’ – as if the most brutal applications of capitalism are the only way. This album’s reissue happens to land in the same week that Israel resumed its onslaught to decimate the whole of Gaza in the name of defending itself against a minority terrorist organisation, while the UK government slammed down some truly brutal plans to slash immigration under the premise of benefiting the economy. This determination to stamp out difference is diabolical, but somehow accepted as reasonable by many. But in taking such destructive paths, it should be apparent that the harm goes far deeper and wider than the claimed intent. Similarly, those who vent their ire against the likes of Just Stop Oil and XR for employing methods which are disruptive and argue that these methods turn people off from their message are missing the point that a) non-disruptive protest hasn’t achieved anything like enough b) there should be no debate when it comes to their message. What they’re objecting to, then, ultimately, is that these protesters are trying to force them to face uncomfortable truths. The saddest fact is that those objecting to the protests don’t give a fuck and just want to get on with driving their SUVs to the McDonald’s drive-thru.
So, at the heart of Mari Boine’s songs is a certain tension which may not always be immediately apparent from their melodic musicality, especially if you’re not fluent in Northern Sámi. For that, you can be forgiven, and whether or not you’re versant in the sociopolitical aspects of their context, it’s easy to appreciate the music on a more superficial level.
The songs of Gula Gula are quite simply arranged, and are, fundamentally, manifestations of folk music. But while the instrumentation is predominantly acoustic, and serves to provide a backing to Mari’s voice, which while always melodic, shows at times a stirring degree of ferocity and passion, as on ‘Vilges Suola’ while the piano-led ‘Eadnán Bákti’ is a soft ballad. ‘It Šat Duolmma Mu’ brings both raw power and some intricate musicianship melded to a thumping subterranean groove.
‘Oppskrift for Herrefolk’ (‘Recipe for a Master Race’) finds Mari singing in Norwegian on the album’s most overtly political song. Musically, it marks something of a departure, too, with a screeching 80s rock guitar solo slicing through the trilling folksiness. It’s almost as if it’s there to reinforce a point. And it works. It’s worth considering for a moment that there are places where such a song could lead to arrest, and worse. This isn’t to say that the Sámi have it easy, but to highlight the fact that these struggles are real and often go widely unreported, unacknowledged, the voices unheard.
Whether taken in, or out, of context, Gula Gula is an enchanting and powerful album.
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Aural Aggravation 