Mono have released a new the video for ‘Breathe’ taken from their new album, Nowhere Now Here, which is set for release on 25th January (Pelagic Records). Filmed and directed by French film director Julien Levy, this is the first ever Mono track to feature vocals from bassist Tamaki. You can watch the video for ‘Breathe’ here:
Posts Tagged ‘Post Rock’
Watch: ‘Breathe’ by MONO
Posted: 22 November 2018 in Recommended Streams and VideosTags: Breathe, Mono, Nowhere Now Here, Pelagic Records. Wonky, Post Rock, post-unk, vidoe stream Sheegaze
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Hesperian Death Horse – Ziv
Posted: 10 September 2018 in AlbumsTags: Album Review, Concept album, dark, Heavy, Hesperian Death Horse, Lifecycle, Post Rock, Post-Metal, Sludge, Swans, trilogy, Ziv
15th August 2015
Christopher Nosnibor
To conceive an album trilogy is certainly ambitious, and I can’t think of many besides the Melvins trilogy released in 2000-2001. And given that it was a full five years since the first instalment, Mrtav (Croatian for the word ‘Dead’), the scheduled 2020 release for what Croatian avant-garde/sludge/post-metal band Hesperian Death Horse state will not only be the conclusion of the trilogy, but their last album, also seems ambitious. Ambition is a good thing, and there’s a lot to be said for having some kind of master plan – although what matters is having the ability to back it up with an execution that does justice to the concept.
The concept in this case is – appropriately for a band whose lifecycle will be represented by these three albums – the cycle of life, delivered in reverse order, with ‘Ziv’ being Croatian for the word ‘Alive’, and the final piece being ‘Rodjen’ (Croatian for ‘Born’).
Hesperian Death Horse is more than a band: they pitch themselves as ‘a narrator of psychedelic, nihilistic poetry that sings a saga of the birth, life and death of every being’. It’s quite a claim, and ordinarily Id scoff at the elevated level of pretence… but this is good.
Ziv is one of those albums that contains just four tracks, which, if released on vinyl, it would be a double with just a track on each side. The first of these, ‘Saol (Part 1: Prizma)’ has a running time of just under ten minutes and is indeed epic in every sense. An echoed, chiming guitar warps and bends into dissonance through the awkward and intentionally ‘wrong’-sounding opening passage, gradually and gracefully building while maintaining an undercurrent of discomfort. Sibilant voices chant low in the mix as a squall of noise and a rhythmic throb jolts… and then its gets really dark. It may be about life, but it doesn’t exactly feel like a celebration of fulfilment: if anything, it’s closer to Filth era Swans: discordant, bleak, jarring, nihilistic, a sonic representation of the grind of life on the treadmill of existence. The claustrophobic entrapment of work and sleep, that vacant, hollow life that isn’t really life, but is life as so any of us have come to accept it.
Don’t look to the second track, ‘Elu (Part 2: Voda)’ for light relief, either. More skewed guitars slant across a woozy, gut-churning bass and loping rhythm to forge a dense, murky backdrop to the impenetrable lyrical incantation, delivered in a bitter-edged monotone. It’s a dingy dirge of soul-crushing proportions.
‘Hayot (Part 3: Mezanin)’ is – incredibly – even slower, dirgier, more oppressive, the blank vocals the sound of defeat. The bass thuds relentlessly, while the guitars shiver at skewed angles across the solid underlying structure: it bleeds into the final song, ‘Liv (Part 4: Horde)’ – and it’s intense. As the pace and intensity build, things go haywire and a sustained crescendo of chaos emerges. And still, the vocals remain blank, impassive, giving the whole searing blast an air of detachment and dislocation. It’s a fair representation of life over the long-term: stripping out the peaks and troughs, it’s a long, bleak and relentless slog of an album. Yet for all that, it’s intensity and sonic force create a kind of gravitational pull that drags you in. Feel the force, and surrender to it. Yes, this is life.
AA
A-Sun Amissa – Ceremony in the Stillness
Posted: 21 August 2018 in AlbumsTags: A-Sun Amissa, Album Review, Ambient, Ceremony in the Stillness, Consouling Sounds, Gizeh Records, Jo Quail, Post Rock, Post-Metal, Shield Patters
Gizeh Records / Consouling Sounds – September 14th 2018
A-Sun Amissa’s fourth album marks something of a shift, which, in their own words, sees them plunge ‘deeper than before. Guitars come to the fore. Heavy, distorted chords are present from the off, complemented by desolate ambient passages of sound. The claustrophobic atmospheres remain but combine with a new density and sonic experimentation to present a huge leap forward in structure and composition.’ The band’s ever-shifting line-up on this outing features the cello work of Jo Quail, which adds to the infinite layers of intricacy and depth.
‘The Back Path’ – the album’s nine-and-a-half minute opener – calls to mind Earth in its exploration of space and tone, as the chords hang, reverberating, into near silence. But there are echoes in the distance, and slowly, it builds as the percussion enters the mix in the background and a persistent, throbbing lead guitar line takes the foreground. It’s a funereal trudge, but it’s also a powerful soaring monolith that’s pure post-rock – with a dash of funeral post-metal in the mix, too.
Elsewhere the sparse, more melodic and melancholic ‘With Wearied Eyes’ trips a trail of latticework guitars that echo into space, and while ‘To The Ashes’ starts with heavy lifting from I Like Trains, it evolves into something infinitely heavier, bolder, not only more metal but also more resonant in some way.
This is very much the stylistic form that Ceremony in the Stillness pursues over its vast expanse. And it is vast: the album’s six tracks cover a full three-quarters of an hour. Everything is slow, deliberate, spaced and paced. And herein lies the album’s intrigue: it employs familiar genre tropes, but approaches them from a unique perspective, and when not pitching a carefully-poised balance of soaring airiness and cinematic vistas, there are passages of ambience which stir the senses and pull at different emotional chords of the psyche.
Closer ‘Remenbrancer’ proffers blasts of sinewy guitar noise and propellant percussion, before giving way to delicate strings and a slow fade, both sonically and emotionally rounding off an album that’s both breathtaking and, in places, harrowing, and above all, immersive.
AA
Tides of Man – Every Nothing
Posted: 19 August 2018 in AlbumsTags: Album Review, Every Nothing, instrumental, Post Rock, Progressive, Tides of Man
3rd August 2018
Christopher Nosnibor
A decade in existence and with three previous albums to their credit, instrumental prog band Tides of Man from Tampa, Florida, deliver album number four. While their first two albums featured vocals courtesy of Tilian Pearson (who, since his departure in 2010 has provided the ‘clean’ vocals for craply-named post-hardcore act Dance Gavin Dance and enjoys a solo career as Tilian), 2014’s Young and Courageous saw the band emerge as a very different, instrumental, entity.
This means that Every Nothing has been four years in the making. It’s an expansive post-rock / prog crossover, with the twelve compositions spreading and exploring in various directions, both in terms of mood and instrumentation. Ranted, the majority of the album weaves reverby soundscapes from chiming guitars, rolling drums and understated, strolling bass, breaking into the occasional sustained crescendo that alludes strongly to the slow-build and big-burst stylings of Explosions in the Sky. And while they do really work hard to delay gratification, to the point that there are moments the album borders on frustration, and much of the album is so much standard template form, when they do break out, as on ‘Old 88’, and the explosive, choppy breaking on ‘Everything is Fine, Everyone is Happy’, which veers into Shellac territory, it proves to be more than worth it.
Elsewhere, the spacious, wistful piano of ‘Far Off’ – a song that exists more in the echoes between the notes than in the notes themselves – reveals a band who are comfortable with giving the structures and sounds room to breathe, and the piano-led ‘Death is No Dread Enemy’ which slows the pace, lowers the tempo and conjures a reflective mood marks an atmospheric shift.
Every Nothing is by no means a high-impact album, or a set which even stands out as an exemplar in its field. It’ll never set the world alight, but is solid, and a pleasure to listen to. And that’s probably enough.
AA
Listen: ‘Faith’ by Spotlights
Posted: 19 May 2018 in Recommended Streams and VideosTags: Faith, Hanging by Faith EP, Ipecac Recordings, Post Rock, Post-Metal, Spotlights, The Cure, track stream
Brooklyn-based trio Spotlights are releasing Hanging By Faith, a five-song EP featuring remixes of tracks from their 2017 LP Seismic by Void Manes and ISIS/Palms’ Aaron Harris via Ipecac on June 15th. The fifth song on the EP, ‘Faith’, is a cover of The Cure classic. It faithfully captures the bleak atmosphere of the original while bringing new dimensions, additional weight, and and expansive post-rock vibe. Listen to it here:
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Watch: ‘The Dead Rift’ by Her Name is Calla
Posted: 1 May 2018 in Recommended Streams and VideosTags: Her Name is Calla, Post Rock, The Dead Rift, video stream
Her Name is Calla are back (again!).
The lead track from their forthcoming EP, The Dead Rift, out in June, is a corker, and they’ve just unveiled a video for it. You can watch it here:
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Tomorrow We Sail – The Shadows
Posted: 11 February 2018 in AlbumsTags: Album Review, Emotive, Folk, Gizeh Records, Leeds, Post Rock, Resonant, The Shadows, Tomorrow We Sail
Gizeh Records – 2nd March 2018
Christopher Nosnibor
Tomorrow We Sail are a classic example of the kind of band who exist outside of their geography. Based in Leeds, the six-piece aren’t generally renowned as part of the local scene or prominent gig-wise, but have a reach that exists in the ether of the virtual world and into mainland Europe. Four years on from their debut, the collective have evolved their brand of folk-infused string-soaked post-rock into something even more unique.
Subdued, strolling beats and rolling piano provide the rhythmic backdrop to the nagging strings and aching vocals on the opening song, the six-minute ‘Side By Side’. It breaks into a sustained crescendo after just a couple of minutes, but it’s more a case of upping the volume and the intensity than hitting the soaring peaks which characterise so much ‘classic’ post-rock. And perhaps this is the key to the differentials which separate Tomorrow We Sail from their peers, and indeed, any other act. The Shadows is a careful and poised album which exploits the dynamic tropes of post-rock but in a contained fashion. There’s certainly nothing as expansive or sprawling as 2015’s ‘Saturn’, with its twenty-minute duration, or even the single ‘Rosa’ from the first album with its thirteen-minute running time. The Shadows is altogether more concise and all the more intense because of it. Moreover, the context feels different, the slant altered somewhat.
In some respects, the context is that this doesn’t feel like a ‘Leeds’ album. Even when the city was post-rock central a decade or so back, with iLiKETRAiNS (as they were then styled), Vessels and adopted Leeds friends Her Name is Calla all over everywhere, there was nothing this folksy or parameter-pushing as The Shadows, an album which expands the limits of post-rock. ‘The Ghost of John Maynard Keynes’ really pitches the folk aspect of the album to the fore, with a chorus of voices giving the almost shanty-like folk tune a lilting aspect.
There is unspeakable, throat-tightening beauty in the piano-led minimalism of ‘To Sleep’ which calls to mind the very best work of the now-defunct Glissando, and at the same time harks back to their debut.
The Shadows is a well-balanced collection: understated, delicate, melodic, it exists, as the title alludes, in the spaces between light and dark, exploring with deftness and sensitivity the infinite shades between.
AAA
worriedaboutsatan – Shift
Posted: 19 January 2018 in AlbumsTags: Abient, Ambient, Atmpspheric, electronica, instrumental, Post Rock, Review, Shift, worriedaboutsatan
Wolves & Vibrancy
Christopher Nosnibor
German label Wolves & Vibrancy is predominantly given to releasing metal, which makes worriedaboutsatan something of an unusual choice. Still, any release by the genre-straddling electronic duo is welcome regardless of who releases it. With two tracks spanning twenty-five minutes, Shift sits somewhere between an EP and a mini-album. And while it’s categorically not metal, because it’s worriedaboutsatan, it does, most definitely, err toward shades of darkness is places. But equally, because it’s worriedaboutsatan, it’s a work built on contrasts and detail.
On ‘Shift 1’, the rendering of those contrasts and details is analagous to a pencil sketch drawn with a relaxed, free hand, the shading effortlessly contoured by a smooth, easy, and relaxed wrist action to form soft, organic shapes and subtle movement.
A throbbing, low-to-mid drone swells dark, sombre. The first beats are but scratches. Paired, isolates. Hanging n space amidst the dense swirl. But they pick up – almost imperceptibly at first – and slowly, so slowly, begin to approximate a sedated heartbeat. From the building tension and growing density, just as it threatens to reach a critical mass of claustrophobia, emerges a soft, supple, rippling sound of light. Toward the end, a stippling, dappling pattern of light in the form of an interweaving motif rises on a slow wave.
‘Shift 2’ is more about stark contrast, black and white op-art flickers: the interweaving motif that surfaced, spectral, in ‘Shift 1’ takes on a new dynamic, a new tone, and dominates the front end of composition. The result is the sonic equivalent of a monochrome kaleidoscope, the patterns shifting in time and sequence with disorientating effect. Simultaneously calling to mind the vintage works of the likes of Tangerine Dream, Mike Oldfield and contemporary microtonal experimenters, it’s immersive and powerfully hypnotic. In time, it tapers away, and the temp slows, returning to the heartbeat bass and echoic click, before resurging around the mid-pint to weave a mesmerising sonic latticework.
Shift is appropriately titled given its endless evolution and morphology. In context of their oeuvre, its one of their ostensibly less ‘beaty’ releases, but it’ still displays the dynamism and sense of atmosphere that was have made their trademark since their emergence as premier purveyors of music that crosses post-rock and electronica. And as such, while it marks yet another evolutionary progression and expansion, Shift is quintessential worriedaboutsatan.
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Watch ‘All These Ghosts’ by VLMV (FKA Alma)
Posted: 1 January 2018 in Recommended Streams and VideosTags: All THese Ghosts, Ambient, Codes In The Clouds, Fierce Panda, Leeds, Monsters Build Mean Robots, Nordic Giants, Post Rock, video stream, VLMV (FKA Alma)
South London duo VLMV (FKA Alma) have announced their new album ‘Stranded, Not Lost’ will be released on Fierce Panda on the 16th Feb.
They’ve shared this exciting news with new music in the form of beautiful single ‘All These Ghosts’ with an accompanying live video shot at The Nave in Leeds.
VLMV is made up of Pete Lambrou of Codes In The Clouds & Monsters Build Mean Robots and Ciaran Morahan, also of Codes In The Clouds. They’ve describe themselves as "ambient-ish, post-something” their music is beautiful and spacious ambient post-rock.
‘Stranded, Not Lost’ is a gorgeous and moving record replete with the kind of brooding, ambient soundscapes, soaring vocals and crashing intensity that have earned the band a small legion of dedicated fans and recent tours supporting the likes of post-rock stalwarts Nordic Giants.
You can see the video for ‘All These Ghosts’ here:
Clara Engel – Songs for Leonora Carrington
Posted: 26 December 2017 in AlbumsTags: Aidan Baker, Album Review, Clara Engel, Max Ernst, Minimalism, Piano, Post Rock, Songs for Leonora Carrington, Surrealism
6th June 2017
Christopher Nosnibor
Mention Surrealism and the chances are Dali will be the first – and perhaps only – name mentioned by many. Breton, Ernst, Magritte may follow, but the chances are few would likely mention Beat luminary Brion Gysin, who was ejected from the Surrealists on the eve of a major exhibition. The fact of the matter is that Surrealism covers a broad territory, and is represented by myriad lesser known – although by no means lesser value – artists in all media. Leonara Carringon may be competitively obscure – as, indeed, are most women in Surrealism – but the English-born Mexican artist was both a painter, and novelist, who not only received an OBE but is also notable as being one of the last surviving members of the 1930s Surrealist movement, living until 2011.
This album (originally released by Wist Rec) is based on Carringon’s works, and the accompanying text quotes lines penned by Carringon: ‘Ice ages pass, and although the world is frozen over we suppose someday grass and flowers will grow again. In the meantime I keep a daily record on three wax tablets. After I die Anubeth’s werecubs will continue the document, till the planet is peopled with cats, werewolves, bees and goats. We all fervently hope that this will be an improvement on humanity, which deliberately renounced the Pneuma of the Goddess.’
Clara Engel, meanwhile, has built quite a body of work, and has also featured on a number of other works, including Aidan Baker’s Already Drowning in 2013. This is album is not overtly Surreal in its sound or delivery, but then again, it does forge an atmospheric depth that reaches into the subconscious and the further reaches of the listener’s psyche.
From the chiming minimal post-rock leanings of ‘Birdheaded Queen’ to the delicate, almost folky ‘Anubeth’s Song (Burn Eternally)’ (although it’s more the arboreal, ancient folk patina of latter-day Earth than anything most would recognise as ‘folk’), the album’s five compositions explore the spaces between the notes and use them to pull the listener in almost imperceptibly.
Soft piano notes and delicately-picked guitar are the primary instruments which provide the backdrop to strong imagery of animal devourment, transformation, and otherworldliness, not to mention infinite intangibles depicted in the most visually engaging of ways. Engel draws together a mesmerising, magical vocal style with compelling yet understated approach to arrangement and lyrical composition. Simple motifs and structures accrue power through repetition.
‘Microgods of the Subatomic Words’ is a splendorous work, brimming with rippling, shimmering electronic atmospherics over a solid but restrained rhythm. ‘The Ancestor’ is slow and sparse and ponderous: echo-laden guitar notes ring out into the thick air and hang, slowly resonating.
Engel’s voice conveys emotional depth, is rich and possesses an ethereal otherness, a kind of disembodied, abstract spirituality that’s haunting and deeply evocative. Exquisitely played and beautifully nuanced, it all combines to make for an album which is subtly strong.
AAA
Aural Aggravation 