German post–modern noise rock ensemble ZAHN will release their second full–length album Adria on 24th November. Adria offers a bold escape from your daily life through technicolor transmissions of post–rock, krautrock, dark jazz, noise–rock, post–punk and electronic music. Influenced by the likes of TRANS AM, THE JESUS LIZARD, METZ, THE MELVINS and TORTOISE. Adria is a compelling soundtrack to a 1980’s anti–utopian road movie!
Adria was mixed and mastered by Magnus Lindberg (RUSSIAN CIRCLES, CULT OF LUNA) at his Stockholm studio. The cover artwork, based around photographs by Lupus Lindemann(KADAVAR), was designed by Fabian Bremer (RADARE, AUA).
The album is a testament to the incredible power of this trio and its ability to effortlessly ensnare your attention for the duration of a ten minute–song of purely instrumental music. Over the course of the album’s 11 tracks ZAHN emerge as a form of PINK FLOYD of noise rock, relentlessly pushing the envelope on what’s already accomplished while remaining tasteful and tasty at every corner.
So many reissues recently have taught me a valuable lesson. I don’t know nearly as much music as I thought I did. Of course, it’s impossible know all the music, and despite feeling I’m reasonably knowledgeable, and compensating what I don’t know with enthusiasm. Time was, I was worried about knowledge gaps: they made me feel stupid, ignorant, and I’ve spent evenings with people who have reeled off bands in genres I’m interested in and not recognised the name of a single one, let alone heard them. I felt like a fraud claiming to be a music enthusiast and worse still, a music writer (I never proclaim to be a music journalist. I write about music, and do so very much from a personal perspective. Sometimes, I stab at maintaining an element of objectivity, but the appreciation of art isn’t objective. As I’ve written elsewhere, the reason we appreciate art is because of the feelings it stirs in us, the way it speaks to us, not first and foremost because of its technical proficiency.
This is a lengthy circumnavigation to the confession that Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung completely bypassed me in the day – in fact, until today, the week of the reissue of their 1995 self-titled full-length debut. I suspect that they didn’t get much coverage in the UK music press, and this was still a while before the advent of the Internet as we know it – and I was a relatively early adopter, setting up my eBay account in 1999 following the demise of Yahoo! Auctions.
As the accompanying bio outlines, ‘The band consisted of four young, ‚classically derailed’ musicians who played their own compositions exclusively their with acoustic instruments such as violin, cello, clarinet and accordion… Their work contained influences from Roma music, Eastern European folk, klezmer and jazz, but was performed with the energy, rebellious spirit and Sturm und Drang of a bona fide punk band. DAAU was part of the fertile Antwerp scene, which also produced dEUS, Zita Swoon and Kiss My Jazz, and soon signed an international record deal with Sony Classical.’
dEUS may have briefly made a mark here in the UK in indie / alternative circles, but the others, not so much, and I suspect that even with its first vinyl pressing, this re-release will likely have a bigger landing in Germany and, indeed, the rest of mainland Europe, than this pitiful island that still celebrates Britpop, and which spent 1995 dominated by turgid sludge by the likes of Oasis, whose pinnacle release (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and Blur’s Great Escape (which was anything but great); the best we got was The Bends, while Robson and fucking Jerome dominated the singles charts for half the year. As if we needed further proof that we’re a small, crappy island with an overinflated sense of self-importance that the longest hangover from the Empire ever. It’s embarrassing, as is the fact that this domestic Brit-centric bullshittery has denied us introductions to many great bands. Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung is a perfect example.
It’s perhaps not hard to grasp why this extravaganza of neoclassical extravagance and its wild woodwind and unpredictable compositional forms didn’t grab the attention of the British Music press, but they missed a work that’s hugely innovative and belongs to no one genre. It’s wild and it’s challenging , but these are positives.
Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung is droning strings, it’s by turns melancholy and slow, and remarkably lively. It’s an untamed beast almost with a life and energy all of its own. But the compositions aren’t in sequence!
‘V Drieslagstelsel’ is the first track, the first of five ‘Drieslagstelsel’ pieces, and it’s followed by the frenzied yet droning folksiness of ‘II Drieslagstelsel’: it’s pretty, but it’s strange. Or, it’s pretty strange. I’m on the fence, while it sounds like they’re stripping the fence with some frenzied violin work. ‘III Drieslagstelsel’ scuttles in with some cheeky chamber stylings before popping in all directions, and it’s kinda cheeky – and perhaps tongue-in-cheeky – jaunty, incredibly busy, and extremely varied. It isn’t the kind of explosive, head-spinning jazz I sometimes find myself wrestling with here, but it covers a lot of terrain in just five and a half minutes, with stage musical qualities pushing to the fore before dipping back down to something altogether less ‘production’ orientated. The last of the ‘Drieslagstelsel’ sequence is ‘I Drieslagstelsel’, and following the frenzied strings and dramatic orchestral sculptures of ‘VI Drieslagstelsel,’ it’s a compact piece of neoclassical music which fulfils the oft-underrated and oft-overlooked purpose of entertaining. It’s a fun and often frivolous piece, in parts a wild hoedown with wind instruments, with an eye-popping energy which delves in to drones and darker territory at times.
What happened to IV? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Rounding the album off is the eleven-minute ‘Doorloop’, which appears to be a traditional track, and its slow, drawn-out notes are funereal at first, before thing go g=crazy and there are even vocal.
Over the course of these six pieces, Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung brings massive range. Back in 95, I probably wouldn’t have appreciated it, and nor would anyone else I knew. But here we are, looking at an accomplished album with much texture and range.
And now, I appreciate it. Perhaps I wasn’t ready, perhaps it was out of step with the times for all but a few – and even fewer here in Britain – but Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung is a remarkable album, and one which is timeless.
I’m finding myself on something of a Neurot trip this week, following my fervent frothing over the mighty new album by Great Falls. As if to prove that the label has been putting out outstanding records for a very long time (and with unstinting singularity, presenting a broad stylistic range, too: this is anything but heavy), twenty years on from its original release, Grails’ debut is getting a reissue. While the nice coloured vinyl pressings (in ‘Coke bottle clear’ and ‘beer’ hues) aren’t necessarily for everyone, the release does afford a timely opportunity to reflect on the debut release of a band who have gone on to forge a significant and varied career, with their latest album – number eight – being released next month.
Steve Von Till’s comments about hearing the demo for the album, on which the offer of’ the release was made, reminds us of the musical landscape of the time in 2002: ‘Most instrumental music at the time was trying to emulate Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Mogwai, but this was different. This seemed to have elements from more diverse sources that I loved such as Dirty Three, Comus, Richard Thompson, and Neil Young, not to mention, who in hell would dare to cover Sun City Girls?’
There was a lot of instrumental post rock around, and while there was a wealth of great bands around, locally as well as nationally and internationally, it’s fair to say that a large proportion of it was much of a muchness, with myriad explorations of chiming guitars and slow-building crescendos.
The prominence of acoustic guitars, softly picked and strummed, and rather unconventional use of violin creates an unusual dynamic on these compositions, which tend to be sparse in arrangement and with considerable space between both the instruments and the individual notes, and the crescendos are few and far between – the first doesn’t arrive until over halfway through the third track, the slow, meandering ‘The Deed’, when the swell of guitar pushes upward through yawning strings and finally the full drum kit crashes in. But the impact is less from whacking on the gain on the instruments, but the musicians utilising the dynamics of playing, and the simple equation that playing harder is louder. Against the prevailing tide of pedal boards as big as drum risers packed with effects, this stands out as being not only very different, but bold, the emphasis on the tones and timbres of the instruments in unadulterated form, the sounds the result of technique.
The soft piano of ‘In the Beginning’, when paired with picked guitar has an almost pastoral feel; the heavy smack of a drum feels incongruous before a soft yet almost clumsy waltz emerges briefly, and structurally, the pieces seem to belong more to jazz than anything else, although ‘Space Prophet Dogon’ (the Sun City Girls cover) draws together elements of Celtic-influenced folk and psychedelia, and goes for a long toe-tapping groove over a crescendo by way of an extended climax. It takes a certain courage to fly in the face of fashion in such an obtuse fashion, as well as to play in such an intimate way that you can hear the sweep of a finger across a fret, where natural reverberations become as integral to the sound as the notes themselves. This is nowhere more apparent than on the hyperpsarce intro of ‘Broken Ballad’, a sedate almost country-tinged tune and one of the album’s more conventionally-shaped pieces. The slowly-unfurling ‘White Flag’ shares a certain common ground with later releases by Earth: slow, spacious, revolving around a simple, picked guitar motif, but it does swing into an exhilarating full band finale that’s different again.
Closer ‘Canyon Hymn,’ presumably a reference to Laurel Canyon, the name of the and when they recorded the demos which would become The Burden of Hope, is by no means an anthem or a theme, but encapsulates all aspects of the album’s range within a soothing five minutes. If the title, The Burden of Hope, implies a certain weight of responsibility, the music it contains sees that hope take wings. Twenty years on, The Burden of Hope sounds uplifting, and still fresh.
Scandinavian post-rock giants SPURV have announced the release of new track ‘Som skyer’ via Germany’s Pelagic Records. The penultimate single from Brefjære, the band’s fourth full-length release due September 22nd; ‘Som skyer’ sees the band layer orchestral grandeur over a shimmering, glacial guitar refrain as thunderous drums push the five and half minute piece to ever greater heights.
Having recently moved to Tromsø, a remote northern province far above the Arctic Circle, principal songwriter Gustav Jørgen Pedersen took inspiration from the forces of nature he found himself surrounded by. Despite the overwhelming presence of the mountains and the unrelenting Arctic winds, Pedersen was struck by the resilience and sheer determination of life, from the birch trees outside his window to a single butterfly battling the breeze.
This delicate balance is perfectly captured in the sheer euphoria of ‘Som skyer’ and its accompanying video. SPURV take us soaring through the sky as the sun peers over the jagged Norwegian fjørds; finding the joy of life in even the most desolate places.
Brefjære sees the band take their latent exploration of neo-classical composition even further. Throughout ‘Som skyer’, guitarist Herman Otterlei’s celestial, spiralling motif is complemented by glockenspiels, a brass section and a 14-voice choir; adding further depth to the incredible dynamic sensitivity that SPURV have carved out over their decade at the forefront of international post-rock.
Gustav Jørden Petersen on ‘Som Skyer’:
“’Som skyer’ is Spurv at its perhaps most ethereal. The song is about the wind that flies over the earth, rustles in the treetops, and plunges down over the mountain. It represents time and fleeting memories, words and ideas that are shared across generations. The song contains old melodies combined with new arrangements, and was finally realized as part of Brefjære after many years.”
I’m late to this one, but make no apologies for this. While the majority of my peers bemoan the fact that there’s been no good music released since, oh, they turned thirty-five or thereabouts, as I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions, I’m finding the opposite is true. I am absolutely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of new music being released, and it’s music of quality. None of it will get within a million miles of the charts, most of it won’t achieve a single radio play, and they’ll be lucky to make 3p off Spotify (but then, that goes for pretty much any act).
But the pitch for Voyage is exciting: ‘The release is a 39-minute inventive and powerful musical experience, journeying through the realms of prog, metal and post-rock, masterfully weaving from pounding and fierce polymetric metal through sprawling and irreverent groove-laden riffs to beautifully captivating melodies.’
Following three purely instrumental EPs, Voyage is the band’s first release to feature vocals, and as the bio details, these are covered ‘with guitarist Markus Lillehaug Johnsen handling all clean vocalizations while guitarist Martin Rygge (who also handles guitars in grindcore group Beaten To Death) providing the fiercer screams’. They also explain that ‘It’s also the first release to be written with the bass lines in mind. Previous effort “Sylvain” was pivotal to this change, when producer Danne Bergstrand and Meshuggah guitar extraordinaire Fredrik Thordendal thought the songs lacked some bass frequencies and Thordendal steeped in to play bass on the EP.’
It strikes me as funny to think that basslines may be overlooked in a compositional context, but there you go: every band is different and some simply focus on the foreground, like bad painters or writers who forget to fill in any background detail to focus on the actions of the characters. The bass is what holds everything together, and not just in a dance context where people rave about the bass: the bass is the backbone. And so it is on Voyage, a jolting, jarring mess of twisting noise that straddles post-rock and post-metal with a hefty dose of jazz lobbed into a mix that’s airy and expansive and of clear appeal to both those who appreciate shoegaze and post-metal.
The lead guitar parts are soaring and light, and spin contrails thousands of miles above the crunching bass and pulverising drums. Echo-heavy vocal samples wash in and out in a way that calls to mind Maybeshewill, but there’s also a dreamy psychedelic hue evident from the start, as on the dreamy but heavy ‘Blue Desert’. There’s no shortage of chunky riffage, with thickly distorted guitars driven by rolling drums, but there’s lightness and texture as the interplay between lead and rhythm creates a compelling dynamic, and the same is true of the contrasting vocals. There are some unusual juxtapositions, too, with clean mellow vocal passages floating over some of the grittiest, grainiest, heavyweight sonic tempests going. There are details to be found among the din; the way the sounds, the frequencies, the notes resonate and bounce off one another is integral to the soul of the way the band play together.
There are also moments where they conjure vast, sweeping sonic vistas, as on ‘Vertigo’, and the joy of Voyage is in hearing musicians displaying remarkable technical skill without the music being excessively technical (for me, there’s a point where technical simply isn’t fun to listen to, where technique and extravagant complexity take primacy over the compositional form. Because you can play difficult stuff fast is all well and good, but it’s pretty useless if you can’t write tunes). Voyage has tunes, and it has range, too – but the way the songs are structured shows that they’re mindful not to pack too much range into each song, and have a sense of how much is too much as they navigate the transitions between individual passages. The climactic closer, ‘Grant the Sun’ is a worthy finisher, a monumental sustained crescendo of incendiary power.
As such, Voyage is appropriately named, as it represents a monumentally transitional spell for the band to the extent that they’ve evolved – rapidly – to become an almost entirely different entity. There’s a sense that their journey will continue, but for now, it feels like they have found territory well worthy of further exploration.
After a lengthy and sustained spell of creativity, dark Devonshire band Abrasive Trees are taking stock, reflecting and consolidating on their achievements to date, something which also affords newcomers an opportunity to catch up, March saw the release of Epocha, a compilation album which gathered their singles and EPs from 2019-2021, and now, housed in a sleeve which continues the thread of the design of its predecessor, they offer up a live album, which captures the band performing at hatch Barn, a venue close to their base in Totnes.
Live albums are notoriously tricky. So many live acts have an energy live that simply doesn’t translate when recorded. Then, at the opposite end of the spectrum, I recall meeting a metalhead in my first few weeks of university who was gushing in his enthusiasm for Iron Maiden “T’ Maiden” as he referred to them as being an amazing live as because “it sounds just like ont’ album”. This stuck with me, because I wasn’t accustomed to such thick Northern accents back then, and also because the idea of a live show so slick it sounded like the CD was a cause for consternation. Some people may think it’s a good thing, of course, but for me – even at the age of nineteen – it seemed to be missing the point of playing live. Especially when it’s a big band, who you’re likely to be watching on screens instead of looking at the stage. Might as well be watching a video at home for that.
Then there’s the recording itself: too much audience and it sounds like a shitty bootleg that’s as much that gobby tosser and his mate yammering away over the band; too hermetic and soundesky and it sounds dead and like there was no-one there, and all the vitality of the live experience is lost. This six-track release, once again mastered by Mark Beazely of Rothko, is magnificently realised: the sound is superbly crisp and clear – it’s obviously taken from the sound desk – but there’s a hum and a sense of space and audience, and it isn’t so clinical as to sound like another studio recording.
There’s irony in the title here: the live experience exists only in the moment, but here we are with a documents which gives us that second moment of existence. But of course, this is not the thing in itself, but a recreation, which captures only a part of it. Dimensions are missing: the sights, the ambience, and so on. This gives us not the full give experience, but an aural document of the band’s performance alone. They know this. We know this.
Four of the six tracks here are featured on Epocha in their studio forms, but the two mid-set songs, ‘Kali Sends Sunflowers’ and ‘Moulding Heaven With Earth’ are from the post-Epocha double-A-side single, and ‘Moulding Heaven With Earth’ is extended here from its near-six-minute form to almost eight her, making for a colossal centrepiece to the half-hour long set. Over its duration, the band sound solid, and assured, and they bring the detail of the studio recordings to their live show, with added dynamics and energy – the bass and drums in particular when they hit peak crescendo cut through in the way that only ever really happens live, and so it’s a credit that this release captures that energy.
The set opens with ‘Before’ from the Now You Are Not Here EP, and while abridged from its original six-and-a-half-minute sprawl to just three and a half, it conjures a magnificently atmospheric space, with chiming guitars, drifting ambient synth drones, hand-drums, and brooding sax, not to mention Easter-inspired vocalisations to build tension, and it segues into the ornate and delicate ‘Now You Are Not Here’ from the same EP, introducing vocals to the set, and finding the band at their most dramatic, evoking the quintessential goth sound from circa 1985-86. Mattthew Rochford’s voice quavers and you really feel as if you’re with him, teetering at the of the world… before the chorus-soaked maelstrom descends.
The soft swell of clean, reverby guitar on ‘Kali Sends Flowers’ is so very reminiscent of Wayne Hussey it sends an unexpected pang of nostalgia, echoing as it does both ‘Severina’ and the intro to ‘Deliverance’. But instead of Wayne’s overt drawing on Christianity in his lyrics, Abrasive Trees delve into other belief systems, and crash into some bold crescendos in the process.
The samples on ‘Moulding Heaven With Earth’ are studio-clear, without sounding at odds with the mix of the music itself, while the near note-perfect ‘Replenishing Water’ breathes deeper as the guitars burst through the air and it explodes into a monumental extended climax that’s absolutely killer and one hundred percent exhilarating. There is so much energy and life here. There is not much vocal, and for some reason this often takes me by surprise.
There isn’t much chat either, but then, on the evidence of this recording, Abrasive Trees’ set relies on building and maintaining tension rather than rapport.
‘Bound for an Infinite Sea’ begins with the crescendo and drives hard to an energetic, bass-driven finale, Rochford’s voice brimming with emotion – and delving into gloom before soaring into gripping tension – and it’s all of this and more that makes Nothing Exists for a Second Moment so great. It’s almost as if you were there, and very much wish you were, but Nothing Exists for a Second Moment achieves the rare feat of making you feel something almost like having been there, slipping a subliminal buzz in the process… It’s as close to a second moment as possible.
Racking up a second release in its first month of existence, new Swedish label skoghall rekordings – the gentler sibling of Dret Skivor – offers up a reissue of the second album by Farming Incident, originally released in 2008 on Wrath Records, home of The Scaramanga Six and Eureka Machines.
The tags which accompany this release include ‘experimental’, ‘hip hop’, ‘ambient’, ‘anarcho-folk’, ‘folktronica’, ‘politics’, ‘post-punk’, ‘post-rock’, and ‘space rock’, and if that seems an incredibly eclectic cocktail, it’s a fair summary of a band who never sat comfortably in any category, at a time when crossovers and hyper-hybridity were still pretty uncommon and even less accepted: this was a time in the wake of the 90s emergence of rap-rock crossovers and around the time when instrumental post-rock’s ubiquity was waning after what felt like an eternity but was in fact a span of maybe four years at most.
For this, their final album, Farming Incident had expanded its pseudonymous membership to four, with Agent Jones (guitar, bass), Agent Mays (drums) and Agent Procktaur (vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards) being joined by Agent Pushkin (backing vocals, guitar, bass) ‘to allow more flexibility in instrument swapping’. And that’s certainly a lot of guitar and bass-playing contributions across their personnel.
‘Elk vs Volvo’ is a choppy slice of post-punk that crunches Gang of Four and The Fall together with sinewy guitars propelled by energetic drumming. It’s also got that authentic lo-fi eight-track early eighties sound, and really only being familiar with Dave Procter’s work from the last ten years or so, it’s something of a revelation to hear him doing vocals – and actually singing(ish) – in a more conventional indie / rock context. The verses on the goth-tinged ‘Sadism vs Fadism’ (although it’s more early Pulp with a dash of PiL and Rudimentary Peni than The Sisters of Mercy or The Danse Society) finds him in more recognisable voice, with a Sprechgesang delivery with flattened northern vowels, before coming on more like David Gedge in the choruses.
There’s indie-surf and straight-up indie in the mix, and it’s all going on really. Casting my mind back to 2008, and some of it’s hazy because time, and beer, and so may gigs and albums, but this doesn’t sound like an album from around that time. The nagging bass and guitar of ‘Stiletto’, which reminds me of Murder the Disturbed but with the synths from B-Move or even Ultravox, giving it very much a feel of c79-81, before it locks into a motorik groove.
‘The Terrorist You Seek Is in the Mirror’ finds Procter in the kind of lyrical territory he’s made his home since, slogging out slogans with passion, but with a fairly standard four-square punked-up pub-rock instrumentation, it’s perhaps the alum’s least interesting track, particularly as it’s overshadowed by the atmospheric stroll of ‘G.O.T.H.’ which explodes in a colossal crescendo three quarters of the way in, flange and chorus heavy guitars dominating.
They chuck in a surprise grunge tune in the shape of ‘Phobos’, but it’s also got that early 90s noise rock slant that owes as much to the more obscure acts. And then there’s the final track, ‘Owls’. It’s a goth—tinged alt-rock screamer, one of those longer songs that simply could never be long enough even if it was half an hour long, in the same way that The Honolulu Mountain Daffodils’ ‘Tequila Dementia’ is simply too short. ‘Night vision, owls are gonna get you!’ Dave sings, channelling paranoia and panic while prefacing the avian themes that would resurface latter in his career on songs like The Wharf Street Galaxy Band’s ‘No Puffins For You, Lad’.
A lot has happened in the last fifteen years. We’ve had thirteen years under a Conservative government for a start, and the whole world seems to have taken a nosedive socially, politically, economically, and it seems impossible to think now that Trump and Brexit and Johnson and Covid were only the tip of the iceberg. But while we’re seemingly more divided than ever as people wage war over pronouns and images of Mickey Mouse in hostels for asylum-seeking children, we do seem to have become more accommodating of music that is so eclectic as to seem rootless. Nine Degrees of Torture probably feels more at home in 2023 than it did back in 2018, but even now, it doesn’t really sound like anything else. Bits of stuff, yes, like a magpie raid on bits and bobs from all over, but it’s not grunge or post-punk or anything really, but somehow it hangs together nicely.
In this sense, Bleaklow is a rather different proposition, and in some respects, the instrumentation is a significant factor in the shape of the sound, with Claire contributing ‘Voice, Nord Electro, Yamaha PSS-170, field recordings, Moog Taurus’, and Richard contributing ‘Electric gtr, drones, field recordings, Yahama PSS-170, Moog Taurus’. But by the same token, there is something about anything Richard Knox does which has something of a signature – not a signature sound as such, more of a signature feel, which comes from the kind of wispy ambience and dense atmospherics.
The overall effect of Bleaklow’s debut, Glume, is mellow, amorphous washes of cloud-like sounds drifting softly on invisible air currents, but there are moments where the textures are coarser, more abrasive, and these provide vital contrast. ‘Husk’ scrapes in with a wash of distorted guitar before tapering tones supple piano and vocals, layered to a choral effect surge and swell.
Claire’s voice by turns evokes Kate Bush and Cranes, haunting, ethereal, and as much as this sits in the post-rock bracket from which Richard and Gizeh emerged back in the early 00s (the label put out not only the The Heritage, the debut mini album by Her Name is Calla, but Knox also put out a super-limited CD of ‘Condor and River’ in a crazy corrugated card sleeve, as well as Arrivals, the debut album by worriedaboutsatan, wrapped in a chunk of blown vinyl wallpaper, which looks and feels amazing but is a real bugger to store… but I digress) it also very much harks back to 90s shoegaze, with a heavy debt to Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine, but then again, it’s impossible to listen to this without recourse to The Cocteau Twins. If this sounds like a catalogue of touchstones, it’s testament to how deftly they draw on myriad elements and whip them into a sonic souffle with the texture of candyfloss – not that this is particularly sweet, but it is lighter than a feather, lighter than air. And nowadays, the packaging is a little less DIY, but still very much focused on sustainability: the packaging for Glume is a recycled cocoa-card sleeve, whereby the ‘recycled card is made from 40% Post Consumer Waste and 15% natural fibres (by-products derived from the food processing industry which would otherwise go to landfill.) Turning a waste product into a natural, GMO free, raw material derived from nuts, fruits etc, resulting in distinctive colour shades’. It’s not just commendable, environmentally: it taps into the physicality of a releasing music and rendering the physical release a work of art rather than a commodity of plastic in plastic.
Everything on Glume happens at a sedate pace, and everything melts slowly together. The chances are that at some point, you’ve sat, stood, or even laid on the grass and simply looked at the sky and watched the clouds slowly shifting shape, rabbits and elephants becoming elongated and increasingly deformed, until they’re no longer rabbits or elephants, but abstract shapes stretching and fading to formlessness. The songs on Glume are by absolutely no means formless, but the sounds are like mist and the structures are supple. It’s a magnificently realised work: textured, detailed, nuanced.
It may not be bleak, but it’s dark, and it’s got detail. Bask in it.
Size matters. Or at least, scale does, if you’re measuring epic. You can’t do epic by halves, and that’s a fact. And when an album weighs in with just five tracks but has a running time of almost forty minutes, you know you’re in proper epic territory (and that it certainly isn’t an EP masquerading as an album). And this is one hell of an album, and it goes beyond epic.
As the bio explains, TAKH emerged from ‘The fruitful collaboration between The Black Heart Rebellion and Echo Beatty’s Annelies Van Dinter on the People album was the beginning of a new musical story. After the end of TBHR Alexander, Annelies, Emeriek and Pieter went deeper in their quest to write music reflecting the true emotions of the musicians. After about one year of free improvisation, TAKH created something truly unique. The idea was very simple: to release the result of the collaboration without pre-orders and announcements…’
There is absolutely nothing out there on-line which provides a precursory listen to this album, and that in itself is beyond rare in an age when bands – and labels – hype releases to the nth degree. More common is that you’ll have heard every track weeks before the release, and this makes TAKH’s stealth approach all the more welcome. It takes us back to the days of before the Internet, when you’d read about a band in Melody Maker or hear about them from a mate or on the sixth form stereo – the means by which I introduced my friends to / tortured my friends with Swans and Godflesh during breaktime.
Swans are one of the bands listed as influencing TAKH, and it shows in the compositions, and to some extent, the musical arrangements, not least of all the way the final track echoes latter-day Swans in their hypnotic, immersive swells of sound.
‘Salomonne’ enters in a swathe of ancient Eastern mysticism, long, trilling vocal drones and esoteric spiritualism which sets the atmosphere before the arrival of the drums, bass, and rasping vocals. In combination, the tension builds as does the sense of vastness, and you feel an endless desert and sky spreading before you, extending infinitely to the vanishing point at which the two meet and fade in a haze. It slowly trudges, shimmering, simmering, and burning, to its weighty climax. It’s metal, but not in a particularly recognisable form.
The percussion dominates the droney ‘Unabashed and knowing’: if The Cure’s Pornography comes to mind, it’s a fair comparison, but this actually feels more like The Glitter Band paired with Joujouka and the triptastic done of a digeridoo. Around five minutes in, seemingly from nowhere, rising like a desert storm, the dual vocals rise up climactically to deliver something resembling an impassioned chorus, even bearing a semblance of a hook, before being drowned in a rising wave of sound: part shoegaze, part eddying panic and a sense of unfamiliarity, and all propelled by a relentless percussion., before ultimately fading to a heavy elongated drone.
The album’s shortest song is also perhaps its most conventional: a crawling bass and plodding beat pin ‘Drôme’ together, and the vocal passages are intersected with a chiming nagging guitar motif before the tension breaks – or more cracks a little – around four and a half minutes in. Perhaps it’s just me and I’m a little cracked, but the break into the light makes you want to cast your eyes to the skins and open our arms, not necessarily expecting a response but to simply absorb.
‘Azure Blue’ has a warped sea-shanty feel to it, amidst the crushing post-rock crescendos which surge and splash. Spread out over almost seven-and-a-half minutes, it’s a beast, albeit one that’s subdued and contemplative.
The album concludes in reflective style, with the ten-minute ‘Hair of a Horsetail’. Captivating vocals, at once ethereal and earthy, quaver over a slowly wavering drone. It’s a duet of sort, and one which delves into deep and ancient spirituality. The bass rolls in around the midpoint, from which the song builds, making for a climactic closure to an album that’s powerful, while often understated. It has so many levels, so many layers, so many depths; at once uplifting and exhausting.
Pow! Sometimes an album will sit in your ‘to play’ pile – physical or virtual – and after a time you wonder if it’s perhaps too late, you’ve missed the moment. But time-panic is just another construct, and it’s never too late. The whole time-frame issue when it comes to music releases, books, anything, is just a question of commercialism. If an album’s not hit critical mass and peak streams on the week of release, it’s deemed a failure, sunk. PR campaigns are deemed failures and bands get ditched by labels, and it’s all symptomatic of our culture of instant gratification. So many of the most culturally significant bands didn’t find their stride until three or four albums in and likely wouldn’t have had the opportunity in the modern climate, which is all about the short term. Thankfully, outside of the mainstream, things are a little less pressured, and there’s an understanding, an acceptance, that things often have a slow diffusion, perhaps not least of all because there’s less scope for pre-release airplay and the like which lead to the release-week bang.
Songs of Abundance, Psalms of Grief came out in April, but then, in the scheme of things, it’s still very much a new release – and it’s a quite remarkable one, at that. It’s atmospheric and intense, combining elements of post-rock and post-metal with operatic vocals and it’s one of those albums that grips from the very start: opener ‘Until’ arrives in a flurry of energy and it’s bold and immense and so, so powerful. There are some big guitars and strong drumming and everything comes together with a density and power. But if the first impressions suggest another act in the vein of Chelsea Wolfe, the album as a whole showcases a quite different style.
As vocalist Amaya López-Carromero explains: “The magic of musical composition/songwriting for me lies in its capacity to create worlds outside of reality where both performers and listeners can explore and process things. A sort of microholiday from everyday life or an exciting meditative state, so I hope that we can share this experience with anyone who listens to the album.”
Songs of Abundance, Psalms of Grief very much conveys a sense of separation and detachment from the humdrum, and possesses an elemental quality that has the capacity to lift the listener elsewhere, in a world of its own. It’s also unexpectedly varied, and the chunky, rattling bass on ‘Dream Hive’ is only one factor – albeit a dominant one – in a layered, textured work. Galleries’ is a true epic: hypnotic, richly textured, it has simultaneously a soaring airiness and the earthy heft of Neurosis, and it’s a potent combination.
‘To the Fields’ reaches a blistering crescendo, during which Amaya’s vocals reach a new height of impact, sending shivers down the spine. Then, ‘To the Gallows’ rushes in on a wave of thunderous percussion before Amaya powers in with some high-impact vocals which border on the witchy. She’s an incredible vocalist, powerful and versatile, and her singing is imbued with a kind of pure spirituality.
‘Bloom’ is something of a contrast, manifesting as clean, wistful indie pop – at least to begin with, before it goes big and brooding, while ‘Ghost Limb’ is a glorious slow-burner which paves the way for ‘Obey’, which closes off the album in strong style, another emotionally-intense song with a gradual build and strong dynamics.
Songs of Abundance, Psalms of Grief is one of those albums that is an instant grab, but continues to yield more with each subsequent listen. And for its variety, there isn’t a song which sounds out of place, or weaker than its counterparts. It’s not solid, it’s stunning, from beginning to end.
Aural Aggravation 