Posts Tagged ‘Reverb’

Tension Span – The Future Died Yesterday

Posted: 28 September 2022 in Albums
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Neurot Recordings – 30th September 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Tension Span’s debut is quite a departure from the majority of Neurot releases and Neurosis offshoots, of which there are now many. Comprising Noah Landis (Neurosis, Christ On Parade), Geoff Evans (Asunder), and Matt Parrillo (Dystopia, Kicker), the blurb hails the arrival of an album that uses ‘the musical language of their past, the dark punk of their early bands… that infuses classic elements of punk and post-punk, and sounds both urgent and personal, speaking truth to the bleak realities of today’s socio-political collapse, and the angst and identity crisis it brings’.

And The Future Died Yesterday delivers on that, in spades. It’s spiky, jagged, angular, the guitars brittle yet driving and everything is driven by an agitated, twitchy bass that hits on every bear of the relentless four-square rhythms. It’s pitched as for being for fans of Killing Joke, New Model Army, Conflict, and Rudimentary Peni, among others, and there’s a keen sense that Tension Span are drawing on elements of classic anarchist, anti-authoritarian, anti—capitalist punk and post-punk as a means of channelling their ire. It’s the spirit of the early eighties, condensed into an adrenaline-fuelled package that makes perfect sense in 2022. What goes around comes around, but this time around it’s harder and more dysfunctional and powered by the Internet.

It’s harder because it’s difficult to differentiate fact from fiction, and because no-one has any time anymore. Everything is pressure, and everything is relentless. Everyone seems to spend every hour chasing their tails, chasing pay, or otherwise struggling to keep up with life. Even leisure time is competitive as people battle to keep abreast of the latest Netflix binges and post their viewing on social media, from simple posts on what they’re watching to full-blown critiques… and seriously, fuck the fucking lot of it and get a grip! As a society, we really don’t help ourselves.

Not so long ago, the press was all over employees regaining control of their work / life balance, embracing hybrid working that involved more time at home and less in the office, and there are endless column inches devoted to ‘the great resignation’ and ‘quiet quitting’ (aka doing the job you’re paid for instead of doing your manager’s job for your own pay) or whatever. It’s all bullshit, and it’s all manipulation from the controllers of capital, designed to keep workers in check and maximise productivity. But who benefits from productivity? Not the productive worker.

The trouble is, so many are simply too preoccupied or busy to notice, let alone complain. ‘Climbing up the ladder when they’re on a fucking treadmill,’ a line from ‘Crate Song’ (a snarling blast that combines the vintage punk of The Sex Pistols with the snarling contemporary nihilism of Uniform sums it all up perfectly. Society says that careers are imperative; the government certainly does. But why? And why does the majority blindly accept this? Because they need the money – and the enhanced benefits of a career climbing the corporate ladder – to keep up.

Tension Span articulate the fury at this false societal construct which exists primarily as a tool oof oppression. The title brings home the bleakness of view: there is no future now. We’re doomed, fucked. This was the mood that permeated the late 70s and early 80s.

The shadow of early PiL looms large over The Future Died Yesterday, and is nowhere more apparent on the bass-led bleakness of the six-minute ‘Filaments’ with its motoric Krautrock vibe, where The Cure and Killing Joke collide in an ocean of reverb. ‘Trepidation’ is built around a thudding flange-coated bass that’s pure Cure, but the vocal is more metal, and this is heavy, oppressive stuff.

Instead of breathing life, ‘Ventilator’ is a furious assault that requires no explanation in the context of the last couple of years, and the second half of the album picks up the pace to deliver a succession of sonic assaults on the shitshow that is America. But it’s not just America: this is the world right now, and it’s fucked, as ‘Human Scrapyard’ attests most succinctly: ‘Out with the old, in with the new…’

The Future Died Yesterday is a dark album – but these are dark times, making this a perfect soundtrack.

The Black Angels – Wilderness of Mirrors

Posted: 19 September 2022 in Albums
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Partisan Records – 16th September 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s simply impossible to keep up with everything all the time. It feels like a recurrent theme, and even something of a mantra: so many bands, so little time.

Over the course of eighteen years, The Black Angels have cemented their position as, as their bio puts it, ‘standard-bearers for modern psych-rock’. And that’s not hyperbole: it’s a fair assessment.

2010’s Phosphene Dream was a major let-down, particularly in the wake of two such stunning predecessors, with Passover and Directions to See a Ghost. Consequently, feeling disillusioned, both Indigo Meadow and Death Song bypassed me, but Wilderness of Mirrors landed in my inbox with the promise of a return to early form after a five-year gap – or, as they put it, ‘marks a triumphant return with their foot on the pedal. Political tumult, the pandemic and the ongoing devastation of the environment have provided ample fodder for their signature sound and fierce lyrical commentary’.

For Wilderness of Mirrors, the band worked with Brett Orrison (co-producer) and Dinosaur Jr engineer John Agnello ‘to achieve something fresh and new while retaining their heavily influential classic sound’.

Wilderness of Mirrors is epic and feels like it needs to be a double album simply because it has such weight and important in a way that’s hard to really define. It’s not sprawling and awkwardly indulgent: yes, it does contain fifteen songs, but less than half extend beyond four minutes. But it’s an album of density.

Opener ‘Without a Trace’ starts out tentative-sounding distant before the bass crashes in like a landslide and in an instant, the listener is sucked into a dense sonic whirl. It’s the gritty bass that also dominates the pulverising ‘History of the Future’ that lands somewhere between Ther Jesus and Mary Chain and Ride, with some blistering guitar that’s a wall of fuzzing, fizzing treble against a busy beat and a bass that buzzes so hard it practically cuts the top off your head. And just like that, you’re back to remembering why this band mattered in the first place. Everything is a murky swamp of reverb, a deep 60s vibe radiating through the 80s and 90s filter.

I’ve long noted how the Jesus and Mary Chain essentially played surf pop with feedback and distortion, and ‘Empires Falling’ follows this approach magnificently, and with its relentless rhythm section and squalling guitars, it bears strong and obvious parallels with A Place to Bury Strangers.

It’s best played at high volume, of course: this is guitar music to melt the brain, and if songs like ‘El Jardn’ and the acoustic ‘Here & Now’ are more accessible, melodic and overtly indie, they offer some much-needed respite, while still boasting some howling guitars. There’s a vaguely gothic hue to the sneaking guitars and dubby grooves of ‘Make it Known’ and the slower ‘The River’, and it works well in contributing to the album’s rich and varied atmosphere and contrast with the jittery tension of the title track.

Ultimately, the best thing about Wilderness of Mirrors is that is sounds like The Black Angels – quintessentially, unmistakeably, with its motorik grooves, simple, repetitive riffs and song strictures that define the chorus not by a significant shift in key or chords, but by the explosion of sound, the simple structures executed with rare panache. They’re definitely on form here.

AA

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Mayflower Madame – Premonition EP

Posted: 28 May 2018 in Singles and EPs
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1st June 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

It all starts with an air-raid siren. A historical sound with connotations of WW2 for many, but still heard in places like South Korea and Japan, it’s a sound which provokes an almost biologically-wired shudder of unease. They may only be tests, but the sound of sirens in the last 12 months reminds us that stability is but precarious. And then the snaking, surfy bass strolls in, awash with reverb… and then the guitars… It’s all pinned to a locked-down groove, and Trond Fagernes’ voice rises up from amidst it all as if from the back of a cathedral. You saw it all coming, right? They obviously did and approach by stealth, before building to a whiling cacophony by way of a climax. But for all of its noise and tension, this feels more introspective than anything they’ve done before.

Norway’s Mayflower Madame draw heavily on post-punk influences – music born out of the dark days of the early 80s, corresponding with the period when cold war tensions escalated to warrant the labelling of ‘the second cold war’, and the economic boom years widened the chasm between the haves and have-nots was rendered more conspicuous by the rise of the yuppie. And so on.

What Mayflower Madame bring to the gothy party is a potent dose of Nordic noir psych and a dash of shoegaze, all doused in massive reverb, and the four tracks on Premonition continue the trajectory of their 2016 debut album, Observed in a Dream.

The claustrophobic focus continues on the swirling, shoegazy ‘Before I Fall’; the guitars twang through a gauze of drifting synths and echoey fx that create a certain distance between the listener and the actual song, an unusual sense of both space and an absence of space. ‘Alma’s Sermon’ is centred around a backed-off yet insistent motoric beat and has greater immediacy and – it’s all relative – upbeat vibe. But then closer ‘Siders Seek’ plunges deeper into darkness: a paranoid shiver runs down the spine of the track’s tremulous guitars, and everything about the song’s construction seems to be about concentrating the tension. And yes, this is tense.

AA

Mayflower Madame – Premonition EP