Posts Tagged ‘Review’

Eville – Get With Me

Posted: 12 May 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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9th May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometimes, when a band has forged its sound with the assistance of quality producers, there’s a niggle of concern when they decide to go it alone. Why are they doing this? Why now? Have they become overconfident in their abilities?

Eva Sheldrake explains the decision: “We’ve worked with incredible producers, and we’ve taken so much from every experience, but with Get With Me, it all came together so naturally that we knew Jude had to produce it. We caught lightning in a bottle—the energy is real, it’s raw, and it’s straight from the heart. The song channels something a lot of women go through but don’t always get the space to talk about. Instead of letting it fester, we flipped it on its head and made it ours. It’s fierce, it’s defiant, and it’s exactly what Eville stands for.”

The fact that it was simply something that happened, that felt right, matters, and that’s significant. More significant, though, is the fact that there was simply no cause for concern, as they’ve absolutely mastered the sound they’re after here. The track dives in with the fattest, filthiest bass grind, and then the guitar is a dense wall of distortion, and then Eva’s vocals are sassy but keenly melodic, and there are layers of harmony in the mix and once again, they’ve mined solid gold. Balancing crunching juggernaut grungy / nu-metal riffery – something about both the sound and structure of the musical elements are reminiscent of Filter here – with a pop sensibility which comes through in the vocals, ‘Get With Me’ has got the lot.

And if the title suggests some kind of schmaltzy romantic allure, think again. This is Eville, and they are not to be fucked with. The mid-section brings all the grunt and threatening fists like a menacing bodyguard looming forward, before the full-throttle finish. The message of ‘Get With Me’ is really ‘get real’ – and it’s driven home hard , with brutal force. Yep, Eville have done it again….

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Harold Nono – Faro

Posted: 30 April 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Bearsuit Records – 30th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been a couple years since we last heard new material from Harold Nono, enigmatic purveyor of weirdy electronica, and platformed by the go-to label for weirdy folky worldy electronica, Bearsuit Records. And Faro is suitably strange, and, well, Bearsuity.

It doesn’t start out so: ‘Raukar’ is primarily sedate, piano-led, sedate, strolling, and overall, feels quite calming, despite jangles and scrapes of dissonance whispering away in the background. As the ambience trickles its way into balmy abstraction, we feel a sense of discomfort, and while the expansive ‘Sketch for Faro’ is soothing, expansive, cinematic, and feels like it could easily be an excerpt from Jurassic Park or another sweeping passage from a big-budget family-friendly movie, there are undercurrents which are subtle but nevertheless discernible which add an element of ‘otherness’ to it, particularly the abstract, almost choral vocal which rises near the end.

An EP consisting of only four tracks, Faro is a brief document, but Nono brings together many elements within this succinct work. Besides, it’s not all about length, right? Faro is sonically rich, imaginative, and ambitious in scope and scale. It feels expansive, transporting the listener over huge landscapes of trees and hills and field and planes, and you kinda feel carried away on it all in a largely pleasant way, despite the niggles of tension which creep in. And during ‘The Hour of The Wolf’ everything begins to explode and expand like some kind of galactic simulation, and suddenly, from nowhere, there are beats are blasts of distortion and everything somehow crumbles, and as silence falls, you find yourself standing, dazed, amidst rubble and ruins wondering what just happened.

While many of the elements common to Nono’s work are present here, Faro does seem like something of a development, expending in the direction of 2023’s ‘Sketch for Strings’ and moving further from the more disjointed, collagey compositional forms of earlier works. It’s less overtly jarring, less conspicuously weird, but don’t for a second think that Nono has gone normal on us – because Faro is subtle in the way it unsettles, and the last couple of minutes completely rupture the atmosphere forged gently and carefully over the rest of the EP. And this is why it’s both classic Nono and quintessential Bearsuit – because whatever your expectations, it is certain to confound them.

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Bug Facer – Man Killed by Train

Posted: 2 April 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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28th March 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

In the early days of the Internet, although graphics were basic and the majority of sites were predominantly text, weird shit proliferated in a different way from the way it does now. Sites like rotten.com, active from 1996 to 2012, homed the kind of gruesome, graphic, morbid stuff that had the potential to traumatise a person for life, although there were very few videos online in the late 90s. However, one video which achieved notoriety was the ‘Traingirl’ footage, in which a woman is seen stepping onto a train track directly in front of a speeding train. And yes, on seeing the title of this new release from Hull noisemongers Bug Facer, that was almost immediately where my mind went.

The EP’s title perfectly encapsulates the unstoppable sonic squall of the music it contains: three wild, jolting, jarring sonic blasts that hit hard.

The band say of the release: “On this EP, we tried to emulate the energy we have at our live shows – like a big wall of noise and chaos. By recording everything in one room, all playing together at the same time, you can capture that energy of a live show & the chemistry unlike when you’re getting into overdubs. Compared to our 1st EP Triple Death, we’ve changed a lot as a band & finally we feel people can experience the energy of our live shows on record”.

Having witnessed one of their live performances late last year, I can vouch for this. The production is unpolished, bringing the immediacy of the live show, and the volume, too. Man Killed by Train FEELS loud.

They’ve certainly had an eventful journey to arrive at this point: starting out in 2022 as a duo, they subsequently expanded to a quartet, yielding the Triple Death EP and Lord of the Rings-inspired single cut ‘Fiery Demon Attacks Old Man on Bridge’ – and now they’re down to a three-piece following the departure of co-founder James Cooper. But this has seemingly resulted in a newfound focus, and as is often the case with the power trio format, the individual members play harder and louder to compensate the absence of that second guitar or whatever it may be.

‘Coke Cola Shop’ tears out of the speakers to deliver two minutes of discordant sonic chaos with crunchy bass, screaming guitar, and frenetic percussion. There’s some shouting going on in the middle of all of it, too.

‘Spinosaurus’ may be mellower at first, hinting at a swirling psychedelic space-rock groove, but it never really settles, instead lurching restlessly here and there and ultimately coming on more like Fugazi than Hawkwind. And then they really let fly for the finale: ‘Sweat Pea’ is simply explosive, with tom-heavy rolling drums driving a serrated buzz of guitar. The bass is so immense, so dense, it makes your stomach lurch. It’s a full-on pileup where punk, noise rock, sludge, and dirty metal collide, and petrol tanks explode and there’s broken glass and broken bodies and carnage all over. It’s raw, savage, completely without compromise – or a chorus in sight – and without question their strongest statement to date.

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Protokoll 19 – When Will It End

Posted: 28 March 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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28th March 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Ahead of a new album release, Protokoll 19 have given us the single ‘When Will It End’. It’s a question I ask myself almost daily. Because fucking hell. Life. The world. Both seem to be an endless hell. You wake up, lug yourself to work, trudge home, you’re wiped, and it’s as much as you can do to eat food, maybe do some chores and get ready for bed again. You scan the news and it’s Armageddon, especially this last couple of months: the world is at war and the fascist agenda of the US ‘government’ sends tsunami-force reverberations around the globe daily. And it just goes on and on and on, forever the same. Here in the UK, our government has decided that mental health issues which [prevent people from working are being ‘overdiagnosed’. We’re all being spectacularly gaslit here. This isn’t a question of overdiagnosis: it’s a matter of how terrible, terrible times – we’re still not really over the effects of the pandemic, and everything since then has felt like the realisation of every dystopian fiction and the worst aspects of history recurring – affect people and send them into states of mental distress. When will it end?

This single, they tell us, ‘sets the tone of what can be expected from the album as a whole. When we find ourselves in a dark place, it often feels like there is no way out. The longer it goes on the more difficult it becomes to engage in anything. We isolate ourselves and see these thoughts as a burden. We’re haunted by these thoughts because they’re always lurking in the shadows.’

With this single, Protokoll 19 deliver a full-throttle stomping technoindustrial blast of skin-prickling tension. The vocals are mangled and gnarly and are more toward the black metal end of the spectrum, a demonic rasp that splutters gasoline and broken glass over the clean surface of hi-NRG synths and a pumping beat. Intense is the word. There is no snoozing through this.

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Brain Pills – Faded

Posted: 25 February 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

It might be a stretch to describe Brain Pills as a supergroup, but the various members of this trio all have form, with guitarist Mike Vest being a one-man guitar-driven noise industry and with 11 Paranoias and Bong being among his extensive catalogue of projects – and he’s joined by percussionist Nick Raybould  and Poundland vocalist Adam Stone. It should be no surprise, then, that this is dark, dense, and gnarly.

‘Faded’ offers four and a half minutes of thick, sludgy, trudgery that feels like an eternity – in a good way. It’s reminiscent of early Melvins – think the slow grinding trawls of Gluey Porch Treatments, rarely over three minutes in length but churning the guts low and slow and feeling twice that.

The sound is immense, a mass of distortion, the kind of overloading, all-out speaker-damaging wall of noise that hits you physically.

The heavy effects on the vocals – magnificently low in the mix – adds a brain-bending psychedelic twist to the megalithic sonic landslide, making for punishing, gnarly perfection.

The band are currently looking for a label to release the album which ‘Faded’ is taken from.

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The Illness / Nature Kids – The Crescent Community Centre, York, 16 February 2025

Posted: 17 February 2025 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

On this night twenty-four years ago, I was at Leeds University Refectory, watching The Sisters of Mercy play their tenth anniversary gig. Having previously only seen them once, in November 1990, at Wembley Arena, to be in the front row in a venue so much more intimate was absolutely mind-blowing. This reminiscence has little to no correspondence to tonight’s event, beyond the date, although I recall that it was a bitingly cold night, the kind of seasonal grimness that means it’s a real effort to venture out.

Thankfully, despite it not only being absolutely biting, but being a Sunday, a decent crowd has ventured out for this, the second part of the album launch event for The Illness’ debut album (the first part having been in Liverpool the night before, with the band being split between Liverpool and York). 6:30 doors and the prospect of not only two quality bands and an early finish are likely all contributing factors in terms of incentive.

So what do we know about The Illness? Not a lot. It’s taken them a decade knocking about to get to this point. The notes which accompany the Bandcamp of their eponymous EP, released in 2020 and featuring Steve West and Bob Nastanovich of Pavement, gives a clue as to where the time goes: ‘Following 5+ years of scrapped sessions, line-up changes and other distractions, both tracks were initially recorded in the basement of a former maternity home, Heworth Moor House in York (on Scout Niblett’s old 8-track machine). Steve recorded his vocals at Marble Valley Studio, Richmond, Virginia and Bob in Des Moines, Iowa.’

It’s a tale reminiscent of the likes of The Stone Roses and My Bloody Valentine stalling on their second album… only this is a band that stalled for more than five years without releasing a note. So the fact Macrodosed has arrived at all seems nothing short of miraculous.

Before they launch the album, Nature Kids – a band who’ve been gigging around York for a while but I have no experience of – warm things up, and they’re nice. That’s not ‘nice’ in the bland, insipid way, but the enthusiastic way. They serve up a set of mellow indie, which is both happy and sad at the same time. There’s some nice twangy country tones and subtle keyboard work, and some saw action, too. ‘Always’ goes a bit post-punk and has a tidy groove to it, and is a standout in a set of consistent quality. The lead guitar is what really stands out – although it’s subtle and understated, to the point that it takes a few songs to realise what it is about their sound that’s so magic. No two ways about it, this is a gem of a band.

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Nature Kids

The Illness is not so much a band as a collective, and just as the album has a roll-call of guest contributors, so they present an ever-changing lineup on stage. There are never fewer than six of them, but sometimes as many as eight, and there is instrument and position-swapping galore, with vocal and bass duties switching all over.

Much of the time, they have three guitars, bass, drums… but there are some synths happening, and their sound is an immaculate blend of indie, prog, epic psychedelic space rock, all executed, if not with precision, then behind a curtain of shimmering sonic fireworks, from blooming roman candles to the spirals of Catherine wheels.

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The Illness

‘Speedway Star’ is the second song of the set, and it’s laid back but had a certain grip. The album version featured David Pajo, and the question keeps arising: how? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter: what matters is that their set – a mere forty-five minutes – is something special.

The final song of the night is a full-on motorik wig-out, and it’s absolutely magnificent, with two trilling synths and two guitars, it’s equal parts Stereolab and Early Years (do better comparison). Danny (Wolf Solent, etc, a man who’s essentially a one-man scene in York and who I gather is a late addition to the band’s lineup) , who’s been keeping restrained throughout goes all out with a blistering guitar workout

The Illness may be well under the radar and well underachieving – given their connections alone they ought to be massive, never mind the fact they’re uniquely brilliant – but perhaps that will change given the brilliance of the album and superb shows like this. The Illness are totally sick… right?

Karobela – Afterthought

Posted: 6 January 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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20th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Here we are on the cusp of the second week of January and still mopping up releases from December. And that’s ok. I don’t get why everyone is so hung up on the end of year / new year thing anyway, and I certainly don’t get why so many end of year lists are published in November. It made sense when we were tied to print media, and monthly magazines went to print a good month in advance, meaning the December editions were being written in October to hit the shelves at the end of November, but in the age of the Internet? Nah. And the sheer volume of music being releases means that things often have a slower diffusion, in contrast to the 80s and 90s when people raced to buy 7” and CD singles on the week of release after a big advance push which was essential for that chart placing, which meant Radio 1 Top 40 airplay on a Sunday afternoon and the possibility of being on Top of the Pops.

So, my somewhat belated coverage of this new single by Kent-based alternative act Karobela is anything but an afterthought. Boom.

The song is, they say, ‘a kick back, in your face retaliation to everyone who thought they could just kick you to the curb’. Many of us have been there: left out forgotten, excluded – not necessarily by design, but because ‘oops’. Well, you can tag along if you like, why don’t you? Out of sight, out of mind as the phrase goes.

The band have clearly put plenty of thought into this tune that’s structured around a low-slung bass groove and builds to climactic, impassioned choruses. It does teeter perilously close to classic rock / indie funk in places, but the energy and raw sincerity carry it through, and they sound like a band who will really grab certain demographics in a live setting, while the relatable content of ‘Afterthought’ is also likely to be a winner.

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Papillon de Nuit – Amber

Posted: 10 December 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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10th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Less than a fortnight after Yorkshire-based collective Papillon de Nuit unveiled their first track, ‘Scarlet’, they present to the world the second fruits of their recent recording sessions, mastered by none other than Tom Woodhead, formerly of ¡Forward Russia! at Hippocratic Mastering. While ‘Amber’ continues the colour-themed song titles, they promised something different, and, indeed, that’s precisely what they’ve given us.

‘Scarlet’ was a somewhat folk-infused tune with a rolling rhythm: in contrast, ‘Amber’ sits more in neoclassical territory, in terms of composition and arrangement, with a lone piano providing the primary instrumentation; around the sung segments are spoken-word poetical passages. Again, Stephen Kennedy leads, but there is a counterpoint in words composed and spoken by Edinburgh-based polyartist Monica Wolfe, and the interaction between the voices and modes of delivery is engaging. This is not rock, or pop, or folk, but unashamedly music as art, and as compelling as it is beautiful.

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Christian – and knowing is half the battle

Posted: 8 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 6th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Another Bandcamp Friday, and another release from Dret Skivor, Swedish microlabel specialising in noise and weird shit on super-limited cassettes. This time, they promise a ‘beast of a release with artwork by the manbear that is Christian Blandhoel’. Side A of this cassette is supposedly the ‘hard side’ and Side B the ‘soft side’, but these things are relative. Mellow it is not, and it really is a beast. I’d been forewarned that it was a long one, and landing the same day I received my copy of the new Swans live album, which clocks in at a solid two and a half hours, I kinda shrugged it off, thinking ‘yeah, it’s long, but it’s not that long…’ and while that’s true, I perhaps should have paid more heed. It’s not just about the length with this one. It’s about the intensity. For the records, Swans’ Live Rope is intense, and anyone who’s seen them live in the last couple of years will appreciate this. But the recordings simply do not capture the experience of being in the room, the decimating volume.

The thing is, there’s listening to music, and listening to music. I listen to music while I’m cooking, but it’s simply on, whereas listening to music with focus is a true commitment, and takes some energy. Listening to and knowing is half the battle takes a lot of energy.

Only a minute or two into ‘bad things keep happening’, the first of the album’s seventeen tracks, there’s some extreme panning that’s churning my guts and making me dizzy, and that’s without the feedback whistles that land just in the region of tinnitus. It’s a challenging six minutes, which culminates in a slugging blast of lung-rattling bass sludge.

‘Danger draws near to what you hold dear’ is an ominous piece of dark ambience with static and hum, crackles and horrific ruptures of noise. There’s a low-end mechanical thrum, low-end doom frequencies which flicker and throb, and nothing comfortable. Trilling feedback whistles for what feels like an age before more bass frequencies hit, and then static and distortion hums and hovers from left to right. This feels like an album designed to inflict optimal pain and anguish. ‘Loaded for bear what a nasty spectackle’ hums and drones and bursts distortion to a point at which is inflicts pain at first, before diminishing in its confrontational intensity.

Scraping strings and ominous drones and unsettling discord and dissonance are all the things one might expect from a track bearing the disturbing title ‘i always hope to find you fully dilated and bleeding’, and when it suddenly ruptures into a surge of fizzing distortion, the experience becomes quite overwhelming – and it only grows more intense and anguishing as it progresses.

‘rendering flesh’ is a horrible mess of buzzes and hums, feedback trills and screams, snarling whirls and blips and glitches. And the unpleasant frequencies, the serrated waves, the tension-building noise just keeps on coming, with the pieces packed back-to-back with no pause for decompression. At times it sounds like a bulldozer ploughing through the speakers, at others it’s more akin to the soundtrack to psychological torture or one of those anxiety dreams from which you wake, drenched in sweat, which fuck the entirety of your day.

Christian may be in pain, and and knowing is half the battle is his way of letting it out. Or perhaps he’s a sadist who derives pleasure from inflicting pain on others. Either way, and knowing is half the battle is likely to stand as an endurance test which many listeners will fail. Christian seems to have a knack for finding all the frequencies which resonate in the wrong way: every throb and click is a tension-building, gut-worrying microassault. ‘Abakan hyperburst’ again exploits both wild panning and distortion to distressing effect, before ‘the current trend of selective autism’ presents a sparse but challenging question. What is he trying to say here? Well, it does seem that a certain type of person will defend shitty behaviour by claiming that they may be on the spectrum – undiagnosed, of course – or have some other issue as a justification, which diminishes and undermines those who are truly autistic, in the same way as the people who shout loudest about their mental health and take time off work for mental health reasons aren’t necessarily those who are truly suffering. It is a minefield, and a topic which goes far beyond the reach of this review, but one that we shouldn’t ignore, since Christian has raised it.

Other titles are perhaps less provocative, and instead are more surreal – such as ‘mcdelivery plush trumpet’ and ‘the wonder of phosphorous burned eyeholes’, but ‘exploding heads in peacetime’ is a blistering trill of feedback worthy of Whitehouse, underlaid with billowing bass.

This would be a tortuous work regardless of duration, as Christian remorselessly pushes all the buttons for noise which is uncomfortable, distressing, but the fact this album seems to last a lifetime only heightens the tension. and knowing is half the battle is painful, horrible in every way – so needless to say, I love it, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

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The Bricks – Modern Mirror EP

Posted: 29 November 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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28th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

I’ve been bigging up The Bricks for some time now, and I would count myself as a fan from the moment they snared me with their early doors set in January 2022 opening for The Kut and Healthy Junkies.

They’ve always been pretty swift at getting their material recorded, with a four-track demo laid down in the summer of 2021 containing the songs that provided the basis for their early sets. Since then, while ‘Picket Fence’ has largely remained a well-deserved feature of the set, they’ve been busy with new material, with the five-track Reverse Alchemy EP landing in February 2023, and now, with six new cuts, Modern Mirror is their most expansive, and perhaps definitive, statement yet.

It’s clear from their live shows that there’s a musical chemistry between the four of them, but equally, the tightness they demonstrate is the kind that comes from disciplined rehearsal. The fact that they got these six tracks done – even though they are succinct, with only ‘Snake’ exceeding three minutes – in two days is a fair indication of their proficiency. This is particularly important for a band who are strong live, because the challenge is capturing the essence, and the energy of the live sound in the studio. So many solid live acts make a hash of things in the studio, going either one of two ways – either they’ll polish the songs to within an inch of their lives, slicken things off with production to the point that they sound flat and lifeless, or they’ll simply fail to convey the live experience with rushed, muddy recordings that fail to do justice.

Here, the production is just right for the band: with a sound that’s from the heart of the gothier end of late punk – think early Siouxie, Skeletal Family, but also with more overtly punk leanings at times – theirs is the sound of 1979-81, and where so many contemporary exponents go wrong is applying 21st century production values in the studio. So here, we have songs which are fiery, choppy, edgy, and the recordings convey the energy and the raw dynamism, but without sounding rough.

The title track is a solid opener, with an intro that builds, and builds, and builds, then everything bursts into life, a chunky bass groove bursting with nifty runs sits tightly with the uncomplicated drumming and come together to provide a solid backdrop to Gemma’s commanding, full-lunged vocals. ‘What’s real? Does it matter?’ she roars.

It’s another snaking bassline swerving around thundering drums which provides the backbone of ‘A Lie’, where the guitars switch from choppy stutters to full-on thrashabout and it’s all over in under two minutes, a powerful short, sharp shock.

‘Snake’ has become a feature of the set as the slower mid-set breather, and it presents something of a more soulful side – as well as the opportunity for a guitar solo. It feels as if they’ve made the most of the slower tempo to explore more broadly, and it works well. It’s also catchy – in that the chorus grabs you by the balls and squeezes, but not too hard.

There’s almost a psychobilly feel to the full-throttle ‘Contraption’, with its sneering punky putdown, ‘Nice try, you’re boring / Nice try, I’m yawning’.

Lyrically, The Bricks always achieve more with less, with snappy, declarative couplets consisting of the fewest words possible and uncomplicated but effective rhymes. And so it is that the EP closes with ‘Meantime’, another songs that’s well-established and road-tested. ‘Trickle trickle… you’re so fickle’ may well not be TS Elliot or Milton, but it’s all in the delivery, and to hear Gemma belting out the dismissive flick of ‘fickle! FOOL!’ with her immensely commanding voice is enough to wither even the most cocksure and arrogant of bastards. With Guy’s magnificent weaving guitar-line and rock-solid rhythm section, it’s a powerful finale.

The Bricks have always been great, but they’ve never sounded more solid, or more confident than here.

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