Posts Tagged ‘Saccharine Underground’

Bell Barrow – True Human Trough

Posted: 16 March 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Saccharine Underground – 27th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Bell Barrow are on fire right now. And so is half the world. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that they thrive on war and global turmoil, so much as feel the compulsion to create in the face of global crisis. I may be projecting a little here, but seriously – come the fuck on: how can anyone not feel all-consuming, abject terror right now? We’re hearing a lot of Israel claiming an ‘existential threat’ from the supposed nuclear activities of Iran right now – although this seems a little lacking in credibility, since it can’t also be true that the USA ‘annihilated’ Iran’s nuclear capabilities last summer. I mention this in my preface to the review of True Human Trough because although the current events aren’t mentioned specifically, it’s clear that this is an act who are tuned in to current tensions as well as ecological concerns, and who channel the energy of anxiety into their music.

As they themselves write, “These compositions function as experiments in torture empathy: forcing the listener to inhabit the suffering inflicted on our ecosystem by human dominance while simultaneously confronting a far older truth—that humanity’s power is temporary, localized, and ultimately irrelevant. Plant life, scavengers, and insect civilizations speak here through perceived chaos, not to ask for mercy, but to assert inevitability. True Human Trough reflects agony, yes—but more importantly, it documents supremacy. We may poison this world for now, but be clear…in the universal order, they rule in the end.”

I admire their optimism, and for what it’s worth, I share this hope. Because right now, it feels as if our species is suffocating the planet harder by the second. And suffocating is how the first track on this frenzied sonic blitzkrieg of an album feels. ‘Solunar Theory’ is a melting morass of experimental jazz immersed in a wall of phased reverb. Time signatures collapse into chaotic discord on ‘The Unbirthing of Jackals’. Everything lurches, drunkenly, it’s a dizzy stagger that’s powerful enough to unsettle the guts and leave you seeing stars. This is a woozy cacophony rendered all the more brain-frying by the wild application of reverb. Everything is off-kilter, the EQ is all over and there’s flange and phase and good old-fashioned manic musicianship, melting Beefheart and Zappa and Trumans Water in a cauldron with The Necks and Throbbing Gristle. Reading that back, it actually reads like some fucked-up Victorian era recipe that’s only missing some tripe and trotters to top a truly foul soup. Bell Barrow simmer up a pretty foul sonic soup even without these ingredients: ‘Neckless of Tongues’ delivers it

‘Infauna’ refers to the animals living in the sediments of the ocean floor or river or lake beds, while ‘bloat stage’ is occurs during the decomposition of a corpse. Yes, I looked this up while experiencing the obliterative force of ‘Bloat Stage Infauna’, and in context, it all makes sense. ‘Rites of Silent Spring’ is almost black metal in its frenetic frenzy, but of course, it’s also a jazz-infused instrumental which is a long way removed from black metal – which pretty much sums up True Human Trough, an album that’s everything all at once.

The production and mix is deranged, demented, furious. There’s no intention of softening the blows here: Bell Barrow are set on bringing pure mayhem and disruption – of the best possible kind.

We are living through historical moments in real time. As we hurtle towards self-extinction – it’s more a question of by which means than if now, what with the pace of climate change, AI’s rapid and unfettered advancement and now – let’s call it what it is – the onset of World War 3 – with True Human Trough, Bell Barrow have created a work which soundtrack the next stage of the end of times.

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Jeremy Moore by Fleurette Estes- February 2026 - Landscape 001

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Jeremy Moore by Fleurette Estes

Zero Swann – Benefactor

Posted: 8 October 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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17th October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

From the very outset, this is not easy on the ear. Sometimes, something leaps out about an album in the opening minutes, and here it’s the production – or lack of. The title track heralds the arrival of Benefactor, the first album by Washington D.C. improvisational psychedelic outfit Zero Swann in two years. And it’s a swampy, reverby, dingy mess. It’s integral to the experience, but it’s also likely to be a deterrent for some – but screw them, it’s their loss, right?

Although straddling heavy psychedelic and the dramatic gothic style, it’s the sludgy, feedback-riven outtakes of The Jesus And Mary Chains’s Barbed Wire Kisses which first come to mind when listening to this.

Benefactor is the follow up to 2023’s Amon Zonaris, which, at the time, was a one-off collaborative release with Scott “Wino” Weinrich. This time around, bandleader and Saccharine Underground label curator Jeremy Moore is flying solo, handling guitars, fretless bass, drums and noise assault. And there’s no shortage of the noise assault on this punishing no-wave behemoth. As they tell it, ‘From the noise rock / no wave snarl of Ritual Tension and early Sonic Youth, to the shoegaze sounds of My Bloody Valentine, to doom and free jazz chaos over a backdrop of pure lo-fi abrasion, Moore’s latest outing is a true crosspollination of styles’. It is, and what’s more, many of those styles are melted together to form a dark, disturbing sonic sludge.

‘Grave Wax Horticulture’ is a skull-splitting mesh of noise, equal parts The Jesus and Mary Chain and Christian Death. It’s theatrically gothy, in the vein of The Horrors, but primitively noisy – which is a fair summary of the album as a whole. It’s experimental, overloading in its racketaciousness – and while is a psychedelic album, it’s a full-on assault album, too, which draws parallels with Head of David’s first album, LP, and simply summarises a noise ethos which eschews convention in every sense.

Moore’s commanding baritone brings a sense of drama, not to mention a certain theatricality to the chaotic, palpating grind, and there’s an edge to his delivery which is both world-weary and tense, a voice emerging from the desolation of a society collapsing, a world in flames. This is surely the sound of the apocalypse, the sound of everything ending. Everything is overloading, murky, blown-out, blasted with distortion and reverb, resulting in a discordant thunderous attack which fires in all directions at once. It’s a primal roar reverberating from buildings collapsed to rubble, a brain-bleeding blitzkrieg of ruinous proportions, as mechanised drum sounds fire like machine guns and missile explosions, cutting through the wildest, densest racket. The absence of overt structures only compounds the sense of things falling apart. It’s the sound of unravelling, of societal threads pulling apart in real-time, a descent into mayhem, anarchy, barbarity.

‘Anagrams for Agnosia’ is perhaps jazz, but jazz in the loosest sense: it’s exploratory, experimental, freeform, but more than anything, it’s the sound of fracture, or fragmentation, instruments churning and burning, and pulling in different directions like splinters of an object in the wake of a detonation. As the screams die down, there is the thud of a panicked heartbeat, before the final track, ‘Phaneron’ obliterates with a squalling wall of howling guitar, stuttering drums and raw, ruinous noise.

Benefactor is an album without let-up, which provides no breathing space, and is thoroughly relentless in its intensity from beginning to end. Recommended, but approach with caution, and a stiff drink. It sounds like the cover looks.

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Zabus – Shadow Genesis

Posted: 1 July 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Saccharine Underground – 1st July 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

This one hell of a hybrid. Just when you think post-punk has been explored to the point at which it has been hollowed out, exhausted, and has only well-worn and instantly recognisable tropes to offer, along come Washington DC’s Zabus, purveyors of avant-garde post-punk with an EP which is something of a ‘best of’ with tracks from their two recent albums, Automatic Writhing (September 2024) and Floodplain Canticles (January 2025), plus a new track which paves the way for their next offering Whores of Holyrood (due in August).

With its immense, reverb-laden sound and expansive, drifting desert-like soundscape ‘Grafhysi Fyrir Alla’ makes four and a quarter minutes feel like a hypnotic span of double that duration. The shuffling bass and big, booming bass are pure dub. The guitar chimes and floats into the ether as everything swashes around in a huge echoic pool.

Of ‘Grafhysi Fyrir Alla’, lifted from last year’s Automatic Writhing, project founder and focal member Jeremy Moore says it’s about “the societal imposition of unobtainable standards of beauty, and our obsession with physical perfection at the expense of true happiness”. This is certainly not a case of style over substance, but a coming together of musical inventiveness with a level of intellect which is rare. “Psychopathologies like body dysmorphic disorder, at the extreme, can lead to a path of ruin, if most of your life is spent chasing a ghost—what you believe the world wants you to be. Death doesn’t discriminate. The end is always the same.”

This is some pretty heavy – and dark – philosophy on offer here, and it’s welcome: as much as there is much to be said for the benefits of the escapism music can offer, there’s equal solace to be found in art which articulates one’s own world view. And so it that that Zabus portray contemporary dystopia from a range of camera angles.

‘Orphalese’ is more uptempo and is decidedly cinematic with its broad-sweeping layers of synths driven by propulsive, rolling drums. There’s no verse / chorus structure, but instead a hypnotic expanse of sound, the aural equivalent of standing on a summit and looking out at a three-sixty horizon through a heat haze. It’s immersive, utterly absorbing, and transportative.

The first of the tracks lifted from Floodplain Canticles is the six-minute ‘Tearful Symmetries’, which is low and slow, Jeremy Moore’s reverb-drenched baritone croon approximating the late, great, Mark Lanegan against a dubby backdrop punctuated the clangs and scrapes of guitar drones and sculpted feedback. ‘This is the end….’ He reflects, but not with sadness or panic, but a sense of inevitability.

‘Golden-rot’ goes all out for the theatrically gothic experience: it’s as big on drama as it is on sound, as an insistent mechanised drum beat pounds away, cutting through a smog of murky guitar and thick, booming bass, and if I wasn’t already perspiring hard from the humidity and thirty-degree heat, this would make me sweat, with its tension and crackling energy.

And so we come to the title track, the first taste of Whores of Holyrood. It’s different again, although the cavernous reverb is a constant. This cut is a brooding piece that borders on country, once more evoking the spirit of Lanegan. It’s spacious, but its intensity brings an almost suffocating weight.

Shadow Genesis provides a perfect introduction to Zabus, and at the same time whets the appetite for what’s to come. And let me tell you, it’s something to get excited about.

Zabus - Shadow Genesis cover art