Posts Tagged ‘Sacred Bones Records’

Watch: ‘In the Garden’ by Indigo Sparkle

Posted: 8 September 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Indigo Sparke has released a soaring new single ‘In the Garden,’ co-written by Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly and produced by Jake Portait (Unknown Mortal Orchestra). The track is accompanied by a gorgeous music video.

The song is arguably Indigo Sparke’s most pop leaning production to date and boasts a big sound. Driving beats, groove laden bass, seductive guitars and what sounds like an actual choir of angels all serve to build this intoxicating sound but it’s Sparke’s beautiful vocal delivery, lyrics, and her gentle invitation toward madness that give this song its euphoric and poignant edge.

Watch the video here:

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Watch: ‘Like A Poisoned Dog’ by Khanate

Posted: 29 June 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Khanate, who recently ended their fourteen year hiatus with the surprise release of To Be Cruel (Sacred Bones Records), have debuted an experimental short visual for ‘Like A Poisoned Dog’, bringing the Karl Lemieux-created album art to life.

“These stills are abstract but depending on the context, they become objects and objective. And alongside Khanate, they have this strange organic feeling,” Stephen O’Malley notes. “They’re abstract, hand-painted film stills, not photos of organic objects or something, which I think is really interesting because it’s similar to our music. We put a frame around the music with a concept and it presents something, but otherwise, it’s abstract. This lined up very well with Karl’s work.”

“In addition to my other film work, I like to work with camera-less film techniques and paint directly on 16mm film,” explains Lemieux, whose resume includes films, installations and performances that have screened at a variety of venues including the Montreal Contemporary Arts Museum, MOMA San Francisco, as well as over a decade of collaborative work with Godspeed You! Black Emperor. “In 2021, Stephen asked if he could use some of those images for the new Khanate record. I’m someone who spends a lot of time flipping through the artwork of records, CDs, and cassettes…. It’s part of my listening ritual. I have always loved Stephen’s record design work and I was very excited about this collaboration and the way it all came out. The idea for a video came later. It’s not a film, it’s not a music video, but some kind of collision between an excerpt from the piece ‘Like A Poisoned Dog’ and the raw material that I used to make still images.”

Watch the video here:

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Boris & Uniform – Bright New Disease

Posted: 24 May 2023 in Albums
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Sacred Bones – 16th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

They’re the first to admit that this pairing may seem like an unusual one, having first teamed up for a US tour in 2019: as the bio notes, ‘Sure, both bands harness the power of big, blown-out riffs, but Boris’s rock heroics, lysergic sprawl, and monolithic sludge summon a different energy than Uniform’s mechanized bombardments and frenzied assaults.’ But often the most exciting and unexpected results emerge when pairing contrasts rather than sameness. Put two drone bands together, you can predict the outcome will be amplified drone; sludge with sludge equals more sludge, and industrial matched with industrial is unlikely to yield any great surprises. Yes, pairing like with like makes sense, it’s safe, there’s an intuition and interplay that comes from familiarity with the territory and the form, and fans will likely be happy being served a double helping of what they like.

But neither Boris nor Uniform are acts who are overly concerned with appeasement: that isn’t to say they don’t care about their fans, but more that they both trust their fan bases to be broad-minded and accommodating of the idea that creative fulfilment is integral to their existence. Even those more casually acquainted with their respective catalogues will recognise that both Boris and Uniform are driven, not by the desire to entertain, but to follow their creative instincts. The way these manifest musically are very different, but in this context, the parallels become more apparent, and it also becomes easier to understand their mutual appreciation for one another. And neither act is new to the spirit of collaboration, with Boris having have collaborated with the likes of Sunn O))), Merzbow, and Keiji Haino, and Uniform having previously released a blistering collision with The Body back in 2018, as well as remixes with Zombi more recently.

It will be news to no-one that this is big on riffs, that it’s loud and heavy, but this is a collaboration like no other: ordinarily, artists will bring their ‘thing’ to the table, and the songs will represent the meeting in the middle ground. This isn’t so much the case on Bright New Disease: the two acts are given equal billing and play evenly to their strengths and stylistic methodologies: but don’t necessarily play ‘together’ in the conventional sense. But when did either Boris or Uniform do ‘conventional’?

The album’s first track, ‘You are the Beginning’, aired online a few weeks ago, is the perfect combination of the two bands’ individual sounds: hard, heavy, the blistering harsh industrial intensity of Uniform, angular, antagonistic, crackling with the punk-tinged rage of Michael Berden, suddenly melts into a wild blitz of fretwork which paves the way for a monster thrash workout. Even the tone and texture shifts from harsh treble to murky mid-range, and it feels like a song of two halves. Quite unexpectedly, it works. When you weight up the value of any collaboration the question is always ‘is it different from or better than their independent works?’ Bright New Disease throws a curveball in that it’s a yes and a no at the same time, and that’s the genius of it.

The explosive ‘Weaponized Grief’ is a sub-two-minute blast of feedback and fury, and another thing which is notable about Bright New Disease is just how short the songs are. While there are a couple over four minutes and the finale, ‘Not Surprised’ does just creep over five minutes, the majority are significantly shorter, and condense a lot into those brief times, too.

‘No’ goes all-out grindcore / thrash in a two-and-a-half- minute flurry of churning guitars, but at the same time there’s something vaguely Spinal Tap – or Melvins –about its overblown excesses, and this may be a short album, but it’s high impact, and that’s true of much of the album: they slam down riff after riff with relish. ‘Endless Death Agony’ brings together the boldest excess of Boris with the most brutal attacks of Uniform, with a shrieking guitar solo fading out ahead of a most punishing riff with more solo mania blistering and melting on top, before the megalithic slow grind of ‘Not Surprised’ drags its way through the pits of hell.

Apart from the gloomy atmospheric suspense of the intro to ‘The Look is a Flame’ there really isn’t much respite on Bright New Disease. It’s harsh, heavy, relentless, by turns sludgy and slow, or otherwise frantic, frenetic, explosive – and packed with surprises, from the murky ambience of ‘The Sinners of Hell’ to the bubbling electronica of ‘Narcotic Shadow’ that sounds more like DAF collaborating with A-Ha and the straight-up glam pop of ‘A Man from the Earth’. Never could I have anticipated describing anything involving Uniform as ‘glam pop’. But then they kill it hard with ‘Endless Death Agony’, which is some brutal shit. Bright New Disease is everything all at once: it’s often punishing, sometimes spectacularly theatrical, and (almost) always heavy, but it’s smartly realised and expounds the importance of identity as both bands showcase and celebrate theirs in triumphant tandem.

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Khanate – To Be Cruel

Posted: 20 May 2023 in Albums
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Sacred Bones – 19th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been fourteen years since there was new music from Khanate, the experimental doom outfit featuring members of Sunn O))), OLD, and Blind Idiot God. It’s perhaps not surprising that my social media feeds have been bursting with the news of the surprise arrival of their fifth album on digital platforms ahead of a physical release next month– and because it landed from nowhere overnight, you couldn’t say it was eagerly anticipated, but it’s got a lot of people excited.

As you would expect, given the members’ main projects, and the previous Khanate releases, To Be Cruel is an absolute monster, with just three tracks spanning a full hour. You don’t tune in to Khanate for snappy pop tunes.

The first chord hits like an atomic bomb, blasting from the speakers with such force it’s almost enough to floor you, and rising from the sustain, crackling synth notes, then another sonic detonation that’s so hard and loud it hurts. Many of the tones and tropes of To Be Cruel are heavily redolent of the crushing doom drone of Sunn O))), but as the first piece, ‘Like a Poisoned Dog’ abundantly evidences, Khanate are different. This difference may be less apparent to the casual listener, but the stop/start power chords and skewed, sinewy shards of feedback are cut from a different sonic cloth, and if Sunn O))) are renowned for their indebtedness to Earth, there are elements woven in here which seem to owe more to early Swans, and while I wouldn’t necessarily want to speculate on whether the album’s title is some kind of response to Swans’ 2014 album To Be Kind, there is some kind of contextual interface here, in that both acts are pushing parameters within a longform song format.

And then there are the vocals: it’s a good seven minutes before Alan Dubin makes his first contribution: the song takes another swerve, the blistering blast simmers down and as he howls and roars, the feel is a cross between the darkest of mangled metal and brutal hardcore. And his manic screams are powerful and affecting. He sounds troubled, but in a way that conveys the kind of tortured mental suffering that’s common to many: it’s a primal howl of rage ad anguish that we struggle to unleash, and so to hear this is to feel emotions channelled by proxy, and as much as it hurts, it’s a release.

‘It Wants to Fly’ takes it to the next level, presenting almost twenty-two minutes of pain. The guitar is slow, crushing, punishing. What can you say? It hurts. It’s also minimal in arrangement but maximal in volume: this is first-gear BPM, with decimating feedback between the crushing chords. At the same time, it’s doomy and ominous as well as raging, making for a powerful cocktail of weight and raw emotion. There is no question that Khanate bring both.

And so it is that the album’s third and final track, the twenty-minute title track, is twenty minutes of low drone and tortured screaming that sounds like a breakdown captured on tape as Dubin yelps and screams about spiders against a sparse backing of a distant rumble and clanging guitar. ‘Look! In the closet!’ he shrieks in what sounds like abject terror. You dare not look. You don’t even want to hide under the bed: you just want to leave the house. The composition takes its time, it hums and drones, and in time, it hits and it hurts, and in some way you wish you could be Dublin, you want this release to have a channel into the unhinged. But you’re stuck on the outside, an observer to what sounds like either the ultimate catharsis or mental disintegration.

Ground down to nothing beyond and anguished screams and squalling feedback, this is bare bones, the sound of desperation. It isn’t pleasant, and there is simply no room to breathe: this is dark, dense torturous, and it’s exactly what fans have been waiting fourteen years for.

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Listen: ‘You are the Beginning’ by Boris and Uniform

Posted: 2 May 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Boris and Uniform might have seemed like a strange pairing when they teamed up for a US tour back in 2019. Sure, both bands harness the power of big, blown-out riffs, but Boris’s rock heroics, lysergic sprawl, and monolithic sludge summon a different energy than Uniform’s mechanised bombardments and frenzied assaults. However, when Boris invited Uniform to team up on a reimagined version of their classic “Akuma no Uta” as a part of their encore, there was an obvious chemistry between the artists. The idea of a collaborative album came up, and the bands spent the next year swapping song ideas and recordings from their home-base studios until Boris and Uniform had an album that captured the fearless exploration and unbridled power of their live performances.

Sacred Bones Records is proud to present the Boris & Uniform collaborative album Bright New Disease on June 16, 2023.

Bright New Disease opens with the collaboration’s first single, ‘You are the Beginning,’ a ferocious thrash-inflected banger concocted by the Boris camp. It was the first piece the band composed during the initial day of their studio session in July 2020. As the title insinuates, the song was written with the idea that it would open the album and, hopefully, open a show one day too. “At that time, we didn’t know when we would be able to resume concerts,” says Boris’ Atsuo, “and our wish became the song directly.”  The uncertainty and anxiety of the early months of the pandemic fuelled Bright New Disease, and “You are the Beginning” sets the stage by stampeding out of the gate with vicious palm-muted riffs, snarling vocals, and dual drum bombardments courtesy of Atsuo and Uniform drummer Mike Sharp. 

Listen here:

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“On tour, we learned more about the depth of their musicality, which we felt was compatible with our own expression,”  Boris’s Atsuo and Takeshi say of their tour mates. “They are a band that can be described in many ways—punk, metal, industrial—but they truly excel because they are not locked into any style. They are always experimenting and innovating.” The feeling was mutual.

“Uniform have been longtime fans and admirers of Boris. Supporting them on tour was a dream come true,” says Uniform vocalist/electronics wrangler Michael Berdan. Guitarist and producer Ben Greenberg was equally excited by the opportunity to team up with Boris and shape the recording of Bright New Disease in his studio. “Wata is one of my favourite guitar players ever, so I’m very stoked we got two duelling solo tracks on this record,” Greenberg says, referring to the intertwined guitar leads on “Endless Death Agony.” This isn’t to say there wasn’t also a shared appreciation for certain classics, particularly when it came to Japanese hardcore. “The first time I met Atsuo he was wearing a Gastunk shirt, and Takeshi has schooled me harder on Burning Spirits than any fetishist westerner could ever hope for,” says Berdan.

Members of both Boris and Uniform talk about songs on Bright New Disease in the context of how they’ll play out in a live setting. Under normal circumstances, such considerations are a part of the writing process for any band with an active live presence. But considering that Bright New Disease was written and recorded in the darkest days of the pandemic, it frames the agitated and tumultuous spirit of the album in a new light. Yes, this is the sound of frustration, but it was founded on resilience. “In the end, it sounds like the crystalised essence of both bands at the heights of their creative abilities,” says Berdan. “It is a testament of friendship and hope in the face of a world on fire.”

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Thou – Magus

Posted: 15 August 2018 in Albums
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Sacred Bones Records – 31st August 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

Magus is Thou’s first full-length since 2014’s Heathen. It’s perhaps fair to say that the three EPs which preceded it – which they forewarned would be ‘a complete sonic departure from Magus and from each other’ – which effectively constituted albums in their own right – did nothing to prepare us for this.

But what exactly is this? As the album’s press blurb acknowledges, they’re ‘often lumped in with New Orleans sludge bands like Eyehategod and Crowbar, [but share] shares a more spiritual kinship with ‘90s proto-grunge bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden’, while ‘the band’s aesthetic and political impulses reflect the obscure ’90s DIY hardcore punk found on labels like Ebullition, Vermiform, and Crimethinc’. All this makes them hard to place.

The album’s opener, ‘Inward’, provides just over ten full minutes of snarling fury that carries enough weight to crush weaker souls who may venture forth expecting any of the soft musicality of the Inconsolable EP (which revealed Thou to be capable of extreme gentility, and, indeed, extreme beauty).

Things turn very black and very sludgy and very heavy on ‘Transcending Dualities’; and while it’s a snarling, low-tuned mess of slow-creeping sludge, there are stray notes that break free to squeal to break the trudging oppression. Bryan Funck’s twisted vocals draw every ounce of excruciation into the mix.

‘The Changeling Prince’ brings grace and grandeur to proceedings, and the hushed intro and expansive sound of ‘Sovereign Self’ (the second of three songs to cross the ten-minute mark) calls to mind Amenra, but his is a whole other level of gnarly, demonic savagery, and the overall sonic density is suffocating.

But Magus does find Thou continue to expand and explore in all directions, and there are three shorter tracks that serve as interludes between the towering monoliths which are the songs themselves: the cacophonous racket of ‘My Brother Caliban’ contrasts sharply with ‘Divine Will’, with its ethereal female vocals and pounding tribal drums. Elsewhere, the sprawling epic that is ‘In the Kingdom of Meaning’ introduces a psychedelic twist to the doomy trudge. And there are passages of extreme delicacy, rich in evocative atmosphere, which draw the lister into quiet clearings with dappled light where an air of calm radiates before the shadows loom, the clouds gather and the next tempestuous storm breaks. Such tension-building passages and contrasts of mood and volume create a compelling dynamic and makes Magus a mighty album which requires attention and exploration of the detail.

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Uniform – Wake In Fright

Posted: 5 January 2017 in Albums
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Sacred Bones – 20th January 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

‘Nasty’ is a word you’re likely to hear or read in relation to dark, gnarly, mangled black metal or crust punk, or perhaps some particularly unpopulist industrial effort, or some particularly savage techno. But on Wake In Fright Uniform offer something that’s a different kind of nasty. And yes, it really is nasty, brutal, savage, uncompromising and unfriendly. And while there are elements of metal, thrash, industrial and power electronics, Wake in Fright – described as ‘a harrowing exploration of self-medication, painted in the colors of war’ – throws down the challenge of a noise all of its own.

Preview cut ‘Tabloid’ doesn’t so much open the album as tear the lid off the thing in a squalling, brutal frenzy. The drums are pitched to a frenetic pace but largely buried under the snarling, churning mess of guitars, feedback and distortion. Michael Berdan sneers and hollers venomously like he’s in the throes of mania, and to describe it as raw would be an understatement. It’s still on the bone and walking around. A gnarly mash of early Head of David, Foetus, Godflesh and the most obscure hardcore punk demo tape you’ve ever heard, it’s anything but easy on the ear. It is, however, a real blast of adrenaline, not so much a smack around the mouth as a succession of steel-toed boot jabs to the ribs.

The earthmoving bass grind of ‘Habit’ is coupled with the dirtiest, dingiest guitar noise you’ll hear all year. ‘The Lost’ combines the harsh edge of late 80s Ministry with an old-school punk feel, New Order trampled under the boots of a thousand-strong army of brutalists. It’s a stroll in the park compared to the thousand-mile-an-hour rage explosion that follows in the shape of ‘The Light At the End (Cause)’, which is nothing short of brutal, a black metal assault. There’s nowhere to take refuge with this album: cover your face, the blows land in the ribs, the back, the legs. Uniform are fucked off, and are going to vent their unremitting ire on anything, everything, and everyone.

The most striking thing about this album – short as it is, with just eight tracks and a total running time of thirty-eight and a bit minutes, (aside from its eye-popping intensity, that is) is its diversity. ‘The Killing of America’ is a full-tilt industrial metal slogger which evokes the spirit of Psalm 69, and packs a truly wild guitar breaks. The tempo is off the scale, to, and th third most striking thing about Wake in Fright is its sustained attack. There’s no let up. Not even for a second. Just when you think there might be a moment’s respite, the buggers up the tempo and the volume and the fierceness by at least another ten per cent. By ‘Bootlicker’ (track six), it’s all reached an almost unbearable level of noise, as the drums pound like machine gun fire through a gut-churning barrage of guitars. Seriously, with Wake in Fright, Uniform make Strapping Young Lad sound like Mike Flowers Pops.

Curtain closer ‘The Light At the End (Effect)’ may slow the pace at last, but the murky Swans-like dirge, with its scratched spoken narrative, remains anything but an easy exit or an uplifting finale. It’s six minutes of postindustrial grind, and a fitting close to an album that comes out, fists flailing, whirling chains and spitting venom.

Don’t come to Uniform looking for a hug. Wake in Fright is utterly terrifying, a horrorshow of a record with not a moment of calmness or humanity. It’s horrifying, squalid, beyond harsh: a sonic kick to the gut. You bet it’s already one of my albums of the year.

 

Uniform - Wake in Fright