Posts Tagged ‘simple’

Emmaleen Tangleweed – Songs From The Unseen, The Unsaid and The Unborn / The Sun Will Still Shine When You Die

Posted: 9 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 21st February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometimes, I find myself reading – and returning to – the write-up for an album and thinking ‘Yes: I’m going to like this… but perhaps not tonight. I don’t know if I’m ready or in the mood’. This immense release, which finds two previously-released album reissued as a single package consisting of seventeen pieces, by Namibian-born Emmaleen Tangleweed is one such example. Listening to new music daily doesn’t mean that writing about it is always easy, and sometimes, I find myself feeling daunted by the prospect, and asking myself ‘how could I do this justice?’

Here’s the preface, which accompanies the release on Bandcamp:

Emmaleen Tangleweed’s music is more accurately described as a channeling than a song. Summoning stories of lost souls too tortured to let go, she cries and yearns as they no longer can, and yet, a silver thread of faith binds them. Themes of death, relationship and lingering hope imbue the listener with an eerie feeling of communion, of conversing with souls who have crossed the great divide.

Painting a visionary picture for the listener the stories contain hidden characters and everyday dramas played out in a time capsule of song giving the words weight in the earthly as much as in the ethereal they are delicately plucked from.

There’s also the fact that I feel obliged to listen to a release the whole way through, uninterrupted, so as to experience it as intended, not as people dipping in and out and skipping through playlists do, meaning that two albums back-to-back is quite a commitment. Anyway.

Songs From the Unseen, The Unsaid And The Unborn (Tracks 1 – 8, 10) was originally self-released in November 2022, while The Sun Will Still Shine When You Die (Tracks 11 – 17) was again self-released in October the following year.

Listening to these simple yet hypnotic folk songs of Songs From the Unseen, The Unsaid And The Unborn, I find myself wondering if Tangleweed is really her name, in the same way I muse whenever I see someone wearing a coat from Jack Wolfskin. It would certainly be convenient if it was, because it’s a perfect match for the sparse but swampy blues of songs like ‘Screaming and Crying’ and ‘Bluebeard’. I also find myself thinking of early PJ Harvey – not because she was in any way blues, but because there’s something in the feel, the fact that it’s folk but not folk, blues but not blues, but not indie either. ‘3 Nights And 2 Days’, one of the shorter songs, is light in delivery, heavy in lyric, but the skipping, picked notes and easy groove are a joy.

Tangleweed’s voice is rich in timbre: not low but it has depths which imbue it with a gravity which in turn adds substance to the songs. And these are not short songs: Tangleweed spins out narratives over slow and steady acoustic strums running for five minutes at a time. But the time floats by.

The songs on The Sun Will Still Shine When You Die feel more considered, and are perhaps a few shades darker. Certainly, the seven-minute ‘Being Born’ is low, slow, epic in scope, and there are two songs – ‘Forever and Ever’ and ‘Lullaby for Lonely Nights’ – which stretch past eight minutes. The former balances a Leonard Cohen vibe with a more Beat-influenced spoken word approach. ‘Nice’ might not be quite the word, but it’s nicely done.

The arrangements – such as they are – are simple, the playing raw, immediate: it’s very like listening to the songs being played in a dimly-lit pub, with a room capacity of thirty, sitting on low stools around sticky circular tables with low chatter bubbling around as people go to the bar and pass observations. I have fond memories of many a night in pubs listening to some outstanding blues artists in my formative years, and I would say that my appreciation of live music really stems from these experiences. But it’s not solely for this reason that this release appeals: there’s something which resonates on a deeper level when it comes to heartfelt blues. It may be due to its timelessness. Wherever you go, whenever you go there, the blues is the blues, and it speaks to the soul. Tangleweed plays with honesty and without pretence, and the result is magic.

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Nine O’Clock Nasty – Smash Grab & Go

Posted: 17 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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17th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Writing on their single ‘Existential Dread’ in these virtual pages in October, James Wells was hugely enthused by the track, but made no bones about the fact he wasn’t keen on the band’s name. But listening to this, it makes perfect sense: with a filthy, serrated bassline that grates away like a rusty saw, it’s nasty alright, and probably best not to be aired pre-watershed. It’s punky, but also owes an immense debt to The Fall, not least of all with the delivery of the sneery, snarky vocals, chewing on the refrain and spitting it out, mangled and messy. The there’s the thumping repetitive drumming and, appearing unexpectedly, some quite buoyant 80s indie synth work. But it’s not just some cheap Fall rip-off – although its lo-fi fizz is integral to its appeal – but brings elements of The Pixies into play as part of its grungy four-chord stomp. They’re not wrong when they describe it as ‘Simple. Direct. Violent.’ And say that they’ve made ‘a song that sounds exactly like the adrenaline rush when you realise that life will never be the same again.’ Clocking in at two minutes and fifteen seconds, there’s no space for mucking about.

They add: ‘We made a song about something complex and difficult. Identify. Surveillance. Scrutiny. Or maybe it is a song about sending dick pics or shoplifting? Really, it means whatever you want to mean. In Crowland you decide what something means. What is truthful.’ One may argue that this is something of a cop-out, but by the same token, it acknowledges and accepts that songs take on meanings which are personal and individual to each listener, and to impose meaning is likely futile – or a likely cause of disappointment to some. There aren’t many lyrics to unravel, as it happens, with the verses consisting of the lines ‘Pixelate me! Hide my face!’ between choruses consisting of the title repeated. Its simplicity is its genius.

OFF! / Teen Mortgage – The Crescent, York, 10th November 2023

Posted: 12 November 2023 in Live
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Christopher Nosnibor

Apart from a couple of dates earlier in the year, it’s been a fair while since OFF! toured the UK. This visit consists of half a dozen dates, taking in Dublin, Glasgow, Bristol, Brighton, and Pitchfork Music Festival in London – which makes York a real outlier. Leeds, you’d probably expect – having previously brought the noise to The Brudenell and Belgrave – but York? The Crescent has been going front strength to strength in recent years, and with some bold booking (notably, tonight’s show is hosted as a ‘Brudenell Presents…’ event), the 350-capacity venue has been bringing some impressive names to a city that for many years languished as a musical backwater.

OFF! certainly qualify as an impressive name. As a founding member of both Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, Keith Morris is indisputably one of the key figures of the original hardcore scene. Since hooking up guitarist-producer Dimitri Coats (Burning Brides), they’ve built a supergroup that’s been tearing up venues since 2009. And the reason they’ve such a strong following isn’t because of who’s in the band, but because they deliver pure, back-to-basics hardcore punk: hardly any effects pedals, no gimmicks or banter, just song after song, most under two minutes long, played as hard and as fast as is humanly possible.

This current iteration finds them boating a powerhouse rhythm section comprising bassist Autry Fulbright II (…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead) and drummer Justin Brown (Thundercat, Herbie Hancock).

In tow, they have Washington DC punk duo Teen Mortgage. They shuffle into the stage crowded with kit (it’s not a tiny stage, but two big drum kits plus some beefy backline don’t leave much room. The singer / guitarist is wearing a Motorhead T and has patches of Misfits and the like on his jeans. He greets the crowd with a drawling “Whassuuup?” and then they’re straight down to business. The duo sound cheap, trashy and in places slightly thin by design: they’re not into the new trend of heaps of effects and splitting the guitar through two cabs or whatever. They’re doing it the old school way, fast and frantic, and with the drums dominating. The result is rather like DZ Deathrays with the addition of twirling drumsticks. Nothing technical or complex, just two guys making a racket and at fast pace. And it’s ace, because it’s so immediate. The crowd – and it’s a decent turnout – recognise this and the moshing gets going early on.

OFF! don’t piss about either. Again, there’s absolutely nothing fancy about their or their setup. Brown has the band’s name in strips of electrical tape on the bass drum. The kit looks battered, and there are just a few bottles of water and mugs of herbal tea on stage – and again, barely any effects pedals.

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OFF!

Keith Morris may have started his careers as an angry young man, and now he’s an angry old man who still performs with the passion of an angry young man. This guy really puts so many bands a fraction of his age to shame. He’s now into his late 60s, but doesn’t stop for breathers, there are no instrumental breaks while he recovers himself: instead, he rants away as feedback streams from the stage between songs. The bald spot is now covered by a hat, and the dreadlocks are down past knees. But other than this, little is different from the times I saw them in 2012 and 2014: the hand-written setlist is still several feet long, consisting of half a ream of sheets taped together and they power through almost thirty songs in less than eighty minutes. Bam! Bam! Bam! Song after song, each one blasting in, bamalamalamalam and stop! The moshpit grows and grows, and the energy in the room is fantastic. And then they’re done: quick, clean, and efficient, this is hardcore at its best.