Sister Envy may hail from Wales, but they sound like they’re from way out of the reach of Earth’s gravitational pull.
Their third single, ‘Swallowed By The Ground’ begins gently, but builds in successive waves: the delicate, wistful jangle of the opening bars has something of a classic 90s / 00s alternative / indie vibe to it, with an emotional pull that’s equal parts Placebo and The Twilight Sad – and then the chorus powers in on a tsunami of guitar.
They set the expectation that the song ‘combin[es] elements of the epic gaze sound of early Verve or My Vitriol with echoes of the sound of bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana’, and yes, this much is true, but so many acts draw on the same touchstones without raising so much as a shrug in the direction of their underwhelming derivative sounding efforts. Yet Sister Envy take those same elements and spin pure alchemy.
The best songs are nigh on impossible to break down to the details of why they work, and it’s here where the famed line about dancing about architecture really makes the most sense. Dissect why ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was an instant timeless classic and you will not only end up empty-handed, but you’ll have stripped out the joy, too. Sure, as is also the case with Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ you have disaffection, alienation, dynamics, and a huge, ripping guitar blasting the chorus, but these elements alone do not in themselves a classic make. It’s in the delivery, for sure, but it’s also in that… je ne sais quoi. ‘Swallowed By The Ground’ has it: passion, power, hook, dynamics, and fuck yeah. This is special.
Whether they like to admit it or not everyone likes to have the opportunity to say ‘I told you’. And so Leeds feminist punk four piece Helle, who describe themselves as ‘a flurry of blistering riffs, unflinching lyrics and explosive live intensity’ and ‘an irresistible firestorm of grit and glamour that takes no prisoners’ drop their fifth single at the end of the longest month in history. And while revelling over witnessingone of their first gigs, supporting Weekend Recovery three years ago, and being blown away, leaving absolutely convinced – and rightly so – that this was a band to watch, I find myself wondering where the fuck has the time gone?
But there’s no time to wallow, and ‘Hyper Bitch’ goes a few steps beyond merely blowing away the cobwebs.
It starts with some dialogue, some chatter, it’s probably staged, but is the perfect representation of the superior music snob wanker who lectures at gigs, not only between bands, but talks over them because his opinion is so much more important. And yes, it’s always a him and it’s always some middle-class white twat who knows he knows best and could do far better. And then – BAM!
This is punk done proper: guitars, bass, drums all going all out – nothing fancy, just full-tilt, four-chord aggression, providing the perfect foil for vocals which bring that same, angry energy.
There’s some sass in the lyric department, too, constructing lines with a patchwork of movie titles in a fashion that we might have nodded to as an example of postmodern referencing and intertext not so long ago: the chorus hits with ‘I don’t wanna be a Mean Girl / I don’t wanna be Clueless like you’ as their tear into the object of antagonism.
It could be that I’m simply more aware now than before, but it seems that masculinity got even more toxic of late, that the shittiest, twattiest representations of the males of the species are pushing back against all of the progress made by feminism in preceding decades, presumably because the idea of strong women makes them feel somehow emasculated, or, put straight, scares them and wounds their pathetic egos and deflates their pathetic dicks. But what’s not necessarily worse, but harder to fathom, are women who are complicit in this, and who go out of their way to undermine others. I suppose this song is for them. But as a package – and a fiery one at that – Helle are part of a new wave of strong female bands who rock harder and rage harder than almost any of their male peers and are all about taking no shit, shouting up, and kicking ass.
They only released their debut single on 1st December last year, and here we are, not quite halfway through January and we’re being presented with single number three.
While Argonaut’s track-a-month schedule for their ‘open-ended’ albumSongs from the Black Hat, matching only that of The Wedding Present in 1992, seemed like the pinnacle of prolific – not to mention the ultimate advertisement for the DIY approach – three singles in six weeks must surely have the makings of a record (pun partly intended). As of this moment, though, we don’t know what their longer-term aim is, or even if there is one, beyond releasing new songs as soon as they’re ready, and if that is their MO, it’s admirable. Without the need to work to the schedules – or budgets – or a label, their only limitation is their own time and energy.
I had initially noted, following ‘Scarlet’, and ‘Amber’, a theme of colours linking their songs, but perhaps it’s female names. Or perhaps it’s pure coincidence, and they have simply plucked one-word titles to denote their songs.
‘Jude’ – which comes with appropriately dramatic artwork, somewhere between swooning gothic drama and pre-Raphaelitism, the source of which I haven’t been able to identify – once again features the voice of poet Monica Wolfe, here whispering, and, as credited, ‘breathing’. These contributions are significant in rendering an atmospheric composition, particularly in the introduction, before the arrival of the piano – of which there are, in fact, two, adding layers to the brooding theatricality of the song, and Stephen Kennedy’s voice.
The feel – particularly in his delivery, with some quavering intonation, and enveloped in a spacious reverb – is very much gothic folk, as he casts introspection, while chasing ghosts.
‘Will the world miss me?’ I whisper
And sigh, as my life drifts away.’
It’s moving, poetic, and powerful, presenting a straight-ahead contemplation on mortality – not in some cheesy ‘romantic’ gothic style, and not in a crass emo way, but a rare sincerity.
Somewhat ironically, in our teens and twenties, we tend to agitate about death, while also treating it with a flippancy, because it’s what happens to old people, but as we grow older, we go out of our way to avoid thinking or talking about it, because as we begin to lose parents, uncles, aunts, and even – increasingly – peers, shit gets more real than we can handle. Invariably, we bury our heads in the sand, shrug off life insurance and toss making wills into the distant future along with pensions, laughing darkly how we never expect to retire anyway.
In the final minute, the song swerves into more electropop territory as the rippling piano combines with a crisp, insistent drum beat. It’s a magical, ethereal moment, which is but fleeting, like dappling sunlight through the branches of trees in a woodland on a breezy day. In many ways, this captures the essence of the song and its sentiment, in its fleeting ephemerality, a metaphor for life itself.
It ends suddenly, with only inaudible whispers fading to the close, and again the metaphor stands. This is perhaps their strongest and deepest release to date, and best absorbed by candlelight, with a large measure of something intoxicating.
Ahead of the release if their seventh full-length album, A Pathway to the Moon, Unreqvited, the Canadian blackgaze solo-project of 鬼 (Ghost), has unveiled a new lyric visualiser for ‘Void Essence / Frozen Tears’. While it’s a timely taster for the album it’s also a reminder that singles are something of a rarity nowadays. I can’t help but feel that this is a significant loss. Perhaps not so much for acts like Unreqvited, whose singles are unlikely to garner radio play or drive the same kind of album-buying traction singles would in the 80s or 90s. The Internet has certainly changed our habits when it comes to music consumption, and while one may reasonably argue that the old industry model was a massive con on so many levels, we not longer appreciate the single as we once did. Singles were an art, and not only the kind pitched to radio play, and not only the standalone release which bridged spaces between albums and perhaps indicated a transition for an artist.
While it’s true that singles far too long for radio have been around since living memory (The Orb’s ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ and ‘Psychonaut’ by Fields of the Nephilim spring to mind, but let’s not forget the songs radio made exceptions for, like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘American Pie’), it’s really only with the advent of the digital stream that ten-minute singles have become commonplace. It is, of course, much easier when terrestrial radio play isn’t on the cards, and fitting a track onto a side of vinyl isn’t something which requires consideration either.
If the demise of the single as we used to know it has one positive, it’s that artists are no longer constrained or limited by these boundaries. You want to release a single track that’s three hours long with no interruptions? No problem. No physical release and probably no audience, but no problem. Anyway. ‘Void Essence / Frozen’ is a single released as a lyric video, as seems to be popular right now. It may not be especial popular with me, but that’s neither here nor there.
According to the press release, ‘UNREQVITED explain: “The final advance track, ‘Void Essence / Frozen’ reveals the causatum of its antecedent, traversing vehemently into the undistinguished”, mastermind 鬼 comments. “Obstreperous yet endowed in euphony, it emblematizes a juncture in the greater odyssey by which it subsists. Redolent of prior opera, it is an ardent offering to the fervent disciple.”’ ‘Explain’ may be a rather generous overstatement, but it’s a bold counteractive stance against the perpetual dumbing down and overt aversion to anything which could feasibly construed as art in mainstream culture in recent years.
Clocking in at nine minutes, ‘Void Essence / Frozen Tears’ is but a brief interlude following ‘The Antimatter’. It’s also something of a contrast to its full-blooded raging guitar assault, with a graceful, chiming guitar. It takes a while for the rapid kick-drumming to hit and propel the guitar, by now soaring high, into the stratosphere.
There is so much detail, so much texture subtly woven into the fabric of this epic, epic composition, and then, around the mid-point, the vocals finally arrive. The screaming anguish is almost submerged in the mix… and then, suddenly, we’re adrift in space, airless. An ambient calm descends for a time, paving the way for the ultimate theatrical climax.
The album is now set for release on February 7, 2025.
Growing up in the 80s, when Wide Awake Club, and subsequently Wacaday was a huge thing, ‘Mallett’s Mallet’ engrained word association as a lifelong mental exercise. And of course, the rules “you mustn’t pause, hesitate, repeat a word, or say a word I don’t like… The one with the most bruises loses!” are indelibly etched in my mind.
Lemon Power reminded me of this, inadvertently, and certainly not by their own design, by triggering my brain to recall The Mighty Lemon Drops, Lemon Jelly, The Lemonheads, and Cat Power, for no reason other than spontaneous word association. I guess alternative music is packed out with lemons. The London-based duo, fronted by vocalist and guitarist Sere, with Ale on bass, bear precisely nil resemblance on any level, but I felt a compulsion to share my workings, so to speak.
‘I’m An Animal’ is pitched as ‘a stirring, introspective anthem exploring themes of escape and self-discovery, so the fact my mind escapes and ventured on a circuitous voyage of self-discovery before I even hit ‘play’ feel like reasonable preparation.
Although ostensibly the same song, ‘I’m An Animal’ is significantly different from ‘Animal’, which featured on their 2022 EP release A Ghastly Meaningless Aggregate. Over a minute shorter, it’s faster, more stripped back and at the same time, punkier, with more edge and more guts and drive.
It’s fascinating to observe just how a change of treatment can alter a song, and it’s evolved from a slow-burner with a nagging groove and ‘big’ chorus to a proper eye-opening slap. It shows that a good song is a good song however you spin it, but it does feel like they’ve really nailed it with this version, with its bold energy and sense of self-liberation. It’s time to let the animal inside loose.
“Do not tell me to smile / I’m feeling volatile,” Eva Sheldrake warns menacingly against a dense, churning chug of overdriven, distorted guitar. Sporting a pink bikini but wielding a baseball bat, you can sense things are about to kick off. And oh boy, do they kick off.
Eville have balanced fire and fury and dense nu-metal guitars with killer hooks and keen melodies from day one, and ‘Messy’ represented a peak in terms of their accessible but hard brat metal stylings, but something has happened here.
Eva’s clearly the band focal point, and as the vocalist and lyricist, to some extent sets the agenda, and on the evidence of ‘Ballistic’, she’s reached her limit and she’s calling it out on shitty men being fucking cunts.
Daily, there are articles in the news and music media about men who are sleazy, rapey, slimeball abusers as victims – exes, fans, colleagues – reach their limit and speak out. Even when there’s no abuse involved, women are faced, daily, with leering, with looks, with salacious comments, patronising mansplaining, being told to cheer up, or to smile, and simply endless shit from twatty men who feel entitled to invade their space in any way they please. ‘Ballistic’ is an explosion of rage that simply says ‘enough is enough’. As such, there’s less focus the accessible melodic elements and everything is channelled into the message, with the medium corresponding with zero compromise.
The familiar stuttering beats kick in at the start before ‘Ballistic’ fulfils the title’s promise and explodes like ‘Firestarter’ on steroids. The band’s performance sees Eville take a giant leap to a brand new level: the guitar is a concrete wall, the drums thrash frenetically, and the vocals… Sheldrake howls like a demon, a full-throated roar, while simultaneously, the accompanying video shows the band taking their bats and smashing various objects in pure unbridled anger.
‘Fuck the system! Go ballistic!’ It’s a simple hook, but pure perfection in its concision. It’s a battle cry, it’s rousing, it’s time to fuck shit up. It is not time to accept the status quo, to tolerate bullshit and plain shitty behaviour.
It’s sheer coincidence that ‘Ballistic’ has landed just a week after the dismal US election result, and misogynistic wankers started ‘your body, my choice’ trending on the festering cesspit promoting every ‘ism going in the name of ‘free speech’, but with this timely release, Eville have delivered an uncompromising anthem that shoves it to all the incel bros and all the other douches. They’re not all necessarily rabid Andrew Tate fans, but just your everyday casual sexist creep.
Clocking in at two and a quarter minutes, ‘Ballistic’ is everything Eville have promised to date, and more, delivering an absolutely definitive statement, and one the most powerful songs you’ll hear for a long time to come.
The Sisters of Mercy have a long history of unexpected covers, and a not only that, but of really ‘making them their own’, as you’ll hear TV talent show judges froth at contestants. Notably, among their B-sides, BBC sessions and live sets, they’ve covered Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’, ‘Emma’ by Hot Chocolate, ‘Gimme Shelter’ by The Rolling Stones, and Kylie’s ‘Confide in Me’. All great songs, all completely Sistersified, irreverent, but in no way sacrilegious.
When it comes to other bands covering The Sisters (obviously, I’m not meaning tribute acts here, a topic I’d perhaps rather avoid right now)… it tends to be metal bands doing pretty predictable and incredibly straight, faithful renditions, cranking up the distortion and giving the vocals some growl. Paradise Lost’s well-known rendition of ‘Walk Away’ is exemplary, in that it really brings precisely nothing. For this, I have to hand it to Lambchop for their stripped-back country rendition of ‘This Corrosion’, which succeeds in making the wildly bombastic epic something completely different, while still retaining something of its core essence. Such achievements are rare.
So here we come to this take on The Sisters’ 1984 single, ‘Body and Soul’: the band’s first release on Warners and their first recording in a 48-track studio. It was also, notably, the first to feature Wayne Hussey, and marked a radical shift from its predecessor, the seething alternative dancefloor monster and arguably definitive single, ‘Temple of Love’.
Critics and fans alike seemed rather underwhelmed at the time, and while it was a fixture of their live sets though ’84 and ’85, it’s not had many airings since their live comeback in 1990. And yet, for me, it’s a song which holds a unique pull which is hard to describe. The cascading lead guitar line, lacing its way across a busy, detailed, yet still nagging and repetitive bassline, and Eldritch going for a more melodic vocal style makes it something of an anomaly in the Sisters’ catalogue. It also contrasts with the rest of the tracks on the 12”: ‘Train’ is a blinder, murky, urgent, echoey and strung out, while ‘Afterhours’ is a truly unique classic, and the 48-track rerecording of ‘Body Electric’ is strong. In this context, I can appreciate why Vessel may have been drawn to the song.
Credit where it’s due, they’ve made a really decent fist of it, too. Sure, they’ve kind of metalized it a bit, but not in a way that’s big on cliché. And it’s not a completely blueprint copy with just a bit more distortion and growl, either. They’ve slowed it down a bit, and in doing so, succeeded in emphasising the guitar detail to good effect. If anything, this comes on more like Godflesh than any generic goth / metal, the thick, sludgy bass trudges along while the guitar rings harmonic, controlled feedback. The drum machine – an essential component here – follows the pattern of the original, but slowed and with more space and reverb, again, Godflesh and early Pitch Shifter come to mind. The vocals are gravelly, but not overtly metal and work well, especially with the harmonies in the chorus.
It does perhaps seem curious that this should be culled form a concept album but as the band explain, “It’s interesting that a cover song was able to fit the narrative of a concept album so well. I’m a huge fan of The Sisters Of Mercy, and was listening while working from home and taking breaks between writing for the new album when ‘Body And Soul’ spoke to me so directly. It was saying exactly what I needed to hear, what I wanted to say, and that was how the story of The Somnifer ends.”
For context, we learn that ‘Musically, The Somnifermerges the epic drama of Candlemass and Cathedral, the cosmic psychedelia of All Them Witches and King Buffalo, and the aggression of hardcore and crossover scenes, all tied together with the timeless spirit of classic heavy metal.’
It may well be interesting to hear this within that wider setting, but for now, as a standalone – and I write as a huge Sisters fan – that this is, for me, one of the best Sisters covers I’ve heard. The cover art is a nice tribute to one of the Sisters’ best sleeves, too.
I’ve been enthusing over Eville for a while now. This is no small thing: in the main, I’m not really big into Nu-Metal. Back in the late 90s, the emergence of Limp Bizkit and KORN didn’t so much leave me cold as cause me to wilt inside, and as time progressed, the emergence of more, ever lamer and more cliché exponents of the genre pushed me deeper into the realms of despondency. Anyone who’s read anything I’ve written over the last decade will know that I’m not one of those middle-aged sad-sacks who bemoans the fact that there hasn’t been any new music worth listening to released since I turned 30. I’m not frozen in time, and I don’t believe that any genre is completely and irredeemably shit. Even Nu-Metal.
Eville are a case in point. One reason Nu-Metal was shit back in the day is because it was so overtly the domain of white blokes. So the prospect of a female-fronted Nu-Metal band changes things for a start, and having seen this ad recently, I have witnessed first-hand their capacity to whip up a frenzy.
And ‘Blood’ sure whips up a frenzy alright. It captures Eville at their absolute best: massive, slugging guitar riffs that punish, and hard, on every level, paired with poppy autotuned vocals and keen, earworm melodies. ‘Blood’ strikes the perfect balance between gut-punching riffage and strong melodic tunage. It does not get better than this, and you really need Eville in your life.
Ramping up the anticipation for their upcoming album, hot on the heels of ‘O God’, The Battery Farm slam down a second single in the form of ‘Hail Mary’. One of the physical formats happens to be a rather nifty mini-CD. I’m rather partial to these as objects – so much so that I released a double-pack of EPs on 3” CD recently. Back when CDs singles were a standard format – and more often than not as a standard and limited edition, alongside a 7”, 12”, and cassette single, back in the early 90s at the peak of releasing as many formats as was humanly conceivable in order to milk fans and maximise copies sold for chart placement – the mini CD offered a format that was both practical and novel: with a capacity of around twenty-three minutes, they provided just the right amount of playing surface and so not only seemed less wasteful than a 5” disc with its seventy-odd minutes space, but they looked dinky, too. The challenge was always how to package them, though: I have 3” singles by The Sisters of Mercy from the late 80s in 5” jewel cases, complete with plastic adaptors for those whose CD player trays didn’t have a 3” divot, although this sort of seemed to defeat the object of the object, if you get my point, while the ‘battery pack’ style limited editions of the singles from the second album by Garbage were as stupid as they were cool, inasmuch as to play the things, you had to trash the packaging – which was probably the idea as an artistic wheeze, presenting fans and collectors with the dilemma of whether to play or preserve it (or buy two).
Of course, while presentation matters, it’s ultimately the content that counts, and with ‘Hail Mary’, The Battery Farm continue the trajectory of ‘O God’, with some sparse, jittery, slightly mathy instrumentation providing a tension-building lead-in before things kick in hard with a fat, buzzing bass around the mid-point.
‘Get this thing the fuck away from me,’ Benjamin Corry snarls with in a thick northern accent, dripping with vitriol, his throat full of phlegm and gravel, and in no time at all, the anguished vocals are spluttering out through a whirling cacophony of noise. It hits like a punch in the guts, and every spittle-flecked syllable feels like it’s being coughed up from the furthermost recesses of Corry’s soul. And yet, amidst it all, there’s a nagging riff, thumping beat you can really get down to, and even a snippet of backing vocal adding a bit of harmony.
For The Battery Farm, B-sides represent an opportunity to explore and experiment, and ‘2 Shackwell Road’ is no exception, with a collage of vocal samples looping across a stammering drum ‘n’ bass beat which gives way to a low-end rumble and occasional blasts of industrial noise. The result is strange and disturbing.
Taken together, the two singles thus far likely give us a fair indication of what we can expect from the album, Dark Web, due in November. It threatens something stark, uncomfortable, a psychologically demanding set of songs which go deep into dark territories, and promises to be their strongest work to date.
This may be Lanna’s debut single, but she’s by no means new to the industry, and has featured a couple of times here at Aural Aggravation with her band Miss Kill, who have garnered some thumbs up for their feisty grungy / alt rock sound.
Initially, I felt a sense of disappointment, assuming – erroneously, as it turns out – that the duo had parting and would never fulfil the early promise and future potential. It came as a relief to discover that Miss Kill are thriving, and have an album out soon, but in the meantime, Alanna is launching a parallel solo career. It’s a twofer!
But what’s interesting about Lanna’s debut single is that while her bio indicates a continuation of Miss Kill’s energetic flight, their emotive grunge stylings, again referencing inspiration from ‘Alternative, Garage and Pop artists like The Kooks, Hole, Cherry Glazerr, Chris Isaak, Placebo & Pearl Jam’, this feels like quite a departure. The premise is that, ‘rather than whine about breakups and having your heart broken’, ‘Forever’ ‘is all about the amazing feeling you get when you’ve found your special one.’
But for a song that’s so much about an effervescent emotional state, it’s remarkably subdued, with a soft, delicate piano, introspective vocal and backed-off drums with a hushed rimshot keeping slow and steady time. It may be a million miles wide of the mark, but this debut sounds for all the world like Lanna is pining for the thing she’s lost, a sad celebration for the loss of a special one as she finds herself bereft and alone.
That doesn’t mean that ‘Forever’ isn’t true to those principles of grunge and alternative rock, but probably feels more like a mid-album slowie than a lead single, and is more Chris Isaak than Pearl Jam or Hole. Still, it’s a well-realised song with an emotional weight that’s conveyed with sincerity, and leaves many doors open for future releases.
Aural Aggravation 