Posts Tagged ‘Single Review’

Eville – Monster

Posted: 15 March 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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15th March 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Following the stop-gap single release of their remixed version of their debut, ‘Messy’, Eville are back and firing on all cylinders with their first new material of 2024. While it incorporates the defining elements which made their previous two single, ‘Messy’ and ‘Leech’ – namely hard-driving nu-metal guitar slabs juxtaposed with electronic drum ‘n’ bass, which combine to drive a ‘a huge pop chorus,’ ‘Monster’ represents a clear step up, and is, as the title suggests, a monster.

Having a specific goal can provide vital focus in the creative process, and this was central to the creation of ‘Monster’.

If Yard Act are striving to make hits, self-professed ‘brat-metal’ trio Eville are all about the Pits, as Eva (Guitar and vocals) explains the objective for ‘Monster’: ‘We are building on the success of our singles by keeping up the standard our fans expect. ‘Leech’ and ‘Messy’ have done us proud, but we are ready to move up a level with ‘Monster’, I wanted to write a feral tune that would be perfect to open up mosh pits.’

It may be old-school, the notion of making music that will hit live and by playing support slots and touring to build a fan-base, but unless you’ve got massive label backing and PR that can score bags of radio play, it’s the only way for an independent act to grow. And it seems to be working pretty well for Eville.

With its stuttering electronic beats and muted, twisted, heavily filtered synthesized sound at the beginning, we’re instantly reminded of The Prodigy and turn of the millennium Pitch Shifter. Being in the demographic where the arrival of ‘Firestarter’ proved to be an absolutely pivotal moment in music – where a rave act brought in hellish guitars and brutal aggression and went absolutely stratospheric – hearing ‘Monster’ evokes the excitement of that time. It was a seismic shift from grunge, and while grunge served to articulate angst, what followed was more aggressive, more nihilistic, more angry.

What goes around comes around, and it figures that a nu-metal revival would ultimately happen following a lengthy grunge renaissance – but more than that, the generation of new bands are coming of age in truly shit times. It stands to reason that they’re feeling angry and nihilistic. And after many missed out on key life experiences during the pandemic, they’re now finally finding the cathartic release of going mental at a gig. The moshpit is the perfect release.

And yes, ‘Monster’ delivers the potential for an all-out mosh-frenzy. And it’s also got huge alternative radio potential, too. The production is super-crisp, ultra-digital sounding, in the way that on their emergence, Garbage slapped us with a sound that was at once dirty and slick. There are some mammoth guitar chugs, and they’re big and chunky, but smoothed and polished. It may only be a fraction over three minutes long, but this is a massive tune.

Argonaut – Trying to do Nothing

Posted: 1 March 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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24th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

A change is as good as a rest, so the saying goes. I don’t know if I’m entirely convinced, but as I seem incapable of resting – there’s always something to do, and if there’s nothing that needs doing in any given moment, there’s all the stuff I want to do but don’t have enough time for the majority of the time. The trouble is, oftentimes, when I do get a window, I find I’m unable to focus, and simply jump and jitter and remember that I need to put another load of laundry on or tidy something or other or add something to the shopping list, and before I know it, I’ve not even stopped for a second. It makes reading books and watching TV incredibly difficult. I’m by no means alone: the vast majority of people I speak to – admittedly, mostly by text as we all seem to be too busy to take time out to meet in person – all make the same complaint, that there simply isn’t enough time in the day, and when you’re stuck in a perpetual cyclone of life activity, it’s nigh on impossible to stop and to unwind. And then, of course, there’s not only physical rest, but mental rest, and it can often feel as if your brain is your enemy, or certainly not your friend.

They say of the song that it ‘reaches for a fleeting February feeling before it thaws and fades’, and the lyrics are brimming with briefly sketched but evocative visual lyrics

I open the window

Breathe in the morning air

But ideas are like sunlight

They’re everywhere

And yet, despite the theme of restlessness which runs through the song, the images themselves are soothing, as is the mellow musical accompaniment, which they describe as ‘Seven spiritual minutes of ethereal melody and synthesised drone for deep and peaceful nothingness.’ It’s certainly quite a change from their trademark fizzy punky poppy tunes or the guitar-orientated lo-fi post punk stylings, with the final three minutes simply being a long, slow-turning drone solo, which is calming indeed.

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Dual Analogue – Long Divide

Posted: 20 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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13th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Another day, the organic evolution of another obscure splinter-genre or a genre cooked up by the music press, or, indeed a band themselves. Given the ever-expanding void in the space where the music press used to exist, that particular scenario is increasingly unlikely, meaning genre demarcations tend to now originate by word of mouth among fans, or from bands. And much as there’s a heavy cringe element to the way in which the music press historically created genres, from goth to shoegaze and Britpop, alongside a whole bunch which failed to ignite, like Romo and The New Wave of New Wave. Sometimes, trying to build a pigeonhole slips into the domain of trying too hard, and more often than not, genre labels simply serve as shortcuts which bypass the requirement to engage in meaningful dialogue as to what an act is actually doing, what they really sound like,

And so the arrival of ‘Long Divide’ by ‘Seattle-based ‘turbowave’ pioneers, Dual Analog serves as an educational piece. They pitch themselves as ‘combining New Wave and Heavy Metal into a brand new genre.’

There’s nothing wrong with ‘Long Divide’, but it doesn’t sound especially metal or new wave, carrying most of the trappings of 80s electropop – although image-wise, there’s a whole heap of 80s hair-rock influence going on, with bandanas and studs all in the mix. And hair. Lots and lots of hair.

‘Long Divide’ isn’t really the sound of bandanas and studs and hair, and is more Depeche Mode circa Songs of Faith and Devotion with some guitars played lowed but mixed low, meaning the synths dominate the sound. The vocals register in that same baritone region of Dave Gahan and a whole host of post punk / goth bands, but there’s something about the delivery – level, tone, pitch, I’m not sure – which hovers on the cusp of uncomfortable… but as the song progresses, it seems to slot together rather better. And then they whip out a big old guitar solo near the end and boom, you’ve got you hair rock fix.

Time was I’d have wrapped up a review with a pithy summation., but this feels increasingly forced and corny, and at the same time, presenting a verdict feels little different to casting oneself into the mould of a star-rating – it’s arbitrary and lazy in equal measure. As much as ascribing a genre is a short-cut, so is declaring an album a 7/10; it’s a box-ticking exercise that appeases the lowest common denominator. A hedge-betting 6 or 7 out of 10 is the coward’s way of saying you’re being polite and sitting on the fence. Whereas I’m ok with saying this is… ok, so-so, middling to me but likely to find a solid fanbase.

AA

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Ever Elysian – Feeling Good / House of the Rising Sun

Posted: 19 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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16th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

A good cover brings something different to a song. That doesn’t mean rendering it unrecognisable or necessitate complete irreverence, but a cover that’s so faithful to the original as to be a carbon copy is utterly redundant. Marilyn Manson’s cover of Soft Cell’s cover of ‘Tainted Love’ is a perfect example of a pointless cover. Johnny Cash’s cover of ‘Hurt’ and The Fall’s take on ‘Lost in Music’, on the other hand, are everything you could want from a cover. ‘Owning the song’, as they say on shit like X Factor and The Voice.

How could any artist bring anything new to either of these well-trodden and frankly threadbare standards? That Ever Elysian have actually succeeded is quite a feat, and a welcome and pleasant surprise. They pitch themselves as purveyors of ‘classic rock,’ ‘soft rock,’ and ‘soul rock’ which does them rather a disservice on the evidence of this inspired offering.

The blurred image which serves as the single’s artwork conveys the woozy, warped opening of their take on ‘Feeling Good’. It’s still got the essential jazzy vibe, but it’s twisted, messed: sultry is replaced with sedation, as if the room is spinning in a late-night nightmare. It’s the sound of ‘feeling good’ a few moments before you fall flat on your face and find you’re incapable of getting up, and you realise everything looks weird and you haven’t a clue who you are, let alone where. And then it takes wings with some big, bold strings, and finally, the flourish of a heroic guitar solo.

‘House of the Rising Sun’ again pairs it back, and slows it down, too, getting deep under the skin of this cautionary tale to render it with nightmarish qualities. This is one of those covers that gives one a moment’s pause to confirm it is in fact a cover, and when the penny drops as to how they’ve approached it… it’s a shiversome moment. Deep, dark guitar tones imbue the performance with a haunting, gothic quality, delivered with a dash of theatricality. The jazz flavour leans into tipsy post-rock and a slow burn that surges to something like the Amy Winehouse Bond theme that never was. It’s a daring rendition, but by absolutely no means disrespectful or irreverent: instead, these two interpretations draw out dark elements which lie at the heart of the originals and bring them to the fore. These are smart, considered, well-executed and exciting versions.

AA

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Ergo Phizmiz –The Tin Drummer Has Collapsed

Posted: 18 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 16th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

For myriad reasons, my head’s a shed of late, and I’ve been doing this for coming up for sixteen years now, cranking out reviews on a more or less daily basis, sometimes during certain spells up to five or six in a day and taking in three or four live shows in a week, on top of dayjob and, since 2011, parenting. So I can be forgiven for not remembering every artist I’ve covered, let alone the details. But somewhere along the way, on seeing this arrive in my inbox, I recall that I have written about Ergo Phizmiz. I have no idea what I wrote, or when, whether I dug it or not, what kind of music it was, but I did write. Ergo Phizmiz isn’t a name one forgets easily, after all.

And so it is that ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ is the sixth release in the second season of Mortality Tables’ ‘LIFEFILES’ series, a series of singles whereby ‘Recordings of places, people, objects, moments in time, environments and quotidian events are shared with a range of artists working with sound. Those artists are then free to respond to the recordings in any way they like, either through manipulation or composition.’

Seems I’ve got some catching up to so, since, ‘Season 01 of the LIFEFILES series commenced in March 2023 with contributions from Simon Fisher Turner, Veryan, Xqui, Rupert Lally, Andrew Spackman and Dave Clarkson,’ and ‘Season 02 commenced in September 2023 with contributions so far from Audio Obscura, Todeskino, boycalledcrow, Simon Fisher Turner, Maps and Ergo Phizmiz.’

The one thing about arriving at a late point in a series and not even in the first season of singles, over a TV series is that there’s no cause for consternation over the plot arc or who the characters are or their back-stories. A single is a single, and it should, by its nature, stand alone, free of the context of series or album, and ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ does.

As the accompanying notes inform us, ‘The following three source sounds were chosen at random:

1. Loud bass music played from a car at the Akeman Inn, Bucks (21.06.2021)

2. A rubber lid stretched across a ramekin (07.07.2022)

3. Seren playing an old acoustic guitar (01.11.2023)’

Phizmiz’s response is to hurl them all together at random, too. ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ begins with a roaring barrage of noise, the roaring thrum of an engine and what I understand to be ‘loud bass music’. On ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’, Phizmiz doesn’t collage or overlap the source materials – which would likely have produced an utterly head-smashing cacophony – instead favouring a different kind of cut-up method, akin to the ‘drop-in’ method devised by Burroughs and Gysin, whereby the different segments are dropped in, ‘randomly’. The sources follow one another, and it’s a haphazard-sounding patchwork of unrelated sounds, although the rubber lid and acoustic guitar aren’t as different as one might anticipate.

‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ is strange, and interesting, and as an experimental assemblage, it isn’t designed to be accessible or musical, or conform to any conventional expectations of a ‘single’. This is nothing more and nothing less than an artistic response to a set of parameters set as part of an experiment – and one that’s novel in its directness and simplicity.

AA

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Shannen Bamford – Addicted

Posted: 16 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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16th February 2024

James Wells

US singer-songwriter Shannen Bamford trades in melodic rocky indie, and despite being a solo artist in name, delivers a full band sound. If the title brings connotations of anguish, agony, conflict, and distress, the song itself steps meekly in and looks at its shoes as it ponders what to confess.

With an acoustic guitar and Shannen’s easy, floating vocals to the fore, and with a picked guitar running through it, ‘Addicted’ is tuneful and accessible, as well as layered in its sound. While there’s no real musical resemblance, in terms of sound and production, I’m vaguely reminded of Natalie Imbruglia, but Bamford’s delivery is altogether more subdued and introspective, and perhaps less enunciated, more breathy. ‘I’m addicted to the pain’, she sings in this song of sadness and loss, on which the mood is more melancholy than anguish or agony.

Structurally, there’s no real separation between the verses and choruses, with the song instead favouring a cyclical repetition which rises and falls along with the vocal melody. It works, not least of all because of its sing-song nature, and her vocal delivery balances confidence with an intimate feel.

So far, so much ok but nothing particularly special, but half a minute from the end, it bursts into a big, big climax, where everything gets louder and the guitars overheat and suddenly, from nowhere, it’s a rush, and the preceding four and a half minutes of ‘nice’ proves to have been suspense while she was holding back.

I’m a sucker for a slow-burner, a climax, a crescendo, and find the fact that a large majority of listeners won’t give a song more than thirty seconds before skipping – because they’re missing out. The final thirty seconds of ‘Addicted’ are explosive and transform the entire song.

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Astari Nite – Necessity Meal

Posted: 10 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Negative Gain Productions – 9th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Pitched as ‘a battle cry against the facade of perfection that suffocates an authentic connection’ and a song that’s ‘about the dark, often unseen journey of seeking forgiveness and finding solace in the unexpected kindness of strangers’ ‘Necessity Meal’ is perhaps the ultimate hybrid of everything that’s gothy and on the darker side of electro/synth pop.

I’d wager it’s pretty much impossible to write about ‘Necessity Meal’ without recourse to Depeche Mode. That isn’t to say it’s just some rip-off, so much as an indication of just how deep and broad their influence is felt at the darker end of the electro spectrum.

‘Necessity Meal’ is built around a rolling drum beat with a harsh snare, and some brittle, trilling synths pave an intro that gives way to some guitars that are by turns cutty and deliver strains of feedback. The verses are a bit rappy / spoken and I can’t help but think of it being like a gothy take on grebo and it sort of works but sort of doesn’t – in the way that The Sugarcubes worked but didn’t: you know, you either dug – or more likely tolerated – the Einar bits, or outright hated them as rubbish intrusions into some great songs, but ultimately, it worked because the Björk bits and the overall thing was more than worth the clash. This feels confused and confusing, a bit messy. But then, as front man Mychael says of the song, “In the end of it all, life can be rather messy, and I can sing if I want to, at my own pity-party!” In the mix there’s a bunch of noise that casts a nod to Nine Inch Nail, and…

…And so it is that from all of this sonic jostling emerges a magnificent refrain: the vocals suddenly come on like David Bowie, and with a heavy sarcasm, deliver the line, ‘Thank you, thank you for the guilt’. It’s unexpectedly, and almost inexplicably, affecting, but somehow, in this moment, the whole song, and everything around it makes some sort of sense.

AA

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Áron Porteleki – Cryptic Bodies

Posted: 6 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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5th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

People often say they hate surprises. I know where they’re coming from, although by and large, the surprise is less the issue than their reaction being seen. As children, we’ve all had the Christmas party and the birthday where we’ve suffered a head-exploding embarrassment where something’s been sprung unexpectedly, and where, as a consequence the walls have closed in and you’ve felt entrapped within a tight, tunnelling space and simply wanted to disappear – right? But there are two kinds of surprises: good ones and bad ones, just as there are two kinds of music: good, and bad.

‘Cryptic Bodies’ is good music, and the perfect surprise, presenting as a discordant chaotic mess of purgatorial abrasion, which smashes its way into a collision of post-punk and… well, what else is hard to say, beyond sinewy, straining dissonance. Really, this is one of those ‘what the fuck is this?’ releases. Personally, I absolutely love this kind of stuff, that’s challenging, shouty, difficult to listen to, let alone define. The music shifts in tone and intensity, a meandering twisting thread of jangliness and extraneous noise that bears jazz influences without being jazz, noise-rock elements without being noise-rock. What does it mean? What is it for? Cryptic is certainly the word, and perhaps it’s best to simply revel in the strangeness than attempt to unravel and decipher it.

But there’s more. The track is lifted from Hungarian artist Porteleki’s forthcoming album Smearing, which is out in March, and it’s not his first work by the title ‘Cryptic Bodies’, as a moment’s cursory research brings us to a ‘documentary’ film on YouTube, uploaded in three parts, which captures Porteleki – a percussionist first and foremost – performing a solo score, which is ‘structured yet improvised’ as the audio backdrop to ‘a contemporary dance piece, where 5 dancers traverse through space, body and time to throbbing experimental live metal music. The work is inspired by ancient bodily practices such as Egyptian mummification and Mesopotamian occult healing rites’.

Being instrumental, and extending to around forty minutes, it’s a powerful soundtrack to a visually striking and remarkably compelling multimedia experience, which also showcases Porteleki’s inventive, atmosphere-building approach to guitar playing. Elsewhere online, his SoundCloud uploads present an array of experimental works, ranging from minimalist dark ambience to wild, maximalist bursts of noise, meaning how representative of the album this cut might be is anyone’s guess. But given the title track, which is currently streaming on Bandcamp, there’s a strong possibility that it’s going to be an extremely varied and extremely unusual collection of highly experimental bits and pieces. ‘No genres’ he states on his Bandcamp. No kidding: Porteleki’s modus operandi appears to be to shatter every mould there is. He isn’t so much leftfield, or outside the box, but outside the field, and he’s burned the box to ashes.

Porteleki clearly likes to push boundaries, and none more than his own. ‘Cryptic Bodies’ offers a gateway into the world of an artist who warrants exploration – but not if you don’t like surprises.

AA

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Eville – Messy (BLAIRTHEPRODUCER REMIX)

Posted: 2 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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2nd February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger… so the cliché goes. ‘That must make me Hercules’ was JG Thirlwell’s response on the Foetus track ‘Grace of God’ from the album Flow. He’s a man who should know, having not only forged a career on the outermost limits of the fringes and survived a brief spell on Sony and else controversy and vilification and general unpopularity as a contrast to a rabid cult following add up to in combination.

Eville are living proof of Thirlwell’s take. When they wrote and first released ‘Messy’ they could not have had the vaguest inkling of just how messy things might get. Theirs is a classic story of disappointment and industry failings, but also of bloody-mindedness, stubbornness and ultimately of resilience.

While Eville’s debut release, ‘Messy’ was picked up – and received enthusiastically by a minority of outlets – and you know, I will take a moment to blow the Aural Aggravation trumpet here, because despite our extremely limited capacity, we do get behind those acts we recognise as having clear potential and which, given the right exposure could and should break through.

Instead of a straight-up re-release, they’re following up ‘Leech’ with a killer remix of their second single. Blair the Producer’s twist on it preserves the blunt force and ferocity of the original version, but brings some extra edge. It’s beefy as fuck and is the definitive sound of nu-metal for the new generation.

No doubt there’ll be middle-aged twats bemoaning how it’s too pop or it’s not the same as the shit that was coming out twenty-five years ago. Middle-aged twats – and generally people over the age of thirty-five, who’ve hit the wall and concluded there’s been no decent new music since they were twenty-one – are plain wrong, and they should be directing their dissatisfaction inwards, and not only examining their own sad old lives, but remembering what is was like when they were in their late teens and early twenties. The sad old cunts who still revel in the days of Britpop might want to remind themselves that the golden age they so revere was largely a revival of various bygone eras, primarily the days of 60s pop and mod – mashed up and rehashed. These people are missing the point that progress happens, and the next generation will inevitably pick up on the music of the one before, or the one before that, and make it their own, and instead of bemoaning kids and their lack of ideas, should take it as a compliment that they’ve picked up the baton and are running with it in their own direction. Eville have that baton clenched tightly, and are running far faster than the pack right now.

The Silent Era – Heaven//Hell – Slowpio

Posted: 31 January 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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15th January 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

As Joni Mitchell sang on ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ ‘Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?’ This will surely prove to be a true summary of the music press, which has been utterly decimated since the turn of the millennium, and seems to be vanishing at a rate faster than the Amazon in the last few years. Suddenly, there is outcry and all kinds of furore following the announcement that Pitchfork will be absorbed into GQ by magazine monoliths Condé Naste – or Condé Nasty, if you will – as publishing becomes ever more focused on profits and the bottom line. John Doran has today published an essay in The Guardian. It’s good, but it’s perhaps too little, too late. I don’t recall the same level of discontent over the demise of Sounds, or Melody Maker, or NME, but perhaps this is the straw whereby people finally realise that, after decades of slating music critics as pond life and scum for unfavourable reviews and scabbing free CDs and guest list, the music press is actually a vital wing of journalism. The prose may not always be Shakespeare or even Hemingway, but the press exists to raise awareness and engage in dialogue around acts people may not have heard of, or otherwise only encounter via the hype. And the press is also low-cost advertising. It costs a hell of a lot less to bung a CD in the post (if only that was still a regular thing) or grant entry to a live show than the expense of pissing away hods on sponsored links on social media.

Algorithms are no substitute for ears and the critical faculties of a functional brain, and ultimately do nothing but narrow the path of engagement. I know, I know, many people over thirty-five bemoan there having been no decent new music since they were twenty, but that’s simply not true, and what happens when people reach a certain age and disengage from the world. Some simply can’t be saved. But it’s wrong to deprive those who can from the whole world of exciting new music that’s out there, and there is absolutely stellar new stuff emerging every single day.

And because I’m still here, and because this site operates completely independently, on a zero-budget basis, and it’s just something I do by compulsion and on top of the dayjob which pays the bills, I can bring you this belter double A-side release by The Silent Era. ‘Heven/Hell’ is sharp, sassy, a beefy blast of post-punk energy propelled by loping drums and driving guitars and it lands between Evanescence and All About Eve, a collision of goth and melodic metal with blistering results. Is it epic? Yes, yes it is. It’s hard, it’s heavy, but it’s also tuneful.

The same is true of virtual flipside ‘Scorpio’. Recorded live at the BBC, the sound quality is as good as a studio recording, and it captures the band bringing low-slugging riffy weight atop some deft bass fretwork and a powerful vocal delivery.

This is exciting and exhilarating stuff, but you’re unlikely to find coverage of The Silent Era in the page of GQ. And that’s probably for the best, but… they deserve it. But since it won’t happen, you can thank me later.

AA

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