Sometimes, a song has the capacity to make you feel different. I find this happens most often when it’s least expected. ‘Coming Good’, the debut release by Learn to Surf came particularly unexpected. It’s certainly not my usual kind of thing – but there’s just something about that melancholic, reverby picked guitar and the washes of rippling chords cascading down over the top, and there’s a nuanced complexity in the relationship between this, and the layered harmonies, which are imbued with a carefree dappled-haze chilledness with a twist of wistful pining that’s hard to really put a finger on.
Because all music is now a vast nexus of intertext and influence, unravelling or otherwise attempting to frame songs – and bands – in a clear and specific context is nigh on impossible, not least of all because so much context comes from within, from one’s own spheres of reference, and as culture has become increasingly fragmented, so our experiences and references lose the sense of universality they once would have had. Time was, when there were only four, or five, TV channels, the entire nation was glued to the same show at the same time, and the following day, everyone would be talking about that episode, even if it was only EastEnders. This was a time when the main way to access music was via the radio, and if you wanted to hear anything beyond the charts or the classics, you needed to tune into John Peel, or Annie Nightingale after the Top 40 on a Sunday night. How times have changed!
I digress, but for a purpose, insomuch as the more disparate our experiences and reference points become, the less relatable and relevant they become to anyone who doesn’t live inside your head. I spent an age wondering what it was about ‘Coming Good’ that sounded familiar, before eventually concluding that it was ‘Gentle is Her Touch’ by Post war Glamour Girls, and the Alt-country / Americana act Sons of Bill on their Cure-influenced last album Oh God, Ma’am. It would likely be more useful for a broader audience to draw comparisons to Ride, and note the jangly indie psychedelic aspects of what is an absolutely marvellous, goosebump-inducing song with ‘classic’ vibes radiating from it in every direction.
The Melvins’ latest opus, Tarantula Heart (April 19, Ipecac Recordings), is quite possibly the band’s most unconventional, catchiest and imaginative work yet, continuing a legacy celebrated for its eccentric and extraordinary output.
A preview of the five-song, 39-minute collection arrives with the release of ‘Working The Ditch,’ and the accompanying Jesse Nieminen-created video. Nieminen previously directed the band’s short film, ‘A Walk With Love and Death.’
Watch the video here:
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“The way we approached Tarantula Heart was different than any other Melvins’ album,” explains Buzz Osborne. “I had Dale and Roy Mayorga come in and play along with Steven and I to some riffs, then I took those sessions and figured out what parts would work and wrote new music to fit. This isn’t a studio approach we’ve ever taken. Usually we have the songs written BEFORE we start recording!”
“The majority of Tarantula Heart has dual drum parts,” adds long-time Melvins drummer Dale Crover. “Roy is an amazing drummer. We would discuss what we would do pattern wise, then we’d just go for it. Improvising riffs and trading off on drum fills.”
In actuality nothing appeared out of thin air. Buzz spent hours and hours with the drum tracks by himself writing songs to what he was hearing drum wise. “When the rest of the band heard these songs I’d created from the sessions, they were blown away,” Buzz shares. “These were fully developed new songs that they’d never heard before that had seemingly appeared out of thin air. Presto!”
Recorded, mixed and co-produced by longtime Melvins’ collaborator Toshi Kasai, the album also features We Are The Asteroid guitar player Gary Chester. Gary and the Melvins’ history goes back to their days on Boner Records, with the guitar player formerly having been a part of the legendary band, Ed Hall.
Next month sees the Melvins head overseas, playing in Japan for the first time since 2019 following a stint where they join current labelmates, Mr. Bungle, for a trek across Australia and New Zealand. Buzz and Bungle bass player Trevor Dunn team up later this year for the “King Dunn Tour,” a 45-date excursion that sees the pair play songs from the King Buzzo releases: This Machine Kills Artists and Gift of Sacrifice. The full list of dates can be found via Ipecac.com/tours.
Hypnotic French Post-Metal quintet Uncomfortable Knowledge have a video out for ‘An Empty Heart Cannot Break’; the fifth and final single to be released from the upcoming sophomore album Lifeline. About the track the band expound that “To be able to accept love, to receive it and to give it weakens us. The phoenix, on the other hand, survives and is reborn alone, no danger because an empty heart cannot break. Therefore the title reflects the evolution of the narrator. He finally achieves a state of completeness and balance through the acceptance of love. He understands that far from weakening, his heart is only strengthened by it. Through a big riff, and an intense melodic progression, this piece aims to put us back on our feet in the face of life’s adversity”.
Watch the video here:
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With Lifeline, we are invited to think about our position in the world, about the meaning of our life, as well as the many sided interplays we may share with our fellow men, while remembering every instant counts. The album will also reveal baroque stringed settings and dark film atmospheres that will add a unique dimension to their sound and is an invitation to both perseverance and resilience.
The band have a series of gigs announced this year…
03/02/24 – Paloma – Nîmes – France 10/02/24 – Black Lab – Wasquehal – France 11/02/24 – MCP Apache – Fontaine L’Evêque – Belgium 16/02/24 – Dropkick – Orleans – France 09/03/24 – Ciné Concert – Ales – France 19/05/24 – AK Shelter – Nantes – France
Finnish post-metal collective BESRA have recently shared a music video for a new song off the band’s second full-length album Transition, which was released in late September on Suicide Records.
Titled ‘Valor’, this new video was directed by Atte Heinonen and Ville Kaisla and is now playing here:
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The band’s vocalist, Hannes Hietarinta had this to say about this new track: "’Valor’ is a good example of the journey we have taken from our debut to the present: from a slow, almost sludgy post-metal groove to a dynamic, progressive, and tighter rhythmic groove. While the new album explores very vast landscapes, ‘Valor’ is definitely on the more energetic side thematically as well: the familiar melancholy and distress have been replaced with courage, honor, and a yearning for lost virtues. In our opinion, a tight song overall!”
Recorded at Rødhouse Studio and mixed and mastered by Cult Of Luna’s Magnus Lindberg, the follow-up to their critically acclaimed first studio album Anhedonia is the result of a long and arduous writing and recording process and sees BESRA circling through a vast spectrum of emotions and sonic textures encompassing elements of post-rock, post-metal and ambient.
Leeds based militant dance-punk duo Polevaulter dropped their debut album ‘Hang Wave’ on Friday to widespread acclaim.
If you haven’t heard it yet, it’s a superb sonic assault of seismically sharp bass and loin-grinding beats, and we wrote about it at length recently.
Now following the album release and ahead of their UK / EU tour starting this week, Polevaulter have unveiled a brand-new video for the album’s latest single ‘Pissed In The Baths’, which you can watch here:
The sonic assault the two create is almost arrogant, fathered from the marriage of seismically sharp bass and loin-grinding beats. The words are quipped and brayed atop the aural landscape. They are boastful, accusing, repellent and inviting, they question and skewer the veins of masculinity, sexuality, the order of things, the music industry and the miserable reality of the North. Polevaulter have toured with JOHN, shared a stage with Thank, Mandy Indiana, Pink Turns Blue, Bambara, A Place To Bury Strangers, VR Sex, and others.
Now, following the album release and ahead of their UK / EU tour starting this week, Polevaulter have unveiled a brand new video for the album’s latest single ‘Pissed In The Baths’.
On writing the track, Polevaulter’s Jon Franz explains; “Pissed In The Baths came about from Dan’s chorus riff which he just pulled out of thin air, we made the verses more straight and got it to swing with my delay. I wrote the lyrics pretty quickly on a bus to the doctors, lyrically it’s about manifesting strength and about us setting sail, I tied the chorus into it as those lines came from a while ago about warming oceans and rising sea levels, it all got glued together.”
The result is a cacophonous injection of climate change activism, brimming with hypnotic beats and thick fuzzy bass and glossed in a coat of sharp unnerving darkness. Chaotic and smashing you in the face with its tidal wave of full-on noise and addictive shouted refrains, Polevaulter are not holding any punches with ‘Pissed In The Baths’ as they continue on their bulldozer-like mission to tear up boundaries.
Debut Polevaulter album ‘Hang Wave’, is a hard-hitting dark and fiercely off-kilter slab of awesome sickly noise alongside baritone-led lyricism acerbic, vitriolic and intense throughout, raising eyebrows and dropping jaws. The album features recent hits like ‘Trend’ and newly released single ‘Violently Ill’ which Polevaulter’s Jon Franz explains- “has more sparse vocals than most of our tracks, gives our music a chance to shine. Its maybe my favourite song on the album.” Other tracks like ‘Pissed In The Baths’, ‘Mint Condition’ and ‘Mia Goth Made Me Do It’ all stand out in what is essentially an absolute mind melting juggernaut of a punk electro dance record for 2024, which lays down the gauntlet from a studio perspective alongside Polevaulter’s diligent process to earnestly take the title of ‘hardest working band in showbusiness’.
Polevaulter weren’t always a duo though as Jon Franz recalls, “We were steaming along as a post-punk band with various noise elements and then lost some members over covid, but me and Dan wanted to keep going. We thought about starting a new band, but we felt that this still had legs. Ultimately, it’s not that different, me and Dan did most of the composition, and we’ve got a clear vision on what we want to do. After touring last year as a two-piece, figuring out whether we could even do it, we realised there’s definitely no reason to stop – and it’s definitely getting better every time we have a round of gigs. I like not carrying instruments around – that’s quite nice. Although, having said that, we’re a duo now and we have more amps, which is weird. Dan has three amps now, and I have two.”
The album was co-produced by longtime friend and artist Shaene Hunter which straddles confidently atop several themes, to which Jon Franz says, “This being our first album or our maiden voyage, I dunno why, but I like a lot of nautical terminology and see that kind of visual imagery when this album was being made. I also write a lot of lyrics about things that directly affect me, like my masculinity, my mind, about being tough and overly arrogant to sell the image of us we’ve created. We have a lot of reference points that I work in, and since we’ve become a two piece, I think there is a lot more depth to everything we do now. We’ve made ‘Hang Wave’ because it’s about time we made this kind of a statement about who we are, what we want to do and what we sound like after multiple line-up changes and situations slowed the progress me and Dan were desperate to make. Since we’ve been a two piece, we’ve got far more done, and we both feel really proud of this album, and we feel strongly that it will do what we need it to do.”
Polevaulter recently performed their debut album on repeat for 8 hours straight via a livestream to raise funds for the Gaza Sunbirds, a para cycling team based in the Gaza Strip. The team is currently providing emergency food parcels and aid to families sheltering around the Gaza Strip. Watch the livestream back here:
Farhood Nik and Anis Oveisi have reunited to form a new electronic group called Delusive Relics. After touring internationally with the band they had in China, Iran, Turkey, France and USA. Farhood reignited his love for electronic music and finally followed his childhood dream of being an electronic artist Delusive Relics describe their music as a culmination of genres such as Synthpop, Industrial, EBM and Electronic Rock and are inspired by artists such as Depeche Mode, Massive Attack, NIN and Tangerine Dream.
Their reminiscent love for older forms of electronic music allow for them to create music in a style that is a breath of fresh air in today’s electronic scene. Delusive Relics’ 2018 debut went off with a bang as they released their single ‘A Woman’s Diary’, the first in an 11-track series titled ‘Chaotic Notions’ was release in February 2019. ‘A Woman’s Diary’ has already been broadcasted on MTV and VH1 and racking up thousands for views on YouTube. Delusive Relics pride themselves on addressing taboo issues with their music too as they dedicated their debut song to gender equality.
In 2019, Delusive Relics was nominated to New England Music Award as Best Band from New Hampshire. The band released the "Blind Owl" album in 2021, They are currently working on an EP called "Mycelium" which is set release later in 2024.
Ahead of the release of their debut collaborative album Orchards of a Futile Heaven, out February 23rd, The Body & Dis Fig share potent, affecting new single ‘Dissent, Shame.’
The track’s devastating force lies beyond pure noise or abrasive textures, evoking weighty emotions with a minimalist drone dirge that gradually builds into an enchanting choral passage. Suffused with a raw vulnerability and a longing for catharsis, Dis Fig’s voice searches for escape in the midst of oppressive atmospheres as if determined to find relief from guilt. She elaborates on the track: “It’s about the act of abandonment, and the guilt and shame that comes with it. Running away from something, seemingly towards your own safety, but as your conscience picks you apart the entire way.”
Orchards of a Futile Heaven affirms The Body & Dis Fig as skilled sound sculptors who have an exceptional ability to make deeply affecting music, bracing as it is touching, harrowing as it is awe-inspiring. While sampling has long been essential to each, The Body & Dis Fig deftly meld their differing approaches to sampling and creating extreme sounds until the boundaries are entirely blurred. The group transmute weighty emotions into bristling sonic atmospheres, buoyed by Dis Fig’s ethereal vocals. She elaborates: “I love the balance. You could never connect to just a machine as well as you could a human. Which is why the combination is so potent for me. I don’t want to hide. I think nothing connects you more empathetically than another human’s voice.”
The Body & Dis Fig plan to tour throughout the US, UK, and Europe in 2024. Dates and details incoming soon.
Listen to ‘Dissent, Shame’ here:
The Body & Dis Fig are a natural pair. Each has pioneered instantly recognisable worlds of sound all their own that defy any traditional categorisations or boundaries. The Body, Lee Buford and Chip King, continually challenge any conventional conception of metal, collaborating with myriad artists and from the folk-leanings of their work with BIG|BRAVE to their groundbreaking work with the Assembly of Light Choir to the intensity of their collaborations with OAA or Thou.
Dis Fig, aka Felicia Chen, pushes electronic music into dark extremes, from warped DJ sets to avant production, from being a member of Tianzhuo Chen’s performance-art series TRANCE to being the vocalist with The Bug. The Body and Dis Fig find kinship in reimagining what it means to make “heavy music”. Their debut Orchards of a Futile Heaven is the perfect synthesis of two forces, twisting melodicism and intoxicating rhythms, layering a dense miasma of distortion with intense beats and a soaring voice clawing its way towards absolution.
The two found kinship in their desire to find new avenues to make heavy music that looked beyond tropes of metal and electronic music by merging the two. “I always wanted the heavier stuff but I also didn’t really like heavier guitar music,” says Buford. “None of it really felt quite heavy enough to me. A human can’t be as heavy as a machine.”
They may have switched labels and stepped things up a bit, but you couldn’t exactly say they’ve sold out.
Watch the video here:
The video was filmed in a barn in Roxbury, NY, and follows their Partisan debut single ‘It’s The Magic’, which earned them praise from Rolling Stone (‘Song You Need To Know’), NME (“on their way to becoming the next great NYC band”), Paste (“an apocalyptic wasteland of NYC’s best underground punk”) and more.
‘The Heart’ is a high-speed train of delirious percussion (two drummers!) and wonderfully demented electronic samples, weaving in and out of frontman Bret Kaser’s lyrics that inquire into the state of spiritual marketplace and the isolating results of consumption. It’s an exhilarating and singular piece of hardcore electronic punk, with Lip Critic using a broad palette of only the most extreme hues of emotion, each marked by a distinctive danceable mania.
Fresh off dates with Screaming Females for their last-ever tour and shows in London and Pitchfork Paris, Lip Critic will tour extensively in 2024. Their first-ever headline tour will kick off this summer. Prior to that, the band will play a special hometown show on 22 Feb at Elsewhere (Zone 1) in Brooklyn and stop at SXSW for a string of shows.
Aural Aggro faves Hammok follow a brace a monster EPs – Jumping/Dancing/Fighting and Now I Know with a new single, with ‘Seance’ providing the latest taste of their upcoming debut album look how long lasting everything is moving for one. The single is served up with an explosive one-take music video produced in the childhood home of vocalist Tobias Maxwell Osland.
‘Seance’ shows the band’s most direct side yet. The song barely rounds out two and a half minutes and at that time gives you a masterclass in hardcore chorus flair. The soundscape is controlled by a constantly forward-propelling drum machine and a metallic synth bass where vocalist Tobias Osland is given plenty of room to dominate the listener’s eardrum.
With fragmented images inspired by horror films and occult traditions, ‘Seance’ brings out a deeply dark and disturbing reality where the protagonist finds themselves in their worst nightmare. A feeling of being haunted or persecuted, a life where your reality is terrorized. Where it all began, in a SEANCE.
The Kut just re-released her holiday single ‘Waiting For Christmas’ with £1 of every CD, vinyl or download sale & all streaming income going to Music Venue Trust this year. According to MVT statistics, over 120 grassroots venues have closed in the past 12 months, including the shock closure of the iconic Moles Club, Bath this week. There are also a further 84 venues in trouble, as grassroots venues continue to struggle despite their huge impact on artist development and the communities they serve.
“We know how important our grassroots music venues are, we live them and breathe them and so are delighted to support MVT in their goal to protect, secure and improve them” explained Maha (AKA The Kut) in her blog announcement this week.
Watch ‘Waiting for Christmas’ here:
The news comes alongside her confirmation as main support for legendary Canadian rocker Danko Jones on his imminent UK tour leg. Hosted at a number of iconic venues this December, the tour visits Bristol, Glasgow, Nottingham, Manchester and London in a final 2023 showdown for The Kut and her all-star collective.
Initially released in 2020, ‘Waiting For Christmas’ is a melancholy take on the holiday period, highlighting the sombre pressures surrounding it, yet with an uplifting message, completed by orchestral strings and Christmas bells. The single charted in the Top 100 of the Official Single Sales Chart (No.65) and at No.10 in the UK Physical Singles Chart on release, where it has subsequently spent 6 weeks. Recorded by Jack Ashley (Popes of Chillitown) at Fiction Studios London and mastered at Abbey Road by Frank Arkwright (e.g. Elton John), the accompanying music video was filmed during the recording session and selected for US airplay by MTV, LATV and Music Choice.
DANKO JONES + THE KUT
UK TOUR DATES
12/12 Thekla BRISTOL 13/12 King Tuts GLASGOW 14/12 Rescue Rooms NOTTINGHAM 15/12 Rebellion MANCHESTER 16/12 Garage LONDON
Aural Aggravation 