Posts Tagged ‘Southern Lord’

偏執症者 – Satyagraha

Posted: 2 July 2016 in Albums
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Southern Lord – 10th June 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

For the uninitiated, 偏執症者 translates as ‘Paranoid’. But despite the logographic characters, 偏執症者 are, in fact, Swedish, although their brand of full-on, fiery, D-beat hardcore punk is heavily influenced by Japanese noise. Satyagraha, first released in 2015, is their first full-length album. Full-length is relative and contextual, of course: with ten tracks and a combined running time of under twenty-eight minutes, it’s shorter than the majority of individual tracks on the latest Swans album. Of course, this squally, thrashy mess of noise exists in an entirely different realm from the new Swans album, and in many ways stands at the very opposite end of the spectrum of antagonistic noise.

The impact of the album relies on its frenetic, breakneck speed, and its relentlessness. Satyagraha does not offer texture or range: it’s an all-out assault, and the album’s primary objective is to slam everything home at full tilt, optimal speed and maximum volume. It’s no bad thing, and it certainly works for them. It’s an album that begins as it continues, with the blistering wall of noise that is ‘Kaihou’. The guitar sound is so mangled, distorted, metalicised and trebled up to the max that it sounds more like power electronics than anything from the rock side of the musical spectrum. It’s an obscene, brutal assault, relentless, remorseless, unforgiving.

The vocals on ‘Bouryoku’ are hollering, screaming, blind with rage, are spewed forth into an infinite cavern of reverb, while the guitars fire so hot they could strip paint. From amidst the squalling bluster of noise, a guitar solo emerges. The shrieking feedback and dense mass of treble on ‘Shisuru Sekai, Iki Jigoku is the sound of a new kind of punishment, before the thunderous drums and bass – for the first time apparent on the album – ratchet up to demolition to the power of ten on ‘Shihaisya’. This is one to play loud.

The final track – by far the album’s longest – sounds like an entirely different band and entirely different album, the soft, analogue instrumental belonging to another world. And yet it works and curiously, it fits, revealing a very different facet of the band, and one which is not unpleasant: quite the opposite, in fact, and it serves to soothe the senses in the wake of the punishment inflicted by the nine preceding tracks. As if the brute force of those tracks weren’t already enough to separate 偏執症者 from their peers, then this truly clinches it, concluding a devastating album in intriguing style.

It’s one hell of an album, and one absolutely hellish album. Visceral and intense, even by D-beat standards, Satyagraha qualifies as an essential work.

Paranoid

Hissing – Hissing

Posted: 5 June 2016 in Singles and EPs
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Southern Lord – 10th June 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Holy fuck. You really need to brace yourself for this. That it’s on Southern Lord and Hissing are described as a Seattle-based blackened/death/ sludge behemoth is a starting point, and the fact the band features a guy called Joe O’Malley, who happens to be the younger brother of Stephen O’Malley gives an indication that it might be heavy… but holy fuck. I’ve (thankfully) never been hit by a truck, but I get the feeling that listening to this is a very similar experience. Yes, it hurts.

My research tells me that the lyrics of the new EP are ‘thematically centred around the effects of the metropolitan environment on the human psyche and explore themes of agoraphobia, urban decay, and incarceration.’ The lyrics aren’t immediately apparent, but the sentiment is conveyed in no uncertain terms, and with unstinting, brutal force.

‘Cairn’ may be an innocuous enough title for a song, connoting a pile of rocks built up by walker to guide others, but there is nothing friendly about this six-minute onslaught. The bass frequencies are everywhere: it’s not a case of the track featuring a hefty bassline but the speakers groaning under the density of the all-consuming bass frequencies which shudder the cones.

‘Husk’ is a similarly terrifying experience, dense, brutal and gnarly. But mere adjectives can’t come close to truly conveying the experience. ‘Dense’ is overused, not least of all by me, to escribe a thick, heavy, impenetrable wall of sound. Hissing create a sound that’s dense to the power of ten, so dense as to almost possess physical presence.

Hissing

 

Hissing on Bandcamp

Sarabante – Poisonous Legacy

Posted: 4 June 2016 in Albums
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Southern Lord – 10th June 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

I’ve said it before, but the reason the 80s produced so much exciting music wasn’t because of the emerging technologies, but because it was a decade of social and political turmoil, marked by widening division. Sure, post-millennium we laugh at the yuppies and the huge mobile phones and the computers with less capacity than a scientific calculator, but the present bears scary and depressing parallels with the past – although if anything, the stakes seem higher than ever before. The global economy is fucked. Ergo, we’re all fucked. The world is at war. It’s not some bickering over some distant islands or a couple of neighbouring countries quarrelling over borders that’s going on here: it’s 2016 and it’s nothing short of all-out, total war. These are supposedly civilised times, but it feels like the apocalypse.

Living in England, it’s easy enough to whinge about conditions living under the current government, primarily because they’re a bunch of greedy, smarmy, smug, lying cunts who loathe the poor, the sick and the disabled and whose only interest is self-interest, but I have a lot to be grateful for, and living in Greece right now would be a whole lot tougher.

Sarabante hail from Greece, and as the press release notes, it’s the country’s dark and difficult times which have provided much of the inspiration for Poisonous Legacy: ‘Heavily influenced by oppression and trying to withstand the ongoing crisis in their home country Greece, their new music is forged in times of extreme austerity, which has without doubt blackened their focus. As a result, the music on Poisonous Legacy is darker, filthier, more sincere and more destructive than before.

There are no two ways about it: Poisonous Legacy is a ferocious and devastating maelstrom of an album. It’s the sound of pure fury, rage distilled and bottled in shot-size explosions of power stronger than any of Brewdog’s gimmicky spirit-strength brews. The majority of the album’s twelve tracks clock in at under to and a half minutes. Poisonous Legacy is an album of punishing intensity and astounding force.

Instrumental interlude, ‘Forewarned Epilogue’, proffers a brooding, gothic sound by way of a reprieve from the full-throttle churning guitar, but to suggest it’s any kind of light in the darkness would be wrong. There is no light, only darkness. And there is no real respite.

 

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Stream: ‘Mass Grave’ by Sarabante

Posted: 20 May 2016 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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At Aural Aggravation, we still remember when the grinning face of someone like Bruno Brookes would beam from the television screen and say, “It’s Friday night, it’s still number one, it’s Top of the Pops!” The demise of TOTP and the collapse into irrelevance of music charts, especially the UK Top 40 singles chart was more or less concurrent with the final and absolute corporatisation of the charts, and while we miss the good old days, it was always a fact that the most exciting music never got near the charts in the first place, even then.

And so, it’s 2016. It’s Friday night, you’re reading Aural Aggravation and here’s some Greek hardcore courtesy of Sarabante, whose second LP, Poisonous Legacy, will be releaed by Southern Lord on June 10th. As a taster, you can stream ‘Mass Grave’ here. Fuck yeah.

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