Posts Tagged ‘Spoken Word’

Papillon du Nuit – Musetta

Posted: 30 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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26th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Although they may have seemingly risen out of nowhere a couple of years or so ago, Papillon du Nuit, the ever evolving, ever-expanding musical project revolving around Stephen Kennedy, alongside Mika, Steve, and Karen (who between them cover vocals, cello, grand piano, guitars, keyboards, and percussion) is a coming together of individuals who have been on and around the ‘goth’ and adjacent scene in the north for some considerable time, to form a loose collective. Having debuted in October 2024 with ‘Scarlet’, they’ve built a body of work through a succession of singles – eight in all. Most acts would have simply compiled said singles to assemble an album – but not Papillon du Nuit, and certainly not Stephen Kennedy – because he likes to do things the hard way. The proper way. And because his roots lie in that 80s goth era where bands like The Sisters of Mercy grew their fanbase through a series of ever-evolving single releases but saw the album as a different medium, a means of creating a specific, thematically unified document. As it happens, Musetta sits somewhere between the compilation and standalone document, plucking a selection of those previous singles and placing them amidst the new songs, meaning that of the album’s nine tracks, five have been previously released, although sitting in the context of an album they feel different somehow. And as much as Papillon du Nuit embrace some elements of goth – or perhaps, more accurately, the gothic (think brooding atmosphere, haunting imagery, a sense of drama) – this is a project which goes far beyond genre, with strong leanings towards neoclassical, chamber pop, the theatrical, even the operatic.

As they explain, ‘The album is named after Musetta, one of the major characters in the opera La Boheme, who is enshrined with all the qualities, and all the follies, that make us who we are. Many of the songs here explore a mythical, almost mystical journey, with life displayed more as an inevitably straight path, rather than something circular. The songs are not about death, but many of them lead there’. Some may mock with a ‘pretentious, moi?’, but Musetta is a work which is fully committed to art, and therefore sweeps pretence aside in being the real deal. That Steve Whitfield (The Cure / The Mission) produced, and co-wrote some of the tracks is nothing if not proof of pedigree, as well as their commitment to delivering an album which goes to great lengths to realise strong intent.

Heavy breathing, a panting even. Tension. Suspense. Then comes the panicked whisper: ‘is it dark, or am I blind?’ It has a decidedly Beckettean feel to it. A piano begins to reverberate. This is ‘Jude.’ As a single, it arrived as a stark and curious hybrid of poetry, theatre, and folk with a prog-rock leaning and a sense of the epic. In a revised context as an album opener, it feels very much like an introduction, a passage into a vast musical world. ‘Pilgrim’s Arc’, the most recent single, released in October, is driving, dynamic, tempest of a composition, and makes for a stark contrast arriving immediately after. Immediately, it’s apparent that there’s no small consideration been given to the album’s flow and shifts in mood and pace, and even this early, themes of time and mortality emerge.

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The first of the unreleased, album-specific songs, ‘Natalie’, follows, and it’s cinematic, widescreen-even, with its string-soaked chorus, again building to a spectacular finale. It’s no criticism to say it sounds like an album track: it’s magnificently executed, and offers some respite from the experimental intensity of the songs which precede it, and the cello-forward ‘A Sea Within An Ocean’ is the work of a band spreading out and settling, stretching their limbs and simply composing to make music, free from the (self-made) pressure to record a single in a day, or whatever their previous process was. It feels looser, more relaxed, and the result is a rolling, hypnotic wave of a song.

‘Cello Poem’ – at a mere two and three-quarter minutes – feels like more of a narrative bridge than a song in its own right, and the spoken word segue links single cuts ‘Amber’ and ‘Ariadne’ – and does so quite effectively, in truth. It does, however, keep death as its focus. And I suppose this is the core of the matter. As they say, ‘The songs are not about death, but many of them lead there’. How many of the great plays, novels, or poems aren’t about death, at least in some way? Death is, after all, the only certainty in life.

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Where Musetta differs from other albums where death is a preoccupation or a focus is that this is an album which carries a weight. It’s in no way frivolous or posturing, it doesn’t take death simply as a motif: it’s a soul-felt meditation on the end of life. No glorification, no stylisation, but a philosophical contemplation. It’s this which makes Musetta so impactful. Not only is youth wasted on the young, but life is wasted on the living, by and large. That is to say, it’s hard to appreciate what you have until it’s gone, or slipping away, and while so much goth – and metal, and so much music of many styles, for that matter – is preoccupied with death in a conceptual way, there comes a point where it comes all to near, all too real, and here it gets scary – rather than a game of lofting skulls and a flamboyant delivery. Shit does get real, and we all have to face the reality of mortality. And at this point, it’s not cool, it’s not dramatic, it simply becomes a heavy reality. We start by losing grandparents, and parents, and often, in between, friends and peers. And when it’s your peers, you start to worry. And if you don’t, you probably should.

Musetta is packed with heavy moments – not so much sonically, but emotionally, philosophically – and it’s woven with a fabric rich in literary allusions and diverse stylistic influences. ‘Visionary’ is a word I’m cautious in applying to anything, particularly anything contemporary – but ambitious and accomplished, wide-ranging, powerful, and moving… Musetta is all of these things, and more.

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Abrasive Trees – Light Remaining

Posted: 20 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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29th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Abrasive Trees’ evolution continues with the arrival of Light Remaining. Over the last seven years, they’ve released a steady stream of EPs, a compilation album gathering material from the early EPs, a live album, and an hour-long drone album recorded by the project’s core member, Matthew Rochford during lockdown. While the lineups have been markedly different, expanding and contracting along the way, there has always been a sense of continuity, a commonality across their catalogue (beyond Rochford himself), and that’s an attention to detail, and a keen awareness of atmosphere, and of balance. Light Remaining, however, is their first full-length studio work conceived as such and recorded as a band.

The single releases, ‘Carved Skull’ and ‘Tao to Earth’ set a certain expectation and tone for the album – dark, tense, layered, and unashamedly arty, even literary in their leanings. And this is very much what Light Remaining gives us – a work that’s sonically immersive, engaging, but also contemplative, cerebral. There’s much to absorb.

With a spoken word introduction delivered over minimal instrumentation, ‘No Solace’ draws the listener in gently – you may even find yourself leaning in, ear cocked to the poetry – before the fireworks begin, an explosive sustained crescendo of rolling drums and soaring, searing guitars, amidst which Rochford maintains a near-monotone delivery amidst the ever-building surge of chaos. It’s difficult to distinguish whether this is a display of serenity or the paralysis of shock. ‘Star Sapphire’ brings contrasting, conflicting tones, textures, and moods, with some pleasant, shoegazey, post-rock chime and jangle paired with some dark, driving distorted chords, perfectly illustrating the attention to detail – and dynamics – mentioned earlier.

There’s something of the feel of Fields of the Nephilim at their most lugubrious and atmospheric to ‘Flickering Flame’ – think ‘Vet for the Insane’, perhaps – before it slowly grows in density and fogginess, and it flows into the rolling swell and surge of ‘Carved Skull’.

If the title suggests something of a slow fade, a diminishing time – and while I may well be overreaching in my interpretation – the very phrase, with its implications of a setting sun feels weighty and weighted, and to carry connotations of an eternal night, the light fading on a dying planet. And this feels like the mood which hangs over the album – a sense of the finite, of impending doom, even. It’s oblique, it’s indirect, but it nags away in the shadows of a work which is certainly darker than it is light. Yes, the light remaining is limited, and the shadows loom ever more darkly.

It’s on the final composition, ‘I Didn’t Mean to Hurt You’ that everything comes together. It’s nearly eleven minutes long, and they make full use of that time to gradually develop the mood, from an understated, picked guitar, rippling in reverb, slowly adding the layers and increasing the volume and density and drums and strings add more and more, picking up pace over time. It’s just shy of the midpoint that it really begins to race forward, and the adrenaline builds in line with the pace and intensity. And finally – finally – the levee breaks, leading out with a slow, deliberate trudging riff topped with a solo from the stars.

Light Remaining feels like the release Abrasive Trees have been building up to since their inception. It’s a sustained work of remarkable detail, nuance, but also density and force. Everything is perfectly realised. It’s huge. Sonically, conceptually, in terms of ambition and execution, the production… this is a peak, a new pinnacle.

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Trowser Carrier + Fern – Helping Old Ladies Cross The Road

Posted: 1 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 1st May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Trowser Carrier – formerly of Leeds and now of Värmland, Sweden – is a genre unto himself, being, to my knowledge the sole exponent of polite harsh noise on the planet. And if that seems like an oxymoron, that’s entirely the point: 2013’s A Flower for My Hoonoo (reissued in expanded form in 2023) offered up musings on cups of tea and tablecloths and all manner of English manners against backdrops of raw, skull-shattering abrasive noise.

For this release (I won’t suggest, as music journos so often do, that it’s long-awaited, as I doubt more than five people have noticed the time between Trowser Carrier releases), TC has paired up with fellow Värmland resident Fern (whose error was released by Dret Skivor a couple of years ago).

The compositions are considerably longer than on the previous releases by either artist, with Helping Old Ladies Cross The Road containing four new compositions, each four to nine minutes in length, plus a thirteen-minute remix courtesy of horse funeral.

It’s the title track which lifts the curtain on this characteristically quirky set, and it seems that Fern’s input has tempered the harsh noise of Trowser Carrier, replacing blanket distortion and abrasion with muffled, exploratory, experimental electronica, which swims casually between space-age weirdness, semi-ambient Krautrock, and sci-fi drones reminiscent of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. TC’s vocals are low in the mix and masked and mangled by distortion and a host of other effects, barely discernible and wholly indecipherable amidst layers of reverb and tremolo. It all sound quite polite and considerate in the delivery, though.

‘Lovely show pillows’ is a work of dank, dark ambience which is unnerving, unsettling. The lyrics are completely beyond unravelling, the voice serving more as another instrument in the slow swirl of sound, but the title speaks for itself, as is also the case on ‘Nearly clean? No really clean!’ a slow drift of cloudlike ambience with submerged vocals which likely references a TV advert from the 80s or perhaps early 90s, the specifics of which elude me. It sounds like a disjointed message beaming in via satellite from a space mission circa 1970, crackling through space and time against a backdrop of whale song. Maybe I need to clean my ears: perhaps they’re only nearly clean. But then a barrage of noise like a thunder storm breaking hits with the arrival of ‘The smell of a lawn at dawn’. This is, of course, peak absurdism, and precisely what one would expect from the label, and in particular Trowser Carrier, whose objective is essentially to take the piss out of harsh noise and power electronics and industrial ambient and all the rest, while exploiting the form with a commendable aptitude.

Horse funeral’s remix of ‘TC + Fern’ appears to meld down the album in its entirety to a single seething morass of undifferentiated slow-moving sonic gloop. Here, any vocals are boiled down and simmered to mere bubbles in a broiling broth, and the track eventually evaporates to nothing.

What to make of this? Well, it’s not designed to meet conventional musical standards. Quite the opposite, in fact. But Helping Old Ladies Cross The Road sees Trowser Carrier + Fern belongs to a territory all of its own, dismantling the tropes and forms of the genres to which the album belongs. It would be commercial suicide if commercial potential was an issue. As it is, it’s simply a magnificent example of obstinate perversity – and good noise.

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Loaf of Beard – Privilege and Other Poisons

Posted: 18 March 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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skoghall rekordings – 18th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Patience is supposedly a virtue… but then apparently, there’s no time like the present. And you’re supposed to strike while the iron’s hot. Clearly, Trump and his negotiators and so-called ‘Minister of War’ figured there was no time like the present even while negotiations with Iran were progressing nicely, with Iran offering substantial concessions around their nuclear programme.

Loaf of Beard’s follow-up to 2023’s Dog had been scheduled for a couple of months’ time, but from nowhere, it’s been brought forward and landed yesterday. It’s not even a Friday, let alone a Bandcamp Friday! Still, after LoB material got an airing on a jaunt of the UK late last year, this might be considered an example of striking while the iron’s still a bit warm, and moreover, given the way things are going, there really is no time like the present inasmuch as we can’t guarantee there will even be a future. There is an urgency to making art right now, and putting it out there FAST isn’t so much about keeping it relevant – although that is a factor, since events are happening at such pace it’s nigh on impossible to keep up – but about processing all of this shit and conveying the intense and myriad mixed emotions these insane times engender.

As they write in the accompanying notes, ‘In these constantly changing and worrying times it is somewhat of a relief that certain artists go out of their way to document humanity’s descent into fucking stupidity and greed’.

Loaf of Beard – a duo consisting of Chisel and Rabies Beefburger tackle these serious matters with an element of humour, Chisel ranting and chanting in a distinctly north of England sprechgesang over uptempo lo-fi drum machines and scratchy electronica. There’s something uplifting about both the musical and lyrical simplicity. On ‘All Of This Lot Can Get Fucked’, Chisel reels off a list of politicians and other public figures, with a chanting refrain of ‘get fucked’. It’s simple but effective, and in a just world, they’d be playing to hundreds of people all singing the words back at them in a display of unity. But that’s not the world we live in, as they point out on ‘Shit Mic, No Fans’:

Some might say I’m the laziest rapper

I have to admit, that there’s none crapper

All the fucker MCs come along and diss me

I spit out rhymes, they just dismiss me

The irony is that this isn’t a million miles away from Sleaford Mods in many respects., and I suspect they’re aware of this fact. When you boil it down, it’s sweary sociopolitical rants with repetitive hooks delivered over minimal electronic backing. But while there is humour here, at times, Privilege and Other Poisons is unafraid to venture into dark territory, and this is nowhere more apparent than on ‘B.A.E’, where they call out the manufacturer of arms and ‘informational security’, whose share price has absolutely skyrocketed in recent years, since Russia invaded Ukraine and war has essentially spread around the globe, with the lugubrious refrain of ‘B.A.E and their profits of death’. And this is how the world works under capitalism. A small – very small – minority coin it in while everyone else’s lives crumble and tens of thousands of people – innocent civilians – are slaughtered because some cunts in suits who wield power beyond imagination are petulant pieces of shit who want global domination like in a stupid movie and think it’s a game.

Elsewhere, ‘Claptrap Fåntratt’ sounds like The Fall circa Light User Syndrome (which is severely underrated in the scheme of their oeuvre). ‘Freeze Peach’ goes full-throttle raging electro/punk thrashabout, with Chisel foaming at the mouth with the chorus of ‘take your fucking flags down dickhead’ before going all-out Beavis and Butthead. ‘I Feel Like a Twat’ serves up a slice of cheesy jazz-infused disco funk, and knowing its awfulness is conscious and intentional only raises the level of awkwardness. This is Loaf of Beard all over. They exist to make you feel uncomfortable – and they succeed. And I for one respect that.

Semi-ambient pastoral contemplations about wildlife and sightings of elk make for some welcome respite: it’s not healthy to be raging all the time, and however fucked the planet may be, nature is resilient. It’s us who need to become extinct.

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alka / Andrew Brenza – My Old Man (A Meditation On Impermanence)

Posted: 13 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 27th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Mortality Tables’ Impermanence Project continues apace, this time with a nine-minute work by alka, with spoken word by Andrew Brenza. This piece uses a 1979 / 80 cassette recording of Mortality Tables founder Mat Smith singing Marie Lloyd’s music hall song ‘My Old Man (Said Follow The Van)’ with his late father, James.

As Bryan Michael (alka) writes, ‘I felt there was a parallel between the rent collector-avoiding moonlight flits that inspired ‘My Old Man (Said Follow The Van)’ and the fleeting, ever mutable nature of life. I also like the idea of moments being captured within magnetic fields – a cassette, in this instance – which can then be re-played. To me, they’re like ghosts of memories.

Given just how fragile those magnetic fields are – prone to deterioration and even erasure – while the very tape itself is liable to stretching, warping, being chewed in the heads and rendered unplayable, or even snapping, it feels as if the medium of the source material is, in itself, an encapsulation of impermanence. Even supposedly permanent records are always at risk of ceasing to be.

And, indeed, such a simple recording, likely made for fun in the moment without a view to posterity, absolutely captures the essence of impermanence; James is no longer with us, but his voice lives on here, while the voice of Mat as a child is a reminder that childhood, too, is but a stage, and one which is, in the scheme of life, but brief.

Initially, the sound is so quiet that one may even think there is nothing but silence, but gradually, soft, gently pulsating synth tones fade in. The instrumentation is sparse, ethereal, cloud-like, while the voices drift amidst a soft, dreamy haze, very much creating the effect of the ‘ghosts of memories’ of which alka speaks. It isn’t until the final three minutes that Brenza’s spoken word contribution begins, reflecting on impermanence and mortality, and ‘the way I started to dress like my father once, after his death, because it made me feel close..’

The different elements are drawn together in an almost alchemic fashion, to produce a work which is not lugubrious, but wistful and contemplative.

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Mr Vast – Upping the Ante

Posted: 7 March 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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26th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Having slipped out ‘This and That’ as a forewarning of the imminent arrival of his ‘difficult third album’, the time is almost upon us for its unveiling. Just as it was six years between his debut, Grievous Bodily Charm and second album Touch & Go, so another eight years have elapsed since then, although he’s maintained his profile through touring – something which for him comes with the added challenge beyond the usual logistical matters with a wild stage act and even wilder and largely impractical-looking outfits. But then, Mr Vast is more than music. The creation of Henry Sargent of Wevie Stonder – perhaps the sole exponents of the cack-pop genre – Mr Vast is more than a musical project. It’s an entire world, where the Vast persona is all encompassing, bringing together music and performance art, and there are no half-measures here, Vast fully embracing the strange, the wonky, the incongruous and the improbable.

He’s at pains to stress that this isn’t art, though, and explicitly states ‘Mr Vast is not art. He’s something that happens to you. So let him.’ I rather feel that there’s no choice in this matter, really. The idiom goes that one should ‘expect the unexpected’, and this could well be a mantra for approaching Mr Vast – although it’s perhaps more appropriate to suggest that it’s all expected when it comes to his work. ‘Accept the expectable, yeah?’ he says on ‘Ants’, before blabbering on about ‘swan crisps’ and reflecting on deep water: the wrongness and the delivery remind me of Nathan Barley – perhaps one of the most underrated and uncomfortable sitcoms of the early 00s. ‘Failure is its own reward’, he croons moments later, spinning another classic postmodern dichotomy within a cocoon of New Age hipster jargonisms.

And so it was – and still is – that ‘This and That’ confounded expectation by being remarkably not-weird, a surprisingly danceable cut that could be legitimately referred to as a ‘bangin’ choon’. How serious or how ironic or parodic it is, remains unclear. Before we get to it on the album however, there’s ‘What’s Difficult About Being Stupid?’, which at twenty-nine seconds in length is more of a sliver of facetious frippery with a toy keyboard, and ‘Scatterbrain’, a sub-two-minute flourish of medieval folk absurdity that comes on like a collision between Horrible Histories and Steeleye Span. Or something. In this context, the pumping hyperactive acid beats of ‘This and That’ seems like a moment of sanity, despite its OTT KLF-style ‘stadium house’ / ambient / soul breakdown in the middle before going full-on happy hardcore. ‘Oh, listen to the sound effects… that’s fantastic’, he comments amidst a stream of conscious lyrics, before drum ‘n’ bass breaks drop.

Upping the Ante is appropriately titled: it’s peak Vast. ‘The Bench’ is almost – almost – a spoken-word vignette within a soft, mellifluous ambient composition, and it’s almost – almost – not weird or off-kilter. But then, as we learn a few tracks later in what seems like a confession of sorts, Vast tells us, ‘I Can’t Help It’. This track is another Hi-NRG work which incorporates drum ‘n’ bass and samples but breaks out into derangement worthy of a Brett Easton Ellis character – but there’s some observational content in the mix, too.

‘Neural Preening’ takes the form of jerky, quirky early eighties electronica, a bit Devo, a bit Thomas Dolby, a lot hyperactive. Keeping up with the sheer range of what’s going on is mind-bending, and while the gentle acoustic ‘Guess Who’ does offer some breathing space, it does so while offering something a bit trippy, a bit Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd. Then he goes and spins things into a different orbit with the murky groove of ‘Crumpet Man’, which could be a ‘Born Slippy’ meets Tubular Bells for 2026 if he wasn’t talking about animals, muffins, and pancakes.

It would be easy enough to simply bracket this as ‘experimental’ – and also ‘barking’ and ‘batshit’, which I’ve probably done myself before – but this fails to give due credit. Sure, there’s a certain sense that Mr Vast’s main purpose is to explore the furthest fringes with no regard for musical or social norms, instead seeing what new novelty oddness he can create, but equally, one gets the impression that this isn’t forced gimmickry, but simply how his head works – this is the work of someone who is wired differently. He doesn’t so much think outside the box, but exists outside the box, while performing origami on said box, which is, of course full not only of frogs, but newts and Natterjack Toads, all of which may or may not exist when the box is closed or folded in a certain way.

Some might think that with his evident ability, Sargent could make music that’s far more commercially viable, but as a writer who thought it would be a doddle to knock out a genre novel and actually get paid for this, only to find that the literary Tourette’s kicks in after a few paragraphs or pages. In other words, he really can’t help it. And this is a good thing. There’s too much bland shit out there. There’s too much manufactured shit out there. There’s too much shit out there, full stop. But there’s a real fear amongst musicians that they need to confirm to have any chance of success – whatever that is – and reach an audience and survive. Mr Vast exists not only outside of this, but in his own world, one almost devoid of reference points, comparisons, and peers. And this is what we need more of in the creative community. Arguably, such freedom to disregard pretty much all influence and all trends is a luxury, but to submit to conformity is to surrender the foundations of what it is to create.

Upping the Ante is warped, weird, and dances to its own tune and no other. It deserves applause – and your listening ears.

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Watch: ‘A Broken Weekend’ by Look, Stranger! (A Northern Story)

Posted: 9 February 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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For the second single from their forthcoming debut EP, Look, Stranger! (the new musical project of Ian J Cole and Louisa Rose) have taken the unusual step of releasing a remix of the as-yet-unreleased lead track, ‘Broken’. Longer than the single version – which in itself is six minutes in duration – it replaces the sung vocals with a spoken narrative and dialogue – source undisclosed, but it’s quintessentially northern, to the extend you half expect Sean Bean to make a cameo with a “bastards!”

Despite the underlying electro instrumentation, the end result is quite different from its predecessor, ‘The Last Thing’, and, indeed, the rest of the EP. It’s indicative of an act not tied to formula and willing to mix things up – which gets the Aural Aggravation vote!

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Benefits / The DSM IV – The Fulford Arms, York, 19th November 2025

Posted: 20 November 2025 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Benefits exploded onto the scene not long after lockdown – and I mean exploded, an atomic detonation of rage. The essence of the setup was pretty simple: angry sociopolitical spoken word delivered with blistering vitriol, backed by a blinding wall of noise. The result could reasonably be described as something in between Whitehouse and Sleaford Mods, but the fact is that from day one, Benefits created their own niche. The live shows were jaw-dropping, and the debut album, Nails captured that raw energy with a rare precision.

The arrival of second album, Constant Noise marked a necessary departure – sonically mellower, far more beat-orientated, a lot less shouty, angry-sounding. My first impression was that it was decent, more produced, but still packed some sting in the lyrics., and will be hard to top in terms of the number of mentions of dogshit in albums of the 2020s. But it’s a fair reflection of post-lockdown Britain: dogs have proliferated exponentially, and concordantly so has the volume of dogshit – and, just as bad, bags of dogshit tied and dropped, piled next to or on top of bins, and hung in trees. What kind of twat does that? A selfish one is the only answer. But as for the album, I kinda let it sit for a while. But over time, with more – and more – listens, the album’s depths reveal themselves. Constant Noise is every bit as angry as Nails, and if anything, the more moderate, tempered delivery hits harder. It just takes a little bit longer to reveal its depths and quality. But how would this translate live, especially now they’ve been stripped back to the founding duo of Kingsley Hall and Robbie Major?

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Benefits

Before we would get to find out, there was the equally intriguing support. The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster are one of those acts who may have only attained cult status during their time together, but it’s one which has expanded since their demise. They were always a band destined to implode, as was apparent when I witnessed a particularly fractious gig here in York circa 2007. But this was always a band which had derangement and volatility wired into their makeup. Guy McKnight formed DSM IV in 2018, and they’re an altogether different proposition, trading in gothy electro with some tidy guitar textures woven into the fabric of the songs, and Guy seems altogether more settled. It’s all relative, of course, and he ventures into the crowd on numerous occasions, and at one point around the middle of the set, tosses mic stand over, drops the mic and busts some tai chi moves. It’s a solid set, both compelling and entertaining, and they’ve got some tunes, too.

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The DSM IV

Benefits don’t really have a great many tunes in the conventional sense. Choruses and hooks aren’t the primary focus of their compositions. Hall’s words range from reflective and ponderous to outright roaring rage, the backing spanning sprawling barrages of obliterative noise to quite chilled dance grooves. But at this volume, and when delivered with this much passion, there’s nothing chilled about this live show.

Here, I find myself returning to the topic of seeing an act you’ve seen before and been blown away by, and going to see them again in the hope of replicating that first time – only it’s a weak hope, because the first time has the element of surprise which is unlikely to be repeated. Yes, a band may be consistently awesome, but that first bombshell experience, that initial high… very few bands have the capacity to have that impact more than once. Benefits, however, hit even harder on this outing than any before.

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Benefits

There was word online that their current tour was as brutal as any they’d ever done. Having seen them three times previously, and never with the same lineup, it seemed like that claim might be a bit of a stretch, particularly without a live drummer. But synthetic beats have a way of bludgeoning and cracking in a way that live drums don’t always, and when paired with gut-churning low-frequencies and ear-bleeding top-end noise, the sonic impact of what blasts from the PA is positively immolating.

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Benefits

Kingsley gets most of the chat out of the way at the start, with a bit at the end: in between, they power through a relentless set uninterrupted. And relentless it is, and not just sonically: with the sole lighting consisting of blinding white strobes for the entire duration of the hour-and-twenty-minute set, the stark, uncompromising nature of the music and lyrics is amplified. They put every ounce of energy into the show, Hall positively streaming with perspiration by a third of the way through. And we feel the passion; the whole room is buzzing and aglow with a sense of unity through a shared experience of catharsis. These are shit times. Dark times, bleak and scary times, domestically and globally. Benefits capture the zeitgeist, and rail against those who will one day be proven to have stood on the wrong side of history – the right-wing, flag-shagging, pro-Brexit, racist, xenophobic, hatemongering, exploitative, manipulative capitalist shits and their supporters and enablers – articulating thoughts and feelings with a unique precision and an intensity which is positively nuclear. The experience is nothing short of mind-blowing.

Watch: ‘The Pilgrim’s Arc’ by Papillon de Nuit

Posted: 23 October 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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The catalogue of material released by Papillon de Nuit, the ever-shifting, ever-evolving musical project of Stephen Kennedy, continues to expand with the release of single number eight.

Kennedy’s approach to the project is both interesting and unusual, with each song recorded at a separate session, often not even fully-formed in terms of writing and arrangement beforehand, and realised with various guest musicians and vocalists. Retuning once more to Young Thugs studio in York, ‘The Pilgrim’s Arc’ again sees Stephen handle a considerable range of duties, from drums to grand piano and providing spoken and sung vocals, as well as writing and arranging the song itself, while joined by Michalina Rudawska (cello) and Karen Amanda O’Brien (spoken word).

The Exceptional Mr Hyde make a guest appearance here, providing ‘menacing spoken word’, while Steve Whitfield  added bass and guitar, as well covering production work

The result is a striking, dramatic, percussion-driven piece with some chunky bass, and layered vocals creating an almost schizophrenic mutter behind a soaring melody.

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Various Artists – an endless sky

Posted: 25 July 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Sinners Music – 28th February 2025

Christopher Nonibor

I’m a little behind with things. Life has a habit of running away at pace. There’s no small element of truth in the observation that Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans – often attributed to John Lennon, but which first appeared in the mid-1950s, in an article in the Stockton Record of Stockton, California.

The latest release helmed by Iain J. Cole and released on his Sinners Music label is something of a departure. Although bearing the ‘various artists’ label, it is, in fact, a set of collaborations recorded with a number of different authors, whose works are narrated by other speakers. Conceived , curated, and the stories edited by David Martin, Iain J. Cole provides the musical accompaniment for the five – or seven – pieces which make up this monumental release.

Each track is a true longform work: all bar two are around – or substantially over – twenty minutes in duration.

Martin’s own contribution, ‘Relic’ evokes aspects of both The Man Who Fell to Earth and The War of the Worlds, as well as various other sci-fi tropes and no small dash of Lovecraft. Cole’s accompaniment is absolutely perfect: largely ambient, it’s composed with the most acute attention to detail, adding drama at precisely the right points, but without feeling in any way contrived or over-egged.

‘What Rupert Don’t Know’ – an exclusive short story written by Glen James Brown and narrated by Alexander King sees Cole linger in the background with a soundtrack that hangs at a respectful distance in the background, and takes the form of some minimal techno.

Gareth E Reese’s ‘We Are the Disease’, read by Daniel Wilmot, has a very different sound and feel. The vocals have a scratchy, treble-loaded reverby sound, somewhere between a radio just off-tune and Mark E Smith. It’s a bleak tale, an eco-horror delivered as a series of scientific reports, and with Cole’s ominous sonic backdrop, which has all the qualities of a BBC Radiophonic Workshop piece, the tension is compelling.

Claire Dean’s ‘The Unwish’, narrated by Helen Lewis marks a necessary shift in the middle of the album – a female voice is welcome, for a start, and so is the change in narrative voice. Women writers observe and relay differently, and the details are integral to the literary experience. Add to that a Northern intonation, and we find ourselves in another world

As a collection of speculative and environmental sci-fci, an endless sky is noteworthy for its quality. The bonus cuts – a brace of ‘soundtrack’ instrumentals showcase Cole’s capacity to create immersive slow techno works which draw heavily on dub. ‘The Rupert Zombie Soundtrack’ is a sedate, echo-heavy slow-bopping trudge, and then there’s the twenty-minute ‘The Blind Queen Soundtrack’, which is more atmospheric, more piano, less overtly techno.

Over the course of some two-and-a-bit hours, an endless sky gives us a lot to process. So much, in fact, that I’m not even sure it’s possible in a single sitting. What does it even all mean when taken together?

an endless sky is delicate, graceful, detailed. Beyond the narratives – which in themselves offer depth and detail – there is something uniquely compelling about an endless sky. Keep Watching…

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