We’ve never heard of Luxury Death, so when the news they’d signed with Punk Slime landed in our inbox we gave a collective shrug. But Luxury Death is such a great name we had to check it out. Ther debut single, ‘Radiator Face’ is a bit more middling indie than we’d usually go for, but we like to keep things varied and we’re more concerned with giving exposure to new and underexposed music than being sniffy about genres. ‘Radiator Face’ is an ace song. Fact. You can hear it here:
The Manchester duo have some tour dates coming up, too, as follows:
August 28 – London, UK – Through Being Cool Bank Holiday @ Lock Tavern September 30 – London, UK – The Finsbury w/ Happyness October 23 – Sheffield, UK – Bungalows & Bears w/ Happyness October 25 – Manchester, UK – Sound Control w/ Twin Peaks & Happyness October 27 – London, UK – Old Blue Last w/ Lowly
Devin Townsend Project are set to release their eagerly awaited new studio album ‘Transcendence’ on the 9th September 2016 worldwide. Ahead of this, August 5th – today – sees the unveiling of the fist single from the album in the shape of ‘Failure’. We could tell you how it’s epic, cinematic, ambitious, proggy and all the rest, or you could just listen to it here:
DTP recently announced a European tour for 2017 with main support from Between The Buried & Me (excl. UK & Belgium) & Tesseract (UK only) plus openers Leprous (all dates). Full list of dates can be found below:
The clue’s in the name: this is Aural Aggravation. We do ambient, but not chillout, no new age shit. We like abrasion, noise and all things unsettling. But it’s Friday night after another week of global turbulence and insanity. The news is a 24/7 scrolling atrocity exhibition and frankly, we need something to keep us from launching ourselves off a bridge. So this comes as a welcome arrival in the AA inbox.
New York City synthesis trio Forma will be releasing their third LP, Physicalist, via kranky on September 23rd, and today we can hear the first excerpt from this sublime album in the closing track, ‘Improvisation for Flute and Piano’. A slow breaking meditation in which the flute provides the soft, subtle atmosphere, and the piano pulses with expressive persistence, it’s a beautiful curtains close on a record that has no shortage of allure and mystique.
Having already guaranteed themselves a slot in the AA best albums of 2016 list, Mayflower Madame are offering up a video to accompany the track ‘Upside Down (the death loop)’. The psych/goth act enlisted Norwegian art collective Born For Burning to direct the video: "We wanted to make the impression that the video consists of two different found tapes. Inspired by the gloominess of the song we sought to make the images of the video disturbing and shot with a lo-fi camera. Some key ideas were trafficking and crime scene footage, partly inspired by the movie Lilya 4-ever by Lukas Moodysson."
Every email and every press release which accompanies every CD – or at least every other email and every other press release – promises the arrival of a staggeing new talent, a band offering explosive riffs or massive anthems. It doesn’t take long to become immune to the hyperbole, and the spial downwards from enthusiams to despair is a rapid one when every any brings more music than an etitorial team of fifty could even contemplate let alone physically listen to.
So why do we do it? Because even when a press release makes generic promises about a band, sometimes they’re actually worth the effort. The email says that ‘London rockers Saints Patience share their retro-electro anthem debut single ‘Break Of Dawn’ out July 8th’ and the truth is it’s hard to muster a shrug. Whaddaya know? It’s actually a decent tune and hints at a band with some serious potential.
Swedish progressive rock/metal innovators Pain of Salvation will release a very special reissue version of their 2002 album “Remedy Lane” entitled “Remedy Lane Re:visited (Re:mixed & Re:lived)” on July 1st, 2016 via InsideOutMusic.
They’ve unveiled a statc audio clip of ‘Rope Ends (Remix)’ on YouTube by way of a taster. Check its epicness out here:
Bearsuit mainstay Harold Nono returns – not that he’s ever really been away – and once again, he’s come up trumps – and thankfully, not Donald Trumps. Swinging wildly from rumbling, dark ambience to mellowed-out doodlesome synthesised post-rock, Nono’s latest effort is as inventive as ever. But on this outing, he’s definitely set his sights on sparse scenes: a gentle piano tinkles in the subtle mists which hover and hum through ‘Otosan’,
There’s a sinister undercurrent that intimates ‘sci-fi horror film’ about the atmospheric ‘Atam No Nai Uma Ga Hashiru’: in contrast, ‘I’m Disguised as an Idiot’ sees Japanese traditionalism collide with western glitchtronica, while ‘Unbeaten Brothers and Sisters’ created a darkly atmospheric tension with its fractured samples and beneath-the-radar fear chords.
‘The Saline Revival Show’ is an achingly mournful piece, a sparse violin / cello arrangement that’s brooding, moving, and evocative. The post-rock echoes carry through into the sparse closer, ‘Watashi Wa Ie Ni Kaeritai’, rounding off an intriguing album that is – as you’d reasonably expect from Harold Nono, and as you’d reasonably expect from Bearsuit – difficult to place, but a lot easier to dig.
Swans have shared the first full track from the forthcoming album, The Glowing Man, out on Young God (N America) / Mute on 17th June 2016.
‘When Will I Return?’, described by MOJO as a ;revelation’, was written, explains Michael Gira "specifically for Jennifer Gira to sing. It’s a tribute to her strength, courage, and resilience.’
Taken from the new EP “Rainmaking”, out May 27th via Denizen Recordings, ‘Crook’ was largely inspired by a strange situation that Andrew (the drummer) found himself in a few years ago, where he and his parents saw an assumed criminal being chased by police officers in central London.
According to Andy, the guy mocked him directly as he ran by for not having the courage to step in, which I found deeply funny – to literally be in the act of fleeing from the police, but still make time to critique other people’s moral fibre is quite an achievement. So, with that as a starting point, we started writing with the intention of exploring cowardice, fight or flight instinct, mob psychology; things like that. What came out was probably more of a self-evaluation than anything else.
Washington riff rockers Mos Generatorwill release their new full-length Abyssinia on July 15th 2016 in Europe and August 5th 2016 in North America. In advance of its release, the band have revealed the first single from Abyssinia in the form of ‘Wicked Willow’. Get your lugs round it here:
Aural Aggravation 