Posts Tagged ‘Sunn O)))’

Teleost – Atavism

Posted: 28 November 2025 in Reviews, Albums
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1st December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Since relocating to Glasgow, Teleost have been forging ahead, first with the release of the Three Originals EP at the start of the year, and now, bookending 2025 – which has seen the duo venturing out live more often – with their full-length debut. And it’s definitely got length: five tracks spanning a full fifty minutes. But it’s got girth, too. Atavism is everything they promised from their early shows – amplified. In every way. With five tracks, and a running time of some fifty minutes, Teleost have really explored the epic space they conjure with their monolithic, crawling riffery, pushing out further than ever before – and with more gear than ever before.

Despite there only being two of them, you have to wonder how they fit all that kit into a studio, let alone a van. They’re not quite at the point of Stephen O’Malley – who had to play to the edge of the stage at the Brudenell when playing solo in Leeds some years ago because the backline barely fit – but at the rate they’re amassing equipment, it’s probably only a matter of time. But this isn’t the accumulation of stuff for the sake of it: this is a band obsessed with perfecting its sound, and then going beyond and taking it to the next level. Volume is integral to that, in the way that it is for Sunn O))) and Swans – and again, not for its own sake, but for the purpose of rendering the sound a physical, multisensory experience. And also because volume facilitates the creation of tones and frequencies simply not possible at lower volumes.

The challenge for any band who rely on these quite specific conditions live is to recreate not only the sound, but the sensory experience, the full impact, when recorded. Recording compresses, diminishes, boxes in and packages something immense, compacting it to something… contained, confined, in a way that a live show simply isn’t. Live, there is movement, there is the air displaced from the speakers, there are vibrations, there is an immediacy and margin for error, all of which are absent from that ‘definitive’ documented version.

‘Volcano’ conjures atmosphere in spades, a whistling wind and tinkling cymbals delicately hover around a softly-picked intro, before a minute or so in, BAM! The pedals go on and the riff lands, and hard – as do the drums. Slow, deliberate, atomic detonations which punctuate the laval sludge of the guitar, which brings enough low-end distortion to bury an entire empire. The vocals are way down in the mix and bathed in reverb, becoming another instrument rather than a focal point. The pulverizing weight suddenly takes an explosive turn for the heavier around the mid-point, and you begin to fear for your speakers. How is this even possible? They do pair it back in the final minutes, and venture into the earthy, atmospheric, timbre-led meanderings of Neurosis. By way of an opening, this twelve minute track is beyond monumental.

They may have accelerated their work rate, but certainly not the tempos of their tunes: ‘Bari’ – which may or may not hark back to the band’s genesis, when they performed as Uncle Bari – rides in on a wall of feedback and then grinds low and slow. They really take their time here, with ten full minutes of jarring, jolting riffery that’s as dense as osmium. Turn it u and you can feel the hairs in your ears quiver and your cells begin to vibrate.

Where Teleost stand apart from other purveyors of slow, droning doom is in their attention to those textures which are grainy, thick, and each chord stroke hits like a tsunami making land reach, a full body blow that almost knocks you off your feet.

But for all of the annihilative volume and organ-bursting weight, Atavism is not an angry or remotely violent record: these are compositions concerned with a transcendent escape, and this is nowhere more apparent than on the mid-album mellow-out, ‘Life’, which offers strong parallels to more recent Earth releases. A slow, hypnotic guitar motif is carried by rolling cymbal-dominated drums. I find myself yawning, not through boredom, but relaxation – until four and a half minutes in when they bring the noise once more, and do so with the most devastating force.

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Penultimate track, ‘Djinn’ is contemplative, reflective at first and then goes on an all-out blow-out, seemingly more intense and more explosive than anything before it. While growling droning rumbling is the album’s defining feature, there does very much feel like there’s an arc of growing intensity over its course. Here, the vocals feel more skywardly-tilted, more uplifting in their aim to escape from the planet, and closer, ‘Canyon’ returns to the mesmeric, slow-creeping Earth-like explorations before slamming all the needles into the red. The result is twelve minutes of magnificent calm juxtaposed with earth-shattering riff heaven.

The fidelity is fantastic, the perfect realisation of their head-blastingly huge live sound captured. The chug and trudge cuts through with a ribcage-rattling density, and there is nothing else but this in your head. You mind is empty, all other thought blown away. It’s a perfect escape. And this is – at least in its field – a perfect album.

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SUNN O))) – Eternity’s Pillars b/w Raise the Chalice & Reverential

Posted: 16 October 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Sub Pop – 14th October 2025

This one has seemingly come out of nowhere. And it’s on Sub Pop. And they’re calling it a Maxi 12”, as was the term for a 12” EP back in the 80s and 90s. And I suppose it does actually quality, given that the old-school Maxis tended to feature either two tracks per side, or an extended version of the single, plus B-sides, and that’s then case here. But with this being a sunn O))) release, the lead track is just shy of fourteen minutes in duration, and the tracks on the flip are eight and seven-and-a-half-minutes long respectively. Back then, a maxi would cost maybe £3.50, or £3.99 (I’m talking about the ‘90s: it was a couple of quid in the 80s… I can’t actually remember the price of an LP in the 80s, but have receipts sitting inside sleeves that verify that in 1994, a new LP on vinyl cost around £7 and a CD £11… so the fact that this ‘maxi’ is $25 tells you all you need to now about inflation and capitalism and how times have changed.

Anyway. The three tracks on this release, with a total running time of almost half an hour are notable as ‘first official sunn O))) studio recordings to feature only the original core duo on heavily saturated electric guitars and synthesis.’ It’s also introduced with a sense of elevation that’s typical sunn O))), when they inform us that ‘sunn O))) gave extreme focus and care to each step and aspect of the recording, each tone and level of saturation, each gain stage and speaker, each arrangement and harmonic. The Pacific Northwest forest is our guide.’

‘Eternity’s Pillars’ is a raging behemoth of feedback and sustain, every chord struck a billowing beast that punches through the endless drone, and while it is unquestionably classic sunn O))), it also brings together the defining elements of early Earth, in particular Earth 2, an album which effectively created the blueprint for the entirety of sunn O)))’s existence. Not a lot happens: that’s never the point. Downtuned guitars churn the bowels, scraping and snarling their way to monumental, megalithic sustain, though a continuous whine of feedback, each strike hanging in the air for what feels like an eternity. The pace is a crawl. Time stalls. It’s absolutely punishing. New shapes emerge, fleetingly, toward the end, notes rising like monuments from a cloud of smoke – by no means a melody, but it’s a progression, a change in mood.

‘Raise the Chalice’ is named ‘for a rallying cry often uttered by Northwest legend Ron Guardipee throughout the mid-1990’ – making it their second composition in his honour (the other being 2023’s ‘Ron G Warrior’, which was also released on Sub Pop), and opens with a full growl like a giant engine slowly revving , but instead of revving up, it gradually revs down into a slow-churning sonic abyss. It doesn’t sound, or feel much like a rallying cry. With the density of dark matter, the enormity of the sound engulfs the senses. By the arrival of ‘Reverential’, there’s a feeling of exhaustion, as if all the light and oxygen has been extracted, and yet still the sound continues to apply a crushing pressure.

While it’s difficult to really rank or compare sunn O))) releases as to what constitutes their ‘best’ or ‘heaviest’ work, this is certainly classic, quintessential sunn O))), and it’s very, very heavy indeed.

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Slomo – The Creep

Posted: 21 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Ideologic Organ – 5th September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Umberto Eco is one of the many authors I feel I should have read, and hope that one day I will get around to reading. Social media has of late showered me with posts and reposts with a quite from Eco about owning more books than you will ever read – something I never much relate to. I only have so many hours in the day, and reading – since I insist on engaging with books rather than passively absorbing audio books while participating in other activities – is one of those pastimes which is time-intensive. I find music-listening to be comparable. As much as I enjoy listening to music while I’m cooking or participating in other activities, I like to give music full attention, especially new music. And it’s in this context that I often find I purchase music – like books, albeit to a lesser extent – at a faster rate than I can consume it. And this is why it’s taken me until the twentieth anniversary release of Slomo’s The Creep to catch up with this cult classic which brings together sludge / doom and vintage industrial influence.

The album’s context, too, is worth providing here, and so, I shall quote at length rather than paraphrase – not because I’m lazy in my writing, but because I fear making omissions, and feel that liner notes or press releases articulate in a way which better represent the artist.

Just one week after the passing of COIL’s Jhonn Balance in late 2004, the 61-minutes of "The Creep" manifested in a Sheffield suburb. Not yet a band and only captured due to happenstance, this first music of Slomo flowed forth without any consideration of it even being "a piece", let alone a release, though it didn’t take long for the participants (Chris "Holy" McGrail and Howard Marsden) to realise they’d captured something of distinct colour on account of how often they were listening to it.

Initially dubbed "The Ballad of Jhonn & Sleazy", the pair soon instead ascribed the music to Boleigh Fogou; a prehistoric underground chamber on the Land’s End peninsula that both had recently visited and been affected by. "The Creep" took its name from the peculiar side chamber assumed to be if ritual function, having no apparent practical use. This ponderous music chimed perfectly with the fogou; an apparently stolid place that teems with life once you become attuned to its frequency.

Fitting in perfectly alongside other massive single-track albums such as Sleep’s "Dopesmoker", COIL’s ‘Queens of the Circulating Library’, Cope’s "Odin", and Boris’ "Flood", "The Creep" secured a limited release on Cope’s Fuck Off & Di CD-R label in 2005 that quickly sold out via supportive outlets such as Southern Lord, Aquarius Records and Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ – then operating merely as a blog and micro-store.

And now, Ideologic Organ present a twentieth-anniversary vinyl edition. No doubt there will be plenty of people who are happy about this: after all, it’s never been released on vinyl, and I expect the tonal qualities of vinyl are ideal for a work where there is so much texture, so much richness of tone. The slow, resonant, reverberating bass during the quiet intro deserves deep grooves and decent speakers.

One downside of where the industry is now – and there are, as most of us are aware, many – is that the days of a promo copy of a slab of vinyl are essentially over (unless you’re writing for a major national or international publication), meaning I’m here with some decent enough speakers, but basing my opinion of the mastering and overall sonic experience based on an MP3 version. And as the low notes crawl, quivering, from those decent enough speakers, the rooms seems to darken and the atmosphere grows thicker, heavier.

Not a lot really happens during the first fifteen minutes, but the effect is profound, in that it resonates throughout the body. There is movement, but it occurs at a tectonic pace, and by stealth, rumbling around the far reaches of internal organs. For anyone who has read The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton’s seventeenth-century analysis of depression which explores the effects of the various humours on both mind and body. And The Creep slowly pulls on the gut and the intestinal tract in the most shuddering, lugubrious ways. At times it’s barely there, but shudders and shivers uncomfortably low on the psychic register. Others… there are low peaks among the troughs, but this is an album that registers more on a subliminal level and certainly low in the guts.

Where I raised the point of the vinyl release likely being popular with many fans, the counterpoint to this is the disruption to the continuity that the format creates. Listening to the MP3 version, there’s a fractional pause at just over thirty-two and a half minutes. It feels like a minor stutter, given that there is a long, low, undulating bass boom that fans out like a ship’s horn or subaquatic signals – but imagine having to get up and flip the record at this critical point before things begin to build. I’m perhaps being picky, but this feels like an unwarranted disruption.

The second half is even lower and slower than the first: twenty-nine minutes of bleak, rumbling abstraction. It’s the perfect amalgamation of drone, experimental, and dark ambient. And The Creep is dark. Whisps of feedback trail around and waft over hovering bass tines which simply roll and reverberate. Time stalls. Everything hangs in suspension: even your mind, and your digestion, hang, suspended, paused. Your breath… your mind. You stop thinking and simply float in this, this sound. Immersive is an understatement. It’s all-consuming, and you can easily lose yourself – completely – in this slow, slow, heavy drone.

20 years on, it’s clear that this is a work which is timeless. Niche, but timeless, in the same way that Earth 2 and Sleep’s Dopesmoker are more than just heavy droning noise. It’s no means an easy listen, but I’d still point to it as an essential one.

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The Spectral Light – Obliteration – Album review and EXCLUSIVE VIDEO STREAM

Posted: 16 July 2025 in Albums, Recommended Streams and Videos, Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Cruel Nature Records – 1st August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

If ever an album was appropriately titled, this is it. Obliteration is from the Sunn O))) / Earth end of the slow and heavy spectrum, with everything low and grinding and dense and seeping along at a snail’s pace – but it’s also so very different. The eleven-and-a-half-minute ‘Teeth’. which raises the curtain on this colossal work, trudges along, thick and murky, the guitars like sludge, overlaid with the most haunting, ethereal vocals, like spirits ascending to the heavens – or perhaps more accurately, fleeing the molten torment of the volcanic pits of hell. The quieter passages ripple gently, but there’s something off-key and off-kilter that proves unsettling, a discordance which isn’t quite right.

The album is described as ‘a visceral, atmospheric journey shaped by improvisation, deep literary roots, and a shared affinity for both crushing heaviness and ghostly ambience’, with the notes going on to add that ‘vocalist and instrumentalist Amanda Votta draws lyrical inspiration from classic rock icons and poets alike – Led Zeppelin, Stevie Nicks, Carl Sandburg’s poems ‘Alone’ and ‘The Great Hunt’, along with Sylvia Plath.’

If none of the influences are immediately apparent, it’s likely because influence can be subtle, more a process of osmosis and assimilation rather than being about emulation. Drawing influence from Led Zep doesn’t have to equate to epic solos and using ‘baby’ a thousand times. And so it is that The Spectral Light suck all of those influences into a swirling vortex.

The churning ‘Branch’ is wild: ZZ Top on acid, Led Zep in the midst of a breakdown, riffs played at a thousand decibels through shredded speakers and melting amps. But it also spins into cracked post-rock territory over the course of its disorientating nine minutes.

Make no mistake: this is a monster: ‘Moonsinger’ warps and bends and it’s emotionally gutting in ways that are difficult to articulate. It touches the core of the very soul. The title track is defined by a dense, metallic churn… and yet there is still a delicacy about it. It’s dark, disturbing, ugly, and yet… beautiful. There is nothing else quite like this. And the dark, airless trudge of Obliteration feels like a black hole… and I find myself being dragged into its eternal depths.

Ahead of the album’s release, we’re privileged to be able to offer a video exclusive for the album’s final track and choice of lead single, ‘Whisper Surgery’. You might want to pour a big drink for this one.

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Stephen O’Malley – But remember what you have had

Posted: 12 July 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Portraits – 27th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Stephen O’Maley will be forever synonymous with Sunn O))). However fervently fans revere Khanate, whatever the reputation of Burning Witch or KTL, however many solo albums he releases, and regardless of the outstanding work Ideologic Organ presets to the world, none of it will ever come close to the success of Sunn O))), which will eclipse anything and everything else he is involved ion for all eternity. It’s not difficult to grasp the reasons for this. It likely quite frustrating, but that band have elevated a niche not-really-a-genre to stratospheric levels, and have achieved more with a single, sustained chord than most could ever dream of.

When I saw him perform solo some years ago, he appeared quite comfortable with this, playing – just off stage – through a backline that was so immense it wouldn’t quite fit onto the stage of the 450-capacity Brudenell in Leeds. Better to have a reputation to play up to than not, and since bowel-churning guitar drone played at eardrum-shredding volume is what people want, delivering it seems like a fair trade.

The blurb for his latest solo release suggests, however, something a shift, but by no means a departure, writing that ‘With But remember what you have had, Stephen O’Malley continues and expands his musical approach by transposing it to multiphonic electroacoustic writing and acousmatic listening. Drawing not only on his extensive experience as a composer and live instrumentalist, but also on the countless studio production and mixing sessions he has taken part in the course of his many projects (in solo, with SUNN O))) or KTL, to name but a few), Stephen O’Malley’s work on this new piece is ambitious, engaging in an inspired research that delves into the deep intricacies between polyphony, intonation and timbrality, enhanced by melodic motifs. To do this, O’Malley summons up his own very personal sound universe, constellated with amplified textures, instrumental sustained tones and raw energy, in order to diffract them into wavefronts, waves and blows that weave a complex, rich and fascinating matter. But remember what you have had stands out as an important work in Stephen O’Malley’s repertoire: it brings together the multiplicity of his musical approach in an exemplary way, while laying the foundations and promises for the future of an already extraordinary journey.’

But remember what you have had is a single, continuous piece, just over thirty minutes in duration. It begins with a parping drone that sounds somewhat like a didgeridoo. It lingers, resurging, cyclical hums and layers of sound and texture build atop of one another… and then what the fuck’s this? Bagpipes? It sounds like bagpipes. But then, it also sounds like guitar feedback and a single chord being struck and resonating for an eternity. And then another chord crashes like a giant Wave breaking over rocks at high tide with a stormy wind behind it.

Whereas the overall pitch and tone of the Sunn O))) sound is low and growling, But remember what you have had altogether more keenly favours the mid and upper ranges, and howls of feedback while whining engines fill the air as it heats up. There’s more discord as the sounds bounce off one another. It’s an exploration of the interaction between notes and frequencies, conducted in a way which can only happen at volume,

By the midpoint, the feedbacks are interweaving in such a way to form a huge reverberating howling drone, which in some respects shares common ground with Metal Machine Music, and it would be difficult – and inappropriate – to completely sidestep Earth 2 here, too. By twenty-minutes, O’Malley conjures an immense collision of sound, jousting and jostling amidst a sonic tempest, before gradually diminishing to a point of tranquillity which is more reminiscent of a string quartet than experimental wave of noise. It makes for an unexpectedly soothing finish, but once again shows the range of O’Malley’s musicianship, as well the breadth of his sonic interests, which extend far beyond all-out weight and sheer volume.

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Teleost – Three Originals

Posted: 16 March 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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3rd January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Only the middle of March and I’m running behind on releases, so my apologies to Teleost for letting this one slip down the pile, especially as I’d been looking forward to it for some time. Even their earliest live shows, Before rebranding as Teleost, the duo, consisting of Leo Hancill and Cat Redfern, showed a rare musical chemistry, resulting in music of huge, immersive power. Recent shows, such as their recent York homecoming show with Cwfen, demonstrated that they have reached a whole other level of almost transcendental drone, a place where sound becomes a physical force.

But the challenge for any band who are so strong as a live unit, is how successfully can that be translated via the record medium. To commit the sound to tape – or digital recording – is in some way to compress and contain it, to reduce it to two – or even one – dimension. A recording is essentially a listening experience, without the visual element, without the klick drum or the low frequences vibrating your ribs, and all of the other stuff. So how have Teleost faced up to that challenge? Remarkably well. No doubt recording the guitar and drums live has helped retain the huge sound of the live experience. No slickening, studio polishing, just that huge sound caught in real-time, and Pedro at The Audio Lounge in Glasgow has done a remarkable job, clearly understanding what the band are about.

Three Originals opens with the ponderous grind of ‘Forget’, where a sustained whistle of reverby feedback is rapidly consumed by the first thick, sludgy chord: the distortion is speaker-decimatingly dense, and there’s so much low-end you feel it in the lower colon. It’s pure Sunn O))), of course, but then the ultra-heavy drums crash in and the vocals start… Hancill’s approach to singing is very much about rendering his voice an additional instrument rather than the focal point, and the elongated enunciations convey an almost abstractly spiritual sensation.

The first time I saw Earth was following their return with Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I, and I spent the entire show completely hypnotised by Adrienne Davies’ slow drumming. It was an experience I shall never forget: it was if time slowed down, and empires could rise and fall between each beat. I haven’t experienced anything similar since, until Teleost. And once you’ve had such a powerful visual experience in a musical context, it’s not only impossible to forget it, but it becomes integrated with hearing the band. And so it is that on listening to Three Originals, I find myself reliving that experience. It’s clear where Teleost draw their influences, but in amalgamating that low, slow drone of Sunn O))) with the more nuanced, tectonic crawling groove of latter-day Earth, they offer something that is distinct and different.

The seven-and-a-half-minute ‘Ether’ blasts in and the sheer density of that guitar is pulverizing. It simply does not sound like two people, let alone that it’s one guitar and no bass. There’s a delicate mid-section consisting of a clean guitar break before the landslide of distortion hits once more. Final track, ‘Throwaway’ is anything but, another sprawling, seven-minute monster dominated by gut-churning sludge and yawning yelps of feedback, while the vocals drift plaintively in the background.

Three Originals is without doubt their strongest work to date, my only complaint being that it simply isn’t long enough. But then, if each track was fifteen minutes long, it still wouldn’t be. In the field of doomy droney heaviosity, Three Originals is in a league of its own.

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Teleost / Cwfen / Makhlon – The Fulford Arms, York, 6th February 2024

Posted: 7 February 2025 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

On arrival, it looks like Nu Jorvik have pulled and been replaced by Makhlon, and at somewhat short notice, but it’s hard to grumble when you’ve got three heavy bands for six measly quid and the headliners are guaranteed to be worth double that on their own.

There’s lots of leather, studs, long coats, and long hair in the gathered crowd, it turns out those sporting corpse paint – perhaps not entirely surprisingly – belong to the first band who are straight-up black metal.

Makhlon’s singer has Neil from The Young Ones vibes. He’s about 7ft tall and wearing a Lordi T-shirt, but snarls full-on Satanic rasping vocals from behind his nicely-washed jet-black hair. The lead guitarist and front man swap roles for the last two songs – both of which are epic in scope, with some nice tempo changes, and they really step up the fury. It’s quite amusing to see him clutching a notebook in the arm which is thrust forward and enwrapped in a spike-covered vambrace, and checking the lyrics, as if it’s possible to decipher a single syllable. But this is all good: time was when York was wall-to-wall indie, folk, and Americana. Now… now we have homegrown acts like this, and the thing with black metal is that it only works when the band and its members are one hundred percent committed to the cause. These guys are, and while they may be fairly new, they’re tight, they can really play, and they give it everything.

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Makhlon

Cwfen – pronounced ‘Coven’ – aren’t Welsh, but in fact Scottish, and this is their first trip south of the border. It seems that since relocating to Glasgow, Teleost have been making some good friends. And Cwfyn are good alright… Woah, yes, they’re good. They are heavy, so heavy, as well as melodic but also ferocious. There’s a lot going on, all held together by a supremely dense bass. The ‘occult metal four- piece’ may be the coming together of artists who’ve been around a few years, but the fact they’ve only been playing as a unit for a couple of years is remarkable, as they really have everything nailed. They’re both visually and sonically compelling: Siobhan’s fierce presence provides an obvious focal point, but the way everything melds instrumentally is breathtaking. The third song in their five-song set slows things, and brings some nice reverb and chorus textures. Piling into the penultimate song, the crushing ‘Penance’, which features on their debut release, they sound absolutely fucking immense. The closer, the slow-burning, slightly gothy ‘Embers’ is truly epic. With their debut album in the pipeline, this is a band to get excited about.

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Cwfen

I’m already excited about Teleost, and the fact that there’s such a turnout on a cold Thursday night says the people of York are extremely pleased to welcome them home. Having knocked about in various bands / projects previously, with Cat Redfern fronting Redfyrn on guitar and vocals, before pairing with Leo Hancill to form Uncle Bari, who would mutate into the ultimate riff-monster that is Teleost, they departed for Glasgow, leaving a uniquely Teleost-shaped hole at the heavier end of the scene.

Absence not only makes the heart grow fonder, but it’s apparent they’ve spent their time getting even more immense since they left.

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Teleost

They’re a band to watch with your eyes closed. Not because they aren’t good to watch, but because their sound is so immersive. Teleost have perfected that Earth-like tectonic crawl. Imagine Earth 2 with drums and vocals. Or, perhaps, Sunn O)))’s Life Metal with percussion. Each chord hangs for an entire orbit, the drums crash at a tidal pace, and with oceanic, crushing weight. Somehow, Leo Hancil’s guitar sounds like three guitars and a bass, and it looks like he’s actually running through two or even three separate cabs. It’s not quite Stephen O’Malley’s backline, but it’s substantial. And you’re never going to get a sound like that just going through a 15-watt amp, however you mic it up. They play low and slow, and Cat plays with drumsticks as thick as rounders bats, yielding a truly thunderous drum sound. In fact, to open your eyes is to reveal a mesmerising spectacle: two musicians playing with intense focus and a rare intuition, and Redfern’s slow, deliberate drumming is phenomenal, and the whole experience is completely hypnotic. They play over the scheduled time, and then, by popular demand, treat us to an encore with an as-yet-unreleased song. Everyone is absolutely rooted to the spot, currents of sound buffeting around us.

Teleost’s influences may be obvious, but they’re at the point where they’re every bit as good as their forebears. The future is theirs. But tonight is ours. We can only hope they visit again soon.

Khanate – Things Viral (reissue)

Posted: 21 December 2023 in Albums, Reviews
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Sacred Bones – 1st December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Released simultaneously with the reissue of their eponymous debut, Khanate’s second album originally released in 2003 – which is, incomprehensibly, 20 years ago further evidences just how far out they were at the time. And the time is worth assessing: in 2003, Nu-Metal was in its final throes, and Post-Rock was in the early arc of its ascendency. It was something of a wilderness time in many respects, with no real dominant trend: it was the year Avril Lavigne and Evanescence broke and Muse exploded, amidst an ocean of limp indie and even shitter commercial pop and r’n’b. The underground was the only place of interest, but even in those underground circles, there wasn’t anything quite like this.

The bio accompanying the release points us toward the darkness that pervades the album and does so from the start: ‘“Pieces of us in my hands, on the floor, in my pockets/red glory,” Dubin howls on opener ‘Commuted,’ setting the stage for Khanate’s second installment of existential dread. Dripping in death, murder and desperation, the album is somehow less forgiving than its predecessor. Which was probably the point”.

On this outing, they really do seem to have gone all-out to engineer an album that’s as stark and brutal as is possible, and the four tracks are drawn out to torturous lengths to achieve maximum discomfort. The aforementioned opener, ‘Commuted,’ is over nineteen minutes long, and the instrumentation is sparse, minimal and heavy with lugubrious atmosphere, while Alan Dubin howls like he’s having his fingernails pulled out slowly and painfully, one by one. It’s as bleak and harrowing as one of Derek Raymon’s ‘Factory’ series novels. It’s not pleasant, not even slightly, it’s not even enjoyable, but it’s perversely compelling. When a rhythm and guitars do coalesce, it’s at a glacial BPM, the kind of crushing, feedback-strewn, bludgeoning grind of Swans around the time of Cop, but with the more paired-back, spacious sound of Greed and Holy Money. But Khanate didn’t simply take these as templates – they scrawled all over them and then trampled on them in order to forge something even more challenging and even more fucked-up. There are lengthy passages where there is little more than crackle and hum, and the occasional burst of percussion. It may employ the tropes of avant-garde jazz, but it ain’t jazz. But what it is is hard to define. It’s not industrial, and it’s not doom. It’s not really metal in any recognisable form. But it is heavy. And it is unsettling, harrowing, and an absolute endurance test.

By the end of ‘Commuted,’ you feel utterly beaten and find yourself wilting from the sheer brutality of it all. And then ‘Fields’ crawls in, lower and slower, taking obvious cues from Earth 2 and marking clear parallels with Sunn O))). This is sinister, chthonic, demonic, not so much other-worldly as nether-worldly. It’s almost ten minutes before the bowel-juddering billows of overdriven, low-tuned guitar slides in like a slow-crawling river of lava. It’s monstrous, ugly, explicitly outright horrible. The hovering hum that takes hold around the fifteen-minute mark isn’t in any way a calming pause, but a nuclear wasteland of tension that pressurises the skull. Dubin raves maniacally like a psychotic locked in a soundproofed cell, and there’s a sense that the whole of Things Viral is a prison, whereby the listener is trapped within walls of sound. ‘I did this for you’, he screams murderously. It doesn’t sound like a kind favour, but like it’s time for payback. It’s chilling and grotesque. This is a fair summary of Things Viral overall. Even the quiet segments – and there are many – are occupied by sections of such weight that make your body feel as if its being dragged down, not by gravity, but by a darker force, one which will suck your very soul.

‘Dead’, at ten minutes, is but an interlude, but it radiates serial killer raving lunatic mania vibes for its entire duration, as the guitars throb and burn. It’s messy, and so, so heavy: you feel the pressure in your ribs, a weight in your limbs. The final track, ‘Too Close Enough To Touch’ is an absolute monster, which sits more closely alongside the harsh noise and overt extremism of Whitehouse and the point at which industrial strains its mangled way into power electronics than anything even remotely metal. ‘Stay inside… stay inside’ Dubin snarls, his vocals distorted and crazed. You barely dare move a muscle, let alone leave the house.

Things Viral goes way beyond darkness, and plunges into purgatorial depths that would have terrified Milton, and 20 years on, still sounds like the dankest, nastiest thing you could hear in any given year.

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Khanate – Khanate (reissue)

Posted: 11 December 2023 in Albums
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Sacred Bones – 1st December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The unexpected and unannounced arrival of Khanate’s fifth album, some seventeen years after they declared that they were calling it a day, and fourteen years after the release of the posthumous Clean Hands Go Foul caused quite a stir in certain circles – predominantly those occupied by black-clad beard-strokers. Although this is very much a stereotype, I’m reminded of the time I went to see Sunn O))) at The Sage in Gateshead on the same night one of Cheryl Cole’s X-Factor protégé’s was performing in the foyer of the three-stage venue. Incongruous doesn’t come close, and suffice it to say, I wasn’t hard to tell who was there for the ultimate lords of drone-doom and who was there for the cheesy mass-market commercial cash-in shit. There were a lot of beards and leather coats.

The reason Khanate are such big news on the underground is that the band is comprised of James Plotkin, Stephen O’Malley, Alan Dubin and Tim Wyskida, and according to their bio, ‘Together, they make terrifying music.’ Between their formation in 2001 and separation in 2006, they managed to find time out from their main projects to record four monumental albums, and the release of To Be Cruel earlier this year came with the announcement of the reissue of all four, both digitally and physically. And so this brings us to the first of these, their eponymous debut.

The press release sets the expectation, for those unacquainted or unfamiliar, telling of how ‘The cramped corner of hell that Khanate takes the listener to, sonically and psychologically, has almost nothing in common with the doom bands that populate stoner-oriented music festivals across the globe. Khanate is doom as a foregone conclusion, as merciless atmospheric pressure, as a blunt object to crack you over the skull with, slowly, repeatedly, and forever.’

Having only released some demos and their debut ØØ Void, Sunn O))) had yet to really break by the time Khanate came out, and in some ways, they beat Sunn O))) to the mark on launching blasting longform drone to the masses, with an album that featured just five tracks spanning a fill hour. And their colossally expansive duration is matched every inch of the way by the sonic brutality.

The album arrives in a squall of feedback before intestine-crushing low-end chords crash in and grind hard, immediately unsettling the lower colon. Thew gnarliest, most demonic vocals shriek amidst the raging infernal wall of noise, dredged from the molten mantel of deep down below. ‘Pieces of Quiet’ is punishing in every way, but not least in that while its devastating, annihilative work is done after about five minutes, it pounds and grinds on well past the thirteen-minute mark.

In context, doom and drone had both crawled out of the depths a good few years before, and with Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version in 1993, Earth had defined a new form of metal with what will likely stand for all eternity as the ultimate heavy drone work. And yet, these guys believed they could add something further to this – and they were right. Drums, for a start. And vocals.

‘Skin Coat’ is every bit as nasty as the serial killer enthusiast title implies, the guitars mangled to fuck, combining to optimal effect the snarling nastiness of the most blackened of black metal and the sludgiest, most gut-churning doom, with 23bpm drum crashes at the crawling pace of Cop-era Swans. It’s dark and its overtly unpleasant, snarling subterranean oozing tar-thick blackness which crawls like larva and destroys everything in its wake.

‘Torching Koroviev’ is simply a brief interlude which fleetingly opens a portal into hell, before the eighteen-minute ‘Under Rotting Sky’ brings what is arguably the definitive representation of Khanate, again, a squall of feedback prefacing a shredding wall of downtuned and overdriven guitar, billowing and thick with a sludge-like density. It is, of course, an absolute copy of the Sunn O))) model, but with demonic vocals echoing, anguished and wracked with eternal pain through the crushing mesh of noise. It’s fearsome, deranged, the crazed vocal screaming into the abyss. There is no rational or clear way of exploring this: it’s scary, and there is no other way to look. This is the final pulverisation, pacing the way for the album’s brutally dark last track. ‘No Joy’ is appropriately titled, and as heavy as it gets. I crawl, cracked, from the crushing drone experience and as long an hour as nature evaporates from my weary body Slowly the lack-hole darkness takes its grip and begins to crush the very life from my limbs.

This album is twenty-two years old. Yes: twenty-two years. And yet it hasn’t aged a day or even a second. While so much music – particularly rock and metal – has aged and sounds of its time, Khanate froze time when they came together, and the result was like nothing else – and still stands to this day.

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Watch: ‘Palliare’ by †The Lord† & Daniel Kubinski

Posted: 5 November 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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†The Lord† (Greg Anderson) and Daniel Kubinski (Die Kreuzen, The Crosses) have released their haunting collaborative track, ‘Palliare.’ Long circling each other with reverence, Anderson and Kubinski teamed up to track guitars and vocals for the song late last year; the former recorded with Brad Wood at Sea Grass and the latter at Howl Street Studios.  The end result is nothing short of venomous, with caustic, corrosive vocals and massive, monolithic guitar. The ‘Palliare’ composition itself was inspired by “an empathetic attempt to interpret the despair of someone in palliative care,” comments †the Lord†.

Daniel Kubinski comments on the track: “The lyrics for ‘Pallaire’ were actually written in 2016 when the first line up of The Crosses were writing songs for an original LP. The lyrics were for a song entitled ‘Goner’ which was kind of a noisy, lightning speed, crazy song that sounded somewhat like the Birthday Party if they had written a hardcore song. I had always liked the lyrics so when the Crosses split up in 2017 (the first inception of the group) I held on to the lyrics hoping to use them for something else down the road.” He continues, “In 2022 Sunn O))) guitarist and Southern Lord founder Greg Anderson approached me and invited me to sing on one of his songs for his project, The Lord. The first time I heard the song Greg sent me, I immediately remembered the Goner lyrics and thought they might work for the song, they were a perfect fit! I am so proud to be part of The Lord family and that Greg and Southern Lord believed in me to come up with the goods.” †The Lord† adds: “I’ve been a massive fan of Daniel Kubinski ever since I heard his caustic vocals in Die Kreuzen circa 1985. While the musical direction of Die Kreuzen changed drastically over the years, it was always anchored by Daniel’s unique, innovative vocal style. Massive respect to him for simultaneously blazing a unique path and breaking new ground. I finally got to meet Daniel when Sunn O))) played with his current band, The Crosses, in Milwaukee at the Turner Ballroom. I was equally blown away by his performance that evening as well as his humility and kindness.”

Watch the video here:

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