Posts Tagged ‘The Reflecting Skin’

Mercury’s Antennae – The Reflecting Skin

Posted: 20 February 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Sett Records – 22th February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Just over a decade on from their debut album, and just shy of seven years after their last release, purveyors of ethereal goth, Mercury’s Antennae mark their return with a new single in the form of ‘The Reflecting Skin’. The trio comprises Dru Allen and Cindy Coulter of This Ascension, and Erick R. Scheid of The Palace of Tears, and the fact they’re currently based between Switzerland and the US is a possible factor in their time away (not to mention the fact a lot of musical artists, especially those who are geographically disparate lost a lot of time and progress to a global pandemic).

As their Bandcamp page states, ‘Their sound incorporates influences from shoegaze pop, ethereal darkwave, and unadorned acoustic beauty, while also drawing inspiration from ambient and modern electronica’.

‘The Reflecting Skin’ brings pretty much all of this in a near-perfect three-and-a-half minutes. Starting out with a dense, chorus-soaked bass, loping drums and chilly synths conjure a dark yet dreamy atmosphere that’s quintessentially gothy but without being cliché. Dru Allen’s layered vocals spin evocative and mystical words gracefully through it all, to mesmerising, almost spiritual effect.

B-side, ‘AGALIA MMXXV’, is, as one might expect, a rerecording of the song from their debut album, A Waking Ghost Inside. It’s different enough to justify the effort: it has a more muscular, denser feel, altogether less brittle and cloud-like, with the bass and drums being sturdier and more pronounced, while still retaining the expansive shoegaze magnificence of the original. This, I suppose is telling in terms of reflecting the evolution of their sound.

That this single release is remixed by William Faith, ex-Faith and the Muse, suggests there’s an original version, which is – one would hope – going to feature on the forthcoming album, due for release in the spring.

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The Reflecting Skin – II

Posted: 2 March 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

A year on from The Reflecting Skin’s eponymous debut – with a gnarly, feedback-strewn live recording from July 2022 released in September if last year, they’re back with II.

Lead track ‘Irreversible Damage’ is a warning of what this will do to your hearing. It’s the dirties, nastiest overloading, overdriven black racket you’ll hear. The drums clatter away and everything is cranked up to distortion, the snarling vocals just a barking, screaming, growling mess of pain, anguish and nihilism. It’s the easiest-going out of the three on what is a spectacularly nasty work, that goes deep, dark, and heavy all the way.

It was listening to John Peel in the early 90s that was my passage to music of such extremity, via acts like Extreme Nose Terror. At fourteen or fifteen, it opened doors to a whole new world. Then again, The Reflecting Skin sound more like they’re opening doors to the pits of hell. And anything less, well, it would practically be pop music.

II is not pop. It’s pain.

‘Loose Hiss’ arrives in a howl of ear-splitting feedback before getting heads—down on a driving riff bashed out at a frenetic pace and it’s a sonic blitzkrieg that’s all over I a skull-pounding minute and fifty-one seconds.

They stretch the dingy ‘Grimace’ out over five tempo-shifting minutes where a dirty downtuned bass dominates while everything else drills into your soul. If you want heavy, look no further. II is immense.

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The Reflecting Skin – The Reflecting Skin

Posted: 24 April 2022 in Albums
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1st April 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Details of this eponymous EP release from Leeds-based The Reflecting Skin are sparse. It’s only since the advent of social media and the ubiquity of the Internet that we’ve come to expect to know everything about an act and its releases – the who played what, the lyrics, the inspiration for and meaning of songs, who their musical influences are, favourite films, etc., etc. And why do we need to know? What actual benefit does it serve, and to whom?

What matters is that this is seriously harsh and heavy. A grinding chord booms, overloading the speakers by way of a welcome with ‘Ceramic Rash’. It’s slow, doomy, dirty and dark, and devoid of percussion, crawls like larva. The vocals are half-buries and swathed in so much reverb as to sound like they’ve coming from the bottom of a well – a well the shaft of which goes down, not to the water table, but the very pits of hell.

It stops abruptly, and it straight into the crashing thud of ‘Limb Off’, which finds The Reflecting Skin go full band and full-throttle gnarly hardcore nastiness. The production is authentically primitive – it’s so dirty, so rough and raw, with the feel of a Walkman recording, and playback with fluff-encrusted tape heads, but this isn’t an impedance, because it simply sounds right. If it slots right in along the mid 80s hardcore vintage, it’s equally very much contemporary Leeds underground / DIY. It’s not slick by any stretch, even the track editing sees each one cut and the next begin, but this is very much integral to the appeal and the form of genre – and it’s totally nonstop no-fi brutal racketing, punching in your face.

I’ve no idea what the title is about, but ‘IMA-IW-BF’ is so distorted it hurts: a raw, raging rehearsal tape from a damp basement or clungy garage, it’s a descending chord sequence that grinds and growls, like a half-pace Melvins trudge but with raw-throated roars for vocals… while ‘Split Wires’ clocks in at a half a minute and just quite simply the sound off punishment at a hundred miles an hour. They really do save the gnarliest noisiest shit for last, though: the six-and-a-half-minute ‘Nocturnal Cough’ is built around the nastiest, most gut0churning bass imaginable. It makes your stomach lurch to the point you want to puke, and it’s propelled by thumping drums that threaten to burst your eardrums.

It would be a stretch to describe The Reflecting Skin as a fun or enjoyable listen, because, quite simply, it hurts. But as ultra-heavy and uncompromisingly brutal releases go, it’s an absolute beast.

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