Posts Tagged ‘weight’

Nadja – cut

Posted: 11 October 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Midira Records / Cruel Nature Records – 24th October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

A new Nadja release is always cause for a pique of interest. Excitement doesn’t feel like quite the right term for an act who create such dense, dark, brooding soundscapes. Centred around the duo of Leah Buckareff and Aidan Baker, each release marks a shift thanks to the contribution of a range of guest performers, and cut is no exception – and this time, following the instrumental epic that was Labyrinthine (2022) – we have vocals, from not just Baker and Buckareff, but also Tristen Bakker, Oskar Bakker-Blair and Lane Shi Otayonii, among others. They certainly bring a lot of guests to a party which features just four tracks. But that is ’just’ four tracks which each occupy an entire side of vinyl on a double LP. As with Labyrinthine, these are compositions which span ten to sixteen minutes, and utilise that timeframe to maximum effect. They don’t hurry things, with slow, tapering drones interweaving, the emphasis on the atmosphere and the detail over the impact. And yet, despite this, or even perhaps because of this, the impact is strong, albeit in more subtle ways.

Their comments on the album are illuminating, explaining that ‘Thematically, cut explores trauma and physio-/psychological stress, as well as possible tools and means of overcoming these stressors, of which the music itself (sonic sublimation) might be one… Musically, while Nadja retains their signature wall-of-noise doomgaze sound, they also explore quieter, more introspective moments as well as new/different instrumentation, with harp, French horn, and saxophone featuring for the first time on one of the band’s recordings’.

‘It’s Cold When You Cut Me’ is stark, bleak, minimal. The air feels dead, it’s suffocating. The sparse percussion rattles along, but the drones are glacial. Five minutes in, rumbling bass and heavy beats roll in, and by the mid-point there are crushing waves of lugubrious noise worthy of Swans, but overlaid with trilling brass and woodwind, jazz in slow-mo, the honk of migrating birds and trilling abstraction.

But this is just a gentle introduction ahead of the thunderous grind of ‘Dark, No Knowledge’, which begins with atmospheric whirlings and even hints of Eastern esotericism, voices rising in the distance, atop wisps and rumbles, echoes and murmurings, before the dense, sludgy, post everything doom drone cascades in like a mudslide. It’s low and it’s slow, crawling like larva. buzzes and rumbles sustain for an eternity. You can actually feel your stomach drop in response to the bass frequencies.

The sound seems to get thicker and murkier as the album progresses, and if ‘She Ate His Dreams From the Inside & Spat Out The Frozen Fucking Bones’ isn’t nearly as abrasive as the title may suggest, its slow repetitious form is truly hypnotic as it trudges its way along.it possesses a rare density which matches its delicacy, and comparisons to latter-day Swans stand in terms of positioning the piece. There are thick, distorted tones grinding like earthworks through the airier overtones, and the contrast brings something magical and soothing. Then ‘Omenformation’ crashes in like a tsunami. The volume leaps, the density leaps, and you find yourself blown away by a sonic force strong enough to knock the air out of your lungs. The dingy, booming bass alone is enough to send you to the ground. The drums are immense. In fact, everything about this is almost inarticulable, as Nadja scale up the sound to beyond that of mere mortal beings. This is music with a physical force and a power beyond words, beyond contrivance. It’s archaic, occult, primal in its power. This is a track which treads through a series of movements, the last of which is crushing in its weight.

It’s true that cut possesses all of the sounds which are recognisable as being concomitant with Nadja’s distinctive dense, doomgaze stylings, and a lot of the vocals are as much additional layers rather than clearly enunciated words, and as such, add further depth – and a certain human aspect to the overall sound. The result is a work which speaks to that level of the psyche beyond words, which conveys trauma and physio-/psychological stress, and which offers a degree of relief through an experience which is wholly immersive and immensely powerful.

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Photo: Hugues de Castillo

Remote Viewing – Modern Addictions

Posted: 1 February 2023 in Albums
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Human Worth – 3rd February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

A shriek of feedback prefaces the gnarly blast of a monster rhythm section, thunderous drums paired with a snarling bass. And so begins ‘Short Distance Runner’, the first of six songs on Remote Viewing’s Modern Addictions. You know in an instant that it’s going to be good.

Of course, you know it’s going to be good before you hear a single sound.

Featuring members of Palehorse, Million Dead, Sly & The Family Drone, Nitkowski and Wound (to name but a few) is quite the underground supergroup. Plus, Modern Addictions is being released on Human Worth, which is in itself a guarantee of heavy, noisy shit of the highest calibre. So yes, you know it’s going to be good. But even then, it’s hard to be braced for something this good.

The guitar alternates between thick, sludgy chords and really sinewy lead lines that buzz and drill, twist and bend and wrap themselves around you and dig in like barbed wire. The tracks are backed back to back, making the cumulative effect of the heavy battering even more acutely felt. Single cut ‘Your Opinion is Wrong’, showcased here in December is broadly representative of the dense, chunky, churning sound of the album as a whole, but doesn’t fully convey the extent of its textures and variety.

It’s not all punishing density, and the band are keen to highlight that theirs is a sound that demonstrates a ‘broader sound that incorporates elements of hardcore, post-rock and shoegaze into the palette of sludge and noise-rock’.

There are some tight grooves amidst the racket, ‘Wasted on Purpose’ effortlessly transitions through a number of varied passages, from full-on balls-out riffage to delicate, evocative swirling post-rock chimes which gracefully convey a very different kind of emotional weight, and if the title ‘Cleveland Balloonfest ‘86’ suggests something bright and airy, sonically it’s more the Hindenburg disaster with it’s slow, low-slung growling guitar that grinds away at a crawl for six and a half anguish-filled minutes.

If ‘Watch Me For the Changes’ is a demonic dirge of epic proportions with a remarkably light ending (and you can’t help but suspect the title is perhaps a reference to the band’s directions for playing it) ,the final track, ‘A.B.B.A. ABBA’ springs an unexpected surprise as the band switch into disco mode. No, of course it doesn’t really. It’s seven minutes of dolorous doom, thick with atmosphere and dripping distortion. It’s the sound of weight so great that it feels as if it’s collapsing in on itself, decaying and crumbling on the way to a slow death, that leaves you feeling hollowed out and devastated. It’s the perfect finale to a superlative album.

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Amenra – De Doorn

Posted: 23 June 2021 in Albums
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Relapse Records – 25th June 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

With everything they do so heavily steeped in a deep sense of ritual, a new album by Amenra is not simply something that happens, it’s a happening, a grand unveiling to reveal something far greater than simply a set of songs. It’s something spiritual, cosmic, and even cataclysmic. And whereas some bands who aspire to such elevation are prone to presenting as pompous and pretentious, something about Amenra – and it’s not just their sincerity – transcends that.

On the subject of transcending boundaries, De Doorn marks a break from the linear sequence of the band’s previous releases, Mass I-VI. While bands conventionally eschew their native languages in favour of English in order to garner a broader commercial appeal, for De Doorn, Amenra have elected to mark another departure in being the first Amenra album to be sung entirely in Flemish. But in certain genres, at least, the language of sound and of music transcends the language of words, and as the press release suggests, ‘De Doorn imparts a universal power by digging deep into local customs. Not just allowing for a greater range of expression through the intimacy, allowances and layers of meaning granted by your native tongue, it takes inspiration from Flemish forms such as Kleinkunst, a folk-based musical wave driven by storytelling, and the passing of wisdom through generations’.

‘Ogentroost’ builds a slow, ominous intro, with slow, dolorous surges fading to silence like a slow-building tide. Colin H. Van Eeckhout’s vocal is hushed, a blank stage whisper against a picked guitar that in time replaces the doomy ambient tones: it’s fully four minutes before the first crushing power chord crashes in and the album’s first monumental, lumbering riff breaks out. But once it does, it’s all a fury. The pace picks up and Van Eeckhout’s finds his raw-throated anguished scream.

Excepting the interlude that is ‘De Dood in Bloie’, ‘De Evenmens’ is the shortest song on the album, clocking in at a mere eight minutes.

There is very much an evolving and emerging sense of formula present on Dr Doorn: the hushed, delicate intro, a long, slow build… and build… before the full-force guitars and howling anguished vocals crash in, pulverisingly heavy, crushing. ‘Het Glooren’ is a crawler – a majestic, lumbering crawler that has that grainy, organic richness of the best of Neurosis, with a picked lead guitar chiming and weaving textures over a dense backdrop of overdrive. Around the mid-point, everything drops out leaving just spoken words and sparse guitar picking an almost medieval motif… and then everything piledrives in, heavier than ever, and it hits like a tsunami, a soul-smashing blast of devastation. Van Eeckhout sounds shriller, more pained, more desperate, than ever, and it’s a hard, harrowing experience.

They really do save the best – and most fully representative – till last. ‘Voor Immer’ is another slow-building slow-burner that absolutely explodes. It takes around eight minutes for it to happen, but when it does, the guitars absolutely TEAR and SHRED and it’s a punishing blast. It doesn’t only touch your soul, it squeezes it, works it like a putty made of raw meat and emotion. And never mind that the words to the songs of De Doorn are inaccessible to any non-speakers of Flemish: even when singing in English, deciphering the words was difficult, and in such circumstances it comes down to the articulation oof emotion through voice in a way that goes far beyond language.

De Doorn is by no means an easy album and it’s not an album that one can dip in and out of. Similarly, there are no songs that stand out as particular highlights, or as having a memorable hook. Instead, what one takes away from the album is an overarching sense of a certain kind of experience, and it’s one that is defined by the contrasts – the lengthy quiet passages, which are melodic, contemplative, evocative, perhaps a little post-rock in orientation, pitched against the roaring explosive segments that are beyond immense. And, in this context of the fill breadth of the sonic and emotional experience that it provides, De Doorn is something else. Not an album so much to listen to, as an album to live through.

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