Riot Season
Continue reading Ultraphallus – Sowberry Hagan [...]
Serious noise rock from Belgium, the third album from Ultraphallus and their UK début on Riot Season. Where do I start? With a name like Ultraphallus am I serious? And what a name it is! Its the mother of all names to trip up spam filters. Sowberry Hagan was recorded over four days in a farm in Liege, but you wouldn’t guess at such folkish origins. And if you did you’d be in for a surprise. Sowberry Hagan is an evil slab of shoegazing, sludgy malevolent doom and claustrophobic heavy rock. This is a nasty album, and I mean that in a good way. It’s evil white noise to scare the crap out of the unwary. And, of course, I mean that in a good way too. Its feverish, ramshackle and as unpolished as they come. Sowberry
The Bride Screamed Murder is superb. Not at all what I expected, but sees the Melvins in fine form. A Senile Animal (2006) and Nude With Boots (2008) saw the Melvins gelling as a tight four piece unit, with Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover playing alongside Big Business’ Coady Willis and Jared Warren. Now I love both these albums, and I would have welcomed a third helping. But we’ve all seen bands fall into formulaic ruts rehashing variations of the same album again and again until everything fresh and innovative is long gone. The Melvins have side stepped this pitfall. The Bride Screamed Murder finds them returning to a looser jam-based sound, reminiscent of their early stuff. This sounds like the renowned Melvins who will fuck up.
Wow, this is a really different kind of Trans Am album. But wow in general, too, it’s also a pretty fucking great album. The first thing that struck me about Thing was its soundtrack-like quality. At points it is more like a vision of Blade Runner rather than the electro rock we know and love from Trans Am.
Lazer Crystal come from Chicago and this is their first full release. The title MCMLXXX is a real declaration of intent, or at least a real advert to the albums contents. And it is, but at the same time it isn’t. I’ve heard many bands that are really stuck in the 70s or 80s to the point of sounding like a stale copy. Lazer Crystal aren’t one of them. Indebted to the 80s, yes; in awe of the 80s, almost certainly; but not stuck in them.
Canadian speed merchants Annihilator have really gone back to their roots for this outing, and it is going back a fair bit. Annihilator is their thirteenth studio album since 1989′s début Alice in Hell. They’ve undergone numerous line up changes over the years with guitarist, and these days also vocalist, Jeff Waters remaining the sole original member of the band.
Wow, they don’t make em like this any more. What am I talking about, this is how they make em these days. Its like Nirvana and grunge never happened. White Wizzard, along with fellow Earache stable mates Cauldron, are part of what sounds like a NWOBHM/hair metal revival. White Wizzard give us speedy riffs, powerful melodic vocals, and big anthemic sing along choruses … if you can hit the high notes. I still find it a little odd that Earache are releasing this kind of stuff. Back in the day, Earache were busy releasing classics such as Napalm Death‘s Scum, which was diametrically opposed to 80s hair culture.
Trans Am‘s blend of rock/electro comes to the stage with live album What Day Is It Tonight? Many lesser bands wouldn’t be able to pull this kind of fusion off. Synthpop and hard driving rock are seemingly chalk and cheese. Lesser bands might have troubles, but this is what Trans Am do and they do it like fucking champs (and indeed sometimes alongside The Fucking Champs).
like about Necropsalms, Obliteration‘s second album, unless you don’t like doomy death metal that is. But, of course, everyone likes death metal. Obliteration hail from Kolbotn in Norway, that’s the home of Darkthrone amongst other bands. Their first album was released on Tyrant Syndicate, the sub-label of Peaceville run by Darkthrone’s Nocturno Culto. So you’d be forgiven for thinking Necropsalms was a good orthodox piece of Norwegian black metal under the evil shadow of Darkthrone; but you’d be wrong.
I wasn’t expecting Super Roots 10 to sound like this, which is what I have come to expect from the Boredoms and the Super Roots series. Super Roots 10 contains “Ant 10″ and three remixes of it, and lives up to the impressive legacy Super Roots lays down. “Ant 10″ itself continues the Boredoms’ recent love of tribal druming. Beginning with chanting, it then moves into a massive wall of tribalisms. Floating on top of this are silky synth arpeggios and psychedelic guitars, all of which create an intense trancey wall sound. Its very psychedelic in a very Japanese way. The synths have been compared to early Nintendo games. There is certainly that. Its a glorious analogue bubble bath of Japanese
Unlike a lot of remix albums where an artist gets a song to work with, the artists on Chicken Switch were given whole Melvins albums to work with. So each track is a remix of a whole album. The Melvins chose experimental electronic artists for Chicken Switch, with such names as Matmos, Lee Ranaldo, Merzbow, Kawabata Makoto and Speedranch getting involved. The result is a pretty extreme makeover. It isn’t an album of mixes that sound nearly identical to the originals. In fact, most of the tracks don’t sound that much like the Melvins. “Queen (Electroclash Remix)” by The Panacea and Lee Ranaldo’s mix are pretty wild chopped up metal. Farmers Manual‘s “disp_tx_skel_mach_murx” and Void Manes‘ “Overgoat” both sound like a reconstituted Melvins struggling to remain conscious,
Mockery is the breathtaking début album from Littl Shyning Man, a.k.a. Christopher Haworth, which was originally released in 2005. To me it struck a chord with Mothlite‘s The Flax of Reverie – a huge symphonic sweeping spectrum of style: a mixture of electronics and instruments, frantic modernist string pieces, vocal harmonies, spoken word, raw buzzing noise, drum and bass joins folk in a shimmering clicking whir. And like Mothlite, Mockery has a quality that is very English. The name Littl Shyning Man comes from the book Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. Mockery is a sound track to this post apocalyptic tale. Christopher Haworth steers us through a landscape that is disjointed and fractured, melancholic and unsettling. The shards and embers of electronica and folk are fused together in the apocalyptic ruins.
Skin Turns to Glass is epic stuff, I love it. Huge shoegazer doom from Toronto-based duo Nadja, who began as a solo project of Aidan Baker. In 2005 Leah Buckareff joined him allowing them to leave the studio and go live, though this album was originally released in 2003 in a slightly different version with Buckareff on bass and vocals. Between them they make a sound that could conquer the world.
The progression from early Earth to modern Earth makes perfect sense, to me at least. Behind the change from dirty droning guitars to country doom, Earth retain a distinctive quality. The sound has changed, and the lineup has changed around Dylan Carlson, but the quality remains: a slow slow moving riff looping round and round, seemingly going nowhere, and catching you out when you start to think that. The riff is, and always has been, one of the keys to Earth. Where the early sound was as stripped down as possible, often solely consisting of a slow ultra-sparse grunge churn, modern Earth has started the process of building up again.