MNRK Heavy It’s been an incredible six years since High On Fire’s last album, Electric Messiah and its evil Santa cover. Since then, High On Fire has tasted Grammy success, Matt Pike posited as the logical successor to Lemmy Kilminster’s title of biggest badass in rock … and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. With his long-term interest in Nibiru, David Icke and fringe theories in general, Pike fell […]
Discus It has been a couple of years since Carla Diratz‘s The Scale was released and you could be forgiven if the line-up for that album viewed it as a one-off; a unique meeting of post jazz rock minds. But when Carla contacted Martin Archer to suggest a more blues inflected album, suggestive of the current world malaise, both he and Nick Robinson jumped at the chance to […]
Well-regarded but under-seen on initial release a decade ago, The Borderlands has become something of a beloved cult favourite, one that along with Ben Wheatley’s early work was key with reviving folk at the centre of horror culture. On its tenth anniversary, this Second Sight re-release gives an opportunity to re-examine the film, and to find it even stronger than the first time round, standing head and shoulders above many of the films that have followed in its footsteps, whilst remaining kind of inimitable, a totally singular concoction.
Oh, a festival of ugly music - how could I refuse? Quite a varied line up too, the action split between two rooms -- the main stage and a cellar-like space further into the venue.
Fyear are a double drummer nine-piece with two spoken word performers which has chosen a suite of seven apocalyptic post-classical soundscapes to force across their message of human mistake, economic disarray and environmental disaster. The sound generated by the group and the thoughts expressed make them a perfect fit on Constellation, sharing recording venue Hotel 2 Tango with many of the label's other artists and a desire to raise consciousness in a new and unique way.
For Maridalen's third album, although the line-up of Jonas Vemøy, Anders Hefre and Andreas Haga remains the same, the venue has changed and instead of the self-referencing village church, they have decamped even further from civilisation to the island of Gressholmen, a boat ride from Oslo, which according to the lovely photographs is an apparently partly abandoned area redolent of the past.
Each subsequent album teetering between this rough'n'smooth threshold, the best a balancing act between and this latest sparsely packaged artefact, revisiting that Zickzack spidery black text and that ever-present dancing primitive swamped here by an acidic yellow, harbours some seriously lovely junkyard / alt-pop moments.
There is an intensity to the delivery especially when set against the stark tones of solo piano, the English words of the self-titled opener dancing into German as Katt Hernandez's lazy violin curls around the piano like smoke. These shards of violin that are spread throughout the album work as threads that draw the stories along, a serrated light into which the voice stares longingly.
For the first album under his own name, a more fluid group of musicians has gathered to flesh out musical expressions that have been approached in a way that highlights the melody and rhythm, but also allows plenty of room for extemporisation. The other lovely thing about the album is that, although it is born of Kjetil's ideas, he leaves acres of space for his guests often moving into the background to allow the likes of Arve Henriksen, Martin Myhre Olsen and Signe Emmeluth to step forward and lead the way.
Computer Students The Conformists have been toiling away in the St Louis hinterlands for nearly thirty years, crafting their awkward, distended “ugly rock music” and stretching it into new shapes, imbuing them with fresh perspectives and leading us away from leaden cruelty to a hypnotic, distorted romanticism that drags new blood and new earth from the cycle of days and seasons. Those arbiters of unusual time signatures Computer […]
Of all the times we’ve seen SunnO))) in action, this is definitely the best. The doom theatrics seem to be taken to a new level, visually grasping the apocalyptic with fresh conviction, the red disc lights behind glowing like dying suns cloaked in smokey blooms. Beacons shivering out in radiating spokes of arrowing light as the sound luxuriates in the smouldering pyroclastic cliff fall.
Freq has been online in various forms since 1 April 1998; this iteration has been around as of 2010, with an archive of older material available.
Considering their current roster, Constellation is the perfect fit for this series of tracks that explore the interaction between electronics and voice in a completely unhindered and boundaryless fashion. Having spent time in groups and working on the edges of experimentation, this album focuses primarily on what Erika can achieve and how far she can push her voice within the song format.
I think of all the Velvet Underground effluvia this is the record I come back to most. I still massively rate Lou Reed as a songwriter but Nico is sheer vibes, like a cliff-face. From one angle she's massively unaffected -- the thin voice, that querulous vibrato. The proper folk singer approach of singing the notes largely undecorated. Nothing clever in her singing.
Desertshore is not an easy listen. Across eight songs, which together are scarcely more than half an hour in length, Nico leads us on a melancholy musical journey through a portrait gallery of those who were, or had been, close to her: Garrel, Andy Warhol, her mother, Brian Jones, Ari. For a woman barely over thirty, there is already an abundance of loss, pain and sadness here, as Nico plays the role of medium to the voices of those troubled and damaged souls towards whom she had gravitated during her passage through the effervescent 1960s.
A re-release of Abel Ferrara’s Fear City finds the cult classic as interesting in its flaws as ever. It’s the mid-'80s, New York is pre-clean up, still a landscape of neon, sex and hovering violence. Former Boxer Matt Rossi (Tom Berenger) and his business partner Nicky (Jack Scalia) run a management company for Manhattan’s best strip club dancers.
Recorded over two post-lockdown days, these recordings are consumed by a desire to play together in a room again after such a lay-off and that air of desire is palpable. This recording, encompassing the second day of the session, is alive with the possibility and their interaction and generosity is plain to hear.
As a fan of Suicide’s tainted pop aesthetic, it’s not surprising that I’m loving the compelling sizzle here. That sleazy love muscle dissonantly dancing in all that analogue compression on Martin Rev's first solo release from the 1980s, now beautifully resurrected by those bastions of contemporary culture, Bureau B.