Spiralling breath sonically sycamored; some songs feel more Cocteaus, others more Budd, with a few blurring the boundaries between each. His melancholic piano gloves that Cocteau glisten rather well. A lonely ambience full of rainy-day reflection, the malign beauty that stalks some of us more than others. The comforting echo of his Pearl collaboration with Brain Eno here somehow more skeletal in its haunting, comfortably offset by the other's opulence.
Michael Rodham-Heaps
463 posts
...the LIVE energy this duo are giving off here is insanely satisfying, pushing a mirage of over-driven echoes into the red. A devotional daggered addictive that whirls around shrill and crowing, wounded in the rewind dry whirr of a tape player. The cicada rub of maracas accenting them strumming lacerations, those stippling busts of air-raid siren, all abruptly cut off shortly after the nineteen-minute mark.
Pearling a Pokemon itch, Xylitol opals an enviable optimistic. The maligned clubland default of drum'n'bass given a serious facelift as those needling hi-hatted hares of "Jelena" leap into some heavenly lifts and whispery ambient glows, something Kate Bunnyhausen expertly showcased at her recent Acid Horse outing.
Sharp and guttural -- the vocals beam, the more romantically inclined tracks literally glowing. Kim’s slow-roasted delivery unwrapping in your ears… the vibrating brilliance of "Off You" caught in a gentle hula-skirted lilac; the spiralling quaffs of "Do You Love Me Now", the nocturnal burn of the only track from Mountain Battles they played, "Night Of Joy", a gentle melancholic wonder that clung warmly to you.
The raw energy of Eva Luna was and still is an utterly satisfying listen, especially if life has dealt you a nasty surprise or two and you really need to vent. Each song kilter-kittens the frustration out of that snotty swizzle with plenty of unruly spanners and razor-tight acidics.
I’ve absolutely loved this band ever since Upset The Rhythm re-released their ill-fated debut back in 2017 and how I’m glad to say I’m hearing fresh material that’s positively abuzz with that subtle beguile that hooked me in the first place. My eye is drawn to, caught in the bleak Stalingrad ruins of the cover. A circle of stone children in frozen celebration taunting the crocodile at its centre as a dirty plumb of destruction ravens the sky. My pupils eating up the image’s futility, civilisation's failing hope entrapped in its accusing stillness.
I must admit, I was expecting more of the soundtrack stuff, so to see him front and centre, really living the songs and acting the parts was quite a revelation with his lovely black and white Airline guitar part of the scene. In front of him was a small electronic device which contained backing elements, but really it was about the interaction of the trio that made the show pop.
What a IDM scuzzy-jazz-noise joy this is. A total fresh skewer on dance music where the ‘I’ is for injured and the dance bit is an interpretative crisp-bag of Ian Curtis-like scutterings. The fragmented energy spurring between Anthony Brown on upright bass and Aron Ward on assorted electronics and effects is a wonderful thing, slipping into the ill-fitting shoes of a host of worn-out genres to monkey-spanner some seriously unhinged magic.
A product of the ever-shifting sands of the group and hot on the heels of VHF’s Hypnotape comes this prime spoken word smothering from those sunburnt folks over at Three Lobed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A pleasant experience that hammocks in your mind's eye, serves as a precursor to the celestial awe of the last two lengthy excursions, both of which are born from a slow and considered start, but evolve quickly to seduce you with their expressive colour.
I honestly thought Xmal Deutschland’s lead singer wouldn’t ever return to music, (very much like the much-missed Danielle Dax), but I’m glad to have her back, here collaborating with long-standing friend Mona Mur and involving fellow Xmal bandmate Manuela Rickers to produce something that’s still haunted by that punk / gothic angst of yore, but is so much more considered, oozing with a refreshed sleekness that’s closer to Viva than the '80s glamourgast that was Devils.
Trailing on the shirt tails of last year's lathe-cut seven inch Afterlife EP comes a whole album's worth that doesn’t disappoint. Pleasantly parading around the head like the cover of an unread novel that fertilizes the imagination before you’ve even taken in a single word, The Afterlife’s treacly glow sticks to you in chorused warmth and glittery keystrokes, the occasional word-form whirling its architecture like an intoxicated hex.
The free-flowing chemistry between Finnish producer and audio engineer Antti Uusimäki (Uzu Noir) and Pharaoh Overlord’s Pekka Jääskeläinen (Ontelo) is great -- low-key and unscripted. Invisible Labyrinth's two sides seemingly to blur into one cohesive whole, each quietly teasing out the best in each other, bringing their undeniable lightness of touch to the listener.
The music here thistles a composed and crafted ambience, eagerly pulling at its constraints. A flush of triggering sensibilities that are masterfully dark. Weaving energies tied to the spherical-shaped symphonics of the next track, "Mono No Aware". Sonics that seem to bounce off the stern-faced circles of samurai on the cover, spilling over in semaphore pulses and torn keystrokes.