WUTHERING HEIGHTS SUMMONS WINTER STORM

It’s the year’s last gasp for new sounds so we’ve got a small but suitably wintry batch to cram in before 2025 disappears. And, as we well know, nothing says deep winter darkness like … Charlie XCX?

Damn right. Let’s get straight to it. Links to tracks are all at the end.

CHARLIE XCX and JOHN CALE – House

Some songs land out of nowhere and own your essence so squarely that you don’t play them too often. You don’t need to – a single listen goes a long way and the intentional underplay prolongs the fresh mystery that slammed you the first time. There’s no rush. It’s all there, waiting. Special.

House is such a track. Being caught out by a Charlie XCX and John Cale collaboration – the day after a chance hearing of Velvet Underground’s European Son (to Delmore Schwartz) unknowingly primed my Cale antennae – is one thing. But the song itself, a charged descent into blizzard hex, is another. Cale narrates with vulnerable yet commanding authority:

“Can I speak to you privately for a moment?
I just want to explain
explain the circumstances I find myself in.”

Doom-heavy cello surges and retreats. Violin slashes squeak and edge your nerves. It’s ominously bleak and supernaturally intense, like the Pennine winter itself. For the first two thirds, it’s Cale solo. When Charlie XCX enters the fray, House implodes in a swollen storm of beats and pained distortion

and then it drops, as suddenly as it rose. Pure dark magic.

[for more spoken word and heavy string, check The Dictator by Catherine Graindorge with Iggy Pop]

SMOTE – Snodgerss

Invader music. That’s what this is. An instrumental soundtrack to an invasion by beasts of the sea. Seriously. Not from the very start, obvs – because a flute dance is never the sound of an imminent attack – but as soon as flute gives way to tidal drones and push, Snodgerss veers towards GY!BE territory and lays on the feedback. No groove, no flow, no funk, just heavy symphonic reps and industrial psyche for a pounding, escalating tension and, presumably, obliteration.

TRENT REZNOR & ATTICUS ROSS – Vaster than Empires

Not quite new, but only a year or so old, is this alternate version to a Reznor-Ross piece from their Queer soundtrack, the 2024 William Burroughs biopic. Hear it out of context and nothing screams Nine Inch Nails soundtrack. Instead of piano, synth or pulse, it’s vocally led – by Reznor, but other voices multiply while the distortions and layers and volume and mass increase over a hypnotic swell.

Then it hits you: it’s a little bit Low, this. Shapeshifting a Double Negative, building a HEY WHAT.

Vaster than Empires: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Alan Sparhawk, BJ Burton.

Come taste the electro divine.

PETER HAMMILL – Fogwalking

Not quite new but only 45 years or so old … WTF, how am I only hearing this genius throb of 80s avant electro mist-icism for the first time in 2025? Get me A Black Box and start fixing that long-broken promise to check Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator.

The title tells you what’s going on – walking in fog on city streets – but there’s a seediness and hallucinatory threat at play, like you get from Iggy’s Funtime and Nightclubbing, that ups the unease. This isn’t soothed by collage-style sax shrapnel panning left and right, nor the heavily treated riffs that are sticky with gloom. It’s the anti-slick and the gothic, drenched in post-punk synth experimentation. Paranoia via machine prog, Fogwalking is of the time yet way ahead … the genuine article.

Tracklisting:

House – Charlie XCX and John Cale
Snodgerss – Smote
Vaster than Empires – Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Alan Sparhawk, BJ Burton
Fogwalking – Peter Hammill

’til next time!