Tag Archives: noise rock

GUHTS – White Noise: TRACK OF THE MONTH

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BROOKLYN NEW YORK, AUSTIN TEXAS AND CARDIFF CARDIFF SERVE THE RIFFS AND THE RAGE FOR THIS REWIND 

Before dipping into the new discoveries, have we got time to splatter the page with Melvins superlatives? 

New album Tarantula Heart is out THIS VERY WEEK which has, of course, prompted a massive Mel-fest in recent weeks. Question is, what would you choose right now for a Melvins reacquaintance?

Aside from a healthy Stoner Witch loop, it’s the Big Business double-drum era that’s done the business (sorry) round here. (A) Senile Animal, Nude with Boots and The Bride Screamed Murder, played in chronological order, makes for a shit-hot listening project: it’s Melvins with more crunch and pace than sludge and crawl, though we know they’ve always mixed it up pretty wildly. And there’s no shortage of rhythmic complexity on these albums either, cementing the notion that Buzz truly is one of the god-level riff lords of our time. Same goes for Dale on drums. They’re juiced and rejuvenated on The Talking Horse, warped and disorienting on The Savage Hippy and beat-shifting headfucks on Evil New War God, and that’s just three highs out of a possible 30. Monstrous stuff.  

That block of albums is the third of three ‘triples’, which is pretty handy for chunking some Melvins together in a vaguely cohesive way. The major label threesome of Houdini, Stoner Witch and Stag was first. Then there was The Maggot, The Bootlicker and The Crybaby trilogy back when Melvins first hooked up with an infant Ipecac. And finally, the Big Business years just mentioned. No doubt there are more trilogies, intended or not, lurking in The Melvins’ vast idiosyncratic sprawl but those three are huge anchor points.

Best wishes to Dale Crover’s continuing recovery from back surgery.

OK, let’s get back to the main gig with three new tunes.  

GUHTS – White Noise

8 minutes of post-metal lumber that mainlines Cult of Luna? I’m in. And I’m especially in for the vocals. This is the Cult of Luna sound you’ve been waiting for IF the CoL voice(s) sometimes gets in the way, though you might not know that until you’ve heard this. Amber Gardner brings more dimensions and she’s so right for this slow-paced slam that it’s the post-metal embellishment we perhaps didn’t know we needed.

And the drop at 3 minutes is to die for. Pure Isis. Fresh voice, new blood, more GUHTS. White Noise right here.

TRANSIT METHOD – Frostbite

Another 8-minute epic, this time from Austin, Texas, and it’s the kind of metal that goes full Mastodon. Taut 5/4 rhythm, mathcore drive, hyped drums on a permanent fill and cosmic space-scraping solos all build to a thrash pickup, more blazing leads and thunderballs kick work. 

Need a breather? There’s a beach-mellow breakdown and some pretty elastic bass to help you catch some rays … but not for long. This is an opus of sections, too wild and varied to detail, so check it here right the way through to the heroic punch of an ending.  

SHLUG – Grated Thumbs

Don’t know what’s in the Cardiff water these days but this post-hardcore shout/speed rager packs more than just relentless aggro into its dank industrial hardcore. A mid-track breakdown, all bass and space and woozy Fugazi, halts the hyperventilating charge for just about long enough to catch breath and let rip again. Buy it from May 8th or hear it on BBC Radio 6 Music’s New Music Fix until early May. 

Rock enough?

‘til next time! 

Monthly rewind
The monthly music rewind

KIM GORDON – Bye Bye: TRACK OF THE MONTH

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DEAD BANDITS, ANNA CALVI PEAKY BLINDER AND KIM GORDON DO THE BUSINESS IN JANUARY AND FEBRUARY

Belated welcomes to the new year in music. Am only just locating the new-tunes mojo after winter hibernation (and we’re not out of it yet but more on that, maybe, in a different blog, possibly) so let’s just plunge right in to this clutch of groundshaking 2024 newbies.   

KIM GORDON – Bye Bye

Kim Gordon reads a list of things. 

And?
And sets it to a depth charge called BASS. With one-note piano jabs, noise guitar influx and agitating keyboard chaospheres thrown together with cut-up panache, Bye Bye compels and arrests with a contemporary weight that almost defies belief. A controlled explosion of art rock and industrial hip hop beats. 

Kim Gordon reads a list of things.
Best thing you’ll hear this week? Yes.
BYE BYE. 

DEAD BANDIT – Memory Thirteen

Instrumental heavy warmth is the order of the night for Dead Bandit’s Memory Thirteen, its brushy drum shuffle positively inviting you into wherever brushy drum shuffles hang. Exploratory guitars draw on Mogwai’s cleaner panoramic angles but the bass here is looser and dirtier. The whole thing teases a climactic Rock eruption but it never arrives. Instead, Dead Bandit deliver a neat triple-time groove that moves in and passes by, just out of reach.    

ANNA CALVI AND NICK LAUNAY – Miquelon 

If a gothic garage band escaped their four-walled space and wound up playing some sort of wild west Americana drone and chant, Miquelon would be their name. The riff in this loose, bass-bending, ritualistic stomp made Anna Calvi’s fingers bleed from the hard playing she hit it with but look where Miquelon ended up – Peaky Blinders soundtrack.

Right, that’s it for now – a short, word-rusty Rewind but the tunes excelled. As always.

‘til next time!

Monthly rewind
The monthly music rewind

THE SCRATCH – Blaggard: TRACK OF THE MONTH

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DEC/NOV REWIND: THE SCRATCH PLUS SPARSE SCOTS BEATS, JARMUSCH ODDITY, RUDE FUNK AND CHELSEA’S WHISPERS

Last-ditch scramble round a couple of new sounds before Christmas hits, even though we’re pretty much in the thick of festive mayhem already … no-one REALLY spends time digging brand new music two days before Christmas, do they? But these tunes have been lurking a wee while and are way too good to miss so let’s just get-the-f**k on with it and keep them on a low-lit back burner, eh?

LORD OF THE ISLE (feat Ellen Renton) – For a Burning World

Lapping waves and luscious Boards of Canada ambience form the hypnotic backdrop for Scottish poet Ellen Renton to speak her words and pull you in. It’s a gentle start but gradually, the beats emerge – nothing manic – and start to break. Electronica washes surge then retreat while a darker keyboard riff makes the hook. Could be a mood piece for the season, as remote or intimate as you want (or don’t want) it to be. Winter explorations abound.

SQURL – Funnel of Love

Hazy, supernatural Western vibes here (not a brand new track either), venturing way out west Americana-style with an unwavering boom-rat-tat beat anchoring satellite guitar fragments. With Jim Jarmusch at the helm, would you expect anything less than exquisite production? No. Check the deft distortion touches and all-round movement and orchestration. The spirit of Dylan Carlson passes by early on but really, Funnel is all about the lightly intoxicating space in which to create your own pictures.

CHELSEA WOLFE – Whispers in the Echo Chamber

Nine Inch Nails always did a good whisper. So does Chelsea Wolfe in this subzero hiss ‘n clank of midwinter gloom. Delicate yet far from broken, it’s a ghostly creep-crawl through Portishead’s emotional machinery while the bent riff, corroded piano and rhythm pick-up are pure Reznor and by the end, Whispers in the Echo Chamber threatens to collapse under the weight of its own distortion. Unfestive but very seasonal.

DON’T THANK ME, SPANK ME! – Sandy

With a taut, garage pop-funk strut grooving over fat bass and pure-funk chords, this infectious jam for Grease character Sandy Newton (yep, that’s what they said) never forgets that space has its place – a !!!-meets-Chaka-Like-Sugar hit with a lick of dirt in the knocked-back guitar fuzz. Can you resist the Sandy strut? Surely no.

THE SCRATCH – Blaggard

Oh yeah, this is it. Tune of the month. A twisting, churning noise-punk riff tangled tight with tom-driven beats whipped through a noise-rock blender, Blaggard’s signature is a piledriving wall of rhythm that threatens mania yet stops just short of falling apart. There are light touches too, it’s not all shout and rage – but a fair slab really, really is.

’til next time!

Stitch
Sketch of Stitch. Because I needed a picture

HEY COLOSSUS – My Name In Blood: TRACK OF THE MONTH

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JULY REWIND: QOTSA STORM WORTHY FARM, HEY COLOSSUS GET BLOODY, ZAMILSKA CHANNELS REZNOR

Right-o, where are we? July … no, it just left dammit, another sign of not getting any writing done. But before we scrape together a handful of ace new noises from the past couple of months, we can’t let Glastonbury go unmentioned, even at this late post-Worthy Farm hour, because 

Queens of the Stone Age: is this as good as live rock music gets?

Of course, it’s the TV version we’re talking about – no chance of actually being there – and even though the ever-expanding BBC TV/radio ubiquity of GLAS-TON-BERRRYYYY often easily grates, this year it didn’t. Seeing Glastonbury through the media means it’s very much a headliner-centric prism but, for rock fans of a certain vintage, the nostalgia-meets-car-crash potential of Guns N’ Roses was impossible to resist. Non-nostalgic sparks flew with, er, Sparks (sorry), Nova Twins, Working Men’s Club and more, but it was the Sunday night Other Stage headliner that promised a special moment.

One of our bands, in the big slot. And it feels like a big deal because although they’re obviously popular, there’s still something a little cult-y about QOTSA – something not quite mainstream. A little bit outside, singular, defiant.

In an interview with Mary Anne Hobbs for 6 Music, Josh Homme quipped that when it comes to Glastonbury, they get asked to do the slot no-one else wants. Last time, it was when Beyonce took the Pyramid Stage. This year, the small matter of Elton John’s Last Ever UK Show was the same-time competition.

The resulting gig was a badass statement in how to step up and own a festival gig. Apologies for the vacuous state of these few words, they don’t add up to a review and definitely offer zero news or insight. They’re just a fumbling attempt to express how exceptional QOTSA are live … a drilled unit with gang attitude who’ve got the chops to do exactly what they want. Stunning show, can’t get enough. Last year, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss turned in a spiritual set that touched on the divine. This year, Queens do the same but with devilish, high-energy relish.  

All of this means the QOTSA love-in continues round here, no doubt helped by the heat of In Times New Roman, but the occasional new sound still managed to creak on through. 

Shall we?

HEY COLOSSUS – My Name In Blood

Having only got two Hey Colossus albums meself – In Black and Gold and Happy Birthday – and not really getting on with the latter while bloody loving the former, we’ve got no choice but to dodge the Hey Colossus backstory and take this tune entirely on its own terms.

And those terms go something like this: sticky dank crawling spidery Slint-y trudgy hypnosis, all via the medium of RIFF. Never has an ascending sequence sounded less positive (disclaimer: I have no actual evidence for that) and those vulnerable shoegazer-esque vocals make a neat juxtaposition. Intricately, gothically doomy and very nearly uplifting, give it a shot and wallow in its dank.

MEMORIALS – Boudicaaa

Matthew Simms, guitarist in Wire. Verity Susman on vocals. Sprightly, catchy post-punk shapes that you might expect but given extra crunch you might not quite expect with an ultra-satisfying heavy low-end oomph that resolvethe main hook. Boudicaaa doesn’t last long and even then, Susman’s vocals disappear long before this already-short track fades away, making it less a song than a sketch that happens to be complete. Neat headbang and no excess. 

ZAMILSKA – Better Off

In trying to create something that captured the trip hop and heavier guitar sounds she listened to growing up, Polish electronica artist Zamilska has conjured a little magic here – a stark beat utilising Nine Inch Nails’ signature sonic decay and Massive Attack’s Mezzanine black-hole teetering. Whether Better Off is typical of Zamilska’s sound or a guitar-enhanced one-off, I don’t know, but it’s a darkly seductive electro strip. 

HEAVY LUNGS – All Gas No Brakes

Jerky shouting with a near-funk punk stab to match, All Gas No Brakes hits you like a rough, rowdy, non-digital guitar-band version of a Working Men’s Club track, an incessant one-note bass pulse that judders, lurches and agitates more than it grooves. Wakey wakey, losers. 

And there we go – a long overdue round-up, must try harder. 

‘til next time!

Northern Quarter, Mamchester
Manchester, Northern Quarter

BORIS & UNIFORM – You Are the Beginning: TRACK OF THE MONTH

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MAY REWIND: GODSPEED MAKES LIGHT, BORIS CUTS LOOSE AND TAMAR APHEK ROCKS HARD

Queens of the Stone Age have been on the playlist a fair bit these past few weeks. Must be the time of year. Or the appearance of new single Emotion Sickness and their fresh announcement as Glastonbury headliners. Or the Homme-sized wormhole started by a couple of top-drawer Kyuss reactions (NASTY!!! FLY!!!) from the groove-loving Lost in Vegas fellas Ryan and George. Or all of the above. Anyway, if Glastonbury is anything like their 2018 Finsbury Park show, QOTSA will surely win over the world.

Let’s start with a couple of typographic opposites. Just because, for one month only, we can.

First is the upper-case underscoring of ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT, aka Efrim Manuel Menucke and Ariel Engle, whose Waiting for the Light to Quit‘s drones-and-violin (is it?) shimmer teases a huge motorik explosion that never arrives, leaving you suspended in rays instead. Beautifully orchestrated, as you’d expect from a GY!BE/Silver Mt Zion spirit.

Second in this desperate, horribly contrived typo pairing is the lower-case/no-spaces charm of West Yorkshire favourites worriedaboutsatan. New album The Pivot takes a more varied detour from the consistently ambient/twilight electronica routes sometimes followed, and that’s mykindaworriedabouts – see the icy, metronomic pulse of Stop the Car for evidence. Go check The Pivot right here.

OK, a couple more awesome discoveries before we shut this dribbling tap of words OFF.

BORIS & UNIFORM – You Are The Beginning

Confession: after following them pretty devoutly for a few years in the noughties, I’ve dropped all Boris balls. Haven’t bought a new album of theirs since D.E.A.R. because that album continued a sequence that just didn’t quite land in the way that Feedbacker, Akuma No Uta, Altar, Smile and the like did. But this is part of the Boris trip because, as we know, there are very many Borises. It all depends which version(s) push your buttons.

Given all that, You Are The Beginning may well be the sound of a door re-opening – and if so, it’s a noisy, ripped-off-its-hinges door because this track starts like an uptempo kicker with harsh vocals and then loses its shit, winding up to a pummelling, chaotic clatter. Carnage from the neck up.

TAMAR APHEK – Crossbow

Primitive, repetitive bass and ultra-taut drums build the hyperactive motor behind Crossbow’s urgent, twitchy rhythm – until, that is, Tamar Aphek’s guitar howls voodoo across the joint. On this track she channels the free-thinking spirit of Savages and Fugazi, meaning space is the place – and it’s between the instruments. Not quite new, this tune and album came out in 2021 but it’s easily the most arresting new encounter from last week. And that’s why we’re talking about Crossbow.

’til next time!

Northern Quarter, Manchester
Manchester, Northern Quarter

KILLING JOKE and EMPIRE STATE BASTARD: TUNES OF THE MONTH

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APRIL REWIND: NOISE SUPERGROUPS, A LEGEND’S RETURN AND A BUBBLE-SWEET POP

Busy month, April. Record Store Day went back to its regular slot, Oxford stalwarts Desert Storm released Death Rattle and launched it with a gig (OK, that was March 31st but it’s close enough) and there was the tiny morsel of news that METALLICA DROPPED 72 SEASONS ON US.

But Metallica is too big a deal to blog share so they’ll get their own post another time.

Until then, some ugly beauties.

Like Empire State Bastard.

EMPIRE STATE BASTARD – Harvest

Let’s take a moment or ten to revel in the sheer class of that band name because it’s surely the best of the year, if not the decade. The track itself is pure Dead Cross on first listen – punk metal hardcore, jammed with tempo shifts and grinding riffs at pace.

But who’s driving Empire State Bastard? Only Mr Dead Cross Driver himself, Dave Lombardo. How good is that? He’s not the only big name either because Biffy Clyro and Oceansize are feeders for the rest of the line-up – Simon Neil and Mike Vennart do vox and guitar, just way harder than you’d imagine. Ace. Harvest video this way.

While we’re in a Lombardo state of mind, don’t forget his new solo album Rites of Percussion, just released on Ipecac.

JAAW – Rot

Lurching noise rock for subterraneans, Rot sounds like the slow decay its title suggests. Driven by the kind of monstrous bass that the late Caleb Scofield laid down for Cave In and Zozobra, Rot neither needs, wants nor gives a fuck about air, daylight and all that other lovely stuff. Nope, it’s a grimy beating of infernal industrial sludge decomposed by assorted guys from Three Trapped Tigers, Sex Swing and, get this, Therapy? – Andy Cairns lends a buried howl. Jaaw Rot: yours if you want it.

KILLING JOKE – Full Spectrum Dominance

Released in March ahead of Killing Joke’s Royal Albert Hall gig, Full Spectrum Dominance is both exactly like any other recent KJ track and somehow new sounding. Don’t know how they keep pulling off this sleight of hand but they do. There IS nothing new. But it sounds so great. Dark arts indeed.

So, Full Spectrum Dominance churns that dense, deceptively heavy power we love so much and adds just a little more mid 80s throwback with ghost-ish keyboards and softer vocals in the verse. And though it’s a headphones track for sure – check that bass separation when you’re plugged in – the chorus is built for a slamming live audience. Is this the most pure distillation of modern-day Killing Joke into a single track? It might just be.

SILVER MOTH – Mother Tongue

Psych folk and fuzz guitar combine with piano, sax and multi-layered voices to lay painterly textures brushed with squall. Hints of Espers, perhaps? There’s a menacing edge to one of the guitars as it moves in and out of Mother Tongue’s intricate web and it all feels timeless/ageless, perhaps drawing on the Isle of Lewis spirit where it was recorded.

And though it doesn’t make you think of Mogwai – not this track at least, it’s much more in the electrified folk sphere – Stuart Braithwaite is in the band. Go check it out.

DAWN RICHARDS – Bubblegum

Something completely different to finish with – an infectious, exuberant electro-dance soundclash that namechecks Beyonce and Prince with enough sex and attitude to outdo both. Reminds me of MIA’s Bird Flu but really, I have no frame of reference for this. Bubblegum bursts with filth-o perfection and unshakeable groove. As Richards says, POP IT. Or not…


’til next time!

Northern Quarter, Manchester
Manchester, Northern Quarter

JAMBINAI: TRACK OF THE MONTH

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JANUARY REWIND: KOREA BRINGS THE NOISE, ELLING PUSHES THE FUNK

Bit slow off the mark with new sounds because, honestly, the post-Christmas deep winter hibernation is still going strong which means…loads of old stuff, over and over and over. 80s hair rock heroics, trad-metal excavations, 70s guitar excess, you get the idea. Might share a bit about these old-school revelations in another post but, in the meantime, three actual current tunes

to get going in 2023.

KURT ELLING – Wrap It Up

Jazz FUNKED. Those who know stuff know Kurt Elling to be a pre-eminent jazz vocalist and a Grammy-winning legend.

But some of us don’t know that. Some of us don’t know shit. Some of us first heard Elling by chance last week but felt the juice in Wrap It Up‘s squelchy, sinewy, ultra funk muso grooves that we drank it up fast. Every note, beat and break is a mini explosion and the whole thing POPS. No idea if the Guilty Pleasures EP will be equally sticky when it comes out but let’s see.

SOFTCULT – Someone2Me

Dreamgaze drift and guitar shimmer, cloaked in thick, voluminous fuzz. If you like the idea of early Smashing Pumpkins being pushed through a goth-ified grunge filter, check Someone2Me by Phoenix and Mercedes, aka Softcult. Music with a message too, listen up.

JAMBINAI – Once More From That Frozen Bottom

A cacophonous GY!BE/Thee Silver Mt Zion climax – and that’s just the beginning. From there we get swept into a softer break and multi-tracked voices before hurling back to harshville and the screams of a soul tormented. Who Jambinai? A South Korean collective mixing electrified rock and noise with Korean instrumentation to create colossal waves of beauty and destruction, if Once More From That Frozen Bottom is anything to go by.

What else this month? Bristol oddrock merchants Franklin Mint put new album Hoo-Ha out yesterday and multi-media firebrands Algiers announced new album Shook, out later this month. Check the pulsing urgency of Irreversible Damage with Zack de la Rocha for an incendiary sample…as ever, Algiers don’t mess about.

’til next time!

amplifier wordsmith: the monthly rewind
amplifier wordsmith: the monthly rewind

MUSIC BLUES: Things Haven’t Gone Well

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HARVEY MILK SOLO MAKES MUSIC FOR BREAKDOWNS

An absolute hulk of a slow-chord surge opens the album in short but wildly heroic style. 91771 is slow enough to be doom but nowhere near sombre enough as it pulls you into the euphorically funereal, if that makes any sense. Drone and sustain pumps your veins with noisy nutrients. Feels good.

This is Music Blues, the solo project of Stephen Tanner, Harvey Milk bassist. 2014’s Things Haven’t Gone Well is his first, and so far only, solo record.

Shame. Things Haven’t Gone Well belongs in anyone’s sludge-noise collection, down at the squalid end where the fuck-ups and failures hang out, and Tanner trades on two strands of guitar-driven dronedoom: one is total pessimism, the kind that beats you down with airless oppression. The other is total pessimism piss-streaked with rock-ist uplift, like 91771 (Tanner’s birth date), and it’s those rock-acknowledging downers that make the record work, though you gotta be patient. Aside from those, a couple of short clips from the Tom Waits School of Freak keep the album broken and fragmented. There are no vocals.

Things Haven’t Gone Well … no shit

The autobiographical PREMATURE CAESAREAN REMOVAL DELIVERY follows straight on from 91771’s colossal awe, but the euphoric touch has evaporated to leave skeletal chords slamming. HOPELESSNESS AND WORTHLESSNESS and FAILURE’s Sunn O))) stylings lift the mood not one bit, and wedged between them is TRYING AND GIVING UP. Get through the defeated first drag and you’ll hear a guitar morph from death-slow one-chord reps to a rough-as-fuck blues lick drowning in diesel dregs. It’s the slowest, grimiest 12-bar you’ve never heard. ZZ Top on a dying battery.

Seven tracks in, you might feel there’s not much to grab hold of. You’d be right. 91771 and a mutant Texan blues tip is scant return.

But IT’S NOT GOING TO GET BETTER is where it picks up (relatively) after the ghostly DEATH MARCH interlude. Here we get guitar breaks and a real human touch instead of blackout basement isolation. Thick, sludgy beauty with light. It crushes, but it’s the crush of a communal gig pile-on.

Then the big one: TREMENDOUS MISERY SETS IN. Tremendous misery – nice. TMSI is final proof that, even on an album as depressed and damaged as this one seems, Stephen Tanner has a Propensity to Rock Out and here his Harvey Milk spilleth over in that Corrosion of Conformity-channelling-Thin Lizzy way, but inebriated, messy and mournful. ’tis majesty on a slow repeat. Then THE PRICE IS WRONG conquers all with a massive Rock ending, completing the album’s transformation from No Hope to Slight Hope.

The closing BONUS TRACK just has to be a Van Halen tribute – not Massive Hits Halen but Weirdo Least Halen, aka Sunday Afternoon in the Park from their toughest (best?) Fair Warning album.

Which means we’ve got a noise rock record that ploughs mental breakdown and dark autobiography, touches on ZZ Top and CSNY (Teach the Children) and ends with a Van Halen freakball …

… sounds about right. Things Haven’t Gone Well comes across as a journey through grief – it nails the slow, draining, disorienting feeling and physicality that grief brings, yet it’s distracted and sketchy too. Music Blues might be depression as expression, but in the end Tanner can’t restrain his need for primal oversized riffs. You can’t keep that down.

Things Haven’t Gone Well (2014, Thrill Jockey Records)
91771
Premature Caesarean Removal Delivery
Teach the Children
Hopelessness and Worthlessness
Trying and Giving Up
Great Depression
Failure
Death March
It’s Not Going to Get Better
Tremendous Misery Sets In
The Price is Wrong
Bonus Track