The latest from Zagreb's instrumental rockers Seven That Spells is a marked improvement over their previous collaboration with Acid Mother Kawabata Makoto. While that album certainly wasn't bad, its main fault was that it sounded too much like any other Makoto project. Here, however, their energy and prowess are on full display.
Hotter than July. This week's episode has plenty of fresh new music by Marie Davidson, Kim Gordon, Mabe Fratti, Guided By Voices, Holy Tongue meets Shackleton, Softcult, Terence Fixmer, Alan Licht, pigbaby, and Eiko Ishibashi, plus some vault goodies from Bombay S Jayashri and Pete Namlook & Richie Hawtin. Solstice moon in West Midlands, UK photo by James. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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On the surface, the second album from Poni Hoax seems to have it all: brooding synthesizers, punchy drums, a dispassionate yet forceful singer, and an icy attitude. While it contains several good songs and some decent hooks, it's not enough to override the album's overbearing mood or its sections of needless repetition.
Don't trust photographs because they're nowhere near as powerful as genuine memories. That may as well be Fleet Foxes motto for their debut record on Sub Pop. At least there's one band that believes their music should be more than the guitars, drums, and voices that compose it.
Created from the minds of four Germans who seem to have a penchant for wrapping themselves from head to foot in bandages, Monokrom manages to produce a monstrous and gargantuan ‘industrial’ sonic juggernaut intent on flattening everything in sight. One Fine Day in the Pyramid is the latest testament from this noisy lot, full of clanks, scrapings, scratchings, and full-on mechanical mayhem.
One of those albums that fits Load’s usual style, this is a disc of punk-damaged goofy thrash that obviously doesn’t take itself too seriously, and even through the cacophony some element of melody does rear its head through the muck.
In his second release to date this year, Justin Broadrick has created something completely different from his previous two splits (with Eluvium and Envy), and two tracks that stand out as different in his entire discography. On the other half, Battle of Mice provide their own brand of emo-influenced post metal that simply doesn't seem to go well with the Jesu material (or vice versa).
United Jnana presents a tasteful and well-executed digipak CD reissue of vintage Nurse With Wound material that hasn't been available in unaltered form since its original release on L.A.Y.L.A.H. Antirecords back in 1983.
The seemingly endless Nurse With Wound reissue program continues unabated with this digitally remastered version of Homotopy To Marie, presented by United Jnana in a digipak with partially restored artwork and, oddly, the same augmented tracklist as the 1992 World Serpent CD version.
This inaugural release for the Chicago-based FSS label is some of the ripest and juiciest experimental black metal to be released this year. Wrnlrd raises a staff of high frequency fuzz graininess, and aims its assault sorcery at all who might attempt to lay claim to the throne of progressive dark music.
After years of brandishing sharp, abrasive electronic rhythms in tandem with Godflesh's Justin Broadrick as Techno Animal, Curse Of The Golden Vampire, and Ice, Kevin Martin rebooted this dormant one-off pseudonym as a logical outlet for his outstanding outsider dancehall productions, dripping with distortion and hot like fire. Stripped of the industrialized beats and roared deejay screeds of Pressure, his latest album under the moniker is, on the surface, perhaps in name only.
