shoegaze / alternative rock

Whenever you think you got Deathwish figured out, they come along and jump into your astonished face with a band like Greet Death knocking out your teeth with all their silky, spooky softness and then embracing you with tall towering yet whispered walls of sound. 

Not trying to come across as philosophical, but this release is so unlike most other Deathwish releases (for example lately Process Black or Frail Body) that it’s already more hitting than all the other releases. 

“Circles of Hell” greets you with an intro that might also be the start of a new Weakerthans record, or the beginning to a good song by some Britpop-sensation back in the late 90s, like Spiritualized or Slow Crush, to drop a more recent name. Another name that might come to mind is Radiohead on their first two records still using some harsher guitar riffs and yet blending those with beautiful pop melodies. “I could give you my heart / what would you say, dear? / I could open my arms / I could just lay here” - pure blessed melancholy accompanied by simple guitar lines opens the record and you feel like meeting an old friend at your high school reunion. And then, after 46 seconds, the first noise part steps in and you are totally drawn in reminiscing of Radiohead, Sonic Youth, Pumpkins and other greats of the early 90s when Greet Death probably would have hit MTV’s Alternative Nation hard. The band is able to shower us with melody and noise, with bliss and pop, with melancholy and sweetness – not only in one song but in each single note. 

They also transport that 90s teenage angst thing, the insecurity of youth, the self-righteousness of being young and misunderstood, of wanting to fit in with a non-conformist movement – just listen to the wonderful lines “I hate my friends / Cause they don’t hate themselves / And they shut me up / I want to be like them / I don’t want to talk / I want to think about my days/ ‘till I waste them all”.

And here is the one single thing you might want to complain about – the content of the record. It is a concept album about a couple splitting up, being unable to stay together. The story is told from one of separated and that person is definitely having a very bad time coping with it and drifts off completely into suicidal ideas. Now, a lot of bands talk about death and suicide, but hardly any talks about in such a way, where the “normality” of such thoughts is really hard and where the brilliant noise-rock-pop music might be called a glorification of these tendencies. You should not listen to this record being in a depressed mood, it might not be good for you. 

Nonetheless, from an artistic point of view, it is nearly unbelievable how impressive this album is. One really has to listen hard to hear that this band is not from the UK, but from Flint, Michigan, that they are not teenagers themselves but twens. And that this is not a wonderfully encapsulated record from the 90s blown through a wormhole into the present and now unloading all its blissful queerness onto the ears of nowadays’ audience. The youth should listen, and everyone else, too!


​Thorsten

alternative / doom / metal

bandcamp

Faith-Faith is an album released by Russian musician Artem Pervykh, under the alias Faith, on September 30. Atmospheric metal with profusely melancholic and symphonic dissonances, this magnificent album is a relentless and formidable masterpiece. Almost fifty-two minutes long, the album has only four long tracks:
1) In the Ocean of My Tears; 2) Clouds On Your Sides; 3) Faith; 4) Oblivion; the first one, a beautiful anthem of serene majesty, the deeply resounding and harmonious cosmogony that emerges from the melodies are exceedingly proverbial rhapsodies of ostensible splendor, that reveals the absolutely graceful artistic competence of Artem Pervykh. 

His musicality has extraordinary features, most prominently the atmosphere upon which marvelously gracious and flexible melodies float, converting a dense horizon of disruptive harmonies into an everlasting sculpture of sonorous virtues. Despite the fact that some songs are indeed very extensive — the third track, Faith, is almost twenty minutes long —, the fantastic cohesiveness displayed by the music, as well as its generally beautiful and exceptionally wonderful tonalities exhibits a superb and incomparable degree of original creative proficiency, perfectly aligned to a sensational level of technical knowledge, that makes this album a very pleasant and delightful experience.  

The spectacular sonorous atmosphere created by the artist is a major point of sensitive highlight in the album. His astounding excellency upgrades the ethereal cosmogony that is a major musical feature within the wonderfully despondent symphonies that floats from the creative atmospheres of the soul. The genuine and intuitive groundbreaking qualities of the album find no match in the genre nowadays. The melodies are made of exceedingly extraordinary levels of beauty, upon which the essence of the album derives its colossal and virtuous strength. 

Faith-Faith is a magnificent, resonating, serene and deeply vivacious album, that not only revitalizes, but opens a new path of possibilities for the development of atmospheric metal as a genre by its own merits. With an exceptionally dynamic, but at the same time fugacious nature, all musical elements on this great album deliberately align, to deliver a wonderfully conceived masterpiece, that deserves to be classified as a milestone of the genre. 


​Wagner

shoegaze / grunge / post punk / noise rock

It’s that special sound of the guitar strings that makes shoegaze so unique – that moment when the pick hits the string and then the sound starts winding its swirling way up the long, thick metal cord. Something similar can be said about the significance of those same strings for a grunge song, albeit here the sound is not winding up slowly and seemingly winding along even after the end of the neck, in many grunge songs the sound is pretty short but robust. You can see the difference clearly when listening to “Loveless” and then to “Nevermind”. 

Rarely a band comes along that denies its allegiance to one side or the other, which merely says “Hey, never mind being loveless!” Timelost is one of those rare bands and at the same time they are more. Another example of 2019’s singular position among recent decades when it comes to new sounds and combinations, just think of Witch Trail or Jambinai. 

So here Timelost are, now entertain us. The first song already transports a similar vibe - “You’ll never know / How strange I feel / It comes and goes / It’s always there” is a laconic take on a broken relationship and the time lost becomes its drive impersonated by the energetic drums and the   quick guitar lines that seem to reach for something beyond its origins. Singer Shane Handal mentions that this is some kind of ongoing motif on the album – relationships and loss, “It’s weird to throw yourself out there to the world and be so vulnerable but it felt honest and real. We wanted to put out a genuine record from the music to the lyrics.” There is something in those good and simple, yet exquisitely shoegaze-grunge songs that goes straight to the heart and makes us want to embrace this duo for all it’s worth. Maybe it’s something like the outro of “Nausea Curtains”, where a few harsh hits on the drum kit end a line of reverberating guitar twists, and the semi-acoustic guitar intro to the following song “Don’t Remember me for this”, where the acoustic-ness is then substituted for some swishing rides of the shoegaze riffs up the neck of Handal’s guitar. 

There are some clearly grungey moments on the record like the intro to “The River broke us” which sounds like a meeting between Kurt Cobain’s neck and Dean DeLeo’s strings. This record is much more than one part Set and Setting (Handal) and Woe (drummer Grzesiek Czapla) – it is neither and stands within a new sound realm, one it draws the listener to. Timelost are here to entertain us, no matter the melancholic mood they were in when writing the record, these eleven tracks spread loads of warmth. 


​Thorsten

dark ambient

A gray cover shower the mouldy hands of a seemingly dead person – no one could live with hands a mixture of burnt to ashes and blown up by frostbite – hanging down in front of an old garment (with one bloody stain on the left arm) as if worn by a mummy from the 17th or 18th century. This cover
gets the listener into the right mood for what will follow in the next 37 minutes.

No sunshine can permeate through the stark, distorted canvas that Clavicvla – mastermind Ittiel has concocted for the follow-up to last year’s “Sermons”, only to show that the starkness of horror scores for the most evil movies, the most gruesome images, the most horrible slow-motions need some kind of eruption: a shriek, a shrill noise wandering from left to right, a slow verbal chant to exemplify the fear to be induced.

Sepulchral Blessing” is not a bad album per se, not that is not true, in the realm of Black Ambient
this band has definitely a strong footing and will even gather more followers with this album. It is
bleak, it got a lot of atmosphere, knows how to incorporate small disturbances into the sub-bass
horror bleakness without ruining the Hadean flow. However, those of us who do not regularly watch old horror movies turning off the sound and for those who cannot envision a dark spawn of John Carpenter and Bohren und der Club of Gore lying in the grave dug up by Mamiffer and A-Sun Amissa this will not do. A class of its own – for its own scene – in its own world. Enter if you may.

black metal

Swiss German is already a hell to understand for anybody who is not from the Northern part of
Switzerland, but turning it into the lingua franca for a black metal record seems even more absurd.
However, one thing becomes very clear when listening to Ateiggaer’s debut EP, to be released in
mid-November: These two guys (working under the monikers Fauth Temenkeel and Fauth Lantav)
make no sacrifices, they take no hostages, they are in it for themselves and for nobody else.

Associated with the up and coming Helvetic Underground Committee from Zurich, they are able to play a furious version of black metal that has long been associated with the second wave of black metal, stemming from Norway. They infuse their fundamental rage and well-shouted visions with short passages of intricate laid-back drum fills, guitar motifs and near-Gregorian chants that connect very well with the mysticism they are here to convey, just listen to “De Dämon us Levania” (the demon from Levania) – everything blends in nicely.

The world as we see it is not theirs, they talk about spheres and gods from another realm, always
able to surprise us with minuscule differences to the usual sound. Not even a year into their
existence, Ateiggaer already got a release by popular German black metal label Eisenton – no
surprise when listening to this EP which is hopefully not their last.

hardcore

When announcing this release of one of his numerous projects on iconic label Deathwish Inc.,
guitar player Aaron D.C. Edge said that this was a dream come true. Naturally, most any hardcore band dreams of releasing a record through Jacob Bannon’s label for several reasons – worldwide acclaim, lots of fans and, of course, the respect of the scene. However, the members of the band have already earned that respect over decades of contributing with so many bands (amongst them 
Deadguy, Kiss It Goodbye or Lumbar), so that this should not be a major goal.


Nevertheless, one goal was surely to release a standout single which they did. The noisy, low-tuned shredding by Aaron, Brock Lowry’s tight drumming or Tim Singer’s brilliant vocals (his name speaks for itself, evidently) all give the listener a shiver-evoking experience. The opener “Lies > Truth” already shows all the strengths of the band and additionally marks a deeply sarcastic lyricist.
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“I don’t want truth… just lie to me” - sometimes people want to be lied to because (maybe) the
truth is too hard to bear, right? Well, truth be told, you will have to try hard to find a better noisehardcore debut single this year. The dream has come true for these experienced musicians. 

"miserable bastard music" / alternative / indie

Burden Limbs debut EP can hit you straight in the face when you least expect it as it displays a rougher version of the kind of dark pop that Kayo Dot presented on their latest record. The darkness is not only shown musically in a synth-driven melodrama like the self-titled track “Burden Limbs” but even more in their lyrics which are pretty straight-forward: “I'm so tired of suffering these reminders of a world I can't abide / Why else would I carve out my hatred and dissatisfaction?” The little red-glowing dots on the dark horizons are not leading the way to new-found hope but rather to blood raining in slo-mo from the skies. Not a lot of songs demand repeat as urgently as this one.

Burden Limbs can also knock you out in ways that do not sound like a doom-version of The Cooper Temple Clause but much more immediate with songs that introduce themselves into your longtimememory by means of simply intriguing lyrics by Chad Murray but also through the combination of synths, drones and gently-interwoven electronica giving you the chance to discover a lot of details and something new each time you sit down to really listen. And listen you should – these Londonboys might be up to something. They provide a great soundtrack to an overdose of medicine you don’t want to take but that you just can’t stop yourself from.

doom / sludge / noise rock / metal

Astral Noize

Split releases – an interesting thing as most of us can name a few from the tip of our head, right? Isis and Aereogramme, Melt Banana and Fantomas, Battery and Ignite, The Ocean and Burst. Sometimes however, those with the unknown bands get you the most. Mid-November, Astral Noize will bring us one of the latter category, releasing a 7” by Kurokuma and Under. The combination is really striking, because both songs at first glance seem totally unrelated only sharing a certain weirdness.

Kurokuma starts off with a cover song (well, that is not unusual for a split release) – reworking a theme song for a 20 year old Sega game classic called “Ecco the Dolphin: The Tides of Time” - fortunately, this is not a close cover but a free interpretation as they turn the whirling theme into a pretty clever doom track with a lot of atmosphere and a striking hihat use so that the listener asks himself afterwards if this might not have been the better theme for Ecco’s second adventure.

Then Under are up next with “Abysal Gigantism” and they definitely have some sense of humor, because their track starts with some field recordings from the seaside so that you hear that kind of stuff you would expect from our dolphin. Then they turn the song into an  eight minute epic somewhere between Crowhurst and Dillinger Escape Plan making clever use of vocoder, swirling guitars and waving drums all being held together by a strong rhythm section. 

In the end, this 7” leaves one impressed by the chutzpah of combining those two bands and the
clever way both complement each other turning this split into a more than welcome stray from the
path of regular splits.

black metal / noise rock / post metal

Sometimes, certain boundaries should not be crossed. For example combining Motown Soul and
Classic Hardcore – that just doesn’t work. Nevertheless, some unexpected combinations might
work, just remember Zeal and Ardor combining gospel and black metal. Witch Trail do something similar – they create their own unique blend of post-metal taking a lot from Sonic Youth and Thurston Moore’s solo work and combining it with pure post-metal. And once again, Belgium (more specifically Ghent) proves to be a brilliant soil for unique combinations as the trio is really able to provide a fresh start to a genre as trodden as post-metal.

They take the classic noise-licks and use them to replace the regular post-metal riffs. This way they also implement the pop-appeal of good noise-rock into their songs. How they start “Lucid” with a noisy take on a nearly surf-twang guitar riff and then build the shrieking vocals around it, always leaving those easy and pumping noise-rock elements at the core of the song and right in the middle of our ears – impressive! Sometimes you must think of the Beach Boys (“Stupor”), but sharing the record with Stiff Little Fingers and Discharge (“Sinking”); suddenly Kim Gordon and SY show up on your mental stage (“Silent Running”) - but interestingly all of the songs are not sung by any of those but by a guy like Fenriz. These 29 minutes full of twists and turns, of clean-distorted noisy-ness and of blastbeats, of infernal shrieks and a unique soundscape really captures any open ear. 

Thorsten

progressive rock / alternative / experimental

Ravage is an album released in September 8, the debut work of nooM, a French progressive and experimental rock project. Thirty-six minutes long, the record has seven tracks: 1) 12:34 AM; 2) Crescent; 3) Nuages; 4) Leave Me; 5) Parting; 6) When We Look At The Stars, We Whisper; 7) Where The Night Ends Us; with a serene and fugacious, almost melancholic musical splendor, the style displayed by this amazing artist is simple, but elegant, refined and masterfully cohesive. Delivering a sound agglutinated by a sensitive, but dispersive consistency, the dynamic vividness of the melodies are graciously perceptive, but also synchronically convergent. Its protuberant calmness dilacerates the introspective restlessness that subtly resides in the essence of its magnificent artistic splendor. 

The marvelous easiness of all the progressive elements are gracefully inserted into the music. The style displayed by the artist anticipates on the dynamism of its iridescent insurgencies the arduous glories of its sincere and vigorous creative possibilities. Despite its strong, homogeneous and exceptionally grounded style, the artist displays a colorful and intricate level of eclecticism and versatility. The fifth track, Parting — which in my opinion is the best — proves that perfectly. Featuring the exceptionally beautiful voice of singer Louise Dissous, the graceful vivacity of her voice certainly adds a tender element of exotic mystery to this song, that not only fits the melodies with gracious intensity, but also complements wonderfully the general guidelines of the rhythm. 

Although in a general evaluation the album can be considered very simple, Ravage is a cohesive and genuinely authorial work of art, whose creative strength is a musician that not only understands perfectly  how his most salutary qualities work, but also has the wisdom to use his technical excellence and creative virtues to conceive a sublime universe of dispersive majesty, where everything can be converted to a sonorous diagram of colorful proficiency, ostensibly crafting a dimension where musical sensibility and dynamic  pragmatism come together, to conceive restlessness as a new form of sentimental freedom.  

With gracefully renitent guitar lines that evokes the purity and calmness of a universe that has never seen light before, the music displayed in Ravage is exceptionally beautiful, and filled with a gracious imponence that is not only sincere, but also exponetially lucid and proverbial, though essentially somber in nature. Nevertheless, the style delivered by nooM is dense, dynamic and relentless, but paradoxically vivacious and splendid. Definitely, Ravage is a very intriguing, resonant, quite eventful album, a masterpiece whose  practical peculiarities redefine musical boundaries, within the diluted framework of a creative mind, that knows no limits or restricitions to its magnificent audacious nature. 


Wagner

alternative rock

When we took a first glance at the cover of this promo we were already teased by the chaos and depth of the artwork (Mark Cruz Teix). The story of The Morganatics is one of progress. The debut album (Never Be Part Of Your World) followed by a live recording of a radio show and their second full recording (We Come From The Stars) were all released  in 2015. The band produced an album (Eternal Return : An Horizon of Infinite) with acoustical versions of songs from the two previous albums in 2016.



The Morganatics call their creations “rock based with a voice of Linkin Park meeting Archive’s atmosphere with Porcupine Tree's guitars”. Well, let us tell you that they have a point but… the two vocalists Seb  (also rhythm guitars and keyboards) and Chris (female vocals, sample and keyboards) have the same timbre as late Chester Bennington. We needed to listen very carefully to distinguish who was actually singing because they sound very alike… The album contains wide range singing with deep emotions and energy. We had mixed feelings with the track Gloria. The vocals sound like a mealy hymn for a commercial add. 

The atmosphere of the tracks is far-reaching, from psychedelic to moodiness and to avant-garde with electronic effects and samples. This band from Paris reaches, indeed, out to Porcupine Tree with their guitar sound. Lauris (lead & acoustic guitars) listened very good to Anathema, his guitar solos are inspired by the two Cavanagh brothers’ weeping sound. There are some unclean vocals by PM (also bass)on this recording. We would have welcomed some more for better variation and balance in the singing. There are two drummers mentioned in the info. Nico, original core member and drummer announced his departure during the production of this album,so Frank took over.

The Morganatics are strange duck in the music pool. Their music is very fused with all kinds of genres and styles, which gave them a somehow an original sound. We’ve  heard creative chemistry with shredding guitars combined with intense and emotional melodies. Melancholy and experimental drift were added to the energetic formula called The Love Riot Squad vs The F-world, which is to our opinion their best work, until now. 

Bands with the same experimental approach but different in style are Område (France) and Thy Catalfaque (Hungary) and Diabolo Swing Orchestra (Sweden).

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Patsker

rock

Madhouse is an Italian female fronted rock band doing their utmost best to be a little more visible on the endless and overpopulated fields of rock bands on this planet. The band consisting of Federica Tringali (vocals), Filippo Anfossi  (guitar), Daniele Maggi (guitar), Michele Canevari (bass) and Ares Cabrini (drums) started playing as a cover band and began working on own songs since 2012. During that same year Federica Tringali decided to name the band Madhouse.

And this Italian band rocks. Madhouse presents ten pumping modern rock tracks with groovy guitar riffs and a lyrical concept, proposing ten hotel rooms in which it is possible to keep looking for your own personal dimensions. Federica Tringali has a powerful voice fitting perfectly with the steaming songs. She does not reach for screaming high chords but uses overdubbed vocal effects which create  harmonic and melodic sounds between the guitar riffs. This charismatic front woman has a powerful voice and can compete with the best modern rock and emo-rock singers these days. Guitar players Filippo Anfossi  and Daniele Maggi conjure some catchy guitar work out of their bag. Minimized keyboard parts furnish interesting  and refreshing impulses to the music. The combo is working hard and had already live gigs in several European countries.

Madhouse’s first full album is filled with enthusiastic (heavy) rock guitars and atmospheres  like 30 Seconds To Mars, Placebo and My Bloody Valentine.  This is a band with international potentials playing catchy, varied alternative rock music. Although they bring nothing new on the horizon this Italian band has balls, courage, musicianship and one hell of a female singer. Very refreshing rock music.

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Patsker

post rock / experimental / alternative

Kota — released in July 2 —, is the debut album of Kota Kota, the personal musical project of English musician Michael Holmes. Sixty-two minutes long, the album has nine tracks: 1)Black Waltz; 2)Lyric; 3)Extend Your Fingers; 4)The End; 5)Burleywood; 6)Transitions; 7)Until The Last Minute You Breathe; 8)Crimea River; 9)L'appel du Vide; with generally long tracks, and exceedingly marvelous and poetic harmonies, this album is filled with  a wonderfully crafted and formidably genuine creativity, that definitely elevates post rock to a whole new level of sagacious originality and splendorous sensibility, unprecedented since the conception of the genre. 

With dynamic melodies, and a very vivacious musical synergy, the sonorous atmosphere conceived in this majestic album circulates within the axis of its own graciosity. Displaying a serene, but conscious acquiescence that delightfully departs from the bright disposition of its fantastic and pristine tenderness, the sound created by the artist delivers directly to the soul the omnipotence of an everlasting beauty, whose poetic resurgence dissipates the eagerness of its volatile and captivating temperance.  

As the sound achieves the glory of the restless melancholy of its dispersive essence, the rhythm gets more and more pervasive, with all of its pungent density proclaiming in the vastness of its consistence the diligence of harmonies that will never fade away. 

With a clear and distinct sound that gradually departs from the latent darkness of its diluted consciousness, the style of the artist is simple, but delightfully graceful and beautiful, as the sound delivers a melancholic stupor that intrinsically reinvigorates the life present on its simple virtues. With its tempestuous dissonances gradually increasing, the rules of harmonies reborn in a more colorful landscape full of ghosts and shadows; otherwise, the melodies — indebted to a fascinating cosmogony that discreetly compensates in the peripheries of its glory a vast conjuncture of progressive elements and lethargic ordeals — rearrange in more graceful patterns the extraordinary creative devices that comprises the fascinating musical universe of Michael Holmes. 

With a smooth, expansive, unexpected and salutary degree of experimentalism, that delivers to the audience a musical sensibility engraved in an audacious virtuosity, the sound present in Kota is a marvelous exposition of authenticity, crafted by an expressively talented musician, that has all the necessary qualities to create an entirely new genre by himself, departing from the unlimited excellence of his own peculiar and formidable sense of incomparable originality.  


Wagner

noise / dark ambient / experimental

bandcamp

electronic

dSound In Silence

progressive / metal / black metal

heavy metal / thrash metal

downtempo / electronic / post rock / shoegaze

facebook

psychedelic / doom

sludge / black metal

ambient / modern classical / experimental

bandcamp

drone / doom / noise / experimental

ambient / electronic

noise rock

stoner rock / grunge / alternative rock

facebook

​Serge

alternative rock

With a thirty-year career on the heavier side of the musical spectrum, Per Wiberg stepped out of his comfort zone with this release. The Swedish multi-instrumentalist was a member of the progressive death metal band Opeth (no  longer playing death metal but prog). He was also member of the stoner metal band Spiritual Beggars. Per Wiberg played keys and piano on work by Arch Enemy (melodic death metal) and Anekdoten (progressive rock). As a live musician he plays for the doom metal band Candlemass and as a regular bass player with the Swedish power trio Kamchatka, who play more blues-oriented, psychedelic stoner rock.

Head Without Eyes has absolutely nothing to do with the aforementioned bands and genres. Per Wiberg calls his debut a different kind of heavy. The urge to go further and further artistically, together with a lifelong collection of records, creates a special mix of melodies that explore the limits of experimental rock music. This release contains a daring pile of tracks full of innovative rock music. The dark lyrics contain intelligent ideas that are accompanied by psychedelic sounds and pumping, rocking guitars.

All instruments and vocals were realized by the master himself. Only the drums were played by Karl Daniel Lidén (Crippled Black Phoenix, Katatonia, Switchblade) and Lars Sköld (Tiamat, Avatarium). Billie Lindahl (Promise And The Monster) borrowed her ethereal voice on the tracks  Anywhere The Blood Flows and Pile Of Nothing. 

Anywhere The Blood Flows and Fader are powerful and drawn-out songs that, despite their length (more than ten minutes), thoroughly influence the sense of time. Much attention was paid to the construction and finishing of the tracks. Hallucinating creative sounds provide an industrial ribbon around this release. The vocal lines of Per Wiberg sound surprisingly good with the threatening song structures filled with gothic leverages.

Head Without Eyes opens after several listening sessions like a lotus. Per Wiberg is a master smith who mixes and forges different types of iron into an insanely strong samurai sword that cuts through the flesh and bones with a sharp rocking blade. This is an exciting piece of rock music with a lot of underlying layers that slowly float to the surface. Head Without Eyes  is an edition to cherish. 

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Patsker