noise rock

Norway’s noise-rock king and queen duo just released a record full of awesome references, hints, and pop-cultural references. AOTY? Maybe!

In 1930 Grant Wood painted one of the most iconic and scary pictures of the 20th century – American Gothic. 90 years later, that picture was at the basis for the artwork to the ninth full-length by Årabrot from Norway. Karin “The Dark Diva” Park and Kjetil “The Tall Man” Nernes took some inspiration from Wood’s picture as well as some from the horror stories about sects in the American midwest, the latter being clear when watching the two terrific and terrifying videos for the songs “Kinks Of The Heart” and “Hailstones For Rain / The Moon Is Dead” which form the short film “Norwegian Gothic”. The video shows a cult follow their leaders – Park and Nernes – and in the end both seem to tower over them with the audience not knowing if the followers are still alive or not. The latter of course quickly reminds one of the massacres in Waco and Jonestown where hundreds of people lost their lives. 

Now the artwork to Årabrot’s new record shows the same kind of pointy windows that Wood displayed in his picture – thus the masterminds behind Årabrot take up the position of the persons in the painting who display a kind of cruel inattentiveness and sheer emptiness which again is more threatening than anything else. Which murderous thoughts might be lurking behind the empty, everyday faces of the man with the pitchfork and the woman who might be his wife, his younger daughter or – even worse – his youngest toy. To show up a clearer comparison – Hitchcock’s “Psycho” will still give you the shivers even if you watch it for the tenth time, “Saw” on the other hand can only scare you once. The horror hidden in plain view is much more effective than the brutality on display in some post-millennium movies.   

But these references are only one bit of the intrigue this record emanates. The Dark Diva and the Tall Man have once again come up with so many effective songs that calling them workaholics might be the understatement of the year – they have only just released a complete EP a few weeks ago with five tracks none of them are on the new full-length and this is their ninth release in the last five years! That efficiency and productiveness might also be connected to them living outside in the wild Scandinavian countryside where they also rehearse and record their stuff inside an old church.

The sixteen (!!!) tracks combine for roughly an hour of music and you can find nearly all styles of music in it – industrial beats, soul, noisy bits, hard rocking riffs and brilliant alternative metal tracks. You can hear Park singing for her soul with all the drama of an old Motown vocalist who tries to seduce the dead. You witness Jaga Jazzist’s Lars Horntveth administer some seriously sinister saxophone lines. You will be seduced by the vocals of Karen Park who is once again as charming as Shirley Manson but with the “sorceress’” background of Siouxsie Sioux. Nernes might be the best Nick Cave-version of Jaz Coleman that ever graced the needle of a record-player. The music is a crossover between the Melvins, Killing Joke, the Birthday Party and Wovenhand. 

It is really hard for me to pick a favorite song from this record, because here that old cliché of a record that functions only as a record is so true. Even though “Norwegian Gothic” is not a record conceptualized like “Songs for the Deaf” with tracks flowing into each other, the whole record just makes sense in this particular order. To find out what holds all these songs together one should mention the awesome work by bassists Dana Schechter (Swans, Insect Ark, American Music Club) and Massimo Pupillo (Zu, Caspar Brötzman). Their earthy, raw, distinct bass lines really form the bridges between the tracks. 

Park and Nernes call this record the culmination of all their previous work and one couldn’t agree more. After “The Gospel” many thought that this would be Årabrot’s peak and yet here we are, five years later and the band has arrived at new heights with a record that might not be matched this year for all its seductive darkness. Which horrors lie behind the multilayered “Norwegian Gothic” will only be discovered in due time – but on can admit that the record is demanding your full attention at every second or otherwise it might crawl up behind and attack you. Just like the guy with the pitchfork in Wood’s picture. 


​Thorsten

black metal / hardcore / noise rock

Hamburg’s most interesting band between hardcore and black metal complete their Rituals trilogy with the release of yet another interesting record.

Having been founded in 2016, Kavrila quickly released their first songs in the form of the first “Rituals” EP featuring four songs and a running time of 12 minutes. The songs were produced pretty noisily and generally lo-fi. They were pretty fast and raw but that was also part of their appeal. The last track “Night”, nevertheless, highlighted the band’s ability for slower, longer songs bathing in atmosphere while not denying the heavy vocals. 
In 2018, after the release of their first full-length the year prior, Kavrila unleashed “Rituals II”, with five tracks and 13 minutes. The songs were still very unpolished but a bit more on the doomy and gloomy side of things. A transition record it seemed at first glance, leaving the listener with the question where this band would go with the final part of the trilogy?

That can now be answered: “Rituals III” will be brought upon us at the end of March and all fans of noisy, heavy, uncontrolled sounds somewhere between Black Shape of Nexus and Mantar, LLNN and Ovtrenoir should pay attention. The guys from the North of Germany really have achieved a somewhat more punkish sound this time and yet there is no lack of full-throttle sonic assaults with lots – one might recognize some Turbonegro-bits. On the other side these songs not only rock like hell but also have some nice little twists and add-ons. Like the slow, atmospheric intro of the opening track “Sunday”, or the noisy swirls igniting “Longing”. The songs have a clearer and more refined production which is a real asset to the whole soundscape of Kavrila, because this way they can play with the dynamics much more. 

Another good aspect of the band is that they got something to say, take “Equality”: The band reminds us that children don’t hate other groups but that they are taught to hate. And that only through teaching them one creates inequality. 

A band one should reckon with, even if this trilogy is complete now – but who knows which beast they will set free next? 


Thorsten

grunge / noise rock / alternative rock

Is it a compliment if you tell a band that they do not sound at all like the place where they come from? It definitely might be an insult to a whole region if one doesn’t really know the  “scene” one is talking about. Nevertheless it probably also depends a lot on the people you are talking to. In case of Norwegian-Finnish duo “Barren Womb” you could say they do not sound as if they were from Trondheim, Norway. If you associate that with music somewhere between Motorpsycho and black metal. However, if you think about the freedom to do whatever you want associated with the vastness of the country, Barren Womb might sound exactly like Trondheim. 

Their songs change their identity quite often, they are hardcore, punk, noise, a bit mathy but they are definitely clearly not caged into a corset intended to limit the airflow within one’s body and mind: the drummer and guitar player are definitely free thinkers. Being able to play some funky stuff like “Hairy Palms” with its mix of indie dance-guitar licks somewhere Parliament and Franz Ferdinand and rock’n’roll drumming in the style of the Black Crowes needs courage and good execution.  One band that comes to mind when listening to “Lizard Lounge” is definitely Torche with their knack for writing catchy yet heavy tunes. 

Their songwriting is really awesome because they never lengthen their songs into the unnecessary. Every song is as long as it needs to be, the whole album is only 36 minutes long, even though it comprises ten songs. “Trimming the fat”, they called it. And yet those songs are chunky and addictive. Especially as they all represent a different “genre”, remember the free thinking approach. If you then follow the Timo and Tony through their tracklist, you notice that they come up with a bluesy ditty right called “Crop Circle Jerk” right after funky “Hairy Palms”. Courage! 

The author is surprised now how often the record has been spinning in a row, but that is also a good sign how immensely enjoyable the whole affair is. Take “Nerve Salad” for example – a nice mathy bit of stoner rock. Or “Hydroponic Youth” with is slowly build-up that is able to keep the tension despite a slower tempo.  

With “Lizard Lounge” you get an awesome record for the BBQ in the summer when you want to entertain your guests with an eclectic mix of songs and ideas that never get bothersome but keep their inner entertainment level high. And then one of their guests will ask “Hey, those guys are from Cali, right?” 


Thorsten

noise rock

Coilguns is Jona Nido (guitar), Luc Hess (drums),  Louis Jucker  (vocals and bass),  who also play in the German progressive metal band The Ocean, and Donatien Thiévent (synths and backing vocals). In the middle of their Millennials tour, the Swiss band could gather enough time and inspiration to craft their newest record. They camped in the studio for a month starting from scratch.

The band members could vaporize all their frustrations in Watchfinders, a tank filled with exploding noise rock. Coilguns tempo of grinding guitar waves and screaming are kept in the exact rhythm by the drumming beast Luc Hess.

​Talking about a Swiss clock, no matter how the speed of the tracks changes from slow to overdrive, Luc Hess keeps everything in the right and precise balance. Louis Jucker, known as the almighty hugger during their live gigs, growls, screams, speaks in all directions. The music is heavy, psychedelic and infested by rabies. Some tracks have calmer pieces, which are only the remnants of the steaming outbursts of anger. 

Their only goal was getting darker, and they did it with brilliance. Watchwinders is like a Siberian ice tsunami crushing everything on its way. Coilguns has built a glacier with twelve levels filled with dangerous traps and pumped themselves into a higher level of noise rock. This outstanding release is available on CD and vinyl on the bands Bandcamp page. We took this bulldozer forever in our heart.

Patsker

noise rock

We are who we are. But we are also what we are made to be, this “what” can be a lot of things – our circle of friends, our job, our upbringing or also the place where we live. We are the way we are because where we are. To put it into a musical context: Everybody can come up with an example of a band that could only come out of this specific region or city; Sonic Youth could never have become who they were if they hadn’t had their roots in NYC, a first class avantgarde melting pot. Outkast wouldn’t have been Outkast if they hadn’t had access to The Dungeon where Organized Noize laid the beats. Nirvana wouldn’t have become one of the biggest names in modern rock if they hadn’t sprung from an area so remote that no real genre-specific scene held them back. 

Now, with Luggage this idea of being who we are because of where we are is quickly supported. This sound, so clean, so sparse, so far away from any kind of over-production – it must come out of Chicago. The sound is clearly identifiable as Electrical Audio because of its brilliant clarity, its ability to be really noisy and distorted and yet still simply clean and sharp. Luggage clearly have taken a lot from Shellac, not only the producer. 

But their musical style is much more rooted in post-punk than Shellac’s, the similarity is the use of discordant, unharmonious guitar parts that whirl through the songs like abruptive lightning through warm late summer evenings. The three-piece has refined their songwriting skills since they formed in 2014, taking a lot of the city urban sprawl and laid-out, symmetrical geometry channeling it into songs with a feel of driving along long avenues passing block after block before encountering a hard stop in form of an accident blocking everything else from view. 

The repetitiveness of Helmet with their mathy schemes combined with Shellac’s feeling for implementing discordance harmoniously into a sound that is clearly more post-punk than noise. For all people who love a bridge between Shellac, Jesus Lizard, Slint and Gang of Four – this is a band you will love. All of the old heroes in a band so urgent in appeal that it is blissfully mesmerizing – the classical noise record of the year. 


Thorsten

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.
​
“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

black metal / noise rock / metal / sludge

bandcamp

Well, well, well – if it ain’t the birthplace of it all, Birmingham? Nobody needs a reminder why the
Midlands are the place where the magic started 50 years ago. Nobody needs to hear about Ozzy and
Tommi and the others. But wait – what came out of Birmingham since then? Okay, Napalm Death,
but what else? Goldie. Okay, okay, Napalm Death and Goldie, but what else? Godflesh! Okay, okay,
okay, Napalm Death and Goldie and Godflesh and… I guess most of you know which movie is
being referenced here indirectly. Just as Reg has to admit that the Romans have done numerous
things for Galilee, the connoisseur of music history must admit that rusty, rotten Birmingham has
done loads of things for music with Opium Lord being one of the latest examples.

It is interesting how Opium Lord can oscillate between Godflesh, Jesus Lizard and Mayhem,
although the later is more obvious in the vocal style only as they are clearly black metal – based.
The musical foundation is definitely AmRep-influenced noise rock (with a crisp bass sound),
although it has clearly been stuffed down the sludge version of a meat mincer only to come out on the other end in the style of a musical coldness to match the sterile cleanliness of Broadrick’s
“Streetcleaner”. This sonic versatility is also the reason why the quintet was able to share the stage with bands as diverse as Oathbreaker, Swans and Yob.

​Speaking of Yob, the five-piece from steel town was able to convince Mike Scheidt so much that he wanted to contribute to this record and thus “Columbia” was born. A song, somehow typically Mike but at the same time also typically Opium Lord. It takes its time to build slowly but then end pretty harshly with a lot of shrieking, nearly buoy-like guitar work. Yet, this track also exemplifies the single problem of this record. The clean parts make the song more interesting and add to its intensity simultaneously showing that more clean parts would benefit the album – a small blemish as the industrial soundscape of the album is still so dense.

With an album like this it is hard to believe that their former label was not interested enough in
them to make this work. However, The Sludgelord profits from it and is able to procure another
gem this year with an album whose sonic coldness that never pushes you away but rather draws you in. Birmingham is back with an example how a rusty environment can provide a good basis for a noise-band rubbing rusty metal blades against our ears. 


Thorsten

noise rock / sludge / psychedelic

After a few months of writing-inactivity I thought it would be a good idea to return with a bang, and what better way to make a comeback than with this rumbling piece of sonic confusion by Belgian noise makers 30.000 Monkies? But before I dig deeper into this album, I've got a few people to thank. In the past few months I have been dealing with some kind of writers-block. I lost interest in Merchants Of Air and in writing reviews so I announced our goodbye. Apparently, people were quite shocked by this announcement. I received a massive array of reactions, gratitude and support from Merchants Of Air fans all over the world. So to all of you: Thank you for pulling me out of the quicksand of music journalism...

...only to be pushed right back in by this pummeling album. This Belgian quartet has been composing intense music for quite some time now. 'Are Forever' is the follow up to 'I Ate Myself to Grow Twice as Big', which was released three years ago. Three years is a long time, so it was time to dispose another slab of worms-infested sludge doom over their audience. And for those not yet convinced: 'Are Forever' will either grind you into a pulp or shatter the last piece of sanity still left in you. Luckily for you, if you're a Melvins/Harvey Milk/Lightning Bolt fan, you will love the shit out of this.

​The album opens with 'Miles Of Smiles', which comes up with a sweet girl asking you if you have ever had a dream. Shortly after, the dissonant and pulsating riffs grab you by the throat, dragging you down into the vile, haunting world of 30.000 Monkies. The easiest way to describe this music is saying it's a blend of sludge doom and noise rock, hence the references to Melvins and so on. Yet, it won't surprise you when I say that there is a lot more to this. There are eerie passages with eerie guitars, impending percussion and frightful mantras. There is the punkish violence of 'The Gift' and blackened elements in plenty of other tunes.

'The Fist Of Impending Joy' is my personal favorite. Not many sludge doom tunes remind me of the old days of symphonic black metal but this terrifying piece of work will definitely grind your nutsack, so to speak. And then there is 'And Ever', which does weird things with ambient and a drug-infused Sonic Youth jam. It serves mostly as an intro for closer 'Cluck Me Up' but it's also a bloody awesome tune. That closer, 'Cluck Me Up', is one of those sludge doom tunes that will devour entire audiences everywhere and it comes with the energy of an atomic bomb.

In all, this is not suited for people who suffer from migraine, neither for people who think it's pretty cool that Luc Appermont and Bart Kaell have been a couple for 40 years. Nope, this is the perfect shot of noisy sludge doom, intended to wreck and ruin everything in its path. If you are a fan of being tortured to death by grinding riffs, violent vocals and methodical drums, you need this album. Damn, it feels good to be writing again...


Serge

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