ambient / darkwave / avant garde

Darkness Is Dressed Black is an album released on May 8 by darkwave/ ambient/ avant-garde electronic musical project Deadly Oak, designed by Spanish artist Vadym Sycantrhope. With nine tracks – Abducted By Stranger, Try To, Hold Me (My Monster), Blood Is Life, Zero, Aethetic Apocalypse, Occasional Tragedy, Underneath The Surface and Stay – Darkness Is Dressed Black is a terrific and superbly unexpected album, and has on the virtual despondencies of its lurid insinuations the majestic – and thoroughly relevant – force of his artistic persona. With the darker nuances of sagaciously somber melodies, that seems to act as sideline hallucinations to the subtle grievances of his extraordinary and pervasively expansive musical dimensions, the album carries on the conspicuous and unforgiving grotesqueness of its style the drastic and more vivacious elements that Sycantrhope always brings with him, under the Deadly Oak moniker.    

A marvelous album, that has on the experimental verve of his seemingly audacious creative compositions a relentless desire to break sonorous boundaries, Darkness Is Dressed Black has no fear in what concerns the outline of its own deeply fugacious, but consistent sonorous configurations: relying on an almost perfect elaboration of a creepy and sordid atmosphere of infamous expectation the laborious art of a genuinely afflictive despondency, upon which every track seems to be opening something sinister towards the unknown. The atmospheres are evidently eager to celebrate the incongruous density of a bizarre planetary isolation, where all delusions of its virtual sensibilities perpetuate the solitude upon which your soul gets deeply confined, while the sound vividly promotes in your perfidious melancholy an intense conflagration of emotions. In the practical axiom of the imperiously consistent worlds created by the intangible density of the sound waves that thoroughly dissipates the anatomy of your soul, the harmonious emancipation of musical allegories that you feel masterly aggregates in your genome the insidious and tempestuous sensation of a world doomed to end in a matter of instants. 

Masterly creating anxious, afflictive and agonizing atmospheres of a hyperbolic lucid exhilaration, Darkness Is Dressed Black is overwhelmed by what Deadly Oak does best: the majestic confluence of several different electronic genres and musical elements, to conflate them into an abrasive set of melodies, adorned by the convoluted rapture of unsolicited shadows, that dream of escaping to the real world, while offending – and feeding – the irrational instability of the artist’s – as well as the listener’s – creative devices. 

More subtle and ambivalent than his previous Deadly Oak work, Darkness is Dressed Black leads the listener to a profound abyss of surreal – and almost pathological – nothingness, that literally feeds your imagination with whatever the things you dare to keep inside your head. Being the perfect soundtrack to a day in a parallel dimension of everlasting fugacity and ecstatic eternity, this album literally has the power to bring about the most elusive and despondent lethargy that you keep hidden within yourself. With the power to attract a symbiosis and a multitude of creative collisions inside a conspicuous myriad of emotional turbulent distances, Darkness Is Dressed Black is another demonstration of the incredible artistic power of Deadly Oak, always ready to surprise its audience, in the best and most inconceivable way possible!     

 
Wagner

electronic / synthpop / darkwave

Nightcrawler is the most recent release by Hungarian electronic music artist Lazerpunk! One hour long, the album has fourteen tracks – as to know, The Message, Virtual Reality, Level One, Worldeater, Miami Mafia, Million Dollar Baby, Warrior, Radio Towers, Night Sky, This Is Not The End, Stardrifter, Nightcrawler, Endgame and The Fading Memories Of Summer And You – that reveals itself to be a very unusual and bizarre piece of electronica. With an intriguing, but exceedingly eccentric mixture of several subgenres, like dark, retro and futurewave, as well as synthwave, amongst others, Nightcrawler relies on too much generic and formulaic electronica devices, becoming a somewhat noisy album, for dealing with so many styles, doing in fact little to aggregate intelligent elements to this generally unfavorable and very conspicuous musical panel of melting electronic subgenres.

Don’t get me wrong. Nightcrawler is not a bad album, but it’s not memorable either. Only if you are a very ardent enthusiast of noisy electronica, you will like this record. Extremely exasperating all the way through, some of its tracks can work in night clubs, but only a handful of them. Some beautiful melodies do emerge along the way, but its principles, in general, are too slow or beaten up to please an audience, and the listener rapidly grows tired of so much sharp and superficial sonorous uniformity, throughout a musical anatomy that inevitably gets excessively monotonous, and ostensibly repetitive. 

There are little elements to describe positively about this album. If you think of it as specifically designed to attend a narrowed niche of electronica, then this work really becomes better understood, and you extract more sense out of it, vividly and functionally. Otherwise, it is just another work full of synth notes and noises, that makes you grow tired – at best, at worst, you die of boredom – while listening to it.

This musician is really skilled and talented in what he does. Nonetheless, he does not challenge himself on a satisfactory basis on this album. He keeps his abilities guarded in a comfort zone, and never leaves. Aside some bright moments, and a handful of good tracks, this album will hardly prove itself to be worthwhile to anyone, unless you are one of those people who can be described as an exception, that fit in the specific niche, upon which Nightcrawler is meticulously inserted.    


Wagner

electronic / darkwave /synthpop

Scandroid is the eponymous self-titled debut album of an electronic cyberpunk darkwave/ retro wave/ synth wave one-man musical project, led by an artist known only as Klayton, based on the United States, responsible also for the projects Celldweller and Circle of Dust. With fifteen tracks – being them 2517, Salvation Code, Aphelion, Shout, Destination Unknown, Connection, Datastream, Empty Streets, Awakening With You, Atom & E.E.V, Neo-Tokyo, Pro-bots & Robophobes, Eden, Singularity and Eden (Waveshaper Remix), the album was released on November 11, together with another one, that is only an instrumental version. 

With a brilliant futuristic techno style of electronica, Scandroid can be best described as the perfect marriage between Daft Punk and mind.in.a.box. Its debut album, without a doubt, is one of the best things that I have ever heard in my entire life within the genre. With a powerful force of its own, filled grace, amazing rhythms, and catchy melodic twists, Scandroid certainly is the future of electronica. With a gracious, but lucid influence of 80’s pop, the artist in question really absorbed all the right things, in what concerns the musical influences from the past. With the fourth track – Shout – being an electronic version for the notorious Tears for Fears classical hit, this album is literally a masterpiece: no flaws, no boring moments, no nostalgia freaking styled tracks. Scandroid is the most beautiful electronica masterpiece that you will ever hear in your life. It’s such a powerful album that it’s impossible to become tired of it. Beautiful, poetic, filled with escalating rhythms and hallucinating melodies that travel through the magical rainbows of a hopeful philosophy of sensibility and love, Scandroid is one of the best albums of 2016, one of the best albums of the decade, and certainly one of the best albums ever made in the history of electronica, as a genre, and as a sonorous expression of art.            

A marvelous and perfect album, like I had never heard before, with equally disturbing ascendant moments filled with rapture, and an indescribable energy that encompasses the songs from the beginning until the end, such amazing masterpiece deserves all the recognition it could get, from the moment it was released. 

Fantastic, imperially suggestive, permeated with a happiness that engulfs the rhythms in a melodic dissonance that dwells from a distance, this album literally made me speechless. Beautiful beyond any description, Scandroid is a marvelous masterpiece, that will define something new in your heart, as well as shape and rearrange through another perspective your musical taste. A wonderful work of art, bound by a universe of glowing light, this is a musical experience like you have never heard. Superb, powerful, unique, with a high level of delusional excellence and majestic artistry, this is definitely the album of a lifetime. A wonderful paradise for the ears, to say the least!       


​Wagner

psychedelic rock / shoegaze / electronic

This album has been hiding away in my albums-to-review box for awhile now. I guess I've just been very busy with other projects while trying to work through the massive pile of albums I still have to check. Yesterday however, I published the new video from Lord Kesseli and the Drums and I was stunned by what I heard. So today, I quickly grabbed the album from under the pile and fed it to my sound machine, twice, thrice, four times and even a fifth. In fact, I spent a total of four hours listening to this debut, wondering what the heck I am going to write about it. 

Lord Kesseli and the Drums are a Swiss duo, founded in 2014 by members of the band Stahlberger. They claim to make slow club music, and that's a pretty accurate description. Personally, I'd go a little further and call it 'psychedelic downtempo doomgaze blues', so no, don't expect some brutal growlings, piercing riffs and massive blast beats. Nope, we're going on an emotional ride along the meadows where electronic music meets psychedelic rock.

The album opens with the song 'Arnold', which reminds me of acts like Slowdive or Jesus and Mary Chain. But there's more to this music, something seemingly rooting in the darkwave scene, with its gloomy atmosphere and choir-like dreamy vocals. As a former DJ on (quite open-minded) gothic parties, I can certainly understand the club music reference. I'd play this at one of my parties anytime.

Of course, that means that there are plenty of electronics, synths, drones, soundscapes and even flashes of noise to be found. Yet, all those elements are arranged in beautiful songs like 'Siri' or the heavy doomgazer 'Fade'. Yes, doom, and yes, that means strong guitar riffs and hypnotic solos. It's all here and it's all magnificent and there's three more slabs of goodness to come, including the bluesy 'Pure Emotion' and the weird uptempo song 'MDMA which blend DAF with Iggy Pop', or something like that. But what would you expect from a song with that title?

As the album closes with the equally brilliant 'Kid' I read that Lord Kesseli and the Drums' intention is to play as many gigs as possible. Well, as far as I'm concerned, they can come play in  or near Antwerp anytime. It would be great to see them on festivals like Desertfest, incubate and even Dunk!. 


​Serge

darkwave / avant garde / experimental

Hurray, Lina B. Doll comes up with a new 'Party Collection', another collection of exclusive remixes, compilation tracks and previously vinyl-only songs. So for fans, this certainly is a must-have. Even more so, it feels like a good overview of Deutsch Nepal's work prior to the recording of his latest full-album 'Alcohology' (read our review), all unmistakably Deutsch Nepal but all different.

The album opens with the anthem 'How Low', immediately followed by the brilliant 'Ich Steh' im Regen', which might be one of his most industrial-feeling songs. He played this song live at Porta Nigra a few months ago (read that review too) and I remember being pissed-off because I didn't have this song in my collection, yet. It's a damn grinding tune, repetitive, harsh and hypnotic. That's how I like my Deutsch Nepal.

'Institution' is a gloomy but melodic song, a bit of a surprise maybe. I've rarely heard Lina B. Doll sing so good. We all know he isn't really a nightingale but apparently he can be really good as a vocalist. Then again, who gives a damn about vocals when the music is this good. 'Social Report' for example, is a nice piece of experimental electronic music, reminding me of acts like Autechre. Yes, Autechre. Don't ask me why.

'Rommel I Love You' once again shows the dramatic, repetitive and somewhat harsh approach we all come to appreciate so much from this Swedish act. 'Janitor' is a strange, minimalistic and gloomy ambient tune and 'Victum Vermis' adds 'dark' to that ambient feel. 'In the Other End of the Bottle' is another quite emotional anthem, again with great vocals. 'The Lonely Comming Down' reminds me of eighties dark electronic acts like Suicide.

And then things suddenly take a strange turn. 'We shall Live Again' has a doom metal feel while 'To The Earth' sounds like Deutsch Nepal discovered synthpop. The whole thing even ends with a piece of distorted classical music in 'Rapist Park Junction'. Oh well, it's a Deutsch Nepal album, what else would you expect? Fans: buy it! Other people: shut up.


​Serge

shoegaze / post-punk / new wave / dark wave

A few weeks ago, I mentioned this album in my 'albums to look forward to in 2016' list (read). Today I have the pleasure of reviewing this brilliant piece of work. Yes, pleasure, and yes, brilliant. This album proves something that I have been claiming for years now: "The KVB is one of the most interesting and promising things in the dark music scene today".Let's go back in time for a while, before I guide you through this album.

The first time I encountered this duo, was in a bar during the Incubate Festival in Tilburg (NL). Back then I really liked their music, which reminded me of something between Sisters Of Mercy, Echo & the Bunnymen, The Jesus & Mary Chain and so on. I wasn't the only one by the way. On my right was a guy dancing almost ecstatically and yelling 'thank you' after each song. Usually it's the other way around but hey, music is freedom.

After their show, I asked Nicolas if he had any cd's. All they had was one copy but they forgot it in their hotel room. We agreed to meet up later and so we did. I still got the CD and it's still being played often here, currently not as much as 'Of Desire', but that has a good reason as you will read soon. When 'Always Then' came out, we met again, at Trix in Antwerp this time. It was a good show and a great album. Hell, I don't even remember who headlined that evening...

Anyway, on to some days ago when I received 'Of Desire', perhaps one of the most anticipated albums in this household. We quickly unwrapped it and fed the disc to our cd-player. What came out was exactly what I predicted in Tilburg some years ago, a very strong album with great songs. An album that proves how a band can grow and evolve into a mature sound while still being loyal to their influences.

So yes, Kat and Nicolas have truly grown into their role as convincing musicians, delivering a number of tracks that can easily stand next to most of the 'New Wave Club Classix' compilation. Opener 'White Walls' is an immediate club hit. It reminds me of the gloomy sound of bands like A Flock Of Seagulls or even The Cure. 'Night Games' repeats that atmosphere, be it deeper and even somewhat darker.

'Lower Depths' is actually the first true surprise for me. In a way, I reminds me of Public Relation's 'New Beat Mind', driving on slow electronics and a monotonous bass lines. Above these, the subdued vocals and slashing guitars create something quite epic, a first highlight indeed. 'Never Enough' is another one, and once again a genuine classic. Here, I'm reminded of Suicide, another one of those cult acts from the eighties, and so is the stunning shoegazer 'In Deep'.

If you were a new wave fan in the eighties, if you have ever enjoyed attending those parties where every single person was dressed black and dancing to gloomy, obscure music, if you sometimes feel nostalgic or in a dark romantic mood, you need this album. 'Of Desire' is not only The KVB's best, most mature and experienced work, it's one of the best albums in the amalgamation of dark music we like to call 'new wave' in the last decade or so. 


​Serge

neo-classical / gothic / ethereal

Once again I suddenly face a musical style that I haven't been following in the past few years.  Several years ago, this bombastic and symphonic version of neo-classical music often appeared on my stereo-installation but as I grew older, I apparently grew out of it.  I guess I needed just a few albums to satisfy my ethereal darkwave needs, Arcana, Dargaard and Dark Sanctuary seemed to have been enough.

Yet, as with nearly all styles I don't frequently listen to anymore, I'm willing to give it a shot and I still recognize talent and quality.  Angelic Foe has both, which is quite understandable when you realize that this is a project by Annmari Thim, former vocalist for Arcana.  She is the composer, concept creator and singer.  Video games sound designer Samuel Lidström helped out a little and Peter Bjärgo (Arcana, Sophia) handled the mastering.

So you can say that we're in good company for this one, good enough to deliver a high quality album, loaded with bombastic instrumentation and Annmari's distinct voice.  At one point I realized that this was decent gothic metal without the metal part, something this genre has always been for me.  That is just fine by the way, I don't necessarily need guitars for my dark musical enjoyments. 

What I like particularly on this album, is the percussion.  These repetitive, almost ritual drums remind me of some martial ambient acts, such as Arditi or Toroidh, both also regarded as forerunners of a genre.  Along with highly symphonic instrumental arrangements, they guarantee an immersive listening experience.  Naturally, the add the sense of drama that makes this music so loved by young goths.

If you're into the bands I mentioned earlier, I advice you to check this out.  You can't go wrong with Annmari Thim since she's a damn talented woman, surrounding herself with top-notch artists.  I'm going to hold on to this one.  I definitely deserves a place in the dark corners of my non-metal collection.


Serge