GodfleshPost SelfAvalanche
The new album from Justin K Broadrick and GC Green’s exalted industrial metal project Godflesh explores their more refined tendencies. That is to say, it’s a crushing, gnashing industrial crusher of a record but with a tempering spine of spartan industrialism. Rather than let themselves loose in an enormous looming cloud of desolate blackness, on Post Self the band anchor themselves around ruthless nihilistic churns. And if anything, they’re even more sickeningly intense for it.
Chastity BeltI Used To Spend So Much Time AloneHardly Art
Chastity Belt are amazingly good at exploring the endless ways in which we are trapped: in time, space, gender, social circles. It starts as a teenage thing but it expands (as you know) into adulthood; over the course of three albums, they’ve peered further into the ways we are stuck, hopeless. They do it, though, with style and soft grace, with pealing guitar and lurching bass and lyrics which are at once funny and sad, bleak and friendly.
RiddloreAfro MutationsNyege Nyege Tapes
Arriving at the start of a bumper first full year for the Kampala-based label Nyege Nyege Tapes, Afro Mutations is a record of bass-heavy, reworked field recordings collected during a residency in Uganda by LA MC, DJ and beatmaker Riddlore. Arriving mostly in short, sharp bursts, it’s a stylish distillation of the producer’s interpretation of Afro-futurism.
PowertripNightmare LogicSouthern Lord
Whether it’s a tirade against fanatical Christians on ‘Soul Sacrifice’ or ‘Crucifixation’, criticising social apathy on ‘Executioner’s Tax’ or ‘Waiting To Die’ or a cry for revolt on ‘Firing Squad’ and ‘Ruination’, Gale’s lyrics are a call to action, backed by relentless, crushing thrash metal. This is no retro throwback, Power Trip have poured their genuine, obsessive love of early thrash, but also Cro-Mags, Prong and Black Flag to create a boiling pot of modern metal mastery.
Japan BluesSells His Record CollectionJapan Blues
By stitching together various different records taken from across his collection, differing in style or sometimes era, he showcases the rich depth of the music by which he is so drawn to. Inoyama Land’s ‘Glass Chaim’ sits alongside a stern Japanese spoken word sample on ‘Everything Passes’ while ‘The Sun Goddess Steps Out In Old Asakusa’ stretches out across almost 12 breathtaking minutes bringing together the contrasting elements of Williams’ record collection into something that is far more than the sum of its parts.
I, LudicrousSongs From The Sides Of LorriesOld King Lud
It would be difficult to file them next to anything, although one always presumed Half Man Half Biscuit and The Wedding Present hovering within earshot. Pretty much unchanged, they have reached their ninth album and they have lost little of their wry sparkle. When you finish listening to these songs, stand up and stride outside – it feels like walking from a cinema after watching a particularly affecting film. (Which doesn’t happen so often, these days.) You do feel as though you have spent time languishing in someone else’s intriguing mindset. I can’t think of a higher compliment.
The Inward CirclesAnd Right Lines Limit And Close All BodiesCorbel Stone Press
By subjecting his panoply of string instruments (cello, bouzouki, viola) to so many degenerative effects, Skelton is using them as a metaphor for the degradation of the human body through the adverse influence of time and the natural world. Crucial here is that the instruments be acoustic: even if the methods of altering and disintegrating them are digital, the result is an organic transformation of familiar sounds.
Deaf KidsConfiguração do LamentoNeurot Recordings
Brazil’s Deaf Kids are one of those bands buoyed by a mystic kind of momentum, a ceaselessness whose source lies in some vital, but unknown spring. Their music is a glorious cacophony, a mixture of pummelling Gnod-esque cataclysms and the traditional sounds of their native Brazil and Latin America; it’s a brutal blend of hardcore punk, metal, experimental noise, and a pumping rhythmic vein with its roots in African and Indian polyrhythm.
Kaitlyn Aurelia SmithThe KidWestern Vinyl
There are moments in The Kid where Smith’s ability to meld the electronic and the organic into a symbiotic web of sound and music is comforting and soothing, the harshness of modern noise and atonality sublimated into something that provides a balming comfort.
Alan VegaITFader
As much as a record about Alan Vega’s awareness of impending death, IT is a diatribe against the last decades of American politics, the Vietnam continuity through Iraq and Afghanistan, the violence that continues to sweep lives and limbs from the young men of rust-belt towns yet hands the votes of their parents to Donald Trump.
ErrorsmithSuperlative FatiguePAN
Errorsmith’s distinctive synth play lights up Superlative Fatigue, whether it’s on the ecstatic workout of ‘I’m Interesting, Cheerful & Sociable’ or on highlight ‘Centroid’ with its zaps sounding like the FX of a sci-fi movie. Elsewhere, pitch-shifted vocals form the tracks’ melodic backbones with the producer himself characterising the vocals as the sounds of androids.
Gary NumanSavage: Songs From A Broken WorldBMG
The album’s overarching concept and vision of an environmental dystopia brought about by global warming feels pretty fucking real right now. There are some neat segments on ‘And It All Began With You’ and ‘When The World Comes Apart’ where our imagined descendants lament our generation’s inability to combat climate change.
Gazelle TwinKingdom ComeAnti-Ghost Moon Ray
Elizabeth Bernholz’s hermetically sealed vision is true, in that she has created her own world with its own internal logic and rules; a world that doesn’t seem to interact with much outside of her perimeter event horizon. A world that, for the most part, she refuses to explain.
PercBitter MusicPerc Trax
With an eye on the disused factories and the discarded bodies of its workers Bitter Music, despite its harsh nature, has an almost faint whiff of nostalgia for a time and a worldview that we knew and thought we understood. Our views of the future are now much grander and more terrifying.
Visible CloaksReassemblageRVNG Intl.
Reassemblage is a peculiar and peculiarly interesting proposition. Using cross-continental and inter-generational influences, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile have managed to weave together – or reassemble, if you will – a tapestry that foregrounds each of its component parts without diverting attention from the idea of its cohesive whole.
LCD SoundsystemAmerican DreamDFA
American Dream is profound, affecting, weird, elegant and awkward. It is sad, euphoric and, in places, mysterious. What’s so appealing about this fourth LCD album is that it feels unconcerned with who it is or isn’t appealing to. Murphy recently wrote on his blog of feeling the need to make a record that’s “better than anything we’ve done before” as a way of making things up to fans who feel cheated by the band’s resurrection. But ‘better’ here feels more like honest, rather than crowd-pleasing.
AlNamroodEnkarShaytan
Al Namrood, whose utterly uncompromising and utterly brilliant new album Enkar was released in May, are Saudi Arabia’s only black metal band, one of the most intense musical forces in the world, let alone the Middle East, but must remain anonymous for their own safety.
Let The Dancers Inherit The PartyGolden Chariot
This is essentially their Bossanova or Little Creatures, an LP that brings their skewed pop sensibilities to the fore and mostly excises the extended elegiac atmospherics and any overly wacky digressions. When these elements are present, they’ve been blended into the record’s pop concoctions – at least five of which could be ‘Velourias’ or ‘Roads To Nowhere’, were the contemporary music business more accommodating.
BotanistCollective: The Shape Of He To ComeAvantgarde Music
While I love, love, love the Botanist’s trademark acoustic, one man, eco-apocalyptic green metal, Collective: The Shape Of He To Come is a fantastic and welcome leap forward for the project. After seven albums in as many years, Californian Otrebor has expanded the Botanist to become a band with multiple vocalists – somehow without compromising their unique sound.
TeleplasmisteFrequency Is The New EcstasyHouse Of Mytholog
Empowering utopianism or hippy-dippy life-affirming twaddle? What could so easily be the latter is assuredly not so with the capable hands of Teleplasmiste at the knobs and controls. They demonstrate conclusively that frequency is the same old ecstatic progenitor it ever was, lifting off and enveloping time and space through the essential purity of all-consuming sound.
