rabrotNorwegian GothicPelagic
Norwegian Gothic, Årabrot’s ninth album, is as dynamic and unpredictable as ever, stuffed with squalling sex and death anthems that could career off the rails at any moment. Like all the band’s albums, Kjetil Nernes has roped in a revolving cast of musicians, this time including Lars Horntveth (Jaga Jazzist), cellist Jo Quail, Tomas Järmyr (Motorpsycho), Anders Møller (Turbonegro, Ulver) and Massimo Pupillo (Zu), but Karin Park’s influence slices through the noise. Squeezed in amongst the nods to punk, black and industrial metal, anthemic choruses push Årabrot’s sound into new dimensions on ‘Kinks Of The Heart’ and ‘The Lie’, and the snakelike grooves and synths of ‘The Rule Of Silence’. It’s like sherbet for Swans fans.
NonexistentNONEXISTENTDownwards
The trio of Astrud Steehouder, Luke J. Murray and Alexander Tucker get drawn into the Downwards spiral for this superb debut release on Karl O’Connor’s always intriguing label. Intriguingly, it sits as a counterpoint to another of my favourite records of 2021, O’Connor’s old mucker Surgeon’s Transcendence Orchestra project with Dan Bean. Where that evokes a spangled mind quietly observing tree tops kissed by the last of the sun, NONEXISTENT‘s drones, earthy growls and watery murmurings steal through the shattered roots of autumn’s destruction.
William ParkerMayan Space StationAUM Fidelity
One of two trio recordings, along with Painter’s Winter, released (unusually for William Parker) on vinyl on the same day, Mayan Space Station is the New York bassist and composer’s first electric guitar trio album. Parker and drummer Gerald Cleaver are on predictably great form here, but it’s guitarist Ava Mendoza’s contribution that’s likely to appear as revelatory to anyone who isn’t already familiar with her work. Mendoza’s versatile playing has touches of the great Sonny Sharrock to it, but doesn’t overly rely on shredding as some of Sharrock’s more obvious imitators do. ‘Tabasco’ sizzles as one might expect, Mendoza adding a perfectly tangential fractal of guitar scree to Parker and Cleaver’s loping beats. The title track, meanwhile, ascends ever skyward, driven by Parker’s propulsive bass and Cleaver’s brittle, metallic-sounding drumming, over which Mendoza’s exploratory guitar lines branch out like searching fingers reaching out into the infinity of open space.
Time Binding EnsembleNothing New Under The SunKit
Nothing New Under The Sun by Time Binding Ensemble, a solo venture by Helena Celle despite the name, is the artist’s first double LP, and its rigid concept (“24 parts of equal length, the collection cycling through each key of the musical scale”) harbours a remarkably expansive, ambitious and moving confluence of ambient drone and modern classical.
Max Syedtollan PlusMinus EnsembleFour AssignmentsGLARC
Four Assignments is a totally unexpected listen, bearing little resemblance to anything an audience might reasonably expect to hear. This is an exciting prospect. It is extremely rare to come across a record that baffles, confounds and delights in the way this does. As an expression of a completely unfettered individual vision it is a triumph, and it strongly suggests that the experimental music scene in Glasgow in general, and at GLARC in particular, is a thriving, creative force.
SlikbackMELTSelf-Released
Slikback is unforgiving when it comes to forging the meanest, most abrasive and face-melting textures, and conjuring the most anxious, panic-inducing atmospheres. MELT could almost be described as an unintentional follow-up to The Bug’s recent masterpiece Fire, both in terms of rage and sandpaper aesthetic. But instead of unrelentless soundsystem pressure and mesmerising vocals, the focus is on undulating polyrhythms and grimy, dissonant and abrasive metal sonics with a quality not dissimilar to sludge metal, next gen East African grindcore in the vein of Duma (especially the opener ‘TOKETA’), French gabber, Nazar’s rough kuduro and industrial hip hop acts, such as Death Grips and clipping..
Goodbye WorldAt Death’s DoorYouth Attack
The five members of Goodbye World, a hardcore punk band split unevenly between New York, Chicago and Denver, have collectively played in dozens of other hardcore punk bands. This, their debut – an LP lasting 12 minutes, if your value system can accept such a thing – is about as good as anything they’ve previously put their name to. Phenomenally economical in its mean structure, recorded impeccably (which is to say it feels like a neverending noggin-clubbing) and lyrically erudite while imagining awful events, like most things released on Goodbye World guitarist Mark McCoy’s label Youth Attack it already goes for collector prices. Do what you need to do to hear it.
Andy StottNever The Right TimeModern Love
The delicate voice of Andy Stott’s regular collaborator Alison Skidmore can be heard across Never The Right Time. Functioning as the fulcrum of his vaporous pop songs, the album leans heavily on his signature multi-faceted sound-art stereo imaging, and the fine balance between anxious atmospherics and forlorn club bangers for which he is known. Similar to many of his momentous releases, the album functions like a fictitious rainy day playlist that might be played regularly at the Black Lodge, “a place of dark forces that pull on this world,” in the words of Twin Peaks character Hawk. Seeing release in April when the premonition of a possibly different summer dwelt on the horizon amid vaccination boosts, it might all seem rather gloomy, but there are still plenty of us enamoured with Stott’s phantasmatic soundtrack to 2010s anhedonia.
Oliver Leith‘Me Hollywood’Another Timbre
Frog Of EarthFrog Of Earthwherethetimegoes
The uncanny world Mel Keane builds as Frog Of Earth is one you’ll find yourself exploring again and again. In a mysterious ecosystem of babbling ambient electronics, amorphous beats and vibrant melodic swirls, we join our amphibious friend as it contemplates and reacts to its ever-shifting surroundings. The liner notes for the release describe the frog as it fends off panic and confusion, and tries to find peace in a world that doesn’t make sense anymore, before realising that acceptance is the key. The message, if you can call it that, is a stoic one, and makes the escapist adventure of this album all the more enticing and transcendent.
MelvinsWorking With GodIpecac
Melvins have stretched belligerence into a fine art and then some over their many active years. From formless, jagged noise rock to Dadaist sludge metal, the one uniting theme through their career is a will to transgress, to bemuse, and to sow confusion. On a good day it’s hard to tell signal from noise – and there’s a lot of noise here, on their 24th record. With the re-addition of Mike Dillard, they’re back to their 1983 lineup, last visited on 2013’s Tres Cabrones. With this, Working With God carries the air of a heady reunion. It careers from familiar, high-energy, hooky sludge rock to little snippets of in-jokes, and then back again.
SuccumbXXICaligari
Californian quartet Succumb’s self-titled 2017 debut is still one of the most unique, abrasive and fascinating death metal records of the 2010s, and this follow-up doesn’t drop the ball whatsoever. The lightspeed, grinding insanity of ‘Lilim’ leading straight into the sinister Portal-esque claustrophobia of ‘Maenad’ is one hell of a way to open the record, immediately demonstrating how much more lethal the band’s faster sections have become and how much creepier and more uncomfortable their slower passages are now too. At just over half an hour, the intensity of those first two-tracks doesn’t dissipate at all for the duration of XXI. The churning six-minute ‘Smoke’ is a great example of how adept Succumb are at maintaining that tension, juggling dizzying stop-start grindcore phrases with dense, dark death metal and sustained, rolling tremolo riffs that feel like having your skin slowly peeled off.
Ruth GollerSkyllaVula Viel
Ruth Goller’s songs on Skylla play out like a game of pass the story along between composer and instrument. Flurries of notes met with bouncing clusters of vocal phrases. An idea knocked back and forth, extended and elaborated in a state of constant evolution. The result feels deeply emergent, a dialogue which is maze-like yet open ended. Bassist with Acoustic Ladyland and Melt Yourself Down, Goller’s performed and recorded with the likes of Shabaka Hutchings and Paul McCartney, but Skylla marks her debut solo statement. Each track is composed with a different tuning, the artist using that unfamiliarity as a vehicle into an instinctive, reactive approach to composition.
Japanese BreakfastJubileeDead Oceans
After a year of lockdown records, 2021 ushered into our lives the new genre of the ‘post-pandemic’ album. One such example is Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee. Celebratory and suffused in optimism, it chimes with the sense of a long dark night finally drawing to a close. This isn’t by coincidence. Michelle Zauner – the Korean-American native of Eugene, Oregon, who has used Japanese Breakfast as a stage name since 2016’s Psychopomp – could write the book about coming out of the shadows and facing towards the dawn. Following an extended and disorientating lockdown of the soul, she’s ready for change. Jubilee finds her figuratively cracking open the shutters and engaging once again with the outside world.
HawthonnEarth MirrorBa Da Bing!
While Coil might serve as Hawthonn’s spiritual locus and Nurse With Wound a frequent comparison, the sound they’ve reached on Earth Mirror sees them seep stylistically outward. And while there’s no denying that this is an esoteric and decidedly uncommercial release, it’s one that has the power to draw fans of other experimental genres into its puzzling orbit. Occasionally, for instance, you get the sense that the album could serve as a dark, disintegrating inversion of the bucolic cheer to be found within Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure. At others you get a hint of how Labradford’s quiet sorrows might have sounded if they were transplanted to some chilly British moor and force-fed a lifetime’s worth of folkloric weirdness. Sometimes, the strongest links seem to be those occupying the further-flung fringes of modern heaviness.
Erika de CasierSensational4AD
Drawing on the sultry throwback energy of ’90s and ’00s R&B, Erika de Casier’s second album is a subtle masterpiece. Working with frequent collaborator Natal Zaks (AKA DJ Central, of Denmark’s Regelbau collective), the pair look to a number of trademarks of the R&B that defined the turn of the millennium, drawing as much on the acoustic guitars that appeared on classic Destiny’s Child and Brandy album cuts as the overall oeuvre of Sade’s best work. Crucially though, Sensational isn’t simply a pastiche affair, as de Casier refines the smoky afterhours energy of her 2019 debut LP, Essentials, and builds ever more confidently on the music of her upbringing.
Godspeed You! Black EmperorG_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!Constellation
Split into four tracks – two 20-minute passages of dense instrumentation with equally dense titles (the record opens with ‘A Military Alphabet (five eyes all blind) (4521.0kHz 6730.0kHz 4109.09kHz) / Job’s Lament / First Of The Last Glaciers / where we break how we shine (ROCKETS FOR MARY)’), and two shorter cuts – G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! is ironically Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s least dystopian record to date. Church bells chime under layers of driving guitars and militaristic drums, and amongst the AM radio static that fills the background, there’s birdsong and, whisper it, a sense of hope. As the album’s opening track comes to an end, it’s punctuated by distant explosions; they could be gunshots, but also, they could be fireworks.
There is something of the atmosphere of a Pipilotti Rist installation about this collaboration between Orange Milk label founder Seth Graham and Austin multi-instrumentalist More Eaze. Woozy and psychedelic, oneiric and melancholic, these nine short tracks combine ambient electronics and frantic orchestration with a liberal and highly expressive use of autotuned vocals. Flurries of squawking woodwinds dance around android torch songs, and strange murmurs hover in the middle distance, but perhaps the most important element here is luxurious use of space and silence. The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid manages to feel dramatic – even overwrought – yet incredibly intimate, whisper close.
Dry CleaningNew Long Leg4AD
With New Long Leg, Dry Cleaning have put away childish things, and as for the production, the imagery, the craft on display: they’re all the better for it. To start, there’s certainly more time to fill here. Florence Shaw’s formerly rapid delivery now allows for instrumental breaks, encouraging Lewis Maynard and Nick Buxton to build loftier soundscapes. A two-minute pause in ‘Every Day Carry’ envelops the listener in the band’s own biosphere, completed by Shaw’s references to the flora, fauna, fatbergs and firearms that have all been accumulating in her lyrical repertoire since the heady-days of 2019.
Ed DowieThe Obvious INeedle Mythology
It’s very easy for an artist with such an obviously well-stocked larder to throw the entire plate of spaghetti at the wall – meatballs, sauce, and all – and see what sticks. Ed Dowie’s minimalist instincts temper those potential excesses. The Obvious I never swings for the fences and misses, never over-reaches, and doesn’t outstay its welcome. It’s sculpted and contoured to within an inch of its life. At the same time, such admirable restraint occasionally stops the record from living up to its promise. ‘Dear Florence’ could soar into something huge and stirring but is content to stay modest, even meek. Closer, ‘Robot Joy Army’ grows some teeth but never has the conviction to truly sink them into anything.
