In view of the top # 5 selections below, I would like to clarify that I did not actually spend 2018 listening exclusively to psychedelic / noise rock from the North of England. Sometimes I listened to psychedelic / noise rock from the Midlands or the West Country too!

But seriously folks, what can I say… with regard to the multifarious other musical itches I need to scratch, it’s been *old stuff* that’s been providing the goods in recent years (which is to say, *newly discovered by me* old stuff, rest assured I’ve not just been blubbing over my old CDs in the attic), and, this is a list of NEW RECORDS, so… what can I say? By and large, it has been the amplifier-abusing denizens of the North who have still been doing the business re: regularly producing music that’s caused me to sit up and take notice. I have no personal connections whatsoever with these musicians, I’ve never visited most of their home towns, and I’ve never even seen many of them perform live – but there it is, take it or leave it, they are the ones who are currently allowing me to maintain a slight toehold on post-2010 musical culture.

Note, 7/2/19: If you're reading this post, please also read this one. Obnox is now honorary number one. It's positive discrimination, motherfucker.


1. Obnox – Templo Del Sonido LP 
(Astral Spirits)

Lamont ‘Bim’ Thomas has been part of Ohio’s underground rock community since time immemorial, most notably playing in The Bassholes, Compulsive Gamblers and This Moment in Black History during the ‘90s, but as far as the 21st century is concerned, he’s been Obnox, and Obnox is not fucking around.

Much like his fellow garage-punk survivors in Midnight Mines, Thomas seems to have responded to the creative deterioration of the scene that supported him by embracing noise, deconstruction and torturous DIY experimentation of one kind or another – but with very different results, needless to say. As difficult to hang with as the band name implies, Obnox mixes torrents of unapproachable, pedal-borne industrial skree with a chopped n’ screwed gangsta rap sensibility, each cutting through the remaining bones of some kind of blown out, rust-belt blues-punk aggro. It is heavy, unsavoury shit, whichever way you want to cut it.

At some point in the recent past, some bright spark at the Astral Spirits label seemingly asked Thomas to record a “free jazz album”. Rounding up a motley bunch of local collaborators, he seems to have gone about this task with gusto, and, if the resulting recordings veer so far from what one might reasonably term a “free jazz album” as to miss the mark entirely, they nonetheless made a really fucking good album, which I'm sure we can all agree is the main thing.

‘America in a Blender’ sets the tone for what follows, with a solitary horn dropping a mangled field of skree deep in the mix beneath Thomas’s earth-shaking, digitally-fucked distortion and disjointed drum tracks, as his bad-phone-line vocal bristles with barely comprehensible fury as he exhorts his fellow citizens to “..wake your punk ass UP” – the perfect opening to a characteristically punishing LP that frequently sounds like a demented, apocalyptic gutter-punk counterpoint the recent up-tick in socially conscious black music repped in the mainstream by the likes of Kamasi Washington and Kendrick Lamar.

On several tracks here, a guy named Morgan Phelps is credited with playing “warr guitar”, which as I understand it is some kind of twelve string bass. Needless to say, he gets far more convincing results from it than the guy from Cheap Trick ever did. On the instrument’s seven minute showcase ‘War Guitar’, extreme low end frequencies roar and shake alarmingly against Thomas and Chuck Cieslik’s equally damaged, killer wasp treble fuzz and wolf howls of pure feedback, exploding dangerously against the top end of the frequency range, resulting in a track that sounds like some strung out, alcoholic Transformer with earth-quake pounding arms tearing down a liquor store, crushing the bricks to dust.

After this, it’s mighty relief when Thomas & co temporarily nix the noise for arguably the album’s stand-out track, ‘Names’, proving they’ve got the chops to knock out a convincingly muscular slice of shimmering, cosmic funk – an exquisite backing track for poet Kisha Nicole Foster and vocalist Ngina Payola to do their suitably furious thing as guest artistes, calling out for spirits of those left dead or crushed by the accelerating inner-city turmoil reflected in the head-against-wall anxiety attack of Obnox’s more aggressive material – a more reflective POV shared by the exhausted and fragmentary ‘Gotta Keep Fighting’, which sounds like the ghost of an early ‘70s Norman Whitfield production being received second hand through an EVP radio séance.

From there, ‘Templo del Sonido’s second half heads back to the grind, like the sound of a city tearing itself apart; lingering fragments of rationality or comprehension are blown to pieces by incendiary bombs of jagged, speaker-toppling mayhem, each instrument suffused with a hellish miasma of effects-box carnage, as Thomas’s voice rants and seethes almost subliminally, like some hi-jacked police radio band spewing abuse on the last day before everything goes up in smoke. As an aural reflection of the kind of desperate shit that has presumably been going down on the ground level during the USA’s current cluster-fuck, Obnox feels right on the money.

Listen & buy via bandcamp.




2. Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – King of Cowards LP
(Rocket)

If you’d told me a couple of years back that a band incorporating two thirds of Blown Out’s line-up would be getting daytime radio airplay, plaudits in the broadsheets and sold out headline dates as far as the eye can see, I’d have…. oh, hell, I don’t know – bitten you or something. So, let me merely tell you something instead, it’s easier: speaking as the kind of grouch who hass more or less made a career out of abandoning bands as soon as they become popular or start contemplating a more ‘accessible’ sound, Pigs x 7 deserve the hell out of their success.

I’ve been lucky enough to see this band play live three times over the past few years – most recently a dangerously crammed sell-out at the Moth Club in Hackney – and on each occasion, they haven’t just been good, they’ve been verifiably awesome. Genuinely one of the most thrilling live rock bands around, they bring an exultantly positive spirit to the stage that, until recently, has perhaps been lost in the doomy murk of their recordings, scooping up the audience like so much rice from the metaphorical barrel. (And they play like absolute group-mind bastards too, needless to say.)

Seriously - sneer all you like, but catch these guys live and you will be floored. Likewise, if the recently acquired Radio 6/Guardian vibes put you off, I’ll simply ask you to play through ‘King of Cowards’ and point out the bits that do not legitimately rock.

Seemingly realising that it the brief Sweet Relief was the track that most connected with people in-between the two mammoth wig-outs on their previous album, the band’s decision to compress their sprawling jams into a series of more pointedly structured, battle-ready Sabbathian scorchers has proven an extremely wise one. Less an aesthetic sell-out (and let’s be honest, if you think the idea a rock band recording sub-ten minute songs constitutes some kind of betrayal, you probably need to check your head and/or weed intake), the move to shorter material feels more like a natural progression, allowing Pigs to lay down an album that more convincingly reflects the energy of their live performances.

None-more-classic influences are, as ever, easy to spot – Black Sabbath’s elemental riff henge, the pulsating, afterburner dirge of Hawkwind, and the increasingly frequent moments in which Matt Baty’s voice breaks and rasps as if he’s channelling Lemmy himself - but [sorry, cliché alert] the band are really growing into their own identity here too, establishing a cross-genre sound that’s purely their own and driving it as hard as it’ll go before the engine blows.

THAT particular groove that presumably succeeded in getting ‘em on the radio (cf: ‘GMT’ and ‘Cake of Light’)? I mean, I’m not quite sure how best to put this in relation to an ostensible doom/psyche/whatever group, but… it’s a bit, dare I say, glam? A bit Glitter Band / Slade? You know, that kind of platform-booted “stomping-down-the-street” feeling? Or am I going crazy? It sure seems to be getting them places anyway, so stomp on, boys. The way they ‘tease’ the riffs, building ‘em up and knocking ‘em down again, on ‘GMT’ and ‘Shockmaster’ is similarly inspired – a move perhaps inspired by playing to live audiences? - and when the full band proceeds to hit it full force… oh boy. We’re talking Panzer Divisions of Love, ploughing through the barricades, or whatever.

Keeping their recording process ‘in-house’ was, I’d venture, another great move, and guitarist Sam Grant’s production here is f-ing fantastic, mustering constant, edge-of-feedback bombast that sounds simultaneously crystal clear and brutally gnarly, ripped with muscular Oh Sees-ish contempo psyche signifiers and crushing, compressed-metal burn; heavy as a warehouse full of Relapse overstock, yet more fun than a B-52s tribute night.

Quite where Baty’s anguished lyrical reflections are supposed to fit into all this, who knows, but, like everything else about this band, it nonetheless just seems to gel so well, the longer tracks (‘A66’ in particular) cutting through the fun & games with a suffocating, Viking funeral intensity, the frontman howling through the maelstrom, driven to some kind of mad, impassioned excelsis. His climactic cries of “hold on” on closing track ‘Gloamer’ come on like Ahab rallying his crew as their harpoons pierce the hide of the white whale – and, for anyone still missing the fifteen minute numbers, let’s just say that if eight whole minutes of that shit doesn’t leave you satisfied, you should probably seek help.

Listen and buy via bandcamp.


3. David Terry – Sorrow tape
(Opal Tapes)

From April:

“Conjured up primarily from voice, keys, Fursaxa-esque accordion drones and a touch of distant, thumping percussion to keep time, there is a carefully wrought sense of slow mo melodicism to these pieces that set them apart from the vast majority of Terry’s lonesome tape droning contemporaries. The layers he builds come together with a more deliberate intent than the kind of accidental / circumstantial methodology that often governs such things, sometimes sounding like the moment of sublime tonal union when everything comes together in some grand classical piece, stretched out and extended across a 20+ minute duration. It’s pretty great.

Emotionally-speaking, ‘Sorrow’ belies the expectations of its title and cover art by neatly side-stepping the over-bearing affectations of woe and world-denying misanthropy that ensnare so many metal bands, instead evoking a more honest, more hopeful field of melancholic drift, suggestive of a deep immersion both in the contemplation of nature, and in the gleaming spires of the distinctly old school, capital ‘R’ Romanticism that so often accompanies it.

Far from the blackened deep space explorations of Bong’s earlier career, the feel Terry conveys here recalls the band’s inspired use of Turner’s ‘Thompson’s Aeolian Harp’ on the cover of their We Are, We Were and We Will Have Been LP from 2015, and – for me at least – it is a very good feel to find oneself on the receiving end of.”

---

Listen and buy download from Opal Tapes.


4. Bridget Hayden – 
Pure Touch Only From Now On, They Said So LP 
(Early Music)

Until this year, I was familiar with Bridget Hayden’s name only as a result of her on/off membership of Vibracathedral Orchestra, but the chance discovery of this solo LP, quietly released by Swedish label Early Music, has brought the nature of her talent home to me very strongly.

A set of home recordings united only by their raw, analogue fidelity and creative use of structure-dissolving distortions, ‘Pure Touch..’ finds Hayden working in a mode somewhat reminiscent of the early (and I would now consider, best) work of Charalambides, or the sublimated song forms of Grouper, but with a considerably harsher edge than either cutting through the reverb.

Led by a voice wraithed in a hill-smoke shroud of effects, ‘Don’t Knock on Your Door’ merges Hayden’s wordless lament with a tangled web of gnarled electric guitar, whilst the brief ‘On Your Way’ is senselessly beautiful, a time-stopping folk spirit ripped from the unlikely plastic guts of a four-track. Piano-led lamentation ‘Fires For Sorrow’ is nigh-on unbearable, touching on a graveside melancholy strong enough to ward off any hint of cliché or sentimentality; just devastating stuff. This leads straight into ‘Cold Steel Rain’, which largely follows suit, stretching this same feel into another extended string n’ voice meditation on weird, sub-lingual grief, its gently overdubbed choral reflections interrupted by disorientating, blown out bass frequencies that butt in rudely, like ghosts at a particularly lurid feast.

Elsewhere, malevolent, Vertical Slit-esque noise-rock rears its head, with the lengthy ‘There Was a Branch Breaking’ in particular standing out as a spirit-sapping downer, the light of glowing, witch fires only just creeping first toward the end of it’s nine minute moorland trudge. In fact, there is often a hostile, depressive kick to these recordings than scratches hard against their corresponding ethereal tendencies.

Reflecting Hayden’s apparent disdain for sullying her music with language, it is difficult to convey in words quite what a remarkable record this is. If anything I’ve written above strikes a chord with you, I would highly recommend spending some time with it.

Listen and download from bandcamp; vinyl available via Early Music.


5. Earthling Society – MO: The Demon LP
(Riot Season)

If you’re not familiar with director Chih-Hung Kuei’s fearlessly insane 1983 martial arts / horror film The Boxer’s Omen [known to Hong Kong audiences simply as ‘Mo’], there is probably not much I can say that will adequately prepare you for the experience of watching it. If you can find a copy, you’re probably best advised to just take a deep breath a dive in. It’s sink or swim territory, for sure.

If you’re unfamiliar with Fleetwood-based psychedelic rock band Earthling Society meanwhile, well… that’s a slightly easier one to get a grip on. A quick listen to their superb 2014 LP England Have My Bones should do the trick rather nicely.

To my great personal delight, 2018 saw these two unlikely cultural touchstones coming together, as the admirable Riot Season label [three separate entries on the this here Top 20 makes them Stereo Sanctity Label of the Year with a bullet – congrats!] presented the world with the vinylised results of a 2017 recording session that saw the aforementioned band blagging their way into a well-appointed studio at Leeds College of Music to record their own alternative soundtrack to the aforementioned movie. So… what more could the adventurous listener possibly need to know? Let’s dive in and try out our best astral front crawl within the psychotropic tide-pool of fire-gargling racket that must surely have resulted!

Well, I say that, but actually, whereas one would have imagined Fred Laird and his band-mates taking the opportunity to unleash a raging cacophony of molten, tentacle-slashing fuzz guitar chaos to match the hair-raisingly outré content of Kuei’s film (and to be honest, I’d probably have been fine with that), the band instead spin their interpretation of ‘Boxer’s Omen’ off in some entirely unexpected directions, perhaps riding some heroic contrarian impulse or other, perhaps taking inspiration from the film’s date of production, or perhaps simply taking advantage of the vintage gear lying around in the LCM studio.

Whatever the case, the LP is a real side-step of a third eye opener, mixing up familiar heavy psyche tropes with a lively smorgasbord of repurposed ‘70s art-rock / ‘80s mainstream tones, the prominence of which presumably led the band to throw shout-outs to stuff like Berlin-era Bowie and Magazine into the album’s press release.

And indeed, opener ‘Theme from MO – The Demon’ inaugurates a beautifully crystalline, clean-ish guitar tone, seemingly ripped through some kind of holy, Taoist chorus pedal, surfing atop Fairlight shimmers and strange, quasi-Asian riffs picked out on some synth bell thingy. Driven by a propulsive, upbeat groove from rhythm section, it sounds suspiciously like the kind of thing that theoretically COULD grace the opening titles of some neon-glazed, atmospheric ‘80s horror movie – if admittedly one that would have you leaping out of your seat to frantically try to google up details on who the hell composed this extraordinarily rockin’ music, especially once some slightly more contemporary, delay-wracked noise textures start creeping in toward the track’s end.

Both noise and groove continue to build across ‘King Boxer’, with E.S.’s highly rhythmic, multi-layered approach to instrumental psych creating a joyous, kaleidoscopic kung fu soundtrack of MDMA-addled dreams, summoning images of flipped out fighters flipping and kicking their way through a bottomless Shawscope vortex or mylar-textured deformities. As is only appropriate under the circumstances, I suppose.‘Inauguration of the Buddha Dome’ takes a darker turn, nixing much of the groove for an unanchored sinister noise exercise, more redolent I suppose of the film’s frequently foul and disturbing imagery, leading the way into the tangled, narcotic tendrils of ‘Mountains of Bliss’.

Soon enough though, the positive vibes are back in spades and the good guys are kicking ass again, ending Side A with the self-explanatory ‘Super Holy Monk Defeats Back Magic Motherfucker’. Here, gong-like synth washes drift back and forth across the stereo field as Laird dons the funny hat and goes full on Mr Vampire, coaxing a glowing morass of multi-layered eterno-riff ectoplasm from his axe. Thank you and good night, Black Magic Mofos - mission accomplished!

Given that the print of ‘Boxer’s Omen’ I watched does not conclude with a thirty-minute coda in which the surviving boxer chills out and gets high whilst recuperating at an Alpine ski lodge, I’m going to assume that this where the movie soundtrack stuff ends, because Side B here brings a different vibe entirely.

Initially, echoed spoken word fragments from actual Asian person Bomi Seo accompany passages of glacial, Eno-esque synth drift, leavened by some blissful, Philip Glass-esque slow mo melodies, like music for a particularly far-out documentary on movement of ice floes in the North China sea, before E.S.’s monolithic psych reasserts itself once more, the band sounding a little more relaxed and free-form than on the A, with Laird’s lead lines sounding particularly majestic, before the first of two lengthy tracks simmers down again for a quitter, more experimental conclusion, as unglued vocal fragments and meandering xylophone improvisations gradually fade away over a fairly long period of time.

Further surprises grace the final track, with an unexpected outburst of sitar-driven, Glastonbury fayre psych-pop, featuring the album’s only real singing, as Laird repurposes a chunk of Fred Neil’s ocean-skippin’ stonage for a brief, delightful bit of ‘Revolver’/Traffic bed-head reverie, before the full E.S. sound once again fades back in, fuzzed out SF ballroom stasis dancing us way out to the merry end of whatever the hell this thing is now the movie’s finished, to triumphant effect.

Listen and buy via bandcamp.


6. Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso UFO –
Reverse of Rebirth in Universe LP 
(Riot Season)

After twenty plus years and what seems like several thousand emissions of blurting cosmic hoo-hah from Makoto Kawabata’s Acid Mothership, even the most strident devotees of their captain’s particular aesthetic would be forgiven for feeling that we have reached a point where there have frankly been *enough* AMT records, and that Makoto & co might well be advised to cease foisting further extracts from their endless sea of blathering chaos upon rookie record label owners, before the collected weight of their vinyl legacy begins to assume the proportions of a global environmental catastrophe.

BUT - and you probably saw this one coming - I would urge those who feel themselves in sympathy with the viewpoint expressed above to give ‘Reverse of Rebirth in Universe’ a spin before getting to work on the AMT vinyl bonfire.

Having inaugurated a “new generation” line-up for the band in 2017 with the recruitment of a hot new rhythm section (AMT Juniors?), Kawabata and equally venerable founding member Higashi Hiroshi now seem to have been further energised by the addition of a full time vocalist – one Jyonson Tsu – and ‘Rebirth..’ sees the newly-minted five piece returning to some of AMT’s signature riffs with a spirit of spring cleaning freshness, resulting in a work that anyone who ever dug the band’s golden age recordings should be able to appreciate.

Eschewing the cyclopean heavy metal cacophony that tended to characterise many previous iterations of ‘Dark Star Blues’, the tune’s distinctive, Arabesque riff is here picked out on bouzouki as a kind of gentle, string-tanglin’ folk groove swings into effect, shaped and led by Tsu’s wordless(?), rhythmic vocalisations. It’s pretty much impossible to avoid comparing Tsu’s drifting, spaced out glossolalia to Damo Suzuki’s work with Can all those years ago, but regardless, he makes for an extremely appealing addition to the AMT sound, managing not to outstay his welcome even across 10+ minutes of churning, wigged out riffage. Of course, the expected torrents of strangulated feedback guitar and knob-twisting UFO synth abuse make an appearance later on in the track, but there’s a sense of purpose and a degree of subtlety at work here that’s great to hear from a band who have for so long dwelt at the furthest edges of self-indulgence.

An equally beautiful recording (Kawabata’s production here is especially superb), ‘Black Velvet Blues’ drags AMT back to some extent to ‘90s PSF territory, establishing a rarefied, shadowy atmosphere that perhaps even Keiji Haino wouldn’t turn his nose up at in one of his mellower moments. Slow, brooding tremolo chords crash headfirst into knotty clusters of strung out noise before the rhythm section manages to establish a mournful, head-nodding groove upon which Tsu makes his entrance, his vocals lending an eerie, oneiric feel to proceedings that really sends me. Where exactly, I’m not sure (a deserted, autumnal island if some kind, perhaps?), but so long as it’s SOMEWHERE, I’m happy.

On the flip meanwhile, ‘Black Summer Song’ takes a more experimental path, opening with string-chiming temple vibes and gnarly fragments of amp detritus, before Tsu’s ‘Future Days’-esque muttering rise alongside a swathe of beatific synth and drone textures. Drummer Nani Satoshima’s busy, burbling chops soon help initiate us into the realm of pure tape-choppin’, radio dial-spinnin’ Candemonium, with Kawabata riding the waves as is his want, dropping fried solos hither and yon – but, crucially, this session finds him feeling considerate enough toward his new bandmates to bow out before he goes completely overboard, leaving us to enjoy lengthy, guitar-free segments of weirdly blissful, perma-stoned Cologne-via-Osaka ambience.

In short then - if you can ditch the baggage and get with it on its own terms, ‘Rebirth..’ proves to be an intensely rewarding slice of long-form psychedelic rock; largely devoid of goofery or excess, it is arguably the best AMT record in years.

(And, it has absolutely fantastic artwork too, as any fool can plainly see. Mine has a different coloured background to the jpg reproduced above, and I like it more, but whatev.)

Listen and buy via Riot Season.


7. Greg Ashley – Fiction is Non-Fiction d/l 
(self-released)

In view of the caustic cynicism and accusatory anger that helped make Greg Ashley’s ‘Pictures of Saint Paul Street’ the most bracing excursion into trad singer-songwriter territory this writer has heard in living memory, one shudders to imagine the extremes of despair that the slow motion global car crash of the Tr**p epoch might have wrung from the poor guy.

For better or for worse, ‘Fiction is Non-Fiction’, an album length grab-bag of recordings quietly dropped onto his Bandcamp page in November, certainly doesn’t pull any punches in this regard, with Ashley taking his lyrical hatchet to such matters as the U.S. / North Korean nuclear stand-off (‘Thick Red Line’) and the moral bankruptcy of the “post-truth” era (“if fiction is the truth, let fiction try”, sneers the title track).

As well as expanding the range of his subject matter though, this collection finds Ashley stretching his legs a bit musically too. ‘Dissociative Pills’ marks a striking return to the kind of haunted, baroque garage-psych that he used to proffer in his bands Gris Gris and The Mirrors. A doomed lament for the love of a lady who seems to be a French school teacher, the song mixes some lyrics that border on brilliance with others so wantonly egregious they might have had a late period Serge Gainsbourg reaching for the tippex (I’ll leave it to the reader’s discretion to determine which is which). But, the fuzz-enhanced arrangement barrels along so persuasively, and Ashley spits out his verse with such depth of feeling, it’s difficult not to surrender and let yourself get drawn in to the unsavoury drama of the whole affair.

Elsewhere, the musical approach regresses further, arriving at the level of pure, snot-nosed drunken punk for the self-explanatory ‘Fuck The Army’ (a definite highlight), and then there’s ‘Blondes & Cyanide’ - a PC-baiting, POTUS-threatening outburst, positively writhing with disgust (both inward and outward-looking), that unexpectedly succeeds in delivering the best bad taste punk rock chorus of the decade. (Seriously, check it out.)

In between all this impotent rage meanwhile, things get pleasantly weird. ‘Indian Summer’ briefly recalls the shimmering, psychedelic reveries of 2007’s ‘Painted Garden’ album, ‘Karen and Catalina are Drinkin’ in Heaven’ is a doggedly repetitive waltz commemorating a pair of suicide victims (it’s one of this album’s surprisingly rare returns to the “drug addiction as pathetic abdication of human responsibility” themes that dominated ‘..Saint Paul Street’ too), and an acoustic cover of Sonic Youth’s ‘Schizophrenia’ makes one wonder at the uncanny extent to which the song’s opening verses sound like the kind of thing Greg Ashley would probably write.

Doubtless many listeners will be apt to deem some of the stuff Ashley sings about here tasteless, poorly thought out or just plain unappealing. There are moments when I’d agree with them, but hey, at least he’s never boring (which by my count puts him one up on every other human being who still persists in singing whilst holding an acoustic guitar), and there is an unfiltered grit and mad beauty to his music that is all too rare in these dark days, and that keeps me coming back for more. Somewhere in The Great Beyond, Warren Zevon and Laughin’ Len raise a glass to his efforts.

Listen and buy via bandcamp.


8. Melting Hand – Faces of Earth LP
(Hominid Sounds)

Having substantially rejigged both their MO and line-up since the drug-huffing guitar shoot-out of 2016’s ‘High Collider’[Terminal Cheesecake frontman Russell Smith is OUT, Marion Andrau (The Wharves - guitar) and Wayne Adams (Hominid Sounds boss - synth) are IN], Melting Hand’s core trio of Mike Vest, Gordon Watson and Tom Fug are back with a splendidly expansive, approachable motherlode of what I would normally tend to classify as cosmic, galaxy-rim space-rock, were it not for the fact that (perhaps with a glimpse of the same wry, genre police-baiting humour that inspired the title of Bong’s ‘Stoner Rock’ back in 2014), they pointedly limit the scope of their contemplation here to Planet Earth.

Hitting a pretty much perfect middle ground between all the instrumental heavy psyche stuff that has tended to dominate my ‘best of…’ lists on this blog in recent years, ‘Faces of Earth’ is a whole ton of fun. Opener ‘Dust’ spins out on a great, propulsive groove from Mr Fug, a sweet silver surfin’ guitar riff gradually leading the band to an exhilarating, free form white-out, wrenching acres of sweet fuzz from the miniature city of flashing lights arrayed at their collective feet.

The decision to cover ‘Earth’ from the Joe Henderson / Alice Coltrane album I reviewed here meanwhile also proves an inspired one, sitting alongside Earthling Society’s epic reimagining of ‘Journey in Satchidananda’ in the extremely rarefied sub-genre of contemporary British heavy psych bands getting to grips with cosmic jazz classics. Hearing Vest force Henderson’s central sax riff through his everything-on-all-the-time guitar set up is a joy, and if the track’s subdued middle section, featuring a spoken word intervention from Lower Slaughter’s Sinead Young (reworking Kenneth Nash’s stoned incantations on the original) initially feels a bit awkward, repeat plays see it settling in nicely, preparing the ground for a thunderous full band return to the riff; both Andrau and Adams make their presence felt here beneath Vest and Watson’s characteristic maelstrom, sending skittering, neck-scraping noise and electronic echo trails ricocheting through the mix.

Back down to “earth” (ha), side B opens up with some seriously punkoid, uptempo riff rock on ‘Terra’. Recalling the maximalist stoner-fuzz moves of Vest’s recent work with Blown Out and Dodge Meteor, the track even accelerates to the point where it begins to sound like some weird, mutant cousin of ‘Jesus Built My Hotrod’ for a few bars. Wowza. ‘Giaia’ is more laidback, relatively speaking, functioning as a great work out for the rhythm section, with the pedals and amps of the noise-makers growling and hissing behind them, before the closing ‘Dirt’ kicks in with a monolithic, doom tempo trudge, its simplistic, two-part riff pushed to the edge of oblivion, lumbering under the weight of what sounds like about a hundred delay-addled, feedbackin’ guitar overdubs. It was this one, I think, that really blew my mind when the band drove into total oblivion during the Desertfest set I wrote up here. Much like Vest’s Haikai No Ku project, it’ll prove an endurance test for some, but a city-crushed-to-dust bliss for devotees such as myself. After thirteen minutes of that, well – job done, needless to say.

Listen & buy via Hominid Sounds.



9. Mountain Movers – Pink Skies LP 
(Trouble in Mind)

If Mountain Movers self-titled LP from 2017 sounded like a heavy psyche lead guitarist carrying out a hostile takeover of an unsuspecting slowcore indie band, ‘Pink Skies’ finds Kryssi Battalene’s maximalist, PSF-styled fuzz warfare fusing rather more organically with the sound made by her band-mates, as the group settle into a more cohesive sound. Rhythm sectioners Rick Omonte and Ross Menze in particular can be heard upping their game here, playing dense, knotty grooves reminiscent of early ‘00s Oneida for Battalene’s amp ectoplasm and delay goblins to play around in, building tracks like the opening ‘Freeway’ into muscular, low key eterno-jams, whilst drifting off elsewhere into strung out, Spaceman 3-esque repetition.

Admittedly, this approach does lead to the impression of second guitarist / vocalist Dan Greene being rather side-lined here, especially given that much of ‘Pink Skies’ remains instrumental, but his presence as an oft-silent partner still proves important, lending structure to what otherwise feel like a fairly directionless bunch of rehearsal jams, particularly on album highlight ‘Snow Drift’, in which his spoken word tale of trying to make it home during a blizzard allows the song to really take flight, with Battalene’s feedback whiteout crashing in to ecstatic effect after a trudging, slushy build-up.

Though of a considerably rougher hue, the song reminds me of simple pleasures I used to experience in simpler times, zoning out to Galaxie 500 or Yo La Tengo’s noisier moments as if they were the first, last and only music on the planet to touch such heights. I thank them for the memories.

For a band vaguely located somewhere on the indie-rock spectrum to still push quite so much electrifying racket into the atmosphere circa 2018 seems little short of miraculous. Perhaps the relative isolation of Newhaven, CT helps? I dunno. Anyway, it’s spiriting to know that bands like this can still attain escape velocity without having to front like they’re anarcho-punks or folkies or psychedelic warlords or metalheads or jangle-pop fundamentalists or whatever. Just playin’, man, that’s all it is. It can get results.

(Really not sure about that cover art though, I’ve got to say.)

Listen & buy via bandcamp.






XXX. Skullflower – 
Werecat Powers of the Crossroads at Midnight LP
(Nashazphone)

Whilst the multitude of home-recorded demos and sessions regularly uploaded to Skullflower’s bandcamp page are not without their charm, for my money the series of LPs the duo of Matthew Bower and Samantha Davies have produced for Cairo-based Nashazphone label (this is the second, following last year’s The Black Iron That Fell From The Sky, To Dwell Within) are working on a whole other level, presenting some of the very best material that has ever emerged from beneath the auspices of this storied band name.

‘Werecat Powers..’ may cut down somewhat on the aggression generally expected of a Skullflower release, but it loses nothing of the project’s traditionally overwhelming scale. The A side’s ‘We Move On Points of Shattered Mirrors’ verily crow-bars open the third eye, with vast-immensity-of-the-universe-opening-up-before-you stomach-trembling synth walls reminiscent of Alice C’s ashram recordings echoing off ancient stone tomb walls; a bead curtain made of motherf-kin planets swinging hither and yon, leaving milky way trails of star debris. Benign oceans of horizontal laser arcs spreading across a grid-like sky of angelic, treble overload, as if Bower’s Sunroof! project calmed down and had a nice cup of some ancient Tibetan tea, whilst his amps shrieked on with an impossible immensity of cosmic light. But, the desert winds still howl and shrill their assault upon a much-abused prayer bowl lost somewhere in the mix, bringing shadows of shambling, parchment-gangling sharp toothed mummies much like the one glimpsed in Ahmed Nosseir’s cover illustration. They of course are the ones who are gradually gonna take this cut over, as knobs are twisted right and overtones accumulate; sand swinging in a hurricane, downing choppers as the ghouls feast on dead soldiers in exultant, dictator-crushing slo-mo, their voices all the while singing mightily from dust-choked, formless spectral throats.

And that’s just the bloody A side! The B (comprising ‘Charnel Ground’ and ‘Departure Lounge’) has more of a glass n’ chrome frippertronics kind of feel to it, but is equally blissful. Mirrored airport glide sucked down a wormhole of cult ritual and black static; obscene UAE air terminals collapsing in upon themselves as ancient giants rise.

That abrupt shut-off when each of the album’s three pieces ends, volume dropping to zero without warning, is a killer. Wherever you’ve been whilst the transistors were squalling and the amps pulsing, the crash back down to The Real is unbearable.

There are a lot of people around offering “psychedelia” these days. Eh – some of them are alright. If you can still find a copy of this LP though, plug in the headphones, get loose and enjoy a dose of the real thing.

Labels: Acid Mothers Temple, best of 2018, Bridget Hayden, David Terry, Earthling Society, Greg Ashley, Melting Hand, Mountain Movers, Obnox, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, Skullflower

For years now, I’ve been eyeing up London’s Desertfest as an event I would greatly like to attend, but in the past, prior commitments, grown up responsibilities and general lack of time/energy/money have combined to stifle my vague dreams of attendance.

In spite of all the reports I’ve heard about how well-organised and lovely the festival is moreover, there’s also been the fact that, given how much I’ve learned to HATE the myriad discomforts of attending music events in anything other than a thoroughly relaxed/DIY context in recent years, the idea of spending a bank holiday weekend pinballing around the sticky-floored venues of tourist-decimated Camden Town, suffering through endless bag checks, queues, beer-soakings, exit crushes, poor-sound-mix birthed tinnitus and midnight takeaways basically sounds like hell - especially when measured against the more tangible pleasures of quietly sitting at home, enjoying the comforts of food, wine, a sofa and some good movies, all with an additional £100+ still in my bank account.

But… this year’s line up. Oh man. For once, the weekend was free. The funds were present and correct. No immediate obstacles loomed. With a couple of weeks to go, we hit ‘confirm’ on the ticket booking. Three days and nights of unadulterated METAL (or, well, unadulterated HEAVY SPACE/STONER ROCK at the very least) loomed. Let me tell you how it went.

All photos are by Satori, by the way, for which thanks.

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Check-in and wristband collection on Friday afternoon is smooth and incident-free, and Desertfest HQ outside Camden’s actually-pretty-nice rock/metal pub The Black Heart is a happy and chilled out place to be. Lovely range of (I)PAs for drinking in the sun, and I highly commend their in-house milk stout for after dark.

Musically-speaking, proceedings begin upstairs, where The Quietus have (applaudably) been allowed to book a set of comparative outliers to the Desertfest remit (including the not-even-remotely rock or metal affiliated electro-punk band Snapped Ankles, who must have caused a few raised eye-brows amongst the purists).


No such concerns hopefully with Casual Nun, who deliver a far more straight forward, rock-orientated set that I had been anticipating - perhaps with one eye on the likely audience, or perhaps just because that’s the way they’re presently rolling, who knows. Anyway, we’re a pretty far cry from the pretty-fucking-out-there psychotropic improvisations found on their ‘Psychometric Testing by..’ and ‘Super Fancy Skeleton’ LPs, as the band’s Black Heart set finds them operating as a more or less trad v/g/b/d four piece, give or take the disorientating swathe of effects through which the ostensible frontman (sorry, I don’t know member names here) feeds his vocals. Working through a set of fairly structured/pre-planned material, they conjure a dense, legitimately deafening space-rock roar built upon the kind of forward moving, Can-via-Hawkwind grooves that remain quite impossible to fuck with, regardless of context. Despite the band’s fairly, well, casual attire (all four band members is front buttoning shirts and sensible shoes fergodssake, with only the vocalist’s Charlie Manson hair/beard combo giving any visual hint of sub-cultural affiliation), one hopes they might have succeeded in luring a few stray Fu Manchu fans into the choppier waters of their recorded output.


Next up, hard to contain my fanboy excitement at standing right in front of Mike Vest for a rare set by Melting Hand, the noise-rock sort-of-super-group he plays in alongside Gordon Watson of Terminal Cheescake/Luminous bodies on bass and Gum Takes Tooth drummer Tom Fug. A slightly tweaked line-up from the one that recorded their debut LP ‘High Collider’ a couple of years back now finds room for Marion Andrau (formerly(?) of Underground Railroad) on guitar and a chap named Wayne Adams (who is an unknown quantity to me at least) at synth. [Thank you to this Quietus interview for helping me with the name badges.]

Riffing on material presumably taken from their forthcoming second LP, I hereby declare that this incarnation of Melting Hand is fucking blinding, and I hope they stick with it for future engagements. Pedal LEDs glow and blink across the floor of the darkened stage like a miniature, nocturnal city, but these are players who know how to use such arguably excessive gear to its maximum advantage, primarily by doing what so many of those indie guitarists who spend thousands down the shops conspicuously fail to do – eg, turning it all on and turning it up.

The result is an exhilarating hurricane of chaotic, free-flowing noise-rock excelsis, sounding as if band-era Skullflower had lightened up, got the bunting out and had a birthday party, and it was bloody amazing. Though still very much centre stage, the rhythm section are a little less dominant in the mix here than they were on ‘High Collider’, thus encouraging the move toward a more full-on noise set-up (for this afternoon’s performance, at least), and a particular shout-out too must go to Andrau, who ably rises to the not-inconsiderable challenge of going head to head with Vest’s characteristic maximalist whiteout, transcending mere second/extra guitar status and adding her own wild and inventive contributions to the group’s sound at every turn. In fact the moment mid-set when she and Vest got about as close to trading/overlapping solos as Melting Hand’s oeuvre allows was a particular highlight for yours truly. Not quite 6PM, and mind and ears are both already blown.

Based on previous visits, I’ve always considered “Koko” (formerly the Camden Palace for those with long memories) to be a contender for one of London’s shittiest music venues. Though blessed with an exquisitely well-maintained (hopefully Grade One listed?) ex-music hall interior, the combination of irksome, unnecessary-queue-generating security procedures, poorly stocked rip off bar and TERRIBLE sound mix / acoustics have all helped make it a place to avoid since it re-opened a decade or so ago, and as such, I was happily surprised to find myself able to glide straight through the doors and into a good balcony position following a quick sprint in the Mornington Crescent direction, moments after The Obsessed began their set.


Sound is as echoy and murky as ever, making it difficult to catch the pearls of snarled, overgrown teenager wisdom Scott “Wino” Weinrich drops between songs, but when the drummer counts in, he and his recently recruited new rhythm section cut through the mix like pros. (Admittedly, the bass sounds a bit like someone distantly operating a machine lathe somewhere down the street, but, as I’ll learn over the course of the weekend, that’s something you’ve apparently got to get used to in these, uh, let’s say established, London venues.)

You’ve gotta love a guy who sticks to his story, and Wino is certainly that. Through Spirit Caravan, The Hidden Hand, his self-titled records and his contributions to Saint Vitus and Place of Skulls, Wino has kept his particular vision alive across four decades, and as a long time fan, I’m stoked to finally see this living, breathing personification of the heavy rock ideal in the flesh, fronting a new incarnation of his earliest, and many would consider most essential, band.

Recognisable songs aside though, we could easily be watching any of the groups Wino has led over the years, and, regardless of the name on the ticket, everything I could have wanted from a Wino gig is present and correct. Pitched somewhere between the raven-beaked solemnity of ‘80s trad doom and a vein of sneering, anti-social biker rock sleaze that reaches even further back, his songs have riffs carved to last out the centuries, a cycle-engine grind backing up his weirdly melodic, funereal hymns to drug-baked cosmic journeying and perpetual outsiderdom, whilst an unmistakable whiff of psychedelic spirituality enters the picture each time he goes for a solo, sending twelve bar wonders of screeching, atemporal jazz-damaged beauty reverberating through the lofty reaches of the former Camden Palace.

Though he operates within a genre that even it’s biggest fans would have to admit is rife with aesthetic posturing, ridiculous excess and general tongue-in-cheek silliness, Wino has been living this music – through periods of addition, poverty and god knows what else – for as long as many of us have been alive, and his songs, even stretching as far back as The Obsessed’s first recordings from the mid ‘80s, retain a quality that is dead-eyed, rock solid and serious as death. It certainly feels like a rare privilege to see him doing his thing on a Friday afternoon in Camden, and I hope I’ll be able to do so again very soon.


‘Serious’ is also a term that springs to mind when discussing Ghold, who we just about squeeze in to see in the packed out Black Heart shortly afterwards. An intense, progressively minded London-based unit who have grown from a duo to a trio, and now seem to have a fourth participant on board, apparently playing a Fender Rhodes no less. Ghold prove to be the loudest band of the festival thus far, and the first to have me reaching for my ear plugs. Though their music is impressive by yardstick, I’m flagging me this point (wimp that I am), and the constant, tension-building noose-tightening of their long, multi-part compositions soon proves pretty gruelling. Having already been warned that folks were queuing down the road to get into a packed-to-capacity Electric Ballroom to catch a glimpse of sludge-core bruisers Eyehategod, I’m secretly relieved when the decision is taken to bale early in order to sit down with some food before pitching out a good spot for Napalm Death in a few hours time.

Now, say what you like about the Electric Ballroom, at least it’s unpretentious. Complete with wall coverings and floor/ceiling surfaces that look like they’ve been pulled together from scrap material to fix up a previous disaster, it’s… long overdue an overhaul, you might say, but it also has the most satisfactory sound mix of any of the large venues used by Desertfest, and a relatively well-stocked/non-extortionate bar and publicly accessible balcony and lounge area seal the deal. Electric Ballroom, yr alright.

Now -- Napalm Death. I’ll admit this has the potential to be a weird one for me. Over the past few years, I’ve come to revere the band’s seminal late ‘80s recordings almost to the point of mania. If prompted in fact, I’ll be delighted to tell you in great detail exactly why ‘From Enslavement To Obliteration’ just edges out ‘Reign in Blood’ as the most important, innovative and/or mind-blowing extreme metal recording ever issued. [If you’re not familiar with it, please become so.] But – as much as I love their music from this era, that is basically where my knowledge of the band ends. I honestly know about as much about what they’ve done since 1990’s ‘Harmony Corruption’ as the average punter at a Yo La Tengo gig, so…. given that that’s about when the line up who are performing as Napalm Death this evening first began to cohere, this could be something of an issue, perhaps?


Well, I needn’t have worried. Far from legitimising such doltish fanboy dilemmas, it turns out Barney Greenway is such an ingratiating frontman, you could probably tell him you’ve just arrived from Venus and aren't really sure what this whole ‘organised sound’ thing is all about yet, and he’d slap you on the back and add you to the ranks of the chosen without further comment.

I’m sure that, for those who have been more closely involved with the metal scene than I have been over the years, Barney’s distinctive on-stage persona must be beyond a joke by this point, but, as a Napalm Death first timer, I’ve got to admit I found him a disarming and hugely charming presence.

How can I best put this… one of the things I’ve always loved about Napalm Death is the way they square the circle vis-à-vis making violent, hate-filled music dealing with subject matter of unimaginable horror, and presenting it as a positive, cathartic, morally integrated force for good in the world. In the three decades that have passed since the band’s initial burst of inspiration, it has become the norm for groups operating in all sub-categories of hardcore and extreme metal to shroud their work in imagery of misery, horror, mass death, torture, genocide, nuclear Armageddon, skulls, gas masks etc etc, to the extent that the original thinking behind this off-the-peg aesthetic is often lost behind a flippant attitude of “fuck everything” misanthropic prurience that, weirdly, seems almost unique to white males who have grown up in parts of the world not conspicuously ravaged by war and death.

I’m not trying to guilt-trip anyone for enjoying this aesthetic – god knows, as a fan of horror movies and doom metal, I’ve spent a fair amount of time wallowing in it myself over the years – but, as stated above, I appreciate the way that, ever since their inception, Napalm Death have been at pains to justify their work (and indeed, their name and artwork) in grown up, socio-political terms, and to make their intentions clear. Then as now, their music is framed as an expression of (and entirely legitimate response to) the horror they feel at the pain and injustice that is inflicted upon the people of the world every single day by those in positions of power, and, by forcing their listeners to confront it in the most visceral way possible, they hope to raise awareness, prompt action, and all that other good social activist type stuff.

They are not putting gore and dead bodies on their album covers just because they think it’s cool, in other words, and I’ve always liked the thought that, in the unlikely event that a benevolent global socialist republic suddenly came in to being, prompting universal equality and world peace, Napalm Death would gladly down tools and spend the rest of their lives playing nice, mellow music for dancing in the sun (perhaps changing their name to, I dunno, ‘Happy Children’ or something).

Anyway, getting back to Barney, I love the way he puts all this across so clearly over the course of a sixty minute Napalm Death set that no one could possibly be left in doubt re: where the band are coming from. In an area of live performance so often characterised (understandably) by muscle-flexing aggression or mute hostility, it is absolutely delightful to find this guy saying “okie dokey, right then, what’s next..” in the voice of a holiday camp comedian in between outbursts of guttural, throat-shredding carnage, hailing the audience as “friends!” with the enthusiasm and good cheer of the MC at an anti-war rally, even as he awkwardly jogs on the spot and hops about the stage like a middle-aged marathon runner warming up on the starting line. He’s just lovely, basically. What a great guy.

Again, I’m sure many in the crowd will have rolled their eyes as his political sloganeering, having heard it all before, but from my POV, he succinctly addressed the broad points that needed to be made to put the brutality of the music in its proper context - religious bigots, slum landlords, anti-abortion campaigners and assorted others can all fuck off; nuclear brinkmanship on the part of world leaders is insane; a happy and comfortable life free from discrimination on the basis of race, gender or sexuality is the right of every human being. Not exactly controversial stuff, I’ll grant you, but hard to restate it too often, right? By the time he’s exhorting us – “in a spirit of friendship and solidarity” – to help him complete the title of a certain Dead Kennedys song – I’m happy to yell along.

(Deep breath.) And of course it helps that the band are fucking great too. I mean, I may have been out to lunch for thirty years, but this is f-ing Napalm Death, innit? They’re hardly going to half-ass it. Shane Embury’s fingers on the bass still look as if they’re moving in X4 fast-forward, and Mitch Harris’s guitar tone sounds like a wolverine biting the head off a terrier. Danny Herrera’s drumming may not quite recreate the beyond human insanity of Mick Harris’s work in the ‘80s, but he still does the business well enough to send just about any hardcore band I’ve watched in the past five years fleeing in terror.

What a fantastic band. What a fantastic set. I need to catch up on those post-1990 records and pick myself up a (hopefully fair trade) T-shirt post-fucking-haste.

To be continued…

Labels: Casual Nun, Desertfest, Ghold, live reviews, Melting Hand, Napalm Death, The Obsessed, Wino

Like so many of us right now, I can’t even begin to give voice to the fear and despair I feel regarding the future at the present juncture. All explanations thus far offered sound uncertain and incomplete, whilst ‘solutions’, when they are proposed at all, seem ludicrously inadequate.

All I can think to say that sounds even vaguely hopeful is that, there are a lot of us sharing this despair. Broadly speaking, decent, right-thinking people are still polling something like 40 – 50% around the world, and that’s a lot of naysayers for the fascists to try to pull down into the mire with them.

Like everyone else, I don’t know what will happen next, or what kind of opposition to it might eventually emerge, but I do know that the percentage of the population that comprises ourselves, our friends, our families, our extended social demographic is not going to disappear overnight. We just need to stay strong and do whatever we can to ensure that the assorted swine now taking the reins across the globe won’t be able to enforce their idiocy upon us, at least until we’ve made them bleed for it. In the simple but apt words of the late Hunter S. Thompson: fuck them.

Meanwhile, some records came out this year. Here are some of the ones I liked the best, in ascending order.




Since I saw them play last year, I’ve oft been want to exclaim that D/i/s/c/o/s are the “best live band in Japan”, which is a fairly fatuous pronouncement given the extremely small number of live bands I’ve seen in Japan, but what can you say – I’m on a PR tip when it comes to trying to spread knowledge of these guys, and it’s a nice attention grabber.

Being admirably adverse to attention however, they don't do themselves many favours, especially vis-à-vis recordings, but whilst this tape of bedroom demos from their basic two piece line-up sees both volume and energy levels necessarily toned down to fit the circumstances, it’s still a lovely listen, with Kato-san’s rhythmic John Lee Hooker via John Dwyer guitar moves & Red Moon’s splendidly exuberant, hi-hat-free drums both readily identifiable.

Happily, the slightly more laidback vibe also gives us the chance to appreciate the surprisingly poppy and well thought out song structures that underpin the band’s sound – an aspect of their work that can easily be overlooked in the blown-out riff-out of their live sets. One of the untitled cuts has ‘ooh-ooh-ohhs’ straight off The Ramone’s ‘Oh Oh I Love Her So’, so that gives you some indication of the bubblegum traces littered round here, but unlike so many of the U.S. bands currently treading those congealing waters, it’s never cutesy, never cloying, never just finger-pointing pantomime; D/i/s/c/o/s understand the street corner spirit that made rock n’ roll and doo-wop so compelling despite its formulaic sentimentality, and, schooled via the gods of Memphis, they’ve got the off-hand chops to make it happen.

There are a couple of absolutely tremendous groovers here (particularly like the one about having “the lawyers on our tail”) that wouldn’t be out of place in these gentlemen’s work in Mule Team (of whom more later), and, whilst it’s clearly not the HERE-WE-ARE world-conquering D/i/s/c/o/s disc I’ve been praying for, it’s nonetheless simple, homemade classic rock n’ roll business with one ear open for the neighbours banging on the wall, and that, as ever, is hard not to love.

Listen and buy via bandcamp (but please, don’t click ‘buy’ on their download version – Y100,000 is about £686 at the current exchange rate – why, those jokers etc…)




This is the first of four releases on this list (that’s, what, 20%?) to feature the magic axe-work of Mr Mike Vest, who will surely need no introduction to those who have followed my fawning appreciations of his work over the past few years.

Amid his voluminous output in 2016, this solo guitar & effects number under the Lush Worker name struck me as a particularly keen venture, taking Vest’s by-now-familiar brand of outer limits psyche/noise guitar rock to the far galactic fringes, where amp hum, neck-scrapes and pedal clicks multiply queasily through massed layers of delay until they sound like echoing emergency sirens and overheating equipment in some derelict, off-world field hospital; lights blinking, gloop spilling, bulkheads crashing, vision blurring and multiplying as consciousness fades and unknown incorporeal entities run amok, all as our man sweetly shreds on oblivious through the medicated haze.

Further edifying proof in other words that there are still no limits to the atmospheric idylls that can be conjured from the ol’ electric guitar with a bit of imagination and technical suss, this is a very nice time indeed.

No less than four other Lush Worker releases have subsequently popped up this year, but I haven’t had time to buy/listen to them. Jesus Christ, slow down man.

Listen and buy via bandcamp.



Just about creeping onto the 2016 list before the door of December slams (good job I’ve been so slack in writing this bloody thing), this debut vinyl offering from under-the-radar North London tape provocateurs “Baron Saturday” and “Private Sorrow” seems to capture the demoralised spirit of the age with almost uncanny precision.
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Though still loosely ‘structured’, this is work-weary, disconsolate, weekend hobby fare, carelessly ditching the blown-out garage-punk headaches of its perpetrators’ better known projects as if they can just no longer be BOTHERED with such a rock n’ roll smoke screen, instead ploughing their remaining resources into the esoteric shed-craft of iffy four-track experimentalism and fragmented instant song creation, daring a would-be audience of their most tolerant friends to care as they veer uneasily between relatively chirpy Messthetics readymades and terrible valleys of caustic, dubbed out despair.

I’ve never been much into ugly-for-ugly’s-sake when it comes to rock or noise music, but thankfully Midnight Mines succeed in a similar process of sublimation to that regularly achieved by the closely associated Black Time, wherein frustration, exhaustion and wilful obscurantism are channelled via a set of sadistically tormented equipment into sheets of disarming, near spiritual beauty; it’s like seeing the crap kicked around in the dingiest corners of the most benighted commuter suburbs fleetingly landing at the feet of a silver-skinned prophet, who delivers the best f-ing free kick you’ve ever seen betwixt the rusted poles that form the goals of some dilapidated nocturnal pleasureground. Or something.

Returning to earth somewhat, just try joining the dots between an English analogue to the poker-faced death trips of Jim Shepard, the otherly emanations of NZ’s Alastair Galbraith, the haunted diatribes of The Shadow Ring and the bed-sit sci-fi of Solid Space, but keep just enough punk rock grease left in the engine to stir some shit up, and you’ll be somewhere in the realm of Midnight Mines.

A right treat for all fans of the kind of parched, outsider nowheresville mojo honed by those aforementioned artistes then basically, inexplicably lurking in the midst of one of the biggest blobs of population density on the map, because nowhere’s as lonely as a city and all that, y’know.

Kudos too for their appropriation of one of Leiber & Stoller’s more troubling exhortations for this LP’s title. I, for one, appreciate it.

Listen and buy via bandcamp.




The conceptual basis behind what is apparently set to become The Caretaker’s final statement is ambitious indeed, and, whilst I won’t bother rehashing the details here, his plan for the series of six releases of which this comprises the first part, and a whole lot more besides, can be gleaned via this interview that John Doran condusted earlier this year with the officially-no-longer-elusive James Kirby. (It’s also one of the best bits of music-write I’ve encountered this year incidentally, so give it a look regardless.)


Upon first listen to this initial instalment then, it is, as one would expect in view of the wider concept, probably the least treated/modified visit to the ‘haunted ballroom’ conjured from Kirby’s stash of mouldering 78s to date (or, presumably, ever), thus blurring the line between his categorisation as a musician or merely a curator of sound further than ever before.

Those (such as myself) who have found this distinction troublesome in the past however are encouraged to put such preconceptions aside, because, taken as a stand-alone listening experience disengaged from its wider purpose within The Caretaker’s catalogue, this disc remains enthralling.

Though Kirby is arguably doing little more here than selecting pieces of pre-existing music and ripping them through his digital recording set up, his keen ear for atmosphere and emotion, combined with his judicious application of cuts, repetitions and selective treatments, ensure that this presentation of keys being pushed, horns being blown and strings being scraped by distant men long dead remains characteristically compelling, enveloping and transforming the mood of any room in which it is played. Though perhaps not as overwhelming or unnerving as The Caretaker’s more processed/maximalist releases, it still *works*, it what I’m basically trying to say.

Even if we want to take it merely as a Duchampian readymade, it is difficult to deny that this is one assembled with the touch of a genius, and I wait with a mixture of anticipation and fear to see what damage Kirby plans to wreak upon these gentle sounds over the next three years.

Listen and buy via bandcamp.



More Vestage interest (sorry) here, as Mike instigates a wild n’ wooly four piece psyche-jam super-group with members of Terminal Cheesecake and Gum Takes Tooth.

The result, suffice to say, is a writhing, shrieking mass of inter-galactic heavy rock maximalism, guitar-lines spiralling out of control like severed tentacles or fizzing electrical cables, as the rhythms ebb and flow like electro-magnetic pulse, battering the poor ship of your brain senseless.

Track titles like ‘Drug Cop’ and ‘Slug Race’ are suggestive of Vest’s comrades bringing a grimmer, more earthbound noise-rock aesthetic to his more usual science fictional concerns, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any sign of this in the music itself, which goes straight to the far end of oblivion from the opening burst of skree onward and never lets up for a second, as the players shred themselves stupid to the point of what is presumably total bodily collapse, like some best-of-both-worlds High Rise / Acid Mothers Temple team-up of dreams.

The closing ‘Spectral Dispensary’ is probably my favourite cut, easing us out with ten minutes or so of mechanized, post-collapse amp turbulence cascading across a rolling drum beat that just won't quit, and.... what more is there to say really? If you like this sort of thing then get with this, because it’s fucking brilliant. And if you don’t – well I can say what I like as you’ve doubtless ceased reading by this point.

So to conclude: MELTING HAND! Yeah! I’d love to see this lot live if they can ever make it happen somewhere in the vicinity of London that’s neither at 3am nor on a £50 festival bill.

Listen and buy download via bandcamp. Looks like the LP is still available from Hominid Sounds.

Labels: best of 2016, D/i/s/c/o/s, Lush Worker, Melting Hand, Midnight Mines, The Caretaker