The Men.
Leave Home. Sacred Bones. Reviewer - David Ellis.
The record stopped spinning but my head didn’t. The Men are a three-way tug-o-war backwards, which means their three songwriters are all pushing forward but nobody in the same direction. Eight tracks over 41 minutes haul the listener through the inside of a howling reverb tank before tearing though garage punk and then disappearing on a drum machine. The Men are The Velvet Underground heard through the musical equivalent of a kaleidoscope.
Opener ‘If You Leave...’ is seduction by shoegaze. The seducer, of course, is one of those people who doesn’t seem to care if you like them, which only makes you like them more. It features noises and dissonance and nothing for three minutes before bold, sweeping sounds pulsate. A lone vocal hook repeats throughout, a soft sadness balancing on the wildness below.
Then the Men seem to forget they ever recorded the track and the album thrashes onwards. True to their previous releases, this doesn’t feel entirely like a coherent body of work. The Brooklyn foursome never sounded like they wanted to write The Wall though, and never does it seem indulgent or as if they wrote to impress. Their variety is convincing for the main part, even with the inclusion of clarinet on ‘Think.’
On one side of the middle sits ‘L.A.D.O.C.H’. The suffocating wetness of the guitars drip into your lungs and the beat hits so hard it should be measured in PSI, not BPM. It’s discouraging, it’s a dirge and it’s as shapeless as fire. Listen to it.
There will be comparisons to Sonic Youth and rightly so; ‘Bataille’ is Johnny Thunders playing through Thurston Moore’s rig. If that doesn’t convince you, nothing will. The thickness of the sound, the controlled fury in the feedback, is glorious. This is where The Men are at their best, writing songs that work their noise-rock heart into something like a melody. It might be tiresome for all eight tracks, but wedged where it is, the stark sharpness of their writing is a delight.
As the drum loop from ‘Night Landing’ runs a few more bars in your ears after the album has finished, you’ll be wondering about The Men. They’re ugly and powerful and glittering. The good revolves with the bad and like red and black on a roulette wheel, you see both without ever being able to tell one from the other.
Pinch.
FabricLive.61. Fabric. Reviewer - Tom Belshaw.
I’ve never been to Fabric. It’s not like I didn’t want to or anything. Who wouldn’t want to stand on a dancefloor that vibrates the music through your bones? Your bones, for Pete’s sake! The closest I ever got to that were those lollipops that played the radio through your teeth.
I just never got around to it is all. I knew exactly what it sounded like in there though. I’ve been an advocate of the Fabriclive mix range since I first heard Jacques Lu Cont expertly weave together Fabriclive.09.
After that Adam Freeland beat the grey stuff out of my head with his heavy electro and breaks driven Fabriclive.16, Aim hugged me through every quiet night shift with Fabriclive.17, Evil Nine made me feel a bit funny in the trousers with Fabriclive.28 and Justice made me appreciate camp French disco with the very different and frankly brilliant Fabriclive.37, which was rejected in favour of Caspa & Rusko.
For a long time these mixes were a platform for carefully selected DJs to entertain you with their ideal night out. They were always fun and never took themselves as seriously as their sister ‘Fabric’ mixes - all apart from No. 23, which we don’t talk about because it doesn’t fit in with what I just said and I don’t want to look like an idiot.
It’s pretty hard to extract artistic merit from a varied selection of songs that come from a varied selection of musicians, unless of course they’re embarrassingly well mixed, or if the artist does what I like to call a ‘Kalkbrenner’ and just plays their own tracks for an hour and a half.
Neither of those things has happened here. Nor is it in the least bit fun. The tone of the release is dark and sparse, packed to the gills with a style of under-produced bass music that is somehow still popular. There’s even a bit of ‘wob’ in the form of ‘Blue Meanie’ by Distance, which sounds even more out of place on this mix than that particular brand of noise does within the nation’s collective psyche.
Having said all that, this is the only place you’ll be able to get a full three minutes of Boddika & Joy O’s ‘Swims’ for quite a while. Every cloud, and all that.
I’ve no doubt there are people out there who will thoroughly enjoy this mix. Unfortunately I just didn’t have enough ketamine on me to really get the most out of it.
Bridie Jackson.
BITTER LULLABIES. SELF-RELEASED. REVIEWER - BEN ECKERSLEY.
Bitter Lullabies is the debut album from Newcastle-based folk singer Bridie Jackson. Clocking in at just over half an hour yet still full of wide open spaces, it’s a short but often intense glimpse into the world of a talented rising artist.
Before I even played the record my interest was piqued by the brilliantly unconventional band that Jackson has assembled, which features string players, a mandolin, glockenspiel, even a bassoon, with a touch of acoustic guitar appearing only intermittently. I’ve always thought it’s essential for singer-songwriters to be imaginative with the arrangements of their songs to avoid being monochromatic, so I was really glad to hear a band with real variety, used subtly and carefully.
The album opens with a single glockenspiel playing a repeated simple motif, before being warmed by a lone cello and a choir of backing voices. The effect is wintery and windswept, yet still beautiful, absorbing and never boring. Later on, larger and varied ensembles accompany many tracks, while some are stripped back to just a cappella voices. The album is united by Bridie’s voice. There’s something a little manic about the speed with which her style changes, from strong and soulful to an emotional cry to an intimate near whisper. This impressive range is again, like the other instruments, used with great care.
The album was largely recorded in big live takes, many of which were on stage at the Sage in Gateshead, a beautiful new concert hall, and you can often hear the natural warmth and resonance of the room in the recordings. In a world of highly compressed artificial sounding music, the realness and imperfection of this record is a refreshing surprise. The recording style suits her songwriting, which, when at its best, is open-ended and spacious. My favourite tracks on this album have an improvisational feel, where threads of ideas are given space to mutate, mature and develop into dramatic and arresting pieces. The two gospel and country influenced songs near the end of the album perhaps don’t fit the mood, though they do add to the overall variety.
Closing song ‘All You Love Is All You Are’ is also one of the most perfectly constructed and heartbreakingly beautiful ballads I’ve heard in a long time and rounds off the emotional connection that runs so vividly through the entire record.
Liberteer.
Better To Die On Your Feet Than Live On Your Knees. Reviewer – Tommy Poulson.
For those of you who have heard of Matthew Widener, you will know that he is not to be taken lightly. He is a heavy metal demon and his highly political outlook on life has been one of the main reasons for his success with his past bands Cretin and Citizen and his new band Liberteer, whose debut album Better To Die On Your Feet Than Live On Your Knees is 17 songs of sheer ear orgasm.
As is expected from Relapse Records, the music is reassuringly heavy. You get blast beats, punk ascetics and heavy vocals laced with ideologies of national anarchy and freedom of the people. This album is the sound of what Che Guevara would make if he listened to grindcore. Listening to the album, you realise how the songs work so well and every aspect of them fits together, much like a huge completed jigsaw of Malcolm X kicking a Nazi in the face.
The album begins with ‘The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer’, which provides a huge, dramatic opening for the album. This unusual introduction fits strangely with the rest of the album with its battle trumpets and drums reminiscent of Turisas, rising to lead the listener to war as the second song ‘Build No System’ explodes. In all seriousness, the riffs and blast beat made me tingle from head to toe. I love this sort of thing. All the treble has been removed and there is nothing but a wall of bass, massive drums and guitar riffs that scream in your face more than the vocals. The album breaks in the middle with a melody of trumpets and flutes before building back into a wall of energy.
The following tracks tend towards a more simplistic theme. ‘Class War Never Meant More Than It Does Now’ is a fist in the air track that would be amazing to hear live with everyone around you chanting the phrase. Following this is the relatively melodic ‘Rise Like Lions After Slumber’, which provides a good mid-paced break in the album and shows a different side to band, proving they are more than just a bunch of brain-dead political whingers.
The album strays more from the typical grindcore mould than Mortician or Napalm Death and has a more punk feel to it, with blast beats, downbeat folk aspects and growling vocals more comparable to Ministry than other metal bands. This variety gives listeners a diversion from their expectations and preconceptions of Liberteer, especially considering the lack of variation on Cretin’s full-length album Freakery and in most American death metal in general.
Voices from the Lake.
Voices from the Lake. Prologue. Reviewer - Ben Dorey.
The second full-length album from Berlin's Prologue Records lands in January and as followers of the labels output might expect, it's a fairly intense and immersive listen. A hypnotic record of ambient music that nevertheless maintains a steady heartbeat of techno throughout, it is a record that has to be listened to as a whole, the tracks melding into one another to such an extent that I often had to check back to see whereabouts I was in the track listing. This is no bad thing, but more an enjoyable pointer towards the embryonic roots of this record in a live performance delivered last year in Japan.
So how does one review a record that has no obvious defining moments or even strictly discernible tracks? I haven't quite worked it out yet but referring to specific tracks simply as pointers as to where we are in the sonic progress of the record as a whole is how I plan to proceed. I'll begin at the beginning I suppose.
'Iyo' is the album's opener. Field recordings of running water are poised nicely at the centre of a stereo field whilr echoing, syncopated beats dance to your left and right. At first they play loosely around the beat, but slowly become anchored around a simple bouncing acid bassline which heaves in waves of intensity with the ebb and flow of acid techno harmonics. All of a sudden we're nearing ten minutes into the record and barely notice the glitchy jumping kick drum that leads into the rhythm changes of 'Vega' and 'Manuvex', which slowly build with the addition of toms and more frenetic rhythms before the first full key change of the album builds out of the tuned percussion and slow crescendo of droning pads of 'Circle'. This leads into the record's first climax as melody appears in the fifth track in the form of a beautifully soft synth that wouldn't be out of place on Selected Ambient Works.
Eventually this dissolves into the more tribal percussion and ammelodic textures of the album's second half, pads shimmering over tabla rhythms and increasingly solid four-to-the-floor kicks. The hypnotic traditions of the Indian subcontinent have been as abused by ambient music as those of Africa have been in harder dance genres, but here they get a subtle airing, backed up with immaculate sound design before a pair of 'Virgo' tracks reintroduce stronger hints of melody and the beats return to a more traditional techno style, despite being soaked in enough reverb to make them sound like Robert Hood underwater. Eventually the kicks relent and as we go into the last two tracks the percussion again reduces itself to glitches and the odd tuned kick, referencing back to the album's opening, before slowly dissipating into lilting processed vocals that fade away in soft conclusion.
This record certainly isn't for everyone, but for those who enjoy fully immersive music and listen to it in the right setting, alone, it may become a treasure.