OFE EOY #2: ET TU, WAN

As mentioned in yesterday's post, this year's album ranking is based on the three-point numerical system of the constructed language Toki Pona. Part #1 set out the mute or many, but now we turn to those in second place (the tu) and my unequivocal favourite album of the year (the wan).

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THE TU

KILLING JOKE
PYLON

(SPINEFARM)

A band that has been around 36 years has no business sounding this furious. While Killing Joke’s basic song template has arguably changed little from their early days, they have undergone a gradual metamorphosis, becoming heavier and harder as the years go by – especially since 2003’s eponymous album. Pylon continues this trend of intensification, with some tracks arguably their most punishing yet. All of KJ’s trademarks are here – post-punk-meets-metal-meets-industrial rhythms, Geordie’s vicious, heavy but curiously elegant riffs, Jaz singing like a pile of burning tyres about conspiracies, geopolitical horrors, psychological warfare and the apocalypse – but just a little further, a little faster, a little more febrile than the last time. Yet for all that KJ excel at snarling vitriol and justifiable paranoia, they are at heart an accomplished, if idiosyncratic and aggressive pop band – most explicitly, on tracks like ‘Big Buzz’ and ‘Euphoria’. Fierce, timely and appropriate, Pylon is the perfect soundtrack to our age. And that should worry us all.

(originally published in Rock-a-Rolla magazine)

ALIF

AYNAMA-RTAMA

(NAWA RECORDINGS)

https://alifmusic.bandcamp.com/

Reviewed on The List:

https://www.list.co.uk/article/74662-alif-aynama-rtama/

UFOMAMMUT

ECATE

(NEUROT)

Despite all the metalhead praise heaped upon them, I’ve never really connected with much-acclaimed Italian riff-lords Ufomammut. Yet for some reason Ecate really got its hooks deep into me. There’s just something so primordial and monumental about their riffs here, almost as if they’re tapping into the pure, unfiltered, Platonic form of the riff itself. It’s massive, powerful, feral and yet, for all its bluster and violence, curiously Zen.

https://ufomammut.bandcamp.com/album/ecate

JESSIKA KENNEY

ATRIA

(SIGE RECORDS)

While collaborations with the likes of Asva, Wolves in the Throne Room and Sunn o))) have associated her with the heaviest of guitar bands, Jessika Kenney’s solo work and collaborations with Eyvind Kang are much less visceral, but no less weighty. A devoted student of Indonesian and Persian music, Kenney is also blessed with one of the most pure, expressive and unashamedly beautiful voices on the planet. Atria is essentially minimalist gamelan – still, spare, breeze-through-reeds slow and spellbinding, driven by meticulous, chiming percussion. While strongly melodic, its primary appeal is textural, lying in the sumptuous, sustained resonances of struck metal, the honeyed tones of Kenney’s poised, elegant vocals, and the mesmerising way in which the two interact – at times, so fluid as to be almost indistinguishable from one another.

https://jessikakenney.bandcamp.com/album/atria

(originally published in Rock-a-Rolla magazine)

ZU

CORTAR TODO

(IPECAC)

Loosely translated from the Spanish, this record is titled ‘Cut Everything’. It neatly sums up the content – angry, violent, lashing out at an increasingly ridiculous world. Their previous album, 2009’s Carboniferous, saw Zu take their spidery, complex, polyrhythmic bass/sax/drums prog and turbo-boost the bludgeon, producing something stunningly heavy but also inviting, even infectiously danceable. By contrast, Cortar Todo and last year’s Goodnight Civilisation EP take the sheer force and momentum of Carboniferous and turn it into a weapon.

Lead track ‘The Unseen War’ comes stomping in, all blunt trauma and sudden flurries of body blows. The wild, tumultuous ‘Rudra Dances Over Burning Rome’ evokes the firestorm of its title in (new to Zu, ex of The Locust) drummer Gabe Serbian’s whirlwind of debris and the charred howls of Luca Mai’s baritone sax. The title track itself gets locked into an extraordinary bit of micro-focused repetition, all tapped hi-hats and palm-muted chug, punctuated by malicious stabs, Massimo Pupillo’s bass rattling teeth as well as guts through judicious use of a sadistic, piercing octave pedal. Only ‘Serpens Cauda’ and the closing ‘Pantokrator’, twin slithers of immersive beatless dread akin to Zu’s recent work with Eugene Robinson, offer any respite from the pummel.

Zu’s music is still wildly inventive and damnably clever, but – unbelievably – this is its heaviest, most punishing manifestation yet. If it continues accumulating mass at this rate it’ll be a neutron star by 2030.

(originally published in Rock-a-Rolla magazine)

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AND THE WAN

FAITH NO MORE

SOL INVICTUS

(RECLAMATION RECORDS)

While the prospect of a new album, 18 years after the last, was absurdly exciting, even the most optimistic of Faith No More devotees must have approached it with a certain amount of anxiety. Reunion albums don’t exactly have an illustrious history. What if they’d lost it? What if they could no longer recreate that elusive magic?

The opening moments of Sol Invictus might therefore appear slightly anticlimactic. Rather than announcing their return with a bold statement of intent, the title track slinks and saunters in, all widescreen shimmer, intimate crooning and spare piano. It’s second track ‘Superhero’ that brings the metallic fire and spittle-flecked bluster you may have expected. Yet this disarming opening gambit sets the overall tone. While some tracks are as punishing and caustic as any FNM fan would wish, Sol Invictus is also characterised by a more restrained, cinematic character, which conveys greater emotional depth than the band’s younger, more cynical selves would ever have been able to muster. A spare, foreboding atmosphere, dotted through with acoustic guitars and pianos, gives the album an air of seasoned elegance – which only makes the furious bits more intense by comparison. The plentiful peaks are as good as anything they’ve ever done: the relentless, claustrophobic ‘Separation Anxiety’, driven by a vicious, instant-classic Gould bassline; ‘Cone of Shame’s transition from ominous swamp-blues to feral noise rock; ‘Rise of the Fall’s infectious patchwork genre-mash; sweet, sepia-toned closer ‘From the Dead’. Best of all is ‘Matador’, the massive climax, which is jaw-dropping in its scale and impact – ‘Just a Man’s scope and choral ascension meets ‘King for a Day’s multi-part structure and ‘Pristina’s emotional bruises, with several new twists along the way.

Stripped down to a focused, concise ten tracks, Sol Invictus makes for a beautifully balanced, varied and consistently impressive collection that far exceeds expectations. It’s a record made by a band not softened by time, but honed by experience. What it’s not is typical Faith No More – which, of course, makes it typically Faith No More.

(originally published in Rock-a-Rolla magazine; also reviewed on The List: https://www.list.co.uk/article/70359-faith-no-more-sol-invictus/)

TWO SPLURGES ABOUT SUNN O)))

SUNN O)))
MONOLITHS AND DIMENSIONS
(SOUTHERN LORD)

Being the most suffocatingly intense band in the world is clearly not enough for Sunn O))). No, they insist on gathering Eyvind Kang, Dylan Carlson, Julian Priester and others, referencing Miles Davis and Alice Coltrane, and evolving right out of their robes. Each of these four tracks is a standout in its own right. ‘Aghartha’ splinters under its own mass as chords fall like slabs of meat upon cold tiles, Attila Csihar intones at the speed of granite, and Namoric horns summon behemoths. The astonishing ‘Big Church’ interweaves the divine and the diabolical: a seraphic choir led by Jessika Kenney wards off hellish grinding, to genuinely theologically terrifying effect. Unusually direct and rocking, ‘Hunting & Gathering’ rides a gnarly riff redolent of Boris-era Melvins. But ‘Alice’, the most explicitly Kangy piece, is the apex. Rising swells of brass and electronics puncture prairie chimes, and its overwhelming climax is, quite unfeasibly, like emerging from a barbed nightmare into a field of fragrant orchids. Brutal, evocative, horrifying and beautiful, Monoliths… is the sound of Sunn O))) obliterating expectations.

(originally published in Plan B)



SUNN O))) @ CORSICA STUDIOS, LONDON

A sentient health-and-safety violation shambles his way through the crowd, swinging a hot censer billowing an intense High Catholic fug. Security bricks of intimidating proportions follow in his wake, stern, nervous. O’Malley and Anderson, standing before an altar made of amps, and hidden beneath austere, moon-grey ceremonial robes, cast claw-like gestures of supplication. The acolytes respond in kind. In case the symbolism is lost, this is Church. Yea, we are gathered here to worship. And the divine object of our pitiful, wretched adoration is the first two seconds of the opening riff of Black Sabbath’s ‘Black Sabbath’. It’s in that moment, the first charred chord, a wrecking ball striking a tomb wall, that metal was forged. Many claims have been made for the diabolical influence of the whole tritone riff, but the real startling power lies in the pure intestinal impact of that single chord strike. Sunn o))) take this insight, and extrapolate it to infinity. Lower, slower, louder. Lower, slower, louder. Repeat until dead, deaf or immortal.

In truth, the second of those three options is the most likely. I’ve attended some sadistically loud gigs in my time. For me, Mogwai, a decade ago at the Astoria, was probably the first to go beyond pedestrian levels of stupefying heavy-metal volume and into the realms of Mega-City One sonic weaponry. Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Jazkammer, My Bloody Valentine, Part Chimp, a particularly harrowing one-on-one in a small room with Kylie Minoise – all, in their own way, were thoroughly excessive in unreasonably thrilling ways. But Sunn o)))… Loud, yes. Stupidly loud, certainly. But loud in a way that you hear from the ground up. Music that gives your duodenum tinnitus, drones that reverberate through your skeleton. The knees take the brunt; the pelvis only suffers a touch of purpling at its crest. By the time the shockwaves reach your ears they’re a mere shade of themselves, only capable of semi-lethally roughing up your soft tissues for their lunch money.

Tonight’s one-off is a low-key low-end treat for grimm devotees. In town to plug their upcoming release, Monoliths & Dimensions, Anderson and O’Malley revisit the now-we-are-ten Grimmrobes Demos. (Or at least something potentially approximating them. Let’s be honest, it’s difficult to extract anything recognisable from this overwhelming caustic morass.) In recent years, Sunn o))) have expanded their line-up, their putrefying sound given living, liquid form by freshly disinterred vocals from Attila Csihar; extra muscle and mass from Justin Broadrick; morbidly swelling textures from Guapo’s Daniel O’Sullivan (whose support slot tonight as Grumbling Fur, in collaboration with Alexander Tucker, wove transporting rural gothic terror-drones from mere violin and cello), etc. But tonight, they’re devolved: no guests, no guff, just two guitars, some leftover Rosicrucian habits, a wall of Sunn amps, some really, really, really sloooow and heavy riffs, The End.

Not only that, but their usual obfuscating theatrics are hamstrung. The hot spotlights sizzle O’Malley’s cloak, and every few minutes he makes frustrated throat-slicing cut-the-lights gestures to the techies. The trademark shield of dry ice fails to co-operate too, dissipating almost as soon as it is fwooshed on stage, leaving them looking like thwarted conjurors. (As an aside, a universal gig truth: no matter how loud your band, that fwoosh is much louder.) Yet, denuded in several ways, Sunn o))) are at their most powerful. Underneath all the husks and disguises and grandiose artistic trappings that they’ve acquired lately is a concentrated distillation of the proper heavy stuff: pure mainlined Melvins tar, only without the distracting fripperies of, y’know, actual songs and words and beats and all that extraneous crap.

(Yes, Earth did it first, and arguably better, but Carlson’s gone all Shimmering Jim Jarmusch these days. A noble and beautiful pursuit, for sure, but someone has to keep the bones quaking.)

For all its cultish congregational air, this experience is in fact a solipsistic one, in which each individual locks into the psycho- and physiological effects of extreme bass and volume and slowness. We’re dwarfed by noise. We’ve shrunk to microscopic size and are being fired down a high-voltage cable. We’re trapped inside that Black Sabbath drang like a wasp in a jam jar. Music that moves at extreme speeds, fast or slow, makes its own tempo in a secret, personal pact with the listener. And this intimacy reveals a truth – the trappings of gothic doom and monastic horror, of extremity and misery and degradation, tend to detract from the simple fact that Sunn o))) are both FUN and SEXY, no? So cartoonishly extreme that they’re entertainingly preposterous; so perfectly refined in terms of pure Platonic-form sonics that anyone with even the vaguest love for the crushing chug must surely abandon themselves to this frill-free sensual celebration. This is metal-as-fetish, anatomical riff examination, the frotting of the frets, the orgasm of the overdrive.

Come and worship. Worship and come.

(originally published in Plan B)