Temporary Infinity is the third album from Newcastle psych-heads Haikai No Ku and it is as if not more unrelenting than their previous offerings. A cataclysmic wall of distorted dirge rolls in from the north, a steadfast maelstrom of monolithic monotony, with the squalls of guitar drawl licking at its heels, driven forth with plodding certainty by primal drumming - it's a gripping gruel of an album, and I absolutely love it. Sleep wishes they could hold down the fort in an apocalypse of their own creation like these guys can.
London noisy devils Casual Sect make one hell of a racket on The Hidden Persuaders. A calamitous catharsis, an implosive idiom, a perilous purge - Casual Sect wrap up their balls of broken punk noise with excursions into sound recordings and ruminations on David Icke and the Hadron Collider. The longest song here is called 'I Hate Jazz'. deliberately toying with what might be seen as an intellectual free jazz playthrough before devolving/evolving into a brutal thrash - as most of these spiked tracks are. Bow down at this destructive altar.
Not to be confused with the bewitching noise act also trailing around Europe, Unavailing is the album from the Bismuth who offer blood sacrifices to Sunn O))) doomsday soothsayers. The duo are infatuated with incremental sludge, as unrelenting as it is inevitable. Without a guitar - Bismuth are all about making bass and drums as tectonically destructive as their multi-membered, multi-stringed contemporaries. Yet they can achieve the same level of devastation without the sonic assaults too - see the quiet comedown of 'Of The Weak Willed' which holds off from the black mass for 14 of its 16 minute running time. It perfectly showcases their innate sense of patience alongside the penchant for obliteration - the world will come down, that is a given; but Bismuth will bide their time.
