Coming Down In Sacred Bones' Church

I picked up This World Is Not Enough, the "solo" album from Iceage's Elias Bender Rønnenfelt under the moniker Marching Church, last month. It is a strange brooding beast - with slight echoes of Rønnenfelt's "day" band, but with far more contemplative, cantankerous and quietly chaotic measures floating through its veins. Sacred Bones has released something that is even further out in the fringes in the form of Coming Down: Sessions in April 12 (out through Sacred Bones), a haunting improv lurch from eye-scratching purification and soul fires to a coalescing caterwaul of cathartic free jazz emulsions (which featured members of Lower and Puce Mary among others). The slow drag-the-lake in harrowing monochrome flaying of the emotional mind. I absolutely love this. News that they are recording a new album is fantastic news. Dive into these immensely murky waters now - they play at London's Birthdays on Monday.

Zero Reticence To Call Out Girls Names

It's been a while since I had heard from Girls Names - the Northern Irish quartet whose second album The New Life features a killer track, the 8 minute closing title track that was one of my favourites of 2013. They marked their year of intent back in last month when they launched the (already sold out) limited edition EP Zero Triptych. I've included it here so you can hear it - suffice to say it's a stunning atmospheric 80s-tinged post-punk epic that circles the Krautrock wormhole due to that insistent beat and great electronics - I am a massive fan (You can get it on straight black vinyl here). Can you even remember when they were a fuzzy guitar pop outing? A decent one too - they had some great EPs. Oh how things have changed...


Well they aren't resting up, as their third album Arms Around A Vision comes out through Tough Love Records in October. First taste is 'Reticence', leaning further into the gothic shadows than ever before, crafting a track that is both beautiful and barbaric. The opening cacophony echoes the cold harsh sonic climes of Copenhagen and the Iceage collective, before settling into a morose black-mirror image of New Romantic post punk, complete with sweet silken synth, before the last twenty seconds leaves one with a decided hook of discordance. It's a brilliant call of arms from a band that aren't just ever evolving, but are almost militant in their seamless metamorphism. Recorded and produced by electronic wizard Daniel Rejmer (I wrote recently about his Room40 release), Arms Around A Vision has gone from an unknown quantity to feverishly anticipated album of 2015.

Girls Names are playing at ACE Hotel in Shoreditch tomorrow night with the great Shopping in support. 

ScandinaviRA

Swedish punks RA are preparing to launch their blistering debut album Scandinavia on us (through Adrian Recordings in March) which can't come soon enough. The Malmo four-piece tear into a propulsive black hole of white noise, drums of the colossi, relentless basslines, and the commanding bellow and roar of Simon Mino, resting somewhere between Ian Curtis, Disappears' Brian Case and fellow Scandinavian reprobate Elias Bender Ronnefelt. But unlike the nascent disdain that coloured Iceage's first releases and the measured temperament of their 2015 guise, RA expel a fervent energy that comes from enervation, desperation and finely-calibrated dissent, coalescing forth in a miasma of spat mantras designed to enrapture and hypnotise rather than eviscerate. While the singles 'These Days' and 'The Void' have more nihilistic pulse propelling them out of the darkness, songs like 'The South' has a pop buoyancy swirling under the opaque surface, and the title track feeds into Gothic march synth-punk futurism. All in all, a heady and heavy album that nonetheless crackles with energy.

Scandinavia can be pre-ordered here.

Take A Puff On Germanic Nihilism

Slovenly Records often put out some really frazzled, wild-eyed rock. Things get just as warped on their label offshoot, Mondo Mongo, dedicated to putting out punk from other countries sung in their native tongue. The explosive punk of Puff, hailing from Berlin, is a great introduction to this new tangent - but in many ways its business as usual, all spit, sweat and venom. A German Ian Curtis hopped up on coke and nihilistic mores, or a demented Iceage shadow blast with added synth meltdowns - a leather-clad carnivale of gargantuan grotesquerie. The blurb states that Puff kills party people on contact, but it's more likely they are reborn crack-lord acolytes, puffing til the end of time.

Grab Identitatsverlust here - check out that cover art - brilliant.

Rubbing Salt Into Your Sacred Institute

Institute are outta Austin, Texas. You'd be excused for double-taking at that, seeing as their geographical brethren would be more akin to the Scandinavian nihilist post-punk set. Lower, Iceage, Holograms - they all know how to remain seductively melodic even as they are stripping layers off the inner walls of your skull. They include members of bands such as Wiccans and Glue (who you will hear more of next week), and from the tense, tetanus-infused squalls of their initial demos to the more fleshed out sound of new EP Salt (out on Sacred Bones), it's clear that Institute isn't part of the system.

Pre-order Salt here.

Like A Moth To A Flame, Over And Again

I spoke about Mourning Glow, the great little EP from San Francisco's Wild Moth, not that long ago. They have since released this excellent LP Over Again on Asian Man Records - Jesus it's good. Strong, pummelling, warm yet raucous tones, frenetic atmosphere that wavers between the type of repetitive punk rock of Double Dagger but dipped in the waters of Iceage, then thrown into the Delorean and flung back into the backwaters of 1995... Over Again is a relentless mashing of all my buttons. The best thing is that it is an assured collection of songs - there are no noodling vignettes, no misplaced sense of gnashing of teeth. It encapsulates a certain place in time, sure, but it also feels authentic, acid-tinged bile tempered by knowledge and experience, then played with. Wild Moth aren't necessarily an angry band, then (although 'Blossom' certain sounds furious), but one that uses dissonance just for kicks as well as for kicking the pricks.

You can pick up Over Again here - it's a great album that deserves attention when December comes around, seriously electric.

Projecting Outwards, Forever

A hologram is a creation of something that is not - a projection of something three-dimensional, allowing things to exist in spaces where they cannot conceivably be. Essentially a technological sleight of hand, designed to elude, to confuse, to solicit, to entrance - to trick. Yet holograms are flawed, even as a figment of the imagination - bound within the limits of projection, forever one-dimensional.

Sweden's Holograms, and indeed the bubbling nihilism inherent in the Stockholm underground scene (if such a thing can be deemed to exist), have a lot to live up to. Can the fires continue to burn, the reservoir of inertia begetting anger like napalm, or will it prove to be a facade, a one-faceted ruse to disguise a thinly-veiled play for style rather than substance? Although You're Nothing, Denmark brethren Iceage's follow-up to explosive debut New Brigade, was an exciting slice of ephemeral gnashing of teeth, its slickness and lessening of jackboot aggression found some detractors. Forever is likely to do the same for Holograms - they may have found themselves on the hip Captured Tracks label, but its popularity could still bread discontent from those that bought wholesale into the surface annihilation.

But as Forever, and indeed Holograms attests, things are far more complex. Forever teeters on the knife edge between exultation and extermination - the wellspring of a volatile relationship with its depths deemed plumbed. And despite the four-piece mirroring the malaise and boredom that comes from feeling isolated in a cold, urban landscape, there are moments of exuberance that (shock, horror) sound almost joyous (see: the chugging rush of, well, 'Rush'; the loose limbed energy inherent on 'A Blaze on the Hillside'). The production sounds cavernous, yet deceptive - it could be coming from a dungeon, a pit, a warehouse, a coliseum. The aggression is still unbridled for the most part, but here it is harnessed with finesse. If anything, Forever has the most apt cover art of 2013 - the William Bouguereau painting at once visceral and balletic, violent yet sleek and seductive in presence and form. Holograms aren't projecting themselves onto a blank canvas, or a paper-thin expanse - this is emphatic, enmeshing, and encapsulating the times.

You can buy Forever tomorrow from here - and you really should. It's bloody awesome.

Lowered Holograms = Higher Expectations

Lower

I'm spending my day writing for other publications - and bizarrely it's all on the heavier side - reviews for local punks Fat and resident scuzzbuckets The Melvins, as well as an interview with OM/Sleep's Al Cisneros (and another with OM/Grails drummer Emil Amos in the works). Yet the music I'm looking forward to listening to all afternoon is of a more Scandinavian bent, as two of the greater exports from Copenhagen gear up for new releases.

Holograms

I've spoken of both Holograms and Lower of recent times (have a read about and listen to their "older" stuff here and here respectively). Combined with the likes of Iceage and Sexdrome, the underground (well, not so underground anymore) music scene there is teeming with parasitic, grimy post-punk nihilism that rattles the teeth and widens the eyes, shortens the breath and quickens the heart. It's exciting times, heightened further with the imminent releases of Lower's debut as-yet-untitled LP through Escho, and Forever, Hologram's longplayer effort (out through Captured Tracks in September). And if this isn't enough, they have both dropped teaser tracks. And lo and behold, they are fucking stellar, particularly Lower's brutal sledgehammer that is 'Another Life'.

Spraying Paints Of Brutality

When Iceage's New Brigade hit in 2011, the face of post-punk was brutally gutter-stomped. For too long bands were labelling themselves post-punk due to the fact that they had sharp, angular guitar tones, regardless of whether they played disco synth or shiny happy themes, all the while glossing the fuck out of it all and force-feeding it to the masses. One of post-punk's most enduring factors is that it is more proficient musically, more complex, yet still upholding elements of the punk idiom. New Brigade was gritty, nihilistic, hungry, rabid, disaffected, infected - and whilst you wouldn't claim to have never heard this style of music played before, it was the confidence and arrogance that such noise was flung in the faces of all and sundry that made them an altogether exciting prospect.

Listening to Austin trio Spray Paint's eponymous LP (out through S-S Records), it's the first time I have felt that same rush outside of Copenhagen for quite some time (Holograms and Lower also kill). Two guitars and drums, noxious maelstrom. This is Wire and Gang of Four on nitrous oxide. This is Arab On Radar speeding through a night of rack and ruin. This is Saccharine Trust eating glass and laughing themselves to sleep. This is Rank/Xerox in the Twilight Zone. This is Spray Paint. And its goddamn killer.

You can and most definitely should get Spray Paint here.

Spray Paint - Jimi's Apartment
Spray Paint - Lap Swimming

Iceage Proves You Are Nothing

 

Young Danish punks Iceage took the world by storm with their nihilistic (I have been using that word a lot recently – I'm definitely in that mode right now) debut record New Brigade. Picked up by globetrotting tastemakers, the quartet found themselves spending much of 2012 playing the US and Europe, cracking out stifling, antagonistic 15 to 20 minute sets, looking bored of the types of crowd they were attracting, barely allowing an emotion to crest the surface over derision. If anything, this further amplified their relevance. I overheard a few people at Barden’s in Dalston in December talking about them, remarking that they had seen them twice and hadn’t lightened up. I almost spat out my beer (but didn’t – that would be a waste). Why like something if you want it to change? There are many arguments to be had over that question alone, but posit this – Iceage have hit a chord because of their disparity, their atonal apathy that dissolves into abject anarchy at the flick of a shorting switch. They are mirroring many of the abject horrors of the disenfranchised, which is what punk rock is supposed to embody anyway.

Then last year they signed up to Matador, and breaths were collectively held. Is this the “lightening up” that those “fans” so desperately wanted? Will this be a selling out? Or will this be an emancipation, a freeing moment for the band to truly expand on the feelings of isolation and simmering aggression that fuelled their creative wellspring?

The result is You’re Nothing – and it has somehow done it all. The selling out part is meant in the most literal sense – they have harnessed themselves to a label that has past and present experience in nurturing important and innovative punk and hardcore (Mission of Burma, Unsane, Fucked Up). Elias Bender Rønnenfelt’s still plays like a modern-day Ian Curtis embalmed in spit, venom and (W)ire, his jagged vocals at once fierce and droll, yet his presence is more forceful, more deliberate, and this fact alone tells us how focused and distilled the Iceage medium has become. Thus many of these tracks are still as breakneck, abrasive and unrelenting as is to be expected, yet there is a channelling of forces in tracks like the closing title track and ‘Burning Hand’ that puts you inside the songs, rather than just riding the wave of their aggression. The music is still hovering on a knife edge, threatening to implode under its own wanton destruction – yet unlike New Brigade, you never really believe it will. Iceage are still a bunch of boys headbutting the walls of their perceived oppressions, yet with You’re Nothing, they are more likely to come out on top. Not that they give a shit either way – and that’s what makes it all the more viscerally appealing.

 

You’re Nothing is out soon, pre-order it here.

Iceage – Coalition
Iceage - Ecstasy

Getting Lower In Copenhagen

Copenhagen is a crazy awesome hotspot right now, what with the emergence of Iceage, War and Holograms. Here is another to add to that excellent bill. More discordant wailing post-punk aggression, this time from Lower, whose short jagged 7" EP Walk On Heads is electric. Its already sold out through Escho, yet they are repressing it very soon. Get an order in, and get in on the ground floor. This is amazing stuff.

Zulus Will Break Your Face - That Is Their Way

The playing field for discordant, disaffected post-punk raconteurs has certainly got crowded of late. We have been advocates of Copenhagen teens Iceage in the past, and others such as Total Control and Rank/Xerox have brought out stellar albums recently. Now add Londoners Zulu to the mix, whose fifteen minute annihilation of a cassette Way Of The Zulu raced out the Stroll On Records doors. That's what you get for tapping the vein of a zeitgeist and only making 100 tapes, I guess. It isn't as immediate or revolutionary as its contemporaries' offerings, yet hopefully there is enough going round to get some re-release thing up and running, because there are some killer tunes amongst these 9 songs. The Clash references thrown in their direction are not just because of the quintet's looks either, especially on 'We're Watching You'. it has been lambasted by some as losing some impetus due to its lack of variety - but this is fucking punk, people! Plus at under twenty minutes, its a heady non-stop session of eating glass. When your opening track is called 'Annoying Song' and begins with a lament that the band members themselves are "a bunch of pricks", and it sounds like he actually means it, you know that this is true DIY punk. Circa 79 too - this is more nostalgic than the other cream of the crop, and it works in Zulu's favour.

You can stream Way Of The Zulu below - we'll wait with bated breath to see if Stroll On push more of these onto the salivating public, or someone else picks up the slack. Either way, this is an exciting introduction.



Zulu - Sistine Chapel
Zulu - Annoying Song
Zulu - Bloody & Rare

Declaring War On The Ice Age

It's no secret that I'm a rabid fan of Denmark's punk nihilist teens Iceage - their New Brigade record is easily one of the best of its kind for the past decade, at the very least. Whilst we all wait anxiously to see if they can ride the wave of expectation to create another killer album, their frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt combined with Sexdrome's Loke Rahbek to form weird electro-disco-no wave-punk outfit War. I say weird, because I shouldn't like this - but I do. Very much. They put a 7" out through Sacred Bones last month, backed up by a split with Lust For Youth (through the great Avant! Records), and the resultant feverish aural masturbation that has hit the taste-makers of this insipid world is OTT - but somewhat warranted.

War - Brodermordet

Posting Rank/Xerox's Punk

San Francisco has to be one of the best places in the world music-wise right now, especially if you love your guitar rock dirty, dingy and fun. But not all is fine and dandy. One of the best albums of 2011 came not from a garage group but some disgruntled guys that, alongside The Men, Iceage and Total Control, proved that some of the best music comes from the darkest spaces - and that post-punk is far from dead, despite many fuckwits' attempts to make it so. Rank/Xerox's self-titled debut is acid-tinged angularity, acid saliva and discord. What's not to love? Nothing, for this album, just like those mentioned above, have distilled what the genre's progenitors (read: Wire, Gang Of Four, Mission Of Burma) gave birth to, and adding so much verve and venom that it refuses to be ignored. I'm a douche for not putting this out there sooner. Rank/Xerox is vital. (Plus the lead dude is an Aussie, and what with Liars still pushing hard and Total Control killing, says something, dontcha think?)

Rank/Xerox is out now through Ros Records.

Rank/Xerox - Cave Dweller
Rank/Xerox - Nausea

Lose Total Control On The Henge Beat

To complete today's triptych of incredible Aussie rock releases, we have Total Control with their Henge Beat. I mentioned seeing Dick Diver last week - well, seeing as Al is from Total Control, it's important for you to see on the strength of the Dick Diver album why Total Control is still his day job. The Henge Beat LP is dark, dank and oh so seductive, a driving synth-punk behemoth that wallows in the flooded basements of Berlin, hiding the remains of the Birthday Party, Ultravox and Wire. You can see a correlation with another white-hot album of this year, Iceage's New Brigade, yet this is a little less brutal. The musical nous of founding member Mikey Young (Eddy Current Suppression Ring, UV Race) may surprise some, but it is clear he not only understands what makes garage rock tick (rather than poseurs), he can also pat Ian Curtis on the nape of the neck before giving him a donkey punch. Henge Beat is rabid, a little perverted, but also another release that seems unaffected by affectedness. This is a sound that pervades the participating members because they believe in this. And that is what makes Total Control a dangerously beautiful (albeit combustible) commodity.

I implore you (like I have with Royal Headache and Witch Hats) - get this now!

Total Control - One More Tonight
Total Control - Carpet Rash

Your Sex Grows Over In This Church...

There was a time late last year when everyone seemed to be losing their shit over Sex Church, the Vancouver outfit whose music dealt in masochistic mayhem of the rustiest variety. Their Six Songs release was raw, brutal, and inherently enervating. Since then though, we have seen a surge of acts drink at the same fetid pond - namely TV Ghost and Brisbane's own Slug Guts. But where TV Ghost embrace a more indie-centric viewpoint to the industrial malaise (and I mean no disrespect - I think it is this pop aesthetic that elevates these guys to a much higher realm than most others plying their trade) and Slug Guts are more style over substance, Sex Church really seem to inhabit the rabid viscera contained within their performances. That's not to say these guys are worse than trash humpers - I'm sure they are lovely tea-sipping fellows? Or maybe THAT will be offensive to them? Maybe humping trash is their ultimate pastime? Whatever, the point is that this is REAL.


And on Growing Over, their latest on Load, Sex Church feel a little more cosy amongst the shards of jagged glass and broken syringes. Its insidious. It sometimes feels like Disappears headed by Rowland S Howard, at others like a freebasing Iceage. But comparisons are useless, like they always invariably are. All's can be said is that Growing Over is exactly that - Sex Church have just let the ether take them over to spew forth whatever it sees fit. Such abandon means that tracks either start with intent before tangentially chugging into the shadows, morph from garage staple to oozing wretch, or thrash you with a thousand hammers before kissing you deeply. Its skewed, somewhat brutal and a more than a little unhinged - and very, very real.

Sex Church - Waking Up
Sex Church - Beneath The Bottom

Jeff Is The Champion

Nashville irreverent psych pop rockers JEFF The Brotherhood have been mining the the predictability of their innate unpredictability for some eight or so years now, and its very likely that most of you haven't amply sampled their wares. Well, this year's We Are The Champions is probably the best chance you will get to understand what this duo - brothers Jamin and Jake Orrall - are all about. And what they are all about is creating imminently catchy psych punk soundbytes with errant speed and mania that invoke the gamut of bands of their ilk, from Ratcat to the Ramones, and then infuse it all with more than a dollop of pop writing acumen. The good Weezer references have been rife, and admittedly fair enough, yet I can't get over how addictive this whole shebang is. The duo are clearly all about the rock out - check out 'Bummer' or 'Shredder' for instance - but then get a load of 'Diamond Way' and you will be happy that if you like your rock, and you like your smart pop, here's a way you can have your cake and eat it too (which is a fucked reference by the way. Why else would you have the cake? Unless you are obliged to give it to a bake sale, or you have inserted a file in it with the sole purpose of breaking your lover out of the pen. In which case, make extra fool!)


We Are The Champions is available on the brothers' own label, Infinity Cat - also home to ace bands Natural Child and HAM1. June also sees them doing some dates Stateside with Fucked Up, and one with iceage - awwwwww yeah!

JEFF The Brotherhood - Shredder
JEFF The Brotherhood - Diamond Way

Video Vacuum - Battles, Balkans, White Fence, Iceage

So its Friday. Im not sure about you, but for me its been pretty damn hectic. Lots of great things happened, but Im reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeealy looking forward to the weekend - its gonna get messy... So here are four killer tracks from four great bands, and some varying degree of awesome videos to accompany them!

I scream, you scream, we all scream, for...BATTLES!



Atlantans Balkans, whose self titled debut album is going great guns, have released a video for track 'Troubled & Done'. Its not the most picaresque of film clips - in fact, its kinda boring. But I do really like these guys, so any coverage is good coverage. Balkans, consider yourself covered.

BALKANS- 'Troubled and Done' from Frank Broyles on Vimeo.

I was unsure of Tim Presely AKA White Fence. He has clout - as lead of Darker My Love and a player in the past few Fall albums - but wasnt sure if his contribution to scuzzy lo fi garage pop was anything to write home about. then I heard Is Growing Faith (out on Woodsist), and have been converted. Listen/watch below and see if you agree...

White Fence - Get That Heart from Behind the Walk-in on Vimeo.

Finally, Denmark's ace angry kids iceage have a vid for 'New Brigade' - watch it and go kick some heads in...

Iceage - New Brigade from iceage on Vimeo

Now get back to work!

Something Wicked This Way Comes...From The Ice Age

Its funny how some things work out. I was writing up this post when my friend Si sent me a message asking if Id heard the new album by iceage called New Brigade. No shit Ive heard, Im listening to it right now dude! Great minds and all that...

So yeah, iceage are, apart from being CAPS LOCK and spacebar averse, a Danish teenage band that seriously know how to be brutal and melodic, like if Bad Brains had an aborted foetus that was given the paddles by early DNA. Then were beaten repeatedly with a stick and left locked in a cage for 18 years. This is visceral, primal, electric, modern, vintage, vile, sublime... This is amazing, such a good record, and the weird thing is, despite the apparent influences, these guys sound so...new. Not many bands can claim that nowadays. Maybe its because so few bands have the balls to do old school hardcore infused with actual vitriol, disdain and unaffected cool, just because they can. These guys are just getting started. A big call, but...album of the year? (YES, I know it came out last year, but with the re-release and all, it can be claimed, can't it?)

This thing is selling like hotcakes, and with New Brigade finding another release through What's Your Rupture? (after sellouts in Denmark and on DAIS Records), iceage are leaving their Scandinavian climes and are playing in London tomorrow night at The Victoria! If you miss this you will not want to live - trust me.

iceage - White Rune
iceage - Collapse