Archive for November 2014

Gangliocytoma is a drum machine grindcore project that mixes razor sharp guitar work with the muddy blurs of gorenoise and goregrind. Expect relentless drum machine barrages, endless guitar explosions and then on top of it all the signature goregrind watery bowels explusion. Despite the mile-a-second goregrind relentlessness, riffs are actually present and audible. Fancy that! It’s not a very long release, yet it’s only a demo so I wouldn’t expect hours of material. But hey,…

When I first heard of this reissue I was all like – Fuuuuuuuu-u-u-u-u-uck that shit. The price being charged for a copy of this remastered old demo was nothing short of total fucking extortion (kek). I think the fact that it took the almighty unit-shifting Cradle of Filth a month or two to sell the 666 vinyl copies of this album shows that I was not alone in this way of thinking. If a band…

What part of this release constitutes as ‘rock’ I’m not entirely sure, but Bong have got the ‘stoner’ part of the title 100% correct. Well, with a name like Bong would more would you expect? Such a simple yet fathomless name can only lend itself to a simple (in theory) yet fathomless (in practice) sound. Bong is music for those who aren’t afraid to sit tight and experience the long haul; the great build up,…

Well, this is… different. I’m aware of the influential impact that Suicide and Mr. Alan Vega have had on some of my favourite artists, so it was only fair that in time I go back even further and plumb those original depths. After a bit of research, and conversing among friends, I came to rest on Suicide’s debut album; a puzzling affair of cheap synths, almost early Lou Reed-like vocals and linear narrative and repetition…

Main is a band that was formed by two members of Loop, including Robert Hampson who was also in Godflesh for a little bit (he played on the Pure album). Main, to me, appears to be some sort of experimental industrial-tinged ambient project that places heavily effected guitar work into a world of noises and other creepy atmospheres. (2021 edit: G C Green of Godflesh also plays on this particular album) And that, essentially, is what…

Look, Sphere is one of my favourite Merzbow releases. Granted, I have in no way shape or form heard them all, but of the ones that I have heard, Sphere is high up there among the best. The three Sphere tracks are pulsing, blooping, bleeping harsh displays of spherical madness. I’m not entirely sure why the tracks were even broken up in the first place, but hey – what do I know. My favourite though…

Ah, good ol’ PLF. Is that Palestine Liberation Front? Pretty Little Flower? Princess Louise Fusiliers? Penguin Liberation Front? Parachute Landing Fall? Pulverizing Lethal Force? Phillip Lewis Fowler? Ha! According to an actual expert that I saw posting in the Youtube comments section (oh, ye exalted one!) the official story is that the band began as Pretty Little Flower, but are now known as Pulverizing Lethal Force. To be honest, they’ve always been known as PLF…

A call on a grindcore group on Facebook for female-front grindcore bands returned the usual list of suspects for someone too lazy to use a search engine, but nestled in that list were two bands I’d never heard of previously, so I guess I’m a bit of a twat for just knocking the Facebook post, but what are you gonna do? Anyway, one of those bands is Sockweb (I’ll get to the other in another…

This is the first time I’ve actually successfully sat through an entire Nadja album. They definitely made delivering kebabs and pizza an ethereal experience, I can say that much. Numbness is like many other releases in the sizeable Nadja catalogue; ridiculously fuzzy, enormously slow, miserable yet hopeful and just a little bit pretentious. Numbness offers (to me) nothing new; it is simply Nadja for Nadja’s sake. Depending on how much you like Nadja, you may…

This is probably one of the more bizarre things that I have bought recently. Cintecele Diavolui is an old alias / side project that was used by Mortiis in the mid/late 90s when he was deep into making mainly dark ambient synth and keyboard based music, or as he called it – Dark Dungeon Music. Cintecele Diavolui is a pretty cool name in my opinion. The phrase means “The Devil’s Songs” in Romanian, which is…

Lull is another Mick Harris project, one I believe that he worked on between Scorn releases back in the day. Lull takes pages from the book of Lustmord; extremely minimal yet puzzlingly fulfilling compositions of sound, often devoid of any noticeable instrumentation, pummelling you instead with lulling ambience (no pun intended) and claustrophobic barrages of atmosphere. Moments then, is the stifling ambient soundscape of choice for those with a short attention span. Instead of the…

I like Killing Joke and I like dub (be that dub reggae or the same remixing technique applied to other genres) but I’ve got to be in the mood for both, so there’s no surprise that I aurally inhaled this gargantuan release in one entire sitting. It took some doing as In Dub is 3 hours long, and contains several remixes of the same few songs. I’m not sure when I’ll actually ever come back…

The hype for hhis record has been unstoppable for the last few months, and rightly so, due to the solid consistency of quality albums that The Aphex Twin has churned out over his long and unusual career. On top of that, Syro is the first Aphex Twin release in 13 years, so to say this album had a lot to live up to would be a bit of an understatement. Luckily, Richard D. James has…

I’ve never really been into Voïvod. I even tried to witness the band play all of Dimension Hatröss at Roadburn Festival 2012, which is hosted in Tilburg’s 013, a venue with arguably the best sound in the world, and I still couldn’t get into it. I just don’t get it – is it thrash? Is it prog wankery? Is it a tired display of both? Phobos though, blew my fucking head off. It works better…