We might just be in the great Skramz resurgence right now. I should’ve written about this two months back when I first came across it, but if you’re into Screamo (of the ‘skramz’ variety) you need to check out Maryland’s Mondrary.
Mondrary’s first single Paraffin is a righteous wall of sound and angst that clocks in at an even 2 minutes and crosses a ton of energetic highs and moody lows. I’m immediately reminded of groups like Pg.99 and Orchid, but I’m more excited to see where the members take Mondrary over the coming years.
But for now nothing else really needs to be said. These kids RIP. Go checkout their single Paraffin and follow their Instagram in the hopes they play the craptastic nowheresville town you live in.
If you’re reading this blog (you are) there’s probably a good chance you’re into dark music- whatever that may be to you. The hunt for new and overlooked records will have you running into the same 5 or so bands or singles per sub-genre with the same spiels about how such and such record is under exposed.
Enter Neglect. Often recommended for people looking for Hardcore bands with darker lyrical themes, Neglect was founded and folded in the early to mid-1990s in Long Island, NY.
Their sound was typical for the Hardcore zeitgeist at the turn of the 1990s. Heavier, slower, groovier, meatier, essentially embracing what Pantera saw as Hardcore music’s potential, but with lyrics on suicide, premature death and nihilism.
If you’re looking for darker records in an emotional sense, you might find this record lacking in depth. Suicide, hatred, death, and anger- if you were ever 16 and inspired by Black Flag’s Damaged to punch a mirror and hurt yourself, this is probably a record that will resonate with you. If that sounds a little too 2-dimensional or underdeveloped to you, you’re not alone.
This extreme degree of anger (self-directed and otherwise) undermines its own emotional impact by drowning out (or leaving out) any nuance in an attempt to win Hardcore’s own anger pissing contest.
Fans of this kinda stuff (I’ve been one at different times of my life) will defend it by saying that it’s ‘brutally honest’ (whatever that means), and to their emotional truth that may very well be the case.
Neglect’s The Complete Don Fury Sessions is a compilation released in 2005 of the band’s work with prolific Hardcore producer Don Fury (production credits include Agnostic Front, Gorilla Biscuits, Born Against, and more). Besides the few movie sample intros and outros it’s a no-thrills album. A bit muddy but all’s fair in hard and core.
For fans of: Pantera, Everybody Gets Hurt, Next Step Up
Does it live up to their classic material? Of course not. You reach over to your shelf of records, thumb over to Slayer, and you’re gonna grab Repentless? No way!
You listen to Slayer because you want that classic Slayer sound. The only reason you’d grab Repentless is because you spent $20-$30 on the album when it was released and now the more it’s played the more your purchase feels justified. Just grab what you really want to listen to: Reign in Blood, South of Heaven, Hell Awaits, etc. They’re great records! Why listen to a nutrient deficient version of what you really want?
Repentless doesn’t give you any other reason to listen to it. Slayer never developed too much from album to album- which has led to great consistency for better or worse. But since no one album offers anything significantly different from the last album- even aesthetically- it’s too easy to reach for the classics over this every time.
Araya sounds rough here. Lombardo is clearly absent. And coming along with Hanneman’s death before recording on the album began? It feels like they should’ve just scrapped it. It’s not bad, but it’s not worth the time or money. Cash grab? Maybe. Same old song and dance? Absolutely.
The only album using Papyrus font on the album artwork I can give a pass to.
nothing will date a single more than its music video
As someone generally burned out on the plethora of soundalike bands with nothing new to bring to Metal- songs that only sound like chopped and re-ordered versions of other songs by other cut-rate extreme metal bands- finally checking out At The Gates’ 1995 classic Slaughter of the Soul was long overdue.
Slaughter of the Soul is fixated on one thing and one thing only: guitar shredding. While less angular and certainly more melodic than anything approaching grindcore, no one riff lingers long enough to create a greater textural or ambient quality to the record (think: black metal). Every moment is a Guitar Hero blue-lightning power-up moment, and if that’s something you’re in to you’re going to enjoy this record.
For some Slaughter of the Soul may be too commercial- too clean, too produced, too melodic- but it’s a logical progression from Mercyful Fate’s work a decade earlier. And so if Mercyful Fate is as far as you’ve gone into melodic metal, and you’re willing to opt to in for deathly fry screamed vocals and throttling double kick driven sections, At The Gates’ Slaughter of the Soul is a great place to start.
Their first album in their discography since The Moving Frontier 11 years prior, Pram’s Across The Meridian is a beautiful record that revels in the exploration of sonic space.
Much like their domino record label mates Clinic, Pram fulfill the post-punk school’s vision of electronic and acoustic instrumentation in a stylistic melting pot.
Prams’ sampling of library music acts as a sort of warp room of the 20th century, creating distinct textural layers on any given verse. Combining the hauntological with playful interpretation, Across The Meridian is an exotica work around an idea of time (specifically the 20th century), not place.
Pram have a cinematic versatility. Jazz, psychedelic guitar fuzz, ambient- really there’s too much to name here- build in strange ways around light and agile percussion. They’re playing with a toy box full of thematic and stylized sounds in a really fun way.
Even at it’s darkest, a childlike sense of awe permeates. A myriad of instrumentation, sometimes crystal clear and sometimes veiled in overdrive show the listener a musical collective at play. There’s no real rules with music, no genre or social structures adhered to, and Pram have embraced this in the advancement of their work.
Across The Meridian is dark and haunting in its own way- not grim. It really is a musical iSpy book more than anything: A healthy balance of fun and beauty.
The musician credits on the album allude me, but if we’re to believe the band photos posted elsewhere there’s 6 people in this band. No way. Not that a band needs to ‘justify’ the existence of their members but if you’re having that many people in your orbit there’s a lot more ways to get better bang for your buck. Add an organ or saxophone or something! Something if not dynamic range or energy.
If that hasn’t said enough, track Small Man Big House is insufferable- a Dead Milkmen’s Bitchin’ Camero minus the humor or even musicianship. In the canon of rock songs about being a musician, it rivals Bob Seeger in mindlessness.
The guitar riffs and tones are completely indistinct, the skits are corny and uninspired. It’s all attitude abuse and 8th notes. I’m only surprised they’re not famous.
Lacking, flat and drowned in vocal put-ons, Here Comes More Bad News is all ornamental Punk tropes atop an alt rock chassis that, whether justified or not, fell out of fashion 10 years ago.
For fans of: Frankie and The Witch Fingers, Wavves, Thee Oh Sees
If the concept of this album hasn’t already been beaten into you by a dozens of other bloggers, let me explain:
It’s a bunch of old ballroom music samples that are looped, and the ware, dust, etc. of the sampled material depicts the degradation and repetition of memory, especially as an affect of Alzheimer’s disease and/or dementia. Slather on spacious reverb to depict the darkness on the edge of memory, yadda yadda yadda and you have An empty bliss beyond this World.
Some perverse way of interacting with the past like making puppets out of corpses, as all sampling in a way is. But at its core The Caretaker- given name Leyland James Kirby- seems to hold a great reverence for time and a respect for its victims (as we all are).
While it does at times feel as if a Nurse With Wound record took itself way too seriously, The Caretaker strikes a fine line of dark conceptual music while being sonically approachable and accessible to a wider swath of people than NWW or other dark ambient works, for which Kirby should be commended.
Anyone who has seen Kubrick’s The Shining or a Jiri Barta film and thought ‘I want to go to there’ will revel in this album. Play it for them, or play it for yourself- It’s a worthwhile listen. Then you can always keep this record in the back of your mind, for when quaintness fades to black you’ll have a good record to recommend.
For fans of: Nurse With Wound, David Lynch, Arthur Fields
Nothing is new under the sun, and that includes this record. But regardless it’s a delightful show of character across 27 minutes of thrashing grind (or is that grinding thrash?).
Clamoring kick-snare pitter-patter interspersed between blast beats give ‘Buried Deep’ a unmistakable Thrash tinge, while the string instruments’ heavy emphasis on downbeats hearkens back to early Metal innovators like Autopsy and Cremation.
Littered with wild false harmonic wails reminiscent of banshee yells (or more appropriately, witch cackles), ‘Buried Deep’ shows a lot of character which I personally love.
It’s your standard thoroughfare of claustrophobic grind sessions and more ‘breathable’ groove-centric open space, single note synth interludes with rain and horror movie samples shuttling the listener from song to song (Listen to second track Despoilment to hear what I mean).
That’s not to say it’s a bad album though. The songs are strong. Fun band name, fun art, fun titling across the album. ‘Buried Deep’ ends strong, and as musicians Witch Vomit certainly bring the chops necessary for what they’re trying to pull off.
There’s a dynamic range missing that if added could really elevate the group’s current strengths. I’d encourage all creatives to further experiment outside of the studio. Editing is the creative’s friend, and no one has to know what was cut from a final album. I’d also like to recommend a band like Witch Vomit to listen to something really out of their wheelhouse- Mr. Bungle, Petula Clark, doesn’t matter so long as it jars open new paths of music experience. See what it can rattle out of the creative mind. Serve yourself, serve your art, and keep shredding.
Like Kraftwerk at a lower bit-rate, this crunchy lil’ synth piece was self-released by Thriftwicker Audio Society in 2021. How To Live A Zesty Life (like a lot of art-brutish music) doesn’t attract the listener with any particular song as well as it functions as a background mood piece to play [insert activity] to.
For me, this might be playing a video game I’ve played a million times before. For others this could be anything. Too distracting to be ‘ambience’, too aloof to be engaging.
Thriftwicker Audio Society’s own take on plunderphonic’ absurdist humor is textbook, but not ineffective (track Thinker’s Milk and TURBOPUKE definitely got a chuckle out of me on the first two listens). Absurdist lyrics- phrases such as ‘drink your oatmeal and often’- are looped and manipulated over cellphone-sounding rhythms. How To Live A Zesty Life is fun and light on cynicism, which helps it stand out from more dense or pretentious punderphonic works emulating the genre’s classics.
These songs revel in a holdover of what we expect ‘digital’ to sound like- a holdover of oversimplified synth lines and looped drum machine rhythms that could easily be a false memory of the music on Bill Nye the Science Guy. More Chick Vekters than Macintosh Plus- it’s an interesting take on the 80s/90s nostalgia that has otherwise been played to death (and now feels insincere) within vaporwave.
If they wanted to, I have a feeling Thiftwicker Audio Society could handle an album of more typically written of songs while remaining true to their sonic palette, and create a very memorable album in the process.
For fans of: Men’s Recovery Project, John Oswald, Strawberry Blonde
“It sounds a lot like you’re the one assessing us”, the ‘interviewer’ says. So what does that make this?
B-side track Interpersonal Relationship Assessment is a 12 minute sound play of the character that is Client_03 being ‘assessed’; a therapy-like interplay in which a feminine robotic voice answers a down pitched interviewer’s questions. All and all, it’s a not-so veiled comment on Neo-liberal capitalism (or ‘late-stage’ capitalism as Mark Fisher put it) in which ‘the artist as character’ acts as a comment on our collective humanity drowned out in the pursuit of productivity.
There isn’t much out there on the ‘sentient computer program’ character that is Client_03, and that’s probably how Charlie Fieber intends it to be.
Screenshot taken on 4/08/2022 from video ‘Client_03 – Ur_Luv’ uploaded 9/12/2021 on Youtube by Supermarkt.
Fieber, better known as Fracture, is an electronic musician from the UK and is one of the founders of the Astrophonica label. And while it isn’t immediately confirmable, it seems pretty likely that they’re one and the same. You didn’t really believe AI music programs were flippin’ samples this well, did you?
Nevermind all that.
A-side track Ur_Luv is an absolute Electro jam. Pitched out and glitched out, Client_03’s flip of Collapse’s Hold Me in Your Arms vocal track grabs the listener’s attention by the ears and never lets go. Swishy drum machine rhythms and punchy kicks keep on stepping as a fat synth acts as the minimal but deep groove needed to push this track to perfection.
The Resident Sound 