Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Lycia — A Line That Connects

Tuesday, September 1st, 2015

As vital trailblazers of ethereal darkwave, Lycia have produced nine studio albums that have evolved along a fascinating path: from the austere and cold drum machine-driven dirges written by founding member Mike van Portfleet into astounding dynamic soundscapes of ornate beauty that took Lycia’s distinctive bleak emotion into remarkably diverse stylistic territories. This breathtaking flourish occurred alongside the addition of David Galas and then Tara Vanflower to the project, resulting in some of the best albums of Lycia’s collection, such as The Burning Circle and Then Dust and the monumental effort that was Cold.

After the release of Empty Space in 2003, Lycia went quiet, with the odd solo effort from each of the band’s three members popping up here and there. It seemed Lycia were done, their tremendous contribution to a particular style of music mystifyingly underappreciated outside of their passionate fan base. Ten years later, Mike and Tara sprung a surprise, emerging from somnolence with Quiet Moments. With Tara singing on only a couple of tracks, it carried the feeling of something more of a solo effort from Mike. Nevertheless, it was a powerful reminder of the tremendous quality of Lycia; that they had returned not out of nostalgia, but as a group getting better at creating engulfing and exquisitely devastating music.

Two years on from that return, Lycia has now released their tenth studio album, A Line That Connects. This new record sees Lycia as a trio once again, with the immensely talented David Galas returning to the fold. If, with the benefit now of hindsight, Quiet Moments represented exciting prophecy, then A Line That Connects is a splendid resurrection foretold.

The new record is not just epic atmospherically, standing by its end at an hour and nine minutes. To their credit, none of this has been achieved by producing anything that gives the impression of being thrown in to seal up empty spaces, even if some tracks might seem more like bridges between others due to their relative brevity. Lycia’s new work holds you fast throughout with sweeping winds of scintillating gloom, compelling you to savour the fascination of the distant horizon. Each surge brings with it marvellous contrast, in one moment cutting across your skin with an icy regard, then effortlessly seizing your hair and filling you with the sense that you could take off and soar.

The sound on A Line That Connects rises as a sheer surface from the outset, like a towering unearthly cliff. If one were to debate that it is their best album since 1996’s Cold, then it undeniably has the best production on any Lycia record so far. The album glistens sonically as a treasure fashioned with great care, without being antiseptic. The huge effect of synths avoids the pitfall of suffocating the guitars. Whether the latter engages in clean and delicate notes and strums or eruptions of ferocious adrenaline, the elements stay out of each other’s way. The bass tones ring warm and clear and the vocals are free to provide the variation in effect and style that characterizes the album as a whole. When reverb plays such a big part, and when each instrument is aiming for the colossal, this really could have ended up a mess of detail bleeding into the amorphous. Alongside David Galas’ mixing efforts, the persistent genius of James Plotkin with the album’s mastering is clear.

Breaking the album down track by track can only provide a false impression. There is something for so many different tastes here. And yet, the album’s title resonates truly. A brooding darkness courses through the songs, whether each individual piece is lulling you into ecstasy or snarling with menace. Isolated from the whole, listening to the Swans-like industrial death march of “Illuminate” then the invocation of the Cocteau Twins in “Hiraeth” (featuring the wonderful Sera Timms of Black Mare and Ides of Gemini in a guest vocal appearance), one could be forgiven for thinking it was two completely different bands. Done properly — to sit down and lose yourself in the entirety of the album from beginning to end — the emotional connection is deep, powerful, and obvious. Whether you are a fan of drone, ambient, doom and other heavy music, goth, darkwave, shoegaze, post-rock or that 4AD sound (I could go on and on here), there will be something here for you to derive much joy from, perhaps broadening your palate along the way.

A Line That Connects finds Lycia as good as they get, a reverberant reminder of their priceless ability to create an immersive atmosphere built from huge sound. Such a progressive outcome through stylistic diversity shows that the band has a great deal to offer still, and should win them many new fans. One imagines that, more than twenty years after first becoming a three-piece outfit, this new album is as reinvigorating for them as much as it is for those who have long held a love for their music.

A Line That Connects is out now through Handmade Birds and Thrill Jockey.

The Black Captain will be hosting RTRFM’s Out to Lunch from 12pm (+8GMT) on September 3rd, as well as September 10th alongside Dave Cutbush.

Strange & Primitive — Strange & Primitive

Thursday, August 27th, 2015

Strange & Primitive’s debut album never goes the way that you expect. There’s violence, but it’s always restrained. There’s tension, but it never gets resolved. And all the while it’s driven on by a relentless electronic beat that makes you think the band is building towards something, yet the payoff never comes. The mix of goth, pop, post-punk, and electronic elements, especially in the opening track “Difficulties Be Damned,” makes for an early comparison to Xiu Xiu. But the vocalist is nowhere near as tortured or depraved as Jamie Stewart, sounding unusually calm within the chaos that surrounds him. The songs themselves are closer to the sort of new romantic synth-pop you’d expect to hear on a 1980s Depeche Mode album. But they’re nowhere near as lyrical as Depeche Mode, missing all of Martin Gore’s trademark wit and gothic sexuality that helped sculpt the band into the icons they’ve become today. So they’re like Xiu Xiu without the emotions, mixed with Depeche Mode without the lyrics, which doesn’t sound like it should be any good. But it is good, and it gets better the longer that you listen to it. So what’s going on with the album? It’s a little hard to get your head around at first, but as you listen to it, you start to find a couple of consistent threads.

First of all, Strange & Primitive are amazing composers, capable not only of referencing just about every 1980s musical sub-genre you can think of, but also bringing in sounds from more exotic material too, like the synthesized wooden flutes in the instrumental “Keep Your Eyes on Daylight” or the strange falsetto vocals in “Seduced by Bluff.” Secondly, the music seems to change in style almost every time you think you’ve got it narrowed down, veering dramatically from electronic post-punk to experimental ambience and onto something closer to progressive rock. The band describe themselves as post-punk and you can hear it in the drums and the tone of their guitars, but the album itself is harder to identify. It sticks to one style for a couple of tracks, then spins out unexpectedly into something else, repeating the cycle over and over again for close to an hour. And all the while there’s this feeling of detachment to it all. Like a scientist running tests through a machine.  After a few tracks you get the idea that it’s not about the lyrics, not about emotions. It’s about the formal qualities of music, and what happens when you put a song together. It’s more like art music than anything you’d usually hear in punk or goth, and once you start to think of it from that perspective, the album starts to make a lot more sense. Strange & Primitive are throwing ideas around, seeing what works and what doesn’t, creating different kinds of pop music out of a carefully curated set of sounds and inspirations. Their music displays obvious connections to the broader Canadian post-punk scene, channelling the explosive sound of bands like Spectres and Viet Cong, but it represents a more measured, intellectual approach to making music when placed beside these other bands, focussed on nuances in melody rather than the raw expression of apathy or discontent. Once you approach it from the proper angle, you start to see how unique it really is with those melodic vocals and that ever-shifting mix of sounds and inspirations.

The biggest issue with the album is its length. Strange & Primitive come up with a lot of interesting ideas in this record’s 50 minute runtime, but they play them out until monotony. This, coupled with the academic nature of the music, makes it difficult to listen to at times. It lacks the force of Algiers, or the nostalgia of The Associates. But stick with it, if you can. This kind of art-school dropout music is hard to come by lately, and if Strange & Primitive make their next release just a little shorter, a little tighter, give it just a little bit more edge, then they will quickly see themselves become enormous. It’s a flawed, but exciting debut that contains within it the seeds for massive cult success. That sort of album doesn’t happen every day. It deserves at least a moment of attention.

Strange & Primitive is out now.

Bell Witch — Four Phantoms

Tuesday, August 18th, 2015

Bell Witch are comprised of just two members. Even now, as I spin Four Phantoms for perhaps the fiftieth time this year, my mind boggles at how two men could conjure up such a immense, tectonic sound.

Bell Witch’s instrumentation is a little unconventional: bassist Dylan Desmond utilises a six string bass guitar and a two-handed tapping technique which allows him to play bass and melody lines simultaneously. As if that weren’t enough, he does so with incredible feeling and nuance.

Four Phantoms is built around a concept: each of its four tracks tells of an apparition condemned to an eternity of torture by one of the four elements (earth, fire, water and air). In isolation, the idea sounds cliché — even cartoonish — but Bell Witch execute it with such power and precision that Four Phantoms truly conjures up an image of transcendental beings screaming from some ghostly realm of the spirit, expressing a misery and pain beyond this plane of existence.

At its heaviest, listening to this record is like being enveloped in thick, sonic magma. Amplifiers crackle and splutter with distortion, the drone of the bass so full of warm sub-frequencies that its rumble becomes more a body-feeling than a sound. These are the moments in which the enormity of the forces containing the apparitions becomes apparent; in which you become aware of the full power of gravity, warping time and space in order to hold the dense husks of dead stars in their cosmic orbit. The spirits are left to scream and rage with a pain and hatred bordering on insanity, their futile cries unheard in the purgatorial void.

But Bell Witch also possess a beautiful sense of space. In their quieter moments, the duo create a remarkable, ethereal atmosphere in which the apparitions whisper their mournful fate over delicate bass melodies; their sorrow gently drifting across the plane. These moments of longing and reflection reveal the band’s true strength: by so effectively juxtaposing elements of light and dark, they are able to produce nuanced expressions of both beauty and misery; brutality and fragility; rage and resignation.

This is classic, cathartic doom executed to perfection. It is miserable to be sure, but also profoundly beautiful, at once expressing the cold, emptiness of death alongside a touching longing for life. Four Phantoms is a high-water mark for the genre that will be very difficult to exceed.

Four Phantoms is out now through Profound Lore Records.

Bolt Gun — Iron Surgeon

Monday, August 17th, 2015

There is a view that metal in Australia, even in the underground, has been more than happy to stick to a business plan built from anachronisms both sonic and conceptual. This accusation bears the character of a certain laziness. Or, perhaps it is wrought from the overwhelming prospect of trying to find needles within the haystack that is the world of digitally available music. Scenes globally are full of bands that choose to emulate and go for tried and true formulae from technical death metal through to the black arts. The bands a writer is most often directly contacted by or encounters most readily are often of this ilk. There’s simply nothing exceptional about Australia when it comes to this phenomenon. For writers who accept the onus to mine more deeply and thoroughly, beneath the visible crust, there is plenty of invention and promise evident within the Australian underground. Some of these artists, such as Hope Drone, are breaking out of obscurity and gaining the attention they deserve. Other continually progressing treasures remain hidden and underappreciated for the time being, such as the project called Bolt Gun.

Bolt Gun formed in 2012, originating as a power electronics solo project before founding member Andrew teamed up with his good friend Jonathon, resulting in the emergence of more black metal and doom influences in their overall sound. As passionate fans of film directors such as David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, Krzysztof Koz?owski and particularly Konstantin Lopushansky, the band’s inspirations drawn from these directors led to an emphasis on vast, cinematic compositions. Alongside these picturesque motivations, musical influences reflect a broad and encompassing love of experimental music, from Burzum to Swans, Phillip Glass, Laibach, and Brighter Death Now to give some examples,

With contributing members over the course of Bolt Gun’s existence hailing from Perth, Melbourne and Europe, they produced their first recording in the middle of 2014. At just under half an hour in length, the epic but underrated Exit As A Swarm expressed a thoughtful blend of drone, ambient, noise, post-rock and black metal of tremendous atmosphere and anguish. The EP provided another example challenging the perception of heavy music in the Australian underground being content to play it safe, full of potential and signs of Bolt Gun’s creative ambition. Content with a focus entirely upon the creation of music, Bolt Gun have remained something of a secret. Recently, the band completed and digitally released their second recording, Iron Surgeon, emphasizing that it is time that they were drawn out of obscurity.

Iron Surgeon begins with churning reverberant drone, pulsating and understated distortion churning just beneath the waves. Slowly, a mantra of bass emerges, seasoned with cymbals and sparing percussion. A guitar releases beautiful flourishes of minimal leads before switching to graceful ringing strums. The drones intensify, all things tying together as an evocation of foreboding and hypnotic kraut ambience.

These portentious and subtly evolving loops erupt suddenly into Iron Surgeon’s second part, the bass motif interpreted through a stately downtempo black metal filter, each call answered with vox infused with a post-hardcore or blackened death spirit, like that of Aldrahn on Blood Must Be Shed. Tremolo picking heralds a transmutation into total sonic fury that draws references from the best of second wave BM. The violence gives way once again to the processional, guitars buzzing with anger all the while, building in volume and reverberance before ripping back one final time into a pyrotechnic storm of destruction.

“III” closes Iron Surgeon as a separate piece, unlike the conjoined nature of the first two parts. This finale is pure ambience, drawing from all of the waves of sound throughout the record’s half hour. Piercing distorted electronic noise and looping waves of feedback swarm before dropping off into an idyllic minimal ambient trance.

Iron Surgeon is an exciting progression following on from Exit As A Swarm. There is the suggestion of future live performances in the pipeline, when the members can get together, and Bolt Gun’s devotion to epic compositions and blending exhausting intensity with soothing calm promises a great experience should live appearances eventuate. Their music, bred from such a diverse and avant garde pool of influence, is well worth taking your time to acquire and to keep your eye on in the future.

Iron Surgeon is available now through Bolt Gun’s Bandcamp.

Locrian — Infinite Dissolution

Tuesday, August 4th, 2015

As evidence of biological catastrophe piles up, obtained from rigorous analysis over time, the staunchest denizens adherent to the “righteousness” of the capitalist ideology and the myths of social Darwinism carry on with the adamant spirit of a suicide mission. Much like Hirschbiegel’s Nazi aristocracy psychopathically carousing around their host Eva Braun inside a locked down ballroom crumbling under crescendos of artillery and airborne death, the detrimental impact of the evolution of humanity’s way of life is ignored in spite of its increasing obviousness. Scientists and other researchers, whose entire professional lives are devoted to building an expert discourse on the follies that accompany our present trajectory, this arc of extinction, have been ignored, then ridiculed, then accused of some kind of traitorous agenda. The conclusions of insight then shift to whether it is now too late to turn back, whether today’s younger generations are now the ones who have already fallen over the precipice. This question of whether hope still exists or it has been forever lost is, in part, the subject of the powerful and frightening book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by journalist Elizabeth Kolbert.

Far beneath the surface of the mainstream, there are those amongst the creative who have reflected this consciousness of terminal decay and a view of what is responsible for it. More recently, some of the music — for lack of a better word — “inspired” by the gravity of the ground rushing up to meet life’s fall has taken on a magnified grimness. It is being written by those who can palpably detect that end times are not tales of angels, trumpets, of wars fought between gods and monsters, but something real, imminent, and driven by the mundane and destructive side of human behaviour. Inspired by these qualities explored in Kolbert’s book, the trio called Locrian has produced an astounding concept album for their latest release through Relapse Records, Infinite Dissolution.

The album’s title beautifully expresses contradiction, that characteristic of humanity detailed in The Sixth Extinction, where resourcefulness and concern can have unavoidable consequences, let alone the obvious detriment callousness and ignorance may wreak upon the environment. This conclusion was also apparent in Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague, which highlighted how even those actions undertaken with the spirit of benevolence and a constructive goal can potentially bring about catastrophic and extinguishing microbiological events. Humanity, and its ecological significance, is complex. Infinite Dissolution reflects this commendably through its wealth of stylistic inspiration, seemingly untouchable by genre and classifiable only in terms of emotional dynamics.

Locrian’s catalogue assembled in the ten years of their existence to date is as prolific as you could find. Fans of the band have never been short on the wonderfully inventive music they create to enjoy. The bulk of it beyond their inception came through DIY and smaller boutique label endeavours, and was characterized by more loose and improvisation-driven qualities. With their first release on Relapse in 2013, and now Infinite Dissolution, there is the sense of more structure creeping in to the albums. This does nothing to detract from, as the band themselves describe it, the vast “cinematic” quality of their music. Infinite Dissolution represents structure bringing refinement to their creative efforts.

Like others writing of the apocalypse of late, the contrasts and changes within Infinite Dissolution are thoughtfully put together so as to flow rather than distract or jar the listener out of the headspace the record aims for. There could be many pitfalls for bringing together noise, ambient, drone, post-rock, industrial, and sonic inspirations from black metal. Such hazards are never apparent, navigated fluently by Locrian’s awesome ability to summon emotive and enveloping atmosphere to tell this story. Each sound enhances the drama of what is taking place, transcendent and symphonic in painting the walls of this demarcative monument to visions of extinction. It is in this quality that the importance of the electronic components of Infinite Dissolution cannot be understated, to contradict their adroit subtlety. This is particularly apparent when set amongst the more explosive guitar-blazing and metallic passages of the album.

Locrian’s past work has been a wonderful and cerebral gift, but Infinite Dissolution is undoubtedly their best music to date. These musicians have brought together their truly broad love of musical styles and deep commitment to crafting art of beauty, depth, and powerfully stirring intent to produce music that matches the gravity and scope of the apocalyptic literature that inspired it. From the cataclysmic and ominous dystopian expectation of its beginnings, to its final moments filled with hope and tragedy, Infinite Dissolution will blow you away with its depiction of the extinguishment of an ornate and wondrous biosphere.

Infinite Dissolution is out now through Relapse Records.

Hope Drone — Cloak of Ash

Tuesday, July 28th, 2015

The Brisbane-based quartet Hope Drone have suggested through their first two digital releases that they were gifted with the potential to produce music of enormous atmosphere and depth. It comes as no surprise, then, that such promise was recognised so soon after the black metal band’s inception, being picked up by Relapse Records (a label who have so often displayed a canny ear). The time of Hope Drone’s first full-length album to come out through Relapse has now arrived, and with Cloak of Ash, such clear promise has well and truly exceeded what it inferred.

Hope Drone might share some similarities with some other notable artists tagged with the “post” prefix on their black metal (which should really only be taken as a signal that an artist has sought to evolve and expand, rather than stick to some Dogme 95 style treatise that stems from a handful of interviews with Norwegians in the early 90s). Comparisons with Vattnet Viskar, Altar of Plagues, or some of the USBM figureheads may instinctively spring forth. However, with more focused attention and repeated immersion in the devastating tsunami of black metal that is Cloak of Ash, it is stealthily apparent that there is plenty that sets Hope Drone apart. As a sum, it belies its references and, even more, that this is a work at the very early stages of Hope Drone’s musical journey.

Cloak of Ash is immense and demanding. This is clear from the outset, with the album opening with a track called “Unending Grey” that just sneaks over 20 minutes. Like The Master awakening in Salem’s Lot, the song opens its eyes with a brief lingering of dreams before exploding into frenzy. The vocals of Chris Rowden are rife with emotive despondency and scorn, yet elegantly and masterfully understated in the mix, like a tormented spirit rasping withering observations as it floats amidst humanity’s idiotic and self-flagellating procession to extinction. Violence dissipates into the soporific, before bursting into something akin to a monumental passage of early Finnish funeral doom. “Unending Grey” exemplifies the density of Cloak of Ash. It is as though, by its end, you have heard what many other metal bands would achieve in an entire album. But with six songs to go, it is but a quarter of the experience in terms of time.

It is a brilliant thing that, for a genre that has its roots in disdain for humanity, the music that bands such as Hope Drone create is stretching far beyond such seminal simple black and white depictions and approaching a complexity more appropriate for reflections on the human condition. As Cloak of Ash progresses, the density of ideas and the thoughtful nature through which they are delivered becomes more striking. Never once does it come across as scattered and thrown together simply for the sake of such lofty aims. There is never the impression of Hope Drone forcing a progressive approach to black metal. Whether it is the mellow beauty of idyllic post-rock or desert rock influences, momentary ambient flourishes, or their astonishing brilliance when delving into full on doom, the compositions are so skillfully blended that such ambition never distracts from the immersive nature of the songs. Seasoned as though with veteran hands, Cloak of Ash never dwells ponderously upon its own deviance from black metal dogma.

The enthralling nature of this richness of ideas is something that is best appreciated through continuous revisitation. To do so becomes as effortless as it seems for Hope Drone to shift stylistically. Even so, Cloak of Ash commands your involvement, particularly with the detail and scope treated to what is, in some sense, a more traditional black metal mix in the album’s sound. This is not background music, something to have on whilst you have a conversation. Such thoughtful and detailed work requires your full attention.

It certainly isn’t easy to create something that will instantly appeal to the established fan base of a particular style without being hopelessly derivative. Hope Drone’s full length debut has done so, a triumph surfing upon ravenous waves of nihilism and intoxicating beauty. In spite of perceptions, perhaps justifiably, of a staunch obsession with strict and safe traditions by the darker enclaves of Australian metal, once again one of the most compelling and interesting black metal albums of recent memory has set sail from these shores.

Cloak of Ash is out now through Relapse Records.

The Black Captain will be DJing at the Electric Funeral Club at The Velvet Lounge on July 29th.

Foxes — Stomp the Earthworm

Thursday, July 23rd, 2015

Foxes channel Eleventh He Reaches London on this taste from Organic Vessels, the Perth outfit’s latest album which is available now on Bandcamp. But whereas Eleventh’s songs were about the build and release of tension, Foxes fast-track the process into explosive bursts of emotion and energy. Foxes have always been about juxtapositions — chaos with harmony, introspection with emotive confession — and on Stomp the Earthworm, the quintet embrace those qualities in full.

Foxes launch Organic Vessels this Saturday at Amplifier with Puck, Statues and Apollo Den.

Day Ravies — Liminal Zones

Tuesday, July 21st, 2015

Day Ravies’ 2013 debut album Tussle was one of the most promising new Australian shoegaze albums of the year. Its mix of Joy Division’s driving drums and angular guitar lines with shimmering dream pop and psychedelic rock was a memorable addition to the local shoegaze scene; matching, and in some cases even exceeding, the high standard set by similarly-inspired local acts like Summer Flake or Flyying Colours. Day Ravies differentiated themselves not only through their musical influences and technical proficiency, but also their sense of playfulness and musical experimentation. Their debut developed a spontaneous, exploratory type of sound, and a feeling of untapped potential; the free-floating promise of new development in unpredictable directions. It’s difficult to write a follow-up release to such an album, immediately strong and self-contained, but stretching out to something even better. But this month, Day Ravies did just that, releasing their second full-length album Liminal Zones. How does it compare to other recent dream pop and shoegaze releases? Does it live up to their earlier potential?

Opening tracks ‘Fake Beach’ and ‘Couple Days’ set the scene with jangly, shoegaze chord progressions over hypnotic guitar riffs and parallel bass lines, driven on by pounding drums. The songs are short and saccharine, with an undertone of darkness to them. So far, the sound is pretty much what you’d expect from their 2013 debut, with a couple of telling minor differences. First of all they sound a lot more confident in themselves and what they’re trying to achieve, and secondly, there’s a faintly audible electronic influence unique to the new album. But it’s really third track ‘This Side of The Fence’ where all the pieces start to come together, where a drum beat and synth melody similar to the opening strains of Joy Division’s ‘She’s Lost Control’ is matched with strange, psychedelic female vocals and reverb-soaked electric guitars. The drums are lo-fi, stuttering and electronic, reminiscent of the FM synth beats of Silent Shout–era The Knife, adding an unexpected new dimension to the music. Dream pop is a guitar genre ordinarily, so it’s interesting to see Day Ravies using elements of electronic art-pop to help them generate the atmosphere on their new release. It makes their songs sound really fresh and original, while at the same time maintaining the sort of energy and spontaneity that made the band so enjoyable in the first place.

The effect is even stronger on tracks like ‘Immaculate Escape’ and ‘March Comes Around’, where the digital elements are allowed to drive the songs forward and almost take the place of the guitars, creating this really novel hybrid of psychedelic post-punk and electronic pop, while at the same time never really straying too far from their traditional influences. They’re a bit like an edgier, more experimental version of Flyying Colours, and what they lack in genre purity they more than make up for with playfulness and sheer originality. And while their music sounds remarkably consistent here and self-contained, it still feels like there’s plenty of ground created here for further exploration in the future. Will they continue mixing FM synths with dream pop or go down a more electronic road? Will the references to 60’s psychedelic music, like the organ sounds in ‘Hackford Whizz’ or ‘Halfway Up A Hill’ take more precedence in a future album, or will they go for something else entirely? Their intentions are impossible to determine, but the album does show that they don’t intend to stop at recreating past successes. It lives up to the potential of their first release while creating even higher expectations for their albums still to come. It sounds like they haven’t hit their peak yet. The band is still rising, still trying to figure everything out, while at the same time being completely confident with where they are, and where they want to go.

With Liminal Zones, Day Ravies has achieved the improbable. They’ve managed not only to exceed the high expectations set by their debut album in innovation and technical quality, but also to set a new and more exciting standard on which this band, and others in its genre can be judged. This is high praise considering the strength of the competition, but this is by far the best new album of its type to come out in Australia this year. Liminal Zones is a landmark achievement. It should not be missed.

Liminal Zones is out now through Sonic Masala and Strange Pursuits.

Funerary — Starless Aeons

Tuesday, July 14th, 2015

Just over a year ago, an atmospheric funeral doom band lurking in the shadows of Phoenix, Arizona, put out a collection of songs that would be very well received by those able to get their hands on it. Funerary’s Starless Aeons was initially and quietly made available as a free download in digital format with a very limited run of 50 cassettes via the Midnite Collective to go along with it. Now, an “official” release through Sentient Ruin Laboratories is imminent in the coming week, with the album being made available again digitally alongside another very limited hand-made cassette run. If you missed it the first time, now is your chance to dive into the colossal soundscapes of misery that Funerary filled the soul with the first time around.

Whilst the numbers may not be reaching the levels of the blues-based sludge family in American doom, there is definitely an increase in the presence of those gravitating towards the deeply morose and funeral stream of doom metal, and of the highest quality to boot. Funerary are certainly here to bolster those ranks with five works of majestic and meditative coldness, crashing into the vast ocean of heavy music as collapsing glacial slabs heralding the extinction of life with a hypnotizing apocalyptic intent. The despondent tone of Starless Aeons is unyielding in its force, weighing down the listener to the earth with its dramatic atmosphere of hopelessness.

Starless Aeons flows together as though it is one piece with movements, rather than a collection of songs. This perception is intensified by most of the songs linking together with soundscapes and ambient effect, along with the collection as a whole giving the strong impression of a singular narrative stream characterized by ceremonially paced grief. Each detail and progression is purposeful and emotionally genuine, expressed with subtlety and patience, components of an essential foundation for fantastic doom music.

“Coerced Creation” provides initiation through instantaneous high volume and ferocity, with a procession of feedback and heavy demolition pulverizing the spirit below shrieking frostbitten vocals. The assault evolves seamlessly into desolate winds of drone-filled atmosphere, gradually bringing crestfallen melodies into play towards the end of “Atonement”, coursing along the same pulse straight into “Beneath the Black Veil”. This central movement overflows with misery, crystallizing the blood with a stunning dolorous harmonized guitar gliding over frigid and spacious accents of funeral doom. The title track follows with a relatively brief and minimal drone, an uninhabitable frozen plain, full of emptiness. In the end, melody is replaced by discord, quietly building up from foreboding strums and feedback into riffs and screams of pure anguish. There is a brief return to the expansive feeling of “…Veil”, before plummeting from the heights back into overwhelming despondency, fading away into a storm of feedback-driven noise.

Starless Aeons is an album of well-crafted symbiotic contradictions, as is the case with so many of the great doom records, without ever veering from its intoxicating essence of crippling depression. It could be the soundtrack for exploring a lifeless world of eternal winter just as much as it is a vast hymn to being locked callously away within the confines of a state of mind completely bereft of hope. If you love doom at its darkest emotive ebb, be sure you pay this world of Funerary’s a visit. Just make sure you remember the way back.

The Black Captain hosts RTRFM’s Brain Blood Volume on July 26 at 1am (+8GMT). You can restream his last appearance on Behind the Mirror here.

Citizen — Everybody is Going to Heaven

Wednesday, July 8th, 2015

Shoegaze is the vodka of musical genres, a clear spirit you can add to almost any other liquid to turn it into some kind of alcoholic drink. It’s the difference between a glass of orange juice and a vodka Screwdriver, or a Bloody Mary and a cold tomato soup. The coolest thing about vodka is it works in almost everything, while still remaining perfect on its own. Shoegaze is about the same. You can mix it up with any other genre, or you can decide to play it straight. Acts like Deafheaven and Dälek use shoegaze to transcend the conventions of their genres, while bands like Nite Fields or French Films use it as a way of filling out their sound. And bands like My Bloody Valentine or Flyying Colours use it differently again: in its pure form, without subservience or dilution, they let it drive their sound. While any of these approaches are enjoyable and equally justifiable, to fans of the genre at least, it’s really the first approach, the introduction of shoegaze to an unfamiliar form, that leads to the most unexpected and memorable musical discoveries. If Everybody is Going to Heaven was a cocktail, it’d be something bizarre but ultimately desirable like a Bloody Mary or a BLT. You might balk at some of its ingredients — alt-rock and emo, mostly, with a dash of noise rock and post-hardcore — but once you try it, you will understand. It’s one of those rare musical combinations that transcends all of its constituent parts, and it’s the shoegaze elements that tie it all together, making this dense, layered, heavy kind of music that ends up sounding different to anything you’ve ever heard before.

‘Cement’ is a bombastic, sludge-infused, post-hardcore opener. It’s loud, riff-driven, and sounds enormous, with sad, melodic vocals over wall-of-noise distorted guitars. The shoegaze elements in the track give the instrumentals a really immediate sense of power, playing off wonderfully against the small, comparatively fragile sounding vocals. The vocals build up during the bridge, which simmers and twists around a repeated guitar riff building into a massive pop-punk chorus. It’s a heavy, moody, and ultimately satisfying structure, which you expect to be repeated in the next track, ‘Dive Into My Sun’. But Citizen keep you guessing, building small vocals over spider-like guitars to a soft crescendo after an unexpectedly short bridge, before deconstructing completely in a single, minimalistic guitar line strung out across a roaring abyss. It transitions seamlessly into ‘Numb Yourself’, which is way more abrasive than the intro would suggest, starting immediately with coarse, impassioned shouting. The bass is heavy, the melodic work is beautiful, and there’s an overwhelming quality to the distortion like something pulled from Heads., or Metz. It’s not noise rock, not exactly, but it’s got that similar sort of power to it. Just layers and layers of guitar chords pulled together under raw-sounding vocals and melodic screaming.

The melodies are nostalgic, reminiscent of 90’s emo but also darker alternative rock bands like Smashing Pumpkins or Placebo. This comparison is only heightened by later tracks like ‘Yellow Love’ or ‘Heaviside’, which sound like they’d fit in amongst the lullabies on Smashing Pumpkins’ Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness, or the softer songs on a early Placebo album. But the energy, the intensity of it all – like a powder keg that threatens to explode at any time, even in the softer tracks – that’s all emotional hardcore. And the combination of these factors – the harmonies, the energy, the troughs, the peaks, and the random, unexpected shows of force – it all comes together into this beautiful, unpredictable and ultimately inspiring package. It’s like the emo equivalent of Ceremony’s recent foray into post-punk revival on their latest album, but the changes in their sound never affect their overall status as an emo band. The shoegaze elements are subservient to the rest of it, used as more of a tool to combine a disparate set of musical influences, to bring them all together into something else. I’ve rarely been a fan of emotional hardcore, but I can’t get enough of this album. It combines the careful melodicism and orchestral layering of 90’s alternative music with the sheer emotional intensity of hardcore, and puts it all together into this devastating aural assault that overwhelms you, then makes you want to sing along to pop-punk-inspired choruses. It’s more than just an emo album, while at the same time sounding like nothing else. Even if you’re not into the genre at all, even if you usually hate it, the album is deserving of your time. And if you are into the genre already, then who knows? It might just be your album of the year.

Everybody is Going to Heaven is out now through Run For Cover Records.