Posted in Whathaveyou on March 25th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Well, the last couple years don’t seem to have made All Are to Return any less caustic. Fair enough. The still-mostly-anonymous-I-think industrial doom two-piece based in the Netherlands were last heard from with their 2022 single “A State in Fear,” and April 26 will mark the arrival of III, which they’ll issue through Tartarus Records in an edition of 50 tapes at a release show that’s also a label showcase about which you can read more below. The first aural peek at III, which of course follows late-2021’s II (review here), arrives in the form of “Drift,” which just might be the harshest three minutes you spend today. At least I’d hope so.
In “Drift,” even the backing drones that spread out through the atmospheres of All Are to Return‘s software-led churn feel nastier, and the way some of the vocals are obscured speaks to the band working with an ideology toward a three-dimensional mix. The rest of III bears that out like an existential burden, and as relates to its surroundings, “Drift” turns out to be one of the more accessible tracks on the record. For example, it’s got a beat, even if that beat is blown out and being used to collapse your rib cage.
Album’s out April 26, as per the PR wire:
All Are To Return announce new album AATR III // Single premiere
All Are To Return Single Premiere ‘Drift’
The ecological dark of our existence is pulsating with the presence of loss. Shifts occur on the periphery of awareness. Fundamental ruptures only inferred from apparent disappearance. Something felt before it is known. From here on, there are no stones that mark the path. -AATR
The two-man formation All Are To Return presents extreme, experimental music with an urgent sense of dread. The duo’s new album III will be released on April 26 via Tartarus Records.
We have entered a new age of extinction – of poisoned lands, habitat destruction and encompassing climate catastrophe. AATR III reflects the harshness of life laid bare to the vagaries of capital, of uncaring generations heaping misery on their successors and the life-forms with which they share a fragile biosphere.
The album’s unmitigated brutality of sound and expression are mediation of these concurrent events. Colossal noise-scapes are shaped with pulsing synth patterns, shredding percussion and vocals that are screams from the void. As a whole, the many-layered compositions carry massive assaults on the senses and a rage unhuman.
Manmade disasters borne from decades of unfettered greed, of carbon capital plundering the earth and choking its habitants – capital unleashed through self-interested short-sightedness, decades of corruption and denial of clear fact.
Our habitats swallowed by rising seas, engulfed in flames. As we drown, burn, or slowly parch and wither, we remember. Oceans heat and corals die as pale sludge in bright blue waters – thousands of years of unfathomable complexity undone in decades. Forests burn and ancient trees that were young when the pharaohs build their monuments perish in the flames. Poisons have spread through all ecosystems. The product of profit-maximizing agriculture at war with life. As insects disappear they signal extinction on a massive scale.
What is lost, is lost forever.
We will remember you through your shattered bones, your battered skulls turned fossil. We will remember you through your plastic deposits, your carbon waste, your radio-active poisons still leaking into our bodies. We will remember your bright and brief existence – and the inevitability of your demise.
Pressing info: 50x Cassettes
AATR III drops April 26th during their debut performance at the Tartarus showcase at Vera, Groningen in the Netherlands with label friends Ultha, Oud Zeer (Throwing Bricks & Ontaard), and Ortega. Event & Tickets:https://www.vera-groningen.nl/events/tartarus-records-presents-2024/
All Are To Return is: F: Bass, Drums, Guitars, Vocals, FXs N: Synths, FXs
Posted in Bootleg Theater on October 12th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
The slow-roiling noise cauldron “Postcript on the Societies of Control” first appeared on mostly-anonymous industrial duo All Are to Return‘s second EP, II (review here, late in 2021. Surely you’ll find it no less festering for the passing of time as it digs into your brain as the minimalist video premiering below plays out alongside. It is harsh, caustic in its presentation. Sparse but not still. Unkind in a way that feels like it needs to be.
And as regards the theme, I guess my only response is, “Wouldn’t that be nice?” Like if this really was the aftermath of capitalism — as in, it ended — and that oppressive powerstructres were somehow pulled apart, maybe violently, and the bright future offered through mid-20th century science-fiction could at last be brought to bear. Oh we’d be writing fucking poetry on a terraformed Mars by now if it weren’t for this pesky internet making it so easy to fill our days with buying or otherwise engaging with stupid, needless bullshit. Happy birthday. My condolences. So cute! Fucking kill me.
But the boxes we live in, literal and figurative, persist. The spread of communications technology has allowed for the illusion of a democratizing effect while reinforcing traditional power structures. Facebook knows when you shit? Does it matter? I don’t know, and if it ever did, it probably doesn’t anymore, because part of this whole thing is human thanatos actively working to kill our native habitat. Circling the drain, people jerk each other off for agreeing about minute garbage while overhead the same five white shitheads who’ve controlled humanity for the last 2,000 years decide to slice the throat of another brown baby to drink the blood. Cha-ching. Cash in the bank. Happy war, Israel and Palestine! You’re pawns too!
No answers here, just noise, and maybe that is the fucking answer. I like “windows without sky” below. Seems like a metaphor born in an apartment. Oh yeah, and the rent’s too damn high too.
Fuck it. Enjoy.
All Are to Return, “Postcript on the Societies of Control” video premiere
All Are to Return on “Postscript on the Societies of Control”:
Spaces of work and habitation – enclosed, yet open to the decentered power of capital and its handmaiden the state. Enclosures are molds, controls are modulation. Networked feedback controls operating through our devices of connection, endlessly tracking behavior, feeding correcting algorithms in the data-flows of intimacy – desire coupled to market logics of infinite demand and controlled scarcity. Windows without sky.
These are the Societies of Control.
All Are To Return is: F: Bass, Drums, Guitars, Vocals, FXs N: Synths, FXs
Posted in Whathaveyou on December 1st, 2022 by JJ Koczan
It’s striking how forward the guitar is on All Are to Return‘s new single ‘A State in Fear.’ The screams buried beneath the initially drumless/beatless morass of riff, echoing cavernous and lonely, speak to the two-piece’s abiding experimentalism and extremity, but there’s less of an industrial style to the four-minute piece than one might’ve expected after their most recent EP, II (review here), which came out late last year.
That’s kind of a thrill, to be honest. A programmed-feeling drum progression does take hold in “A State of Fear,” and those screams resolve themselves into a pattern of lyrics I’d just about love to read, but as they seem to be reconciling with contemporary reactionary conservatism — which is nothing if not nostalgia for a time that never actually existed and terror at an unknown future — the fact that they turn the amps up here makes them a less predictable band in my mind, richer in sound and able to cover a wider swath of stylistic ground. No gods, no masters, no borders, no wars. Maybe no genres?
If only. They liken it to a combination of elements from their first two EPs. I’ve been wondering if after the two short releases All Are to Return might’ve put themselves this year to the task of writing a debut full-length. Listening to the aurally fucked sensibility of “A State in Fear,” I’m even more hopeful for such a thing to manifest in 2023.
Links, a brief description, and the song stream follow:
Two-man formation All Are To Return presents extreme, experimental music with an urgent sense of dread.
“Perpetual dread unhinges us. Threats real and imagined Indistinguishable. The multitude stirs – and it hears the siren call, but not the alarms that sound. Enthralled by the specter of a life brutish and short. The deal with the Leviathan has been remade. We are right to fear – the many and the one.
“[A State in Fear] is a track that was born from the spirit of our debut, but with the musical nuance of the second EP. We present it on its own as a complementary track to these first two releases. The background-themes here are of course not unknown to many listener; worrying trends of fear infiltrating the imagination, of multitudes lured into online bubbles of festering hatred, furthered by the existential angst of pandemic life – and clearly for us Europeans – the renewed reality of war.
Released as digital only track on November 28th 2022. Music by All Are To Return. Produced, mixed & mastered by All Are To Return.
All Are To Return is: F: Bass, Drums, Guitars, Vocals, FXs N: Synths, FXs
Posted in Reviews on January 21st, 2022 by JJ Koczan
Last day. I guess we made it. There was never any doubt it would happen, but I wouldn’t call this the smoothest Quarterly Review ever by any stretch. Weather, canceled school, missed bus, The Patient Mrs. about to start a new semester at work, plus that day that had three noise rock records right in a row — who slots these things? (me) — it hasn’t all been easy. But, if you’ve ever read the QR you might know I’ve developed a tendency to load a bunch of killer stuff into the last day to kind of give myself a break, and here we are. No regrets.
Thanks for reading this week (and any other week if you’ve ever been on this site before). Here’s how we finish.
Quarterly Review #41-50:
Dream Unending, Tide Turns Eternal
Beautiful and sad, this first collaboration between drummer/vocalist Justin DeTore (Solemn Lament, ex-Magic Circle, many more) and guitarist/bassist Derrick Vella (Tomb Mold, Outer Heaven) under the moniker of Dream Unending harnesses a classic early ’90s death-doom melancholy, but it’s not as raw as the image of My Dying Bride circa ’92 that might bring to mind. If you want to do mashups, think Novembers Doom meets Alternative 4-era Anathema. Tide Turns Eternal brings together seven songs in 46 minutes and is memorable in stretches like the guitar progression of “In Cipher I Weep” and the crushing chug of the title-track as the Massachusetts/Toronto duo harness the a true sense of classic death metal just ahead of the two-minute weepy guitar interlude “Forgotten Farewell” and the 10-minute closing title-track. Perhaps there’s some inspiration from Bell Witch in the making, but Dream Unending‘s atmosphere and patience are their own.
The title don’t lie. French expat Sergio Garcia, living in Indonesia, concocts 11 instrumental tracks of fuzzy flood, and if he wants to call that soup, then yeah, that’s as good as anything I’ve got. “Razana” opens with two minutes of garage-style strut, while “Back to Origin” crunches and “Fuzz Soup” feels a bit more of a psych freakout with its lead guitar and drums that remind of Witch, all performed by Garcia, who adds organ to boot. “Quest for Fire” is probably more in homage to the movie than band, which is a little sad, but the song brings in some minor scales and droning atmospherics, and “Ride the Mammoth” pushes more straightforward into the languid wah whatnottery of “Argapura” at the presumed start of side B, which feels rawer in “The Shelter” and more chaotic in the buzz of “Surfin’ the Dune” before “The Cheating Mole” turns to nighttime darkjazz, “Tumulous” turns its acoustic start into a hairy march punctuated and grounded by the pop of snare, and closer “Narcolepsy” finishes with a duly zombified, organ-laced take on tape-trader doom. These experiments work well together throughout Fuzz Soup, united by weird and unpredictable as they are.
Gänger is third in a purported series of four EPs by Manchester, UK, four-piece Farfisa, and its four songs solidify some of the more let-go aspects of 2020’s Bravado, taking the folkish shine of a cut like “My Oh My” and turning it into the dug-in garage prog rock of “Honey Badger” and riffing out dirty and fuzzed on “River Rash.” Frankly, I don’t know why, having once conjured tones like those of the penultimate “Clinton” here, which sound like something that would make Ty Segall start a new band, one would ever not do that again, but I won’t claim to know what the fourth EP in the series might bring. One can only hope that, when the series is wrapped, they compile it into some sort of offering — a double-tape or some such — and release the whole thing together. As it stands though, Gänger is my first exposure to the band, and they smash through “Limitator” with due prejudice. I can think of five record labels off the top of my head who’d be lucky to have these guys, but nobody asks me these things.
Fucking a, rock and roll. Reykjavik’s Volcanova aren’t through “Salem,” the lead cut from their righteously titled Cosmic Bullshit EP, before they’ve cadenced Uncle Acid in the verse and broken out the cowbell, so yes, it’s that kind of party. That cowbell comes back almost immediately for “Gold Coast,” which tramps out big riffs like Def Leppard used to make, and “Desolation” brings the bass forward effectively in its hook, the band having already built fervent momentum that will carry through the rest of the 26-minute mini-album. Not to pick favorites, but “End of Time” feels purposefully placed near the middle, and “No Wheels” — yup, more cowbell — splits that and closer “Lost Spot” well, giving a grounded stretch of pure shove before the finale hard-boogies and big-drifts its way to a surprising wash of an ending, organ included. You don’t call your release Cosmic Bullshit if you’re not looking to get attention, and Volcanova certainly earn that with these tracks.
The premier collaboration between Arizona’s Aiwass and Colorado’s Astral Construct — the latter also stylized as ASTRAL COnstruct — is a seven-minute single called “Solis in Stellis” that bridges terrestrial and ethereal heavy psychedelias. At a bit under eight minutes, its melodic flourish and weighted underpinning of low end, drifting guitar and fluid rhythmic progression sound like nothing so much as the beginning of an album that should be made if it’s not currently in the works between Drew Patricks (Astral Construct) and Blake Carrera (Aiwass), who both function as solo artists in their respective projects but come together here to show the complementary potential of each for the other. Lush in atmosphere, patient in its delivery and spacious without being overwrought, “Solis in Stellis” is hopefully the beginning of more to come from these two, who might just end up having to call themselves the Aiwass Construct if they keep going the way they are.
Seven years after 2014’s The Witching Hour, Ohio’s Doctor Smoke return with Dreamers and the Dead, a solid 10-song/42-minute run that makes up for lost time by reimagining ’90s-era Megadeth sneer as dark and catchy heavy rock and roll. The four-piece led by founding guitarist/vocalist Matt Tluchowski may have let a few years get by them — that’ll happen — but if the intervening time was spent hammering out these songs, the effort shows itself in the efficiency with which each cut makes its point and gets out, a song like “These Horrid Things” casting its mood in the verses before opening to the chorus, winding fretwork building tension into and subsequently through the solo. This is a revamp of the idea of a classic metal influence, the first instance of a generational shift I can think of that’s bringing this particular vibe to a heavy rock context — the pounding and sprinting of the title-track might’ve been thrash in the ’80s, but a decade later it was thicker and so it is here as well — and Doctor Smoke make it theirs, no question. One wonders what the next seven years will bring.
Rebranded from their moniker of Sierra, Ontario progressive heavy rockers Willowater bring the four-track/14-minute EP as a quick hello to listeners new and old. Guitarist/vocalist Jason Taylor and bassist/drummer/vocalist Robbie Carvalho (also synth) chug out in early-Tool fashion on the opener “Ultimatum,” and the subsequent title-track answers back in kind with shared vocals and a bit of twisting, pulled squeals of guitar, and so on, while “Fly High” calls to mind Dio-style riffing with a bassline to bolster the classic metal vibe, and “Winter Now” builds a tension in its keyboard-laced 3:26 that, somewhat maddeningly, never pays itself off. Perhaps the message there is of more to come. Hope so, anyhow. Sierra were a quality band, and undervalued. Willowater seem to be taking another shot at catching as many ears as possible. A fresh start. Not so crazy different from what they were doing before, but sometimes a name can make all the difference.
This second EP from the anonymous Dutch outfit All Are to Return reignites the brutality of their 2020 self-titled debut short release (review here), while expanding the stylistic reach. Opener “Carceri” tips into industrial black metal before resolving itself in harsh screams and drones, while “Surveiller et Punir” feels even more experimental/art rock with tortured screams far back under noisy guitar. “Classified” is shorter and more beat-oriented, but the distorted wash of “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (bit of positive thinking there, almost in spite of itself) is abrasive as fuck, such that the quiet, minimal synth that starts “De Profundis” accompanied by more obscured screams seems almost like a relief before it builds to its own post-Godflesh industrialized crush. They finish atmospheric on “Desiring Machines,” blowing out conceptions of extreme music in about the time it takes for you to put on your shoes and jacket so you can go out, wander into the wilderness, and never be heard from again.
Members of Mirror Queen, the just-signed-to-Tee–Pee-proper Limousine Beach (really, I haven’t even had the chance to post the news yet), Zombi, Ruby the Hatchet and Osees coming together for three Mountain covers. Mountain Sides do “You Better Believe It,” “Dreams of Milk and Honey” and “Travelin’ in the Dark,” and they knock it out of the park accordingly. I don’t know that this would ever get to become a real band between the commitments of Morgan McDaniel, David Wheeler and Steve Moore, let alone Owen Stewart (Ruby the Hatchet‘s drummer) or Paul Quattrone from Osees and a geographic spread between New York, Philly, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, but as a quick outing to test the waters, these three songs want nothing for vibe. Of course, being Mountain songs helps, but it almost inevitably would. Still, I’d take a record of tunes they wrote themselves, even if it doesn’t happen for another decade because everyone’s busy.
Serenity in experimentalist drone and psychedelia, marked by the interplay of organic folk and otherworldly elements of fluid aural adventures. The backward, swelling repetitions of “The Alluring Pool” answer the watery worldmaking of leadoff “Rivers are a Place of Power,” the backing chimes reminding of water moving the air, the acoustic guitar on centerpiece “Riverbank” furthering the theme in sweetly plucked notes while Duncan Park (who also collaborates with Seven Rivers of Fire) picks up the journey again on “The Winding Stream” with a current of melody playing beneath the main acoustic lines of the song, instrumental in its entirety. Invoking the Flood, apart perhaps from some warning that might be read into the opener, grows more peaceful as it goes, though Park‘s inclusion of vocals on closer “Over the River” speaks perhaps of other tributaries waiting to be explored. Still, it is a sweet and encompassing, if short, trip downstream with Park here, and if the flood comes, at least we had a good time.
Posted in Whathaveyou on November 15th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
It hasn’t been that long since the anonymous two-piece All Are to Return released their self-titled debut EP (review here), just over a year, but they’ve apparently gotten noisier and a bit more avant garde in that time if the streaming track “Carceri” is anything to go by. The new release, called simply All Are to Return II will be out in a continuing collaboration between whoever these guys are and Tartarus Records, which will press the six-song bit of presumed nastiness to tape and has preorders up now. I liked the last one, can’t hear anything that’ll make me change my mind so far, and look forward to the darkness to come. The harsher industrial stuff doesn’t always get me, but these guys hit a nerve. That’s about as straightforward as I can say it.
Suitably brutal artwork and the release info follow here, as per the PR wire:
All Are To Return – Enigmatic & Experimental Doom Duo Share New Song “Carceri”
The enigmatic duo known as All Are To Return have just revealed a new song from their forthcoming new EP “All Are To Return II”, which is now set for release on November 26th via Tartarus Records.
Born from enforced isolation, the duo’s first EP released in October last year, presented a noisy industrialized-doom carrying an experimental edge, measuring brutality with an urgent sense of dread. Precisely one year later, All Are To Return are ready to release a new EP simply titled “All Are To Return II” once again via Tartarus Records.
The EP is a reflection on the dynamics of space and confinement. The evolving compositions are harsh yet layered. There is nuance in expression – vocals responsive and confrontational, guitars cutting into dense synth drones, sparse melody erupting amidst pulsing noise. Pre-orders are now available at this location:https://shop.tartarusrecords.com/product/all-are-to-return-aatr-ii/
AATR II is tearing at walls and skin. Hear the ghosts of revolt stirring inside societal prisons. Haunted by the philosophies of power and control. No resignation.
Edition of 100 cassettes
Also available as shirt bundle.
1. Carceri 2. Surveiller et Punir 3. Classified 4. Postscript on the Societies of Control 5. De Profundis 6. Desiring Machines
If you missed All Are to Return‘s 2020 self-titled debut EP (review here) when it came out through Tartarus Records, the industrial noise duo’s video for “Bare Life” should offer a bit of a glimpse at what they’re all about. Hard-hitting, distorted beats bury likewise harsh screamed vocals, the procession moving at a clow, consuming pace all the while. In the video, it’s given sparse movement flashing on the EP’s cover at first that builds over its four-minute course, but the proceedings are extreme the entire time, and the same holds true of the EP’s five tracks, whether a given part is raging or ambient, subversive or pummeling.
I’ve spent a decent amount of time with this EP since it came my way and I still feel like I’m getting to know it as a work of industrial doom. But I dig it and I find a lot of commonality of purpose with a project I have going kind of quietly under the radar as well (shh…). Tartarus has tapes, as they will, and longsleeve t-shirts, which might not do much for you when it’s 100-degrees out, but, you know, still somehow feel extra appropriate for industrial music to me somehow. I’m not sure why that makes sense, but it does.
Dig the space in this mix, the way the drone underscores the beat, the vocals extreme but far back enough to be atmospheric. I’m way on board with that.
Enjoy:
All Are to Return, “Bare Life” official video
Two-man formation All Are To Return merge hauntingly raw vocals with violent synth-percussion and powerful bass riffs. Born from enforced isolation, the duo’s first EP presents industrial-doom carrying an experimental edge – measured brutality with an urgent sense of dread.
A solitary raging in the dark – All Are To Return’s debut EP is raw in mood and execution. The sound combines harsh alienating vocals, with aggressive analogue synths and gritty resonant guitar. With this first outing All Are To Return explore doom through an integration of machine-music. In this, tension is both theme and structuring principle. This is expressed in the shape of the songs – with a certain cinematic quality – and echoed through the song-titles. One might say the EP is haunted by the specter of societal disintegration. There are echoes of bleak political philosophies – life naked to the brutality of a state in fear.
Posted in Reviews on October 7th, 2020 by JJ Koczan
Day three of the Quarterly Review. Always a landmark. Today we hit the halfway point, but don’t pass it yet since I’ve decided to add the sixth day next Monday. So we’ll get to 30 of the total 60 records, and then be past half through tomorrow. Math was never my strong suit. Come to think of it, I wasn’t much for school all around. Work sucked too.
Anyway, if you haven’t found anything to dig yet — and I hope you have; I think the stuff included has been pretty good so far — you can either go back and look again or keep going. Maybe today’s your day. If not, there’s always tomorrow.
Quarterly Review #21-30:
Hum, Inlet
One has to wonder if, if Hum had it to do over again, they might hold back their first album in 23 years, Inlet, for release sometime when the world isn’t being ravaged by a global pandemic. As it stands, the largesse and melodic wash of the Illinois outfit’s all-growed-up heavy post-rock offers 55 minutes of comfort amid the tumult of the days, and while I won’t profess to having been a fan in the ’90s — their last studio LP was 1997’s Downward is Heavenward, and they sound like they definitely spent some time listening to Pelican since then — the overarching consumption Inlet sets forth in relatively extended tracks like “Desert Rambler” and “The Summoning” and the manner in which the album sets its own backdrop in a floating drone of effects make it an escapist joy. They hold back until closer “Shapeshifter” to go full post-rock, and while there are times at which it can seem unipolar, to listen to the crunching “Step Into You” and “Cloud City” side-by-side unveils more of the scope underlying from the outset of “Waves” onward.
Oslo’s Hymn answer the outright crush and scathe of their 2017 debut, Perish (review here), with a more developed and lethal attack on their four-song/38-minute follow-up, Breach Us. Though they’re the kind of band who make people who’ve never heard Black Cobra wonder how two people can be so heavy — and the record has plenty of that; “Exit Through Fire”‘s sludgeshuggah chugging walks by and waves — it’s the sense of atmosphere that guitarist/bassist/vocalist Ole Rokseth and drummer Markus Støle bring to the proceedings that make them so engrossing. The opening title-track is also the shortest at 6:25, but as Breach Us moves across “Exit Through Fire,” “Crimson” and especially 14-minute closer “Can I Carry You,” it brings forth the sort of ominous dystopian assault that so many tried and failed to harness in the wake of Neurosis‘ Through Silver in Blood. Hymn do that and make it theirs in the process.
Carried across with excruciating grace, Atramentus‘ three-part/44-minute debut album, Stygian, probably belongs in a post-Bell Witch category of extreme, crawling death-doom, but from the script of their logo to the dramatic piano accompanying the lurching riffs, gurgles and choral wails of “Stygian I: From Tumultuous Heavens… (Descended Forth the Ceaseless Darkness)” through the five-minute interlude that is “Stygian II: In Ageless Slumber (As I Dream in the Doleful Embrace of the Howling Black Winds)” and into the 23-minute lurchfest that is “Stygian III: Perennial Voyage (Across the Perpetual Planes of Crying Frost and Steel-Eroding Blizzards)” their ultra-morose procession seems to dig further back for primary inspiration, to acts like Skepticism and even earliest Anathema (at least for that logo), and as guttural and tortured as it is as it devolves toward blackened char in its closer, Stygian‘s stretches of melody provide a contrast that gives some semblance of hope amid all the surrounding despair.
As it clocks in 27 minutes, the inevitable question about Zyclops‘ debut release, Inheritance of Ash, is whether it’s an EP or an LP. For what it’s worth, my bid is for the latter, and to back my case up I’ll cite the flow between each of its four component tracks. The Austin, Texas, post-metallic four-piece save their most virulent chug and deepest tonal weight for the final two cuts, “Wind” and “Ash,” but the stage is well set in “Ghost” and “Rope” as well, and even when one song falls into silence, the next picks up in complementary fashion. Shades of Isis in “Rope,” Swarm of the Lotus in the more intense moments of “Ash,” and an overarching progressive vibe that feels suited to the Pelagic Records oeuvre, one might think of Zyclops as cerebral despite their protestations otherwise, but at the very least, the push and pull at the end of “Wind” and the stretch-out that comes after the churning first half of “Rope” don’t happen by mistake, and a band making these kinds of turns on their first outing isn’t to be ignored. Also, they’re very, very heavy.
It’s all peace and quiet until “Psionic Static” suddenly starts to speed up, and then like the rush into transwarp, Kairon; IRSE!‘s Polysomn finds its bliss by hooking up a cortical node to your left temple and turning your frontal lobe into so much floundering goo, effectively kitchen-sink kraut-ing you into oblivion while gleefully hopping from genre to cosmic genre like they’re being chased by the ghost of space rock past. They’re the ghost of space rock future. While never static, Polysomn does offer some serenity amid all its head-spinning and lobe-melting, be it the hee-hee-now-it’s-trip-hop wash of “An Bat None” or the cinematic vastness that arises in “Altaïr Descends.” Too intelligent to be random noise or just a freakout, the album is nonetheless experimental, and remains committed to that all the way through the shorter “White Flies” and “Polysomn” at the end of the record. You can take it on if you have your EV suit handy, but if you don’t check the intermix ratio, your face is going to blow up. Fair warning. LLAP.
The second 2020 offering from Hurst, Texas’ Slow Draw — the one-man outfit of Mark “Derwooka” Kitchens, also of Stone Machine Electric — the four-song Quiet Joy is obviously consciously named. “Tightropes in Tandem” and closer “Sometimes Experiments Fail” offer a sweet, minimal jazziness, building on the hypnotic backwards psych drone of opener “Unexpected Suspect.” In the two-minute penultimate title-track, Kitchens is barely there, and it is as much an emphasis on the quiet space as that in which the music — a late arriving guitar stands out — might otherwise be taking place. At 18 minutes, it is intended to be a breath taken before reimmersing oneself in the unrelenting chaos that surrounds and swirls, and while it’s short, each piece also has something of its own to offer — even when it’s actively nothing — and Slow Draw brims with purpose across this short release. Sometimes experiments fail, sure. Sometimes they work.
It took all of a week for the married duo of Ana Muhi (vocals, bass) and Sven Missullis (guitars, vocals, drums) to announce Might as their new project following the dissolution of the long-ish-running and far-punkier Deamon’s Child. Might‘s self-titled debut arrives with the significant backing of Exile on Mainstream and earns its place on the label with an atmospheric approach to noise rock that, while it inevitably shares some elements with the preceding band, forays outward into the weight of “Possession” and the acoustic-into-crush “Warlight” and the crush-into-ambience “Flight of Fancy” and the ambience-into-ambience “Mrs. Poise” and so on. From the beginning in “Intoduce Yourself” and the rushing “Pollution of Mind,” it’s clear the recorded-in-quarantine 35-minute/nine-song outing is going to go where it wants to, Muhi and Missullis sharing vocals and urging the listener deeper into doesn’t-quite-sound-like-anything-else post-fuzz heavy rock and sludge. A fun game: try to predict where it’s going, and be wrong.
Following a stint on Metal Blade and self-releasing 2018’s What Was and What Shall Be, West Virginia’s Brimstone Coven issue their second album as a three-piece through Ripple Music, calling to mind a more classic-minded Apostle of Solitude on the finale “Song of Whippoorwill” and finding a balance all the while between keeping their progressions moving forward and establishing a melancholy atmosphere. Some elements feel drawn from the Maryland school of doom — opener the melody and hook of “The Inferno” remind of defunct purveyors Beelzefuzz — but what comes through clearest in these songs is that guitarist/vocalist Corey Roth, bassist/vocalist Andrew D’Cagna and drummer Dave Trik have found their way forward after paring down from a four-piece following 2016’s Black Magic (review here) and the initial steps the last album took. They sound ready for whatever the growth of their craft might bring and execute songs like “When the World is Gone” and the more swinging “Secrets of the Earth” with the utmost class.
Take the brutal industrial doom of Author and Punisher and smash it together — presumably in some kind of stainless-steel semi-automated contraption — with the skin-peeling atmosphere and grueling tension of Khanate and you may begin to understand where All Are to Return are coming from on their debut self-titled EP. How they make a song like four-minute centerpiece “Bare Life” feel so consuming is beyond me, but I think being so utterly demolishing helps. It’s not just about the plodding electronic beat, either. There’s some of that in opener “Untrusted” and certainly “The Lie of Fellow Men” has a lumber to go with its bass rumble and NIN-sounding-hopeful guitar, but it’s the overwhelming sense of everything being tainted and cruel that comes through in the space the only-19-minutes-long release creates. Even as closer “Bellum Omnium” chips away at the last remaining vestiges of color, it casts a coherent vision of not only aesthetic purpose for the duo, but of the terrible, all-gone-wrong future in which we seem at times to live.
I saved this one for last today as a favor to myself. Originally released in 2016, Los Acidos‘ self-titled debut receives a well-deserved second look on vinyl courtesy of Necio Records, and with it comes 40 minutes of full immersion in glorious Argentinian psicodelia, spacious and ’60s-style on “Al Otro Lado” and full of freaky swing on “Blusas” ahead of the almost-shoegaze-until-it-explodes-in-sunshine float of “Perfume Fantasma.” “Paseo” and the penultimate “Espejos” careen with greater intensity, but from the folksy feel that arrives to coincide with the cymbal-crashing roll of “Excentricidad” in its second half to the final boogie payoff in “Empatía de Cristal,” the 10-song outing is a joy waiting to be experienced. You’re experienced, right? Have you ever been? Either way, the important thing is that the voyage that, indeed, begins with “Viaje” is worth your time in melody, in craft, in its arrangements, in presence and in the soul that comes through from front to back. The four-piece had a single out in late 2019, but anytime they want to get to work on a follow-up LP, I’ll be waiting.
