Posted in Whathaveyou on July 7th, 2026 by JJ Koczan
I could probably have waited until the single came out — which is happening like two and a half weeks from now — to put up a post about Skyjoggers‘ new album, Frag Nicht Nach Sonnenschein, but frankly, I don’t trust myself to remember and even if I put it in my notes, a lot can happen in that amount of time. I’m not reliable, is what I’m telling you.
From the weirdo hotspot of Tampere, Finland, the trio Skyjoggers released their 12021: Post-Electric Apocalypse (review here) album last June, and it was the kind of record that was too much its own thing to call anything other than progressive. That, however, was the beginning and not the end of it. Spaced out, cosmically mischievous, expansive and dug-in, it was a headspinner that scientists are still trying to parse out and surely won’t be done by the time the new one — the title translated from German as, “Don’t Ask for Sunshine”; don’t worry, I won’t — arrives in November through Sound of Liberation Records.
Speaking of Germany, Skyjoggers will be there in August to take part in Blue Moon Festival in Cottbus and back again in October for Keep it Low in Munich. Those are the only dates I’ve seen but probably not the only ones either announced or to be announced. And of course with the release four-plus months out, we’re still ahead of the arrival of the first single, which is called “Ancient Steel” — that’s the cover art below — and will reportedly hit on July 24.
If you’d like all that info again plus a pre-save link, here’s this from social media:
We’re proud to announce the upcoming Skyjoggers album ”Frag Nicht Nach Sonnenschein” will be released by Sound of Liberation records on the 13th of November 2026.
You’ll get a taste of what’s to come soon as we release the first single of the album ”Ancient Steel” on Friday the 24th of July.
Posted in Reviews on March 18th, 2026 by JJ Koczan
Feel like we’re really getting into it now, and that’s a good thing. I’m not saying I was shaking off rust for the first two days, but I look at the spread of styles across the names above and ‘it’s gonna be a good day’ pops inexorably into my head. I like that feeling, which I guess is how we get here in the first place.
It’s Wednesday of this seven-day QR, so we’re not quite halfway through yet. If you’ve been keeping up, thank you. If not, it’s okay. You’re still welcome to peruse the below and hopefully find something that speaks to you.
Quarterly Review #21-30:
Clayton Burgess, If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now
Self-recorded and just as raw as the day is long, the first solo album from Clayton Burgess (Satan’s Satyrs founder, also ex-Electric Wizard), If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now, is so classic in its substance it can’t help be modern. And I’m not talking about the pop garage indie of the 2000s, like it sounds cheap but also everybody has perfect hair. Songs like “Kerosene” and the Mellotron-laced “Meadowlands” are more in the Rise Above Records mindset of retroism, which is to say doing the thing for real and letting the genres sort themselves out later. Thus the proto-punk of “Little Bat Dreams” and the strut of “Scenic Byway” coexist with the jazzy “Faustine,” and so on. “Signal Fire” and the closer “Golden Age of Volcanism” are a bit darker, maybe a little closer to Burgess‘ work with Satan’s Satyrs, while “Greasy Bangs” lives up to its name for all of its 90 seconds, a heavy garage instrumental of the ’60s tradition. What’s amazing about it is the whole style is based around familiarity and yet the indentity built up throughout is so individual. I haven’t seen a lot of hype about it, but here’s hoping Burgess continues this pursuit.
There have been some personnel shifts in Swedish stoner-doomnodders New Mexican Doom Cult, and their second full-length, Ziggurat, operates mostly in the same volume-worshipping vein of riffing as 2023’s Necropolis (review here), but with a deeper perspective in “Metatron” and the pointedly doomed “Return to Babylon,” among others. The band now is Nils Ahnland on guitar and vocals (also bass), drummer Jonathan Ekvall and Jonas Strömberg on keys/production, and though they’ve given up some tonal impact as a result of dropping to a single guitar (layering notwithstanding; looking at you, “Criosphinx”), the tradeoff is they’re more flexible in sound while remaining plenty heavy from “The Church of Starry Wisdom” onward. Sabbathian roll is a specialty of the house, but the satisfaction when “Sungod” finally kicks in at full volume speaks to a different kind of mastery before the doom-hook in “I Stand Alone” rounds out. Curious where they’ll go from here.
Following on from 2025’s Never Never (review here), Toronto mellow-hangs specialists Lammping continue their four-album cycle of collaborations with this second one, bringing them together with Drew Smith (The Bicycles) and Chris Cummings (Marker Starling), as core Lammping duo Mikhail Galkin (vocals, production, guitar, etc.) and Jay Anderson (drums) slide so smoothly into and out of dub instrumentals and low-key heavy vibes, always fluid, here hinting toward jazz, there shimmering into the techno experiment “Prelude to Never” ahead of the finale “Never Done,” which closes like psychedelic singer-songwriter fare from some lost decade that was never actually real. I guess the update is Lammping remain on their on wavelength of sound and on their own echelon of cool. Spending some time there with them could only be to your greater benefit. Two more LPs coming.
Most of the material on Mos Eisley Spaceport‘s apparently-self-released live album, Live on Crow Hill, comes from their 2023 debut, Further, but with newer two songs at the end in the 12-minute “Interstellar Mantis” and “In Your Mind,” the jam-based classic heavy blues boogie rockers give a glimpse at where they’re headed just the same. And that’s not to take away from “Space Shift” — which starts with the Star Wars sample from whence their moniker hails — or the scope in “Ashes to Ashes” made organic by the fluidity of the band’s performance, I’m just noting the progression underway in their sound. Whether brand new or not, they deliver, and the fact that they’ve added organ to the arrangements in the time since the record came out means these interpretations stand on their own regardless. Most of all, the set is a blast and sounds like they’re having as much fun playing as I am listening, which is plenty. It would feel silly to ask more of it than that, whatever it might portend for them moving forward.
How lucky you are that after 40-plus years of industrial sounds depicting dystopian apocalyptic scenarios you finally get to live in one. Dome Runner are the machine punishment humanity deserves in an era where a tech CEO can casually say something about flying drones into people’s heads to kill them and/or licensing common knowledge on a subscription model and not be immediately imprisoned or extrajudicially hanged to the benefit of all. World Panopticon is suitably brutal across a 76-minute span, the Tampere, Finland, troupe keeping one foot in ’90s industrial metal as they did on their 2021 debut, Conflict State Design (review here), but filtering this through modern tonality and horrors. There are breaks, quiet parts in longer songs, interludes, etc., but I don’t know that I’d call any of it a real letup in the looming sense of oppression, and well, get used to that, because the boot on your neck that they’re portraying isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Welcome to the age of it-gets-worse-and-nobody-stops-it. At least you still have the music, for now.
While clearly written as individual pieces, the six songs comprising the 36-minute run of Italian heavy psych instrumentalists Basaltic Plateau‘s late-’25 debut LP, Dead Dinosaurs Echoes flow exceedingly well into each other, extrapolating the ebbs and flows within a given track into how it interacts with those around it. In this way, the three-piece build a landscape of sound — some kind of sound… scape! — across the span, warm-toned and so easy enough to liken to a desert rock influence, but heavier in its payoff stretches and up for trippier weirdness in “Summer Dream” and the more technical severity of the closing title-cut, also the longest at nearly nine minutes, and less predictable in its entirety than one might expect going in. As a debut, their self-awareness bodes well, and the psych of “Cuttlefish Galaxy” and progressivism of “Sleep Paralysis” might be careening toward each other like the Milky Way and Andromeda, but if there’s to be a conflict between the two, it’s a ways off. In the meantime, their creative reach serves them in immersing the listener.
Should you find yourself needing a reason to feel hopeful about the future of heavy rock, that Gjenferd might be part of it should more than suffice. The Bergen, Norway, four-piece of guitarist/vocalist Vegard Bachmann Strand, bassist Samuel Robson Gardner, keyboardist/vocalist Jakob Særvoll and drummer/vocalist Sivert Kleiven Larsen present their second album in Black Smoke Rising, and draw a thread back through decades of heavy rock stylization to conjure a sound that is their own and welcoming, unpretentious and progressive in kind. Whether it’s the shuffle of “Bound to Fall” and the hook of “Ride On” or the moodier nod of “Calling Your Name” and the mellow-till-it-ain’t “The Silence,” the band are dynamic, thoughtful in their craft and vital very much in the ‘alive’ sense of the word across the 10 inclusions, further distinguishing themselves among the emergent next generation of heavy rock and rollers. The listenability here can’t and shouldn’t be discounted, which is to say, don’t be surprised when you come back for another round with it.
I feel like it may forever be my fate to feel like I’m trying to catch up to Codex Serafini. Yes, temporally — their second LP, Mother, Give Your Children Sanity, came out last November — but also stylistically, and in this I feel a oneness with the universe, for which the UK outfit are an intentionally odd fit. Spacerocking in their own dimensional phase, the band follow 2023’s The Imprecation of Anima (review here) with a status-quo threatening cohesion that lands heavy with Wayne Adams‘ production but is more about the plunge into the farther far-out, sax and skronk and ritualistic melodies and madness. The title-track brings healing, but not like you’re thinking, whatever you’re thinking, and the subsequent blowout in capper “Marching Like a Toad” (before the drone finish) could hardly be better earned. Bands rarely sound so willing to follow where their whims take them, and the quirk in Mother, Give Your Children Sanity is more appreciable for that.
Airy grunge pervades the self-titled 2025 full-length debut from UK trio Sunbreather, resulting in a tonal richness one can hear in the eponymous “Sunbreather” or the prior “Apricity” as the record gets going, creating a kind of terrestrial psychedelia that vocal effects and an upped fuzz quotient in all-caps centerpiece/side B leadoff “WINE” seems to revel in pushing to one side or another. I like this album a lot; the way it feels like it’s establishing one aspect of the band’s sound or another and then moves on to the next idea without losing itself in indulgence. The organic flow. The closing pair of “Sleep” and “Aubade” emphasize this, with a fuller lumber in “Sleep” that opens atmospherically in “Aubade” while staying dreamy in tempo at least for most of its time. I say all the time that the challenge for UK bands is distinguishing themselves from the constant glut of their home country’s underground. That might be true here as well, on its face, but in actually hearing the songs, Sunbreather come out ahead in terms of identity. I’m pretty sure this was self-released, but I can’t imagine they wouldn’t be able to find a label if they wanted to for it.
True, the Moscovian plodders don’t have ‘bong’ or ‘weed,’ etc., in their name, but they’re pretty close to bong metal regardless on this initial three-songer, Dope Druid, lumbering through dank megasludge on the opening title-track before rolling noisier into “Wolf Shepherd” and chug-and-feedbacking to a point of near-abrasion (of the willful sort, mind you) on “Tsar of Blood,” making for a solid 19 minutes of damage to eardrums and braincells alike. So much the better a tone on which to break onesself. Imagine drowning in bong water. They aren’t shooting for anything overly complicated, but there is sort of a scope to the onslaught, and the rawness overarching becomes a benefit to the impact of the material — its heft is engrossing and the way the harshness comes through the recording lends aggression to the groove — but I’m not sure that’s aspiration so much as fortunate circumstance. It’s moot, ultimately, because any way you go, Konung have come to crush you into flattened little bits, and the best advice I can give is go with it and deal with the cleanup after.
Posted in Whathaveyou on October 28th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
It wasn’t overly hyped or anything, but I dug the gosh darn heck out of Dome Runner‘s first album, Conflict State Design (review here), when it came out through Svart in 2021. That record had a decidedly ’90s bent to it, with a pointed Godflesh influence at root in a way that the seven-minute single “Salvation Access” streaming below seems to work outward from. I hear less compression in the sound, more range and atmosphere, still with a heavy industrial charge running underneath. The new LP is called World Panopticon and it’s out Nov. 21, also through Svart Records.
Actually it’s a double-LP, and I’m here for the ’90s-style CD-era running time as well, especially if Dome Runner pan out to be as multifaceted as the first album made it seem they might. I haven’t heard the sophomore release yet, so can’t speak to the whole of the thing, but I’ll hope to hear it and have a review sometime between now and, well, whenever they do a third one, I guess. This post is very much a reminder to myself that that’s something I want to make happen when/if I’m able.
From the PR wire:
Salvation Access – DOME RUNNER’s new single out today; Upcoming album World Panopticon out in November via Svart Records
Industrial metal juggernaut DOME RUNNER have been grinding in the underground since 2017, fusing elements of extreme metal, hardcore and alternative with dystopian soundscapes and grinding machinery. Svart Records are proud to unleash their ambitious sophomore album World Panopticon in November.
The album’s second single Salvation Access was released today, October 24th, and the band’s mastermind Simo Perkiömäki comments on it as follows:
“In Salvation Access the album starts closing in thematically through collapse into acceptance, the place that ultimately sets the observer free. While the record deals with the various ways one tends to limit oneself even to the very edge of one’s own purpose, there are eventually deadends where you have to find another way instead of going through. The song represents a storm of light at the end of the tunnel for the soul-searching sun.” Watch the official visualiser for Salvation Access HERE
World Panopticon, the 77-minute double album, represent the strongest and most unafraid songwriting of the group while going dynamically and sonically further than ever before. Thematically spawn from a dystopian world as an escapist tale fused of observations of modern and future functions of society while simultaneously focusing in rebirth of the observing self-shackled within yet driven to break free, the album takes the listener deeper to the world around and beyond, open for those who dare to dive in.
World Panopticon is out on Svart exclusive ultra clear w/ black smoke vinyl, limited turquoise vinyl, classic black vinyl, and digipak CD. Release date November 21st.
The second-most dense object in the universe only to black holes, neutron stars are estimated to rotate over 700 times per second, driven by the incredible force of their own gravity. There are a couple reasons why this factoid comes to mind listening to “Huevos Rancheros/Rapid Round” leading off Skyjoggers‘ sixth-but-a-bunch-were-jam-releases album and first for Supernatural Cat (Ufomammut‘s label), 12021: Post-Electric Apocalypse, from the entrenched groove of the Tampere, Finland, trio’s boogie, to the fuzzed blowout that surrounds, the way they take Earthless-style instrumental ‘go’ and the spin of Alexi Belle‘s echoing solo.
Following up their 2024 split with Sula Bassana (review here), the Tampere-based Belle, bassist/vocalist Juan Rico (also synth) and drummer/vocalist Gabo Sabor offer four cuts across 36 minutes of earthly spacetime, with the opener as the longest of the bunch (immediate points) running an early gamut as if to tell the listener to buckle up for what’s coming, though by the time Skyjoggers get down to the last push in “Huevos Rancheros/Rapid Round,” with fervent energy and a solo that has a bit of Slayer‘s noisy impulse, they’ve showcased enough dynamic to cover an entire full-length.
Now, this might be called fortunate, since at 13:50, “Huevos Rancheros/Rapid Round” takes up such a significant portion of the record’s runtime, but it’s intended to be a major part of the thing and it is. In complement, the closing “Tessæil” stands at 12:19 and rushes through its post-punk intro to a driving, gloriously fuzzy riff, a crash-laden blowout in the spirit of neo-space metal, and a turn to progressive swing — in like the first minute. And yes, it continues to go from there, trading parts back and forth while not so much in a rush as working in its own definition of time and how the song unfolds.
The guitar and keys take some of the place of vocals, say, in the song’s midsection, with a kind of ringing-out, but the build is directed into a fuller wash that’s transcendent in the spirit of Skyjoggers‘ proggy countrymen in Polymoon, and the residual noise and feedback that end it on a long fade seem to emphasize the grand cosmic blink that has just taken place. In their moments of righteous abrasion, Skyjoggers are blinding and throwing elbows — see “Tessæil” from about six to seven minutes in, or “Huevos Rancheros/Rapid Round” throwing down the space-boogie gauntlet with its solo and echoing vocals around 11:30 — but as captured at Soundwell Studios by Janne Hakanen (Johannes Latva did additional recording, Niko Lehdontie mixed, Hanaken mastered), the sound is rich enough the underlying plan and structures at work are less the focus than the masterblaster fuzz and pickup shoving groove.
As though to emphasize the point, 12021: Post-Electric Apocalypseseparates “Huevos Rancheros/Rapid Round” and “Tessæil” with two shorter pieces, “Newtonin Kanuuna” (3:58) and “Døpehølm” (6:26). The former ends side A of the vinyl and the latter starts side B; they are sandwiched between the two extended tracks. And as much as the album greets the listener with to-neck immersion on the quick in its opener, “Newtonin Kanuuna” condenses its rhythmic charge to follow the pattern of surfy-twists set by the guitar, an effects-laced solo either of guitar or synth blinding in how it cuts through the surroundings.
‘Kanuuna’ is ‘cannon’ in Finnish (also ‘hangover’ in slang, apparently), and the bass distortion around the two-minute mark might just be where that explosive aspect manifests, though I’m not going to take away from the nodder bridge that takes hold after en route back to the jabs of the verse before they’re done, a shorter encapsulation of their modus, inherently more structured-feeling than the longer songs, but a reminder not to hold doing more than one thing against the band and that the album is better for it heading into the side flip and the even-bassier roll of “Døpehølm,” where they seem to find the meeting point between space and stoner idolatry, lumbering through the six and a half minutes with distant-cast vocals and a heaping dose of noise besides.
There’s some flash in the guitar late in “Døpehølm” of more extreme progressive metal, and that might be telling of what Skyjoggers have in mind going forward, or frankly it might not, I have no idea. But it doesn’t feel in listening through 12021: Post-Electric Apocalypse that there’s a lot that would be ‘out of bounds’ for the band in terms of songwriting. True, the songs reside well within a heavy psychedelic framework, but the angle of approach they’ve taken is their own, and the brashness that comes through the production further defines the character of the record, whether a given song has vocals or not.
As noted earlier, immersion is a lot of the goal here, but Skyjoggers‘ songs aren’t just looking to be the backdrop while you go about your day, or to lull you out of consciousness with repetition. There’s movement in 12021: Post-Electric Apocalypse whether it’s the build-up near the midpoint in “Tessæil” or the scuffed-up shuffle in “Newtonin Kanuuna,” and that’s best served by an active listening process, repeat visits, and so on. Whether a given listener has that energy to give will be up to how desperately they’re looking to be thrust into exospheric space, but the band are ready to go when you are.
Skyjoggers are no strangers to creating narratives and settings in time and space around their work, and the title 12021: Post-Electric Apocalypse would seem to follow suit in evoking a sense of story. Is that a year? A person’s designation in some dystopian ID system? What does ‘post-electric’ mean in this context? Are humans without power, some solar flare or EMP horror scenario? The songs don’t really answer these questions or seem to try/want to, but in the atmosphere and consuming throbs meted out, the trio meet the apocalypse head-on with expanse and maybe a bit of escapism through the songs themselves. If you’ve got plot-thread questions, fine, but don’t get so wrapped up in it that “Huevos Rancheros/Rapid Round” passes by on its way to the Kuiper Belt to look for planet nine. There’s more here than terrestrial paper could hope to convey.
Posted in Whathaveyou on March 25th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Ahead of launching the Spring tour that will see them make stops at Sonic Whip in the Netherlands, Desertfest Berlin and Esbjerg Fuzztival in Denmark, among others, Finnish heavy psych instrumentalists Skyjoggers have announced the May 2 release of their new album, 12021: Post-Electric Apocalypse. In case the three-piece’s weirdo-psych cred was still in doubt after their live-recorded 2024 split LP with Sula Bassana (review here), the fact that the upcoming long-player is being issued through Supernatural Cat — aka Ufomammut‘s label — should quell concerns. If not, the first single “Tessæil” is streaming now with 12 minutes of immersive persuasion.
In addition to the dates listed below, Skyjoggers have been confirmed for the legendary Stoned From the Underground in Germany as well as Down the Hill in Belgium, so expect further news to come as we head toward and past the album release through the remainder of the year. The PR wire has plenty of info to hold us — you and me, who are looking forward to the album — over until next time.
And here it is:
SKYJOGGERS: Finnish Space/Psych-Rock Trio To Release 12021: Post-Electric Apocalypse LP On Supernatural Cat May 2nd; “Tessæil” Video/Single, Preorders, And Tour Dates Posted
Tampere, Finland-based innovative space/psych rock trio SKYJOGGERS present their sixth LP, 12021: Post-Electric Apocalypse, confirming the album for release May 2nd on Supernatural Cat, the label formed by the Malleus Rock Art Collective and members of Ufomammut.
Fusing the exhilarating elements of space rock and psychedelic soundscapes, SKYJOGGERS’ music captures the essence of cosmic exploration, characterized by hypnotic riffs and an experimental approach that pushes boundaries. With a focus on dynamic performances and rich instrumental textures, the band invites listeners on a journey through uncharted musical territories.
On SKYJOGGERS’ 12021: Post-Electric Apocalypse, the band focuses on themes such as death, loss, and despair. The writing of the album took place during the pandemic, forest fires in the Amazon, and wars around the planet; The band took inspiration from such themes trying to channel the hard topics into something beautiful shining a ray of hope and light into the world through music. The album showcases the heaviest side of SKYJOGGERS heard to this day, bringing elements of black and doom metal into the band’s unique mix of modern space rock.
12021: Post-Electric Apocalypse was recorded at Soundwell Studios, Espoo by Janne Hakanen who also took over mastering duties, with additional recordings by Johannes Latva in Soossila, Tampere, and was mixed by Niko Lehdontie. Malleus Rock Art Collective handled the artwork and design.
“We first met Ufomammut in Warsaw a few years ago while on our first European tour. We bonded over our shared love of music, art and screen printing,” the band reveals. “It was quite a surprise when they asked us if we’d be interested in releasing our next album through Supernatural Cat; we said yes right away!”
Urlo of Ufomammut, Supernatural Cat, and Malleus writes, “Sometimes we are really impressed by a band when Poia and I are on tour with Ufomammut. SKYJOGGERS were a bolt from the blue, watching them play really amazed us. And we are so happy that their amazing new album is coming out on Supernatural Cat!”
The album’s lead single, “Tessæil,” is a nearly thirteen-minute-long epic ride. “Polyrhythms, screeching guitars, and wailing sirens block out the sun and bring about an auditive nuclear Winter,” the band writes. “This massive track ends 12021: Post-Electric Apocalypse like a weapon of mass destruction; leaving nothing in its wake.”
In support of 12021: Post-Electric Apocalypse, SKYJOGGERS will embark on an extensive album release tour to kick off in early May, including appearances at Desertfest Berlin and Esbjerg Fuzztival. Find all tour dates listed below and expect additional shows to be announced.
SKYJOGGERS Tour Dates: 5/03/2025 TPO – Bologna, IT 5/07/2025 Koncerty Na Garazach – Bratislava, SK 5/08/2025 Café Wolf – Graz, AT 5/11/2025 Dürer Kert – Budapest, HU 5/12/2025 Arena – Wien, AT 5/13/2025 Mocvara – Zagreb, HR 5/14/2025 Feierwerk – München, DE 5/16/2025 Poortgebouw – Rotterdam, NL 5/17/2025 Sonic Whip – Nijmegen, NL 5/18/2025 Backyard Club – Recklinghausen, DE 5/20/2025 C.Keller – Weimar, DE 5/21/2025 Dreikönigskeller – Frankfurt, DE 5/24/2025 Desertfest Berlin – Berlin, DE 5/25/2025 Klub Mechanik – Warsaw, PL 5/27/2025 Klub Szalonych – Wroclaw, PL 5/28/2025 KuBa – Jena, DE 5/29/2025 Neue Welt – Ingolstadt, DE 5/30/2025 Kulturwerkstatt Karnak – Kassel, DE 5/31/2025 Stellwerk – Hamburg, DE 6/06/2025 Råhuset – Copenhagen, DK 6/07/2025 Esbjerg Fuzztival – Esbjerg, DK
SKYJOGGERS: Alexi Belle – guitars, effects Juan Rico – bass, synth, vocals Gabo Sabor – drums, vocals
Posted in Reviews on December 11th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Wow. This is a pretty good day. I mean, I knew that coming into it — I’m the one slating the reviews — but looking up there at the names in the header, that’s a pretty killer assemblage. Maybe I’m making it easy for myself and loading up the QR with stuff I like and want to write about. Fine. Sometimes I need to remind myself that’s the point of this project in the first place.
Hope you’re having an awesome week. I am.
Quarterly Review #21-30
—
Thou, Umbilical
Even knowing that the creation of a sense of overwhelm is on purpose and is part of the artistry of what Thou do, Thou are overwhelming. The stated purpose behind Umbilical is an embrace of their collective inner hardcore kid. Fine. Slow down hardcore and you pretty much get sludge metal one way or the other and Thou‘s take on it is undeniably vicious and has a character that is its own. Songs like “I Feel Nothing When You Cry” and “The Promise” envision dark futures from a bleak present, and the poetry from which the lyrics get their shape is as despondent and cynical as one could ever ask, waiting to be dug into and interpreted by the listener. Let’s be honest. I have always had a hard time buying into the hype on Thou. I’ve seen them live and enjoyed it and you can’t hear them on record and say they aren’t good at what they do, but their kind of extremity isn’t what I’m reaching for most days when I’m trying to not be in the exact hopeless mindset the band are aiming for. Umbilical isn’t the record to change my mind and it doesn’t need to be. It’s precisely what it’s going for. Caustic.
The fourth full-length from Boston’s Cortez sets a tone with opener “Gimme Danger (On My Stereo)” (premiered here) for straight-ahead, tightly-composed, uptempo heavy rock, and sure enough that would put Thieves and Charlatans — recorded by Benny Grotto at Mad Oak Studios — in line with Cortez‘s work to-date. What unfolds from the seven-minute “Leaders of Nobody” onward is a statement of expanded boundaries in what Cortez‘s sound can encompass. The organ-laced jamitude of “Levels” or the doom rock largesse of “Liminal Spaces” that doesn’t clash with the prior swing of “Stove Up” mostly because the band know how to write songs; across eight songs and 51 minutes, the five-piece of vocalist Matt Harrington, guitarists Scott O’Dowd and Alasdair Swan, bassist Jay Furlo and sitting-in drummer Alexei Rodriguez (plus a couple other guests from Boston’s heavy underground) reaffirm their level of craft, unite disparate material through performance and present a more varied and progressive take than they’ve ever had. They’re past 25 years at this point and still growing in sound. They may be underrated forever, but that’s a special band.
Writing a catchy song is not easy. Writing a song so catchy it’s still catchy even though you don’t speak the language is the provenance of the likes of Uffe Lorenzen. The founding frontman of in-the-ether-for-now Copenhagen heavy/garage psych pioneers Baby Woodrose digs into more straightforward fare on the second full-length from his new trio Lydsyn, putting a long-established Stooges influence to good use in “Hejremanden” after establishing at the outset that “Musik Er Nummer 1” (‘music is number one’) and before the subsequent slowdown into harmony blues with “UFO.” “Nørrebro” has what would seem to be intentional cool-neighborhood strut, and those seeking more of a garage-type energy might find it in “Du Vil Have Mere” or “Opråb” earlier on, and closer “Den Døde By” has a scorch that feels loyal to Baby Woodrose‘s style of psych, but whatever ties there are to Lorenzen‘s contributions over the last 20-plus years, Lydsyn stand out for the resultant quality of songwriting and for having their own dynamic building on Lorenzen‘s solo work and post-Baby Woodrose arc.
The popular wisdom has had it for a few years now that retroism is out. Hearing Baltimorean power trio Magick Potion vibe their way into swaying ’70s-style heavy blues on “Empress,” smoothly avoiding the trap of sounding like Graveyard and spacing out more over the dramatic first two minutes of “Wizard” and the proto-doomly rhythmic jabs that follow. Guitarist/vocalist/organist Dresden Boulden, bassist/vocalist Triston Grove and drummer Jason Geezus Kendall capture a sound that’s as fresh as it is familiar, and while there’s no question that the aesthetic behind the big-swing “Never Change” and the drawling, sunshine-stoned “Pagan” is rooted in the ’68-’74 “comedown era” — as their label, RidingEasy Records has put it in the past — classic heavy rock has become a genre unto itself over the last 25-plus years, and Magick Potion present a strong, next-generation take on the style that’s brash without being willfully ridiculous and that has the chops to back up its sonic callouts. The potential for growth is significant, as it would be with any band starting out with as much chemistry as they have, but don’t take that as a backhanded way of saying the self-titled is somehow lacking. To be sure, they nail it.
Oase is the second full-length from Berlin’s Weite behind 2023’s Assemblage (review here), also on Stickman, and it’s their first with keyboardist Fabien deMenou in the lineup with bassist Ingwer Boysen (Delving), guitarists Michael Risberg (Delving, Elder) and Ben Lubin (Lawns), and drummer Nick DiSalvo (Delving, Elder), and it unfurls across as pointedly atmospheric 53 minutes, honed from classic progressive rock but by the time they get to “(einschlafphase)” expanded into a cosmic, almost new age drone. Longer pieces like “Roter Traum” (10:55), “Eigengrau” (12:41) or even the opening “Versteinert” (9:36) offer impact as well as mood, maybe even a little boogie, “Woodbury Hollow” is more pastoral but no less affecting. The same goes for “Time Will Paint Another Picture,” which seems to emphasize modernity in the clarity of its production even amid vintage influences. Capping with the journey-to-freakout “The Slow Wave,” Oase pushes the scope of Weite‘s sound farther out while hitting harder than their first record, adding to the arrangements, and embracing new ideas. Unless you have a moral aversion to prog for some reason, there’s no angle from which this one doesn’t make itself a must-hear.
Big on tone and melody in a way that feels inspired by the modern sphere of heavy — thinking that Hum record, Elephant Tree, Magnetic Eye-type stuff — Florida’s Orbiter set forth across vast reaches in Distorted Folklore, a song like “Lightning Miles” growing more expansive even as it follows a stoner-bouncing drum pattern. Layering is a big factor, but it doesn’t feel like trickery or the band trying to sound like anything or anyone in particular so much as they’re trying to serve their songs — Jonathan Nunez (ex-Torche, etc.) produced; plenty of room in the mix for however big Orbiter want to get — as they shift from the rush that typified stretches of their 2019 debut, Southern Failures, to a generally more lumbering approach. The slowdown suits them here, though fast or slow, the procession of their work is as much about breadth as impact. Whatever direction they take as they move into their second decade, that foundation is crucial.
As regards genre: “dark arts?” Taking into account the 44 minutes of Vlimmer‘s fourth LP, which is post-industrial as much as it’s post-punk, with plenty of goth, some metal, some doom, some dance music, and so on factored in, there’s not a lot else that might encompass the divergent intentions of “Endpuzzle” or “Überrennen” as the Berlin solo-project of Alexander Donat harnesses ethereal urbanity in the brooding-till-it-bursts “Sinkopf” or the manic pulses under the vocal longing of closer “Fadenverlust.” To Donat‘s credit, from the depth of the setup given by longest/opening track (immediate points) “2025” to the goth-coated keyboard throb in “Mondläufer,” Bodenhex never goes anywhere it isn’t meant to go, and unto the finest details of its mix and arrangements, Vlimmer‘s work exudes expressive purpose. It is a record that has been hammered out over a period of time to be what it is, and that has lost none of the immediacy that likely birthed it in that process.
Indianapolis four-piece Moon Goons cut an immediately individual impression on their third album, Lady of Many Faces. The album, which often presents itself as a chaotic mash of ideas, is in fact not that thing. The band is well in control, just able and/or wanting to do more with their sound than most. They are also mindfully, pointedly weird. If you ever believed space rock could have been invented in an alternate reality 1990s and run through filters of lysergism and Devin Townsend-style progressive metal, you might take the time now to book the tattoo of the cover of Lady of Many Faces you’re about to want. Shenanigans abound in the eight songs, if I haven’t made that clear, and even the nod of “Doom Tomb Giant” feels like a freakout given the treatment put on by Moon Goons, but the thing about the album is that as frenetic as the four-piece of lead vocalist/guitarist Corey Standifer, keyboardist/vocalist Brooke Rice, bassist Devin Kearns and drummer Jacob Kozlowski get on their way to the doped epic finisher title-track, the danger of it coming apart is a well constructed, skillfully executed illusion. And what a show it is.
Although it opens up with some element of foreboding by transposing the progression of AC/DC‘s “Hells Bells” onto its own purposes in heavy Canadiana rock, and it gets a bit shouty/sludgy in the lyrical crescendo of “What a Dummy,” which seems to be about getting pulled over on a DUI, or the later “The Castle of White Lake,” much of Familiars‘ Easy Does It lives up to its name. Far from inactive, the band are never in any particular rush, and while a piece like “Golden Season,” with its singer-songwriter vocal, acoustic guitar and backing string sounds, carries a sense of melancholy — certainly more than the mellow groover swing and highlight bass lumber of “Gustin Grove,” say — the band never lay it on so thick as to disrupt their own momentum more than they want to. Working as a five-piece with pedal steel, piano and other keys alongside the core guitar, bass and drums, Easy Does It finds a balance of accessibility and deeper-engaging fare combined with twists of the unexpected.
Progressive stoner psych rockers The Fërtility Cült unveil their fifth album, A Song of Anger, awash in otherworldly soul music vibes, sax and fuzz and roll in conjunction with carefully arranged harmonies and melodic and rhythmic turns. There’s a lot of heavy prog around — I don’t even know how many times I’ve used the word today and frankly I’m scared to check — and admittedly part of that is how open that designation can feel, but The Fërtility Cült seem to take an especially fervent delight in their slow, molten, flowing chicanery on “The Duel” and elsewhere, and the abiding sense is that part of it is a joke, but part of everything is a joke and also the universe is out there and we should go are you ready? A Song of Anger is billed as a prequel, and perhaps “The Curse of the Atreides” gives some thematic hint as well, but whether you’ve been with them all along or this is the first you’ve heard, the 12-minute closing title-track is its own world. If you think you’re ready — and good on you for that — the dive is waiting for your immersion.
Posted in Reviews on November 27th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Sula Bassana and Skyjoggers both took part in this year’s Dazed and Spaced Festival at Bar 227 in Hamburg, the former headlining the second night on April 27 and the latter playing earlier that same evening, having traveled from their Earthly home in Tampere, Finland, to play. The tracks — recorded by someone named Funcky — are pretty lo-fi, with Skyjoggers starting off side A in ground-torching fashion on “Step One: Breathe/Step Two: Levitate,” building momentum quickly with the lead cut from their 2023 three-songer EP, 37 Steps ’til Sunlight, released on vinyl alongside 2022’s I Am a Stone in Gagaria, the band detailing aurally their adventures on the planet of the same name as they hurtle through the cosmos with an FTL engine apparently powered by reverb, raw distortion mixed by Johannes Latva and mastered by Janne Hakanen, and sheer will.
As this split is my first encounter with the three-piece of guitarist Alexi Belle, bassist Juan Rico and drummer Gabo Sabor, I’ll admit my ignorance of Gagaria, the Kosmonoita or the uncharted solar system where their 2019 LP, Seasons of Uiu, reportedly took place. Nonetheless, the Finnish unit make a joyful racket out amid the void and the dark energy, and “Lightrunner” is careening and swirling alike, vocal echoes cutting through clearly, but buried in echo in classic space rock fashion. But Skyjoggers aren’t necessarily a classic space rock band. Their sound, and their apparent conceptualist ethic, certainly has roots in the style, but “Lightrunner” takes off on a more modern, funkier jam after it hits the halfway mark and before it realigns around the forward-directed, gleefully noisy thrust. It’s a blend that will make it easy for listeners coming into the split expecting a weirdness of character to get on board, but frankly, the ship is loaded and is gonna launch whether you’re on it or not.
The destination, here, for Skyjoggers is the floating “…For Outer Space,” which at nine and a half minutes is nearly as long as the first two songs put together and likewise represents a shift in style. Taken from 2018’s Journeymen full-length, where it’s preceded by “Set Sail…,” “…For Outer Space” initially leaves behind the tumult of “Step One: Breathe/Step Two: Levitate” and “Lightrunner” in favor of mellower cosmic blessings. They bring it up to a wall of noise efficiently enough, but the sense of purposeful meander, the feeling that it all might come crashing apart, remain consistent. It doesn’t, of course, or the set probably wouldn’t see public release at all, but “…For Outer Space” rides that line as it moves deeper into its second half with a this-is-why-it-closes-shows, big-no-bigger nod that, even in this live version so much about the energy the band are bringing to it from the stage still feels immersive.
One could hardly ask a more fitting lead-in for Sula Bassana. The long-running Kassel, Germany, solo-project of Dave “Sula Bassana” Schmidt — who not only is releasing the split through his Sulatron Records label (Echodelick and Cardinal Fuzz also have copies) and mixed his band’s portion (Eroc mastered), but is known for outfits like Electric Moon, Zone Six, Liquid Visions, the way underrated Weltraumstaunen, Moonseeds who released an album earlier this year, and so on — took on a full lineup in 2023. This is the first release I know of to feature it, and as they reinterpret and flesh out “We Will Make It” from Sula Bassana‘s 2022 album, Nostalgia (review here), Schmidt himself fleshing it out on organ and synth/Mellotron while guitarist Adrian Grod adds vocals and bassist Kristina Schmitz and drummer Franz Fesel conjure molten groove, the context feels appropriate.
“We Will Make It” feels more volatile with its shouts past the seven-minute mark, repeating the title line with due insistence, but indeed, the band get where they’re going, which is a quick receding before the harder-hitting finish. As a complement to Skyjoggers‘ closer, “We Will Make It” has moments of heavier kosmiche push, maybe even a bit of grunge in the riffing of guitarist Adrian Grod — which are a novelty on a Sula Bassana release in themselves — alongside Sula‘s Mellotron and declarative vocals, the linear groove of Franz Fesel and the corresponding low-end flow of Kristina Schmitz‘s bass. A full lineup is a turn for Sula Bassana to make, and the amalgam of different players obviously is a shift in dynamic for an outfit that used to just be one person, but “We Will Make It” does, in fact, make it. It makes it clear that a live performance such as one captured here, that the notion of expanding on past ideas and adventuring into new ground yet to be discovered, is the point.
Can’t argue as “We Will Make It” leaves a scorch mark halfway through the solar system and the analog sci-fi, vaguely-Eastern synth sets a backdrop for Grod‘s somehow cultish echoing spoken word intro to “Come With Me.” The destination isn’t clear — that is, I’m not sure where we’re going — but they cover a pretty broad swath in the 13 minutes of the split’s closing track; languid, fluid, druid. It’s not all wash as they dive back to the keys and vibemaking from whence they set out, but when the volume comes back around by about nine minutes in, they sound like they’re rending the fabric of spacetime. Gravity jam. The sense of reaching into the unknown is palpable, and even the residual noise after the drums make their final crash feels immersive. It’s not just that Sula Bassana have become a band, then. They’ve become this band.
A live release is a fascinating way to unveil that, and perhaps not what Schmidt and company originally had in mind for Sula Bassana‘s ‘debut’ as they’ve gotten going over the last year, but “We Will Make It” and, especially “Come With Me,” which is a new song, herald journeys to come. It’s strange to think of Skyjoggers as the more experienced band considering Sula Bassana‘s recently-reissued first album, Dreamer, came out in 2002, but the new lineup is fresh and sounds like it, which if it needs to be said is not a complaint. Psych-heads, Sula-worshipers, or anyone looking for a bit of alt-universe aural escape, here you go.
Finnish extreme industrial two-piece Vorare are releasing two albums this month, and the Rope Tower collaboration LP pairing them with Geneva, Switzerland, experimentalist noisemaker Earthflesh is the latter of them, set to issue on May 31. That puts it just one week after the standalone Atelier lands May 24 as the follow-up to 2022’s Voyeur (review here), and that record too is a barrage of death-stench machine cruelty. The concurrent offerings began their respective recording processes about two years ago, but where Atelier was finished in May 2022, the five-track/30-minute so-dark-it’s-like-you-read-the-news Rope Tower started toward the end of that summer and seems to have been longer in its poisonous steeping.
Earthflesh earlier this year released the 39-minute single-tracker Light-Matter-Spirit — also stylized all-caps — and amid the panicked pulsations of “Seepage” premiering in the ropes-and-hoods-themed video below, the effectively noise-on-noise blend feels particularly harsh, even in the context of what Vorare have done before. It all seems to decay in the middle of the six-minute piece, with indecipherable blown-out growling to offer no real comfort and a later drag of beat offset by various electronic hums before it ends with distorted drone. That’s also how “Ovigerous” leads off Rope Tower, but the opener hits less immediately with its beat, instead using that drone and various piercing high frequencies to set the backdrop for the cruelty about to unfold.
I’ll note that “Seepage” isn’t the first reference to bodily discharge from Vorare, whose debut EP was 2022’s The Drainage Rituals (review here), but together with Earthflesh, the foreboding ambience wrought in Rope Tower is its own thing. Listening front-to-back as “Haswell” slowly fades-in its threat with howls like distant mechanized beasts or war horns echoing over devastated landscapes, the feeling is like when you stand somewhere you know that a murder or something else awful happened. That lingering aura of the reality of violent death. Certainly the suicidal/executionary imagery bolsters this impression, but as “Haswell” cymbal-washes out circa 2:50 and everything but the guttural vocals goes away for about 20 seconds before slamming back with a grueling thud, rising to a speaker-blowing (seriously, watch out) low-end static unto its gradual wash of funereal sounds, the confrontation is consuming.
“Sopite” doesn’t blink in staring into this overarching void, evolving its infected cinematic tension with non-beat rhythmic back-and-forth and elements appearing and disappearing as they go. Without the onslaught of the vocals, the penultimate piece of Rope Tower feels like a respite, but the keyboard lines in its second half and the rumble underscoring them are consistent in their horrific manifestations and more than just a setup for the eight-minute finale “Turpentine Falls,” which begins with its own flatline drone and far-back growling over the course of its first two minutes. You could call it minimal in everything but how it makes your skin crawl. It’s not until 3:47 that the beat and harsh screaming kick in, and from there, the next several minutes embark on a vicious build-up so that by the time they hit the six-minute mark, “Turpentine Falls” has grown to the LP’s most ferocious cacophony.
It’s anyone’s guess who’s meting out which aspects of the punishing entirety — most of the vocals seem to come from the Vorare side, so that’s something — but as “Turpentine Falls” shifts from its payoff to the fading residual drone that ends, it underscores the way Rope Tower works on multiple levels at once in a mix that’s deep enough to hold the monsters it does. United perhaps most of all in their readiness to push the limits of extremity in music through their way-gone-and-way-dark approaches, the alignment of Earthflesh and Vorare results in an aurally caustic and immersive nightmare. Words like ‘heavy’ don’t begin to cut it.
Rope Tower is out May 31. “Seepage” premieres below. It’s NSFW unless you never want anyone in your office or other place of employment to talk to you again. Which maybe you do, and fair enough.
Good luck:
Vorare & Earthflesh, “Seepage” video premiere
VORARE, the Finnish avant-garde drone-doom/death industrial duo comes together with the Swiss one-man drone/noise outfit EARTHFLESH to bring you the five-track, 30-minute collaboration album Rope Tower. The albums is the second of the two VORARE albums coming out in May, scheduled to be released on May 31. Pre-orders available here:https://vorare.bandcamp.com/album/rope-tower
Having crossed paths first elsewhere, the idea for the two projects to collaborate came into fruition after each noticed they’re on similar wavelengths when it comes to hallucinatory aesthetics in both aural and visual worlds. The work begun in late summer ’22 and took its own time to morph and refine over the ensuing year and a half, involving multiple recording sessions across countries, and meticulous attention to detail above all. The end result is a perfect amalgamation of the two entities, presenting familiar corners from both worlds yet discovering brand new nooks along the way.
Rope Tower is an immensely dark but pervasive journey throughout various sonic fields ranging from structured bursts of industrial and doom to seeping, slowly evolving droning ambiances, that melt together seamlessly as a single tapestry free of dashed lines and silent spaces. The narratives detail real life events from the personal to the more broad instances, more often than not brushed in monochromatic colours and vile mien. You can only match the abyss by becoming one.
