More albums, more catching up with things, more staying ahead of things, more cherry picking through the mountain of albums, more picking of the cherries, picking off the cherries, the never ending pile of demanding cherries that find their way here on a daily basis. You surely know the policy by now? We do, on the whole, only feature the albums and things we feel positive about. We really don’t have time to clutter up these already overloaded pages with negative coverage of things that do nothing for us, there isn’t the time or space, there isn’t any need, although some times there probably is. Here’s another five or so….
HaywardxDälek – Hayward x Dälek (Relapse Records) – The important news here is that the very very real reality of this album sounds every bit as good as the prospect of it sounded on paper. And how good did it sound on paper! That low slung Dälek thing and yer man Charles Hayward from This Heat and currently Abstract Concrete coming together for an album called HaywardxDälek, I mean, come on!
Is it sounding a little like Webcore right now? Like they could go for miles and miles? It has got that back room of The Robey on a Club Dog night feel, that experimental festival band feel, Ullulators and such, that almost dub-like forward moving spirit, we are deeply into an instrumental package, that low slung Dälek voice is resting right now, when he does kick in then he kicks in a very serious New York way, this is a real coming together.
“HaywardxDälek is the brand new collaborative album from acclaimed This Heat drummer and creative force Charles Hayward and rapper/producer Will Brooks (aka MC dälek). The album combines daring improvisation with hip-hop-informed sampling; it’s a thrilling tour de force journey into an uncharted new world of sound and possibility” – not sure if it is uncharted, it is a rich path they’re taking us down though, it certainly is rewarding…
“The collaboration came together through Samarbeta, a residency and artist development programme produced by From the Other in Salford, UK. The bulk of the music was recorded live in September 2023, Hayward improvised on drums and synthesiser, while Brooks played an SP-404 sampler and an iPad loaded with Samplr sampling software. Written over two feverish days in a studio at Islington Mill, the songs came to life in a blur of inspiration. They were recorded soon after in the New Adelphi Studios at the University of Salford before the duo spent just one day shaping a live version, which they debuted at Fat Out Fest. The entire process, from first note to live performance, unfolded in a single, whirlwind week. Brooks then took the live recording back to his Deadverse Studio headquarters in Union City, New Jersey, for mixing and adding lyrics for “Between the Word and the Drum,” “Asymmetric,” and “As Children Chant.” The resulting body of work sees Charles Hayward and MC Dälek bridge generations and continents, uniting South East London and New Jersey in a scintillating exploration of rhythm, abstraction, and sonic architecture. It’s a striking album that traverses the lines between hip-hop, noise-rock, ambient soundscapes, and free improvisation”
– well that’s how the record label tell it and for once do let yourself believe it all, this is a striking album. This is an album that really bites, at times blissful, at times nothing short of incredible, but then there is one of the driving forces behind This Heat, one of the msot vital of bands back there, teaming up with the powerful restraint of Dälek. One of the best gigs we ever saw was a Dälek gig down in the London basement that was the Borderline and this, with Mr Hayward sharing the controls, has that same forward moving intensity of that never to be forgotten night in that dark basement (must dig out that interview we did with Dälek that night, must start posting old interviews, we do have one hell of an archive, that was a particularly rewarding encounter)
This is rich, this is intense, even the calm passages of ambiance are intense, and of course Charles Hayward is a rhythmic force; intense, intent, lean, not a moment that shouldn’t be there, powerfully economic. And Dälek has both performed and mixed everything just so perfectly, his flow really is intense, tense. The two of them together are apocalyptic at times – that bit there feels like the wheels of capitalism grinding us, dark, ominous, anxiety, a menace, but but but, it is organic, it is warm, the mystery of the city at night, strange machines outside the back of Waterloo station at four in the morning in the days before there was a nighttime economy. Hayward x Dälek is an inviting album, at times graceful, it is a compelling combination of the two creative forces, a glorious blending, no one is dominating, at times one or the other leads, it is a perfectly balanced coming together of the two.
A piece of work that goes to many places, Hayward x Dälek is powerfully rewarding album, there’s so much depth, soul, menace, dark questions, so much spirit, that spirit of this age? of this heat? Surely one of the strongest albums of this rather musically rich year? No question about it, this is every bit as good as the idea of it was, highly recommended.
Bandcamp / Relapse / Charles Hayward / Dälek
And….
Between The Buried And Me – The Blue Nowhere (Inside Out) – One of those complex progressive metal bands that aren’t going to settle on one note when they can cram in ten. Between The Buried And Me do their thing well, plenty of light and shade, clever, complex but not overbearingly so, it was all going so well until we got to the tediously predictable cookie monster vocals; “Progressive metal visionaries Between the Buried and Me return with their most immersive and eclectic record yet—The Blue Nowhere. Mixing uncharted musical detours with their distinctive aggressive identity, the band create a conceptual world unlike anything in their incredible catalogue”.
The band from North Carolina are kicking out complex progressive metal that for once is genuinely progressive, adventurous, challenging and jam packed with rewarding chopping and chaning, slicing and dicing, with bobbing and weaving, they joust well, they’re challenging themselves musically. Now if only the vocalist would grow up or maybe shut up, when they do colour it with ‘proper’ singing then yes.
There’s some genuine musical adventure here, the delicious fifty-two seconds of the Peter And The Wolf classical flavours of Mirador Uncoil for example. Between the Buried and Me (silly name) are relentless, they never let up, even the light bits are intense, even the shade is extreme and let’s cram another screaming guitar bit in here before we hammer on those keyboards again, and now they’ve gone rather Danny Elfman on us (no bad thing) and now a little operatic, pile it all on now, add all the sprinkles and the rest. They are rather good at it….
And another one that we need to catch up with before the year really does end…
Agriculture – The Spiritual Sound (The Flenser) – Now this is a positively violent album. Agriculture call themselves an ecstatic Black Metal band, they come from Los Angeles, they are a whirlwind of screaming noise and speed metal, thing is, they’re not like all the others. I once had an argument, on a late night top of a London double decker bus, with a guitarist from an extreme metal band about how he and his band were all about doing something new while challenging themselves to stay within the boundaries of their chosen genre – it got quite heated as he waved a copy of Organ at me and ranted about a review he didn’t like. Agriculture seem to have achieved everything the man on the bus wanted to, there is a spiritual sound, The Spiritual Sound, a sound that does indeed trace “a narrative arc through extremes: searing, sky-cracking catharsis on side A; a slow-burning, devotional undercurrent on side B”.
The album is largely a fusing of the visions of its two principal songwriters, Dan Meyer and Leah Levinson: distinct voices, deeply complementary. This is a damn fine, sometimes shimmering, sometimes positively violent, constantly challenging extreme metal alblum that rewards far more than most metal albums do these days. This is an album alive with colourful detail, with bits that bite like metal should, old school metal now and again, an album that never becomes predictable, that demands your full attention, that just demands really. That start to Bodhidharma is inspired, the whole piece is, the whole album, the whole thing is and Hallelujah is just that. Beautifully exstatic cathartic Black Metal that gets better and better the more you let it in. Bandcamp
Junior Brother – The End (Strap Originals) – I guess we could just stick Junior Brother over there is some kind of convenient catch all folk music box while we consider the days and days and days and the idea there isn’t really a weekend? It would be easy to just say he’s an Irish folk artist and leave it over there but that really would be lazy and it would miss the point of what he continues to do in such a compelling way. Stick Junior Brother in that lazy folk box and you might think he’s not for you and really he is absolutely not (just) a folk artist.
This latest album sneaked out a couple of months ago with very little fanfare, we have coved Junior Brother before, quite a few times, must confess we almost missed this September album release though and this really does deserve both to be covered and to not be thrown into some pigeonhole where it will be ignore by most. Stuck in a box over there that’s probably marked for those types only and ot be ignored by everyone else as we pick whatever it was he ate out of our teeth.
There’s all kinds of layers to peel back here both lyrically and musically, he has indeed won the match, did he want to win it though? Yes he is playing with traditional sounds, standing in his own skin as it were, yes it is very Irish as it blends a feel of the avant-garde with more traditional forms of music, the result is something very modern, something very forward looking and he is dying to be good, you do have to listen to what’s he’s singing in case he nearly falls into it again.
Junior Brother is the artistic name or Ronan Kealy, a critically acclaimed (by those who know), idiosyncratic Irish singer-songwriter from County Kerry, he is rather distinctive, lyrically raw and you might say rather unique as well as uncompromising both in terms of thought and musical delivery. Compelling, intricate, full of contradiction, pushing boundaries and mostly just damn good to listen to, just good to enjoy even if he is, at times tackling rather dark subject matter, tackling rather personal and rather political subjects and even if he is taking different parts of things that might be hard to swallow.
Everything Junior Bother does is with grace and if not always with beauty it is all rather beautiful. If it is with a touch of Irish folklore and sometimes doubled over and curled on the ground it is always richly challenging as well endlessly charming as he goes down and down and round and around those Ringforts with a glamour, round and around for ever and ever, as her makes his bed yet can never quite go to sleep…
Oh what satisfying days. Why are we here? Start digging, terrified of his dreams or meeting the memory man? is he lost? At what cost? You do have to keep listening, catching line of what he might be saying and what might be smiling in the skies and he dances around those Ringforts and all they hold within those circular walls and those souterrains. And you do what his to go on, whatever the will, you do want his spirit, his hope, is this hope? Ominous spirit? Pagan spirit? Does it remind us of those Oroonies? Surely there’s hope here? Hope and a lot more than just folk… This, one again, an Junior Brother always is, is excellent.
Links: Label shop / Strap Originals / Junior Brother / You Tube
And one more before we’re done with this page….
Moron Police – Pachinko – (Mighty Jam) – Some kind of very North American sounding sometimes soft sometimes hard, mostly politely somewhere in there between the two, rock from Norway. Right now they’re sounding like some kind on sanitised clean cut Styx.
This is a non stop one piece concept album, the band’s fourth album – “This is the big one. The ding of dongs It’s 60 minutes of non-stop MoPo action. And it’s a concept album about a guy who turns into a sentient Pachinko machine in Tokyo. As silly as that is, this has been an immense labour of love. It took everything to get this one done…”
And we’ve just hit the quite reflective bit, mostly it has been clean cut and semi bombastic softish hard rock up until this point, it will continue in that North American AOR manner that almost touches on the Kansas/Journey side of clean cut very nearly but not quite Prog Rock for the rest of the album once we are passed the quite reflective ballad.
Some of Pachinko sounds like bits of (annoying) afternoon television chat show theme tunes, it clearly is a labour of love, it is well recorded and produced, some of it really is cheesy and that really is an awful band name. What can we say, well let’s politely leave it with you (some of it really is cheesy, soft cream cheese, they’ve gone all limp and slushy now on this twelfth of fourteen short songs), we have gone back to this album a number of times in recent weeks, I guess you could call it joyous, uplifting, committed, brave maybe? We’ll politely leave it with you, their pop rock concept album with you, you might like it, it isn’t really one for us… Bandcamp
Previously….
A little more from that Junior Brother album….
THE ORGAN 