More more more. More albums, shall we dance around it all again, Did we say that last time? And the time before? Where were we? It was all about the background collage really. Hey, too many albums not enough time, and (some of) these things do demand proper time and anyway, and, and then, and you do know we only have time for the good ones don’t you? Well most of the time, then again sometimes, well sometimes. And you do know no one reads the editorial bit at the top, well why would they? Here’s some more albums, there are so many, the one’s that weren’t delt with yesterday are now all lost underneath the ones that arrived today and that rather good Duritti Column album that landed here last week is burried way down in the mountain with all the others that are demanding time and attention,
Sweeping Promises – You Say I Romanticize (Sub Pop) – We’ve been sharing slices of the rather rewarding new Sweeping Promises album all Summer, the record is almost here now (out on August 14th). They’re from Lawrence, Kansas and they’re hitting is with what is described rather accurately as “a frenetic new offering”. You Say I Romanticize is the name of the new album (and yes they are American so we’ll forgive the misspelling of romanticise). Frenetic, feisty, deliciously urgent New Wave Post Punk that sounds like a lot of things without ever letting you put your finger on anything too obvious in terms of an influence or a comparison. Tunes, they’ve got some killer tunes, songs, lyrics, they’ve also got details, little undercurrents within the great songs, synth runs, basslines, little hooks that are almost hidden under the frantic energy and the Gossip of it all. Bassist/vocalist Lira Mondal has just the right voice to go with just the right attitude found in all that spiky delivery. New Wave pop tunes, pop songs that occasionally demand a scream, songs to get your hooks into, nothing revolutionary, just really good songs delivered in just the right way by people clearly doing it the right way…
“Recorded over an 18-month period, largely prepared and periodically interrupted guitarist/producer Caufieldby Schnug’s non-SP production work, You Say I Romanticize is a tribute to the chaos of creation and collaboration under shifting circumstances. For years now Schnug and Mondal have embedded themselves in their combination tour house and recording studio in Kansas, annually working on dozens of albums from other bands, hosting tour stops, planning shows, and the like. After an immersive process of tracking and whittling down YSIR demos and carving out an idiosyncratic chamber recording method for the album’s intentional wall-of-sound, the duo brought in touring drummer Spenser Gralla to play the songs like the band would on stage….”
So many things to like here, to celebrate, so much to embrace in the self-expression of Sweeping promises, in their creative energy and their freshness, a frenetic freshness, a frenzied delight of a post punk new wave album, a proper one… Bandcamp
Queen Elephantine – Live Once – Now that’s a band name that rings vague bells, I believe we may have covered the good Queen Elephantine a couple of decades ago; “A nebulous worship of heavy mood and time, formed in Hong Kong in 2006 and now based in Philadelphia” so it says on their Bandcamp page and another reminder that there is a new album in the intray today. Well actually they say EP; it is something like thirty minutes, three tracks, three long pieces that all kind of do the same thing, here’s what the Queen has to say on the shape of things….
“a pilgrimage through cosmic sludge. The shapeshifting post-apocalyptic rock band draws from psychedelia, doom, drone, and noise as well as free jazz and sacred music from around the world. They have released six full albums as well as several EPs including splits with Elder and Sons of Otis, and have joined Oxbow, Insect Ark, and many others on the road….”
A paragraph that kind of sums things up rather nicely, a heady mix psychedelic guitar and drone improv that does kind of feel spiritual if you are. Little hard to feel spiritual on a Tuesday morning in Hackney, an August Tuesday morning rather than a July one (yes that was a smartarse Urian Heep refrence that is of no relevance what so ever). Queen Elephantine sound heady, they sound exotix, they sound very psychedelic, touching on stoner rock, they do drone rather a lot, they have some tasty riffs that don’t invade the sound too much, they kind of sound like their artwork looks. They do their thing extremely well…
Bandcamp / queenelephantine.com
Maya Ongaku – Nothing Space Music (Guruguru Brain) – An extremely mellow, delicate, very easy on the ear leaf-like set of musical things from Fujisawa, Japan.
“Maya Ongaku have always been searching for what exists just beyond the edge of perception. Since forming in the seaside towns surrounding Enoshima, the trio has followed a path guided less by intention than intuition, allowing songs, ideas, and experiences to emerge through a process they describe as 自然発生 (shizen hassei), spontaneous occurrence. Nothing Space Music is the deepest expression of that philosophy to date….”
It is all rather like sitting under the trees in the sunshine playing with daisys and admiring the exoticness of hoverflies should you be of the mind to so jsut that. Refreshing, cleansing, a touch too mellow and dare I say hippy-shaped for these ears, you might find it as beautiful as it obviously is. Bandcamp
Cartilage – Operating Altar (Everlasting Spew) – One of those extreme metal bands where the guitarist has too many fingers and needs to show us how tediously fast he can play while the singer keeps stepping on drawing pins and another one does the bottom-end growling unless of course it is just one person (in which case they better call a vet as soon as possible). How many of these bands are there?
“After four bloody years and a quick taste-test in 2025’s Tales From The Entrails EP, San Francisco’s Cartilage will deliver their third full-length slab of sinewy gore metal, Operating Altar, through their allies at Everlasting Spew Records on September 11th. For fans of Exhumed, Impaled, Carcass, Disgorged, Impetigo, Repulsion and Terrorizer” so says the press release. Something to do with Deathgrind, Gore Metal and well I kind of need my metal to be a little less obvious and maybe on a label that doesn’t have such a dumb name?
Martin Virgo – Ghost Piano (Virgo Records) – Composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Martin Virgo, “having previously worked with such musical luminaries as Björk and Massive Attack”, went on to produce and compose the music for his own band Mono. Classically trained in composition and piano at the Guildhall School of Music, he has apparently now developed a taste for Chopin, French Impressionism and well:
“I came to the point a couple of years ago when I wanted to create something that was completely stripped of all the frippery and distractions of modern production techniques,” explains Virgo. “I wanted to write music that had a sense of lineage, but within a very distilled style. I also wanted to take a break from the world of digital audio production, so all the tracks on ‘Ghost Piano’ were recorded live by myself on a Steinway model B acoustic grand piano, with the cello on the title track played by Nick Cooper (The Michael Nyman Band).”
So really, whast we have here is some polite Chopin-like piano music, not sure if anything much has been added to the sound, it is nice enough if polite Chopin-like piano music is your thing, not sure why it’s been sent hete, it isn’t really our thing, it might be yours, we’ll politely give you the link to his Bandcamp page
Pylar – Delyrio (Cavsas) – “With Delyrio, Spanish practitioners of lucid delirium Pylar return to further expand its singular body of chrono-irrational sonic artefacts. Conceived as the opening movement of the band’s final album cycle, Delyrio pushes deeper into a fractured realm where metaphysical inquiry, delirium, and sonic extremity converge” – This is indeed a mammoth album, a giant slice of creatively intense (extreme) metal
“Having previously descended into vast territories of cosmic horror and existential collapse, unpredictable metal entity Pylar now abandon all remaining certainties in favour of pure delirious propulsion. The result is a work driven by dislocation and irrational intensity, where time, identity, and structure dissolve into a constantly shifting hallucination” and yes, it is lazy to just quote the press release but hey, this almost forty minute four track album is ambitiously epic and the earfood more than backs up the claims made. Extreme, intense, tense intensity, progressive, challenging, pushing at the edges….
“Operating as speculative agents and symbolic detonators, the members of Pylar manipulate and deform the primordial language of metal through what they describe as the Law Of Salazar, a mechanism of radical perspective displacement. Their vision further absorbs conceptual fragments drawn from philosophical fiction, speculative realism, and the experimental thought of figures such as Reza Negarestani, Amy Ireland, and the chaotic theoretical currents of Cybernetic Culture Research Unit….”
You see, metal, and yes this is within the realms of metal, can be challenging, it can be pushed, it can be proper art, it can pull together fragments of extreme music’s traditions in a slightly different way. These are big slabs, four of them, four epic pieces of extravagant (almost) ritual. Uncompromising and conceptually immersive, demanding of your time, demanding you go in and let it take you into what is a very dark, very rhythmic genre pushing and rather recommended extreme metal experience (somewhat let down by the artwork)… Bandcamp
And before we go, here’s some live Maya Ongaku from 2025…
Previously…
THE ORGAN 