(released July 11th, 2018, Magaibutsu Limited Records)

After a 13 year hiatus, Japanese zeuhl band Koenji Hyakkei has returned with what may be their magnum opus, ‘Dhorimviskha’. Every moment of this 1 hour-long album is aggressively inventive, and delivered at such a relentless pace that it can be exhausting to keep up with. But as its litanous song structures become more familiar with repeated listening, each song reveals a microcosm of vibrantly unconventional songwriting ripe for exploration.

Though ‘Dhorimviskha’ has rough stylistic similarities to jazz fusion or progressive rock, much of it is beyond the labels of traditional genres. Unusual time signatures constantly interchange and mutate, supported by the interlocking syncopation of each instrument, and at times motifs are even superimposed at double their original tempos, such as the penultimate section of ‘Levhorm’. There is also frequent use of polytonality, where specific chords shapes are moved around and outside of the original key. These dizzyingly rapid modulations give some sections, like the piano break early into ‘Vletztemtraiv’, a wild, unrestrained feel. There is order underneath this apparent chaos however - with the exception of the occasional paroxysm of fusion-inspired improvisation (played as noisily as possible, of course), everything seems to be rigorously composed, which helps to tailor ‘Dhorimviskha’s dissonance into specific, repeated formats. This restraint is enhanced by the frequent use of florid diatonic keys and melodies harmonized in fourths, something that is, to me, inescapably Japanese-sounding. ‘Palbeth Tissilaq’ epitomizes this sound, and serves as a quick breather before the colossal final track.

The instrumentation on ‘Dhorimviskha’ is, appropriately, as dense as its ideas - with reed instruments, guitar, keyboards, bass, and drums, there is a continuous flux of sonic textures. It seems like many of the band’s members contribute vocals as well, with the primary vocalist’s precise, operatic melodies interspersed with styles ranging from manic ‘sprechstimme’ to harsh growling or screaming. A curious feature of the instrumentation is a relative lack of effects, aside from typical reverb/compression, some distortion on the guitar, and the occasional use of synthesizers. In fact, the recurrent ‘clean’ piano sound is one of ‘Dhorimviskha’s many idiosyncrasies, especially given how compatible it is with even the album’s most savagely noisy freak-outs. 

Perhaps it is these contrasts - between clean timbres and frenetic dissonance, between rigid repetition and redefinition of themes and these themes’ sprawling, kinetic quality - that makes ‘Dhorimviskha’ such a compelling listen. Yet somehow, the album so clearly adheres to single unifying vision, despite containing such multitudes, and at such length. As a result, it stands as not only the best, but also the most challenging release of 2018. 

(released February 9th, 2018, Carpark Records)

Palm’s second album, ‘Rock Island’, is surprisingly accessible for a band that so clearly prides itself on experimentation. Between its short song structures, major key-centric chord schemes, and bubblegum vocal style, it comes across almost as an eccentric math rock iteration of the Beach Boys. As it turns out, this surface level pop sensibility conceals a fascinatingly strange approach towards composition and timbre.

Use of odd time signatures is an expected feature of math rock, and somehow their presence on ‘Rock Island’ is casual - an effortless groundwork upon which its more impressive features are built. Namely, a considerable number of songs feature metric modulation, and its omnipresence allows the album’s frequent tempo changes to occur with varying degrees of invisibility. Some songs have more specific rhythmic experimentations: ‘Dog Milk’s slowly drifting vocal parts allow its nimble 11/8 meter to be parsed with an unexpected two-pulse groove; ‘Bread’ suddenly interrupts its relaxed pacing with a raucous 8-on-5 polyrhythm (not just a polymeter!); the quarter-note guitar chords on ‘(Didn’t What You Want) Happen’ serve in alternate sections as downbeats and swung upbeats. This uncompromising rhythmic trickery practically needs new vocabulary to do description justice.

The counterweight to all of this is a reliance on repetition. Motifs are often repeated at length, allowing sheer familiarity to override most of the intimidating rhythmic complexity. On some songs, such as in the outro of ‘Composite’, this even approaches a trippy, ‘broken record’ kind of aesthetic. Instrumental technique is also generally adapted to fit this premise - the guitars are often played with an abrupt, broken-chord style that reduces their melodic shape to a single, easily-repeated unit.

Interestingly, it’s this complex interplay between rhythm and arrangement that leads to this album’s unique timbre. The MIDI guitar pickups and drums that Palm uses are a logical way of harnessing ‘Rock Island’s complexity, but fortuitously, they also enable the use and manipulation of synthetic sounds. From this emerges the vintage canned-drum sounds that lend an unrefined sense of nostalgia. But more importantly is ‘Rock Island’s unique guitar tone: somewhere between a steel drum and a bell, it is a singular mystery hiding in plain sight. In the context of the album’s relatively simple chord progressions, this tone imbues a colorful, almost tropical aesthetic, which occasional appearances by other equally synthetic-sounding patches help to support. Perhaps the pop-compatibility of this sound was an unintended consequence, but it results in a wonderfully catchy yet inscrutably intricate work of art.

(released January 5th, 2018, Wharf Cat Records)

Most of Noah Anthony’s output is in the vein of vaguely dance-oriented industrial techno, but on his latest release under the Profligate moniker, he employs a gritty darkwave aesthetic that ranges from brutal electronic noise to softly sullen post-punk. ‘Somewhere Else’ is fundamentally a mood-setting album, but it takes a lot of technique to lend shadings and subtleties to a mood that is intentionally stifled and dreary.

The many facets of this album are, perhaps, a natural development of its sparse, echoey production, which appeals to both its somber live-instrumental and analog-electronic components alike. This feature is most evident in its quiet moments: the almost-whispered vocals dither between solemn and menacing, and the clean guitar and bass slither in an equally drawling fashion. Muffled synth pads mirror the vocals in their imitation of breathing, whimpers, or groans, and this dreamy quality is an unexpectedly apt complement to the atmospheric rock aspects of the album. At many points, there is only a skeletal framework of rhythm, though even then, it is always clever: see the narcotizing 3-on-4 polymeter in the title track, or the stuttering 17/16-meter rhythm of ‘Jet Black (King of the World)’.

‘Somewhere Else’ has an aggressive side as well, though this is handled largely by its electronic aspects. At its most intense, it reminds of a tortured, Casio keyboard-on-fire, with squealing, gibbering synths, and shredding, mechanical percussion. Here the analog quality of the electronics imbues their distortion with a hideous, organic feeling that amplifies the album’s overall sense of dread. And aside from this effect, these noisy elements play an important role as focal points among the otherwise scattered, pointillist composition. The machine gun-loud snare drum assault in ‘A Circle’ provides a sonic density under which the rest of the track seems to plaintively lurk. And even in the margins, gritty but nuanced use of delay or backmasking enhances the texture of the album’s rhythmic elements.

It is all too easy for music attempting to be ‘dark’ to come across as maudlin or hackneyed, but ‘Somewhere Else’ succeeds where others fail. Its cold, depressive atmosphere is absolutely genuine and uncompromising, and combined with smartly restrained songwriting, it makes for an emotionally moving listen.

(released March 9th, 2018, Holy Roar Records)

For many bands, their first release aims at exploring and displaying a distinctive and specific style. But on their first album, ‘Mire’, Conjurer use the opportunity to masterfully mix elements from many metal subgenres into a tastefully varied yet contiguous whole. While the deliberately-paced tempo and mammoth low-end guitars establish a foundation in sludge metal, elements of black metal such as lengthy blast beats and tremolo picking are also frequently used, as well as nods towards death metal, progressive rock, and post-rock. The true brilliance of ‘Mire’ is how all these influences are woven together.

Surprisingly, the band isn’t all that hurried to bounce among all of these styles. Most of the songs on ‘Mire’ are rather long, and patterns in how each of the stylistic elements are woven into song structures unfurl gradually. Of course, this pacing, in combination with a tendency to use 3/4 time, resonates with the epic slowness found on many other sludge and doom releases. This seems like it might clash with the ethos of the album’s high velocity thrashing beats, but most often, the drums evolve through multiple modes against a single riff cycle, gradually building up sonic density.

In fact, density is a major part of how Conjurer builds and releases tension. Many sections are compositionally frugal, enabling the use of somber clean guitars (memorably contrasted with distant-sounding harsh vocals on ‘Hollow’). At other points, the breathing room is more brief; in the midst of things, the whole band will sometimes drop out for a beat or two, giving the spotlight to a momentary guitar motif. In both cases, this helps prime the listener to savor the punishing heaviness of the more dense sections, which range from simple, booming sludge metal breakdowns to salvos of technically challenging riffs, all under the dominion of powerful, death metal-inspired roars.

Another point of variation is the album’s tonal content. Much of the guitar work careens through a variety of harmonic minor or diminished modes, even using them as a chordal ornamentation, such as on the last section of the title track. At times, this style resembles the articulate guitar lines of Opeth. However, the band is just as comfortable returning to a diatonic context when the mood calls for something more sentimental. And importantly, the riffs that express these ideas are organized with a sense of purpose, often by way of atypical melodic cadences, such as the syncopations in ‘Of Flesh Weaker Than Ash’. Overall, this flexibility, between loud and soft, between consonance and dissonance, and within the structural arrangement, is what makes ‘Mire’ such a thrilling, meaningful album. 

(released March 30th, 2018, Les Disques Bongo Joe)

Psychedelic folk rock has a rich cultural history in Turkey, where the genre became popular during the 1970’s as rock influence and music technology filtered in from the Western world. The Amsterdam-based band Altın Gün carry on the tradition in a modern light on their first full length release, ‘On’. This masterful fusion of Anatolian folk and contemporary psychedelic funk rock delves into the possibilities of this cross-fertilization while advancing their elegance and production quality.

To the uninitiated, the most obviously Turkish elements on ‘On’ are the vocals and the bağlama. The band’s two vocalists (one male, one female) employ a finely honed vibrato that reflects the music’s folk roots while also imparting a sort of balladic sophistication. Likewise, the bağlama (not totally unlike a thin, three-stringed guitar) has a distinct and expressive playing style, which emphasizes tightly winding melodies and trills that bubble and groove over the steadier rhythm section. Critically, both the voice and the bağlama can play microtones, which figure moderately into Turkish folk scales, and impart a very distinct and complex harmonic essence to the music. However, interestingly, the band balances this with non-microtonal guitar, bass guitar, and keyboards, defining each song’s structure with a diatonic chord progression. Careful arrangement is required in order to avoid stepping into outright dissonance, especially on microtone-heavy songs like ‘Halkalı Şeker’, but it enhances the applicability of the style to the relative consonance of Western rock.

This compromise results in an album that is, simply put, fun. With sleek eloquent basslines and taut drum patterns accompanied by tasteful percussion, every track on ‘On’ is infectiously catchy. But even at its most driven, the rhythm section moves in an uncluttered way that provides definition to the melismatic vocal parts instead of obscuring them. The guitar in particular is surprisingly unobtrusive, ceding most of its spotlight to the bağlama and instead opting for staccato chords and understated wah-pedalling. In a similar vein, keyboards serve as a sparse adornment, ranging from tenderly-psychedelic synths to the vintage organ on the opening track ‘Tatli Dile Güler Yüze’.

The cohesive sum of these stylized embellishments is quite full-sounding though, especially when it verges on syncretism, as opposed to merely juxtaposition. The lightly-overdriven bağlama solo on ‘Caney’, for instance, bears a delay effect which roots it firmly in Western concepts of timbre, despite its extremely Eastern melodic inflections. Likewise, the drum and percussion ensemble on ‘Çiçekler Ekiliyor’ so finely straddles the boundary of these labels that it defies classification. ‘On’ as a whole is full of these moments, and proves it to be both a highly competent genre study as well as an artistic message all its own. 

(November 16th, 2018, Solid State Records)

Azusa’s genealogy is as varied as it is formidable - with the guitarist and drummer from Christian thrash metal band-on-hiatus Extol, the bassist from recently defunct mathcore legends Dillinger Escape Plan, and the vocalist from the somewhat lesser-known indie pop group Sea + Air among its ranks. Though a broad stylistic comparison to Extol is inevitable, Azusa’s debut album ‘Heavy Yoke’ proves to have greater flexibility. By tempering its galloping thrash metal with more thoughtful, expressive songwriting, it provides a well-rounded experience that is as cathartic as it is harrowing.

Upon reflection, the unique guitar approach inherited from Extol is actually well-suited to explore lighter territory. While heavy, chugging rhythms serve as a compositional backbone, they frequently admit legato chordal phrases, which pair well with ‘Heavy Yoke’s more emotive melodic content. Of course, these phrases are delivered with the same agility and sense of urgency, often in the form of upward spiraling modulations that impress an odd metamorphotic quality. These chord progressions are fascinating, clearly bearing some jazz fusion influence, with the usual thrash metal dissonance of tritones and semitones buried inside more nuanced chords. The vocalist is in her element here, and on lower-velocity tracks like ‘Fine Lines’ and ‘Programmed to Distress’, her clean vocals are redolent of alternative rock’s earnest passion.

But make no mistake, Azusa does not compromise on their ability to hammer out raucous thrash riffs, and their violent precision is all the more satisfying after emerging from a tangle of heady, progressive composition. This milieu is essential to ‘Heavy Yoke’, whose primary challenge is its shifting rhythms (often utilizing swingy triple meters, such as on the title track) complemented by complex drum fills. The transition into more straightforward territory is always fluid but impactful, underscored by the sudden unleashing of the vocalist’s explosive shrieks.

What sets ‘Heavy Yoke’ above its peers, however, is how organic it sounds, despite its stylistic diversity. The arrangement bristles with texture, obliquely adding layers or syncopations to the short, densely-packed song structures. Even on a timbral level, the harsh vocals are fervid with the trembling and cracking of real dismay, while the bass guitar seems to audibly rattles with energy. Compared to the standard tropes of progressive/thrash corners of the metal scene, Azusa seem to call upon a deeper, more honest intuition for these features, and the result is cultivated into something truly moving.

(September 21st, 2018, Anti-Ghost Moon Ray)

Gazelle Twin has been actively making music for over 7 years, but even after several albums of experimental, industrial-inflected electronic music, her ideas are still fresh and vibrant. On ‘Pastoral’, she infuses her characteristic vocal-centric noise music with an unexpected dose of English traditional folk terroir, in the form of harpsichord and recorder. This unique concept serves as a vehicle for both her politically trenchant lyrics, as well as a lurid and unhinged sound that is completely unlike anything else in today’s electronic music scene.

The vocal styles on ‘Pastoral’ are not new for Gazelle Twin per se, but their wide variety is still quite evocative, ranging from dramatic and reverberant singing to sinister chanting filtered into a menacing alien mutter. The latter defines the album’s most impactful moments, where Gazelle Twin’s facility for sonic violence is on full display. The martial attack of drums on tracks such as ‘Better In My Day’ and ‘Hobby Horse’ combine with these insistent vocal mantras to produce a sense of alarm and dread. And while the percussion is actually rather austere in even these heaviest cuts, the use of samples often compensates as a rhythmic, time-filling anchor - duration being the only certainty remaining, after any semblance of traditional harmony is wrung from what would normally be tediously normal instruments.

While the recurrent use of harpsichord and recorder provides cohesion among the ubiquitous samples, the manipulation employed upon them produces abstractions which are profound and engaging. This is especially true when pitch shifting facilitates atonality, such as the caterwauling recorder sample which begins ‘Dance of the Peddlers’. The resulting sound sculpture is an object of morbid interest all its own, and as something vulgar and essentially absurd, it mirrors the anger and biting sarcasm of the lyrics.

Yet many of ‘Pastoral’s tracks fill a more subdued atmospheric role, which is often a welcome reprieve (though really, they are no less malevolent sounding). There, the sampling is texture-focused, with an array of warbles and drones fluttering by in a hallucinatory interplay. Sometimes they adopt a more expected sense of harmony, such as the roiling chords of ‘Glory’, which underscore a powerful vocal part. But in other parts, the samples even resort to cheeky references, such as the recordings of a ‘Punch and Judy’ show, or a phone call to the local police station, both found on ‘Jersualem’. While darkly funny, they also affirm this powerful album’s aim at English culture, and enhance the impact of its grotesque aesthetic. 

(February 23rd, 2018, Northern Spy)

‘Old Ghost’ is Renata Zeiguer’s first full album as a solo artist, and it succeeds wildly in its goal of embedding modern indie pop with strains of the 60’s chamber pop and Tropicália. Her masterly vocal performance guides a selection of charming and smartly-written pieces which balance intricate harmonies with a dreamy and splendorous atmosphere. Rendered with a vintage sonic palette, these attributes yield a viscerally pleasant album that is still equally capable of challenging the listener.

Curiously, the ineluctable charm of this ‘vintage’ aesthetic is the thing that seems to motivate and direct a lot of ‘Old Ghost’s writing. Of chief significance is Renata’s vocal performance itself, as the obvious foremost attraction of the album. The dynamics of her mellifluous soprano encompass both intimate half-whispers and bold, flourishing melodies. Sweeping glides are a mainstay of her characteristic vocal technique, and their resemblance to an exotica-inflected slide guitar imparts a similarly indolent mood. The album’s two guitars emulate this languid sort of phrasing as well, on tracks like ‘Follow Me Down’, both as an explicit part of their melodies and as an consequence of subtle flanging or tremolo. With the addition of ample reverb, these effects portray the guitars as almost ‘living instruments’. On the pre-chorus of ‘Bug’, they become almost redolent of orchestral arrangements, further contributing to the album’s quaintness.

An entire other aspect of this which meshes with ‘Old Ghost’s relaxed and sumptuous texture is its chord progressions. While their harmonic structure often employs typical pop tropes, they frequently divert into jazz-influenced progressions. Renata’s Argentinean heritage is clear on ‘Below’, in which she summons bossa-nova chord shapes - chromatically complex yet somehow gentle, and an eager accompaniment to short and simple, middle-range guitar melodies whose catchiness makes these songs so intrinsically easy-sounding.

Yet at other times, these catchy melodies are interpreted with more panache. On ‘Neck of the Moon’, the guitar is ensconced in fuzz à la The Pixes, and the drums and bass support it with an echoic indie-pop energy. This jangly side, which ‘Old Ghost’ emits in climaxes and bursts, betrays a certain playfulness that can be found lurking in the album’s depths. It’s not always brash either: even when the rhythm section’s playing is more subdued, the omission or addition of measures here and there provide a slightly disorienting sway without becoming totally jarring. Likewise, the surreal stream-of-consciousness lyrics often provoke a raised eyebrow. But on the whole, these features only serve to fully flesh out the album’s vibrant beauty.

(November 2nd, 2018, Colline Noire Records)

Noise Trail Immersion’s latest release ‘Symbology of Shelter’ is ferocious beyond reckoning. The Italian quintet infuses standard black metal songwriting with aspects of chaotic mathcore which impart an extra dose twisted fury to this concept album. The result is a no-holds-barred challenge on how much dissonance and chaos can reasonably fit in one album while still retaining a sense of direction and internal logic.

A fact critical to understanding ‘Symbology of Shelter’ is that, while the album appears to be split into seven tracks, the band recommends the album be treated as though it were a single song. This is not without precedent, and for many bands who use this approach, it is an opportunity to reuse sections or themes throughout the album’s course. In contrast, ‘Symbology of Shelter’ has virtually no repeated long-form structure. Instead, it cycles between short-lived, non-recurrent themes and tortuous passages of constantly mutating discordance. This latter component would almost seem improvised, if not for its deft rhythmic coordination. Still, even without repetition, there is a sense of slowly unfolding tonal consistency. This is especially apparent in the ‘Empty Earth’ movement, whose ideas evolve at a slower pace, unified with slightly longer motifs. Nonetheless, this songwriting style summons a general feeling of relentless forward motion, In the context of the album’s bleak and cacaphonous aesthetic, it gives the impression of hurtling headlong towards death or some other equally terrible thing.

‘Symbology of Shelter’s angular composition also contributes to this sensation, especially its rhythmic inclinations. Though the drummer’s technique draws heavily black metal, his high-velocity blast beats are frequently interspersed with structurally diverse fills, and the interplay between these modes continually rearranges to form vertiginous odd-time signature grooves. The band’s dual eight string guitars express a similar mathcore-esque volatility, alternating between tremolo picking, quick arpeggios, and muscular low-register accents or riffs. Their broad melodic range also inspires plenty of interesting figures (much needed, in lieu of any longer-term aspirations), such as the descending riffs that interchange disconcertingly in the middle section of ‘Acrimonious’.

The harmonic content of ‘Symbology of Shelter’ is what sets its fulminant chaos over the edge, though. Chord progressions are based more on bass melody than broader harmony as each root note convokes arbitrarily diminished scale degrees. At other times, it is impossible to identify a tonal center, and instead the guitars devolve into a whirlwind of abstract and jagged pseudochords and tone clusters. And of course, piercing through the heart of it all are the vocals - at their height, they are completely non-tonal and delivered with a rabid intensity (notably strident in the final throes of ‘Repulsion and Escapism II’), though in ‘The Empty Earth II’, they settle into a debilitated moan, before gradually reintensifying. Between its dissonance and structurelessness, ‘Symbology of Shelter’ is a challenging listen, but one which sublimely portrays the darkness it resolves to. 

(self-released December 2nd, 2018)

Some art succeeds because it refines its ideas into their best, most immediate form. In contrast, Y/N’s album ‘Larry and the Eternal Light’ succeeds sheerly through its unfettered creativity. Y/N’s stubborn refusal to work within any major musical tradition creates a slew of strikingly novel ideas that make up for its roughness. I don’t know enough about the musician behind Y/N to definitively qualify him as outsider artist, but this album carries the same propensity to simultaneously disturb and fascinate.

While far from normal, ‘Larry and the Eternal Light’ doesn’t fit into the stereotype of gratuitous, self-aware weirdness either. It has an unexpected innocence, especially in its instrumentation, which frequently uses unfiltered plugins - glassy piano, organ and drums that seem ripped out of a high schooler’s GarageBand experiment. At other times though, Y/N extensively manipulates his sounds, ranging from a fuzzy and spasmodic electric guitar, to stuttering, staccato synths. Perhaps the most distinctive is his vocals, which marry unsophisticated, Wayne Coyne-esque quavering with the slightly-screeching auto-tune of someone like Young Thug. They even occasionally diverge into either plan spoken word, or contrarily, an inscrutable mess of pitch adjustment and distortion. It’s no surprise that the lyrics are equally esoteric, with surreal and often irreverent takes on themes like introversion, death and sex (coarsely candid on such tracks as ‘Cumming Makes Me Die’). As well, there is a memetic repetition of certain specific lyrical motifs, such as the color red, Manhattan, and various family members that gives the impression of a schizoid internal fantasy world.

Despite all this, ‘Larry and the Eternal Light’ is surprisingly accessible. Many of its songs have this propulsive energy that surpasses a lot of their unusual acoustics. The tight funk of song snippet ‘What I Say Is What I’m Feeling’ uses its artificially abrupt instrumentation to emphasize its rhythm, and later this style expands into nimble improvisational sections. ‘Literally the Best’ and ‘Laying Rail’ share a number of features in this regard, with solos ranging from glitchy micro-looping of samples or sputtering guitar, to almost inhumanly-syncopated clavinet or synth.

At other times, the rhythm is slow and loose, with non-quantized composition giving it an unpolished bedroom-production feel. It is then that the album’s peculiar harmonic sensibilities become more apparent. While a few songs rely on standard chord schemes, others completely avoid using triads, instead playing diatonically over suspended chords or gangly non-chordal constructs, like the incessant piano figures on ‘Manhattan’. Again, it is never weird in quite the way you’d expect, and perhaps it is this impertinent, guileless experimentation (the ‘Larry’) that make Y/N’s work so brilliant (the ‘eternal light’).