And another month races past! Time and music releases need to calm down a bit, I barely know where I am these days, and we’re only edging into the summer.
Surprising no one, there’s been loads of great music this month as well, but life has gotten in the way a bit, so some of the reviews are a bit shorter than usual.
Sorry about that, but it’s better to have some blog than no blog.
But enough chat.
Tape Runs Out
Floodhead
Indie
Floodhead came out at the end of last month, but missed the blog cut off. It would be a crying shame for this album to be ignored though, so here we are.
To be perfectly honest, some of Floodhead is out of my comfort zone. There is a vague feeling of 70’s prog going on here and some of the vocals have a touch of multi tracked feyness about them. But, when an album is this good, you have to put your hangups about a hammered dulcimer behind you and embrace it.
The second track, Ark, is an early stand out. Showcasing the band’s control of melody and being effortlessly able to carry you along with them while the aforementioned dulcimer sounds amazing.
Overseas Assignment is a joy of a song where the vocal melody on the chorus is a truly perfect bit of music. 90°C has a very pleasing touch of post rock about it, without ever indulging in crescendocore.
Floodhead is a very pretty, slightly downbeat, proggy indie album where you’ll be hard pushed to find anything else that sounds just like this. It’s brilliant.
Lo!
The Gleaners
Metal
It’s been nearly six years since Lo!’s last album, and the Sydney outfit have really come out all guns blazing for this release. That’s the only way you can describe the death metal blast of the opening track, but there’s much more to Lo! than death metal. There’s a crushing amount of sludge that keeps the bpm locked down but somehow that just makes everything heavier. Lo! also a willingness to experiment with more relaxed and even pretty sections that makes them stand out from their peers.
The album highlight is the title track, it is just so fantastically intense, mixing post metal while turning up the sludge. The hammering drums will undoubtedly soundtrack a lot of slow headbanging during their live shows.
The second half of the album expands the band’s sound, mixing the slow heavy with some blistering riffs to stop things getting too repetitive. The song Pareidolia reminds me of Current 93 of all bands, not an obvious influence on a band like Lo!
The closer, Mammons Horn, shows how effortless Lo! can make this mix of genre and dynamics seem and works nicely as a summation of what the band have been doing on this album.
It’s always great to hear a band experiment with different genres and sounds but it can make trying to pigeonhole them in a review annoyingly difficult. Lo! really live up to that exclamation mark, delivering an album that has been worth the long wait.
Ballamona
Institutions
Baggy (?) / Industrial
Have you ever asked yourself what a mashup of Low Fidelity Allstars and say…. Front Line Assembly would sound like? Probably not, but Ballamona are here to answer that question for you.
Institutions starts with an almost Baggy swagger, but when it kicks off, instead of the post punk guitars you’d expect, you get some grinding industrial guitars. It’s as likely to set off a mosh pit as a dance floor.
The second track, Open Air Prison, is a more standard dance punk track but still has some heavy guitars chugging along.
This is a really impressive debut. If you want some music to get you dancing, but also want some teeth to it, this is the ep for you.
The Infinity Ring
Nemesis & Nativity
Goth/ folk/ post rock
It’s going to be impossible to review this album without mentioning Swans. You see, some of this album sounds a lot like the 90’s era of Swans. Now how you feel about this album will come down to how ok you are with a band adopting another’s style, but there’s more than enough going on here to get past any worries you might have about the originality of the group’s sound.
The opener sets the tone perfectly, the slow drone and light, middle eastern violin ease the listener in before the guitar takes the song forward. It sounds like the introduction to the end of the world as it slowly builds introducing the hypnotic drumming and repeated vocal refrain.
Somehow, the song Tiferet II, sounds like a post rock song by Scott Walker. The first half of the album feels almost like gothic folk in places, while the back half of the album is far more intense and grating.
The final track Nemesis & Nativity finishes up the album on a more epic and melodic slowly unfurling with strings lifting the ominous tone that’s slowly building to the album’s post rock crescendo.
If none of these references make any sense to you, ask yourself how you feel about very dramatic guitar music sung by a man with a very deep voice. If that’s a yes, you’ll love this.
MAULÉN
El Miedo De Amar Pero Igual Lo Hago
World Music / Metal
MAULÉN are a very unusual act, because they honestly don’t sound like anything I’ve heard before by sounding exactly like a hybrid of Dead can Dance and someone like Amenra. This feels like World Music fed into some sort of doom metal / post metal filter. Even using a male and female vocalist on different tracks reinforces the DCD feel to the album, while the slow mournful guitars build a much heavier atmosphere.
The first song, Rostro sounds like an Eastern European religious rite, while Sirjatan sounds more like an occult invocation.
The second half of the album feels more traditional doomy metal; but it still has that world music flavour that makes it stand out from the crowd. The choice of singing in several languages makes this very distinctive and I honestly don’t think I’ve heard anything quite like this album before.
GR^VE
Inevitable Entropy
Shoegaze / Doomgaze
Inevitable Entropy is a collection of the band’s first singles, remastered and repackaged here into a surprisingly coherent ep.
They’re labelled as shoegaze but they’re much more intense than that, with some of these songs closer to the doomgaze of bands like Spotlights than Slowdive.
That’s not to say it’s all crushing, Safe is a dreamy number that carries the listener off on sunny evenings but the band never stray too far from the monstrous low end that they have weaponized.
What makes GR^VE stand out from the crowd is the way the huge riffs and chest rattling bass are deployed, this is almost sensual rather than aggressive. The bass positively slinks through some of these songs.
Opening track, Resign Your Fate, gives me the same vibes as The Pink Room from the Fire Walk With Me soundtrack and that’s as great a compliment as I can give.
The ways of exile 