Back from a busy Bank Holiday weekend, and it turns out, a busy April for new music.
/Subject /Tracks of the Month
/Playlists 
/Spotify / 
/YouTube
/Related /581/Tracks/Mar-25 /Tuesday Ten/Index
/Details /Tracks this week/16 /Tracks on Spotify Playlist/14 /Duration/70:00
In fact, there were so many tracks I could have featured that I capped it at sixteen and held some over until next month.
Tonight (Tuesday 06-May) brings /TheKindaMzkYouLike /037, the latest exploration of Alternative music new and old.
A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.
Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).
/Track of the Month
/Nevada Hardware
/The Suburbs Dream of Violence
/Split Scene
There were murmurs around Resistanz about the brilliance of this album from those who’d heard it in advance, and every bit of the hype I heard then – and from everyone else since, not least I Die: You Die, whose review I read after I wrote this to find we were on the same wavelength – is entirely correct. The artist has been kicking around for a while (and made quite a splash with their stellar remix of KLACK not long since), and it’s seven years since No Future. Going on this release, the time has not been wasted.
Beats are heavy (and, er, Big), there are breakbeats that hit like a herd of elephants, tempos are kept mostly high, samples fill in every possible gap (was that Terry Christian in the rampaging closer Letters of Sympathy?!?)…basically, this is wild, club-bound industrial big beat, and I fucking love it. Pick of the album for me – which for me is like trying to pick my favourite dog, as there was a good case for featuring every single track – is the out-of-control pacing of The Suburbs Dream of Violence, which is like the late-90s Chemical Brothers tearing the place up with Cyanotic along for the ride.
/SCALER
/Broken Entry
Also having fun smashing genres together are Bristol collective SCALER (I’ve previously featured them as SCALPING in their earlier incarnation before an understandable name change), whose first new track since the VOID cycle (singles, album, remixes) sees an interesting evolution. Broken Entry literally looms into view, with ominous bass and beats gradually gaining volume and force, before a guitar riff drops into the mix out of nowhere, and we’re off from the club to the moshpit. There has always been a heavier edge to SCALER’s sound, and they’ve not been shy about using guitar sounds in the past, but this feels like the first time that they have really let their metal influences show, and it’s an impressive shift. Quite what else we can expect from what is presumably a new album is anyone’s guess.
/LOATHE
/Gifted Every Strength
It feels like it has taken a fucking eternity to get here – last album proper, and their bulldozing breakthrough, I Let It In and It Took Everything, was released five years ago – and they’ve toured incessantly since, but at last, we have signs of recorded life from LOATHE again. Gifted Every Strength takes us on a six-minute tour of all of the elements that make LOATHE great – skull-crushing breakdowns, melodic interludes, ambient explorations, electronic-assisted riffs that blur and fuzz while leaping out of the speakers, not to mention the intro that punches you in the gut – and reminds us that the band are one of the most fascinating, powerful metal bands around at the moment, partly due to their fearless vision, but partly because they are simply doing it better than everyone else.
/Flesh Eating Foundation
/This Is All I Hear Now
/Before The Skeletal Dance of our Festering Jesters
Flesh Eating Foundation have long been an interesting outlier in the UK industrial scene, using vintage and refashioned electronics to create an abrasive, unusual sound, topped mostly by the spoken word vitriol of Blind Jonny Smoke, and they made quite a splash when they played Infest a good few years ago. Jonny was born severely deaf, and has also mostly lost his sight in stages since he was a teenager, and more recently almost entirely lost his remaining hearing in one ear. Add to that his – completely understandable – fury at the constant chipping away by successive Governments of support and services for the disabled, and this album has a vital, searing edge that is impossible to ignore.
Apparently bass frequencies are one of the few sounds Jonny can now hear unaided, and so this album booms with bass, only adding to the vitriol and power of the sound. This Is All I Hear Now literally shakes with the force of the basslines underneath, while Jonny seethes at his own situation and the world around him going to shit. In a world seemingly getting worse by the day, this is a deeply personal trip into the real life struggles of those being trampled underfoot by an uncaring world, and it is quite brilliant.
/Garbage
/There’s No Future In Optimism
/Let All That We Imagine Be The Light
Thirty years on from their game-changing, multi-million selling debut album, Garbage finally return this summer with a new album, and the band have been at pains to state that they had to consider writing an album that was full of hope and optimism, lest they descended into despair at the darkness in the world. A brightness and sense of hope is not exactly what you might expect from Garbage, or from Shirley Manson’s lyrics (one of their greatest and best-known songs pokes fun at the dour image of her fellow Scots in Only Happy When It Rains), but somehow, There’s No Future In Optimism feels that brighter song, leaning into the poppier edge that Garbage have long been masters of.
/Stereolab
/Melodie Is A Wound
/Instant Holograms on Metal Film
While Stereolab resurrected for live shows again in the past few years, there was no indication of new material, with remastered albums and compilations instead sating any fan needs for a while. So I have to say it was a surprise to see the announcement of their first new album in fifteen years last month. Don’t expect any reinventing of the wheel – their quirky, Anglo-French experimental, kosmische-leaning lounge-pop remains intact, led by the sometimes dispassionate and unmistakable vocals of Lætitia Sadier. Of the songs released so far, the near-eight minute Melodie Is A Wound is the better song, that fades out of and into distinct sections like the changing of a vintage radio dial, as if they had so many ideas that they simply decided to use them all. It is playful, sweet and sounds wonderful.
/Pulp
/Spike Island
/More
Perhaps even more surprising was the announcement of the first new Pulp album since We Love Life in 2001, and led with a song that suggested Jarvis Cocker is still, after all these years, musing on how on earth his perennially-ignored band somehow became the voice of a nation. Spike Island was a site of chemical industries by the Mersey estuary in Widnes for many years, before being cleaned up to become a park, and famously was the site of a Stone Roses show in 1990 that saw a resurgence of (very different) chemical use on the island, and hazy half-memories recalling that the gig actually wasn’t very good. Is this what Cocker is saying – that be careful with those rose-tinted spectacles, as the past isn’t always what it was cracked up to be, and there are references in this song too that suggest Cocker is trying to atone for what he became in those years after Different Class. Pulp’s music back then was brilliant, and still is – and live the band remain an extraordinary, life-affirming force. That they are back recording new music is certainly something for celebration, and Spike Island is a pleasant, unchallenging return musically.
/Miki Berenyi Trio
/Vertigo
/Tripla
Perhaps it has been the month for indie veterans, but Miki Berenyi’s latest project has the feeling of a definitive moving on from Lush – even if, apparently, she’s still willing to play some of the old songs with her new band. Sure, Berenyi’s sweet-edged voice still shines through the hazy music, and guitars are still put through a whole deck of FX pedals, that’s for sure, but there is a clarity that perhaps wasn’t there on that original Lush material (the Britpop era is an outlier, of course), and the songs are damned lovely. But peel the skin back, and there’s still some venom here, such as amid the electronic, near trip-hop pulses and guitar washes of Vertigo, where she seems determined to leave the past behind, even if she can’t forget or perhaps forgive.
/Dream Hack
/Body Double
/Platinum Paradise
Sam from Randolph & Mortimer has long been on record about his love of techno and electronic music, as much as his love of industrial, and both camps have informed his Randolph & Mortimer project in different ways. His more recent Dream Hack side project has branched from R&M by being inspired solely by the Sheffield clubbing of his youth, and this second EP under the name is explicitly influenced by his time at the Megadog night. It shows, too, with the surging Body Double taking in both punchy techno and that unmistakable influence of Underworld in their game-changing nineties’ pomp (just listen to that treated vocal refrain, and those droning synths for conclusive evidence). Sure, it sounds like those artists, but that’s the whole point – this is Sam using those sounds he’s so familiar with to create his own vision of that style, and this is a great tribute without it just being a cover.
/Comaduster
/BLACK SUN RAYS ft Mari Kattman (SINGLE VERSION)
/BLACK SUN RAYS + WAVELIKE
It’s been five long years since the last Comaduster album, and this two-track release starts the arc of MEMORY ECHOES, it appears, with the Bandcamp page telling us something of the depth of the story that awaits. BLACK SUN RAYS gives us the mental disintegration of a particle physicist in the aftermath of a world-changing cosmic event. With the assistance of Mari Kattman on vocals, it certainly gives the hints toward the emotional depth and bleakness of what’s coming, the intricate electronic tapestries of the past at least partially set aside here for an excursion into melancholic, gothic folk music, and the result is a remarkably affecting, elegant song – which, it should be noted, is a “single” version that stretches well beyond seven minutes. Réal Cardinal once again amazes with the sheer scope of his vision.
/The Infinity Ring
/Elysium
/Ataraxia
The first of two artists new to me this month, and that I’ve been pointed to by my friend Kenneth who writes at The Ways of Exile. He said that The Infinity Ring would very much appeal to me, and he’s not wrong. A five-piece from Boston that straddle the fringes of post-metal and pitch-dark, gloomy folk, much of Ataraxia nods towards the imperial phase of Swans in the early nineties, where they’d shed the pummelling force of their earlier songs for bleak, sparse songs about the uglier corners of human nature and emotion, and there’s also something of The God Machine here too. Certainly Cameron Moretti’s rich, deep vocals – that have the sound of someone that has experienced a whole lot in their life – help the comparison, but so does their use of unrelenting repetition and stark structure. Elysium was the lead track from the release, and is a great summation of what the band does. Sure, it’s not going to be for everyone, but emotionally heavy music like this rarely is.
/BÅKÜ
/OPPOSITE 1
/SOMA
The second recommendation from the same source is of French post-metal band BÅKÜ, whose hyper-dense sound makes for an overwhelming listen (especially when the full album is five tracks and nearly an hour in length). The first track – all of nearly twelve minutes of OPPOSITE 1 – takes a bit of time to begin adding layers, but once the dam breaks slow, sludgy riffs start propelling things forward, and Daniel Arnoux’s vocals are a bark into a hellish domain that surrounds him. The immense depth of the mix – and sheer aggression of the sound – reminds of the lost classic Concrete Sustain by Batillus first and foremost, a sound that to some is ugly and unrelenting, but to others like me is a work of toil and sweat, and scratches an itch that just sometimes I need to hear. The unusual use of vocal samples later in the track is really unsettling, too – I had to check twice that I didn’t have something else playing…
/Katatonia
/Lilac
/Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State
The run-up to the announcement of the latest Katatonia album – their x – was perhaps derailed a little by the furore surrounding the departure of founding guitarist Anders Nyström, which suggested a hefty difference of opinion over the direction of the band. To be fair, it’s long been clear that Katatonia have found their niche and will never be returning to the heavier sound of old, and the last few albums have certainly had their moments, too. So, what about first single Lilac? It sounds like present-day Katatonia, with their trademark, bleak power, and Jonas’ vocals having that world-weary disappointment, and the band still having that heft to the sound suggesting that they are nowhere near done yet.
/Mojave Phone Booth
/Unrelated
/Blood Doctor Volume One
This artist is possibly best-known for featuring Tobey Torres-Doran (once of millennial industrial-rockers Snake River Conspiracy), but there is a lot of interest here. With their third album coming soon, a few singles have begun trickling out, and Unrelated is a snarling beast of a track, with squealing synths providing a discordant counterpoint to a bass-heavy, sluggish beat pattern that sounds a whole lot more than the sum of the parts involved. Torres-Doran’s vocals proceed unaffected, a nicely melodic element to a song that to some might be a tough listen. The other song released recently, Capsule Change treads a similarly challenging path, suggesting the upcoming album should be a lot to deal with.
/Nyxx
/Crown
/Salt EP
I’ve used the term on this site occasionally, but it continues to make me wonder – what exactly is “industrial pop”? It’s certainly darker and usually harsher in aesthetic and sound than synthpop, but it is fair to say that most artists that use the term barely sound like each other at all. Nyxx is perhaps part of the current wave of women who are writing left-of-the-mainstream pop music, but using influences more relevant to themselves, in this case there is very much an industrial/goth element to the sound, with a low-end thump to the song that means it would absolutely be at home in most industrial/goth clubs – it’s the chorus that takes it into pop territory. Interestingly this track also features one of the stars of Resistanz Festival for me the other week: genCAB.
/Caustic
/Thirsty Dog
/FIEND I
Matt Fanale has been a busy man of late – with regular releases on a number of fronts (most notably KLACK and Daddybear), but remarkably it’s been seven years since the last Caustic release, and with the recently fast-funded Kickstarter for FIEND I / FIEND II, it’s been suggested that this might be the last time he releases music under the Caustic name. That’s perhaps understandable – he’s been releasing music as Caustic for over twenty years, and his life has changed enormously in that time. And with his longstanding sobriety, covering Nick Cave’s searing examination of self-destruction by drink and whatever-else, Thirsty Dog, makes a fair amount of sense. The original, from the 1994 Bad Seeds album Let Love In, is a rollicking punk-rock thrash, and so Fanale turning it into a thumping electro-punk rager actually works very well. Fanale, now a sober husband and parent, can perhaps look back on his hell-raising days with a bit of humour now, hence this song – an interesting counterpoint to Booze Up and Riot, that’s for sure.