This month’s ten tracks I think you should hear.

Playlists:
 Spotify

Took me a while to get into this, but I’m growing to love it more and more with every listen. A slow-burning, slower-paced track to open the long-awaited new album, and from what I understand this slower pace doesn’t last for long. The other promo track has been the studio-recorded version of American Porn Song at long, long last – and as might have been feared it’s not as good as the Cyanotic remix of it [free download] from a few years back…

Less of a grower, is the first new material from Rotersand in a year or so, and it’s a hell of a return. While 1023 was a good album, it never really seemed to catch on like previous stuff, and I suspect things may be very different this time. A stomping, hulking beat, some cryptic sloganeering, and you have a track that is going to slay dancefloors and hopefully is a precursor to an album as good as this.

This is more like it. With a few exceptions, the last album was a little tepid, and in comparison this comes at you like a rabid dog. Thumping beats, jagged guitars, and a monster chorus, too. With them still bringing tracks like this, it’s no surprise that they are rising fast, and again, I’m really hoping that the new album is as good.

According to Wiki, Epiphora is “excessive tear production usually a result from an irritation of the eye”. Which is a slightly strange title for an album, but either way this is a amazingly pretty album. Another of a gathering wave at the moment of highly intricate and elegently constructed electronic albums that reward repeated listening, this is one of the most impressive tracks here. There’s yearning melodies, glittering soundscapes and an overwhelming sense of late-night melancholy that makes this (and the whole album) an essential purchase.

Thomas Rainer’s diversion from L’Âme Immortelle (a band I’ve ever really been into at all) has certainly turned heads. The image certainly has something to do with that, I suspect – “Imperial Austrian Industrial”, it proclaimed on the first album last year, which appeared to consist of vague military and sexual metaphors over beats and tunes that were hardly breaking new ground. Not a lot has changed with the second album, other than that the girls in military outfits in the CD/lyrics booklet get their kit off, and the metaphors are rather less abstract (Tanzdiktator, anyone?). There are a couple of jaw-dropping standouts, though, and this is one of them – an outstanding industrial dancefloor workout that has a brutally heavy beat but tempers it with enough breathers through the track to suggest that this is a track heading straight for the dancefloor. Expect to hear it at Autonomy on Saturday.

No idea who this lot are, other than that I got this album on promo for review, and that they are on D-Trash records. it’s industrial-meets-metal-with-a-few-other-things-besides (seemingly including an ex-member of Aborym, too), and broadly is ok, but not much more – although this track is outstanding. It builds steadily, before exploding into life with what appears to be a sample from an old Nine Inch Nails remix bolted in to spectacular effect (somehow it runs alongside the existing track without sounding out of place).

The album as a whole is a little disappointing – it doesn’t do much different to the last album, really, and they sound like CoF more than ever, although at least they sound like CoF back when they were good. Either way, not all of the album is bad by any means, and this track in particular is an absolute belter. An ominous synth line opens it, before the drums and riffs burst through the wall. The monstrous, chugging chorus breakdown and the swirling vortex of noise that erupts after the small synth breather that follows it are also notable.

An unusual and unexpected post-punk influence permeates this album (by far Tony’s best yet), but here different influences are added – a piano line that could have come from a Paradise Lost track of yore, and then Jamie from ESA‘s vocals that swiftly get buried by his vicious guitar riff that comes out of nowhere. The elements that make this up are a little unexpected, perhaps, but it all works brilliantly.

I absolutely adore this track. Not sure why – synthpop isn’t always my thing – but something about it just pushes the right buttons. Gorgeous, breathy vocals, and a non-too-intrusive electronic background. It might be their way with a cracking chorus, too. Either way, for me this new album is a step above Peek-A-Boo, and is stuffed full of great tracks (others to note include Breakthrough and Ghosts).

Yes, it’s JS from Pitchshifter. And this is a great remix, too. The first effective Pitchshifter remix I can recall appearing in ages, and it does all kinds of clever things with the mix, pushing the guitars in the chorus right to the forefront (try it on headphones – the guitars nearly burst out of them), and then phasing other elements all over the place. The original track was a merely good track from a good – but not perfect – album, but this injects all kind of life into it and sounds much more like it – the first time I heard it I felt like joining in to the mixed-in live audience applause at the end.