Another new month (where is this year going?!?), so time for my usual monthly roundup of ten tracks you should hear. If there are other things I should hear, please tell me…
It’s a little bit of a diversion while we keenly await the forthcoming album The Medication Generation, but as always there is somehow no hint of filler about this. Sean Payne from the band mentioned in an interview I did with him last year that the soundtrack for Terminator 2: Judgement Day was his starting point for music generally, so taking on this theme was perhaps a logical step. It’s a bruising rework of the theme, too, that keeps the spirit of the original theme while still unmistakeably sounding like Cyanotic. The new album can’t come soon enough…
Cyanotic’s labelmates Left Spine Down have also been busy of late, releasing recently this remix album that saw a number of takes on various tracks from their debut album Fighting For Voltage – intriguingly leaving their best track U Can’t Stop The Bomb well alone – along with a couple of covers (She’s Lost Control and Territorial Pissings) and then this one new track. Which, as might be expected, is more high-paced electro-punk that doesn’t really do too much different to what has come before, but then, when it ain’t broke…
I very nearly included two tracks involving Seb Komor in this list – his remix of Reset on the Left Spine Down album above is the best remix on it – but I decided in the end on just this. The pace of this pounding, dancefloor-aimed CD is reduced just once, for this hulking brute of a track that sounds almost like a Noise Unit production, except with much, much heavier beats. And it sounds awesome.
This new album has had something of a hysterical reaction in the press, it’s lengthy – and very loud – drone-based music being seen as something of a pinnacle for these guys. While they do appear to be the cool name to drop (again), they do do what they do very well indeed – and this particular track, featuring choirs and other assorted effects, is jaw-dropping. The album as a whole is by no means the second-coming, and let’s be honest – you will either love or hate this, there is no in between – but is certainly very good indeed.
I have had so many people recommend this artist to me – I’ve only ever heard his remix work for In Strict Confidence before I got this – that I had to pick up an album at some point. I chose to start with the latest release, and it’s pretty impressive, the almost impossibly clean and precise electronics making for a sound that sounds truly unique. I suspect that I’m going to need many more listens yet to be able to appreciate the whole album, but it’s this track that has caught me first – breakcore chaos and almost orchestral sweeps, all in the same song, and it’s ace.
This live album, recorded in New York when 65Dos were supporting the Cure, hasn’t met with such a great reception from the press, which in some respects seems to be a little unfair. Certainly this album is a stopgap prior to a fourth album, and the two new tracks included in the sets – which I’m pretty sure they also played when we saw them in Sheffield earlier this year – don’t appear to be the finished article yet. It’s the older stuff, though, that shines the most here – in particular the usual heartstopping run through the track that is possibly the closest 65Dos have got to a song with a pop-structure, although wordless of course. After a number of years of repeat listens, it still sounds a bit like Mogwai, but I’ve still not tired of it yet.
I was left a little disappointed by much of this album when listening to it on Spotify, but the opening track – a sparse, spacey track that sounds as though it was recorded in the dead of night – is fantastic, and one of the best tracks that Tori has done in years, in my opinion.
As a friend noted at the time, it’s interesting to wonder how exactly The Berzerker managed to record this track or film the video while keeping a straight face for any take at all. This cover – a grunting, pseudo-grind take on the TaTu hit from quite a few years back – is perhaps the most unlikely cover ever released, and if there are any more unlikely covers than this, I’d like to hear about them.
I’d love to get hold of the new Babyland album at some point, however it appears that Metropolis have not made it available online, at least for the UK/Europe, so I’ll have to order it and wait for it to arrive via snailmail sometime. In the meantime, I’ll continue listening to this fantastic album, from which this track is by far my favourite track – a thumping, raging track whose beat seems to sound like it was fashioned from beating metallic objects before being treated within an inch of it’s life.
Another band I’m never going to get tired of, I think, is this band. They may have been “gone” for twelve years or so now, but I’m still listening to them a lot, although my preference for which album goes on my iPod seems to change every month or so. And right now, I’m back into listening to their older, more extreme material, but it’s this track that always gets me – the bizarre, almost choral vocals followed by the monstrous tribal drumming that ends the track.