Split-EP Review: Ef / Tiny Fingers – Vāyu

This split-EP is a collaboration between a ten-year old act from Gothenburg and a leading force in the Israeli music scene.

With a decade of live performances under their belt, the DIY post-rockers Ef have played with a vast range of bands and have built up a reputation for appeasing fans of both sweet sounds and heavy crush. Here, they set about drawing inspiration from the natural world to piece together a heart-warming wash of colour.

“Hiraeth” stretches into view with its exposed soft underbelly instantaneously exposed. It’s a gently tentative, rich piece of ambient music with building drums and an orchestral flood of violins. It’s only at its climax that the claws come out as the band show they are unafraid of tackling distortion and discordance. “Sju” works the emotions a little harder by managing to fuse melancholy and warming afterglow. Within a heartbeat rhythm, yawning violins and a sparkling synth wash, they filter the echoing sound of chirruping nature. Each delicate note is placed carefully and used sparingly, with the focus on space and echo, to create a series of continuous, supple fluctuations.

The remarkably odd “11ShotsAndSuddenDeath” moves keenly from piano-led meander into what feels like a reprise of “Sju”. It honestly feels like we’ve been dumped midway through a song into a chorus. “And down we fall” is a catchy hook but after the millionth time it does get repetitive. The song feels incomplete despite the fact that it has two natural conclusions within it. Beyond even that we find it then dragging on unnecessarily to 8:11. It’s the unconvincing song that won’t die.

Next on the bill we get instrumental psych-rockers Tiny Fingers. With their diverse sound, these dudes have been asked to perform with such diverse acts as The Mars Volta, Damian Marley and the Dub Trio. When you hear their music, it’s not difficult to see the connections.

“Dust” offers up a broken backbeat with samples, coloured with a rich cosmic vibe and a smattering of electronic effects courtesy of the fantastically-named keyboard player, Nimrod Bar. Wild, overdriven guitar a la Monster Magnet completes the set as suddenly we find ourselves in a whole other universe to the one we began in. After pitching up such a curveball, “Sanhedrin” simply hits it out of the park. A super-smooth jazzy set-up with brushed drums drives a sampled wash burning with portent. Like waves crashing back and forth on the beach it shimmers on and on, morphing to oblivion and I love it.

One presumes it’s the pair’s vintage sound that convinced them to combine EP’s but one suspects it’s more the case of a label alpha dragging along a rough diamond. It seems a pretty safe bet that most will come away having discovered something they dig, but also plenty of filler that they wish they hadn’t uncovered.

Also online @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2016/10/ef-tiny-fingers-vayu-pelagic-records/

Album Review: Earth Ship – Hollowed

Berlin’s Earth Ship are a band that crosses genres. Depending on your state of mind when you press play, you’ll hear something different each and every time.

Firing out two parts doom and one part southern metal, Earth Ship have managed to muster an album that collects, like music nerds, a vast range of their influences. Starting out with a driven, downbeat Alice In Chains vibe they steadily ramp up the pace and the power to peak at something equating to Kylesa’s whirlwind crush before bringing it back through thrash and blackened metal to settle back into a doomy groove.

Blasting off the wall of noise with a scowling bag of nails vocal, opener “Reduced To Ashes” melts an initially gutsy, visceral sound into a driven dual vocal that mimics the melancholic laments of the aforementioned Alice In Chains. At ts heart the jerking back-and-forth swinging rhythm is a simple structure by design, so it’s a surprise to find it repeating throughout the album. Following up, the title-track introduces itself as its tonal brother, attacking from a different angle with half-paced, down-tuned chugs creating an imposing force. This looser blueprint risks demoting it to mere filler but at least it warns you just how complex their constructive thought processes are.

Deeper in, the variation continues – morose, lush verses, driven with effortless power by twin vocals, melt into a roared death attack. Surrounding it they use an amalgam of High On Fire’s immense vocal grunt, Monster Magnet’s heady theatrics and Torche’s relentless cyclical riffing to shock and invigorate.

“Conjured” provides a wicked groove interspersed with harmonised vocal “aahs” and is both accessible and memorable. Then, diving into the abyss, “Monolith” offers up a suitably menacing, rumbling undercurrent with big blackened melancholic tones. Imposing its wrath upon the listener it echoes through to violating feedback. “In Fire’s Light” is even darker, heavier and throws ever more powerful hits. It also features the enigmatically repeating line “The sands of time are running low…”. Here, they sound like a beefed-up Purified In Blood.

Wading through, the succulent, thick layers envelop you. Whichever you choose to lock onto, be it the scrawling multiple-overlaid vocal, the demonic throat-scouring or the slow, persistent driven quality, you are always plugged in. And then there’s the moments when they revert to feeding in old school elements. One particular track that will give you a shit-eating grin is the thrashed-up “Castle Of Sorrow”. The fiery, metallic tang, of the thing throwing out curses in twin-speed attack with pillar-to-post riffage is a joy. Even the monotonous closer “The Edge Of Time” has value here with its long, weighty, sustained chord strikes and maddening Acid King-esque ethereal doom.

There are negatives to consider. These aren’t so much songs as they are a series of flavours. There is an over-reliance on sheer power when the variety of attack should be the star. With trigger points supplied by the guttural roared sections they do have a tendency to batter the eardrums a little too often. A solid wall of noise each time will only drive you in one direction. And the album does rely a little too much on needless party tricks. As an example, “Safeguard Of Death”‘s automaton vocal intoning instructions over and over will drive you nuts.

Earth Ship are essentially like getting all your favourite foods and putting them on a single plate. Consume each individual part carefully and you’ll love this experience. Mix them all up and it’ll taste like something you’d give to your dog.

Also online @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2016/07/earth-ship-hollowed-napalm/

Album Review: All Them Witches – Dying Surfer Meets His Maker

Direct from the recording studio of a remote mountainside cabin, hand-built by the band, perched above the fake glamour of Dollywood, here comes an utterly bewitching album of luxuriantly rich sounds. It draws its inspiration from across the dusty plains, glutinous swamps and rolling hills of arcane America and knits together the softer edges of desert rock and folk blues with transient tonal nods to country, pop, psyche and stoner.

The first thing though that hits you about this album however is the unbelievable restraint shown throughout to not swamp the songs with lyrics, instrumentation or verbose affectations. Remarkable, especially when you consider the quality of the musicianship on show and the melodious quality of the vocalist – one Charles Parks. No, here things are stripped back to allow for the essential to shine and the unnecessary to melt away.

Stepping through the doorway and into that initial mellow riff of “Call Me Star”, you are whisked immediately away into All Them Witches’ universe. The tension, the stress melts away and you begin to float. It works as a real statement of intent, forewarning us to expect the unexpected; there are to be no fireworks, no clap of thunder, no desperate need to blast out your ears before they settle. Hewn back to its humble core, it oozes star quality. Sat atop its mellifluous acoustic guitar, the band displays an exquisite touch, gifting the song a lightness and an almost magical quality. Both beguiling and jaw-droppingly beautiful.

The instrumental eight-and-a-half-minute “El Centro” picks the pace up, drowning the listener in a Torche-like melting pot of battering stoner chugs and shifting psychedelic affectations that centres round a two-note riff. Within two tracks they have blown any preconceptions you might have of the band not once but twice. And for the kicker? How about a spot of “Dirt Preachers”? A driving rhythmic build with a grim vocal performance injected with malice and menace and a storming chorus. The viciously slow final section drags up sinister undertones of religious paedophilia by littering the lyrical wordplay with lines like “Come all you children to my arms” and “Twist your fingers, I’ll call you a star”.

Betwixt and between, there is a bluesy lush jam, a half-whispered vocal, a dash of harmonica and a gorgeous acoustic instrumental to wallow in. Venturing down “Open Passageways ” and its pursuing tonal reprise finds ATW managing to morph the goodness of Coldplay’s early naivety with Moby’s “Extreme Ways”. It’s a monster track of acoustic guitar with bowed violin gifting it a folky hue with a sumptuous kick of vocal hook – “Scream and shout and bellow / Chew up your love then swallow”.

Then, as the album draws to a close, the band continues to loosen their belts, resulting in a maddening dropping away of exploratory content. What it does allow them to do, eventually with Monster Magnet hats firmly in place, is jam; to gradually step backwards from the lead to walk beside the listener offering simple chanted echoing incantations and a degree of psychedelic warbling.

The “solitude of the mountain”, as Parks describes it, has indelibly coloured the album, removing it from their harder, faster back catalogue and gifting it a laconic, unforced swagger and a beautifully controlled flow where everything fits with everything else. Having initially been released in late 2015, essentially what you’ve got here is the record everybody missed from their album of the year lists. From here there are no limits.

Also online @ http://www.avenoctum.com/2016/02/all-them-witches-dying-surfer-meets-his-maker-new-west-records/

EP Review: Crippled Black Phoenix – New Dark Age Tour

Crippled Black Phoenix have always been a hard one to pin down to a single genre so its no surprise to find multi-instrumentalist Justin Greaves still warping any pre- or mis-conceptions we may have of his band. This long-playing EP comes hot on the heels of last year’s White Light Generator – an album that marked their 10th anniversary.

Having tackled the emotional journey from stoner doom to freak folk they continue their homage to the likes of Pink Floyd by covering their classic composition “Echoes” from the 1971 album Meddle. Here they strongly echo the source material yet manage to expand it from its original 23-minute running time, employing some neat little tricks and charming affectations, to a whopping 37-minuter in two parts. Definitely a melange that Floyd fans will want to check out.

The two original tracks here provide most insight into their evolution. With trumpets and gunshots opening the album the scene is set by “Spider Island”… something wicked this way comes. Slow, clean, dark instrumentation with a long, languid, deeply affected vocal brings the constituent parts to climax somewhere between the damaged grunge of Soundgarden and the dizzying wash of Monster Magnet.

Nestling up to this the title-track and album focal point is a psychedelic journey down a more occult side-road. Big on cyclical effects, pinged bass and warming Hammond organ, the structural twists stand out like bullet-points. The central rhythmic break is a doozy, lingering within an echoic chamber of Jarre-ish Oxygene effects. From here, the instrumental patterning continues to morph until It becomes apparent that the track has already reached its peak and lost its sense of direction long before it meanders to a close.

A record that is not without fault then, but one that sits pretty on its perch.

Also online @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2015/12/crippled-black-phoenix-new-dark-age-season-of-mist/

Album Review: Riotgod - Invisible Empire

Listening to Riotgod, you get the impression that when Monster Magnet’s rhythm section, bassist Jim Baglino and drummer Bob Pantella, first discussed forming a side-project they must have been literally bursting with ideas for ground that they wanted to cover. The surprise here is that they were most definitely looking backwards not forwards. The players have clearly gorged themselves upon rock music’s back catalogue and are now fit-to-burst with a smorgasbord of different tones and textures.

The simple construction and swaggering cadence of the music helps knit the whole project together, but there is still plenty of track-to-track chopping about between styles. The guitars lay down most of the groundwork, but it is Mark Sunshine’s vocal affectations that provide the hammer to bash in the nails here. In doing so, he becomes the focal point that so identifies each change of direction. He’s there with a Stockdale-esque yelp when the band hit upon a cosmic jerkiness so reminiscent of Wolfmother, as they do for “Breed” and “Loosely Bound”, and he’s not averse to developing an affected Coverdale lilt for the surprisingly Whitesnake-a-like “Slow Death”.

At points through the swaggering “Fool”, “Tomorrow’s Today” and the menacing “Crossfade” you’ll hear some interesting grunge elements popping in. The band plunge themselves into recreating a kind of Pearl Jam meets Alice In Chains vibe with Sunshine finding time to piece together some Cantrell harmonies and they ram home the point with the standout track, “Firebrand”, which recreates the dark verses and soaring chorus that are so reminiscent of Soundgarden. Even the lyrics recall Cornell’s elemental writing style – “Nothing is spared from your wide open mind / Swallow and flower the seed.”

Having been birthed from such a vast stoner beast as Monster Magnet, it’s definitely a surprise to find hardly any heavy-lidded plodding and so many classic and alternative rock threads. You’d assume naturally that a band attempting to span both these genres, might struggle and end up producing a messy product but, save for the ostentatious acoustic “Gas Station Roses” and the disconcertingly haphazard psych break in “Hollow Mirror”, they do keep it all flowing along relatively smoothly.

They may have borrowed a couple of striking chord progressions and clichéd riffs here and there and Sunshine is certainly guilty of paying plenty of homage, but you’d balk at suggesting that this sophomore effort isn’t an enjoyable album because of it. Invisible Empire rolls along at a fair lick and is full of little treats along the way (the rock n’ roll punch of “Saving It Up” or the sweeping melodics of “Rebirth”, for instance). If you value invention over devotion then I’d suggest you steer clear of Riotgod. The rest of you, especially those with a penchant for grunge or rock music with a modish kicker, step right this way.

Also online (with track samples) @ The New Review = http://thenewreview.net/reviews/riotgod-invisible-empire

Album Review: IIIrd Alternative - IIIa

IIIrd Alternative are, considering their realm of expertise, a Danish quartet who are most probably named after the Monster Magnet track "Third Alternative". It's your first hint, then, that this album's gonnna rock like a bastard. They have put together an instrumental album that draws on the dense neck-jarring grooves of Russian Circles and one that drops off to envelop you like so many other purveyors of dark, progressive and thickly ambient music.

Standouts are the constantly stick-shifting "Dark Rift" and the driving force and sweeping layers of "Umbra". Both these sound like they come from somewhere deep within the bowels of the Earth; rising up like musical magma to burst and pop on the surface in impressive explosions, before the molten liquid rock slides away to progressively ooze its way across the landscape, cooling the pace as it journeys.

Released back in January, it's almost inconceivable how such a work of art as this could go relatively unnoticed for so long. It's a real word-of-mouth album this so check it out and share the wealth. You'll find a full stream of the album, with an option to purchase the download, at: http://iiirdalternative.bandcamp.com/album/iiia

Track Listing:
1.Umbra
2.Eye Against Eye
3.The Great Flood
4.Dark Rift
5.Deficit
6.Æble