Do you like to dress in black? Do you prefer a solitary pint of cider in the back of a smoky bar? (the smoky part might be hard to fashion in this day and age) Do you favour wearing a trenchcoat? Do you feel in a state of perpetual ennui? Maybe you are a Berliner! Or perhaps you’re a member of a Darkwave band… maybe both!
What is it about our aching nostalgia for the eighties that finds us being drawn back to this magical decade? Perhaps video did not actually kill the radio star until the end of this era?
Evergreen (Hopeless Records) is a very ambitious album and frankly by far the most thematically well-rounded and best effort from Pvris yet. Lyndsey Gerd Gunnulfsen has seamlessly planted a flag on the moon here, showing it was her that made this project special all along. Not only a queer champion, Gunnulfsen is a top-notch creator and performer who can back it up with grade-A material with startling philosophical depth amidst the beats and hooks.
Crosses a.k.a. ††† the duo made up of Deftones’ Chino Moreno and producer/multi-instrumentalist Shaun Lopez has shared a new remix of their track “Day One (Machinedrum remix).” You can stream the track on all DSPs and watch an official visualizer below. This is the first new music from the band since their cover of George Michael’s “One More Try” for their annual Christmas covers series. The group released their new EP, Permanent.Radiant (read our review here). Continue reading
Darling the Dawn (Constellation Records) is the debut album by long-time collaborative duo Ariel Engle (La Force, Patrick Watson, Broken Social Scene) and Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion) as ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT. For forty-four minutes of vocal-driven electronic droning — combining the melodic tones of Engle with the “noise” (as the credits put it) of Menuck — there’s less of a sense of being taken from A to B, but rather being given the warm blanket of a trance to lie in.
Ever since their original EPs dating back to the start of the 21st Century, Enter Shikari have been one of the stand-out bands of the alternative UK scene for bringing together a variety of sounds under a single uniform. Not only being one of the more experimental bands in their field but also one of the only bands to showcase these genres in a fully realised art form that just, quite simply works. Now twenty years on, the band’s Spark (see what I did there) has not faltered at all. It’s been incredible to see this journey showing the group adding more and more genres to their arsenal. In the prior two albums, Enter Shikari have shown they’re more than able to dip into Brit-Pop to classical with ease. The ever-present question that lingers on after each release is: what could the band do next?
Puscifer will always be best known as one of the many creative outlets for Tool / A Perfect Circle vocalist Maynard James Keenan, and as an avenue for the most obscure depths of his musical creativity. But the band has always been a collaborative affair, with Keenan working alongside many different artists over the years, with their albums subsequently always providing an infusion of many different ideas and experiences. Existential Reckoning : Rewired (Puscifer Entertainment / Alchemy Recordings/ BMG) is the remix accompaniment to their 2020 album, which itself was a typically avant-garde electro-rock melting pot of futuristic and otherworldly sounds.
Philosophy On Pessimism is the debut EP released on Translation Loss Records by New Miserable Experience, a project featuring members of Rosetta, Model Prisoner, and Revocation. The quartet pieced together the sum of their parts remotely, using file sharing to bounce their ideas around to one another, and have created an ethereal-sounding record with a foot firmly in the darker regions of the eighties synth-wave style.
Crosses a.k.a. ††† the duo made up of Deftones’ Chino Moreno and producer/multi-instrumentalist Shaun Lopez has shared heir cover of George Michael’s “One More Try” accompanied by an animated visualizer. Releasing covers is now a holiday tradition for the duo, with last year’s rendition of “Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazarus. With the Crosses touch on it, this 1980’s heartbreaking ballad takes on an even greater weight, considering the upcoming 8th anniversary of George Michael’s death on Christmas Day. The group just released their new EP, Permanent.Radiant (read our review here). Purchase, stream and Watch “One More Try” here! Continue reading
Crosses, or ††† if you prefer, really prefers foreplay to making love. The synthwave and electro-rock music duo made up of Deftones’ frontman Chino Moreno and Far producer/ multi-instrumentalist Shaun Lopez has been teasing us for over a year with singles, a top-tier cover, and pulse-quickening videos as they readied their new EP, Permanent.Radiant (Warner Music Group). Fit in and around Chino’s heavy schedule with Deftones and Shaun’s producing work, the new EP continues to build upon the path they laid out, minus former collaborator Chuck Doom, who has departed the project.