Outer Battery Records are building quite the musical roster for themselves not just with Swervedriver’s brilliant recent EP The World’s Fair, which was reviewed recently for Ghost Cult, but also the inclusion of Heavy Blanket (with J Mascis), Petyr and finally Obits; best known for featuring the legendary, late, great Rick Froberg (Drive Like Jehu/Hot Snakes), RIP. Excitingly, there are also live albums from Dinosaur Jr, Om, and OFF! available from the label. Impressive, right?Continue reading
Unlike Britain’s flagging public transport system, Melvins are regular as clockwork. In fact, such is the Los Angeles by way of San Francisco by way of Monsanto, Washington outfit’s lust for creating new music, that the fantastic amount of releases put out can be positively overwhelming and hard to keep up with. Continue reading
Nik and Keefy of Ghost Cult Mag to discuss Pink Floyd’s involvement in the swinging sixties in London, the gravitational pull of the art, music, and fashion. The stuff of legends and earning the band the moniker “space rock” we discuss the dual blessing and curse of this possible misnomer.Continue reading
On Raw Blood Singing (Debemur Morti Productions), Insect Ark returns with an otherworldly and compelling sci-fi landscape of noir, subtle menace and mystery. Continue reading
Great music, like great movies, can take you to another world. Instrumental synth-based duo Zombi work their transporting, soundtrack-oriented magic on the sublime, cinema-literate Direct Inject (Relapse Records).Continue reading
With the first release in eight years, Norway’s Dødheimsgard return armed with a reputation for the abstract and the almost absurd. Formerly a more pure Black Metal act, 1999’s seminal 666 International saw the band broaden their sonic palette to incorporate a widening range of styles within their sound, often incorporated in sudden ways as opposed to fluidly throughout, with 2015’s return, A Umbra Omega, receiving plaudits and adding to their cult following.
Moths, the five-piece stoner/prog outfit from San Juan, Puerto Rico, take a voyage into space on their debut LP. As cosmic and inter-galactic as the results are, this mission perhaps required more focus, more direction and a tad more discipline. The myriad metal genres, frequently-changing time signatures and disparate musical sections idiosyncratically grafted together into songs can make it hard to grasp or nail down any plan behind it all.
Atmospheric black metal project Tome of the Unreplenished have upped the ante on Earthbound (Avantgarde), the band’s forthcoming album. After laying the groundwork on a few initial releases, multi-instrumentalist Hermes brought in a full-band for 2017’s Theurgy – Act I. A departure from the more musically straightforward debut, 2015’s Innerstanding (both I, Voidhanger), the first “full-band” release, probably alienated some listeners. If you aren’t open to noise and industrial experimentation (think more Throbbing Gristle than Nine Inch Nails) you may want to leave that one alone. The latest release is far more in keeping musically with the debut record and it’s a satisfying forty-six minutes of riffing and atmospherics.
Kontact’s debut EP is rather tricky to pin down in terms of style. Voivod makes the most immediate comparison with an aesthetic immersed in similar cosmic theming and the vocals channeling Snake in a similarly manic yet almost robotic sneer. However, the guitar work draws more on Speed Metal gallops and doomy riffs than the high-pitched dissonance that would come with such an association. King Gizzard at their heaviest might also be an applicable reference point though there isn’t quite as much psychedelic fuzz wafting about.Continue reading
Not content to just let the sludgy boi/spooky girl pairings have all the fun with multi-artist collaborations in Doom, A Story Of Darkness And Light (Stickman Records)features the coming together of Elder and Kadavar as Eldovar (I don’t know where that ‘o’ comes from either). The two groups certainly make for interesting bedfellows; while both are arguably rooted in Seventies Rock traditions, Elder has evolved to Heavy Prog splendor while Kadavar largely subsists on off-the-cuff Stoner Blues. However, their shared interest in various genre experiments as well as established track records of high quality material gives plenty of fertile ground for such a union.