This week’s round-up of newish releases from Darwin Rev, Fog, Coasters, Deeper Beats, and Tape Hiss & Sparkle.
Rockardi | Darwin Rev | Distraction Disco/Apple Music | RY
Darwin Rev is the future, or at the very least, the present. At just 14 minutes for its seven tracks, Rockardi is nothing short of heroic.
Blistering through with distorted guitars, petulance, syncopated fast beats, reverb, and a genuine weirdness. There is very little to say about this album other than it’s fourteen minutes long, listen to it, you have nothing better to do with those fourteen minutes. I fucking guarantee you.
The Unseen | Fog | Bandcamp | LMN
From the first 40 seconds of this album, I knew I was in for a trip. A doom trip. When the heavy bass and drum thrum kick in, it’s over for me. It’s giving Tool, but only in the slightest. The Unseen, an album by Fog, is a melodic, dreamy, and hellscape-type doom metal record that most people I know wouldn’t appreciate, but then again, most of the people I know don’t even like Turnstile.
Fog himself or itself, or the entity behind these deliciously dark melodies, is a one-man project that truly shows off his influences, being Monolord, Sea of Grief, Dopelord and so forth.
The solos are whiny and fucking downright gooseflesh-inducing. While Fog’s EP is without a doubt solidly rooted in the realm of Doom Metal, the third track gave me heavy Mastodon feels, and this is naturally a fucking good thing. Older Mastodon, though; again, this is a pretty poes good thing.
All in all, this is doom metal in its rawest form; it’s gloomy, doomy, and fucking EPIC.
Not My Wife | Coasters | Apple Music | RY
Coasters’ new single, Not My Wife, chugs along for a couple of bars, throws in two high notes, chugs along for a couple more, two more high notes, then opens out into some kind of breathy chorus thing, all delivered by somebody with a cold.
Absolutely generic, absolutely forgettable.
Also fuck you Coasters, I will not use lower case for your song title, you don’t deserve lowercase titles!
Celestia | Deeper Beats | Selville Records/Apple Music | LMN
This is very deep, chilled melodic afro house—it’s fucking perfect for the end of the bender, provided you’re having a bender with people of culture, not white hippie friends who only listen to fucking psytrance, and Xavier Rudd. (Kill me).
I say it’s the perfect end to the “bender”, but really it’s the kinda soulful tunage that can be played at any time, much like when the day started, and I found myself packing MD caps while writing this review, and grooving with a relaxed grin on my beak.
Smooth, soft, silky, soulful selecta.
Chasing, the first track on this less-than-half-hour, 4-track EP, features delectably sexy and smooth vox by Angelica Nietta, perfect for those of us who positively gobble up house with R&B vocals.
Deeper Beats, a local music producer, disc jockey, and audio engineer, is an advocate of deep, soulful, and groove-first house music, and his accolade as an audio engineer is evident from as soon as the first 10 seconds of the EP. The production is on a level that Crazy White Boy would appreciate, with top-notch mastering and excellent production.
Our Burning Kingdom of Smallest Most Sacred Flowers | Tape Hiss & Sparkle | Bandcamp | HE
This album is so sumptuously shit it could be used as fertiliser to terraform Mars. The thing with lo-fi acoustic folk is that you are sacrificing production values, so you need to make up for it with something else—vocal beauty, lyricism, instrumental virtuosity, or songwriting brilliance. This album has none of that.
Perhaps artist Simon Tamblyn oozes charisma and has a rich circle of friends and admirers who will listen to this. Perhaps his gigs are fucking lunacy. Yet none of that comes across here, leaving a feeling of deep melancholy at having squandered time and attention that could have been better spent hanging up laundry or having a mid-to-decent wank. BVs and some layering mark progress from earlier releases, yet they also make it feel like listening to early Pink Floyd via a phone call from 1971.
Contributors: HE – Hagen Engler | LMN – Lloyd Martinez Newkirk | RY – Roger Young