ninehertz

A round up of nine recent releases in bitesize review form...

Let’s go continent by continent in lieu of any other obvious pattern jumping out at me. Beginning in Europe, and first up to Milan with Toilet Snake, and their sludge punk riot of an EP Back from the Sewers (out on both Electric Valley Records and Teschio Dischi). The warm thick sludge tone pushed forward by punk accelerator works well, and on the stand out title track, with a bit of gnarlier-end Fu Manchu in the riff, it becomes rocket fuelled and packing a punch. The constant pent up aggression in the vocals could be more of the noise-rock world if they didn’t consistently reside atop these whirling fuzz-loaded and heavy guitars. Good stuff.

Closer to home, in Birmingham to be exact, we find Voidlurker releasing only their second EP (and first in five years) despite seemingly being a constant fixture on the UK doom underground circuit. Their Iggy Pop-riposte titled Loathe for Life is out on the ever busy APF Records any day now. It is made up of four slabs of doom (that’s right, slabs – songs isn’t the word) – between 7 and 9 minutes apiece, towering and sludgey hanging doom riffs that don’t do anything you’d not expect, but that’s not the aim here. It achieves its doom purity goal.

Heading north to Glasgow brings us to Grabenfusss, and their album The Horror. It is esoteric, an assortment of electronic robotic noises coalescing into a beat you can get behind, experimental to the max, random spoken word ranting into the electricity, not unlike an obtuse Sly and the Family Drone live piece at times. Others you feel like you’ve intercepted indecipherable alien shuffling electro glitch contacts, with a strong Scottish accented narrator. On Broken Kingdoms, an off key alarm sound is joined by a hundred wind chimes in a strong breeze, before completely by surprise a song breaks free, albeit one that could be Oranssi Pazuzu’s wildest synth driven cosmic pilgrimages, minus the black metal undercurrents. It’s a strange but highly inventive listen.

And now we move to Asia, and how better than via ‘The Gateway to the East’, Istanbul, and a gang of punks there by the name of BABA SAD. Their öfke hediye release is a live album, an atypical way to hear a band for the first time, but this is punk which thrives in the flesh. The vocals are coarse and hoarse, but this is played with a smile, a lo-fi happiness evident even from afar that is infectious. They mix it up too, some noise-rock, some snarling post-punk fury, all leaving you with the sense you’d have loved to have been there.

Over in Samara, Russia, two-piece Shit Happiness’ instrumental noise-rock EP Forest 1, Forest 3 appears, leaves it mark and is done in under ten minutes. It is a wired sonic explosion, blast waves pushing you back in its heavy post-rock meets math-rock agitation blur, with weird effect-strewn vocals and madcap guitars. It is unsettling and at times thrilling.

Moving to Kuala Lumpur brings us into more common ninehertz grounds of stoner/doom, clear from the album artwork. Hanyut’s Dalam Bunyi brings in my second Fu Manchu reference of the round up, with Koboi Angkasa sounding like a muffled version of King of the Road with bite in the vocals. The vocals are a unique oddity elsewhere, seemingly alien at times, comically so in some. That they’re accompanied by fuzz-rich stoner riffs is obviously welcome. The “acid-drenched” prefix to doom they proclaim clear throughout in its oddities and weirdness and it is worth noting it gets better it goes on.

Time for a trip over the Pacific to South America now for a couple of releases; first up Curetaje from Ecuador. We featured their last release on our podcast back in 2022, and loved it so much entered it into our releases of the year despite it being about 6 or 7 minutes long. They’ve pushed the boat out this time to a near ten minutes in total, and it is no less ferocious. É-la vita... is a grand splurge of death metal, grind, sludge and crust, punk anthemic one moment, blasting your ears away the next. It’s dead good, plain and simple.

A well crafted split is next, combining Iah and Hijo de la Tormenta, of Córdoba in Argentina both, on a record entitled Iah de la Tormenta. Iah are likely known to anyone with passing interest in the stoner rock/heavy psych boundaries, plying a beautiful line of psychedelic space rock and post-rock for many years now, exhibited as well as ever here. Hijo de la Tormenta maybe less known, but if this acts as a showcase then they’ll win many over; stoner rock with psych vibes, flowering into slight proggy expansiveness drawing potential comparisons to the great Elder, while their second track recalls the Singaporean mob Marijannah.

We end in North America. I’ve reviewed a couple of releases from Oklahoma and surrounds of late, and I don’t know if certain algorithms have kicked in but loads more music from the area has reached my ears since, Bugnog being one. They’re a duo, with a cool new EP American Dreamed – stoner rock with a bit of force behind it, a bit of grit but otherwise fairly straightforward with plenty of tongue in cheek, and a lot of fun with it. The last track heads towards doom, but it’s the penultimate World Bore III that wins out for me, a development away from the norm, maybe even a touch of modern-day Baroness – really impressive for a two-piece.