An incestuous month this time around, ladies and gents, with two pairs out of the four bands featured here sharing members between them. I think that sentence just about makes sense. We have the mysterious figure of Umberto releasing the latest addition to his solo SESSOVIOLENTO pantheon of ugly whilst also taking on guitar duties for the new release from transcendent nightmare-peddlers Ewige Schlankengraft. While on the slightly less horrific side we have Pianos Become The Teeth, who (reportedly) share a member with hardcore uber-super-group United Nations. The author Jess C Scott once said of incest in her novel Wicked Lovely that ” I felt like an animal, and animals don’t know sin, do they?”. Now, I don’t know much about that, so let’s talk about some fucking music, alright?
Ewige Schlangenkraft – Enlightened Violence (COF Records)
As delightfully repugnant as ever, Ewige Schlangenkraft have traversed the comsos once again to deliver another collection of ‘songs’ that test the limits of human perception. Or, in other words, members of Cease To Exist and SESSOVIOLENTO (all part of the expanding Yamabushi ‘family’ of bands, London’s answer to Les Légions Noires ) jamming on tunes that sound like inter-dimensional horrors unleashed.
Where to start? Where on earth to start. My conversations in the past with members of this band have seen them comment on the supposed lack of effort that goes into an Ewige Schlangenkraft recording but, honestly, I think it takes some doing to sound this gleefully strange. The vocals are the shriekings, mumblings, howlings and roarings of a wounded animal; shot in the spine and left to die. Musically, there are no fucks given and little concessions. Black metal is touched on, some post-punk here and there, a dash of white noise for good measure. Riffs seem random and wandering, the guitars sounding like a dentists drill grinding into your skull. Song structures are all over the place for the most part, occasionally snapping into focus to reveal a malevolent rhythm or a sinister groove.
This EP is the aural representation of the moment where you witness an unspeakable act of terror that leaves you permanently damaged. In short: it’s fucking wonderful. Ewige, please don’t ever stop.
Get the tape or listen to it here (downloads will be available when the tape sells out)
Pianos Become The Teeth – Keep You (Epitaph)
If you’d have told me 3 years ago when I failed to make it through to the end of the opening track on Pianos Become The Teeth’s The Lack Long After LP that in 2014 they’d release an album that would immediately become a contender for the best thing I’ll hear that year then I’d have told you to get the fuck away from me. But here we are. And it’s true. Their new LP Keep You (their first to be released since signing to punk mega-corp Epitaph) has managed to instantly get under my skin like so few records this year truly have.
Risking potential fan alienation by introducing a drastic stylistic change (think less frantic screamo and more the sombre heartache of The National) Pianos Become The Teeth have crafted an album of exceptional depth and staggering honesty. Kyle Durfey’s astonishing lyrics are bewilderingly dense; spinning complicated webs of melancholy but always leaving the slightest trail of breadcrumbs for you to follow in order to empathise with his pain. His shimmering vocal performance is the icing on a cake already made of icing while his bandmates show remarkable restraint and deliver songs that are somehow even more exhausting than back when they were spazzing out. A truly special record. And one where the only antidote is listen to it again immediately after it ends.
You can find where Epitaph sell their shit without a link from me
U
nited Nations - The Next Four Years (Temporary Residence)
Good fucking God this lot make a noise. Ex-Thursday vocalist Jeff Rickly continues to lead his merry band of hardcore stalwarts (including, but not limited to, Converge’s Ben Koller and Glassjaw’s Daryl Paulmbo) in an attempt to make as much soul-denting racket as humanly possible. And succeeds. I’ve never been too sure whether United Nations are hardcores best in-joke or a deadly proposition to be taken seriously but this new record pretty much marks them as Not To Be Fucked With, offering a dazzling display of technical prowess, genre-hopping songwriting and more unhampered aggression than is sensible to consume.
Ben Koller continues to be the only drummer in hardcore who can be identified just by the way he batters his kit with bewildering precision and the level of Rickly’s screaming cannot be healthy but United Nations are far more than the considerable sum of their parts. The Next Four Years is a simultaneous homage to the 90’s noise that inspired it and a fuck you to the state of things as they currently stand, all the while sounding like a band from the future. Among the flat out chaos there are plenty of moments that surprise; the tidal grooves at the end of ‘Serious Business'; the Deafheaven twinkles on ‘F#A#$'; the mid-paced melodies of ‘Stole The Past’. A confounding and confusing record; part screamo, part powerviolence, sometimes with nothing to say, sometimes saying so much, all wrapped in a veil of black humour and self depreciation. I have no idea what it all means. Which, I can imagine to their delight, is precisely the point.
Buy it with money here
Sessoviolent
o – Mindfucker (Yamabushi Recordings)
Perhaps what’s most surprising about SESSOVIOLENTO’s new record is how normal it sounds. Well, relatively speaking. Their Molestador EP released back at the start of the year saw SESSOVIOLENTO unleashing a set of blistering tracks that bridged that voids between black metal, punk and pure sonic torture. It’s ferocity was shocking; its lo-fi recording and eternally echoing vocal screams were a ghastly peek behind a veil of darkness from which there is no return. With Mindfucker, SESSOVIOLENTO (on this recording consisting of main-man Umberto along with a drummer credited only as L.B) instead offer up a set of sleazy, scuzzy and snarling punk tracks which feel like they’re designed to be listened to while you’re strung up in a suburban basement, clad head to toe in a PVC suit without a safe word in sight. Probably. And there’s even what constitutes an actual hardcore breakdown on ‘In Love and Lust’. Now, I wasn’t expecting that.
Umberto’s vocals are distinctly discernible across all tracks this time around, making it feel like an oddly intimate and personal collection which arguably makes them all the more unsettling. Themes of twisted sexual fantasises, transformations of the soul and a call for “slaves of the cross” to “rot in your sickness” all add up to create a set of recordings that bring the horror worryingly close to home. SESSOVIOLENTO may sound slightly more restrained on Mindfucker, but they’ve never been more disturbing.
Get the tape or buy a download for a couple of coins