THE DEVIL'S MONTH: June 2023
Every first Thursday we round up some of the finest releases of the previous month.
Six, count ‘em, six months have passed since THE DEVIL’S MOUTH joined up with MONDO NEGRO to bring you some the most finely curated selections out of the mountains of records that have come out this year so far. And yes, almost every month I have moaned a little about how there is so much good stuff out there and how this short and neat pile of five is so hard to choose, and well, I can tell you that it just gets harder as the months go by. Many a difficult moment has been spent, considering the easy way out, muttering “would it really matter if I picked thirteen records this month?” to myself and pushing down other similarly dark thoughts. So far, I’ve held on, and hopefully I’ve just guilted you into reading this just out of pity for the arduous task that faces this poor old writer every month. So much time listening to amazing music…
Diminishing
The Unnamable
(Anti-Corporate Music)
Hey, down here! Yes, you! Carry on reading and stop waiting for the band picture to fully load, it’s really blurry like that. And once you listen to the “music” on offer by this new cross-country (N.Y./Texas) project, you’ll get why the guys appear only as vague spectral entities. I’m exaggerating with the commas around music back there, but do hang on tight, because Dave Brenner (Gridfailure) and Lane Oliver (Yatsu) aren’t pulling any sonic punches here. Situated somehwere in the wasteland between industrial, harsh noise, dark ambient and drone, Diminishing paint it all black, using occasional the grey shades of Japanese noise, Khanate and some of the nether reaches of the Cold Meat Industry catalogue as blobs of paint on thick brushes. However, it is all still music, in the broadest sense of the term. Even at its most bleakly atmospheric, ‘The Unnamable’ never meanders past the point of structure, never spirals into randomness and never disappears up its own behind with some kind of experimentalist pretentiousness, which is a very good thing. Though it never manages to reaches the Khanate-esque depths of opener ‘An Emptiness’ for the rest of its duration, there’s plenty of spine-chilling moments, from the sinister, soundtrack-y eeriness of ‘That Sinking Feeling‘ to the Lustmord-ian slow-burn of ‘Altruistic’, just to mention a couple of highlights. This album offers a gripping, uneasy journey from start to finish.
GELD
Currency // Castration
(Relapse)
After the rather vague and hazy nightmares of Diminishing, nothing like getting back on to earth for a proper, solid and concrete beating, right? And make no mistake, a fucking beating in some forgotten, dark back alley of Melbourne is what you’ll get with the new GELD album, ‘Currency // Castration’. After two brilliant full-lengths on smaller labels, 2018’s ‘Perfect Texture‘ on Iron Lung Records and 2020’s ‘Beyond The Floor‘ on Static Shock Records, it seems like the time is right for this bunch to step up another level. Relapse does indeed feel like the perfect home for them, as despite maintaining the raw as fuck nature of the songs just like they were on those two first records, still hitting you with their simple - but never simplistic! - and effective savagery and the constantly in-the-red intimidating intensity, there’s also an unmistakable air of “big band” to all this. Sure, it should be a lot of fun kicking around with twenty other like-minded weirdos in a basement somewhere while they play, but at the same time you can also tell that this music truly calls for a massive moshpit with thousands of fans going apeshit on a proper festival somewhere. There are hints of Trap Them in some of the most infuriatingly catchy tunes like ‘Clock Keeps Crawling’, but also some surprising stuff, like the oblique nature of ‘Secret Prison’ for instance, which the press release that came with the promo akins to a sort of “Voivod if they were a Japanese hardcore band” kind of thing, and it really is spot on. Overall, one of the most deliriously, devastatingly unhinged albums of the year so far.
Loma Prieta
Last
(Deathwish Inc.)
Well well well, it’s good to see these guys again! After a relentlessly regular release schedule in the first period of their existence, with five fantastic albums put out between 2008 and 2015, Loma Prieta, perhaps the most forward-thinking, genre-bending screamo band of this century - to the point that calling them a “screamo band” feels a bit like a reductive insult -, kinda went silent on us for almost a decade, with just a little 7” in 2020 to signal that they were still around. Fortunately, putting on ‘Last’ is just like reuniting with your old best friends - comfortable, reminding you of all the good times you’ve had before, but still with a little twinge of excitement over the new things they have become since you last saw each other. Even when they were putting out records every two years, Loma Prieta never really did the same thing twice, and now with eight years in between, the contrasts are even sharper. On one hand, some of this record’s most manic, mathy moments are among the most intense they’ve ever recorded, but on the other hand, the melodies they trace are often of a surprisingly delicate fragility. Genre-wise, it’s all over the place - the floating graciousness of ‘Symbios’ is an obvious example of how far they’ve come, but also take something like ‘Dose’, for instance, which is screamo, post-punk, pop-punk and indie rock all at once. Just like a human being, whose deepest emotions it means to portray, it’s impossible to describe ‘Last’ as happy, sad, angry, luminous or dark, as it is all of those things and more.
Royal Thunder
Rebuilding The Mountain
(Spinefarm)
So I’ve done a Discography Deep Dive on them, I’ve had Mlny on the podcast twice (on a regular Ten Rounds episode and on the #100 celebrations talking about ‘The Bear’), and I kinda harassed poor Albert until he caved in and let me do the feature on the new album on the new issue of Decibel. Does it show a lot that I’m kinda into this band? I often speak of the moment when my buddy/mentor Jonathan Selzer showed me their first EP way before its release date after telling me “I’ve got something here that I know you’ll like” with a wink, because I feel that was a significant day, as if the music made by these people knocked something loose inside me then, and it’s been bouncing around in there ever since. Which I know is a weird image, but it’s meant to be a good thing. So it warms my heart that they are, indeed, rebuilding this amazing mountain of sound they have erected together called Royal Thunder, back in action, in a good place in their lives, and making some of their best songs - which is no small feat, considering their previous three albums and two EPs contain some of the finest rock music ever. No hyperbole. ‘Rebuilding The Mountain’ does feel exactly like its title, and it’s a reflection of everything these people have gone through in the past few years. Mlny’s lyrics in particular walk that fine line between intensely personal but still universally relatable with grace and elegance, and the way she sings them over Josh Weaver’s typically unforgettable riffs is still as profoundly emotional and dripping with raw honesty as ever. It’s music for coming back, yes, but also for a reckoning. It’s music for welcoming who you will be, but also for accepting who you were. That they are able to transmit this and so much else with what is also the most stripped down, no-bullshit approach to songwriting they’ve ever had is nothing short of genius.
Swans
The Beggar
(Young God Records)
There really is no need for any kind of “review” or even commentary of new Swans records, there hasn’t been for a while now. Though Michael Gira kicked off this second incarnation of the band in 2010 with, essentially, an album of songs, the fantastic ‘My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky’, it feels like, upon eventually reaching that “sky”, whatever form it might have taken for him, the man has touched upon something more primal, something beyond mere music, or songs, or albums, or any of these little trivialities we bother ourselves with. ‘The Seer’ marked the beginning of an all-consuming journey, a unified quest for something I suspect not even Gira himself is quite sure what it is, but it’s the journey itself that matters, that engulfs the records, the live shows, the rehearsals, the people that come and go in the band, the books, the films, the art, everything. All of it is swirling around in a continuum, sucking musicians and dedicated fans alike into it, and ultimately, in its perhaps unachievable final form, it’s like it doesn’t even matter anymore what it’s called or even who’s playing it. As he builds and builds and builds, Michael Gira seems to be getting tantalisingly closer to the primordial sound of the universe itself, the humming of existence, the ebb and flow of time and space - and yet, at the same time, he’s never sounded more internal, more visceral, more human, just like that not-quite-monochrome heart on the cover artwork. I swear to you I haven’t taken any substances before writing this, but what else do you do with a two-hour album filled with more ideas and starting points for deep thoughts than all the other albums on all The Devil’s Months together, an album that opens up with a fucking 43-minute song? You don’t do anything, you just sit there and let it wash over you, and you keep doing it, over and over and over and over and over.