THE DEVIL'S MONTH: October 2024
Rounding up some of the finest releases of the previous month - now including Andy's picks too!
As we told you last month in our typically rambling intro, the sheer density of mention-worthy releases is growing steadily in these last months of the year, and October might just have been on of the richest months so far in 2024. It was hard to narrow it down to our usual number, so just know that there’s a whole bunch of awesome stuff out there still waiting for your own investigation and discovery. Aside from TDM, we naturally recommend our friends over at Mondo Negro for your exploration and record-acquiring needs, as well as the lovely people in our Substack recommendations list.
Anyway, enough chit-chat. José and Andy have stuff to tell you now. Enjoy the ride!
Buñuel
Mansuetude
(Skin Graft & Overdrive)
They said from the beginning this was a real band, and after almost a decade of activity Buñuel keep proving it with a relentless pace of an album every two years (minus a plague pause in 2020), all the while, crucially, never repeating themselves or stagnating in any way. Just like the legendary filmmaker that inspired their moniker, they too explore the outer fringes of human imagination at each turn, never afraid to face the darkest corners of our minds and shine a meek, gentle (mansuetude!) light on them. Also like Buñuel, the Luis, political and social commentary are infused in each of these ramblings, turning their albums into the musical equivalent of a particularly intense therapy session while watching the news at the same time. The resulting music is usually the end result of those activities, a whole bunch of noise-ridden, blues-inducing, unhinged aggression, transmitted as much by Eugene S. Robinson’s typically brilliant shouted/moaned/screeched/spoken vocals as it is by the stellar Italian trio around him, in particular the guitar-torturing genius of Xabier Iriondo. ‘Mansuetude’ goes further than any of the previous three albums did, eschewing the traps of genres (though referencing pretty much all the right stuff, from noise rock to jazz to metal to punk, even) and focusing more on the gut-wrenching intensity of the delivery. You know what’s the biggest compliment we can heap on this album? There’s a little bunch of remarkable, like-minded emotionally on-the-edge guests on it (Jacob of Converge, Duane of The Jesus Lizard and Megan of Couch Slut), and while their participations are indeed awesome and do add a lot to the whole package, they’re not at all what stays with you in the end, nor do they feel like unnatural highs, or excuses to have “big names” written on the booklet. Oh, and speaking of names, if you’re an Eugene fan, in a world without Oxbow, this is as of now his only band, so hopefully that will be one more little encouraging tip to help promoters around the world realise how essential this music is, and how we need to start seeing them on more big posters throughout the year. Get to it.
Cemetery Skyline
Nordic Gothic
(Century Media Records)
I don’t know how high this will be on my forthcoming best albums of 2024 list (yes, it’s coming in December), because there is a lot of fine aspects to carefully consider before I finally give them all up and just order the list on gut instinct alone, but if the only criteria was “number of listens”, this would be #1 by far. There’s no use waxing lyrical about it or trying to convince you of anything - if a band consisting of people from Dark Tranquillity, Amorphis, Insomnium, Sentenced, Witchery, Entombed and more doesn’t excite you straight away, then Cemetery Skyline is probably really not for you. If, however, the Finnish/Scandinavian razor-sharp melancholy of 90s “dark metal” ever appealed to you, if you ever thought “why doesn’t he sing like this more often” when Mikael Stanne does those soaringly sombre clean vocals in Dark Tranquillity, and if the sort-of-genre “gothic metal” doesn’t send you running in the opposite direction, then make yourself comfortable, as you are in for a real treat. Let’s just say that if ‘Nordic Gothic’ had been released in the 90s, it would have been hailed beside Sentenced’s ‘Down’, Paradise Lost’s ‘Draconian Times’ or Katatonia’s ‘Discouraged Ones’, just to give a few examples, as a prime example of how melody, melancholy, heaviness and darkness can coexist and end up creating something equally beautiful and oppressive. Some velvety Sisters Of Mercy / Fields Of The Nephilim touches here and there just reinforce the genuine pedigree these five famous musicians injected into this project, a real labour of love that we will now hope they will find time to continue doing. The way songs like ‘Violent Storm’, ‘Torn Away’ or beautiful closer ‘Alone Together’ take control of your brain for days deserves proper continuity.
Harvestman
Triptych Part Three
(Neurot Recordings)
Yeah, I know, after we spent 47 minutes talking about the whole Triptych with the great Steve Von Till, there isn’t all that much more to say about it. This is just another signaling of the brilliance of this year-long project that Steve had reserved for us for these past months - we might remember 2024 for a whole bunch of horrible reasons for a long time to come, but at least we knew that for three of the year’s full moons (April 23rd’s Pink Moon, July 21st’s Buck Moon and October 17th’s Hunter Moon) Steve was there with a part of the Triptych to ease our spirits and help our hearts and minds travel far away from this cesspool of human suffering and malice for a while. October’s Hunter Moon finally saw the release of this concluding third part, and though it’s hard to see it as a standalone piece, if you do try that exercise, it’s arguably the strongest of the three. Once again a masterful amalgamation of material whose origin spans a couple of decades, also expertly embedding every musician that lent Steve a helping hand (and there’s been a few important ones, like The Bug, Douglas Leal of Deafkids, Wayne Adams of Petbrick, Dave French of YOB and Sanford Parker), it will be a transcendental, truly psychedelic - in the true sense of the word! - listen whether you do it on its own, or preferably as part of the whole Triptych that you can now listen from beginning to end. Go try it and undarken a little of your day.
Sun & Sail Club
Shipwrecked
(Heavy Psych Sounds)
It’s not like anyone, in the grand scheme of things, really gave Sun & Sail Club’s previous two albums anywhere near the kind of attention they deserved, but whatever, these don’t seem like the kind of people that do anything for those reasons. Sure, the name is a little silly and doesn’t inspire at all the kind of music the are able to blast away from your speakers, but Sun & Sail Club are none other than Bob Balch (Fu Manchu) on guitar, the two Scott Reeders (the Fu Manchu/Smile one on drums, and the Kyuss/The Obsessed one on bass), and punk legend Tony Adolescent (of The Adolescents, obviously) on vocals. A fantastic line-up on paper, and as they have already proved before with both ‘Mannequin’ and ‘The Great White Dope’ (even if Tony only joined the band on this latter one), the result of their gathering is much bigger than the sum of those other band parts. Right from the beginning, ‘Shipwrecked’ makes it clear that it is a dramatic improvement even on those excellent previous efforts, a veritable factory of kickass riffs and punked-up, blistering rock-outs that in a fair world, could and should serve as the perfect antidote to the current anti-guitar music sentiment that the general bubbling crap floating in the mainstream exhales. From the Cathedral-like doomy menace of ‘Drag The River’ (“not looking for solutions / not really giving a fuck,” Tony sneers, sounding for all the world like a beaten down and drugged up Lee Dorrian) to thrashy blasts like ‘Torture Garden’ or ‘Tastes Like Blood’, ‘Shipwrecked’ really does no wrong. Go headbang now!
Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld
Christian & Mauro
(Specula Records)
It took them a while, but finally these two remarkable artists finally got back together to give the astounding ‘Still Smiling’ (2013) and ‘Nerissimo’ (2016) albums a proper little brother. Though a long time has passed, opener ‘Starkregen’ immediately feels like the two picked up where the collaboration left off. “I’m getting nervous for you being around," Blixa offers in his unmistakable piercing voice, and from then on it’s yet another rollercoaster of sometimes dark (“Auf dem Rücken: Unterirdische Rüstungsfabrik / Ich schlafe mit den Toten / Dora / Mittelbau”), sometimes apparently mundane (“You make excellent cake, Dear Carlo”), sometimes profoundly deep (“The universe is flat and simpler than we think / a finite universe in the shape of a dodecahedron”) and sometimes entirely abstract (“Es kommt der Gigant von der anderen Seite / aus dem Schlamm und aus den Gräben / aus den Kratern, dem wunden und verbrannten Land / Er macht sich mit Wanzen und Würmern gemein / Er hat ja keine Flügel”) lyrical meanderings, fluttering seamlessly between English, German and Italian (“Il mio Italiano non ha fatto molta strada,” Blixa apologised eleven years ago during a song on ‘Still Smiling’, but it now seems that quite some road has been traveled since), while the music steadfastly refuses to take second stage even to this master of orators. With both men handling an intimidating amount of instrumentation, from the more conventional to “a mythological keyboard who can play with ciphers, letters, characters, sounds and noises”, the sounds produced often channel the dark jauntly cadence of Tom Waits, while sometimes seem like they’re trying to follow a lost Buñuel film, to neatly tie it to that other band we talked about up there. The approach feels, almost paradoxically, both classic and futuristic at the same time (“their musical roots belongs also to the future,” it is said on their Bandcamp), and also both cosmically infinite and quietly intimate - something the title, consisting of the two men’s real names (Christian “Blixa Bargeld” Emmerich and Mauro Teho Teardo), might hint at. Or not. The point is always in the not knowing. It’s the playfulness, both with music and words, always leaving you a little on edge trying to figure out what is being said or referenced, or not, that really elevates ‘Christian & Mauro’ to genius status. Ultimately, you’ll be the one choosing the path you want to take through these songs. Christian and Mauro will be right there with you regardless. “And you? Remain! Bleib übrig! Bleib übrig! Rimangono!”
Care Home - Lead The Weak (Bandcamp)
I was a huge fan of Care Home’s 2022 release, ‘Assisted Living Pt1’, and was eager to hear this latest one. Insistent, pulsing noise rock with sepulchral keyboards and the kind of percussive stabs normally found in modern classical music. Not dissimilar in attitude to Girls In Synthesis and The Murder City Devils. There’s a keening compulsion at play here which drags you into its centre.
Jabu - A Soft And Gatherable Star (Do You Have Peace?)
Coming into winter this is just the perfect record for surrendering the light to. Heavy on the low end with ‘Faith’-era Cure guitars on tracks like ‘Oceanside Spider House’ and some shoegaze aesthetics throughout, the record unfolds at its own pace which provides a warming comfort, as the sparseness of instrumentation leaves room for your mind to wander patiently through the sounds. ‘If I Asked You, You’d Tell Me’ has quivering strings not unlike Richard Skelton’s ‘Landings’ project and ‘Temporary’ uses warm gusts of bass, aching melody and plangent strings to bring the album to a beautiful close.
Louse - Creep Call (Riot Season)
Featuring some members of The Shits, this crew has a deranged Stooges vibe with feedback employed in free jazz style abandon and much string strangulation. The tracks lurch wildly and there’s a lot of fun to be had within their gleeful menace. ‘Phrogging’ is a boisterous stomper with searing slide noises (imagine Mötörhead’s ‘Orgasmatron’ played by The Jesus Lizard) and ‘The Good Life’ fizzes and spits over a motorik beat. ‘Creep Call’ sits alongside Rainbow Grave’s ‘No You’ album as being a noise rock record strangely uplifting in its negative energy.
Lower Slaughter - All The Day Long (Human Worth)
This track would sit perfectly alongside Workin’ Man Noise Unit’s ‘Cruisin’ The IDR’ as a much needed remodel of the driving song. A headstrong mutant variation on Dr Feelgood’s cranked up rhythm and blues with guitar licks cut short and held locked into the rhythm section. Play this first thing in the morning and watch the rest of the day turn golden.
Street Grease - BLOODBATH1 (Venn Records)
I fucking love Street Grease. A young band with addictive industrial chops. Towering riffs, heart racing FX and vocals that deliver the lyrics like punchlines to very dark jokes. This is genuinely thrilling stuff. The ghosts in the audio machine include early Ministry and Front 242 but this has a very modern approach with bits of Petbrick in there too. This is what we should be seeing on main stages at rock festivals. ‘Take the Blood from My Body’ is a highlight and the astounding ‘Spit’ sounds like it’s melting as it plays.
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