THE DEVIL'S MONTH: May 2025
Rounding up some of the finest releases of the previous month - including Andy's picks too!
We’re getting close to the middle point of the year - and get this, from July 2nd onwards, we will officially be closer to 2050 than to 2000, feel old yet? - so hacks like me already feel entitled to start throwing around expressions that end in “of the year”. In our obsessive little minds, some records are already shaping up to be the best, or the craziest, or the biggest surprises, or the most whatever of the year. I think I throw that around about two or three of the picks this month, but bear with me, it’s been a particularly rich one. I didn’t even throw in Steve Von Till’s new album ‘Alone In A World Of Wounds’, released on May 16th, since I had already talked about it at length on the recent Discography Deep Dive about the great man. Fortunately our lovely Andy Cairns and his spotless music taste allow us to double the tally, and he brought out five more astounding releases from last month with his picks, so the agony of leaving out stuff is alleviated a little. As always, never forget that if you want to get some of these and other kickass records, our friends over at Mondo Negro should be your number one stop.
Onwards! As always, do let us know what your own favourites from last month have been. What is spinning in your turntables and making your own head/heart spin in tune?
John McKay
Sixes And Sevens
(Tiny Global Productions)
John McKay is one of the great unsung heroes of electric guitar music, and by consequence one of the true revolutionary pioneers for just about 99% of the bands you’ll see feature on this here rag and many others. Whoever your favourite guitarist is, chances are their favourite guitarist is John. Geordie, Johnny Marr, Robert Smith, Thurston Moore, Jim Reid, Kevin Shields, Bobby Gillespie, Pat Smear, you name it, they all worship at the McKay altar. Steve Albini once famously said of the first Siouxsie And The Banshees album that “even now nobody understands how that guitar player got all that pointless noise to stick together as songs”. If you’re into any loud guitar music released in the last 45 years, you kinda owe it to this gentleman. The thing is, after the acrimonious split from Siouxsie in 1979, there really weren’t many blips on the McKay radar. He spent a few years (1982-1989, more or less) leading Zor Gabor alongside his partner Linda Clark, exploring his unique way of texturing those guitar sounds into remarkably skewed melodies, a period which produced a grand total of one 12” single in 1987 containing the tracks ‘Tightrope’, ‘Amber’ and ‘Vigilante’ and a few legendary live shows. After that, John and Linda didn’t exactly disappear (they ran a stall on Camden Market in London, selling their homemade jewellery, during the ‘90s), but his music did. Until now! This album is a collection of recordings made mostly during the years after the Siouxsie split, throughout the ‘80s, a couple of them actually became Zor Gabor songs (‘Tightrope’ and ‘Vigilante’ from that 12” are here, in what seem like more rudimentary versions, but that actually work much better), others not really, but a good part of it is entirely previously unheard, and even the songs that had surfaced before in any capacity feel quite different. There is a very interesting list of collaborators, namely Kenny Morris, the drummer who left Siousxie alongside John after the famous bust up at an Aberdeen record shop, Mick Allen (Rema Rema), Matthew Seligman (The Soft Boys) plus Graham Dowdall and John's wife Linda who were the rest of Zor Gabor. Sadly, Linda, Graham and Matthew have all passed away already, and I wouldn’t be surprised if making their extraordinary contributions to this music public was part of the motivation that lead John to this release. Whatever it was, I’m glad he did it - despite it being “old” music, it shimmers with a vitality and an originality that really speaks of the man’s talents. It’s a sort of better, unfollowed avenue that post-punk could have taken had he stayed in the Banshees, or had he maintained a “public” kind of musical career, still getting all the noise sticking together as songs like no one else can. Furthermore, despite it being an archival sort of release, it holds up surprisingly well as a whole. Varied kinds of songs and approaches, yes, but in the end it feels like an album and not just a hotchpotch of “lost” material. In fact, one of the best albums of the year, even. The best part of all this is that, not only are ‘The Blessed West’, ‘Flare’ and ‘Taken For Granted’, the 100% previously unheard songs, among the best and most exciting on the album, but there are actually a couple of live shows planned already, so the story isn’t over. At 66 (67 tomorrow - happy birthday John!), we might surprisingly still get some more new music out of this underrated genius. Here’s hoping. In any case, welcome back!
mclusky
the world is still here and so are we
(Ipecac Recordings)
Few bands really nail the unhinged kind of approach - the totally unexpected, “holy shit that was crazy” effect that you get even if you’re listening to a song for the 100th time. Manic, wild, unhinged, but musically and lyrically, mclusky are a great poster boy example of the unfairness of the music world - whereas some of their very few comparable contemporaries, like At The Drive-In, even got some worldwide success, mclusky are still in the realm of the “cult band”, that weird genius that still feels like a best-kept secret even after all these years. Well, hopefully now, in their proper second coming as a band (they had originally split up in 2005), after years of related side-projects and half-reunions that never really made it, they’ll get the dues they are owed, though I’m not holding my breath. This album is brilliant, make no mistake - they’re still the craziest kid in the playground, the brilliance of their mouth-watering 2023 comeback single (‘unpopular parts of a pig’ / ‘the digger you deep’, which are both feature here again) is further expanded, even including some less crazy moments (‘not all steeplejacks’) that provide great dynamics to the album as a whole, and with all the typical surreal lyrics you’ve come to expect from these guys. All in all, this is a full package of unbridled joy, youthful excitement, angry sarcasm and raw harshness, like a nightmare you actually enjoy going through. One of the most exhilarating listens of the year so far. Listen to it ridiculously loud and throwyourself against the walls in reckless abandon for maximum effect.
Ols
Poświaty
(Pagan Records)
Ols is the one-woman project of Polish musician Anna Maria Olchawa, who kinda like our recently featured Band of the Week artist Sally Dige, is a kickass do-it-all who writes the songs, the lyrics, the arrangements, sings and plays all the instruments. ‘Poświaty’ is already her fifth album since the start of the project in 2016, and it’s an instantly captivating piece - a rich, full folk experience, drawing gravitas from the ambiance of woods-dwelling black metal and melodic sensibilities from more urban styles of music, towards an end result that is as haunting as it is addictive. Opener and first single ‘O Niej’ alone will have you humming along, regardless of your knowledge of the Polish language, and instantly transform your surroundings into a dark patch of an old forest at the same time. As a more song-oriented, catchy Wardruna or a less expansive, less big-band, one-woman Dead Can Dance, Ols gathers the best of the two worlds, the appeal of the song and the envelopment of the atmosphere. It is, in fact, an album of dualities. Anna mentions that “musically, I wanted to capture that feeling of a city evening – a bit lonely, a bit cold, but also full of a strange kind of energy. It's definitely a departure from the neofolk sound I'm known for, embracing a more urban, almost trip-hop vibe. But even though the forest might be further away sonically, its spirit, its presence in memory and feeling, still breathes within the lyrics,” and that halfway-between approach really is clear even after the very first listens.
Shearling
Motherfucker, I am Both: "Amen" and "Hallelujah"...
(Mishap Records)
So Sprain got to enjoy the success of their last album ‘The Lamb As Effigy’ for all of five minutes, having played their very last show two days after its release and officially announcing their disbandment about a month later. Fortunately, to help us get over the feeling of an unfinished job with that very promising band, a wild Shearling appears featuring Sprain’s Alex Kent and Sylvie Simmons, with the promise of further developing and using songs written but never released during their time in their previous band. Well, the expression back there was obviously a Pokemon joke, but “wild” really is the best way to describe Shearling - if the title of the album isn’t indicative enough that things are about to get crazy in here, trust me, they are. And how. It’s funny that in his picks for this month, our beloved Andy Cairns says about the Stratford Rise EP that “you need to hear this to truly get the vibe,” because that’s really what you need to do with this. There’s no other way to put it, ‘Motherfucker…’ is a colossal headfuck of a record. An unfathomably dense, out of control monstrosity, a 62:20 track plucked from hours and hours of jams and demos and other recordings and given a semblance of structure, with enough astounding ideas in it to full most bands’ entire careers. The language itself shifts from mundane to poetic as the two main stories progressively intertwine (one about Idaho, the other about Eden, a sort of brutal metaphoric perspective of how it is to grow up queer in that state - Idaho, that is, not Eden), just as Alex’s voice flutters desperately between end-times prophet ramblings, Daniel Higgs-like out-there cosmic wisdom and Daniel Johnston-like real unfiltered pain, from forceful spoken word to menacing whispers, from haunting moans to agonized Scott Walker-on-crack wails, from furious growls to blood-curdling screams. Though he only announces his presence after an already twisted introduction of four disorienting instrumental minutes, as soon as he does, he becomes the focal point, the master of storms that seems to invoke everything around him, the huge sludge riffs, the cruel noise rock rawness, the broken jazzy parts (it’s not free jazz, nothing is “free” about this), the hellish, cartoony Fantômas-from-’Suspended Animation’ childlike passages, bursts of noise… you name it, they ruin it. Usually we praise seemingly incongruous albums like this by saying that somehow it all comes together, that cohesiveness is found even with chaos, but hey, there’s no such pretence here. Little effort seems to have been taken for anything to fit together, and it’s in fact that fractured, who-gives-a-fuck kind of approach that makes the pain feel all the more real. Call it a stream-of-unconsciousness or something.
Swans
Birthing
(Mute Records / Young God Records)
It’s hard to extricate this album from the fact that it will be the last “big sound” Swans album. It’s tempting to start looking for signs, for references, for goodbyes, for transitions, for new births of course (the title alone puts you on that road already, right?), and maybe to make up stuff that isn’t really there. Or is it? On a superficial listen - if you can superficially listen to yet another two hours of punishingly intense music like this, spread out over seven songs, most of which revolve around the twenty minute mark, but I digress - it does seem like “another one”, another gargantuan effort that will take several delightfully painful weeks to fully digest, just like the five ones before. To be honest, and this is a compliment, I feel like I haven’t properly digested any of them, despite the unhealthy amount of time spent listening to them on airplanes, trains, dog walks, in bed, while working, sitting with my eyes closed or in any other situation. If you’re losing track, I’m talking about the period including ‘The Seer’ (2012), ‘To Be Kind’ (2014), ‘The Glowing Man’ (2016), ‘Leaving Meaning’ (2019) and ‘The Beggar’ (2023), and let me just say that’s a hell of a legacy right there, even if Swans hadn’t had two or three other eras at least before that. Actually, the odd man out in the post-reformation discography is actually the return album, ‘My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky’ (2010), which was the last Swans album to feature relatively “normal” songs rather than these tectonic pieces that demand at least half your full waking time to even begin to process. However, even if it might indeed be my brain desperately attempting to make connections, after getting past that “superficial listen” feeling that it’s just another one of those, it’s with that album that I start to find a lot of parallels in some of ‘Birthing’s more uncomplicated passages. Though in a different format, the euphoria that was present in those songs shines through here sometimes, like on that achingly beautiful closer ‘(Rope) Away’. While there are definitely some of the most dense, typically Gira-howling moments in the band’s history here (‘Guardian Spirit’), and some genuinely menacing moments (the deceptive, demonic lullaby of ‘Red Yellow’), there are also some of Gira’s most clear lyrics, seemingly wanting to escape his usual grotesque, abstract poetry. It’s not as unflinchingly despaired as the “big sound” albums have mostly been, as if there’s a beam of light getting in from some crack that we might not even know exactly where it is. Even the dog bark at the beginning of ‘I Am A Tower’ feels accidental, but then left in with absolute purpose to alleviate the atmosphere and give it a little more humanity. Maybe. Maybe all of those things are already part of the transition, maybe they are already a step towards the next iteration of Swans, or maybe it’s nothing at all. Maybe it’s Swans just being Swans. And whatever happens next, we’re okay with that.
Amusement - Standing On Top Of The A Bomb (Dirt Cult Records)
Starting off this month’s picks with a big, big tune that perfectly accompanies the bursts of spring sunshine coming through my window. Amusement feature the mercurial talents of guitarist/producer, Stan Wright (Signal Lost, Deathreats, Arctic Flowers) and this buzzbomb melds the fierce intelligence of Rites Of Spring with the blown out euphoria of prime Hüsker Dü. Vocals bleed with compassion and the guitars shimmer and distort with a bright hope. Start your day with the record this is from (the ‘Holding On’ EP) and feel the lift it gives you.
Electric Chair - Caught On Tape / Physique - Our Devastation (Iron Lung)
These two tracks are a taster from their forthcoming split LP out on June 27th (I love split LPs, not enough of them these days, sadly). Electric Chair are the more rock‘n’roll proposition with Poison Idea intensity and Zeke-style lead runs while Physique shake the walls with their hellish d-beat fury. (If you haven’t heard their 2023 masterpiece, ‘Again’, I suggest you seek it out). Two different but vital approaches to making punk rock. Bring on the full split album.
Sex Scenes - Everything Makes Me Sick (Big Neck Records)
Flailing, furious, relentless hardcore from Milwaukee. The songs fall into each other reminiscent of a crowd in a hectic pit, ‘Want and Need’ slams like early Die Kreuzen (who once resided in Milwaukee themselves) and features a spectacularly catchy mid-paced breakdown. Sex Scenes have an intuitive grasp of hardcore dynamics which keeps the whole set so very compelling. Countless memorable riffs and an in-the-red-drenched-in-feedback aesthetic that keeps energy levels high throughout. ‘I’m Not Your T.V’, ‘Impressive’ and closer ‘Nothing’ are highlights but this album makes the most sense when you blast it as a whole at chest-rattling volume.
Stratford Rise - Stratford Rise EP (Stratford Guys Ltd)
Belfast’s Stratford Rise return with this stunning EP. Epic and avant-garde in equal measure there is so much bursting out of the speakers in the short running time. ‘Gunshow’ channels The Mars Volta, Mclusky, King Crimson and The Fall Of Troy into a two and a half minute song that begins with tectonic riffage and ends with what sounds like the studio walls collapsing. ‘Prone’ has a hyperventilating vocal atop guitars suggesting sheets of corrugated iron copulating before a jazzy, atonal solo squeezes through the mix. ‘Snowsports’ begins with a bizarro Shellac goes prog groovy guitar riff and features what sounds like steel drum filigrees peeking their head above the cacophonous apocalypse. ‘Machine To Water’ concludes this wild thirteen minute EP with some gleeful Captain Beefheart by way of Can and Magma fuckery and an ambient, almost new age, denouement. You need to hear this to truly get the vibe. You won’t be disappointed.
Visions - Decay (Ebullition Records)
Delicious post-punk from Portland OR. in the vein of the much missed Arctic Flowers. Ben Taylor plays high tension guitar figures with shades of John McGeogh, Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds and even some Richard Thompson-esque folksy flourishes (the track ‘No Good’ is one of the many lovely examples of this). Sara Heise’s vocals carry the strong melodies with dark authority and, to these ears at least, there’s a touch of Pauline Murray from Penetration which I love. Uplifting, positive punk with massive tunes and a clarity in the production that lets the individual members all shine. To top it all off there’s a brilliant cover of ‘Warriors’ by UK punks Blitz, too.
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Gonna take the liberty of adding my favorite here too
https://thecallousdaoboys.bandcamp.com/album/i-don-t-want-to-see-you-in-heaven