a review of a punk and noise rock band from Oslo

Daufødt throws a thousand pounds of "Glitter"
 

"Glitter" opens with a hard-driving bastard of a song. It's Daufødt's demand to be reckoned with.

The Oslo band plays punk with a noise rock sound—walloping drums, full power-chord guitars, and raw vocals forced out from deep inside.

The album is Daufødt's third. The promotional material describes it as more radio-friendly than the first two.

Of the new songs, "Jeg vil bare hjem" tries hardest to make friends. Listen below. Simple, repetitive chords and a swinging backbeat bring out the attitude that sometimes goes missing from the vocals on this album.

But the song I like is "Skjelvet." The bass, propelled by drums, chews through the dense, dark future while the guitar rings out watchful notes like a lantern casting shadows. The vocal smears glittery mud along the path in case we need to turn around.

The young band takes a grim view of the future and says, "When everything goes to hell, at least you can have a good soundtrack."

We will each reckon with the future in our own way.

The album is set to be released September 20 on Fysisk Format Records.

 

a review of a noise rock/mathcore band

Lower Automation’s newest album, Strobe Light Shadow Play, is an experimental, dissonant mishmash of noise rock, hardcore, and mathcore. The music has such a sense of motion, of nervous energy, sounds can seem like randomness overtaking the system. The band tests and tries things, and the noise is barely contained—but it is not chaos. “It’s the most experimental and noisiest release we’ve ever put out, but also probably the most melodic,” the band says.

Among my favorite songs is “Information Entrepreneurs and Their Lipsynching Choirs,” which opens with a piercing, shaky, manic vocal. At 15 seconds, the buzzy bass buzzes into a punchy dance beat while the distorted echo- and reverb-tweaked guitar bounces off the walls. Drums fritter and snap out.

“Acolytic” opens with little discordant riff that features a subtle lift at the end of each series of strokes. The bass rumbles and yawns, and the drums motion frantically and then pause and punctuate a desperately prayerful vocal. The energy grows, but then, at 1:25, the band pulls back into a bad-attitude bass riff, the drum marking time more evenly while the guitar still noisily sparks off around the room. The album captures some very good moments, and this song is a great example.

Another exciting moment is the what-the-hell-is this? opening to “End Scene”–a fast-picking classical guitar with softer emotive singing. This gives way to noisy, raw hardcore—the guitar is nuts. At 1 minute, cello strings sift from behind bass-drum hits before the song dives back into the fray.

The songs are short, hovering around 2 minutes each, and sound a little like The Locust with bits of The Dillinger Escape Plan, Botch, and At the Drive-in. Strobe Light Shadow Play will be released November 22nd via Zegema Beach Records. Lower Automation, a trio from Chicago, has two previous releases—an EP titled Maps from 2016 and a self-titled full-length from 2021.

a quick blurb about some noise rock band

 

Pulpy belligerence on noise rock band Mal’s swirling debut

Sounds from the far end of a bender

Mal play experimental prog-ish noise rock. The addition of a bad-tempered saxophone differentiates this soup of sound—a sound that adds metal, free jazz, and art rock—from a lot of other noise rock bands. Mal formed in late 2019 and on October 21, 2022, released its debut, Malbum, on Ordovician Records.

This versatile 4-piece band from Minneapolis cites Sleepytime Gorilla Museum as an RIYL. And the boozy sax can add the noirish sound of blurry neon over black and white—ahistorical scenes built on shaky metal scaffolding.

something about a Vandal X best-of

The band’s volume knob goes only one direction.

Vandal X’s noise-rock sound has moved over the last decade from angular punk and metal influences toward sludge and doom, away from bands like The Jesus Lizard and Helmet but still near to Unsane. Now the Belgian band, which formed around 1995, celebrates its career with a best-of album, XXV, accompanied by a compilation of rarities.

The band is a twosome of volume masochists dishing noise-rock fans all they can handle and more. Bart Timmermans is the original singer and guitarist, and Dave Schroyen took over the drum kit in 1999 after the original drummer, Jo Boes, left.

XXV starts with “Fuck ‘m All”—feedback feeds into riffs that punch through the wall. The scream-shout chorus “Fuck ‘em all!” burns through the mic connection. First songs are often statements, and this is a fine one. Drums on “Jacobs Wife” pop with syncopation as the guitar plays a guileless riff that turns out to be a great contrast to the song’s big bass-drum kicks.

On “All Lined Up,” the snare drum cracks out the bars and goes full bore into the chorus, where layered vocals seethe out “All lined up against the fuckin’ wall!” with the barking guitar’s tone buried in the low- and mid-range. XXV has 13 songs, and the last third or so sound more like sludge metal—maybe none more so than “Patient Zero.” The vocal is deeper, the guitar tone has a fuller, more present buzz, and the drums sound gauche. Next to the earlier, faster-paced songs, though, this final stretch drags.

The pandemic delayed the release of XXV, but the band has assured its audience that the best-of will finally come out December 10 (via 9000 Records). It will be offered in a limited-edition white vinyl (remixed and remastered) with a CD of previously unreleased demos, live recordings, and rarities from the band’s “archives.”

something about a debut from a Dutch doom-noise trio

Each sate sullenly apart, gorging himself in gloom. – Lord Byron

Farer debuted last fall with Monad, four songs—exercises, really—of droning grinds of blistering, drilling bass; thunder-and-lightning drums; feedback; and throat-herniating, injurious shrieks that are more primal scream therapy than performance.

The doom-noise trio (two bass players and a drummer) started as Menhir in 2013 but changed the name to Farer in 2019 after recording this debut. The intensity in these four tracks carries on for 12 to 14 minutes at a time, and this prolonged length can recast the intensity as a drone effect.

This Dutch band is working out a sound. What they have so far is grim and brutal, all right. It's a difficult, hungering debut.

 
Monad was released in November 2020 through Aesthetic Death and Tartarus Records. (On September 24th, it will be available as a limited edition clear and black marbled-color double-LP housed in a heavy gatefold.)

something about the Jars album, ДЖРС III

Jars moves you with a mix of dangerous grooves and hardcore punk on its latest album, ДЖРС III. The first song, “Заебало” (“Sick”), hammers out snaking riffs with a mallet. The guitars cut a dissonant, high-end whine, and the anxiety is eased only by the yelling vocals (“Oh!”) and driving drums and bass guitar. The tension grows over the song—and over and again on these nine tracks of ear-filling discontent.

Jars is a Moscow-based noise rock trio. It has existed in some form or another since 2011. The band has a handful of albums and EPs, and in December 2020, released ДЖРС III (a Russian translation of the band's name plus III).

Find the dialed-in inebriation of “Черное прикосновение” (“Curse Curse Curse!”), the five-minute musical equivalent of bashing in car windows in a convenience store parking lot. The song features a bass-driven groove below guitar notes that crunch and jangle while the vocal yells behind the din.

Jars want you to recall the 1990s and record label Amphetamine Reptile. I hear Shellac and Drive Like Jehu. And on “Спидкоп” (“Speedcop”), I hear even a little Converge. This compact, powerhouse of a song opens with a moment of feedback, then explodes into hardcore. Everything sounds good: the screaming vocal, the way the guitar strings ring out rather than shoosh a wall of distortion, and the penetrating bass and crisp drums. Nicely done.

The album ends with “Москва слезам не верит” (“Moscow does not believe in tears”), a half-marathon in a pocket groove. Nasty guitar streaks color and vocals shout out—but all succumb to the flexing rhythm of the bass and drums. The song retools after five minutes, escalates, slows—the sound of a band sharing consciousness—and drives on, passing 10 minutes, with gobs of mud thrown off with each turn of the wheel. The album’s song lengths vary, but the volume stays the same.

 

an album review of “Let’s Not (And Say We Did)” by Zeahorse

The blurry streetlights and bitterly ferocious noise rock of Sidney.

Zeahorse’s latest album tyrannosauruses through a world experiencing a mass-extinction event. The first song, “Designer Smile,” careens forward with its weight-throwing groove and tyrannical vocals. The sweaty, raving lyrics—“I wish you could see me know / I'm exercising my designer smile!”—sound both insecure and commanding.

Let’s Not (And Say We Did) is the Sydney-based band’s third album and first in over four years. Zeahorse’s sound calls to mind bands like Unwound and Fugazi. Think noise rock and post-punk.

After a couple of galloping tracks, Zeahorse canter through a chunkier groove on “Guilty.” The lyrics describe treading water in a hyper-self-conscious culture of self-improvement. The rising and falling vocal sneers, “When our heads get turned into mush, blame it on the hoo-haa, the Friday night fuss ‘cause I’m dated and bloated and boring and sinking / The party will never end with someone like you / Whatever you do will only make it worse; whatever you do now will only make it hurt.”

On “The Ladder,” Zeahorse bare teeth at the ladder-climbing company man: “Ah, I climb the ladder—there is nothing better! If I could be the spanner, will you be my hammer? Ah, I climb the ladder—there is nothing better! I could be a friend to everyone!” This disaffected lament boils over to the sound of hard-charging post-punk.

Find a slight change in sound, from post-punk to a sludge-gummed crush, on “20 Nothing.” The song opens with a big beat, then rolls out a savage bass tone that sounds great with splashy cymbals. Zeahorse flash big, broad noise-rock stripes and more satire in the lyrics: “I'm so happy, I'm so ready to turn my moments into nothing / Suffocating under the money tree / This ain’t no place for you, and it ain’t no place for me.”

The four-piece band keeps it loud in the pocket. Songs on Let’s Not (And Say We Did) seethe massive grooves and layered, blaring vocals. The singing has that quality of sounding taunting, scolding, and pleading all at once—Johnny Rotten-style, already done. The lyrics deliver indelicate attacks on the materialistic, shallow, and image-obsessed—familiar targets and features of culture that, the louder you rail against them, the more they envelope you.

 

Note: Not really my taste in music, but I think it sounds good and can imagine others enjoying it.