1-800-TONIGHT SELF TITLED

Pure, glowing, late nite Lo-Fi cheeze from 1-800-TONIGHT. Irradiated post capitalist on-hold music, commerce lubrication, scintillating and bizarre in it’s paradoxical vitality and corpulence. Dreamy, vaporous, intoxicating and suffocatingly, radioactively corny. Smoky sax, slowly unfurling default beat patterns from electronic kit banks, rounded electronic Bass sultry with late 80’s/early 90’s porno chic, twinkling keys from Hong Kong action film melodrama, languid fuck music from beyond the end of totemic capitalist iconography, a hologram advertisement dancing on the wall of a bombed out shopping mall. 1-800-TONIGHT is a side project of luxury elite, long held by me to be one one of the more important artists from the Vaporwave thing. Both projects carry that cosy, empty feel and vibe that I cherish in this particularly weird cul-de-sac of post internet ‘music’. Artistic value is defined, as ever, by the dead-eyed consumer.

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APARTHIVA RAKTADHARA – ‘আ​দ​্​য​া​প​ী​ঠ ম​র​ণ​স​ং​হ​ি​ত​া​’

Kalikshetra sorcery and black death hate from Aparthiva Raktadhara. Makes good the promise of their demented demo, here presenting an absolutely ruthless scroll of ancient, martial Death Metal heresy. Vicious drumming both in execution and style, the frothing fills and lurching double bass groove warped with irreal essence, dry sulphuric Guitars and Bass sounds coalesce in sorcerous, kris-like blade riffs and molten lightning bolt solos, both unorthodox and fervently devotional to archaic forms, searing and scything as war commanding hissing vocal topples pious bodies and desecrates meek souls. The ossuary-dry production accents the aggression, ignoring spooky reverb trends in favour of monolithic, unavoidable deathcrush. There’s a tangible air of Brutal Death Metal here, in the extremely aggressive arrangement and inert recording atmosphere, making for a particularly cruel, violent listen. Hail Kalikshetra Death Metal Shunyata!

Iron Bonehead Productions

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DAYDREAM PLUS – ‘CLUES RECALLED FROM MEMORY’

Pastel tranquiliser Math Rock from Torontoans Daydream Plus, a side project from members of Tomb Mold. Vaporous and helium light Math Rock busy with richly composed instrumentation, akin to Green Hill Zone music via over-achieving Fusion Jazz band belting out perfect Casiopea/Girraffes? Giraffes! covers, horizontal in cocktail supping calm. Crisp purifying Guitars and Bass afloat on a peppermint breeze of soft touch percussion, loaded with hooked jazzy melody and shuffling dexterous pristine rhythms. Vapid and morphine warm, it’s gorgeously recorded, pristinely produced, and soaked in the UV rays of exceptional musicianship. A sumptuous sidestep into beatific smooth. Take two with ice water and relax.

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TUNKIO – ‘HYPERTROPHIC EXCRESCENCE’ EP

Super short EP from Finnish grindfuckers Tunkio, two man crusty Grindcore crammed to the brim with crust chord gore and zealous blast beats! Combines ideas from Finnish Hardcore, Gore and Crust to create a disgusting homunculi of foetid underground Grindcore, in the tradition of Parazitozis or Hyperemesis. Short songs stuffed with superfast warped blur crust chord rippers, bass-less and barbed to brutal perfection, pinned down with hyperfast crude drumming adorned with trashcan snare, mincing and blasting with some Hardcore parts too, topped with pitched down pukefeast vocal slime and burned into loud tape demo recording quality. Ablaze with deliriant energy and roaring with disillusioned outrage. Killer anime samples too. Dankness. Snag a 7″ from Iron Corpse!

Iron Corpse

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ASTRAL TOMB – ‘SOULGAZER’

Fiendishly psychedelic psychotic slamming Grateful Death Metal from Colorado three piece Astral Tomb. Mutating psyched-out Slam Death Metal via Fusion Jazz expressing effluvic cosmic jam sesh vibe, spiraling deadly riffs curl from the indifferent abyss in obtuse parallel shapes atop some of the most rapturous, innovative and intuitive drumming I’ve heard in quite some time, replete as it is with constant accents and astral fills. Super low burly cosmic cube vocal drifts across the timescapes, absolutely gigastoned technical riff patterns and ego deleting solos emerge and develop amidst exceptionally compelling, pummeling rhythms that lurch, slam and blast. Heavy use of synths, including a portentous separate synthscape track, trap the mind in the negazone as the power trio returns through a timewave portal to truly flay the prone mind with monstrous proggy Death Metal riff miasma. Red-eyed, long-haired, DMT addled, farsighted and utterly fucking brutal. I recently indulged a cranked as fukk listen through of ‘Soulgazer’ with the venerable Werewolf Hippy in his lair; his stoned drooling visage, profane exclamations and cackles at each unexpected deathly, slamming, tie-dyed turn delighted me no end. A triumph of xenomorphic Metal.

Blood Harvest Records

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SALAC – ‘BURIED’

Avon Terror Corps affiliates Clíona Ní Laoi and Max Kelan Pearce, aka Salac, are going down in unrighteous flames. Forged in the decelerating isolation of lockdown, the duo’s third and apparently final album is a grievous abrasion, the grim soot-blackened churn of their previous two outings taken to its (patho)logical extreme. As demises go, it’s about as ugly as it gets. Eschewing industrial music’s more frenetic tendencies, ‘Buried’ obliterates at the sluggish yet inexorable pace of an oil slick, filling every crevice of headspace with thick sulphuric slurry to which resistance is futility defined. Catastrophically mistitled opener ‘Elixir Of Life’ serves immediate notice of the horrors to come. Ballasting mephitic squalls of bass distortion with an injuriously colossal kick drum, it seems purpose built to target the pain receptors, a supposition reinforced by the agonised screams that circle just within earshot on the track’s greasy periphery. ‘Unforeseen Demise’ is similarly pitiless, its rust-sloughing grind accentuated by a diseased polemic from Pearce who hectors into the void like a cyborg street philosopher with seconds left to live. Think a doomed Psychic Graveyard stripped of their smirks and you’re on roughly the same cancer ward as this cadaverous creation. Ni Laoi, by constrast, is a specialist in juxtaposing the ghostly with the ghastly. On ‘Bask’, her narcotic siren song is the winding sheet around an egregiously overdriven bassline, whilst ‘Caoin’ is an ambient dream turned nightmare, the plaintive lament of a seraph tapped forever in the fetid confines of a sulphur mine. Salac have checked out with a seismic death rattle. Buried? You will be.

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