Chelsea Wolfe's Unknown Rooms reviewed for The Quietus

 
"What need for smoke machines and face masks, when you can summon storm clouds?" - Read the rest of the review on The Quietus

I'm Amazed 13/10/12: Nadine Shah

From the North East, via Norwegian and Pakistani parentage, Nadine Shah writes music that comes from another place altogether. This track blends the doomy vocal attack of Beth Gibbons with the throbbing bass drive of Massive Attack's 'Angel' and the minimalist, piano-driven menace of Trent Reznor's more left-field Nine Inch Nails work. As beguiling as it is threatening.

Also look for 'Cannit Leave', a ballad (in the Nick Cave sense) of destructive dependence that turns its face to an icy northeasterly and ends up in a blizzard. 

Nadine Shah - Aching Bones EP version
Nadine Shah - Cannit Leave

The Impossible Defence: Amputechture

What is that noise? What are these lengthy space-jazz drones, minute-long bass solos and yelped falsettos? And what, in god’s name, are “sabretooth monocles”? Uh-oh, it’s The Mars Volta. And not only that, it’s their ludicrously schizophrenic 2006 album Amputechture, the release that was described by Pitchfork as a “blizzard of onanism” and that finally outdid the majority of post-At the Drive-in goodwill by a good seventy minutes.

So what is it about Amputechture? Only six years earlier, Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez had the world queuing up to anoint At the Drive-in as the new kings of punk rock, the new Fugazi – the new Nirvana even. How exactly do you follow Relationship of Command? And is there any lasting artistic merit to being the new version of anything old? Amputechture, regardless of what anyone thinks of it, represents the duo’s most defiant rejection of that particular poisoned chalice.

It is of course completely over the top – Tetragrammaton moves erratically from phase to busy phase for sixteen minutes as Bixler-Zavala discovers new and possibly unnecessary octaves (how piercing can the word ‘glossolalia’ possibly be?) while ‘Meccamputechture’ launches with its own Jackson-esque yelps before launching into lengthy stretches of OCD-prog (in which the ‘D’ is for ‘Dub’). Meanwhile, ‘Humans’, we are told, are ‘Ornaments’ and ‘Persuasion deflowers your sympathy’. This is not a streamlined or elegant listen. It’s one that pushes the boundaries of taste as well as patience – in the way that any good piece of art should.

The album reflects the crossover between grotesque and ridiculous – it is a carnival in the true sense, reflecting Bixler-Zavala’s disdain for Catholicism (in interviews, Bixler-Zavala recanted a true story about a Romanian nun dying in a cellar, locked there by a priest who thought she was possessed), by holding it up to ridicule. With the exception of the haunting ‘Asilos Magdalena’, Amputechture is odd-shaped and ungainly, a carnival piece with the grimacing face of a gargoyle, the body of a snake; the wings of a crow and the slender arms of the Virgin Mary emerging from its eye sockets – something bizarre like that. It is an album that is as ugly, as strange and as powerful as the beast that it sets out to attack.
 

And while we’re talking about the carnivalesque, what about the snakehipped, street-party of a bassline that slinks its way through the closing three minutes of the Fania -meets-Zeppelin explosion of ‘Viscera Eyes’? Or the demonic, after-dark horror of ‘Day of the Baphomets’, in which Ikey Owens’ Korg CX-5 provides a shrieking, ghoulish chorus to Bixler-Zavala’s own exorcismic call-and-response babbling and the whole eight-piece ensemble descend into a hammering 1-2-3-4-5/1-2-3-4-5-6 riff that sounds like hell folding in on itself – until a bongo solo begins?

Bixler-Zavala sometimes compares the band to the League of Gentlemen, which suggests something about The Mars Volta that is not often considered, that they might possess – wait for it – a sense of humour. In that sense it is entirely possible to view Amputechture as a ludicrous, and occasionally danceable, gothic satire.

But the main thing – more than any of the preceding flood of hopeful conjecture - is that I just really love listening to it.

Skyfall? Or Passing Showers? And Why do I Care?

I once worked in a seafood restaurant owned by Rick Stein, where one night Stein's culinary counterpart Raymond Blanc arrived and sat at the bar. Blanc ordered a dozen plump Cornish oysters, served atop a bed of crushed ice on a glimmering metal tray the size of a shield. In this kind of restaurant a creeping smarminess is considered the only suitable interaction with the smug families that arrive from nearby yachts and second homes (the sorts of families whose parents make their four year olds complain about the tap water or send back their own lobster - something those four year olds do with relish and impossibly well-practiced contempt). With this dignity-effacing smarminess I asked Blanc if his oysters were to his satisfaction.

"Non", he replied, frowning slightly. "Zey are ok, but oysteurs should be crisp, zey should have zeeeng".

What does this have to do with Adele and her theme song for the new James Bond film? The Skyfall theme, like those oysters, seems to have all the right constituents - powerful, distinctive vocals, a bed of plush orchestral waves and the film's title scattered across a slightly inexplicable love story narrative (especially inexplicable considering 007's chequered and fickle relationship history). But past these ingredients the song drifts by, digestible but hardly awe inspiring, lacking the bombast and personality of Shirley Bassey's 'Diamonds Are Forever' or Paul McCartney's 'Live and Let Die'. No zing.

And then there's three minutes of chorus to close the thing out, recognisable as such only for it's repetition of the title. Skyfall? This is just . . . drizzle.

And the worst thing is that people - like me - are gullible enough to think for a second that this is important. Another mediocre, studio-approved theme tune, for another medicore installment in a franchise that relies on its bad films to make the mediocre ones look good. But people go for it. I went for it. I had to write most of an article about the song (a theme tune for a movie - not even the movie itself) before the inanity overwhelmed me and I couldn't even be bothered to fini... blah blah, Skyfall, blah blah, drizzle . . .grey-day piss shower boredom . . oysters . . . blah.