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The Beast Within a werewolf-themed British horror film directed by Alexander J Farrell is being released by Signature Entertainment to streaming platforms from 19 August.
Denver, Colorado's noisy industrialist Amps Kill (Stephen Bailey) is back with his latest full-length assault, Wretched Inheritance. A bleak, post-industrial offering, this newest is a well-constructed journey into chaos, sex, death, and decay, capturing all the tenets of the genre's grim messagery while keeping the electronics fluid and engaging. Delightfully crispy on the edges, this dark, throbbing collection of songs captures the ethos and beauty of the passage of time and everything's inevitable demise. Whether structural, natural, or animal, nothing can escape this and Wretched Inheritance does a great job at showing the listener this world with a very objective and dark lens.
Eyal Maoz and Eugene Chadbourne's The Coincidence Masters is a whimsical and absurd collection of free improvisations by two guitar players, who are using their instruments for anything but their conventional sounds. The album is fifty-two minutes long, divided across eleven tracks of a variety of lengths.
To anyone with even the vaguest interest in the avant-garde, jazz, psychedelia, counterculture and dare I say prog, Soft Machine need no introduction. With music that initially helped shape late 60s underground psychedelia, by the turn of the decade the band had adopted an almost purely instrumental prog avant-jazz aesthetic courtesy of what is generally considered to be their ‘classic’ line-up of founding members Mike Ratledge on keys and Robert Wyatt on drums, plus Elton Dean on sax and Hugh Hopper on bass. It is these four musicians who appear on Høvikodden 1971, showcasing Soft Machine at their virtuosic and improvisational best as they perform across two consecutive nights at the Henie-Onstad Art Center in Oslo. While the second gig was previously released back in 2009, for this latest release we are presented with a handsomely remastered version of what might at first glance appear to be two very similar shows – the tracklisting appearing near-identical – but rest assured this is most definitely not the case.
All The Things That Happen comes in a smart gatefold card wallet, decorated with photographs of various things with contrasting textures: a wall, a window, a tree, a dandelion head, a spiked plant, and a dog - all presented in interesting, contrasting colours. It’s a neat visual representation of the album within. Bates constructed it, according to the label spiel, ‘primarily with the self-imposed limitation of a Casio SK-1’ - a crude early home sampling keyboard that I myself own and will one day sell for millions of pounds to an eager circuit-bender. The album has nine tracks, with the shortest just clearing two minutes and the longest nearing seven minutes, all are electronic and blur ambient sounds and ideas with more noisy territories.
Tubby’s Want The Channel is a two-CD collection that brings together forty dub remixers from the 70s by Jamaica producer Niney the Observer.
Sting is a recent addition to the killer spider/ creature feature genre. It’s set in a New York Apartment block- where a tinny meteorite carrying a spider egg crashes through a window. The film is an entertaining shot of pop-corn horror, blending creepy-crawly atmospherics, light humour, some quite brutal/ intense moments of gory horror, with a family drama centre. Here from Studio Canal is a physical release of the film- coming as either a DVD or Blu-Ray release- I’m reviewing the latter.
Here we from Poland’s Sado Rituals is a four-track wall-noise release themed around Audrey Horne- an eighteen-year-old character from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, who is rather obsessed with Special Agent Dale Cooper. All four of the tracks are dense, taut, and set examples of the walled noise genre.
Без Названия ( English translation Bez Nazvaniya) servers up four twenty-minute slices of walled noise from Шумоизоляция/ Shumoizolyatsiya. Each is as thick, bluntly bass-bound, and unforgivingly brutal as the other.
Here’s another untitled release from Warsaw Poland’s ELEKTR0BATH. For the last year or so- once or twice a month- this walled noise project has been putting out a release with the same monochrome picture of a bowl of flowers, and the same title- an interesting idea, though not quite sure how one identifies one from another!?...anyway this one is from 9th of August 2024.
Die, Monster, Die is a mid-1960s blend of gothic horror, mystery, and sci-fi. The American British production is roughly based on the H.P Lovecraft short story The Colour Out of Space- it features Boris Karloff as the wheelchair-bound father of the Witley family, who have been forsaken by the nearby town- due to all manner of strangeness going on in the family’s fog-bound & eerier green light lite mansion. The film is a good mix of creepy chills, hamming it-up thrills, and sci-fi unease. Here from the BFI is a Blu-Ray taking in a new scan and a hearty selection of extras.
You might not know it, or don't care if you did, but the 90s are being pilfered with reckless abandon. It's there for the taking, I guess, especially for a generation that has no immediate knowledge or experience with the decade, the very last before the internet turned subculture into a wikipedia entry. Ok, I sound like one of those ill-tempered former indie kids, complete with crow's feet and a receding hairline (check and check!). But while this sounds overly categorical and partly (mostly?) dismissive--is it my slacker penchant for meta-discourse?--I think this background goes a long way in highlighting the unique qualities of Soft Violet, and in particular, the newest album, Sterner Stuff.
Single White Female is an early 90’s psychological thriller, with a rewarding steady build of tension, a neat old apartment setting, a few light erotic touches and some effective moments of surprise plotting/shock. The film regards a woman who has recently split with her partner- getting a flatmate who is not quite what she seems. Here from Powerhouse is a Blu-Ray release of the film- taking in an HD scan of the film, one new extra & great selection of archive fare.
Time to Kill Records presents Hellhole, the latest offering by the Finnish hardcore assault unit called Rats Will Feast. Active since 2018, Hellhole appears to be their 4th release (and 3rd full-length).
Thirteen years since 2011's Back from the Funeral, Pennsylvania's Mausoleum is back with its newest full-length, Defiling the Decayed. Proving that death metal is a timeless beast, this latest pulls out all the stops to bring forth some classic death from beyond the grave. Like a creepy, shambling monster inhabiting a loved one's former body, Mausoleum's newest album plods forth bringing very familiar and classic-sounding metal to the masses. And while it's not breaking any new ground, its old-school tone and vibe will be very comfortable to those looking for something new to scratch that old itch.
Here we have the third volume in Severin's euro gothic film boxset series Danza Macabra. It shifts the Italian focus of the first two sets to Spanish gothic horror- featuring four films spread over four Blu-rays, with new scans for each & good selection of extras for each including commentary tracks for each film. Many of these pictures are unknown/ rare- so this is a unique & fascinating boxset, presenting films that most European horror fans won’t have heard of, let alone seen before.
Here we have a twenty-track CD bringing together the cream of the crop from the back catalogue of Angolan folk and semba singer-songwriter Bonga- aka José Adelino Barceló de Carvalho. He has been recording since the early 70s, and is seen as having one the golden/greatest voices in world music- as it blends rich/ felt soulfulness with slightly ragged/gravely edges. This compilation first appeared in 2009, and this is a Lusafica CD reissue of the release.
Rat Man is a prime slice of late 80’s euro horror cheese which is ridiculous, campy, bad-taste, and at points creepy/ gory- but always highly entertaining. It finds the (then) world's smallest actor Nelson De La Rosa, playing the title character who was meant to be a poisoned clawed monkey-rat crossbreed, who is stalking ‘n’ killing models on a Caribbean island. Here from the fine folks at Cauldron Films is a new Blu-Ray release of the film- featuring a new 4k scan, a commentary track, and a few interviews.
Love Hotel is a mid-80s Japanese drama which deals with desperation, regret, and trying to reset the past. It’s set around a rather problematic premise/ storyline regarding a man who attempts to rape & kill a prostitute, then re-meets her two years later. The film is lightly edged with erotic & moments of doubt/ edge- but largely it’s bitter-sweet, at points fairly glum character study… not sleazed exploitation, or a violent pink film its plot may suggest. Here from Third Window Films as part of their Director's Company Collection, which focuses on the legendary 1980s Japanese production company is a recent Blu-Ray of the film, taking in a new scan of the film, a commentary, and a few new & archive extras.
Here is a 2022 release from Michal Neithan Kielbasa (Whalesong, Nothing Has Changed, Harmony of Struggle) under his alter ego Lugola. It is the fifth release under that name and is the project’s first live album, recorded at the XX Wroclaw Industrial Festival in November 2021. It’s a raw slab of brutal, noisy power electronics to clear out even the most congested ears.
Cute is truly the polar opposite of its title, which the dictionary defines as appealing in a pretty or endearing way. The eleven-track album finds the UK pushing their extreme and uneasy sound down sonic avenues such as psycho-ambient, intense electronica, jagged & bent beat scaping, nihilistic electro-punk and beyond.
Before And After Silence is an eight-track CD looking back at the early 1990s work of Nimh ( aka Italian-born Giuseppe Verticchio). All of the simple part-named pieces focus on droning & at points crude ambience- with some quite blown-out & noisy undercurrents.
You don't have to look very far to find something honouring the lower reaches of the fidelity spectrum, whether that is in music, or elsewhere. Whether it is due to an understandable exhaustion with the slickness of digital production, I cannot say, but in the field of guitar pedals alone, you can't throw a rock without hitting a loft effect these days, emulating vinyl crackles, tape hiss, or just some poorly aged equipment. What makes Yui Ondera's 1982 standout against the riff-raff, is that in addition to employing 4-track tape recorders and other warbly devices in his repertoire for the 10 tracks that make up this release, 1982 functions beneath and beyond the merely aesthetic concerns of the lo-fi craze. 1982 is the year of Ondera's birth, and the place where that occurred, Iwate, is perhaps familiar to some for the waste to which this area was laid by the earthquake of 2008.
Appearing in the early 2000s Bruiser was one of the later films helmed by George A. Romero (Night Of The Living Dead, The Crazies, Creepshow). The film is a mix of modern parable/ drama, thriller, horror, and lopsided black comedy. It regards a brow-beaten business executive waking one morning, and finding out his face has been replaced by a blank white mask with pinprick eyes. The film is certainly an interesting/ if not wholly satisfying addition to Romero's filmography, and here, it gets a new release from Powerhouse. It’s available as either a Blu-Ray or UHD disc- featuring a new 4k scan of the picture, and a selection of new & archive extras.