Itcouldhappentoyou – South Africa Intersection

I love how each song is a listener’s play-dough, ready to be interpreted a million different ways.  As I trip along to Itcouldhappentoyou‘s latest – a fragmented, soulful slice of distorted, industrial-type noises that wouldn’t sound out of place on the Requiem For A Dream score - the recurrent to-and-fro sounds cause me to imagine a couple talking animatedly.  I lend them characteristics: he is brief and bruised, and she more emotive and frenzied.  It’s a crisis talk, and it’s a shame, for they finish each other’s sentences and clearly have a rapport.  But the moment is tense, critical, the climax of a longstanding problem.  They’re interrupted by the phone ringing, tart chimes that both try to ignore, and distracted by the rattlesnake-like presence of a mystery third party, a would-be homewrecker hovering in the wings.  In the end they row above the carping phone, but all feels increasingly fraught and the ending, a final sly rattle from the intruder, doesn’t bode well at all.

Vision Fortune – Night Jukes

Purveyors of the most demented sound this side of the loony bin, Vision Fortune‘s latest EP Night Jukes provides more captivating atmospherics: perma-throbbing guitars, monotone vocals and seditious drums that together form an arsenal of blurry meanders.  It’s like a rock version of witch house – possibly (but probably not) explaining why the third song is simply called Drag (drag being another name for witch house).  The raw opening track Heavy Saddles is my fave, though: it’s a spellbinding story of how one hook can carry a whole song…

Peepholes – Caligula EP

photo by Alphan Nukan

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Caligula is the title-track from London duo Peepholes‘ latest EP, out via Upset The Rhythm.  Calmer than some tunes on the record, it nevertheless ascends gradually – but unstoppably – to a psychedelic, panicked plane, a place where the sun never shines and our mortality can no longer be ignored.  And yet, for all that it’s fraught, there’s also a beauty here: the beauty of honesty, of abandoning excuses.

Picture The World In Signs plots a similar path, but without the histrionics: instead it comes with a Prozac-ed mollification, as if heard at a distance or via a dream.  Including the industri-hell finale, it has the quality of those revelations you have just as sleep comes; desperately you try and grasp them, and resist the fatigue, but it’s a losing battle and they slip away, enigmatic and free.

Ghostliest of all is Moon Gangs‘ remix of Tunnels, a musical child run away from home, never to return.

Figures

Counting Frequencies by Figures

The Unkindness of Ravens – Virus/Viper

You stumble around blindly, crashing into walls, falling down stairs, smashing glasses, and the world is soundless, emotionless, freezing cold, bleached of colour, somehow cruel.  Memories recurrently buzz into your head, but you shove them back down, unwanted, not now please, no thanks.  You scrape a blade across raw skin, masticate some glossy white gump and then grab for the brass handle.  It’s morning.  You’re late for work.  You should have stayed in last night.  And you probably oughtn’t to be listening to The Unkindness of Ravens’ new double-A side, full of industrial, gothy electro-rock.