Mala Herba, “Wounded Healer”

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Mala Herba - Wounded Healer

Mala Herba
Wounded Healer
White Forest Inc.

Since Polish artist Zosia Hołubowska’s first demos as Mala Herba emerged seven years ago, the work under that aegis has never lacked for confidence or consideration. Its themes of folk wisdom and practice, not to mention fluidity between modern techno/body production, acoustic experimentation, and bracing vocals, have been there since day one, with the nature of individual releases has been determined by subtler choices in focus and refinement. New LP Wounded Healer is Hołubowska’s most varied release to date, but also gets as deep into Mala Herba’s arcane forest as has yet been ventured.

As with previous Mala Herba releases, newcomers and fans will both likely focus initially onWounded Healer‘s vocals, and the increasingly fervent incantation of opening track “Siemieniec” indicates the level of drama much of it is pitched at. With each track featuring contributions from other femme Eastern European artists (there’s no indication as to whether those contributions are musical, vocal, or both), there’s a range of registers and moods, with the vocals complemented by weighted kicks and and atmospheric pads and sampling. It’s tough to always know whether the vocals (predominantly in Polish but with some Ukrainian mixed in if I don’t miss my guess) are serving as wards, banishments, excoriations, laments, or some other form, but they’re almost always arresting even free of direct linguistic context (the album’s title alluding to the wisdom of Greek centaur Chiron leaves the tracks themselves open for a wide range of allusions and interpretations).

But in the corners of Wounded Healer are many moves made by Hołubowska and their collaborators which add depth and colour beyond its more bracing elements. The gradual chopping and sampling of the initially simple sing-song vocals of “Lipa” over the course of its run time could be taken as a drift into the uncanny abstraction of the human voice, or given the decidedly organic ethos which runs through the record, simply as a reflection of natural decay and the degradation of recordings and bodies. The rising and falling harmonic rondo of “Nikt” is similarly softer than much of the record, but the shape of the pulsing kick which runs through it finds a textural contrast in both the heavily processed and naturally recorded vocals which alight through it.

Wounded Healer is a stark listen which gets Mala Herba’s appeal and power across in as strong and direct a manner as we’ve heard, but also offers depth both through its collaborators and Hołubowska’s subtle but adroit flourishes. You don’t need to speak Mala Herba’s language to know that they trade in strong medicine.

Buy it.

Wounded Healer [WFI005] by Mala Herba

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Tracks: October 21st, 2024

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The Hallowe’en weekend is nigh, which is of course an exciting time of year for folks of our particular stripe, although as we’ve discussed a few times in the past, we have a hard time getting quite as excited for Samhain is we did when younger. It’s certainly a function of us being old, and tired, and over-committed in all aspects of our lives, but there’s also a weird amount of pressure (you know, the kind that used to be reserved for Family Christmases) surrounding the whole thing that makes opting out feel like the right option. Does that mean we won’t be costuming up and DJing various parties in the coming weeks? No it does not. Does it mean we’ll probably spend some time chewing over how our relationship with Gothsgiving has changed in recent years on the podcast at some point? PROBABLY. Tracks ahoy!

Normal Bias

Normal Bias

Normal Bias, “Falling Down”
Sick new joint from the duo of Matt Weiner from TWINS and Chris Campion of Multiple Man in their Normal Bias guise, in advance of their first full LP, Kingdom Come which drops this week. You’re getting a lot of the same musical ideas you would associate with each act, like Weiner’s smokey, low-voiced vocals, and Campion’s body-funk, but there’s something very specific in the way these two artists collaborate that makes the sound much more than the som of its parts; wistful, groovy and above-all danceable.
Kingdom Come by Normal Bias

Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, “Driving Black”
Say, did you happen to catch our Red Lorry Yellow Lorry commentary podcast yesterday? We didn’t have time to mention it, but by complete accident that historical deep dive coincides with news of the first proper new Lorries record since 1992. While reunion gigs and a handful of new(er) tracks have come and gone over the past couple of decades, the prospect of a full EP’s worth of new tunes from Chris Reed & co. is an exciting one. Folks who recall the band heading in a ‘leather and Americana’ direction similar to that charted contemporaneously by the Mary Chain at the tail end of their original run will hear that thread being picked up again here.
Driving Black by Red Lorry Yellow Lorry

Skelesys, “The Answer”
Berlin’s Skelesys has been accruing a bit of buzz in the darkwave world with a handful of bootleg mixes and an EP on Oraculo (plus a hot take on a Zanias cut a few months back), but based on the preview tracks for its debut LP, that buzz should be heavily amplified quite soon. Tunes like this stake out a prime spot smack between the chilly minimalism which drives a lot of current darkwave and the warmer melodicism which can be found in subtler expressions of it, and are very well arranged.
Fading Echoes LP by Skelesys

Cardinal Noire, “Gun Metal”
Hell yeah, more teasers for the upcoming Cardinal Noire LP via Artoffact. We’ve written at length about the Finnish duo’s work in the classic post-industrial style (not to mention their various side-projects in adjacent styles), and the reason is simple; in a genre that has lots of bands that mine the classic Vancouver sound, very few have ever done it better or with more conviction. Just hit play on “Gun Metal” for a proper slice of acid-vocalled, orch hit beating, sample mangling excellence if you need an example, and then go pre-order Vitriol while you’re at it.
Vitriol by Cardinal Noire

Neurowulf feat. Stefan Poiss, “All This Life”
The heavily trance-driven style of Slovenia’s Neurowulf isn’t the sort of thing we find ourselves regularly reaching for, but we’ll admit it – a Stefan Poiss feature is enough to grab our attention. The mind.in.a.box main main sounds right at home riding a very futurepop friendly kick and some stabby arpeggios which should have folks of a certain vintage flashing back to mid-00s dancefloors, and Neurowulf does a bang-up job of framing his immistakable vocals in the proper light.
Kolaps by NeuroWulf

Static Ghost, “Corpse Code (Qual remix)”
Pacific Northwest underground techno-body producer Static Ghost has impressed us greatly, both via this year’s excellent Depatterened EP, and the times we’ve seen them perform live. The appropriately titled REMIXED gets added to that resume, featuring new takes on the hard-hitting cuts from the EP by the likes of Dildox, Poison the Vicar, Damascus Knives, and this thudding slice of club-bait from the ever-solid Qual. Great stuff, and an easy add to the Bandcamp wishlist in advance of its October 25th release.
REMIXED by STATIC GHOST

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We Have A Commentary: Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, “Talk About The Weather”

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Red Lorry Yellow Lorry - Nothing Wrong

The tar-black, mechanically thrashing blast of negativity and angst which is Red Lorry Yellow Lorry’s debut LP is the subject of this week’s commentary podcast. Talk About The Weather Distilled extant strains of post-punk and goth rock into one of the tightest and noisiest records of its generation, and we’re looking at how it fits into the Lorries’ own progression as well as the broader musical histories they drew upon and influenced in turn. As always, you can rate and subscribe on iTunes, download directly, or listen through the widget down below.

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Michael Idehall, “Apokryphos”

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Michael Idehall - Apokryphos

Michael Idehall
Apokryphos
Ant-Zen

The net cast by Swedish experimentalist Michael Idehall is so wide – falling over rhythmic noise, neofolk, death industrial, dark ambient, and more – that any new material from him need only adjust its focus onto a certain area of his purview in order to feel like the work of an entirely new producer. New LP Apokryphos continues to hoe the hard road Idehall’s chosen, working more out of unnerving intimation than direct aggression.

Apokryphos is threaded through with muted, scraping percussion with individual beats linked by detuned acoustic samples and other organic elements warped into the uncanny valley. Idehall takes a less is more approach to arrangement after finding just the right shade of disturbance with his sound design. Dotting the woozy acoustics of “Black Void” with just the slightest punctuations of feedback from an electric guitar we never properly hear carries more menace than a sudden blast of ear-ratting chug might have. The modern Neubauten ping and pulse of “Never Tell Me” similarly connotes the real unspeakable truth being hidden just out of sight.

But to write about a Michael Idehall record without paying close attention to the vocals in unconscionable. Idehall clearly knows not only that his vocal power makes him a unique quantity in the fields he works in, but that the malleability of that instrument demands to be exploited. The weary, warbled incantations of the aforementioned “Black Void” and the devotional, guttural whisper of “Foreign The Shore” are in keeping with the hair-raising fare we’ve come to look forward to from him, but Idehall’s peppered some curveballs into the mix, too. The almost Kurt Weill-like vein tapped on “The Dark Spots” and “Three Paths Across The Back Of The Horse” puts the record’s more traditionally noisy moments into sharp relief, though the former’s fractured sing-song – “You have seen the spots on my skin / What did they whisper to you in the dark?” – is certainly no more comforting.

Like the rest of his best work, Apokryphos has just enough in common with the dark electronic genres to which Idehall’s clearly indebted (hints of late period Coil should be detectable to the veteran listener) to give the newcomer enough to hold onto, but it’s the stranger and more off-kilter paths his muse (or perhaps his own voice) leads him on which leaves a lasting and chilly impression.

Buy it.

apokryphos by michael idehall

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We Have A Technical 529: A New Bistro

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Black Magnet

We have a slightly industrial metal themed two albums episode of the podcast for you this week, dear listener, as we chat a record needing no introduction in Killing Joke’s Pandemonium and the rare modern industrial metal record which gets us excited about the genre again, Black Magnet’s debut LP Hallucination Scene. We’re also talking about a surprisingly great Sisters of Mercy live show and what can be gleaned from the latest Sick New World lineup. As always, you can rate and subscribe on iTunes, download directly, or listen through the widget down below.

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Dark Chisme, self-titled

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Dark Chisme
self-titled
self-released

After seeing Seattle’s Dark Chisme perform this summer at Terminus Festival, two sentiments were repeated in every conversation we had about the band; firstly that they were excellent live, and secondly that it was shocking how good they are considering how long the band has existed. At the time of this writing the duo of Christine Gutierrez and E have been making music as Dark Chisme for about a year, but you’d honestly never know it listening to their self-titled debut. Fusing modern electro-darkwave sounds with latin and techno influences, the group’s music has confidence and poise that would be notable in an established act, much less one this fresh.

Much like their energizing live show, much of the music on the record is truly set off by Gutierrez’s big personality. A standout cut like “Fangs” is solid on its own, the speedy pace and snappy bass and drum programming accented with some touches of latin percussion and organ that give it a genuinely unique flavour. That said, what puts it over the top is Gutierrez’s capacity to sound both disaffected and dramatic through its repeated chorus of “Vampiro /Vampiro”. Similarly, the way she leans in on the chorus of “Yo Puedo Vivir Sin Ti” makes the song’s relatively minimal arrangement over into a anthem, the occasional yelp or shouted “Hey!” injecting some punky charm. She does both foreboding (“Beautiful Obsession Killer”) and strident (“Complicate”) equally well, finding the right mode to make each song feel different and fresh.

To that point, the band’s debut does have some issues with variety in terms of the instrumental side of things. While there are several cuts that use some unconventional ideas and sounds to good effect (“Sombras” has some touches of NRG in its octave-driven bounce, while “La Musica Oscura” goes for driving techno with its synth stabs and wails), there are a few numbers that feel a touch thin in their composition. The duo favour minimalism, letting drums and bass do a lot of heavy lifting and Gutierrez’s voice do a lot of the work when it comes to hooks, an approach which works, but leaves cuts like “Vete De Acqui” and “Cold” feeling paint-by-numbers in terms of their programming. Weirdly the album starts with one of its least impressive songs in “Move”, which would be a passable bit of atonal DJ fodder coming from most dancefloor-leaning darkwave acts, but feels subpar when compared to what you hear Dark Chisme do elsewhere on the record. None of those songs are bad per se, and Gutierrez is just as much of a force on them as she is on any other song, they’re just lesser, which sticks out when the highs here are so very high.

Still, a few exciting cuts aside, there’s something truly, immediately great about Dark Chisme, and it captures a goodly amount of the lightning in a bottle charisma that the band have on stage. No doubt some of the songs have already caught on with DJs in your town or DJ stream of choice, and listening to the record it’s easy to get excited about the project’s prospects; as a debut it sounds like a band who aren’t just ready to go to the next level, but arrived and made it their home before most of us had ever heard of them. If this was year one, can you even imagine what year two might bring? Recommended.

Buy it.

Dark Chisme by Dark Chisme

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Tracks: October 15th, 2024

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We’re off to see the Sisters, the guttural Sisters of goth! Yep, the Senior Staff will be in attendance tonight as Doktor Avalanche’s travelling medicine show comes through Vancouver, bringing with it all of the decades-old questions about the quality of the Sisters of Mercy as a touring entity and of the troves of still unreleased new music which will likely make up the majority of the set. We’ll likely have some thoughts on this week’s podcast, but until then we’re keeping our fingers crossed for “Marian” and “Emma”.

Soft Vein, contemplating

Chameleons, “Nostalgia”
Wrestling with childhood experiences through the eyes of adulthood was a pillar of strength for The Chameleons in their original incarnation, and so the reformed band returning to some of its earliest, pre-Script Of The Bridge material for a new EP seems fitting, especially when you’ve got a reflective tune like “Nostalgia” to use as a calling card. LP of new material Arctic Moon is still on the horizon, but until then the Tomorrow Remember Yesterday is giving us some beautiful Billy Pilgrim-esque time slips.
Tomorrow Remember Yesterday by Chameleons

SDH, “Do I Look Like I’m Laughing (MVTANT remix)”
Interesting news last week as it was revealed that SDH, an act we’ve followed closely for a few years had signed to Artoffact Records. The announcement came with a fresh remix of “Do I Look Like I’m Laughing” by MVTANT, taking the original darkwave cut into some funky body music territory, but without losing its moody, continental charm. The end result, as you can hear below, has a kind of 12″ dub charm to it, like a Razormaid remix from that service’s golden era, death disco for underground dancefloors.
Do I Look Like I'm Laughing? (MVTANT Remix) by SDH

Soft Vein, “God Whispers”
Speaking of Artoffact, the label will be releasing the sophomore LP from California’s Soft Vein Through Blinds for January of 2025. Like the preceding record, there’s a lot of modern electro-darkwave going on with the teaser single “God Whispers”, requisite minimalism and all, but we’re hearing much of the EBM and electro influences at play here in the bassline and drum interplay. One notable aspect of the track is the increasingly worked up vocal as it heads towards its conclusion, giving the otherwise very structured track some dangerous, slightly unhinged energy to play off of.
THROUGH BLINDS by SOFT VEIN

Vision Video, “Dead Gods”
Big goth rock moves from Vision Video, who have remained a major touring presence in the North American scene over the last few years. A cut like “Dead Gods” really does tie them directly into the musical traditions that Dusty Gannon has become an internet face for; between his tremendous vocal performance and the cut’s excellent use of spooky keys and haunted house reverbs, there’s just a super solid core of second wave-styled goth rock under the hood of the track. Listen to that guitar arpeggio, and that busy cymbal-work on the drum track. This is the good stuff.
Dead Gods by Vision Video

Boar Alarm, “Stepping On Ants”
Between fresh Analfabetism material and a whole new death industrial/ambient collaboration it’s been a busy back half of the year for Fredrik Djurfeldt, but he’s still not done. Representing the unrelenting approach to industrial and EBM which birthed Severe Illusion, his Boar Alarm solo project’s new LP is packed with brutal, hypnotic loop and grind style material like this cut.
Automatic for the Dead People by Boar Alarm

Yeun Elez, “La croix des cinq chemins”
Linking neofolk, dungeon synth, and dark ambient together, the first tasters of the new tape from Hoel Von Helvet’s Yeun Elez project evoke the misty and marshy landscapes of rural France which the project’s title refers to, even if you didn’t spend your youth traipsing through them as Von Helvet did. His earlier work as Techno Thriller had a much more industrial cast, but this shift towards the mystic has been in the works at least since 2020’s Decameron.
La croix des cinq chemins by Yeun Elez

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Observer: Einhänder & Sleek Teeth

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Einhänder
Can’t Think Of A Title For This
self-released
The title of Michael Landscape’s new EP in his Einhänder guise is Can’t Thing Of a Title For This, which suggests the exact sort of freewheeling musical experience the mind behind Seattle body music act Chrome Corps is shooting for. In opposition to the strident FM sound of his most well known outlet, the music on the EP is a combination of acid, breaks and analogue techno, all delivered in off-the-cuff fashion that feels very much like it was sequenced live to the recording, sound system style. That rougher-edged approach is a goodly part of the appeal of a track like the squelchy “Clandestine”, the clanging percussion sounds in the mix bouncing off one another, which along with some chopped and sequenced vocal samples put rhythm and groove over its minimal melodic elements. The use of the Amen break as the basis for “Namibia” is a bit of sleight of hand; once the song really gets rolling it becomes a bit of Meat Beat Manifesto-esque electro, full of groovy menace and percussive switch-ups. The EP is capped by digital bonus track “Pulse One”, which pulls deeply from Landscape’s love for vintage video game soundtrack sounds, creating the illusion of a side-scrolling space shooter (or a Rez bonus level for if you were a Dreamcast devotee), hypnotically focusing in on forward momentum, with each new layer of programming slides inevitably into the picture. Its rugged by design, which is as a good a description of Einhänder’s sound as any, strap in for a bumpy ride.
Can't Think Of A Title For This EP by Einhänder

Sleek Teeth
Sleek Teeth
self-titled
self-released
The string of individual tracks leading to LA newcomers Sleek Teeth’s formal debut pointed to the duo having a preternatural sense for beefing left-field EBM and related genres up with some disarming and at times precious melodicism. That’s a read which holds up on the duo’s self-titled EP, both in the new tracks it offers and in framing existing tracks against one another. From the opening rubbery bounce of “Operating” and the gasping pulse of “Gone” it’s easy to see links between Sleek Teeth and road-less-travelled approaches to EBM taken in the past by the likes of Forces or White Car. But those grooves and rhythms are almost always just one measure away from an understated but addictive hook. The weary, arch vocals of “Endless” recall the sour candy pop ambitions of Zeigeist and other acts formed in the wake of electroclash, but there’s more than enough personality in Sleek Teeth’s chilly croon to make each of these five tracks hit as part of a unique and united presentation. It’s one of the best debut releases we’ve heard this year regardless of length, and as an arrival statement hints at similarly strong things to come. Recommended.
Sleek Teeth by Sleek Teeth

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