As always, we end the year, avoiding off-topic comments, with a partial ‘selection’, in no particular order and with the usual omissions, of the records that we have listened to the most, or rather that the flood of new releases each week has allowed me to listen to at least more than once. Happy New Year to everyone!!!
- DUCTAPE “Echo Drama” LP [Swiss Dark Nights]
The third album of the
Turkish duo is once again an electrifying unavoidable addition to our favoured listenings, rushing from the onset with an accentuated driving rhythmic charge for an opus in which the band’s native language appears in three songs, curiously relegated to the no less magnetic and engaging final part. The strong, haunted female vocals explore a scary unveiling of inner insight through a myriad of painful emotions, surrounded by the striking poignant intensity of sparkling guitars and synth architectures to grasp the profound feelings of gloom and disillusionment enshrined in the most genuine darkwave spirit. It’s always exhilarating to hear how the genuine and reflective melodic songwriting prowess of the duo shakes and revives the genre with abiding passion and intoxicating flair.
Favourite Track:
- LOVATARAXX “Sophomore” LP [Cold Transmission Music]
Fruit of a lengthy development probably to a large extent fashioned during their ceaseless live tour around the world and influenced, they tell us, by the 80s and 90s horror and Sci-Fi movie soundtracks, the
Grenoble duo’s ‘sophomore’ album, 5 years since their debut, skillfully embodies the icy and minimal fascinations of their 80s French Coldwave heritage focusing mainly on synthesizers and drum machines, not disdaining more retro romantic hook-filled (synth)pop episodes, without ever giving up strains of experimentation. Whilst the backbone of the album is struck by ineradicable spectral darkness and by a lingering icy sense of fidgetiness, harnessed by a mood-shifting array of relentless dancing beats, thick throbbing basslines, and hypnotic lush swirling arpeggios, the warm melancholic, and cold restless male and female vocals convey haunted human energy and brooding emotional depth to the thought-provoking sonic narrative stressed about the future of mankind.
Favourite track:
- ECHOBERYL – “Through the Chaos” LP [Mother Solitude Records]
Three years from our longtime favourite
“Mother Solitude and Other Dark Tales”,
Paris-based surreal dark electro-wave storytellers
Echoberyl return with an impeccable and most personal studio album to date, both retro and current, at once timeless.
Cecilia Dassonneville &
Adriano Iacoangeli pay tribute to parallel worlds (and identities) in
“Through the Chaos”, with a cast of bizarre and tormented characters created by
Cecilia to share her darkly fascinating view of reality. Just like each song creates a unique plot twist and sound pallet,
Cecilia’s vocals change throughout the LP to display a myriad of conflicting emotions. Ranging anywhere from sad, fragile introspection to breathy, lustful longing, bitter spoken words, and a brief period of peaceful ethereality, while a powerful and haunting atmosphere by
Iacoangeli weaves an eerie and slightly off-kilter web of synthetic tones and organic textures, built by relentless clattering and pounding drum machines, chugging rumbling basslines, swirling synths sparkling like neon lights, and piercing guitar inlays, to further expand the depth and vibrancy of the drama. This album does not contain a typical Hollywoodian happy ending, since the three bonus tracks will disclose what it is like when the darkness creeps back in.
Favourite Track:
- KLINE COMA XERO “Running In The Dark” LP [Objet Trouvé]
The third LP by the analogue electronic music project led, since
2012, by
Sacramento-based artist
Tony Williams delivers a thoroughly immersive, visceral and urgent Minimal Synth-Wave narrative through an alchemical fusion of relentless stark looping rhythms, flickering spirals of tensile synth iciness, and cerebral industrial aesthetic, moulded out of the literary influence of
J.G. Ballard’s unsettling novels. Cranky, sputtering and syncopated drum programming and whirring undulating low ends, grind and pound their way, galvanised by layers of adrenalised roiling synth leads, injecting a lingering sense of alienation and restlessness, whilst frigid, sterile, at times agonized and haunted disjointed spoken word vocals, describe a baleful futuristic urban wasteland of anxious gloom and paranoid dystopia, to mirror a stark reality, pervaded with uncompromising claustrophobia.
Favourite track:
- MALE TEARS “Paradisco” LP [Artoffact Records]
The 4 piece Electro Pop
Los Angeles-based outfit, led by founding member
James Edward, leaves the Gothic doom and gloom behind for a devoted, heartfelt love letter to the lush, darting and bittersweet Synth-Pop sounds of the 80s, peppered with Italo Disco strains, whose rich and glittering layers sop with echoes of ABC, Pet Shop Boys, Human League passing through New Order, Jazz, Gary Numan, and Ultravox. A dramatic push and pull of toxic emotions driven by feelings of brokenness, emptiness, and fear sets the stage for vibrantly nostalgic sparkling auras of icy tinkling synth melodies, neon strobing mists, and hypnotic bombastic dancing beats to surround an array of crooning atmospheric vocals, breathy female whispers and cold baritone echoes, to reveal a dystopic loneliness and insecurity found in modern day romance. A fantastically impressive timeless album for both dreamers and dancers alike.
Favourite Track:
- MAYFLOWER MADAM “Insight” LP [Night Cult Records / Up In Her Room / Icy Cold Records]
Regarded as a defining moment in the
Norwegian outfit’s history, their third album culminates in a trilogy started in
2016 and marks a step forward in overall production and songwriting quality, that refines the band’s penchant for 80s Post-punk at its most romantic edge (Echo and The Bunnymen, The Church), colored with lambent textural shoegaze atmospherics combined with dashes of surreal cinematic and psychedelic fascinations.
Mayflower Madame‘s most personal LP thus far,
“Insight” carries with it a wide breadth of uneasy heartfelt emotions rooted in loss, love, escapism, and catharsis, delivered by aching forlorn vocals, that invite the listener to take a haunting journey of profound emotionality and sublime timeless melodies.
Favourite Track:
- GRUNDEIS “Every Second an Ocean” LP [Undressed Records]
After the more than positive debut album,
“Amygdala,” three years ago, defined by a multifaceted, atmospheric Post-punk outside of excessively defined patterns that clearly left a glimpse toward future intrigue for a band with a still unrefined, yet special flair. The sophomore opus does not disappoint expectations with an organic evolution of their moody, still obscure, sonic inclinations, swerving between shimmery shoegaze catharsis to both reflective and abrasive, alternative rock dynamics, strained with surreal psychedelic sheens, on which overall stands out the magnetic haunting vocals of both tragic beauty and raw primal pain, deftly framed by a mesmerizing and sparkling multi-layered effect-filled guitar work, to sculpt a powerfully sensual, spectral, and visionary sound, melting hearts and minds with emotional overload.
Favourite track:
- DATE AT MIDNIGHT “Fading Into This Grace” LP [Manic Depression Records]
After a five-year hiatus, veteran
Rome-based 4-piece
Death at Midnight are back with the band’s most impressive, cohesive and thrilling release to date, scraping and encompassing the gothic-tinged depths of Darkwave and Post-punk’s most obscure intersections. A disquieting spellbinding atmosphere of haunted vocals switches between agonized cries and grumbling distortions, to brood in an agony of anxiety and sadness, whilst searching for an elusive state of grace around which an impetuous, throbbing rhythm section alongside a thoroughly gripping, swirling epic instrumental clamour of tormented murky visceral spleen and sparkling pain-fueled electricity, creates an aural assault on the senses, equal parts spiky, poignant and mesmerizing.
Favourite track:
- POLICE DES MOEURS “Commencement” LP [L’offre Et La Demande]
“Commencement”, the fifth album from the experienced
Montreal shapeshifting chiaroscural Minimal Synth act, made of
Francis Dugas and
Manuelle Gauthier, delves deeper into the transcendental, esoteric and ghostly realms than the previous effort, flowing out with hypnotic percussive tribal loops, whilst sitting alongside their distinctive bouncing vibrant and emotional-ridden Synth-Pop aesthetic, all tied together with layers of lightly distorted vivid vocals, taking on many exotic forms of expression, to conjure, through an adventurous lens of arcane mystery, the universal sorrows and trials of humankind.
Favourite track:
- LILA EHJÄ “Clivota” LP [CROUX Records / Toutdoux Records]
Parisian “one girl band” Lila Ehjä‘s sophomore effort cranks out an obscure introspective fusion of ethereal misty Darkwave and raw and unnerving Post-punk, layered with ominous grungy Industrial and Electro undertones. Rich in emotional intensity and tormented magnetism, it’s coursed with an existential spleen and cold dreary rigor that seeps glimmers of light into a hypnotic lingering of melancholic tones. A lost focal point of wistful introspective vocals seems far away under the heavy load of distorted, droning and almost solemn guitar work, mechanical rhythms, and churning basslines, but if you listen closely through the hard outer noise there is a strength of beauty, sensuality, and causticism that makes for an engrossing whole listen, showing off a massive level of visceral sonic reach and spine-chilling esoteric allure.
Favourite track:
- EAT-GIRLS “Area Silenzio” LP [Bureau B]
It’s an inebriating sensation to delve into the phantasmagorical creative impetus of the
French trio from
Lyon, capable of combining an irrationally logical spirit of sonic investigation with a pop immediacy, constantly balanced between dream and reality, effortlessly incorporating past and present in a distinctive coalesce of aesthetic patterns and informal transgressions, that follow one another with an apparent naturalness and unpredictability. Playful, angsty and urgent interlockings and mazes of space-age psychedelia from another planet, cranky post-punk and sad synth-swollen coldwave suggestions, shift and wobble on crunchy and reverberant dubwise grooves, crisp, obsessive tribal percussions and hypnotic motorik beats; at the same time, a peculiar array of whimsical vocal polyphonies and spoken words change tone and texture frantically, to evoke a variety of mercurial moods, making for a true mind-expanding and heady dances between alienation and allure.
Favourite Track:
- NECRØ “Into Oblivion” [Cold Transmission Music]
The
Lisbon-based cold and dark electronic project emerges from the union of two souls, different and complementary, as much as the music they create, an eerie, lush, full-bodied and melancholic Darkwave built on the contrast and harmonization of the shadow and the light, the otherworldly and the carnal, to take the listener on a moody and intense journey through the beauty and pain of human existence. The powerhouse of commanding female vocals, both biting and ethereal, lead us with an uncanny awareness through a haunting immersive realm of crisp and slashing industrial electro rhythms, throbbing with uncompromising and visceral droning energy, laced with abrasive swirling emotive synths. The
Portuguese unit ushers a solid, powerful, and fascinating debut with flowing confidence and craft, generating a magnetic sense of hypnosis from which it seems impossible, but most possibly we never wish to awake.
Favourite track:
- URGE “Here/After” LP [SBLWBCK Records / Icy Cold Records]
French unit draws icy Coldwave shivers and moody Post-punk infused with Shoegazing sparkling resonance in their debut endeavour. In the wake of a personal betrayal, haunted and melancholic, slightly raspy, baritones, split between warm vulnerable pain and cold shadowy self-deception, to battle it out unto a mysterious breakthrough of the “Here/After,” where danger and sensuality seek each other and harmonize seamlessly, to command both a tightly wound and erratic, as well as an introspective and hypnotic fusion of blistering and cathartic guitar stabs, shifting tight rhythms, dense bass convulsions and wintry synths, delivered with changing nuances and edgy accuracy.
Favourite Track:
- NEON LIES “Demons” LP [Wave Tension Records / Cosmic Brood / Diffuse Reality’s Periphylla]
Since
2016 Neon Lies has been the D.I.Y. brainchild of
Zagreb’s
Goran Lautar who spans vintage-styled spiky, dark Minimal Synth and catchy Synth-Pop, served with icy moody synth hooks, chugging basslines, a driving drum machine and lost downtrodden at times softly emotional vocals, struggling to find meaning within a torment of heartache and alienation. Whilst you will surely find more pitch-perfect refined proposals around,
Neon Lies provides extremely straightforward and emotive
‘personal hymns’, pulsing and rumbling with a mesmerizing sense of angst and desperation, scrapping through the visceral deep murk of electronic scope, ascending from there with immersive repetitions, vibrant throbbings and obsessive, glowing motifs, to bring the listener both resonant and warm addictive dancing pleasure.
Favourite Track:
- NIGHT IN ATHENS “Wasted Reflektions” LP [Wave Records]
Equally haunting and alluring, as well as gritty and vulnerable, teetering between bewitching spectral narratives clad in gothic melancholy and climactic Electro/EBM-fueled bursts that puncture an atmosphere brimming with tension, to provoke an achingly impetuous dance bounded by hope and bitterness. A bold use of more melodic vocals brings a unique blend of uncanny punk-tinted spoken words, soft wistful introspections, and a triumphant sense of balance, guiding the listener from a comfortable darkness into an abyss of chaos and despair and finally to a newfound state of fearless love. Embedded in punk spirit, NIA’s third album showcases a broad and multi-faceted sonic spectrum that shines through in an increasingly focused and cohesive way, heralding intrigue for further developments.
Favourite Track:
- TURQUOISE “Avant Demain” LP [Freaksville Records]
The band’s sonic foundations of
“Reverb, Introspection and Electricity” since
2019, adorned by the soothingly seductive vocal delivery of
Sarah Boom, finally reached the long-anticipated debut album to navigate seamlessly bittersweet retro-modern French-style synth-pop romance, and neon-lit, slick New Wave nostalgia, swirled by moody, thrumming Post-punk basslines alongside sparkling and edgy emotional guitar riffs. A battle against the inner darkness, delivered through mostly vibrant sensual emotional French vocals that sync temperament with a dramatic shifting soundscape of haunted glistening guitar strings, icy mercurial synth melodies, and churning bass rivers of doom, located somewhere between hope, longing, angst, and gloom.
Favourite Track:
