Outsideleft Week in Music is all down with new monolithic things

After four LPs. Divide and Dissolve have signed with Bella Union. The first single from the union (ha!) is "Monolithic". Divide and Dissolve's Takiaya Reed says, "Monolithic is a prayer for systems of liberation, freedom, Indigenous sovereignty, and for a Black future. This song is hope for the seemingly impossible and for things that have never been seen or experienced in many lifetimes. Where no memories have been created." After a cinematic sleight of hand, Monolithic quickly gets so heavy, intense and black you can see the carbon nanotubes collide. Divide and Dissolve are doing a massive American tour right now ahead of a new album in 2025. Playing around but no playing around, not even for a minute. I think it is okay to say "Monumental."

'Dirty and Divine' is the title of the album this is drawn from, and I'm sure this bunch of Swedish hard rockers would love to be seen as some hard ass muthas you don't want to mess with, but in reality, they look as hard as the Pillow Department in Selfridges.  I am imagining that there is a Pillow Department there.  If not, I'm going to look a bit silly.  Like Thundermother.

Almost five minutes of magic from Peter Cat Recording Co. From the LP 'Beta'. Here's the Map and the Territory... "I feel like a lot of the frequencies might leave if the door's open..." So joyous, so muddy and murky, so amazing it makes me feel that they, somewhere in their moaning, like they sound like they could moan about anything, like I could moan that they make their guitars sound so obstreperous, like they were played on synths... It all together makes me feel like there's a reason to live. Still figuring out whether Peter Cat Recording Co is it. Might be. Giants either way.

Buñuel was , of course, a master surrealist film maker.  This is nothing like that, resembling the Red Hot Chilli Peppers on a bad day. Buñuel say they "make music for those of us willing to take a closer, unflinching look at the depths of human instinct". Unfortunately, my human instinct was to skip to the next review.  Nothing to see here, move along.

Joyous soul, thrown it around like only they and a number of other people can! 'Let's Go Back' floats and gloats in its primitive piano melody simplicity. A delight. Fine interpretive dancing too if you can wait...

Emma Anderson, arguably writer of the best songs in Lush, then half of the criminally underrated Sing-Sing, released 'Pearlies', her first solo album last year and it was rather good. 'Pearlies' has received the guest remixer treatment which will be released in October as Spiralee-Pearlies Rearranged. This remix, by Ladytrons Daniel Hunt, is the first single from the album. It basically sounds like you'd expect given Anderson and Hunts pedigree which is fine by me. A lovely hummable vocal line, delicate guitar solo, occasionally surprising chord changes and a desire to play it again as soon as it ends. Well worth 4 minutes and 23 seconds of your day. Or 8:46 if you play it twice.

Well, it's got the good diva thing stamped all over it. And lots of food references. Let's talk about songs where food isn't comfortable. And clothes. I like songs with clothing references. Good, authentic panting at the end. These cats are artists.

The Ouroboros is an image of a snake eating its own tail.  There is ample scope in that for an analogy about the circular and repetitive nature of this track, with its rhythmic breakbeat, chant, and wailing sax line.  Its a groovy little number, very early 90's rave fodder really, but then there is nothing new any more.  It comes, it goes, but fails to leave much of a lasting impression and it's slightly overlong, Happy Mondays-eque, shuffle sounds very familiar. Reading the comments on the YouTube video, I could be forgiven for thinking this was the best thing ever, before remembering that these are all posted by friends of the band in an attempt to create a buzz.  All videos have them nowadays.  It's a hummer though, and by that I don't mean that it stinks!

In a recent conversation, our esteemed founder, LamontPaul, quoted author Dexter Palmer " There are no new stories in the world any more" in the context of Hollywood's constant recycling and re-making of old plots and storylines. The same applies to music, in spades.  We have witnessed a long line of re-mixes, re-issues, re-treads, re-imaginings, and anything else beginning with the word 're' over the past few years, of which this is but the latest. You all know this track. How could you not? Yet here it is again.

Slowdive release a couple of mixes of Kisses, the most popular track off 2023s 'Everything is Alive' album. The original song is basically New Order Lite if that is possible so what do the Grouper and Daniel Avery mixes bring to the table? Well Grouper have slowed it down and taken away the drums so it now sounds like Kisses if youre listening to it on a tube train with the noise cancelling on your headphones switched off. I quite like it. Daniel Avery has whacked on an old school drum'n'bass beat and seemingly taken everything off the original except for Rachel Goswells keyboard swirl and some oos and ahs. At 3 minutes 30 it made me smile but any longer and the joke wouldve fizzled out quickly. Better than I thought it would be but the bar wasn't set very high.

I've tried but given up finding what label this is out on, I'm guessing it's self released by an Austin, Texas band. The press release is little help, and starts out "Culture Wars (think Depeche Mode, U2, The 1975)" which isn't promising. Frankly I'd sack the press release goblins if I were them. Slagheap rock with its guitars stuttering out at the same rhythm as the vocal in the chorus, very over serious, sounds old fashioned but not in a good way. A little like The Delays maybe, without the faded seaside glamour, somewhat humourless, dreary. Auto-tune, acoustic breakdown, almost precision crafted to annoy me, in fact. The production isn't bad, basic competence gets one heart I guess. No idea  what he's singing about though, presumably someone called Miley, that I don't care what it's about says it all really.

I think I saw TV on the Radio at the Hollywood Bowl, but as I listen to this that seems unlikely. Did they open for Massive Attack? Then again, did I see Massive Attack at the Hollywood Bowl. Don't seem right that they would be there either. By rights I should be categorically happy about it all. But I am just not sure. There's a TV on the Radio tour. Go find out for yourself.

On 'No Music' UK dreampop duo Maven Grace sing about the courage of musicians driven underground by oppressive regimes.  We have all heard about how underground artists playing western influence music were regarded as a threat in Soviet era East Germany, Poland, and Russia itself. Pussy Riot are a more recent example of that.  Music has always had the power to focus resistance and promote counter culture independent thought.  All Governments hate that, but totalitarian regimes even more so. Read here about how music was brought back to Afghanistan, then musicians had to flee abroad when the Taliban regained power in 2021 by way of example. Its a depressing thought. The accompanying video presses this point home, against the claustrophobic and cluttered tones on show in 'No Music'.  This is not pop music by any means, as the space you normally get in pop, dreampop or otherwise, simply isn't there.  The music feels crammed in, much like political prisoners in their cells, fighting to speak, to sing. That, I'm guessing, is the point.

Both of these are taken off their new 'Free Energy' second album that has just released and are like chalk and cheese, or maybe chalk favoured cheese, with 'Minus World' a breezy, pulsing, drone pop tinged whirl, and 'Blue Dada' a Saxy/sexy psych rock influenced storm. LA's Dummy are an enigma, unable to decide if they are a pop band, a rock band, or a psychedelic band. All of them, probably. You decide.

You know, with a name like War on Drugs, this band have no right to be as stultifyingly boring as they are. There is a whole live album of this corporate, stadium Dad Rock crap on the way too, heaven help us. Thank god we have bands like Melt Banana in the world to balance this out.  If I had a shredder for bands, this lot would be amongst the first into it. There is a pretty long queue though.

"In a world where there are no more heroes, The Fleshtones  walk the earth like Roman gods." Well, not quite, but they do make a damned fine noise here, which is rather fitting as they are one of the supports acts opening for the Damned on their UK tour in December (along wth Dr & The Medics - remember them?).Despite their advancing age, The Fleshtones show the many other reformed vintage bands how it's done

Wavering, wandering Americana from Merce Lemon. Does put me in a redolent mind of Kathleen Edwards—the Jason Isbell configuration of. Merce Lemon's Crows have all of their own pernicious beauty though, and it's too late to carp at them when you realise you're already in love with what's going on here.

Drug Castle was the nickname given to a facility in England where they used to conduct what were often unethical, experimental, psychological procedures during the ‘60s and ‘70s. Originally built for use in World War II, different psychologists and psychiatrists could book it out, and then take patients or volunteers down there for however long, and do whatever they liked,  including experimental treatments using frequencies to harmonise with emotional frequencies, causing a third frequency to be created, with bizarre results.

Industrial band History Of Guns had been trying to make contact with beings from another world without much success, so one evening on a whim they decided to catch the train to Drug Castle along with long-term collaborator filmmaker Howard Gardner, who captured the results of the experiment on film.  That's the story anyway.  The resulting film is your typical arthouse black and white affair, filmed in the light of a campfire on a beach, with a grinding industrial soundtrack culled from their latest album, 'Half Light' and repetively intoned vocals, like a latter day Virgin Prunes, before breaking into an acoustic ballad to mark the passing of night and the breaking of dawn.  It is remarkably effective and quite spooky too, with hooded figures flitting in and out. For a low budget mini movie it works well in the way Blair Witch Project and Eraserhead did. Given the plethora of dully predictable band videos around, History of Guns deserve full 5 heart credit for attempting this and breaking the monotony of the weekly slog through Youtube 'visualisers'.  More like this please. 

History of Guns latest album, 'Half Light', is available for free download here

Lovely and meandering sounds invoking an untroubled, untroubling fantasy. Somewhere along the way they've removed the struggle required to realise fantasies in the hope of making it easy for you to inhabit. I too want to escape a world of pain. But the mellow preoccupations here just leave me feeling guilty. I love the quiet revolutionaries, Tasha is a favorite, right up to the moment before there's nothing left but easy listening m-o-r schmaltz. Determined to say nothing. Not that that is even a bad thing. Most songwriters do just that. An assumed prerequisite for career success. The parts are greater than the sum. Aisha Badru is a really impressive singer. Hers is an evocative voice that needs something other than the moons, the tides and the sun to evoke. 

The operatic indie veterans release their first batch of new songs since 2014. Remembered most for their classic 1998 album 'Deserter Songs' which was all strings and drama topped off with singer and leader Jonathon Donahue's helium vocals. For the last 26 years they seem to have toured the world basically performing Deserter Songs and releasing the odd follow up album which soon disappeared into the ether. There have been odd curveballs such as 2019s recreation of Bobby Gentrys classic Delta Sweete album complete with a host of distinguished female vocalists from Norah Jones to Phoebe Bridgers and Vashti Bunyan. However Gentry's album is so much of a piece that recreating it seemed all a bit pointless, although you'd be well advised to seek out Margo Price's singing Sermon-an extraordinary performance. Anyway the new album is... Without sounding like I'm damning it with faint praise... Quite good. On the 8 drifts here, Donahue's vocals are now mostly spoken, gentle, occasionally husky ruminating on lost love, mood swings, the connections between music and nature, a-top swirling keyboards, strings, various brass instruments, more textures than tunes, it often sounds like a spoken word album with sonic glimpses of Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain, various film soundtracks, and even the odd surf guitar twang. It's quite an absorbing record that I suspect I will visit every now and then. Is it as good as Deserter Songs? In a word No, however it's their best album since Deserter Songs.

Well. Invariably love Big Crown Records and particularly love these instrumental records, perfect for writing to. Glorious Game which was one of last years best. Without Black Thought? Weird. Not Republican Weird. Weird in the old good disconcerting way. It's a loss and a gain at the same time.

In addition to all of Louis Cole's usual musical collaborators in Clown Core and Knower, the budget has now stretched to Netherlands based jazz, big band and symphony Orkest Metropole and its conductor Jules Buckley who has worked with everybody from The Cinematic Orchestra to Arctic Monkeys, and even Dizzee Rascal. Those of you who may be familiar with Cole's previous work will have heard filmic preludes, clattering drums, falsetto vocals, often sung by Cole himself, wailing guitar or saxophone solos, almost prog keyboard solos, and lots of mischief. The trouble with this record is that there are three different bands fighting for space in an overly long 66 minutes. Stephen Ellis' Brainfeeder Records are noted for releasing ambitious records such as those by Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, and of course Ellis' own Flying Lotus material, however this record is really far too stretched. Maybe it wouldve made three great EPs or been far more strictly edited, and also some of the lets prove we can play jazz solos could've been removed. Don't get me wrong there is some great stuff on here but only some. I'd recommend going back and listening to Coles Live Sesh and Xtra Songs, Knowers Knower Forever album, or scare yourself daft watching Clown Cores Hell and Van videos on YouTube.

Bill Leeb is the Vancouver-based mainstay behind pioneering electro-industrial acts Front Line Assembly and ambient-pop duo Delerium, as well as a collaborator with numerous other acts, including Noise Unit, Intermix and Cyberaktif.  If that list means something to you, you will already have a good idea of what to expect from 'Model Kollapse'.  Bill is a past master at this.  He could probably do this in his sleep (and I do mean that literally).  The signature pulsing stabs of electronics, set against tightly compressed rhythms, with sequences, samples, and cuts up blurbling away in the background, coupled with urgently wispered vocals, are something he has made his own.  The single 'Muted Obsession ' is a pristine example of his art.  Whilst you may not find a lot of surprises on  'Model Kollapse' , even down to the song titles,  'Terror Forms', 'Infernum' and so on, for your average Front Line Assembly fan, this will do very nicely, thank you.  The real surprise here is that Bill hasn't produced a solo album previously.  I can't imagine he hasn't had plenty of offers.  Just in case you were wondering, the term 'Model Collapse' (or 'Kollapse' in FLA speak) refers to a phenomena in artificial intelligence where trained models, especially those relying on synthetic data or AI-generated data, eventually degrade over time.  Bill is worried about the impact of AI and automation.  We all are.  Dystopian is the new black it seems.  The fact that we will all soon be living in what feels like an endless Terminator sequel is beginning to dominate album themes across the board.  Bill was warning of this in his music a good many years before others though, so he has first dibs I guess. 'Model Kollapse' is the closest you will get to a handbook for a dystopian future that is fast becoming our present. Make the most of it whilst you still have the capacity for independent thought.

For some reason we may never know, Matador's PR omitted to send us Kim's latest album back in March, despite our gushing in Outsideleft over every single taken off it, but we scraped together our pennies and bought it anyway, because its so damn good. There are acts that tread the nostalgia circuit playing karaoke versions of their greatest hits (you know who I mean), there are bands who never stopped, and continue to put out new material but never quite reach the creative heights of their debut albums, and then there is Kim Gordon, who could easily have rested on her laurels and been touring round a version of Sonic Youth ('Kim Gordon's Sonic Youth' or some such nonsense) but hasn't. Instead, she is making her best music yet. Unapologetically challenging and experimental, 'The Collective' is an outstanding album.  If you know Sonic Youth, you may already have this.  If you know Kim Gordon, you WILL already have this.  If you don't know either, where have you been?  Get with the plot and seek this out.