Industrial / Noise

Review: Angry, abrasive and thoroughly menacing, but in a 'still would drop in a club' kinda way, Futuro De Hierro prove there will always be a place in Spanish electronic music culture for industrial-leaning EBM chaos that forgot how to take prisoners long before any prisoners were up for the taking. Heavy, heavy music that's not for the faint-hearted, if the movie Blade had been real and there actually was a vampire club this is likely to be something along the lines of what would be played. Don't be scared, though, it's definitely worth braving the harsh edges at work here. 'Las Fuerzas Grises' is a broken beat joy that could pound any dancefloor into submission, whispered and barely-audible spoken word vocals adding to the feeling of future punk. 'Costumbres Y Medidas' is industrial techno along the foreboding dread-filled drone lines, 'Construir' sounds like 'Machine Gun' by Portishead finally found its warzone.

Review: Prepare to be challenged, rewarded, amazed, mystified and generally won over. New Zealand musical Goliath of the hallucinogenic experimental rock variety, Alastair Galbraith can sound like the Patti Smith tripping on peyote album recorded with the Soundwalk Collective last year, the Velvet Underground's attempts to write music in the vein of heroin cold turkey, Beta Band in full hypnosis mode or strikingly pared back classic country folk. And he deftly shifts between these styles with seamless and seemingly effortless ease. Poetic, DIY, and steeped in an improvised tradition, guitars help tell journeyman tales, violins recount mournful stories, and distorted, obtuse sections provide a sense of not only rules going out the window, but rules never existing to begin with in the mind of the album's creator. Tightly coiled at times, loose and open in other moments, it's difficult to categorise and even harder to forget.

Review: Norweigan dark lord Mortiis, formerly of black metal icons Emperor, released the seminal dark ambient album 'Keiser Av En Dimensjon Ukjent' on Roger Karmanik's Cold Meat Industry imprint 25 years ago. It receives a much welcomed reissue here on Italian label Ordo MCM. The album delved deeper into Havard Ellefsen's passion for creating dark and epic soundscapes, inspired by the unlikely combination of black metal, the glam rock of Kiss or Wasp.. and J.R.R. Tolkien! Largely recorded on a Roland JV-30 synth will no sequencing or with any knowledge of notation or sheet music, it is still nonetheless a milestone release for the genre which has not aged a bit. Limited to 500 copies, so don't sleep on this one.

Review: Having cut his teeth with some devilishly deviant drops on Primitive Languages, Lost Soul Enterprises and others, New York's R Gamble returns with a stunning mini-album for Public System that brings his canny twist on minimal wave and EBM to wax for the first time in years. As well as being a dab hand at programming his boxes to impart his ghoulish bangers, what sets Gamble apart is his sense of composition, making proper ear-snagging songs with structures and narrative. Marrying that accomplished approach with the clamour of his production style, and you've got yourself a slice of '80s inspired creepiness that's a cut above the rest.