Powerful, potent songs yield a brutal post-punk sound. Just imagine WARSAW meet WIRE meet the FALL and you will already have a good idea of their musical universe.
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Following 2022’s ‘Rough Dimension’ LP, Noel Skum – aka Andrew Clinco of Drab Majesty – made the radical leap of expanding his psychedelic post-punk vehicle VR SEX into a fully collaborative five-piece band. To christen the new group’s camaraderie, they booked a block of studio time in Glassell Park, swapped skeletal iPhone demos, and “did that classic thing of a band making the exact record they want without any interference.” Working 12-hour days, they banged out the basics in a week, then tracked the rest over a month, fine-tuning it with flourishes, FX, and amplifier experiments. Hard Copy is the result – 10 tracks of sneering psychedelic punk streaked with Chrome-damaged freak-outs and snotty power pop harmonies chronicling sex doll love affairs and glue-sniffing fatales. Mixed by guitarist Mike Kriebel – an accomplished engineer with dozens of credits across the punk, goth, and garage underground – the album is dense, rich, and spatial, spurred by Clinco’s muse of “reckless abandon.” Shadows of Chrome, Stickmen With Rayguns, Japanese psych, and loud- quiet-loud grunge anthems flicker here and there, but ultimately VR SEX’s mode is more sardonic and saturated, oscillating between ripped leather riffing and space echo meltdowns. Banning plug-ins was a mission statement, with most instruments tracked direct into the board, then guitars added via a daisy chain of amplifiers, panned and mixed and matched for maximum intoxication: “My goal is always to load up every take with as much sound as possible in one pass.” Lyrically, the record revisits the project’s perennial fascinations: twisted lust, cheap thrills, dirty money, doomed delinquents, and ruined romance amid the creeps and cracked dreamers of gritty city voids. The title refers to the uncanny valley between “facsimile and the real thing, and the illusion that one is better than the other – when both come with their own menu of delights and demonic pleasures.” Hard Copy embraces extremes and outliers, delusion and perversion, the conflicted dimensional depths lurking in every exploded heart: “I can be ugly / I can be strong / I can be proper / I can be wrong / I can be lovely / or I can be gone / the thing that will haunt you is still hanging on.”
The Dancing Plague of 1518 is the electronic influenced darkwave/post-punk project of Conor Knowles, located in Spokane, Washington (USA).
Born in 1998 in a small town in Savoie, Yorismäki is a new French electronic music producer. His stage name comes from the fusion of his first name Joris and the name of the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. It was while working as a sound engineer, driven by a passion for sound processing and synthesis, that he truly discovered his urge to create electronic music. His music is influenced primarily by New Wave, but especially by the resulting industrial sounds, as well as more modern electronic elements, all within a dark universe. The result can be both, a brutal and visceral music, as well as atmospheric. For his first album, the inspiration comes as much from music as from the visual : The movie, with the disturbing and surreal universe of David Lynch, with a always dark look on humanity, or the cynicism, the beautiful shades of colors and lights and simplicity of Aki Kaurismäki’s movies. The present, where we seem to be plunging day after day into an increasingly dystopian world, where humanity, more connected than ever, yet seems to disconnect from reality, the individual curling up on themselves, losing control of their life, letting themselves be guided by algorithms, thus sinking into complete vacuity. |
