Skip to content

pop music

The Coffinshakers – Graves, Release Your Dead (2023)

The Coffinshakers keep reaching me by surprising ways. Halfway the 1990’ies I found a flyer of their “Vampiric country music undead” among more usual metal (and related) flyers. Country music in the dark metal scene. Odd, yet amusing.

Many years later I was working through the psychobilly (and “gothabilly”) scene and I learned that The Coffinshakers were still undead and kicking. It seemed that the band did play live, but not outside Scandinavia, so I started to suggest them for the Wave Gotik Treffen every year, especially when that festival started to incorporate psychobilly, The Coffinshakers would fit wonderfully. No succes so far.

Then earlier this year The Coffinshakers were announced to play at the Helldorado festival in my home town! I immediately bought tickets. Helldorado is the follow up of Speedfest. Speedfest towards the end was no longer a strictly speedrock/psychobilly festival as other kinds of rock and metal started to be booked as well. Helldorado was last weekend. There was a stage with mainly metal, a stage with different kinds of rock and a small stage for a variety of bands, including a psychobilly band and… The Coffinshakers.

The band gave a wonderful show. Rob Coffinshaker mentioned that there was a new album after 16 years of silence. Fortunately they played many up-tempo old songs, some dating back almost three decades.

The new album is (on the Coffinshakers scale) down- to midtempo, fairly melancholic, at times very accessible, but still with the Vampire-theme lyrics. An odd mix with songs that would fit well on Americana-type radio shows, yet with lyrics that require a certain kind of humor. The album is nice. The band has good musicians and Rob still has his Johnny Cash-type voice. So when you are looking for something out of the ordinary, The Coffinshakers still are.

Links: The Coffinshakers, Svart Records

Unhuman + Petra Flurr – Mala Vida (2023)

Petra Flurr is an interesting artist, but by the time I discovered the wonderful albums “Puffmutter” (2009) and “Download Selbstmord” (2012) they were ‘too old to review’. Obviously I do not follow him close enough, as there have been several releases since.

Flurr usually works with other artists. Modernista, 89st or Unhuman. “Mala Vida” is not the first cooperation with Unhuman. The sound of Petra Flurr holds the middle between old school EBM and electropunk. Discogs describes him as: “Italian/German queer punk electro EBM singer and performer” which I suppose fits the bill. Unhuman is originally a Greek who also moved to Berlin.

Flurr’s voice reminds of old school EBM’ers and also the sound leans towards things such as DAF every now and then. Some tracks have a typical ‘disco speed’ which goes for the whole of “Mala Vida”. On other releases the speed can be a little higher.

“Mala Vida” is (in my opinion) not the best album of Flurr, but it is still good and easy listening and like with a project such as Infecticide or Parzival on the more cheerful end of my musical spectrum.

Links: Unhuman, Petra Flurr, Bite

A Place To Bury Strangers – See Through You (2022)

  • shoegaze

I have said it in my latest reviews, every new album APTBS seems to get softer. I thought there had again be line-up changes, so I was curious what the latest attempt would sound like.

“See Through You” opens with a bit of an ‘old style’ track. Nice, not too loud, steady rhythm and screeching guitars. The next track sounds less interesting to me. After this the tempo seems to rise a bit, but in “Let’s See Each Other” this is mostly the suggestion that this may happen. Fortunately, with “So Low” we are finally off with the more energetic side of APTBS. Nothing too extreme yet, but a nice rhythm and a typically structured song for the band.

What follows are mostly fairly up-tempo tracks with steady rhythms, screeching guitars, but not as loud as the band used to be. Sometimes a bit more ‘surf’, sometimes more ‘shoegaze’ and sometimes more APTBS.

I still prefer the older albums of the band, but “See Through You” is a fairly good album in general.

Link: A Place To Bury Strangers

A Place To Bury Strangers – Hologram (2021)

I discovered this Brooklyn band when their 2012 album “Worship” was released. ‘Shoegaze overload’. The music was noisy, chaotic, at times energetic and great. I listened to their back catalogue and APTBS became one of my favourite ‘pop’ bands (perhaps even the).

As with (1980’ies) shoegaze, the music has a ‘wavey’ touch, drumcomputers, feedback, screeching guitars. There are loud and softer tracks. I prefer the wilder tracks, but most of the softer tracks are great too.

With more recent albums the softer tracks appeared to have gotten the upper hand. The wild tracks are still great, the other tracks became less of my interest. So I made a playlist with tracks that I want to listen to more often and I play that list more often than I do the albums. With every new album, there were fewer tracks that I put in the playlist.

Then the opening track of “Hologram”, called “End Of The Night” was made available and again it is a fairly soft track. Nice though. A bit ‘surf noise’ of The Vandelles type. When the mini album came out, the second track “I Might Have” positively surprised me. Lots of feedback, lots of noise and some energy. But it again is the only track that went to my APTBS playlist. Not that the other tracks are bad, but they are simply not in the APTBS style that I prefer.

2021 Dedstrange

Radar Men From The Moon – The Bestial Light (2020)

It is strange how things go sometimes. Last week Facebook notified me that Aufnahme + Wiedergabe (from Berlin) has an event in my hometown in October. There are never concerts of interest in my hometown, so I clicked to see which bands (Spit Mask and Gnaw Their Tongues, the first has released material through A+W, the latter is a Dutch noisy doom metal band). Then I noticed that another organiser from the concert is a name new to me: Metakamer, “a independent clothing brand based in Eindhoven” (sic). Well, well.

On the Facebook page of Metakamer a radio show was announced which opened with… Haus Arafna. This took place on an Eindhoven radio-station I had never heard of: Rararadio. There prove to be some (locally) famous musicians active there. Then there is also a link between Metakamer and a local band that I already knew, but not too well: Radar Men From The Moon.

RMFTM is an experimental rock band. They tend to change styles with every album and frequently also change members. They very recently released an album (May 8th). A good reason to listen what is what.

“The Bestial Light” contains noisy rock. Sometimes the sound is slightly stoner, sometimes the psychedelic rock background shines through, but most tracks are more like Swans (their noisy style), Zeni Geva or Pop. 1280. The band itself seems to call their style “acid metal” and “strange wave”.

Not bad at all!

Links: Radar Man From The Moon, Fuzz Club

A Place To Bury Strangers – Rare Meat (2017 / 2020)

Earlier this week somebody posted a live photo of APTBS on an industrial forum and I replied saying that they are my favourite popband, which was not received well. I found APTBS when I was looking for more uptempo “shoegaze” many years ago and I still see the band that way.

In basis the style of the band is shoegaze, so wave-type rhythms, screeching guitars and soft vocals. The band has two sides. On one end of their spectrum they make soft songs that are well described as “shoegaze”. On the other end they go way off track with extremely noisy rock with massive feedback walls of guitar noise. Unfortunately, the latter style seems to become thinner as new releases are put out.

Somehow I missed the tape from 2017 on which “demos and rarities 2003 – 2017” were released. Due to everybody having to stay at home because of the Corona virus, the band decided to release the “Rare Meat” through their Bandcamp page. A great idea!

“Rare Meat” opens with two magnificently noisy tracks, “I Walk Away” and “Hit The Ground”. Then follows a less interesting soft song, but we are soon back to guitar noise again.

Some tracks are earlier version of songs that appeared on albums. Most tracks were new to me. There are great energetic tracks, but I do not like most of the softer songs here (sometimes they are better), but over all “Rare Meat” is an excellent album that brings back the old days of this great band from Brooklyn.

Link: A Place To Bury Strangers

Kompikations – No Good News (2019)

It has been a while since I heard a track of this Belgian electropunk outfit on X-Wave Radio. By then they had a few releases out that were old sold out. A little later I discovered that these releases are available from Bandcamp.

The trio makes excellent punk. A vocalist, live drummer (who sounds like a drumming machine, which is quite a feat) and a guy on keys. The music is very much punk, but (as expected) ‘half electronic’. Perhaps they are the ‘most electropunk’ band that I know.

In spring 2018 I got to see them live in a total punk bunker in Aachen, Germany, an extraordinary lively show.

On 1 February Komplikations released their latest 12″ on the same label as their previous releases: Rockstar Records. The preview track “Radio” was less energetic than previous releases. The other tracks prove to be even more so. There is even some sort of ballad.

The music still sounds like Komplikations with the typical vocals, drumwork and synths, but the punk-sound, even the punk-feeling, wore off. There still are the political / social lyrics (a punk band has to have a message, eh?), but I sorely miss the energy of the previous albums.

Links: Komplikations, Rockstar Records

A Place To Bury Strangers – Pinned (2018)

Even though the band still has the line “total sonic annihilation” on their website, “Pinned” is again softer than its predecessor “Transfixion” of 2015.

As before, some tracks of the new album have been made available earlier as singles. These tracks already gave the idea that the band again took a step away from “total sonic annihilation”. The same was true in 2015, but “Transfixion” still contains some descent mayhem. Not so on “Pinned”…

The album opens with the downtempo track “Never Coming Back” that was one of the singles. It is a good song with a nice noisy middle piece. Also “Execution” reminds of older days, a minimalistic song with noisy out-of-tone guitars, but again, on an earlier album this would have been one of the soft songs. Then follows a very soft song with the “wavey” sound that the band has played with before.
The album develops towards slightly noisy tracks that are somewhat “poppy”. Most tracks are nice, but as I previously preferred older material over “Transfixion”, I think I will play “Pinned” even less.

And then comes something weird. The album lasts for only about 35 minutes (12 tracks). This is the album that is available on ‘normal’ cd. There is also a “Brainwash Machine” version which has an extra cd with 8 extra tracks and a running time of about half an hour. These two would have easily fitted on one cd to make an album with a proper length. This double cd version can only be bought as part of a box set which has thrice the price of the cd. The extra tracks are available on digital music sources though…

This cd opens with a drilling machine and guitar noise and the tracks here are more wickedly experimental and noisy. I suppose this cd is the side of the band that is (now) regarded as ‘less suitable for the general public’. It is not that here we only get the “total sonic annihilation” that we were waiting for, but there are some new style-experiments with little coherence, possibly songs that were recorded, but which the label did not find fitting for the album itself. Looking over this cd, in general the tracks are not better than on the album itself, but the more interesting material is to be found here.

A thing that I noted -by the way- is the prominent place of female vocals. Is Lia Braswell a new member or was she pushed ‘forward’ more? In any case, according to Discogs the band has had some line-up changes with four members no longer present. I have no idea if these changes are recent and perhaps explain to more ‘accessible’ (relatively speaking of course) style, but just something I noticed.

So to wrap things up. “Pinned” makes a nice album. Be sure to get the double cd when you liked the band before. Again the band seems to be drifting away from my musical preferences, so my guess is that when I feel like listening to “total sonic annihilation” I will keep going back to older albums.

Links: A Place To Bury Strangers, Dead Oceans

Sqürl – EP #260 (mcd 2017)

I got to know Sqürl because the American director Jim Jarmusch plays in it and Sqürl played a big part of his film “Only Lovers Left Alive” that I badly need to see again.

Sqürl makes very slow, (mostly) minimalistic, instrumental drone / stoner / psychedelic rock music that fits “Only Lover Left Alive” perfectly. The band produced a couple of EPs: “#1”, “#2”, “#3” and now “#260”. There are two full-lengths. One is the soundtrack of the said film, the other a live recording. The ‘ambient rock music’ works well as background music, it is moody and somewhat dark. “#260” Does not contain my favorite Sqürl music, but it certainly is a nice album to listen to.

Sqürl moved to the varied and interesting label that houses artists and bands such as Zola Jesus, Moon Duo, Blank Mass, David Lynch, Lust For Youth, Pharmakon and Factums.

Links: Sqürl, Sacred Bones

Soviet Soviet * Endless (cd 2016)

  • wave

I thought I knew this band because I listened to them when I noticed them on the schedule of the 2016 Wave Gotik Treffen. I do not remember seeing them though and I cannot find confirmation that they played either. Maybe another festival?

Soviet Soviet neither is the old wave-band I thought it was. Their debut is from 2009 and “Endless” is the third full-length. Like on other albums that I heard, the band makes a nice piece of 1980’ies type wave music with high-pitched guitars and also quite distinct high-pitched vocals. The music is a bit too ‘wavey’ to be shoegaze, but the term “post punk” is often used to describe them.

“Endless” is (to my ears) not a masterpiece, but a descent album in a ‘vintage style’ that I do enjoy to listen to every now and then.

Links: Soviet Soviet, Felte