Alex Spalding - Amos In Flames // NMMREM IV

Narrow-minded Metalhead reviews experimental music - IV
[Siro177] Alex Spalding - Amos In Flames

A few months ago I noted quite a lot of cheers and satisfied listeners of Alex Spalding's effort Amos in Flames, which is why I decided to give it a real chance. Alex Spalding is the owner of the label Noise-Joy and has been actively releasing albums and committing to the underground music scene since 2006.

First impression, the refreshing cover art, gives Amos In Flames a headstart. Amos in flames equips my favourite kind of underground cover style, a blurry image. To make things better, the image is stylishly topped with cool oldschool font and lines.

It is only natural that also the music impresses instantly. Amos in Flames is quite a varied album and gets an ambient and promising start in Golden Ships, followed by oddly shortly ending, but extremely pretty, Funeral Flowers which leaves you hungring for more. Turns out this track seems to shape out much of the album in an unfortunate way. Many tracks, for example Succor and In Essence seem to either end too soon or sound like sketches in need of a few more layers. And amongst them there are a few jewels which sound a lot more ready than the rest.

My clear personal favourite is the 4th track, Glimmer. It is packed with an hypnotic beat and excellent varying ambience making its 6 minute length feel like 3 minutes. It would be a perfect track for a demo (demoscene, "non-interactive multimedia presentation made within the computer").

After the wonderful first 4 tracks Bluelids / Breaking Apart isnt a worthy successor and Succor, while having interesting variety and a beautiful background melody sounds like an unfinished track. It could become a fine one if worked on though.

Disappointing and and in essence are made of similar fruity loops -reminding sound and not much happening under an okayish background. Where did all that glimmer go so soon? Amongst the way to the end, Crushing Spirit brings more bread to the table with a danceable rhythm, making the biggest peak in the "just ok" mid-album 25 minutes.

Just when you think the record has said everything, the 13th track Nazca flows into psychedelic oddbeat. The track starts off with dreamlike enticing ambience and turns on a wicked and odd beat, giving you some examples what Alex Spalding can do when he is on his game. Unfortunately unlike Glimmer the beat doesn't hold its ground and lingers along a bit too much (probably cause its odd and when you've listened to for a while it stops being odd and loses catchiness), making this track good instead of great.

Following its name the 15th and last track 5th Cup - Divinorum has an extremely druggy feel. Starting a buildup it sets out its ground ready to explode... But instead keeps tripping up and down on acid and turning up new melodies and oddness. As a sistertrack to Nazca it closes up the album in a memorable manner. 

All in all Amos in flames is an interesting piece of work and if you can find your way through all sketch-like tracks it delivers some fine nighttime music. With more self-criticism, it could have been an excellent ep. Had Alex Spalding read my mind and only released the 7 clearly better songs Amos In Flames would surely be a contender for my top 10 albums of 2011.

Overall score: 7½/10

Download the release: http://www.archive.org/details/siro177AlexSpalding-AmosInFlames


Overall ranking so far (Hell, do I actually like anything else than nighttime music?)

1. Master Toad & Pollux - Offer Their Souls
2. Golden Cloud & O.S.I.S. - Split
3. Alex Spalding - Amos In Flames
4. V3Rb tH3 N0un - Th3 dUbsT3p d3m0


Narrow-minded Metalhead reviews experimental music, why?

Being an avid underground rock/metal listener and huge fan in finding new music and genres I stumbled to TRASHFUCK Records, RedSK and their noise in 2009. A lot of their releases at best make me bored, scared and entertained at the same time. This impressesed me to try out more of the weblabel scene and introduced me to Sirona Records' Arnaud. I decided to start reviewing electronic music records after I realized Im really not sure what is going on in half of Sironas' releases.

Im trying to give my humble opinions on some new music, whose genres, I may or may not have any familarity, but sure thing is they are far from my normal music grounds. I have a feeling, if by chance I happen to stumble to albums with genre titles like "rave" "deathcore" or "techno", I might have a hard time saying a single positive thing, but nevermind that. You can always bypass it by the fact that im just narrow-minded metalhead reviewing experimental music.

Electronic artists which I can say im a fan of are few, but some. Including Venetian Snares, Scorn, Nothing, Boris Clitoris / The Amoeba, Master Toad, Godflesh, Slagsmålsklubben. P.S. I know its hip to hate dubstep nowadays, but some dubstep can be mindblowing.

V3Rb tH3 N0un - Th3 dUbsT3p d3m0 // NMMREM III

Narrow-minded Metalhead reviews experimental music - III
[Siro187] V3Rb tH3 N0un - Th3 dUbsT3p d3m0

My First Wub Wub Re cord/view

I've never dag deeper on dubstep except a few uninteresting tracks, Scorn's majestic Stealth -album and occasional Skrillex track (from which Scatta is the only one that i've listened outside of beer-infused-moments).

However lately, from a reliable source, I came to realize there indeed are a few categories!

Take a look: http://www.explosm.net/db/files/Comics/Rob/intervention.png

The actual review record The Dubstep demo falls heavily to the wub wub category. And that is just fine as it is where Scorn belongs too. First thing that cames to my mind after encountering the record is why sane people still use numbers in their titles? It does not look cool for people 15+, in fact, vice versa. Secondly, the cover photo is pretty damn cool. A bit 2000s (probably cause of the paint shop pro reminding text) but cool, glitchy. Love it.

The beginning of the first, rather randomly named track, dooF esenihC, gives an image that the music is produced better than it actually is. Anyway promising beginning, but after a while it becomes obvious this basic beat isn't going to hold for a long time. The drop lacks the unexpectedness and doesn't fill the soundvoid like a supreme drop is supposed to. Varying background noises don't make it significantly better (even though they are much more interesting than the drop itself), nor do the dapdapdap dabadada breaks. Thank god the track progresses into a nintendo-like intermission at 3 minute mark because the constant repetition makes it drag badly. Much more interesting. Then we "progress" back to the oh-so-boring wubwub drop. Allright, brains off.

My brains turn back on itself as the second track type03, inflates me with some Scorn-like darkstep sounds. So much better! Atmospheric. Unfortunately the track takes a hippier aspect with the 1 minute break. Then on comes the next break, furthering the downward spiral into another less interesting part. The package ends like it started, only now it sounds uninteresting and off-place. The structure of the song is in need of serious finetuning.

Third track is finally something fresh! Hungryshima is CHAOTIC with lots of breakcore edge and filled with cool noises and distinctive melodies! First part ends to a rather sick random break. This drop has so much more than the previous. OUCH THE TREBLE! Not dubstep for the masses thats for sure but for a noisehead this is pretty amazing. The end is absolutely sick too. Maybe a bit more volume-balancing should have been done with the obscure sounds? When listening this with headphones it is generally advised to turn the sound down so the trebles won't bust your eardrums.

On the next track, dubstep with a mario clip, the perverse chaotism of Hungryshima is long gone. This track takes a a basic wub-wub approach, sounding unfinished. Same goes for the last track, which has nothing more than an interesting title. It is just screaming for some proper south london grime vocals. At least it made me google the genre grime to see what the hell it is.

All in all, the release has a feel of being "my-first-dubstep-record" as it delivers a very random package and odd unfinished tracks. Thus the name "Dubstep demo" suits it well and you can't really expect the quality of a normal ep from a demo.

I have no will to put most of the tracks on my playlist but the throughoutly entertaining Hungryshima is for sure going to visit it regularly. If I have to pick a throughoutly mediocre release or mostly uninteresting release with one great track, I'll pick the latter any time.

Overall score: 5+/10

Download the release: http://www.archive.org/details/siro187V3rbTh3N0un-Th3Dubst3pD3m0


Overall ranking so far (I listen to enough dubstep to have MORE than 2 sub-categories!)

1. Master Toad & Pollux - Offer Their Souls
2. Golden Cloud & O.S.I.S. - Split
3. V3Rb tH3 N0un - Th3 dUbsT3p d3m0


Narrow-minded Metalhead reviews experimental music, why?

Being an avid underground rock/metal listener and huge fan in finding new music and genres I stumbled to TRASHFUCK Records, RedSK and their noise in 2009. A lot of their releases at best make me bored, scared and entertained at the same time. This impressesed me to try out more of the weblabel scene and introduced me to Sirona Records' Arnaud. I decided to start reviewing electronic music records after I realized Im really not sure what is going on in half of Sironas' releases.

Im trying to give my humble opinions on some new music, whose genres, I may or may not have any familarity, but sure thing is they are far from my normal music grounds. I have a feeling, if by chance I happen to stumble to albums with genre titles like "rave" "deathcore" or "techno", I might have a hard time saying a single positive thing, but nevermind that. You can always bypass it by the fact that im just narrow-minded metalhead reviewing experimental music.

Electronic artists which I can say im a fan of are few, but some. Including Venetian Snares, Scorn, Nothing, Boris Clitoris / The Amoeba, Master Toad, Godflesh, Slagsmålsklubben. P.S. I know its hip to hate dubstep nowadays, but some dubstep can be mindblowing.