Coded Marking—Coded Marking

This self-titled EP from Leeds three-piece Coded Marking marries beat sequencing with brash bass to evoke the forgotten misery and terror of the 1980s. The decade had seen temporary whitewashing in younger people’s heads, and been painted as an endless John Hughes/Señor Spielbergo schmaltz-fest. The resurgent popularity of post-punk, though, has helped resurrect awareness of the period’s financial desperation and nuclear paranoia. This isn’t to imply that contemporary post-punk acts are a nostalgia trip. Their existence more likely symptomizes the 80s’ cultural anxieties rearing back up like a fucking hydra, as the craggy ghost of Thatcher cackles from the sky.

In this sense Coded Marking vanish amidst a sea of their own peers. There’s a lot of people around who are worried about the same stuff, it seems. Where the band distinguish themselves, however, is in their fairly unique and sickly sonic palette. Instrumentals are rich, full and bass-laden. Everything sounds muggy and indistinct, as though the master was found in some plane wreckage or one day bubbled up out of a swamp. When instruments poke their heads above this miasma, they buzz and clip (see: the guitar which plucks its way through closing track “The White Cord”).

Vocals, too, are treated almost to the point of inhumanity. Words become hoarse exhalations who find most of their meaning through the expressiveness of their delivery. Beneath the post-processing is a voice similar to Jason whassaname from Sleaford Mods—and I’m not saying that because I’m a Southern willy who thinks Leeds and Nottingham are the same place. There’s a gravelly and overexerted timbre to vocals—halfway between apathy and pure rage—and a relaxed attitude towards staying “in time” (whatever the fuck that means).

These tracks are unassuming but still make themselves known. They basically function as a collection of dark jams who lock into grooves most sane people would be happy to listen to for ages and ages. There’s no doubt this band would be a great experience live, but until you can go see them, this EP is the next best thing.

Coded Marking is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Mint Field—Sentimiento Mundial

The cover of Mint Field’s Sentimiento Mundial is unassuming; a camouflage of desaturated pastels mustering semi-coherent suggestions of shape. But the longer you look, the more it reveals a plumage of vibrancy and fine detail, a Klimt-like depiction of fog-swathed blossoms. The album itself works similarly, gathering like mist until it utterly engrosses you.

Sentimiento Mundial feels modest, ascribing a greater value to listeners’ experiences than displays of virtuosity. Vocalist Estrella del Sol performs stunningly in every song, but barely raises her voice above a whisper (channelling of the tender power of legendary vocalist Jarboe). Callum Brown’s drumming is tight as a whip and invisibly energetic; a heartbeat which has been assimilated into the other assorted gurglings of the body, but without which the album’s vitality would be lost. Sentimiento Mundial as a whole gestures towards krautrock—in groovy repetition, but also in understated, seemingly effortless precision. It’s the introvert’s version of the guitar solo; a performance in which not a foot is put wrong from start to finish.

Precision isn’t everything, though—and krautrock is a limiting comparison. Sentimiento Mundial is freakier and more lysergic than most music from that scene. If Mint Field have exhumed the bones of neu!, rather than slavishly piece their skeleton back together, they’ve made a pagan effigy and slathered it in flying ointment. The entire album is peppered with unassumingly bizarre touches. Opener ‘Cuida Tus Pasos’ has a shade of Jandek’s “first acoustic phase”; pitting its vocal and guitar melodies against each other for a tone of isolation, miasma and malaise. This easy dissonance can be heard throughout, and later cleaves ‘No Te Caigas’ into discrete halves. ‘Nuestro Sentido’ feels—impossibly—like an MTV Unplugged version of My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything.

Not only do Mint Field pull these excursions and experiments off, they preserve beauty and coherence through them. A great vocabulary serves both scientists and poets alike. The tools don’t dictate the job. Some musical experiments are like sitting through a linguistics lecture; Sentimiento Mundial is like reading Emily Dickinson.

Sentimiento Mundial is available for purchase and streaming here. Releasing 25th September.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Abronia—The Whole of Each Eye

Roger Ebert once described the setting of Westerns as a landscape “where the land is so empty, it creates a vacuum demanding men to become legends”. It’s no surprise, then, that the machismo of rock music so often finds itself there. Carlos Santana is the most well-known desert rocker, but its practitioners are too numerous to list. Something about the open spaces, the resonant canyons of the American frontier, invite a sound loud enough to fill them.

These things are always a balancing act—what may sound legendary to its performers can play as ludicrous to a crowd. But with The Whole of Each Eye, Abronia prove themselves to be up to the task. They achieve, but do not insist upon their own vastness. The band also incorporate a huge number ideas from unlikely sources, avoiding the anonymity of all those other grains of sand out there.

More so than Santana, Abronia resemble Malinese Tuareg band Tinariwen. Songs are driven by similarly hypnotic guitar-work and plodding beats that feel like they’re accompanying a caravan of travellers. Occasionally the pace increases for a Krautrock-inflected sojourn—such as on opener ‘Wound Site’—and the result is an apocalyptic treat; the climate-change-era Can. The sparsity of these moments, these oases of stormy weather in an arid world, underlines and emboldens them.

This confluence of styles paints Abronia’s desert as the desert of our future: a culturally amorphous landscape defined by long-forgotten traditions, the artefacts of which can be exhumed from the sand and assembled in new and exciting ways.

The Whole of Each Eye is available to purchase and stream here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Toy — Happy in the Hollow

Toy, The Horrors’ gloomier younger brother, have been guilty of not living up to the promises that their self-titled debut deafeningly announced back in September 2012. Since then, 2013’s Join The Dots and 2016’s Clear Shot felt too easy, resting in-between mechanical krautrock rhythms and swirling shoegaze. Although very ‘in vogue’ over the last seven years, Toy never struck the balance between great songwriting and spectacular walls of sound that their first full-length managed.

However, Happy in the Hollow feels like a watershed moment for the Brighton band. Having split with Heavenly Records in 2018, signing with Tough Love and then releasing their first self-produced record, Happy in the Hollow was always going to be a make-or-break album.

The first track, ‘Sequence One’ instantly feels more direct than anything on their last two releases, maintaining the fingerprints of their well-documented influences, but with a greater emphasis on melody and a much more confident and convincing vocal performance from Tom Dougall. This song is emblematic of the album generally, as melody seems to have been the key driving force behind much of the songwriting on Happy in the Hollow. This is refreshing to hear, and gives the band a vitality that hasn’t been present since 2012.

There are still moments where Tom’s thin and ghostly vocals can’t quite go toe to toe with the rest of the band’s instrumentation, such as on the track ‘Energy’, where the rattling pummel of Charlie Salvidge’s drumming and the angular post-punk stylings of the guitar line make the vocal performance seem rather limp. On the song ‘Strangulation Day’, the sustained synth notes allow the vocals to take center stage, but they are just not quite strong enough to carry the song. Mercifully, this is one of the shorter tracks on the album.

However, this record is definitely a step in the right direction for the band. The focus on melody has bolstered both the jangle-pop sensibility of tracks like ‘Mechanism’ and ‘You Make Me Forget Myself’, as well as the extended soundscapes in ‘Jolt Awake’ and ‘The Willo’. The latter track reveals a new side of the band’s sound, taking influences from sixties and seventies folk rock bands that give the album much more focus, reigning in the slightly more indulgent psychedelic freak-outs that they were guilty of on previous efforts. 

Happy in the Hollow is ultimately the documentation of a band finding a more unique and definitive sound that relies slightly less on wearing their influences on their proverbial sleeve. Stepping into uncharted territory, both personally and musically, has reignited that spark that many saw when the band first erupted onto the scene. Is it flawed? Yes, but Happy in the Hollow has a claim to being the band’s most coherent and engaging release to date, proving we’re not quite finished playing with this particular toy just yet.

Curious newcomers should seek out Toy’s self-titled album TOY, their single ‘Left Myself Behind’, and the ‘Make It Mine’ EP. Happy in the Hollow is available for streaming and purchase here.

Words by Jack Dice