Observer: E.T. & Nuxx

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E.T. - Full Anarchism
E.T.
Full Anarchism
self-released
ID3 tagging their latest work as Egalitarianism Today (much like early Foetus records the literal name always changes even if the brand doesn’t), Minneapolis synthpunk duo E.T.’s new LP is a direct and refreshingly irony-free statement of irritation and rage at the current state of things from, as the title not-so-subtly hints, an anarchist perspective. Putting out records since 2018’s fantastically titled Phone Homo‘s given them a sense of confidence and purpose both thematically and musically which pays off well, with their rough and tumble production style takes precedence over specific sub-genres and styles here. The scrapy programming and muffled bass of “Bow Down” feel in-line with “Larva Leaks”‘ over-caffeinated kicks, even though the former is structured far more like a modern TBM banger than the latter’s more classic approach to jumped-up synthpunk. Most of the lyrics do a solid job of framing E.T.’s critique as a matter of personal feeling and larger historical truth, while “Someone Else” interrogates the ways in which capitalism makes each of us small cogs in its larger death engine. Those themes are bracketed with a mix of samples left as voice-mail styled bumpers; in addition to the usual suspects like The Fly, Aliens, and Terminator 2, you’ve also got BLM activists, Reservation Dogs and the immortal Ursula K LeGuin popping in to drop bombs. Solid stuff from the liminal edge between all our dystopic todays and tomorrows.
Full Anarchism by Egalitarianism Today


Nuxx
Bird Brain EP
Synthicide
As noted in the bandcamp liners, NYC electronic artist Nuxx’s new EP for Synthicide Bird Brain is all about reinvention. Aside from shortening the project’s name from Nuxx Vomica, the five whipsmart tracks here are louder and more compact than they’ve ever been before, and find Nuxx stepping out from the layers of reverb and disaffection in her delivery to stand directly in the spotlight. Musically the songs find a bracingly uneasy middle ground between rapidfire half-shouted, half-rapped delivery, raw electro and chopped up rave synths and breaks with results both hypnotic and menacing. The atonal groove of “Break Me” screeches and squelches but is instantly tamed by Nuxx’s bitten-off “I don’t care/I like it” vocal chant, while opener “Bad” finds her riding a raunchy bassline into the ground, acting as her own hypeman, tossing off distorted ad libs while sirens wail around her. The songs are short and sharp by design, allowing for “Done”‘s litany of sick-of-this-shit complaints to land at high impact speeds even before the distorted screeches crash into the mix – just like the refrain on the title track lets you know, Nuxx isn’t fucking around.
Bird Brain EP by Nuxx

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We Have A Technical 557: Budgie’s Over-Under

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Gary Numan

We’re talking about records by electronic pioneers who need little introduction in Gary Numan and Uwe Schmidt’s Lassigue Bendthaus, but while the latter’s Matter is an undisputed, hugely influential masterpiece, Numan’s Berserker has a more mixed legacy, hinting at the rough sledding ahead. We’re also chatting loads of festival news (real and hypothetical) on this week’s episode. As always, you can rate and subscribe on iTunes, download directly, or listen through the widget down below.

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Ships In The Night, “Protection Spells”

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Ships In The Night
Protection Spells
Metropolis Records

There’s a sense of warmth to the music on Ships In The Night’s Metropolis debut Protection Spells, and a pleasing familiarity in its song-driven electropop and witchy darkwave. While Alethea Leventhal’s project has existed for a decade at this point, Protection Spells represents a level-up in the Virginia native’s material; the reverie and the hopeful melancholy of the preceding records and assorted singles is still here, but the actual songcraft and production feels tighter and more considered, bringing out the strength of the material and of Leventhal’s own performance as a vocalist.

The change is apparent from lead-off track and single “Blood Harmony”, with its helixes of synth arppegios and simple drum programming, leaving the spotlight Leventhal’s understated vocals. The retiring confidence in her voice grabs the ear, making the most of small changes in tone and mood, never showy, but also never shy or obscure; when she lifts her voice to a slightly higher register during the bridge to the final chorus, the whole song blossoms into a new form without a need for dramatics or vamping. It’s a record full of those kinds of subtle but impactful moves, such as the shifts in phrasing that usher in the chorus of “Inside”, or the choice to perform the lush “Wells of Pain” in a matter-of-fact delivery that still manages sweetness and succor. The trick is in making those canny choices sound natural, which Leventhal does with admirable skill, tasteful and playful in equal measure.

The other obvious change is in the nature of the songs themselves, which feel more solid that any point in the project’s history. Ships In The Night’s preceding releases often suffered from an excess of atmosphere, where despite having some nice melodies, the instrumentation was either too sparse or too wet with reverb to latch onto. Protection Spells keeps it simple and present, adding to the record’s appealing coziness. It does feel a bit strange to call a record this dependent on soft-edged pads and multi-tracked vocals, but the economy of the arrangements and especially the presence of the drums have a grounding effect; “Some of Those Dreams” pulses where it could have laid fallow, and sleeper highlight “No One is Coming” makes a total meal of its opening bassline and kick-snare rhythm track, squeezing every ounce of life out of it before switching to a double time shuffle that brings the song home.

Protection Spells‘ strength is apparent even in one of its few missteps: the wholly unnecessary cover of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” isn’t unpleasant by any means, but feels like the move of a less confident, less complete artist and ends up highlighting how instantly familiar Ships In The Night’s own material is. It’s an imminently listenable record with a broad pop appeal, brimming with a likeable and unshowy charisma.

Buy it.

Protection Spells by Ships In The Night

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Lana Del Rabies, “Le Temps Viendra”

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Lana Del Rabies - Le Temps Viendra

Lana Del Rabies
Le Temps Viendra
self-released

An inscription in Anne Boleyn’s prayer book, and the figure of Boleyn herself, might sound like material suited for a meditative folk or neo-classical concept record rather than a blast of pure death industrial. But then again, Lana Del Rabies has never been a pro forma noise project. Building out from a pair of tracks released in the aftermath of 2023’s incredible Strega Beata, the Les Temps Viendra EP continues Sam An’s impressive exploration of gothic atmospheres and weighty themes of mortality which often reaches beyond the limits of familiar forms of noise.

Like the best LDR work, all five tracks here find equanimity between the sludging percussion and feedback which makes up the bulk of the instrumentation and Am’s vocals, with both halves of the equation expanding beyond the de facto extremity one might expect. “Anne Boleyn” begins things with a tremoring hesitancy, introducing the ambiguity of the queen consort as both innocent martyr and ambitious courtier. “Queen Of The Black Muses” swaddles a Swans-like machine beat in warm feedback and An’s circling vocals, praying to the deep for ascent. The wary but comparatively laidback “Incubus + Succubus” is as close as Am’s ever come to ’90s alt rock-cum-industrial territory, and acts as a breather before the slow sweep of “Tender Creatures”, which slowly builds from windswept drones to draw in churning dirges which sound as though they owe as much to the hurdy-gurdy as power electronics (not for the first time, the similarly historically minded noise of Menace Ruine seems one of the few accurate points of reference for LDR’s work). The titular closer finds Am seemingly occupying the roles of inquisitor and repentant confessor at once, with a shift from furnace blasts of noise to warm pads mirroring the resignation of one at peace with their own mortality, regardless of when the axe falls.

The phrase scrawled by Boleyn in her prayer book which gives Les Temps Viendra its name has fascinated historians, and certainly from a modern perspective can be read as either foreshadowing her sudden fall from favour and trumped-up trial and execution, or the larger historical judgment of her husband and killer, or both. That sort of morbid triple entendre is the sort of tesseract Lana Del Rabies thrives within, modulating between levels of resonance both sonic and emotional. Recommended.

Buy it.

Le Temps Viendra by Lana Del Rabies

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Tracks: May 5th, 2025

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It’s Verboden Fest this weekend here in Vancouver, folks! As always we’re excited about seeing some festival fam we rarely get to hang out with on our home turf, see some familiar favourite acts, and to check out a few completely new to us acts, the latter of which are numerous on this year’s bill. As always, if you’re in town for Verboden, come and say hi to the two goofs introducing bands to the stage.

Our friend and yours, Caustic.

Camlann, “Worship Me”
Whoa, Camlann’s new one does the weird cross genre thing that the Indonesian darkwavers have had on lock for a while now, but this time it’s goth rock and like early 2000s pop-rock. It’s such an odd combination of sounds that aren’t actually totally disimilar (they both rely on big, broadly appealing hooks and fist pumping rhythms), done in the way that the duo only can, which is to say with a certain combination of deadpan sincerity and off-kilter weirdness. The band has had some real strong singles in the last six months or so, a new album in the not so distant future seems inevitable.
Worship Me by Camlann

Wicked Girls, “Big Dumb Banger”
A new collab between Louisahhh and kimifromtheinternet, Wicked Girls’ first teaser from their Good Dogs EP certainly does what it says on the tin in terms of offering up big doofy kicks and a slew of wormy acidic programming. But, as with all things Louisahhh has a hand in, there are certainly layers beneath the most obvious readings which we’re looking forward to gleaning once the full EP is out.
Good Dogs by Wicked Girls (Louisahhh & kimifromtheinternet)

Caustic, “Thirsty Dog”
It’s been a bunch of years since we had a new Caustic single, although Matt Fanale hasn’t ever been far from our speakers between his work as half of Klack, as Daddybear and various other musical endeavours. Enter “Thirsty Dog”, an unexpected Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds cover, remade as a manic electro body blowout, delivered in Caustic’s recognizable growl. And it’s frankly a cover that makes a lot of sense – setting aside the jump from bluesy garage howl to thudding industrial clamor, it’s the sort of self-excoriating screed that has informed some of both Cave and Fanale’s best work. With the B-side “Never Look At You Twice” going even further down the industrial punk road, it’s looking like July’s Fiend should be a real paint peeler.
Thirsty Dog by Caustic

SDH, “Lovers Wonder (Alen Skanner remix)”
Spain’s SDH team up with one of our favourite current remixers Alen Skanner for a new version of their December 2024 single “Lovers Wonder” and its absolutely tremendous. Now if you follow us, you know we’ve spent a lot of time talking about Alen Skanner’s capacity for high-speed Mortal Kombat style techno-body productions, but in this case the song is taken into a much slower, layered and triumphant direction, taking the lovely melancholy synthpop of the original and building it into an epic. For its bombast with the synth choral voices and thunderous drums, it shows a real subtle grasp of craft, ferreting out the melody of the original and recontextualizing it in big, bold, and imminently replayable fashion.
Lovers Wonder (Alen Skanner Remix) by SDH

WLDV, “Bewitched”
We mostly know Spanish producer WLDV for his uncanny ability for unlicensed remixes of dark classics which somehow dodge the jarring edits and levelling issues such projects usually fall prey to, but he’s just as adept at his own original productions. New EP Bewitched is effectively a sandwiching of this spiralling giallo number between an intro and outro, putting all the spotlight on its tightrope walking between classic, misty 70s analogue witchcraft and more modern Boy Harsher school styles.
WLDV – Bewitched EP by WLDV

Laughing Chance, “Champion’s Tear”
Uneremitting, circular, and entirely pure industrial noise. With that sort of description it should come as no surprise that new project Laughing Chance is the work of Chrondritic Sound honcho and all-around noise impresario Greh Holger. Somewhat different from his main noise project Pure Ground in terms of its use of whirring, monomaniacal loops, pieces like this are a reminder of the ear for detail Holger has in sampling and layering clattering field recordings like these (we’re also choosing to interpret the name as a reference to Ric Flair’s immortal 1992 Royal Rumble performance).
Dead Weight by Laughing Chance

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