Month: July 2023

Post-rock Mondays: Que viva España

/ Tony / 4 Comments

Another Monday only this time to sit alongside the buzz kill of work I’ve got an emergency date with the dentist to add insult to injury. However, post-rock is once again providing a comforting tonic and as I prepare to set sail for summer in less than a week I’m enjoying a volley of offerings from Spain where we’ll be touching shore twice in the coming weeks.

Once again I’ve tried to find a way of summing up the genre and have found this handy yet daft and pretentious explainer: “Post-rock generally applied to bands that used the typical instruments of a rock band—two guitars, a bass, and drums—with nontraditional rhythms, melodies, and chord progressions. Guitars created ambience by altering the colour and quality of the sound. Vocals, if they were included, were frequently treated not as a vehicle for lyrics but as an additional instrument. The focus was on the texture of the music and the sound produced rather than on melodic patterns and the basic structure of a rock song. Embracing “quiet as the new loud,” post-rock shifted away from the hard, male-driven outbursts of rock music as that music became more commercialised; post-rock and other alternative genres were more independent and less commercially oriented.”

I’ve mumbled before about how I love the universality of a genre that doesn’t rely on words and can, accordingly, be created whether those inclined to do so happen to be. Spain, particularly, has proven to be a real treasure chest of great post-rock bands and with a real sense of variety across those. My way into it came by chance when I found the website for AloudMusic – a label and distro operating out of Barcelona and championing all things of alt / post / homegrown bent. I’ve found through my admittedly non-expert ears that the bands from the Catalonia region lean toward the the melodic with bands out of the capital providing some almighty wallop. I’m probably wrong, as much exposure as I try to seek there’s undoubtedly more to learn.

Anyway, here’s today’s selection.

Toundra – Cobra

Probably the most widely-known of Spain’s post-rock bands and bringers of the aforementioned almighty wallop. Toundra hail from Madrid and formed in 2007.

Exxasens – Your Dreams Are My Dreams

Also formed in 2007, Exxasens hail from the beatific Barcelona. What I love about this band are that they typically have a space theme to their albums and that their drummer feels like he’d be equally at home in a hard rock band – I’d like to think that live he beats the shit out of his kit – propelling it along like bloody rocket yet never overpowering it.

Audiolepsia – Brain Fog

Another of those melody-first acts from Barcelona, Audiolepsia lean more toward the soaring guitar end. They’re a couple of albums in and while I picked up Muses from Aloud Music when is was put out with assist from another all-things-post championing label, Dunk!. Their recent Waves and Particles was self-released and picked up via Bandcamp, something which makes me feel like I’m kicking more coin to the band themselves, always a plus.

Jardin De La Croix – Intermareals

These guys come from Madrid and veer – see – toward the heavier, citing themselves as a mix of post-rock, post-hardcore, post-math and post-is-always-late. Maybe not the latter. Five albums in, the latest released on Aloud Music. This is from their 2016 stormer Circadia.

Astralia – Abyss of Night

It’s been a while since Astralia – formed in La Floresta, just outside of Barcelona – have released anything. Their two albums – 2017’s Solstics from which this track is taken and 2014’s Atlas – are great examples of the more ambient end of the genre (I’m not talking panpipe moods, mind, there’s still plenty of clout) and I hope there’s more to come.

Exquirla – Destruidnos Juntos (EN: Destroy Us Together)

Technically this is Toundra, again. Well, sort of. This is what happens when one of Spain’s most crushing post-rock bands finds itself on the same bill as one of the country’s flamenco singers, Niño de Elche. Fittingly – as I’m going to be revisiting the city shortly – the meeting took place in Cadiz. It’s one of those things that on paper doesn’t sound like a winner: the power and intensity of Toundra combined with flamenco singing. As it turns out it’s fucking GOLD. The album Para Quienes Aún Viven (EN: For those who still live) is one of my favourites and I’ll punch this up at home and in the car. I just wish they’d do it again.

Mirror Image by Gunnar Staalesen

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From the PR: “Bergen Private Investigator Varg Veum is perplexed when two wildly different cases cross his desk at the same time. A lawyer, anxious to protect her privacy, asks Varg to find her sister, who has disappeared with her husband, seemingly without trace, while a ship carrying unknown cargo is heading towards the Norwegian coast, and the authorities need answers.

Varg immerses himself in the investigations, and it becomes clear that the two cases are linked, and have unsettling – and increasingly uncanny – similarities to events that took place thirty-six years earlier, when a woman and her saxophonist lover drove their car off a cliff, in an apparent double suicide.

As Varg is drawn into a complex case involving star-crossed lovers, toxic waste and illegal immigrants, history seems determined to repeat itself in perfect detail … and at terrifying cost…”

There are few reading pleasures like sitting down with a new Varg Veum novel but then there are few writers as good as Gunnar Staalesen. Since reading We Shall Inherit the Wind back in 2015 Staalesen has become one of my favourite writers and a new Varg Veum novel from Norway’s finest is always reason to get excited.

Like all good pleasures, the reading of a new Staalesen novel is something to be savoured. The problem is that it’s also so bloody good and addictive that it’s usually impossible to put down. Mirror Image builds up momentum so masterfully, places just enough hooks in each chapter and leads the reader from ‘wait, what?’ to ‘hang on, but that means…’ so compellingly that addictive isn’t the word and before you know it you’re knee deep in snow peering through a cabin window and on your way to a denouement that’ll leave your jaw open. Oh, and Mirror Image may be the most stunning of those yet.

There’s a quiet poetry in reading a novel set in 1993 that works perfectly with Varg’s style. I’ve said before that Staalesen’s lone wolf is neither a Reacher or Harry Hole, there are no explosive set pieces here nor does our hero deliver any violent kicks to the kidney that ‘would have sent a football out of the stadium.’ Instead, Veum tracks his clues determinedly, putting in the leg work and the miles as he puts the pieces together. In 1993, devoid of cell phones to ping locations from (though Varg does revel having such a then-new device) or the ability to reach someone in an instant with a text, Mirror Image moves to a different pace. It’s joyous to sense the work and miles – numerous early morning starts and ferry crossings across those fjords to islands not yet reached by bridge – involved as Veum doggedly chases the truth across a geographical distance that manages to mirror the chronological distance involved as he travels back and forth across both the country and decades to unravel the complexities of his case.

Speaking of mirroring… how about the symmetry in the events of 1957 affecting the central characters of Varg’s current case just as the events of his previous investigation affect his current life?

There’s a huge amount to enjoy in Mirror Image. From the characters – both familiar and new – to the perfectly detailed landscapes. Staalesen’s style and prose remains that of a master, succinct yet evocative with more than a crackle of charm and humour all clearly written by an author that takes delight in the form. The plot is as wonderfully crafted and multifaceted as you’d expect from a Varg Veum novel – just when you think the pieces are starting to come together Staalesen can subtly work in a new angle that brings increasing layers into play and still find a way to seamlessly bind them into one.

The only bad thing about Mirror Image is that it must draw to a close. Though that close, again, is possibly the finest ending to a Varg novel to date.

Mirror Image is the ninth Varg Veum novel in my collection (of a published nineteen with) and yet Staaelesen still manages to bring something new to the character with every instalment, ensuring that Varg remains both familiar to readers but compelling enough to want another novel straight after finishing, all the while continuing to set a high benchmark for both Nordic Noir and fiction as a whole.

My thanks, as always, to Karen at Orenda Books for my copy of Mirror Image and for all the work she’s done in championing these books in English, my bookshelf would be a poorer place without them.

Spinning Newer Things

/ Tony / 3 Comments

It’s been a while… but I thought it about time to throw up / down / about some of those new sounds I’ve been loving lately in between binging on classic Springsteen (I mean The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle has got to have finest Side B out there).

Explosions In The Sky – Ten Billion People

PHEW! After announcing ‘The End Tour’ and pulling all other content from their social feeds back in April, Explosions In The Sky triggered months of speculation as to whether such a name referred to the band calling it a day or a new album. It’s the latter, thankfully, and its announcement came with the release of their first new non-soundtrack music in seven years, ‘Ten Billion People’.

Slowdive – Skin In The Game

You wait years for a favourite band to announce a new album and then two come along at once. Slowdive announced their upcoming new Everything Is Alive back in June with new single ‘Kisses’ and have now dropped ‘Skin In The Game’ too as… well, I guess they’re not really pre-release ‘singles’ anymore just ‘tracks’ which seems somewhat cack but this a gorgeous slab of that warm wash of shoegaze loveliness Slowdive have perfected.

Sigur Ros – Gold

OK: make that three new albums from favourite bands! 2023 is shaping up very nicely – all it needs now is for Springsteen to drop a new non-karaoke album. In one of my Monday post-rock posts I dropped a Sigur Rós track and was about to make a snarky comment about how they’d promised a new album in June and yet… then the cheeky little scamps dropped a new album like *that*. Átta appeared online in mid June (physical copies will follow) and has been in my ears many a time since, it’s another gear change from Kveikur, moving away from that album’s aggressive brooding to a more rich, almost ambient slice of beautiful calm.

Picture Parlour – Norwegian Wood

I heard this on the radio a little while ago. On paper (or screen) I’d describe it as Cyndi Lauper impersonating Poison-era Alice Cooper against a string-rich backdrop akin to ‘Design For Life’ with a pretty solid guitar that eventually bursts out into a solo. Which doesn’t really sound like a good combo but yet it really works for me. I think they’re from Liverpool. This is the only thing they’ve released thus far but I’m ready for more.

The Mysterines – Begin Again

Their album Reeling was only released in 2022 but The Mysterines are already releasing new music – guess you need to keep momentum going in the days of streaming – and ‘Begin Again’ is a a slow builder that does the job nicely. The acoustic strum makes me think of an early Placebo rhythm.

Blondshell – Salad

Blondshell’s self-titled debuts is one of my favourites of the year so far and Salad is a belter.