Rosetta Stone
Nothing Is Sacred
Cleopatra Records
From Aretha Franklin to obscure German psych act The Rattles, covers have been part and parcel of Rosetta Stone since day one, and with a full two LPs of original material on record since Porl King’s formal reactivation of the legendary goth rock project, it’s perhaps not surprising that we have a nominal sequel to 2000’s Unearotica. But while that release focused on new wave and synthpop sources (that disc’s read on “Synchronicity II” remains underrated), it’s a swath of classic rock, predominantly from the 70s, being taken up here. Like most cover records, Nothing Is Sacred falls flat when it doesn’t offer a fresh read on well-worn material and picks up when it finds something new to say about songs you’ve heard a hundred times. The line between Cream’s “White Room” and BOC’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper” and the liquid picking of early Rosetta Stone material is easy to see, but was already drawn with much more verve on the cover of “The Witch”. That King’s instrumentation has become far more sparse since those days thus becomes the metric for delineating missteps like the above from some surprisingly effective and understated moments. Of all things, Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” feels pliant and vibrant under the chill, shimmering ministrations it’s given here, and the surprisingly light and sentimental take on Hawkwind’s bicyclic psych odyssey “Silver Machine” pays off just as well, almost alluding to that band’s dalliances with new wave in the late 70s. (Side note: Between this and the recent Leaether Strip covers record, Cleopatra continues to do its new releases no favours by shoving them out the door with appallingly generic and soulless AI art.)
Agony & the Middle Class
Pig Cheese
Trigger Warming
Agony & the Middle Class is the industrial project of Antoine Kerbérénès (Chrome Corpse, Dague de Marbre) and Dana Mukanova, who ply a sound between mutant EBM and the weirder strains of modern screwball industrial. The songs on Pig Cheese are chaotic and frequently change directions on a dime, but that doesn’t mean they’re careless; witness how the groove of “Wholesale Guilt” reinvents itself several times via switch-ups in its manic drum programming and FM bass sounds, never losing a step even when the individual beats have sped up to glitch speed. The title track establishes itself quickly with panned samples and a straightforward bassline, then ramps towards a chorus of squealing synths, returning to the verse which has metastasized with still more beats and samples, almost unsettlingly so. In the midst of all that Pandemonium there’s still some pretty excellent songcraft; “Addiction” forgoes the madness for a lovely twinned vocal and noirish melody, classic post-industrial that recalls the Vancouver sound, albeit deconstructed and redesigned, with chattering synths and the gated snares and open hats that meld and melt into the soupy reverb. It’s good and weird as you might expect from the principles, territory that beat-driven industrial could stand to visit more often these days.
