Oh shit, it’s December. Maybe two more weeks of coverage before our annual year end coverage kicks off, and we have quite a lot to get to before then in terms of records and catch-up listening, plus revisiting of records for the top 25 assessment. That’s not all we have going on though, as our friends at Vancouver’s Invisible Orange have asked us to co-present the upcoming Lana Del Rabies show in Vancouver featuring tourmates God Is War, and local support from Xiphoid Dementia and Exeunt. You may recall LDR made our favourite record of 2023, so getting to see them perform live early in 2025 should be a treat – we’re hoping to see local folks there, and hey, if you’re in the PNW why not considering coming down for it. Until then, here’s another edition of ye olde Tracks for your listening pleasure.
Un Hombre Solo
Black Magnet, “Damage Device”
Full disclosure, this edition of Tracks is being written with a massive hangover for half the Senior Staff, so the prospect of hearing an excoriating new joint from American industrial metal act Black Magnet might not seem like a very pleasant experience. On the contrary however, there’s a caustic quality to the band’s sound that burns away the haze and leaves the mind raw and ready, a function of how developed their grindy sound design and mechanical chug have gotten without losing the immediacy or overpolishing things. Paint peeling music for an age where we could use more of it.
Give My Remains To Broadway, “Far From Here”
Chilly debauchery holds court on the new EP from Toronto enfants terrible Give My Remains To Broadway. Speedy and spiteful numbers like this connote cold walks home from keggers in third floor Kensington Market walkups and regret. They’re racing ahead of many of their peers with their release schedule and ferocity, keep up or get left behind.
Matteo Tura, “Molotov Cocktail”
Italian producer Matteo Tura has established themselves via a small but potent catalogue of mid-tempo techno-body bangers, tracks that recall Gessafelstein and the Hacker at their most groovy. New EP Disobey Club has plenty of that, but we’re especially taken by “Molotov Cocktail”, where some post-punk style bass acts as the hook and mood-setter, yielding a very different but not unwelcome blend of sounds to the release. Whether Tura will follow it up with more songs in this vein is unclear, but we’d certainly be happy to hear them explore it further.
Misfortunes, “Μια Ιστορία να Αρνηθείς (A Story to Deny)”
Ioakim Vasileiadis has been releasing synthwork as Misfortunes since 2017, but his first single on Swiss Dark Nights is the first time we’ve bumped into him. This number shows a solid sense of what works and what doesn’t in terms of the pace and palette of minimal wave, and perhaps most impressively finds just the right ways of expanding upon and veering away from the track’s immediate presentation, something rare in a style which is often fixated on repetition to the point of its own detriment.
Un Hombre Solo, “Clepsidra”
We’re a bit behind on this October release from NYC’s Un Hombre Solo, but we’d be remiss in not mentioning it in this space. Like a lot of the act’s other material there’s a pleasing minimalism to the two tracks on cassette release Hombre Deprimido, but the anger we’re hearing on “Clepsidra” is something else entirely. The combination of shouted vocals, hard hitting drums and some sharp synth strings is really quite effective, and has us wondering when the next LP might be coming down the pike.
Null Device, “Baby, It’s No Longer Cold Outside (Because of Climate Change)”
Lastly, the fine folks at Elektrovox have teamed up with grabyourface to bring us grabyourchristmastree, a comp sagely branded as being “by goths who hate Christmas music”. Exhibit A: Null Device updating the creepily coercive “Baby It’s Cold Outside” for the modern day. All proceeds are going to cat shelters in the UK and France, so dig deep, but be warned, thanks to the UK’s oddball ‘#1 Christmas single’ tradition you’re likely to bump into everything from Frankie Goes To Hollywood covers to the horrors of Mr. Blobby elsewhere.
