Grains - Grains (2024)

Country: New Zealand
Style: Electronic/Space Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Apr 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Here's something interesting from down under. Grains, who hail from Wellington, which marks as far south as you can go and remain in a capital city, apparently started out as a duo playing synth ambience but they bulked up 2021 to a five piece band. They're primarily electronic, but they run quite the gamut within that. How? opens up as almost new wave, like Tangerine Dream with some welcome throat singing. I am loving how that's travelling far from Mongolia nowadays. Then Ever adds a beat and starts to explore the potential of what five guys playing these instruments can do.

I like Ever, which is over in fewer than five minutes but still moves from pop music into space rock and on into something more esoteric. Sometimes this feels acutely poppy, especially early in Unco and Flying Saucer, which appears to be an old piece of music condensed a little for this, their debut album. There's disco on Unco and there's new wave on Flying Saucer, but both evolve elsewhere. In the former, electric guitars float around deep underneath the synths and gradually surface as the piece runs on. That's quite a tasty solo building towards the two minute mark and a neatly delicate section just after four.

The latter is one of the two epics the album has to offer, L.O.T.A.F! being the other one. Any track here could easily have been extended far past its actual running time, but Grains only allow some extended exploration on these two. They do think about it on Unco too, which almost reaches the seven minute mark, but they haul it back in well before it can sprawl out of control. Flying Saucer starts out poppier than usual, a very old school lead synth backed by far more modern synths, but it also gets heavier than usual late in its first half and again during its second.

If it wasn't for the overt guitars midway through L.O.T.A.F!, then Flying Saucer would feature the poppiest and heaviest moments of the album, which ought to give a good idea of how far it shifts over its eight and a half minutes. And that's a good thing. Anything that trawls in space rock even as a component really ought to take the listener on a journey and I got that the most here on this one highly versatile track. L.O.T.A.F! took me on a journey too but a much darker one that isn't to out there but to in here, which gets experimental and claustrophobic.

It's the longer pieces that connect with me the most, the two epics but also Unco and, after them, the closer, Succession II, which is pure electronic rock in the seventies tradition but introduced to space rock and with layers of extra electronic chirps. It's like walking into a maximalist spaceship control room with ADHD. This one's only five and a half minutes long, which isn't sprawling for the fourth longest piece on an instrumental electrona album. I say instrumental, by the way, because not one of these pieces involves the delivery of lyrics but there are vocals here, whether they're recorded or sampled, just occasional vocalisations and that throat singing on How?

That's not to say that the shorter pieces don't work, but they're far less ambitious. How? sets the scene and Ever is an introduction to where we might be going. Pans is more than a pleasant interlude, but for half its running time it seems to be exactly that. It does get more interesting in its second half but I don't think it quite figures out what it wants to be. And Succession I is evocative from its very first moments, as if it's dumped us into a rainforest and we have to figure out which one. However, it's easily the shortest piece here and it never answers the questions it asks. Succession II seems a lot more confident about shifting to answers within a couple of seconds.

I like this a lot and it's easy to get completely subsumed by it, but how substantial it really is may depend on many further listens. Grains have been around for a few years now, with their earliest recordings issued in 2019 on a single called ζ, the Greek letter zeta. Back then, they were the duo of Calum Turner and Peregrin Hyde. Nowadays, there are five of them, with additional cello from a couple of guests. However, I'm expecting that Turner and Hyde still provide the bulk of this on a selection of synthesisers and sequencers. The rest flesh out the sound into something more. Lets see where they go from here, because I have a feeling that they're going to keep evolving.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - The Silver Cord (2023)

Country: Australia
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Oct 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I blinked again. I believe I've reviewed more albums by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard than any other artist, this being my fifth, but, every time I find a new one, I realise too that I missed a host more. My previous review was of Omnium Gatherum, which came out last April but they released Made in Timeland earlier in 2022 and Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, Laminated Denim and Changes after it, plus PetroDragonic Apocalypse earlier this year, whose seven tracks apparently serve as the yin to the yang of the seven others here. I can't keep up.

What's more, this album boasts two CDs, each featuring the same songs but with greatly different lengths. The regular album runs a mere twenty-eight minutes, making it rather short for anything by this band, but the other runs close to ninety, every one of these three to four minute songs over ten in their extended versions and the opener, Theia, over twenty. As you might expect, the short versions are snappier and more commercial and the extended mixes are more immersive. Oddly, the tracks on that earlier 2023 album add up to forty-eight minutes so it's an off balance yin/yang whichever way we look at it.

I haven't heard PetroDragonic Apocalypse, but it appears to be another metal album, following in the footsteps of Infest the Rats' Nest in 2019. This absolutely isn't, because it's electronica, though none of the components we think of as being associated with pop music make it so. This is still rock music, even if it's full of pop elements and comparisons will highlight that. For instance, Set is such electronica beats that it feels like house music when it starts out, with a tone right out of the new wave era and a lively attitude that's all seventies funk. Somehow, though, it ends up more like the Prodigy than any of the names you might expect, except perhaps Steven Wilson. He shouldn't be a particular surprise. The Prodigy only become more overt on Gilgamesh.

Notably, there are no actual guitars on this album, if I'm reading the credits right. However, there are plenty of guitar synthesisers. Similarly, I don't believe there are any actual drums, at least in the traditional sense, but there are electronic drums and drum machines. In fact, the core sound for the album stems from drummer Michael Cavanagh's impulse buy of a Simmons electronic drum kit. Fellow band member Joey Walker has said that "as soon as he plugged it in, I thought, 'That's the sound of the album right there."

What all that means is that hard beats are replaced by pulses and riffs are played on synthesisers rather than guitars, five of the six regular band members credited on synths of varied description, only Michael Cavanagh excluded because he's dedicated to electronic drums. Even then, two of his bandmates also have credits for drum machine. However, there are still beats and riffs and this is generally structured like rock music, most obviously a combination of prog and psychedelic, with a lot of Hawkwind in the effects but John Kongos in the drive of Chang'e and Yes in the vocal melody in Extinction.

I've been a fan of electronic rock music for decades, but this doesn't sound like any of the artists I listened to back in the eighties, like Tomita, Vangelis and Tangerine Dream. The latter are likely to be the closest comparison in that world, because they evolved substantially over the decades and became just as important to clubgoers dancing to the beats as those of us who sat in big venues to listen carefully to the depth of the music. However, I'm far less familiar with that era of their sound so I can't offer any comparisons. What I can say is that the Tangerine Dream influence is far more clear on the extended mixes with their long instrumental sections.

This is a fascinating album for me, because it's not remotely like anything I usually listen to, most obviously in the heavily manipulated vocals on the title track, but it is a King Gizzard album, so it's hardly unusual for it to be something completely different. That's kind of what they do. This is just new territory again for them and me. I'm not particularly sold on the short version of the album, not because it's all poppy electronica but because everything about it is so short. Every time they get a groove going, it's over to make way for the next track.

Personally, I'm far more into the longer version with the extended mixes, because the band are able to truly get their teeth into these vibes. I found more influences leaping out on these mixes too. I didn't hear Pink Floyd on the short version of the title track, for instance, but they're there on the twelve minute extended mix. And so, for rock and metal fans, especially those who perhaps found King Gizzard through PetroDragonic Apocalypse, this is definitely one for the open minded, but then that's kind of required for King Gizzard fans.

Tangerine Dream - Raum (2022)

Country: Germany
Style: Electronic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 25 Feb 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Prog Archives | Wikipedia | YouTube

Thorsten Quaeschning joined Tangerine Dream as long ago as 2005, he's put in as many years with them as the founder members of most groups I review at Apocalypse Later. However, he's a rather late arrival in this one, even if he's the driving musical force behind them now, inheriting that role from Edgar Froese, who formed the band in 1967 and remained with them until his death in 2015. I found Tangerine Dream in the mid eighties, probably through the Friday Rock Show, and absorbed their first couple of decades of work, with 1974's Phaedra still one of my favourite albums. I finally caught them live in 1990 and wish I'd have seen them more often than just that once.

It's fair to say that they're one of the most influential bands of all time, having a hand in virtually every subgenre of the electronic era, from rock to pop, classical to dance, from stadiums to clubs. I haven't heard anything new from them in years, though I knew they were active and continuing to build an already immense back catalogue. I've probably heard forty albums by them and I haven't scratched the surface. So I thought I should check out Raum, which was well received last year, and I found it fascinating, not least because it's built in part on recordings from Froese's archives.

It's definitely more contemporary than the Tangerine Dream I know, but not by much, even with a thoroughly modern beat kicking in early in the opener, Continuum. It appears that Froese made a conscious effort to revisit some of the band's older sounds in his later years, reversing the modern direction that his son, Jerome Froese, had helped to push while with the band during the nineties and noughties. This feels like it's both, a look back to various eras of the band's history but also to the future. It's not a nostalgia release, but it is an affirmation that this new Tangerine Dream can continue to make worthy music without forgetting its roots in the old Tangerine Dream.

It starts off more modern, clearly 21st century electronica even as it looks back. What's notable is that Continuum feels very happy and much of the album follows suit. Coming to this from the dark ambient Blut aus Nord soundscapes I reviewed yesterday, anything might seem happy but there's a strong upbeat nature to this album, whatever era it's identifying with. Portico certainly carries on from Continuum so closely that I kept missing that the track had changed. I'm used to epic long pieces of music from Tangerine Dream and this opening pair only rack up fourteen minutes. There are two compositions here longer than that on their own.

The first is In 256 Zeichen, which is older school, clearly looking back to the seventies, but with the electronic experimentations of the band's earliest years transformed into more of a world music framework. Ther'es a section that reminds of an Indonesian gamelan orchestra, even though it's flavoured with glitch eletronica. There's plenty of that in What You Should Know About Endings, a more ambient piece peppered with glitch. There are fascinating sounds here that are turned into rhythmic effects too, reminding of all things of Pink Floyd's Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict.

For those who remember the eighties, when Tangerine Dream moved into a far more commercial sound and started to churn out memorable soundtracks to films, You're Always on Time hearkens back to those days. This is smooth Tangerine Dream, and Along the Canal continues in that smooth vein, softening the sound at one point with what appears to be a flute to float over some organic electronic rhythms. Both get more modern at times but feel like they were born from the eighties era of the band.

And the album wraps up with a more in depth piece in the fifteen minute title track. Sections here remind of that heyday in the seventies, after they'd moved beyond the experimental krautrock of their earliest few albums and moved into improvisational album long compositions, like Ricochet and Rubycon. I heard some Phaedra and Stratosfear here too, in the keyboard clouds and rhythms.

Unsurprisingly, given that this is my favourite era of the band, this is my favourite piece, but it's all good stuff, underlining how vibrant Tangerine Dream seem fifty-five years on from their founding and seven from the death of their central figure and final remaining early member. As unlikely as it might seem, Paul Frick, who joined as a guest in 2018, before elevating to a full-time member in 2020, never even met Edgar Froese. Hoshiko Yamane did because she joined in 2011, but Thorsten Queschning, the bandleader nowadays, only dates back six years before that, joining soon before the band's fortieth anniversary. That's surreal. Nonetheless, the future looks bright.