On 6th March 2020, Honey Harper released his barnstorming celestial-country debut album, Starmaker, which was nothing short of being breathtaking. However, shortly after the release of this glorious triumph, just days before Will and Alana were set to promote the record, the infamous pandemic took a hold of the world and destroyed – a long with many other artists’ new records – Starmaker’s insurmountable potential. Just over eighteen months later, I managed to catch up with Will and Alana over breakfast to discuss their thoughts on Starmaker, the damage Covid-19 had on Honey’s incredible debut record, and what they have in store for Honey Harper in the future.
Will: So, we checked out Sputnikmusic and there’s lots of love, which is really great! I’m humbled.
Oh man, yeah. There’s a lot of people that aren’t really into country music on there – I think the guy that wrote the review [Sowing] for Starmaker, he wasn’t really into country – but Starmaker feels like a really good Gateway album to get you into that sort of thing. It’s super accessible because it does so many other things as well. So, yeah, there’s a lot of people who love it; you’ve got a lot of people that gush over it.
Will: I was kind of blown away. I felt very loved, it was pretty great, yeah.
With a lot of the seminal black-metal-folk-y albums like Agalloch and Ulver, their artwork is intrinsic to – like you said before Nathanael, when you were walking through the city listening to The Mantle, how the sky sort of connected with you while you were listening to the music – the overall feel of the music, and the album cover represents a lot of that perfectly as well. Listening to Inheritance, I think the cover perfectly encapsulates what you’re going to be hearing. Was there a conscious effort to find the best artwork that represents the songs or was it just by chance?
Nathanael: Yeah, it was sort of both. Obviously, with Musk Ox we don’t have any lyrics, so the artwork is very important in the way that it’s going to give people the visual representation that adds to the music. It was intentional, but also by chance, because we never really discussed it. I had an idea, and I took this photographer to a place literally 5 minutes from my house where there’s this railroad – like, it’s not a Photoshop thing, it’s literally just over here and we took these photos of it and it worked with the concept. At the time, I looked at one of the photos and thought “yeah, this is definitely it!” and then Raph was like, “actually I like this one” and Evan agreed with…
Musk Ox are the real deal. Yet, only one month ago I had no prior knowledge of their existence. It was only through Sputnikmusic’s Album of the Month feature that I came to hear of this Canadian trio – their latest album Inheritance had won best album for July which encouraged me to check it out. In short, Inheritance is a truly spellbinding peregrination; a creation that feels perfectly attuned to nature. It’s an idiosyncratic ambient experience that has some of the most rewarding songwriting heard thus far in 2021. Palpable, lucid songwriting that carves impeccable detail into Inheritance’s tracks. Vivid soundscapes, gigantic crescendos, and a perfect harmony with beauty and melancholy. As such, it left a lasting impression on me. I approached the band’s guitarist, Nathanael, for an interview. The result is a two-part epic detailing a lot of what makes Musk Ox’s members the inimitable pioneers they are today – as we talk about the importance of production, what it’s like being in a band in Canada, Tool, their artwork and influences, and what the future holds for Musk Ox. It goes without saying that you should check out their latest triumph, but if nothing else, this is a good place to start and get to know the band.
For those who don’t know, could you give us a bit of background on the band and how it all came…
We live in a time where sequels and call-backs are done to death. Take your artistic medium of choice and witness the litany of hackneyed cash-grabs attempting to tug on your nostalgic heartstrings. On the boldly stated Colors II, Between the Buried and Me buck the trend and deliver on the promise of following up an all-time classic. As a standalone, this album is a gigantic, progressive gymnastics routine packed to the absolute gills with instrumental mastery and compositional/genre fuckery, the likes of which we’ve rarely seen. Taken as another rainbow block of molded clay to be affixed onto their 2007 construction, what we have here is a balls-to-the-white-walls two-part epic that reframes their entire sprawling discography. No matter where you lie along the prog metal appreciation spectrum – this deserves your ears, if only as a reference point for what’s possible. – Inoculaeted
Older is a dark album. Forget about all of those broody metalheads sporting warpaint and screaming about Satan over blast beats and tremolo-picked guitars, this album is genuinely dark, palpably agonising and it uses an array of styles in order to emit the nuances of Michael’s anguish and cognitive dissonance. At this point, for the uninitiated, you’re probably asking yourself how the hell George Michael, one of the biggest pop artists of the eighties and nineties, went from being a bubbly popstar sensation who sang about being on the dole and having steamy sex over archaic synthesiser, to crafting intensely emotive songs in an almost unrecognisable fashion? Welcome to post-mortem, the essay series that deep-dives into some of my most revered works. Whether you’re a fan of George Michael’s very modest volume of work or not, Older is nevertheless an intriguing monster bathed in sorrow, confusion and, surprisingly, optimism over what George was going through between the time of Listen Without Prejudice Vol.1 and his seminal masterpiece, Older. On a personal level, George Michael’s third album is one of my all-time favourite albums and as such, is easily Michael’s magnum opus (which isn’t to be trifled with when you consider every one of his works are, at the very least, excellent). However, what makes Older such an interesting case study is how it was birthed on, arguably, some of the darkest events of Michael’s entire life. These events would cement his direction in 1996; an album that would take…
Is anyone else surprised to see a classically-influenced instrumental album win this month’s AOTM? Granted, the month of July was no fall of ‘91 but this is Sputnik: ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’ has less votes on this site than Asking Alexandria’s 2017 self-titled release (yes, they do still make music.)
I don’t know what neofolk is. Ulver’s early work sounds like shit to me. What the fuck is a wooden grouse? Why am I listening to this neofolk album with literally a grayed out picture of a deserted railroad track on its cover, in the middle of July when it’s 110 degrees out? Why? Because it sounds metal as fuck.
Nathanael Larochette, in addition to having the most pretentious sounding name in all of neofolk history, serves as the group’s classical guitarist and co-composer, next to Raphael Weinroth-Browne. Larochette is also a member of the instrumental progressive metal band, The Night Watch, and boasts credits on Agalloch’s final album, while both Larochette and Weinroth-Browne have appeared on Woods of Ypres records. Musk Ox has appeared on compilations next to big-time nature metallers Empyrium, October Falls, and has shared the stage multiple times with the aforementioned, Agalloch.
So, in much lesser words, Nathanael Larochette is a metal guy who likes to make the metal musacz. And while much of this album sounds like the backdrop to a serene cabin in the middle of bumfuck Oregon, its dense and occasionally frenetic-sounding climaxes…
Given that the album offers little in the way of questions — by serving up the same indie-lite standards: trite lyrics, helium vocals and nothing new whatsoever — Blue Weekend still packs a punch where it counts, because the songs themselves still ‘mean’ something to this listener. The rhythm on “Delicious Things”, the throwaway pop of “Play the Greatest Hits”, and the build up and soaring crescendos on “The Last Man on Earth”; they all converge to create an album that offers up more than it ever intended to, and in doing so, means so much more in the process. – zakalwe
Up-and-coming Brits Black Midi and uber-revered Sweet Trip both release an album. The “Album of the Month” section was all set to celebrate either of these indie juggernauts. No chance that hundred minutes long Italian album snatches the trophy.
And yet it did. Despite deserving all jabs thrown at its overreliance on certain metal and/or folk genres, Sputnikmusic still allows itself to embrace some detours from its well-established flagship genres, the latest deviation coming from IOSONOUNCANE – Italian for “IAMADOGGO”, and stage name of Jacopo Incani. After eight minutes of relative calm split between the first two tracks, “ashes” allows tension to rise to never let it decrease: from then on, mad and reflective moments take turns to instigate a mood always content to frighten the shit out of you, whether your tripes are tightened because of an eerie tribalistic passage or because post-industrial razors cut through your guts (RIP Kentaro Miura). Fortunately, IRA never crosses the Rubycon of ugliness, even in its most unnerving moments; rather evoking how extreme beauty can be. This attitude to offer the most bizarre art possible also shows itself in the lyrics, a hotchpotch of Italian, English, Spanish, and French, without any sense of continuation; “rising el rajul oublié” being an authentic-and-absolutely-not-modified excerpt of the album.
IRA is the ultimate testimony of the richness of the current musical catalog. Sure, fodder albums will still be thrown at us, bands will continue…
The Million Masks of God came at the perfect time. Overall, the record’s musicianship is as tight as ever, Andy Hull is at his most ambitious, and the overall songwriting is possibly the best it’s ever been in a Manchester Orchestra album. However, it’s the album’s themes – the feeling of grief and guilt, emotional and spiritual crises, the moment where you lose a loved one – that make this album so great. Just about everyone can relate to this album in some way. I’m not saying that hypothetically of course; just about all of us here has had to deal with some horrible experience over the course of a year, including me. 2020 was a fucking horrendous year, it was depressing, traumatic, and incredibly scary. Yet at the same time, The Million Masks of God isn’t an album that reflects on those horrible experiences, it doesn’t toy with or exploit your emotions in that way. If anything, it’s more of an acceptance to what happened – that in spite of all the shit that we’ve gone through, it’ll all be okay. It’s hopeful, optimistic, and at times, happy, and right now, I think all of us could use a bit of that in our lives. We’ve been stuck at home, grieved and cried for far too long. It’s unsure when all of it will end, but it will at some point, and…
Marilyn Manson’s career has been an eventful one, there’s no denying that, but what I find particularly interesting is how he manages to find reinvention at the most crucial moments – to the point where it’s as if he knows his relevance is on the guillotine. It’s no secret that he’s had a lot of ups and downs in his three decades of making music. The man fluctuates between two personas: a profound prophet, and a lowbrow, brainless jester – admittedly donning the latter more than the former – and I’m convinced he’s completely self-aware of these two personalities. The bit that makes him so fascinating and by association enduring, is that just when you’re about to write him off for good, slipping on the banana peel for the umpteenth time, landing firmly on his face and writhing around on the floor with a pathetic desperation, he somehow manages to bounce back stronger than before. At this point I just account this rare pattern of events to be Manson’s Thing. Seldom do you see an artist rebound like this guy does.
By the turn of the ‘10s, I had at this point long accepted that Marilyn Manson was over the hill – he wrote a timeless and classic trilogy of albums and proceeded those works with a decade of solid-to-average follow-ups for the LOLs. To be honest, this story is an age-old one for a vast majority of bands, but then…
Rarely in Sput’s illustrious history has the Album of the Month been this closely contested. While some recent favourites such as Krallice’s supposedly “listenable” Demonic Wealth were blown aside with the weight of a brief fart, albums such as Dvne’s Etemen Ænka stood strong, beat only by the sheer magnitude of quality on this album of the decade contender. Okay…
“Meanwhile, at a bar, a Drunkard muses“ is a Strap song penned on 2003’s A Monday at the Hug & Pint – it’s a cracking song, on one of their best albums, but it’s also a powerfully symbolic title representative of that confessional blend of post-rock and slowcore that is so uniquely theirs. Over the course of their career, frontman Aidan Moffat has mastered the art of such musings, forming a collection of legitimate poetry like a laureate of Sunday’s spent hungover reminiscing of the night before in brief flashes. Tales of lost-love, shags, infidelity, booze, boredom and the mundane beauty of a head in the gutter – at times these are hilarious, at times they’re jarringly honest in recollection. Eighteen years separate As Days Grow Dark from that one, sixteen since the last Arab Strap release. Make no mistake, their return was never a given. It was evident that the duo had grown unsure in their output. Making a step braver than many artists unfortunately take, the duo placed their art on hold, taking…
If Sputnikmusic’s “Album Of The Month” series has taught us anything over the course of last year it’s that not all records are created equal. Fairly, a statement like that could easily be considered hyperbolic if not for the sheer vastness which Imperative Imperceptible Impulse commands, surging out of the realms of disso-death and into the hearts of those fed a full serving of Ulcerate, Gorguts, Deathspell Omega and early 90s Demilich. Yet, Ad Nauseam’s sophomore is a beast, a behemoth of ingenuity – taking the very sequencing that made those groups named above what they are and defining their own individual take. Imperative Imperceptible Impulse crashes through the simple boundaries of what traditional music is, crafting devastating compositions with unique experimentation, something mostly credited to the band’s ‘do it yourself’ approach. It’s this meticulous design that articulates the very essence of Ad Nauseam’s central make-up.
By itself, Imperative Imperceptible Impulse is not an easy listen by any means. In fact, these tracks ‘demand’ attention, repeats and introspection. Whether it’s the tempo breaks, jarred rhythms, breakneck shifts in dissonance…there’s something to enjoy for all fans of extreme music. The unpacking of such a record comes with great reward, you just have to take a deep breath and fall in face first. – Robert Garland
The return of Black Sheep Wall in 2020 definitely comes with auspicious timing. I mean, who else is as appropriately equipped to lay down a fresh batch of songs that will undoubtedly straddle the unrelenting mayhem and melancholy of one of the most unsympathetic years in a generation? Indeed, without an ounce of hyperbole coming from my stern sentiment, Black Sheep Wall are true veterans of the sludgy, doom-dirge sound – palpable legends at this point who wield nihilism and anguish with an atypical bravado. Similarly, their works – even the less favourable ones – exhume a raw honesty seldom felt with a good portion of other bands. New music aside, the long-awaited announcement of their flawless, nihilistic masterpiece I Am God Songs getting its very first vinyl release back in June was a joyous revelation for fans – a fitting re-release, eighteen years on, that is certainly qualified to be 2020’s soundtrack – but more to the point, it became the starting posts for a band with a bright future ahead of itself. Here we deep-dive into the band’s long, esoteric history, analyse I Am God Songs, discuss the imminent new album, and talk a little about what the future holds – so hold onto your butts.
Let’s start by giving out a little backstory on the band. You guys have been at this a very long time now and all things considered, Black Sheep Wall is somewhat of an enigma. Can you give us…
August 2020 Album of the Month: Two People – Second Body
Second Body could not have come out at a better time. After keeping myself from checking out most of the singles prior to its release, I pressed play on the album for the first time as I started my morning walk through a picturesque valley in the Swiss Alps. Allowing Two People’s music to adorn my quest for breakfast was nothing short of perfection; from the peppy beats of ‘Loud’ and ‘A Taste’ to dreamier cuts such as ‘Been a Little While’ and ‘Under the Hood’, each aspect of the record capitalises on the band’s newfound sense of immediacy in the best possible way. As I exited the local bakery, however, it was the second chorus of ‘The Line’ that completely floored me. It’s not an obviously grandiose moment, not one of directly distinguishable beauty, but rather one of astonishing subtlety in a song that still manages to retain [i]Second Body[/i]’s instantly gratifying nature. A simple drum beat, some low piano notes and Phoebe Lou’s heavenly croons: everything fits, everything feels right. It’s the moment that solidified Two People’s second body of work as something truly special, connecting the organic beauty of the album with that of the mountains towering over me as the replay button and a paper bag filled with fresh croissants and yoghurt accompanied me on my walk back. – JesperL
Eesh, where do I start here? Let me open up by saying that after I had seen 3TEETH live back in 2018, all bets were off: in my estimation, these guys were to become imminent torchbearers of the industrial scene. Shutdown.exe was an imperfect experiment but, christ, the potential was written all over the wall. The album’s opening track ,”Divine Weapon”, was some of the heaviest shit I’d heard in 2017, but moreover the album collectively enveloped the vintage of industrial’s high points whilst modernising it with metalcore styled riffing and some heterogeneously applied electronics and vocal work. Again, it wasn’t a perfect offering by any means, but it displayed the gamut of their capabilities. Fast forward to 2019 and the aching anticipation I had for their third album, Metawar, was met with disappointment – not because it was a bad album, but because it failed to capitalise on that spark Shutdown.exe presented. Indeed, Metawar swapped the inimitable experimentation for a more candid chapter in their career; a commonly designed mainstream offering that did the job well, but ultimately subverted the high standards I had for this band.
Now Harry Potter has a new film coming out and 3TEETH have covered two flamboyant songs for it. At this point, the whole ‘look, this heavy metal band has covered the unexpected!’ is about as original as throwing a TV out of a hotel window, but, oh boy, Alexis and co. went all the way with this one – covering Dead or…
