Pulse: New Music You Need #19 – ArcTanGent Special

Lambhorn

You could potentially describe Bristol-based quartet, Lambhorn, as progressive mood music. I mean, only if you wanted to. I just did, but you don’t have to. I don’t have that kind of power… yes. It’s apt though, because listening to the sprawling instrumentals Lambhorn create is akin to observing the ebb and flow of a person’s mood via audio.

Their songs tend to transform from sparse ambient passages, through tightly coiled and intricate detail, to weighty outbursts of passion and aggression. Though there is an overarching serenity to most of Lambhorn’s music, there is an underlying penchant for changing rhythms to creates a stirring grooves under the waves emotional colour.

 

Vodun

Vodun are awesome. There, I said it. How could they not be though? I mean, anyone who cites their influences as ‘the crushing noise of the spirits’ has to be crazy awesome, right? At the very least they’re crazy, and that in itself is always a good thing, so it’s win/win.

The Londonian three-piece brandish a primal, tribal, carnal, and maybe even spiritual, breed of rock in the rawest sense of the genre; the rhythms are frenetic, spasmodic, and off-kilter, the riffs strut, scuttle, swagger, and sometimes go into warrior mode, the textures vary from stoner rock fuzz density to hazy and wavy psychedelia or haunting sparseness. Then you’ve got the powerhouse vocals that are impossible to be drawn away from.

 

PSOTY

Now,  you might have an idea of how you’d imagine former Pet Slimmers Of The Year might sound, on the basis of their name alone. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that you might just be way off in your assumptions, and thoroughly making an ass out of both you and me.

That is, unless you were imaging the sound of PSOTY as expansive at horizon reaching levels, dense with a churning heaviness the flattens everything in its path on its way to those horizons, interspersed with hypnotic and eerie eye of the storm calms. However, it’s not all post-metal doom and gloom, because there is lightness of touch with delicate layers of melody that lifts PSOTY soaring skywards.

 

Crows An Wra

Crows An Wra are progressive punk pirates of Penzance; is what I would say were I a complete douchebag, and whilst I may be a douchebag, I’m not a complete one – I am incomplete. Unless, anyone found that terrible spot of alliteration and play on the band being from Penzance witty. In which case, I definitely said it. As to Crows An Wra in actuality though, these five are often called progressive punk, I might prefer space punk or psychedelic hardcore, but this isn’t about me.

The band manage to combine the kinetic energy of punk, and the unhinged quality of hardcore, but bust them both open into a far more spacious sound terrain. A place where frenetic and furious bursts of punk rock can be bookended with warped and distorted expansion, an intricate yet vast minimalism, brooding acoustic passages, experimental song structure and melodic progressions. Basically, it’s pretty fucking brilliant is what it is.

 

Juffage

Jeff T Smith, otherwise known as Juffage, is an oddball, and I don’t think he’d mind my saying that; those are the best kind of balls (I can hear you sniggering, get your mind out of the gutter). Multi-instrumentalist and ‘sound-artist’ are both an impressive talent and curious label to have, respectively, and Juffage here has them both.

It’s quite obvious listening to Juffage though, that he is a multi-instrumentalist because of the obvious understanding of different instrumental mediums that shines through each song’s orchestration, if you will. What’s also apparent is that that ‘sound-artist’ job description rings true too; multiple instruments and textures are applied to songs like colours from a palette to canvas, genre lines are blurred into avant-garde meaninglessness. Yet, these songs remain ‘songs’ through and through.