Mr Kinski's Music Shack

An album about death, dying and grief in 2020? I’m not sure I can listen to that was my initial reaction, but as soon as I read that the album was inspired by Max Porter’s novel Grief Is the Thing With Feathers (I saw Enda Walsh’s mind-blowing adaptation at The Barbican, starring Cillian Murphy in 2019) I dived in headfirst and what an uplifting experience this turned out to be.

Tunng’s Good Arrows was one of my favourite albums of 2007, but this new release takes the band’s sound to another level. For a start, the instrumentation is less electronic, glitchy and is so much more organic and natural. There is space for the music, and lyrics, to breathe in these arrangements. Opening with Eating the Dead, based on the Wari indigenous people of Brazil who used to, well, you have read the title. The song is heart-beat paced, and talks of devouring the memories of the person who has recently passed. Like the majority of the album, the song is incredibly moving, because of, not despite of, its unsettling subject matter.

“Lay you on my kitchen table
Cut you open tenderly
Eat your heart and eyes and mouth
Every word you spoke to me”

The pure, infectious pop of Death Is the New Sex hides the dark message in the lyrics.

“Death is the new Sex
Coming soon to fuck us all”

SDC (aka Swedish death cleaning) is the lyric that hit me hardest, for very personal reasons. SDC is a song about the process of organizing and de-cluttering your belongings before you die, so those left behind don’t have to do this heart-breaking task. Deciding what remnants of someone’s recently ended life gets thrown in the bin or kept within the family as a keep-sake is a harder task than you might first imagine. Something that might have been intensely personal and precious to the person who has passed could be seen as something to be tossed away, as simply junk. That faded picture, or creased and barely legible hand-written letter could contain so much of the person, their hopes and dreams and if not cherished, could be lost forever to landfill.

Three Birds features a delicious bass-line, underpinning a gentle percussion free arrangement. A Million Colours is a simple, Love Cats like song that builds as layers of guitar and strings are dropped onto the topic of not being able to comprehend the impending loss of a loved one.

“You, I can’t quite imagine you gone
You a million bright colours all strewn about”

Carry You and The Last Day touch on the memories that remain after we have gone and what physically happens to us after the process of dying, along with the need for us all to live in the now, living our lives as fully as we can. This film only plays once.

The arrangement on Tsunami is one of my favourites on the album. A decaying note under a simple piano line and lead vocal slowly builds like the incoming deadly wave, getting closer and closer. The band leave us with just the vocal line that soon becomes isolated, stranded and alone in a silent sea. Such a thoughtful and powerful piece of music.

Scared To Death is one of the jewels on this album, featuring luscious strings and feeling like a classic album track from the mid-70s.

“You’re so scared to be what you’re not yet
Hoping love is its own reward”

Derren Brown features on the intro to Fatally Human, another album highlight due to the strong production and string arrangement. I love how disembodied voices float over the slowly departing musical track, as silence finally reigns over all.

The genesis of Dead Club, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, rounds off the final quarter of the album with two tracks written and recorded in collaboration with its author Max Porter. No punches are pulled on Man, and the album’s final track, its companion piece, Woman. It might be uncomfortable at times, but there is a searing honesty that the subject matter demands, throughout these two tracks and the album as a whole.

If you want more than just escapism in your music, and appreciate honesty, beauty and a little dark humour, then please give this album by Tunng a listen. Prepare to be moved.

Buy Tunng Presents…Dead Club from Amazon

Eating the Dead 07:14
Death is the New Sex 04:14
SDC 05:38
Three Birds 03:59
A Million Colours 05:41
Carry You 04:53
The Last Day 05:32
Tsunami 03:11
Man 03:32
Scared To Death 04:53
Fatally Human 06:20
Woman 04:22

Variants is the companion piece to the debut album from Cobalt Chapel (released in 2017). Cobalt Chapel is the psychedelic folk-rock pairing of Cecilia Fage (Matt Berry & The Maypoles) and Jarrod Gosling (I Monster, Regal Worm).

Variants takes the songs from the bands debut and re-imagines them using a vast array of effects, cassette loops, found sounds and field recordings, spitting the tracks out in a very different format to the originals. What this does is give the release a real consistency, and a more stripped back, sparse feel to the album, which is quite gothic at times.

My original review described Cobalt Chapel’s debut as being “perfectly suited to the Autumn and Winter seasons” and this is even more so for Variants, which works well as an album in its own right, whether you are aware of the original album or not. As the temperature drops, and as the snow starts to fall, Variants could well be the perfect soundtrack to your winter.

The album opener, We Come Willingly (Variant), turns the original song on its head – gone are the loud drums and the fairground waltz, and in comes a disquieting, dream-like arrangement. Cecilia Fage’s vocals appear through the fog as Jarrod Gosling manipulates and twists the drone-like synths and dark electronica.

Fruit Falls from the Apple Tree (Variant) is delivered over slow building accordion lines, retaining the main melodies from the original, but with an added darkness in its variant form. The song switches gear around the half way mark, with delay-laden percussion splashed on to the canvas.

Two of the highlights from the band’s debut album are up next, both in very different guises. Who Are the Strange (Variant) is a spine-chilling hymn to the absurd whilst The Lamb (Variant) moves on from the vocal-only original, with deep, distorted organs under-pinning the track.

The Lamb (Variant) sounds as if it was recorded in a deserted, haunted church on the Yorkshire moors. Maybe it was? Anyway, I prefer this new variants version of the song, even though it makes me feel a little uneasy.

Singing Camberwell Beauty (Variant) has the feel of a more pastoral Portishead, and would be perfect for use in a Channel 4 Christmas Ghost story. Producers take note.

Horratia (Variant) is a disturbing soundtrack to accompany “the story of an aging B-movie actress revisiting her life and career.. all but forgotten, except in the minds of obsessed horror/sci-fi convention-goers.” One of my favourite performances on the album, I love the way the keyboards gently drift into the mix before the heavily-processed drums make their presence felt.

The album ends with it’s longest track. The 11 minute plus Positive Negative (Variant) feels like the soundtrack to a late 60s psychedelic film, with off-kilter drums and sharp ride cymbals on top of mournful keyboards and the cleanest vocals on the album. The clarity of the vocals makes the clever production effects, added at the end of some lines, all the more powerful. This song has to be experienced with headphones, there is so much happening, with little nuanced touches revealing themselves on subsequent plays.

Positive Negative (Variant) is a powerful end to this well sequenced album, and offers a good taste of what might be in the pipeline for Cobalt Chapel for their next album.

Buy Variants by Cobalt Chapel on Amazon

We Come Willingly (Variant)
Fruit Falls from the Apple Tree (Variant)
Who Are the Strange (Variant)
The Lamb (Variant)
Black Eyes (Variant)
Singing Camberwell Beauty (Variant)
Two (Variant)
Horratia (Variant)
Positive Negative (Variant)

Cobalt Chapel release a new digital EP, Mountain, on June 1st 2018. Cobalt Chapel are Cecilia Fage (Matt Berry & The Maypoles) and Jarrod Gosling (I Monster, Regal Worm and award winning Tim Bowness artwork).

Mountain is the first release since the duos debut album, which was released in early 2017. The EP’s title track displays a much fuller sound than the music on their debut. A buzzsaw synth line underpins this slice of twisted pop, and as usual, there are plenty of twists, turns and off-kilter hooks lurking just below the surface.

Unusual echo effects and distortion add a mood of quiet unease, as the pace changes towards the end of Mountain, propelling the song into a more Gothic / choral territory.

Like a soundtrack to a dusty old haunted fairground, Bohemia is chock-a-block full of Jarrod’s favourite vintage keyboards, with not a VST in earshot. The lyric-less piece is apparently inspired by a love for odd European soundtracks.

The third new track on the EP (track 4 is an edit of lead song Mountain), is the longest track clocking in at over 10 minutes, and is my favourite song on the EP. Canticle is a dark rallying-cry of hope against the spectre of terrorism, and an exploration of escape, through nature, from the anxiety and intensity of city life.

The first section features gentle, beautiful treated vocals from Cecilia Fage, and like much of Cobalt Chapel’s music, evokes the sound of the late 60s / early to mid 70s.

The pace then dramatically shifts up a couple of gears, as layers of organ and spacey keyboards suddenly give way to the chaos and despair (clearly referencing the subject matter) as the music fights to break through the audibly distorted, visceral fog of fear. It is certainly uneasy listening, but often music has to challenge and disturb you to make its point, and Canticle is often dark and emotionally disturbing.  This heavy, powerful track ends on what feels like a celestial journey.

Canticle is an intensely moving piece of music, and hints at the steady progression in Cobalt Chapel’s development. The music on the Mountain EP builds on the psychedelic, choral and keyboard driven sound of their debut and adds a new-found emotional intensity.

If you have not heard any of the duo’s music, the Mountain EP would be a good starting point, so dive in.

Mountain is available to stream or buy from 1st June 2018 on all digital platforms.

1. Mountain
2. Bohemia
3. Canticle
4. Mountain (Edit)

Pre-order the digital Mountain EP on Amazon.