His digitally enhanced voice so reverb swaddled on the former that it’s as if a ghostly choir has filled the wings of a cathedral. Miller also appears in vocal form on ‘Faith’ and the aforementioned ‘Pavements’. It creates space for vocally spat malice and allows for sonic growth far beyond speaker-busting distortion. Whether it’s mangled piano clinks adorning the forlorn line “I already know where my grave is” on ‘Pavements’, down-tuned strings adding a cinematic bent to the climax of ‘Waiting Room’, or the paranoid thickets of deep bass creeping out like a sluggish ferry turning in an underground tunnel during ‘Stained Materials’, the production from Heyes’ former classmate Rainy Miller is lean, potent, and focused. Venomous bitcrushed power electronics are replaced with pensive drones and booming kicks. Here, however, that fury is angled internally rather than at the listener. Whilst this EP is less blown out than predecessor, And Salford Falls Apart, there is still a rage at the heart of it. Sometimes, at shows where everything is being put on the line and the crowd are open and receptive, the cap even comes off and it is in these moments of vulnerability that Heyes makes his hardest impact.īut, to get there, first you have to go through the wringer with him.Īrmour II is that wringer.
There’s something of Scott Walker in how he wears it, the height of the peak shifting depending on how trusting he seems to be of you. It stuck out like a pair of hammered thumbs from the rest of the footage and I couldn’t help but wonder – who was this man and why was he so intent on inflicting injury upon himself?īorn in Preston, based in Salford, Tom Heyes cuts an imposing figure: a tall, pale skinhead with a baseball cap often pulled down tight over his eyes. Convulsing against electricity wires on a grey rooftop an hour or so in, Blackhaine appeared like a burst-bonce Rubber Johnny wrenched from his chair. Experimental band Bomb Sniffing Dogs posted about a mid-lockdown screening of the film Any Body Can Be President (In The Play School Of The Damned) at the key Salford venue. I first stumbled across his work at The White Hotel (a fertile home of creativity in Salford that has helped propel Blackhaine, Iceboy Violet, Rainy Miller, and many more into underground prominence). North western rapper Blackhaine appears to be taking a comparable approach. The Canadian experimental folk musician Clara Engel describes their process as “not writing the same song over and over so much as writing one long continuous song that will end when I die”.
0 kommentar(er)
