Music to de-Truss your senses

Joanie, Mehmet Aslan and, er, Goatwhore to the rescue

Stephanie Cabral; Robbie Campbell

If you found yourself watching Liz Truss's conference speech today and feeling an irresistible urge to cleanse your eyes and ears with the nearest pointed object to hand, you have my sympathies. The combination of the scratchy voice and the uncomprehending eyes makes her hard to watch. And why is it that she remains completely calm when methodically taken apart by Gary Gibbon on C4 news and yet makes herself so angry when giving a speech that you feel the pork and cheese could be about to burst out of her at any moment? But the worst bit of all was the way, grinning as if accepting earned applause, she trotted on to the baritone strains of Moving On Up. The cognitive dissonance was explosive, a sensory overload akin to having Dick Van Cheadle's "pinch" device in Ocean's Eleven go off inside your head.

If you were anywhere near as infuriated by it as I was, your eyes and ears could do with some soothing, so here's a disparate roundup of the some good music I've come across this week.

Schadenfreude (single)

Joanie

Let's start with something dulcet. Joanie (@joanie4eva if you're on Instagram) is a singer-songwriter signed to the extremely hip indie label Permanent Creeps Records. Schadenfreude is described in the press release as "disco-inflected, elegant pop that is smart and confident and the perfect introduction to this compelling new artist". I can't argue with that. She has an EP to follow, called Neurotica, and I think you probably now have a sense of the territory. Joanie says she was "listening to a lot of late-Seventies disco songs when Schadenfreude was born", and if you think of the way Debbie Harry was probably listening to a lot of late-Seventies disco when Hart of Glass was born, and then add a dash of St Vincent, you'll be even warmer.

It's a fine song, but I strongly recommend you watch the video first if you can. It's a moving-mosaic effect, with Joanie in various guises, all moving, sometimes singing, but it's when some of them start shaving, covering their hair in green tape and peeling off strips of sticky stuff that it grabs your eyeballs. This is one of those magical moments when a good song and a good video combine to create something a thousand times the sum of the parts, like the Hurt video (Nine Inch Nails or Johnny Cash). You need to see the video only once, and it stays with you, redelivering its emotive punch whenever you hear the song.

The Sun Is Parallel (album)

Mehmet Aslan

Techno, in the specific sense -- as opposed to deep house, electro and so on -- accreted into its recognised form in about 1991, and in thirty years its various modes and archetypes have been comprehensively explored, with the result that nothing astonishingly new-sounding has come out for some time. Likewise it is hard to imagine anyone writing a piano etude that knocked Chopin's "Winter Wind" masterpiece into a cocked hat.

In the strobe-scorched acid-soaked sonic battlefield of a 3am warehouse this is of little consequence: clubbers don't need new; they just need punishing. But albums are a different matter. And seemingly millions of techno-ish albums are released with nothing obvious to distinguish them. I suspect they are bought more out of loyalty than because of any sparkling innovation they contain.

Some producers, however, exploit the album form properly and, rather than stringing a few dancefloor numbers together with a bit of aerated filler, turn out a coherent work that prevents you from concentrating on anything else, and I found Mehmet Aslan's new LP, The Sun Is Parallel, to be such a production. The spoken snippets, including "What you've got to remember is the world is a huge musical composition", somehow avoid pretentiousness and in any case are kept to a minimum, but what captivates is the expansive production with textures from techno, Krautrock and its descendants and world music. The blending and layering of synthesised and live elements is achieved in a way that suggests untold space -- quite mesmerising.

Aslan, a Swiss artist from a Turkish family, has a connoisseur's reputation. A thrifty release schedule has given him great cachet: for instance the For Discos Only imprint, with a catalogue including Luciano and Ricardo Villalobos, was resurrected for him. For me he has most kudos from having wittily called his debut The Mechanical Turk. I recommend his new album heartily.

Angels Hung from the Arches of

Heaven (album)

Goatwhore

At about the time that techno was finding its feet as a musical form in the late 1980s, a band called Carcass were playing small gigs at Planet X in Liverpool and northwest England's other finest slime pits. Carcass played brutally heavy but intricately constructed death metal with lyrics and artwork taken from pathology textbooks. The songs had titles such as Embryonic Necropsy and Devourment. They were perhaps a bit esoteric and in time the members drifted back into normal jobs. But while they were taking an extended and as far as they knew permanent break, something odd happened: a new generation of metal bands sprang up, to whom Carcass were icons, and they developed a standing and fan base orders of magnitude larger than when they were last active. Suddenly they were being asked to headline metal festivals across Europe.

It's a great story, and in my opinion their late success was thoroughly deserved because hiding behind the unsettling imagery and aural battery was a craft and musicality that set them apart from pure noise merchants.

This review is meant to be about Goatwhore, and the reason I mention Carcass is that this album immediately put me in mind of the old Merseyside doom crew. The alternating growls and snarls of the vocals; the complicated riffs following a determined logic more or less impenetrable to the listener; the tightness and use of split-second breaks: I'm sure these guys have Symphonies of Sickness and perhaps Even Reek of Putrefaction in their record collection. They are in fact old hands, having been around for 25 years, and this is the eighth album by the New Orleans band. Not everyone's cup of tea, certainly, but if you're even remotely intrigued by the sound of "47 minutes of ... death, black, thrash and sludge metal delivered with breathless intensity and an unrepentant bloodlust", put it on and give your neighbours a treat.