April 2024: Everything Everything All At Once
Reviews of Everything Everything, Polinski and Jaguwar
Apologies, it’s been a minute - had to take off March to deal with some personal stuff. It’s a shorter installment this month, but there will be some exciting coverage over the next few months so hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already! And scroll to the bottom for the playlist - lots of great new music out in the last couple months to check out.
From the Pit: Everything Everything
Troxy, London, 5th April 2024
Everything Everything remain a slight oddity in the UK music scene. Somewhat genre-defying (art rock? Oddball indie? Hell, there’s definitely some math-ness on the early albums), they’ve shown remarkable longevity, releasing their seventh album at the start of March. Along the way there have been Star Trek samples, B-sides as good as anything on the albums (looking at you, Happsburg Lipp), and catchy popular bangers - they were briefly the soundtrack to BT Sport’s football coverage, a time when they were as close to pop stardom as they’d get following fourth album A Fever Dream.
Fast-forward through a pandemic which saw two quick releases in succession. Re-Animator was weird and slightly broken (the messed-up mastering on In Birdsong deliberately so; the demo track mix-up on the vinyl release for album closer Violent Sun unfortunate), and the marketing of follow-up Raw Data Feel focusing on AI-generated lyrics jarred, given how critical Jonathan Higgs’ unique & surrealist penmanship is to their sound, and has aged even worse since ChatGPT and the proliferation of thoughtlessly automated content1. Any doubts I had about the band reclaiming its former glories have been quelled by two things: latest album Mountainhead is full of quality musicianship and memorable bangers, and their live show remains a thrilling spectacle.
The setlist is packed with new album cuts, opening with The Mad Stone and its rapid-fire, TikTok-ready bridge. The crowd is on board too, singing along in full voice to the likes of The End of the Contender, Enter The Mirror (with its reflected-spotlight stage trick a stark visual) and for encore performance Cold Reactor. Higgs’ voice is on top form, vaulting across rapid-fire falsettos and the deeper snarls not really heard on material since 2015’s apocalyptic Get To Heaven. Guitarist Alex Robertshaw is an enigma - deftly switching between the simpler indie licks that open Wild Guess, but clearly capable of shredding to rival any guitar virtuoso, as when closing out the likes of crowd favourite Spring, Sun, Winter, Dread.
The new album focus is illuminated by a stunning backdrop of the titular mountainhead logo, the band bathed in dynamic coloured lighting design as good as I’ve seen at the Troxy. But there’s plenty of space in the setlist for the earlier albums, including crowd favourite Distant Past, which Higgs leaves partly to the audience with no real drop in volume or intensity. By the time we reach closer No Reptiles (possibly one of my favourite songs of all time), I realise I’ve had a massive smile on my face for the past hour; the rest of the crowd is likewise euphoric, continuing to chant the outro refrain down the streets into the night. It’s good to have Everything Everything back.
Support was provided by The Divorce - an understated four-piece band with dual male/female vocalists channeling the country vibes of Ferris & Sylvester. Delightful counterpoint belting, some intricate and unusual guitar-as-texture work, and enough song trope variation to keep you on your toes made for an enjoyable set after a personal run of slightly disappointing support acts.
On Rotation: Polinski - Meet Me By The Panamax Barricades
Released 5th April, 2024 on Data Airlines
I’m on the record as a massive 65daysofstatic fan - their synthesis of glitchcore breakdowns, anti-capitalist diatribes and technical innovation have had me hooked for well over a decade, as they’ve evolved from attention-deficit post-rock band, through phases of dance and movie/video game soundtracks (notably for No Man’s Sky) into their much more experimental incarnation today, building infinite music generation systems and eschewing standard music release structures. So, little surprise that I have a lot of time for key member Paul Wolinski’s synth-heavy side project efforts as Polinski. Based in Berlin, with a PhD in musical composition and a lead architect of the Infinite Wreckage system I wrote about last August, Polinski returns this year with a new mini-album out on Data Airlines (also home to baroque chiptuner Master Boot Record).
A follow-up to last year’s Telex From MIDI City, Meet Me By The Panamax Barricades carries that album’s atmosphere and worldbuilding, but adds a little more pulse and pace to proceedings. Opener and lead single The Matte Flex is a wash of optimistic synth lines and hyperspeed programmed drums, before degenerating into more sinister, panicked fare. Fractal Club, Let’s Go! perfectly encapsulates the algo-rave mood (AKA “club music for computer nerds”), deftly controlling moments of dance-like euphoria reminiscent of the We Were Exploding Anyway 65dos era with that hackathon soundtrack feel - I’m not sure if I should be off my face in an abandoned warehouse or off my face typing madly into a POSIX shell.
The album closes with ten-minute opus Nostalgia Lake Is Dying, Pt 1 & 2, whose second half threatens to shine a little optimism on what is a more panicked, frenetic album than its predecessor, before fusing those digital horn & string textures with the bass beats that characterise the thumping heart of the record. It may lack sonic variation at times, and its sound is unlikely to appeal to all, but the execution throughout is superb.
There’s a delightful evocation throughout of that same retrofuturist landscape from last year’s album - a sonic palette transporting you to an unrealised cyberpunk future, all neon lights, driving rain, post-capitalist resistance run on VHS tapes and hacker decks. (Even the vinyl release comes packaged in a floppy disk sleeve.) The lead single’s music video builds on this, derived from a functional operating system(!) constructed by the artist, all windows, alerts and snippets of 90s style forums and fake digital ‘zines. Fans of Neuromancer, Hypnospace Outlaw and other such media will be very much at home here. The release also coincides with the launch of Wolinski’s Komoy Noise Research Unit blog - a thoroughly entertaining read covering the lore and writing of the record, as well as algorithmic music generation, retro media and the politics of music. It’s a brilliant read and well worth your time.
Listen on Spotify | Listen on TIDAL
Have you heard… Jaguwar
Shoegaze is back in fashion in the 2020s - but emerging slightly ahead of the curve were Jaguwar, the German three-piece who worship at the altar of the Ring Modulator pedal. Jaguwar nailed their colours to the mast in 2017 with Ringthing, complete with Loveless-evoking cover art, and immediately won me over with their catchy playful melodies and the alternating male/female vocals with slight emo affectations. It wasn’t perfect - some of the song structures, whilst fun, are a little rote, and the male vocals/lyrics in particular occasionally grate - but it was a lot of fun, and made a splash on my radar and on what existed of the shoegaze community in the late-2010s.
The band have continued to plug away since then, releasing sophomore effort Gold in 2021 after a crowdsourced funding campaign to pay for the studio time. The recent popularity surge of Slowdive and the Gen-Z adoration for shoegaze may have left them slightly betwixt and between the behemoth legacy acts of the ‘90s and the newer kids on the block; however new album 1984, released on April 1st, shows them more than game to press on with their own unique style - and on the likes of Infinity’s A Time Bomb, some honest-to-god rock-out riffage and breathless drumming. A wonderful, European love letter to the genre.
Listen on Spotify | Listen on TIDAL
This Month’s Playlist
This is a harsh take; in their defence, the band worked closely with AI researchers to define a text generation system that learned from bespoke selected text sources, going through a curation process to write the lyrics in conjunction with the system output. On the other hand, the lead single Pizza Boy kicks off its chorus with “I’ll have a Coke / I’ll have a Pepsi now”.