Style: post-metal, sludge metal, shoegaze, noise rock, stoner rock, post-hardcore (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of:  Parannoul, Asian Glow, Neurosis, Boris
Country: South Korea
Release date: 15 May 2025

Modern medicine is amazing. People have lived well over a year with an artificial heart, and doctors can perform entire heart transplants. Alas, the human being still needs a heart, be it a machine or originally somebody else’s, and a person would wither and die almost instantly without the blood-pumping organ. South Korea’s Baan have a mission: rip out the still-beating heart from four genres and try to keep the result alive for sixty minutes. According to their Bandcamp, Baan aim to be “Doom but not boring / Screamo but not crying / Hardcore but not macho / Shoegaze but not sucks.” Dodging all four of those pitfalls while playing those genres is gonna require a musical miracle to occur on Neumann. Do Baan achieve what doctors cannot?

Let’s proceed one by one. Neumann certainly avoids the crying part of screamo by not being screamo beyond some halfheartedly shouted harsh vocals; the record also contains some amateur cleanly sung, crowd-chant adjacent cleans. Both vocal styles are completely obliterated by the mix to the point of being nearly inaudible—they may have recorded them from across the street—rendering them a strident nuisance. Similar to the self-described “screamo” aspect of Baan’s sound, the macho part of hardcore, by virtue of mostly avoiding true punkiness, is eschewed by Baan. Those two soul-of-the-genre omissions are cheating, though, and Neumann is really post-y, noisy, atmospheric sludge metal, with the atmospheric part coming from shoegaze and stoner rock influence.

Thankfully, the doom metal (read: sludge and post- metal) parts are not boring, and the shoegaze aspect don’t sucks [sic]! Fuzzed out guitars and Baan’s love of noisy amplifiers drive Neumann, and the South Korean band have a keen ear for melody and rhythm, with wistful yet hard-hitting guitar parts and dynamic, Mastodon-esque drumming. “Birdperson 새사람” has the first shoegaze part around 3:40 with airy guitars above pummeling double bass, but it’s not until the second track “Early Bird Dies Fast” where Baan hit their stride, the spacey trem picking of the simultaneously woolly yet shimmery guitars playing a beautiful tune—almost nostalgic in tone, as if Astronoid wrote stoner doom. The strongest asset in the band’s arsenal, however, is their weaponization of noise, with exemplary moments like the middle breakdown of “Sing a Brave Song 2 씩씩한 노래를 불러라 2” and the sludgy violence of “Reversal of a Man.” The bass playing is also killer, but unfortunately it almost never makes an appearance with the exception of “Sing a Brave Song 1 씩씩한 노래를 불러라 1” where it gets significant time leading. 

Despite the strength of the riffs and drumming, the album wears itself thin within forty minutes, the schtick played out. By the end of the three-part “Sing a Brave Song 씩씩한 노래를 불러라,” I’m snoozing at the prospect of more Baan, and the boring track “Not Yet” contributes nothing that previous songs like “Histrionic” hadn’t done better. Moreover, the closer, “Oldman 헌사람,” plays into a tedious atmospheric intro that lasts for several minutes before recapping with uninspired shoegaze vocals from Asian Glow; so, I’m forced to admit that while the shoegaze instrumental sections don’t sucks, the shoegaze vocals sucks. Baan clearly had fun tinkering with their amplifiers and jamming out—at the expense of a more concise, better album. 

South Korea is truly a hotbed for noisy, homemade shoegaze recently (Parannoul, Asian Glow, Huremic), and Baan have certainly made a name for themselves with the release of Neumann. Their mix of energetic, growly, and fuzzy guitar tones with passionate and delicate melodies contributes something new to their scene. The band just needs an editor and a better singer. But fans of everything from post-metal to punk will find something to enjoy in Neumann—I certainly did.

Recommended tracks: Early Bird Dies Fast, Histrionic, Sing a Brave Song 1-3 씩씩한 노래를 불러라 1-3
You may also like: Meth., The Angelic Process, Glassing, Huremic, Sadness
Final verdict: 6/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram

Label: independent

Baan is:
반재현 [Baan Jae-hyun]
김진규 [Kim Jin-gyu aka April 28th]
이성재 [Lee Seong-jae]
장진웅 [Jang Jin-ung]

The post Review: Baan – Neumann appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: experimental rock, noise rock, post-rock, post-punk, avant-folk (mixed vocals, spoken word)
Recommended for fans of: Sprain, Swans, A Silver Mount Zion, Slint, Maruja, Talk Talk
Country: California, United States
Release date: 1 May 2025

Stitched together out of thousands of hours of studio recordings, Talk Talk’s 1988 painstakingly crafted masterpiece, Spirit of Eden, was a landmark album for post-rock. The band sat in a blacked out room equipped with an oil projector and strobe light twelve hours a day for several months, listening to the same six tracks on repeat; session musicians would jam for hours on end only for Talk Talk to use mere seconds of the result; and the group recorded with a twenty-five person choir only to decide “nah, this ain’t it.” Spirit of Eden is a mosaic, and the tiles are treasures plundered from endless hours of tapes. That the project came together as seamlessly as it did is remarkable—one could not listen to Spirit of Eden for the first time and discern that it was sutured together note by note.

To create their debut record Motherfucker, I Am Both: “Amen” and “Hallelujah”…, Shearling—born out of the recently defunct noisy post-rock band Sprain—have similarly sewn together segments from hundreds of hours of largely improvisational recordings. The result is a single, monolithic (Motherfucker is a single sixty-two minute track) slab of noisy post-rock, avant-folk, and obnoxious British post-punk.

Motherfucker is cinematic in scope, driven by the lyrics which cover a bifurcated narrative—one side about Idaho; the other, Eden. Prosaic yet poetry, the wordsmithing is intriguing with the two stories weaving in and out of each other in a stream-of-consciousness rambling. Occasionally, the poetry touches on brilliant. Highlights include: “And the spots on our Appaloosa¹ hide / Might be mistaken for constellations at night / By obligated stars and half-imagined lines / Splattered intentionally there against the night sky” and the vulgar honesty of “I know I’m naked / Eve’s cunt obscured now / By the branch of a huckleberry bush / Adam’s cock now / So tightly sheathed by a palm frond / Before the mirror I too place a hand over / My little Appaloosa / Tucked silently away in his little stable.” The storyline reads as an allegory for queer shame from growing up in Idaho—the Appaloosa taking on an apotheosized and subverted role². The intricate symbolism is maddeningly dense, however, and some of the literary devices are implemented on the amateurish side, albeit fitting the crazed descent into madness of the storytelling.

The bard of this chaotic story, Alexander Kent, provides an impassioned vocal performance that will make or break the album for many. His first vocal entry after the first 4:00 of instrumental noodling, dissonance, and feedback is an incredibly unpleasant moan. From there, he ranges from dramatic spoken word to the rambled shouting of a madman, from operatic croons to gruff, almost-growled barks and wailing moans. His voice drips with pain—maybe some malice—from years of shame and stigma, and the screams can be cathartic (the intermittent large climaxes are the prime examples), but for an unfortunate portion of the time, Kent’s atonal shouts and vocal deliveries are grating, horrific for listening; he needs to save the aggressive shouts for the crescendos lest they ruin their gravitas… which they certainly do. The godawful singing fits the vulgarity and verisimilitude of the lyrics, but Kent should focus on a more subtle delivery when the music calls for it. 

The music on Motherfucker traverses a diverse range of influences. The record is spliced together from a mix of phone-recorded demos, jams, live recordings, and traditional studio sessions, Shearling carefully attempted to put together the recordings into a cohesive sonic epic à la Talk Talk… emphasis on attempted, though. The songwriting of Motherfucker transcends stream-of-consciousness into the nonsensical. Climaxes materialize out of nowhere; Pharoah Sanders-esque saxophone parts or home-made Gamelan bells are equally as likely to be played by Shearling; ethereal industrial styles reminiscent of Lingua Ignota make their appearances in between the abrasive noise rock; and non-Western drumming styles may transition into glitchy electronic beats. Nary a consideration is made for transitions, either. Even the final five minutes after the final epic climax—the clear high point of the album is from 38-46 minutes as the bass pulsations lead into increasingly potent doses of screaming and crushing instrumentals—feel like they have little thought put into how they fit into the flow, with flatulent, deflated horns and some final random screams closing out the track. Shearling ensure the listener never knows what’s coming next.

Producing an album sewn from several different recording methods proves difficult for Shearling, too. Unlike Spirit of Eden which feels impossible to know was blended together as it was, Motherfucker’s collage never coalesces completely. Whatever instrumental section currently backs the vocals is unduly emphasized in the mix, and the clash of dynamics and styles renders Motherfucker a disappointingly and disjointedly assembled album. Shearling achieved an opus as haywired as it is intense, yet they get lost in the sauce doing so, the songwriting too scatterbrained for its own good. 

Many post-rock albums have suffered from over-ambition in the past forty years, and Motherfucker suffers for it, too; yet, Shearling have certainly achieved something admirable here—granted, over-long, insane, and extremely challenging (and frankly painful). To improve on the deep compositional flaws, Shearling ought to look back to Spirit of Eden. Finally, that Motherfucker is part one of a massive two-part epic must be mentioned. Clearly, Shearling are overflowing with ideas—hundreds of hours of them—so I hope they manage to restrain themselves without losing the ambitious charm so central to their identity.

Recommended tracks: it’s a one track album…
You may also like: Cime, Natural Snow Buildings, Ken Mode, Sumac & Moor Mother
Final verdict: 4/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram

Label: independent

Shearling is:
Alexander Kent: Vocals, Engineering, Production, Cover Art Design, Guitar, Synthesizer, Trombone, Samples, Hammered Dulcimer, Banjo, Harmonium, Accordion, Singing Saw, Percussion, Taishogoto, Organ, Glockenspiel, Mellotron, Mandolin, Autoharp, Piano, Bells
Sylvie Simmons: Guitar, Synthesizer, Organ, Hi-C Programming, Samples
With guests:
Wes Nelson: Bass, Upright Bass
Andrew “Hayes” Chanover: Drums
Rachel Kennedy: Vocals
Mate Tulipan: Tenor Saxophone, Trombone
Ian Thompson: Alto Saxophone

1. The state horse of Idaho with a splotchy hindquarters resembling a Dalmatian. ︎
2. I mean, check out that album cover. In the context of this being a queer narrative, it is certainly striking. ︎

The post Review: Shearling – Motherfucker, I Am Both: “Amen” and “Hallelujah”… appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Experimental Rock, Art Rock, Noise Rock (mostly clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Dead Kennedys, Modest Mouse
Country: Colorado, United States
Release date: 10 January 2025

One of my favourite pastimes when I was younger was drawing. I enjoyed the act of creation, of forcefully extracting something from the infinite comfort of non-existence. But I was also a perfectionist; I hated the thought of painting the “wrong” colour or penning a line of ink in the “wrong” place. So, I developed a sketchy, fuzzy kind of art style, usually using pencil, which meant that I never had to commit to an idea; I could always change my mind later, or blame the messiness on the art style itself. There is a vulnerability in being public, in being clear and precise and unapologetic. Hiding in the safety of the messy, uncommitted corner, I could always anaemically defend against any criticism of my work with a “well it’s just a sketch, anyway”.

TULPA‘s latest release, Plum Pinball, feels like it comes from a very similar place: one of defensiveness, of wanting to create but in a non-committal way—of fear. The title track, “Plum Pinball”, even hints at this masturbatory false bravado: “shut up and listen, I’m plum pinballing” says ‘I am important, shut up and listen to this art I created to pleasure myself and myself only (unless you like it and want to join in, as well)’. Two hands are better than one.

This is the case for many experimental albums: the would-be artist wants to create music but (a) does not know how to play an instrument, (b) does not know how to sing, (c) cannot construct songs, (d) cannot write lyrics… take your pick. TULPA can do some of these things, some better than others, but none of them extremely well. They struggle to create music in the same way a snake struggles to shed its skin—they instinctively know that they can do it, but it is a time-consuming, labour-intensive, uncomfortable process.

On first listen, Plum Pinball is about as enjoyable as a root canal. On “True Crimes”, the shrieking distorted guitar, the nasally scream-singing, and the perfectly milquetoast rhythm section make you regret the sin of having ears. The lyrics on “Part-Time Mortician” read as though someone trained an AI chatbot on edgy YouTube comments written by preteens underneath Jordan Peterson videos: “And my friends could all choke, and my family could choke / On their smoke, and I’d laugh ’cause I know that it’s what they deserve. / (D.A.R.E.) / (Soft eugenics).” I’d suggest taking a chill pill, but this band already seem overmedicated.

On the other hand, if you’ve got a masochistic side and listen to this album a few times, it grows on you, like a particularly aggressive melanoma. There are some redeemable aspects: the vocalist has a distinctive timbre and significant power considering just how high of a register they sing in—for example, on “The New Black Something Something”. “Mission Tripperz” is about as close as this album gets to indie rock and would be well-received by fans of Modest Mouse. Despite its edgelord lyrics, “Part-Time Mortician” has catchy vocal melodies, an infectious momentum, and is one of the few tracks on the album that feels truly “fleshed out”, filling in empty spaces with synths and double-tracked guitars.

Is Plum Pinball groundbreaking? Not particularly. Is it catchy? Only when it isn’t actively repellent. Is it something I would listen to again? Almost certainly not. But would I listen to the next TULPA album? Absolutely. Art is meant to make you feel something, not necessarily something good, but something: it may intrigue or repulse you, but it should never bore you. Plum Pinball needs further distillation to its essential elements, more sincerity, and less intentionally sarcastic edginess in its lyrical themes in order to be a great album. TULPA need to allow themselves to be vulnerable.

Recommended tracks: Part-Time Mortician, Mission Tripperz
You may also like: DE()T, Bomb, Nunchukka Superfly
Final verdict: 4/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram

Label: independent

TULPA is:
– Jacob Gustafson (everything)

The post Review: TULPA – Plum Pinball appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Math Rock, Noise Rock, Experimental Rock (Mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Good Tiger, Closure in Moscow’s first and third albums, The Mars Volta, Eidola
Review by: Christopher
Country: France
Release date: 3 November, 2023

You shouldn’t judge an album by its cover, but that ghost is very appropriate for NORD’s latest ethereal release. With two albums under their belt, this French experimental math rock trio have taken time to craft something rather different on new EP, The Implosion of Everything That Matters. Their sophomore album, The Only Way to Reach the Surface, was an intense work of creative math rock which almost veered into blackgaze territory at times. At twenty-six minutes, follow-up release The Implosion of Everything That Matters forefronts the electronica influences that dominated the shorter, interlude-y tracks on their last album into their noisy rock style. 

On The Only Way to Reach the Surface that experimental math rock accounted for about 75% of their sound, while weird synth experimentation made up the remaining quarter; on The Implosion of Everything That Matters the ratio is flipped; hell, it’s more like 90%. The strange cyclical synth that opens “I. Candles” sets the tone for the record and NORD play with a lot of haunted sounding synth throughout,. “II. Truth Philters” is suffused by bittersweet organ swells, eventually drifting into a bridge that sounds like echoes of some haunted carnival over an infectious drum stomp, something that puts me in mind of Noctourniquet-era The Mars Volta. Meanwhile “III. Incantation” may be the most electronica-driven track on the album, replete with backing ambiences, buzzing synth bass, and some drum and bass inspired percussion.

Throughout The Implosion of Everything That Matters, Florent Gerbault’s anguished falsetto is wracked with emotion—coupled with the organ which often lurks in the background it makes for a rather disconcerting vibe. A guest performance from Yuki on “III. Incantation” provides haunted vocals and the recitation of something in Japanese which I can only imagine will be nihilistic. Though genre-wise this is a much less heavy release, emotionally The Implosions of Everything That Matters is an intense experience, running the gamut from funereal to disturbed.  

Moments of NORD’s former abrasive sound remain here and there. Dissonant synths and harsh vocals open “II. Truth Philters” in 7/4, just to remind you that this is ostensibly gritty math rock. The moments of harsh vocals and more noisy rock are few and far between, reserved for intros and climaxes. As a self-contained experiment it works but I do find myself missing NORD’s maniac older sound. I’ll never fault an artist for daring to evolve, but NORD are almost unrecognisable here and it’s not always for the better. 

While the harsher edges have been sanded down, NORD remain unabashedly experimental. Take “IV. Sexorcism” for example: the track is imbued with a Vangelis-like synthwave sensibility evocative of some dystopian city, bolstered by a synthetic percussion and a thick bass groove. The synths begin to go off-kilter, melting into a more irreverent section, perforated by a wraithlike sax solo overhead. Meanwhile, the elegiac title track has a funeral march-like beat with accompanying trumpet as though NORD are mourning for their own former sound, until segueing into a driving drum and bass groove with arpeggiated synth which builds to the final crescendo.

The Implosion of Everything That Matters is an intriguing evolution towards the uncanny for NORD, an experiment in alienated synths and a somewhat unhinged sense of sadness. It’s a record for a very particular mood which may limit its reach but it nevertheless taps into something deeply felt. I can’t quite get my head around it, but I mean that in a good way, I think. As much as I do wish a little more of their older sound remained in the DNA of this release, NORD remain an incredibly fresh voice in experimental rock who are absolutely worth listening to. 

Recommended tracks: II. Truth Philters, V. The Implosion of Everything That Matters
You may also like: The Mercury Tree, Black Peaks, Telomēre, Maraton
Final verdict: 7/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Label: Klonosphere – Facebook | Official Website

NORD is:
– Florent Gerbault (guitar, vocals)
– Romain Duquesne (bass, samples)
– Thibault Faucher (drums)
– Manuel Dufour (guitar, synth)

The post Review: NORD – The Implosion of Everything That Matters [EP] appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Experimental Rock, Math Rock, Microtonal, Progressive Rock (Clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: black midi, weird King Crimson, Kayo Dot, Battles, Squid, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s microtonal albums I guess
Review by: Christopher
Country: US-OR
Release date: 7 September, 2023

What the heck is a microtone? So: most Western music you hear is conducted on a typical 12-notes-to-the-octave scale, made up of semitones (A, A#, B, C, C#, etc). But these notes aren’t immutable and frequencies exist between those notes; microtones can be accessed within the 12-note scale (e.g. by bending guitar strings), and we can divide the octave into a different number of notes to access microtonal intervals—we just don’t often do so because it sounds “out of tune” relative to the 12-note scale we’re all used to. It’s analogous to the colour spectrum: we think in terms of red, blue, yellow, etc, but there are finer gradations of colour to choose from, as anyone who’s swatched a bathroom will know.¹

With that foregrounding out the way, let’s commence: The Mercury Tree! This Oregonian experimental rock threepiece are veterans of the underground, their proclivity for unorthodox innovation having not exactly proved a recipe for mainstream recognition. On previous outing Spidermilk, the trio decided “our music is just too accessible” and so began to play with microtonality; sixth album Self Similar continues that experiment. On both releases, The Mercury Tree divide the octave into seventeen equal divisions² (which they further subdivide into thirty-four and sixty-eight notes). Atop strange time signatures and polyrhythms aplenty, the result is disorienting, dissonant music that presents an active challenge to the listener.

Right from the disorientating continuing ascents of “Grown Apart” you know you’re in for some Weird Shit. The eerie ambiences, off-kilter lead lines, haunting vocals, and crashing noisy sections are back in force and turned to a variety of ends: whether it’s the driving desert rock rhythm of “Stay the Corpse”, akin to Queens of the Stone Age if their physiognomy was being warped by eponymous Thing from The Thing; the counting challenge of “Dreamwalking” where echoing plucks cycle contrapuntally in and out of making intuitive sense; or the terrifying “Binary” which makes simple acoustic chords sound nightmarish before exploding into possibly the heaviest section on the album as the double bass pedal pounds away and Ben Spees screeches “BABY, BABY, BABY, BABY” in fire alarm falsetto. The Mercury Tree are back and they’re harder to describe than ever before.

And they’re joined by some veterans of the avant-garde world. Daimon Waitkus (Jack O’ The Clock) provides the surreal percussiveness of  hammered dulcimer, tongue drum and psaltery, as well as providing guest vocals, on “Recursed Images” and the powerful closer “After the Incident”. Both are proggy excursions through a variety of eerie soundscapes, from ghostly clanging to thick mathy riffage to bubbling keyboard-driven chaos to the unexpectedly beautiful melodies that soar over the usual chaos on the final track. Meanwhile, “Self Similar” features Gabriel Riccio (The Gabriel Construct) on lead vocals, whose deeper timbre is a pleasing switch-up before turning disconcerting when harmonising with Spees. The haunting vibe (more than usual) gives way to a short explosion of harsh vocals before becoming, somehow, more haunted in its vibes as pensive ambiences glide over an outré piccolo bass riff.

The main problem with any work like this will always be accessibility. I really like what I hear on Self Similar, which proves a consummate blend of the two strands of The Mercury Tree’s style, but this is a band who will always be more intellectually interesting than emotionally connective. If you love watching Adam Neely and Jacob Collier expound on music theory esoterica and analysing jazz music theory then you’ll likely be very open to what The Mercury Tree are selling, but for most listeners there’s something necessarily Brechtian about this willful experimentation; such an inherently intellectualised approach to music can be somewhat distancing to the lay listener. And yet sometimes The Mercury Tree hit upon a vein of sublime sonic surreality, and I feel like they’re accessing something more real within me than they did on Spidermilk. 

Self Similar builds smoothly and confidently upon Spidermilk’s tentative foundations, successfully marrying the xenharmonic zaniness with their wild, mathy songwriting style in order to create a musical puzzle box that will prove infinitely rewarding to those willing to invest the necessary time and open-mindedness to access it. This is The Mercury Tree’s weirdest album yet, but it might also be their best, seeing them refine a defiantly unconventional sound unlike anything you’ve heard before. That alone is more than enough reason to take a chance on them. Listen. Then listen again. They might just open up a whole new sonic dimension for you.

Recommended tracks: Grown Apart, Stay the Corpse, After the Incident
You may also like: similar experimental rock: Jack O’ The Clock, The Gabriel Construct, Nick Prol & the Proletarians, Ventifacts; microtonal metal: Kostnateni, Blut Aus Nord, Jute Gyte, Scarcity
Final verdict: 8/10 (9/10 if you love outlandishly experimental music)

1. I can’t talk theory all day, I’ve got a review to write (also I don’t know much about music theory). For more on microtonality, I found this video a helpful crash course ︎
2. Why 17 equal divisions of the octave? The Mercury Tree explain in this interview ︎

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Independent

The Mercury Tree is:
– Ben Spees (vocals, electric and acoustic guitar, keyboards)
– Connor Reilly (acoustic and electronic drums)
– Oliver Campbell (bass, voice)

The post Review: The Mercury Tree – Self Similar appeared first on The Progressive Subway.