Album of the week with Talk Show: Pulsating in the fear vacuum

Highlights: London band Talk Show has released their debut album, "Effigy" Talk Show's album seems like a conceptual work, a danced-through, sweaty, paranoid, desperately euphoric party night on the brittle rock above a lava fissure. Singer Harrison Swann, bassist George Sullivan, guitarist Tom Holmes and the precise drummer Chloe MacGregor manage to generate a sound that is not only musically very trendy, but also electrifying. Talk Show make music that captures the zeitgeist of constant social and political tension.

The Prodigy, LCD Soundsystem, industrial rock? Everything is coming back, but rarely so brutally and consistently drilled into the current fear zeitgeist as with the London band Talk Show. And: News from Idles.

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Post-punk band Talk Show

Photo: Daniel Topete

Album of the week:

The unexpected forces that can be unleashed when listening to old records by The Prodigy can be heard on the band's debut album Talk Show. Yes, really, The Prodigy. And not necessarily the notorious “Firestarter” version, but the earlier one, the one with apocalyptic-technoid tracks like “Weather Experience” or “Poison”. In addition, the quartet, which comes from the still booming post-post-punk scene in South London, mixes even more influences from the nineties and noughties: Nine Inch Nails (NIN) and similarly self-torturing industrial rock, the urban bass pressure of LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture, the smoldering one, Sinistre by Suuns from Canada, the Chemical Brothers of the “Exit Planet Dust” era.

Doesn't that sound particularly original? It isn't, at least not when you describe it so matter-of-factly. What singer Harrison Swann, bassist George Sullivan, guitarist Tom Holmes and the precise drummer Chloe MacGregor manage to do is generate a sound that is not only musically very trendy, but also electrifying. "Effigy" has a kind of raw, pulsating energy that is rarely heard in this consistency, most recently last year with the electro-noise rockers Model/Actriz, who fish in similar references. Talk Show's album seems like a conceptual work, a danced-through, sweaty, paranoid, desperately euphoric party night on the brittle rock above a lava fissure.

When he wrote the first lines of the brilliant but annoying opening track "Gold," he had the feeling of a climax in mind, says songwriter Swann, "feelings of frustration and turmoil, tension and relaxation. We looked at the early Prodigy and songs with that kind of energy, and that helped us shape the rest of the track." At the beginning of the song, the protagonist nervously plays with the gold coins in his pocket, but the wealth doesn't kick. “There's a hole in my head” he repeats manically in the chorus, which is of course a nod to Trent Reznor's NIN classic “Head like A Hole”: No “god money” in the world can provide relief. The fear vacuum of hopeless, dark, oppressive times must be filled with other things - drugs, excess, sex, lots of loud, driving music.

Talk Show make music that captures the zeitgeist of constant social and political tension. Catastrophe is constantly lurking in these mercilessly thrashing, sawing and whipping hellish funk grooves. “Just feel it/ just feel it,” Swann implores with a lascivious growl in “Gold.” “We get closer and closer,” he whispers in “Closer,” but that doesn’t mean intimacy, but rather a step to the edge of an abyss. “Disaster waiting to happen,” it says in “Oh! You're! Alles! Mine!”, but also: “I don’t have the answer, I just have the question.”

Talk show

Effigy

Label: Missing Piece Records (Membrane)

approx. €28.99

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February 16, 2024 6:47 p.m

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No answers, just intoxicated catharsis. The soul has long been sold, the slowly exhausted party guest muses to the oppressive bass as he looks at his stressed face in the puddles of spilled beer on the dance floor: “Thousand empty bottles/ Reflections on the floor.” But what the heck? The music pushes him and the crowd, fidgeting with angular, twitching movements, without mercy, further into the feverish "Panic", which has nothing in common with the Smiths song, but has a lot in common with Nick Cave's "Red Right Hand" in a Marilyn Manson version .

At the end, in the almost flawless dance track “Catalonia,” you know where this nightmare party of our time took place. And Talk Show, long celebrated in their homeland, recommend themselves as an interesting band that boldly experiments with genres and styles in order to capture their diffuse but alarming attitude to life into a nervous, disturbing distortion, "Effigy", of our unsteady times. Suddenly it doesn't sound so nostalgic anymore.

(7.9/10)

Listened briefly:

Idles – »Tangk«

Idles from Bristol have also noticed that LCD Soundsystem's post-punk funk from the noughties is popular again. The punk rock band, disrespectfully described here as "Mods with an awareness craze", is collaborating with James Murphy on their fifth album. The irony of the track in question "Dancer" is perhaps that you can't dance to it (and the Sleaford Mods can't do that either). can do better without a collaboration). Idles have perfected their special sound of brutalist but well-intentioned social criticism on the excellent "Ultra Mono" (2020), and since "Crawler" (lots of soul, ambient experiments) they have been trying out new things - such as completely unironic love songs against the world frustration. Unfortunately, they ended up with U2 in tender hymns like “Idea”, “A Gospel” and “Grace”. If not even Coldplay, whose famous “Yellow” beach walk video in the clip for “Grace” is trimmed to Joe Talbot’s singing using AI. Creepy! But in the context of Idles, it's so amazingly obvious that it could almost seem cool again. But only almost. Fortunately, the old idles, grimly thrashing around on worn-out bones, can still be found on "Tangk", for example in "Gift Horse" and in the beautifully mainstream and anti-harmony "Hall & Oates". It doesn't always have to be the second or third albums that are "difficult" and disorientating. At least it's fun.

(7.0/10)

Liz – “Amy Winehouze”

As we all know, “Billie Jean” is one of those songs that makes everyone sway their hips or nod their heads, no matter how inappropriate the location. Rapper Liz is still waiting for such a compelling hit, even if her own Girlboss track called “Billie Jean” is pretty cool. The 25-year-old from Frankfurt am Main is not afraid of big ambitions and role models: her debut album full of self-confident street rap was called “Mona Liza”, the successor is now “Amy Winehouze”. Liz has now moved to Berlin, which is known to be an even tougher place, and immediately longs for the “Main Grau” and the prefabricated buildings of her hometown. At the same time, she no longer wants to answer the phone “when the street calls” and no longer wants to blow “3 grams” out of her nose every night. The fear of falling (again) into drugs and loneliness can be felt in each of the 15 tracks that drift through Berlin's glittering and gutter nights. It's an album that serves as an impressive showcase for Liz's many talents and skills. This contrasts in a very exciting way with the oppressive, often touching crisis mode of her soul, which she discusses in the texts. Musically, with her expanded circle of producers, she now covers a wide spectrum of melancholic ballads (“Amy Winehouze”), hard-hitting rap (“100%”) and longing, danceable dance-pop (“Fahren”). On the way to becoming the great drama queen of German rap.

(7.8/10)

Helado Negro – “Phasor”

There is a lot of talk right now about whether machines equipped with artificial intelligence can do art. Until that happens, it will still be people who breathe soul into the devices. Like the New York Latino Helado Negro, one of the gentlest songwriters and tech nerds in the contemporary indie folk scene. He named his new album after an effects pedal for guitars that is mostly used to play dub reggae. However, there is hardly a trace of it on his album, which in tracks like “Colores del Mar” or “Echo Tricks Me” sounds more like pensive, entrancing Tropicália; as if Dan “Destroyer” Bejar had had a contemplative session with Gilberto Gil. It's not the device that dictates the genre, but the user. Before recording “Phasor,” Helado Negro, whose real name is Roberto Carlos Lange, spent some time with the legendary “Sal-Mar,” the gigantic electronic musical instrument that Salvatore Martirano built at the University of Illinois in 1969. His track “LFO (Lupe Finds Oliveros)” celebrates (in Spanish) electronics pioneer Pauline Oliveros and Fender amplifier designer Lupe Lopez. With so much musical homage to one's ancestors, one could easily forget that despite all his droll sound experiments, Lange also writes compellingly beautiful, warm-hearted songs - including the wistful "Wish You Could Be Here" and the swinging "Best For You And Me". A good spirit in the machine.

(8.0/10)