Sunlore / Heartland Review (The Hardly remix)

These two LPs came to me via Tequila Sunrise and Cream of Turner but really via Freq... (the proper review is here - this one has ugly appendages)

...And they came with the coolest hand-made LP sleeves I’ve seen in ages. Beautiful, odd designs.

The Sunlore sleeve is a psyched wig-out of paint and scratches and burns, looking not unlike one of the shotgun paintings of William S Burroughs if he'd found himself knee deep in Max Ernst smears (you can see it being made on the label website).



The Heart Land sleeve is perhaps a riff on Throbbing Gristle’s original sleeve for Second Annual Report, consisting of a wrist-thick gatefold slab of industrial card and a label that should be attached to one of those TPS reports that Lumbergh was always trying to get Peter to attach in Office Space.



And if the sleeves are idiosyncratic, so is the music. Sunlore’s explorations sound like explorations, as if they will be songs sometime in the near future but haven’t quite evolved yet.

I haven’t decided yet whether this approach really works in the way they intended it to but there’s certainly enough interesting stuff here to make you dig deeper, to listen harder. Or maybe... No, there's definitely stuff in here, scratching to get out...

At times they sound a little like some of the early albums by Volcano The Bear before they went, ahem, pop with Classic Erasmus Fusion (Ok, they never went pop, they couldn't pop out if someone kidnapped their grandchildren) and they use a similarly odd blend of instruments and non-instruments: toys, pianos, organ drones, broken keyboards, bruised guitars...

These fragments sound like they’ll eventually get to some pretty intense places but right now they’re just winding up in style...

the music wants to be more music.. it wants musical progeny... musical babies....

Heart Land play with drones and cycles, but abandon formal structure for abstraction and fluxHeart Land play a similar field (I think it’s the same people) though theirs is a muddier approach, a denser vision, almost a shadow of the twinkling Sunlore album. Jung would listen to these two albums and smile. Heart Land play with drones and cycles, but abandon formal structure for abstraction and flux. Genres flip in and out of the mix; slight hints of jazz (This Heat style jazz i.e. notjazz which may be jazz - I don't really understand jazz) and psychedelia and folk and Dada. Tzara would have liked this, would have jigged in a robot costume, or dressed like a moat. He'd have skipped in stage to the detuned bells and Sapir-Whorf errors with a grin that could've smuggled aubergines...

Not quite beguiling yet but you’ll want to hear more.

Both albums are remarkably economical; a lot of artists would have half the tracks and simply extend the motif, hoping to bludgeon their way through repetition and familiarity. They know who they are. We could all name three bands on two hands.

But... neither of these collectives seem to want to fall into that commercial trap; the tracks end if anything a little too quickly, giving the impression of a low boredom threshold, or a lack of tape. These releases electrify the sheer oddness of the attention-defecit approach and the gamble associated with taking this route; people will not like these LPs simply because there's not enough repetition...

These albums are sighs; expect bellows in the future.

Keep watching. This label is a thrilling anti-capital conceit in this awful age of austerity. Reward and applaud these guys, even if the music isn't quite your thing. Buying some of these albums is a revolutionary act and this is said from the dull-sensed, detached and disinterested opinion of someone who didn't have to pay for them at all, who sucked them all up on the heavy and ever-open coffers of the mighty Freq...