Just as it seemed as if the Broken English Club formula - surgically precise technoid drum programming cutting against the diseased tissue of industrial noise - was in danger of becoming a victim of its own perfection, Ealing-born producer Oliver Ho rescued his Ballardian industrial post-punk project from stale repetition and hooked his audience back in.

By throwing his gaze beyond the concrete of the Westway and the London suburbs he grew up in, deep into the accursed fields and forests of rural England, he found a home amongst the druids and a fertile source of inspiration for his thrillingly dark ambient noise project Slow White Fall.

If Oliver Ho's musical endeavours had equivalents in Ben Wheatley's filmog, Slow White Fall is the Kill List to Broken English Club's High Rise; a nightmarish netherworld where sinister chanting and occult ritual killing substitute the far more mundane horrors BEC shines a harsh white light on. This foray into the murderous backwoods of the English psyche rubbed off on Ho's main project and lent 2022's superb Artificial Animal an extra sinister layer of meaning that would've been absent if he had been content to tread shallow creative waters after the success of the White Rats trilogy.

The twin powers of modernist paranoia and ancient superstition are back in full force on SOLAD, released on Ho's own Death & Leisure imprint: let's see what eldritch horrors Oliver has dredged up from the post-Covid hinterlands of human experience for us...

Songs of Love and Decay: track by track.

  1. A Shallow Lake opens the album with a classic bit of BEC-patented spookiness and machine gun percussion rattle over which "The...lake" is repeated like an ominous mantra. The title here is an evocative bit of scene-setting of the kind that Ho has been doing since the first Broken English Club release opened with a track called "A Square Shaped Room". See also: "Nursing Home" from Suburban Hunting. You always know where you are from the moment the needle hits a Broken English Club record, and it's never anywhere pleasant.
  2. Crawling goes straight in with the jackhammer industrial techno syncopation, laced with the by-now familiar whine of distortion that has become one of Ho's trademarks.
  3. England Heretic's title got me going "yes we get it Ol, you're attuned to the ancient mystical dark magick that permeates the very soil on which we walk. Why don't you sacrifice a fatted calf on Ealing Common about it?" (I'd pay to come and watch this, btw). The song itself does however manage to convey a lot with no more than three or four different simple synth lines.
  4. Love and Decay unites ghostly, mangled vocal samples with a thudding, warehouse-ready kick; the most straightforwardly techno-sounding track so far.
  5. Death Cult: "pray...kneel...dream...kill" Ho's processed voice intones, over a stomping, clapping, hi-hatted four-to-the-floor beat. The rave is well under way. Or should that be the ritual? You see where I'm going with this.
  6. Vessel of Skin opens with an uncharacteristically saucy synth riff that continues through the song accompanied by guitar whine and primitive 808 clicks & claps that recall Sandra Electronics. Like a minimal electronic cover of You Really Got Me. Which is a hell of a concept to think about.
  7. Night Fall is a little on the monotonous side of 4/4 but with some orchestral flourishes, processed vocals and insistent arpeggios keeping things interesting. Another "let's hear it in the club before passing judgement" moment.
  8. Pacific Island Kill: not to hammer the JG Ballard inferences but a pacific island is where the big man spent a significant portion of his childhood (his family interned by the imperial Japanese military) was it not? A genuinely sinister and affecting piece which shows off Ho's slowly but surely broadening sonic palette and his mastery of stop-start dynamics.
  9. Lost Gods: urgent siren-like synth stabs lead into crushing slabs of percussion and squalling distortion. Tantalisingly liminal metallic guitar textures creep in towards the end; not the first nod to Ho's grindcore-soundtracked adolescence in BEC's oeuvre and probably not the last.
  10. Prisoner: a competent but largely forgettable acid bleeper.
  11. Sacred Sacrifice lets you know right from the title that it's going to be more Slow White Fall than Broken English Club, and the ensuing cocktail of spectral voices and distorted sounds (guitars? electronics? It's ambiguous) confirms this. There's something oddly soothing about this one, however. An island of tranquility amidst the choppy waters of ...Love and Decay.
  12. Ghost is where a strange new noise enters the BEC sonic lexicon. Somewhere between a rusty spring uncoiling and an old overheated desktop PC telling you in no uncertain terms that something wasn't ejected properly. I appreciate this noise and look forward to hearing it again on future Broken English Club tracks.
  13. Non Place: here's where the album's most interesting and satisfyingly steel-tipped rhythms have washed up. Rhythmic, but not necessarily danceable; a trade-off anyone working in the realms of industrial must be willing to make.
  14. The Occult Body: at an hour and five this album feels at least one track too long, and while there may be one or two in the middle I haven't firmly identified as filler, there is no doubt in my mind that Songs... would be none the poorer if it ended on Non Place (or perhaps even Ghost) instead of this BEC-by-numbers snoozer. Not bad by any means, but hardly essential listening either.

Overall, SOLAD gives Broken English Club fans exactly what we want and expect, with enough surprising quirks along the way to keep things interesting. It's also representative enough of where Oliver's sound is coming from and where he's going with it that a new listener can get a good feel for the project overall.

I'm in no mad rush to listen to the entire album again immediately, but there's enough here to make me want to come back to it another time and in another place - maybe in a deserted airport car park, or perhaps up to my knees in a haunted peat bog. A solad 7/10 effort.