It's about that time of year when the days get shorter, the weather gets crisper and I can finally get a decent night's sleep and go two hours without requiring a shower and a change of clothes for the first time since mid-March. Just around the corner looms that inevitable feature of the later months - no, not a premature explosion of Christmas deocrations, I'm talking about end-of-year album lists. So as to avoid panicking and rattling off 10 of the most fair-to-middling releases I absently threw on while doing the washing up in 2023, n0teeth is beginning the countdown now (in no particular order) so as to make sure only the releases I've genuinely enjoyed and properly had time to sit down and consider make it to the final list.
Before I get stuck into it, an apology for yesterday's n0teeth no-post. My excuse is that I went to the British Library to try and listen to a saucy bit of KLF gear they've recently acquired and, having failed to do that (probably by asking the wrong person), went for "just a quick after-work pint" with a pal who happens to work in that hallowed red brick postmodernist temple of knowledge, which turned into "watching a pipa performance on Deptford beach at low tide":
By the time I rolled home I was too tired and inebriated to write a post so without further ado, here is today's main order of business...
Album and EP review: The Lunacy of Flowers - How Could You Let Me Grow To Then Just Let Me Die? / Heave A Sigh
I believe in madness, in the truth of the inexplicable, in the common sense of stones, in the lunacy of flowers, in the disease stored up for the human race by the Apollo astronauts. - JG Ballard
Real heads know that once upon a time the Tallinn-based Lunacy of Flowers was the London-based Dave.I.D. (aka David Hedges), whose 2011 album Response still holds up as one of n0teeth's favourite releases of the 2010s:
It seems the years have not mellowed Hedges in the slightest - quite the opposite, in fact. Nor have they let his work ethic slip. The prolific DJ, producer and vocalist has found time in between recording his monthly online radio show to unleash an album and a fifth of his trademark post-punk electronic angst, with vocals alternately sardonic and melancholy, rhythms swinging from martial and grandiose to nervy and rapidfire.
Here at n0teeth Towers we try not to read too much into lyrics for fear of embarrassing ourselves, but it's hard not to relate lead single Heave A Sigh's refrain of "This is reaction, this is reaction" to the increasing atmosphere of kneejerk nationalism and isolationist paranoia currently haunting the UK (I couldn't say what it's like in Estonia at the minute - answers on a postcard). However, deft songwriter that he is, Hedges never spells anything out explicitly, and the ambiguity between the politcal and deeply personal has been a hallmark of his lyrics from the beginning.
Given that How Could You clocks in at a nice concise 33 minutes and change, a listener with a longer attention span than mine might be demanding to know: where's the rest? Fear not, for the album was quickly followed up by the Heave A Sigh EP:
The closing track "Fatma" has become a particular obsession of mine because it, for lack of a better term, fucking ROCKS. Balls-outedly so. Crashing martial drums and screaming synths give way to NIN-esque guitar squall and Hedges' impassioned vocal delivery, which turns on a dime from mournful intonation to urgent bark. With this year's releases LoF has set a high standard for just how dark darkwave can be.
Dave.I.D. is dead, long live the Lunacy of Flowers!