Charlotte Wessels
The Obsession
Charlotte Wessels delivers her most intense, cathartic and musically dynamic album yet in The Obsession. At the heart of this album is the seamless integration of pop-esque hooks, perfect for singing along to, powerful and more progressive leaning instrumentation, along with fully immersive personal and intimate lyrics.
Chasing Sunsets introduces the album with a rather epic start. Not only does it combine catchy hooks, heaviness, and waves of melodies throughout, Chasing Sunsets sees Wessels demonstrate her highly proficient vocal skills effortlessly with technically challenging vocal melodies. Dopamine, featuring Epica’s Simone Simons, ventures into pop realms. It’s perhaps not the most obvious song choice for Simons to be involved with on the surface but, sharing in the meaning behind the track, the emotional connection does come through. The album’s first single, The Exorcism, descends into the haunting depths and marks one of the darkest songs on the release. Alternating between more delicate sections and the thundering heavy, there’s a chaotic feel to the music that is apt for the message being conveyed. As well as the bombastic instrumentation throughout, Wessels again shows off her versatility and immense skill as a vocalist with her harsh growls and an enthralling held note.
The Obsession progresses through an array of moods across the following tracks. Soulstice is heartwarming yet also carries a melancholy aspect. As a listener in the Northern Hemisphere, it feels apt to reminisce over the current transition from summer into autumn. The Crying Room showcases further vulnerability taking form in a ballad style. It’s relatable and comforting—sharing that feeling of fear. Ode To The West Wind features Arch Enemy’s Alissa White-Gluz, a frequent collaborator with Wessels, and the track brings an intriguing darkness. White-Gluz’s harsh vocals add additional texture and power, as the song traverses through furious and unusual arrangements. Maintaining their tradition of taking inspiration from historical literature and art, this track paying homage to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Serpentine follows and offers a dark ballad. It’s moody and sumptuous in the textural layering of electronics, and vocal effects.
Praise brings a brighter and uplifting sound. Featuring a gospel choir and with organ parts thrown into the arrangement, it’s an unexpected genre shift that provides a ray of sunshine among the shadowy parts of the album. All You Are begins with an intimate opening. The prominent bass line gives the track a grounded sound, while vocals and piano melody lines in a higher register float above. The elegant softness of the main vocal melody hook continues beautifully throughout while the instrumental arrangement dynamically ebbs and flows. Vigor And Valor is given a heavier boost with the new Obsession line-up. Guitars are given a highly technical twist, the orchestration is crisper, and vocals revamped. The contrasting vocal layers in the verse produce an intense and foreboding effect before bursting into the ethereal soaring chorus. The track’s following segment Breath; is also given new life in a stunning orchestral arrangement. Leading to Soft Revolution (2024) one of Wessels’ most loved songs and one of her early releases as a solo artist, is given a thorough The Obsession reimagining injecting further heaviness and power. • HR
For fans of: Simone Simons, Floor Jansen, Ad Infinitum
‘The Obsession’ by Charlotte Wessels is released on 20th September on Napalm Records.
Johnny Foreigner
How To Be Hopeful
This has been a long time coming. Johnny Foreigner themselves would probably be the first to admit that; in the statement accompanying this album, they reveal it’s arriving 28 months past the intended deadline. Said statement also comes armed with the sort of purple prose you might expect from such a critical piece of the late 2000s’ / early 2010s’ indie intelligencia. How To Be Hopeful is described as “a pure product of chaos magic”, and “the least Johnny Foreigner of albums” in reference to its meticulous construction. As far as output itself goes, however, there’s no need for such downplaying at all. Thisis as inimitably Johnny Foreigner as anything they’ve ever done, which, eight years removed from their last full-length, is a really damn good thing.
Theirs isn’t the sort of assemblage of skills that tends to wear itself away, either. Like much of the indie-rock of the era, Johnny Foreigner resoundingly hold up on the basis of being an obelisk of creativity that works on its own time and charter. The vocals are yelpy and layered to where each individual contributor can be clearly made out, even if they aren’t directly poking out from behind someone else. There’s an emphasis on instrumentation that’s shaggy and jostling and uninterested in severing its frays. The lyrics, meanwhile, proudly wear the literary knots and complexities of a band with clear ideas, not mainstream win-more buttons. Very Johnny Foreigner in its ways, then. And it’s still really cool to hear, not just because their era continues to give in terms of quality music—both from its original propagators and that ones inspired by them—but because, even among them, Johnny Foreigner remain distinct. Songs like What The Alexei and Their Shining Path have the omnipresent kernel of melody within them, but plastering on every JF-ism renders them unique beasts in their own right.
Now, it should be iterated that the Johnny Foreigner catalogue is pretty star-studded, and How To Be Hopeful is kind of just ‘another one’ within it. They’re yet to surpass, say, Johnny Foreigner Vs. Everything in terms of what could be called a ‘signature’. But again, that sort of mindset feels of very little consequence. This is an album that can still fully exist outside of arbitrary hierarchies and rankings, thanks to an influx of passion and radiant energy that washes any such concepts away. That’s really where How To Be Hopeful elevates itself the most, and honestly, where it needed to. You can feel the dogged, independent spirit ceaselessly coursing away, of guitars bashing away or shimmering gently with equal expertise, and of not a single superfluous hand in the pot. The Johnny Foreigner Manifesto also indicates their return came about when they had something more to say, and that ethos of purpose can be felt on How To Be Hopeful right down to its smallest, most ancillary bones.
What’s more, it’s a take on indie-rock that feels right at home in 2024, in a landscape defined by forward-thinking work and dismissal of the ‘ordinary’ ways of working. Admittedly it would’ve been better off a few of years ago among that particular inrush, but as seems to be the consistent pattern with Johnny Foreigner, things don’t line up with the norm and they take it in stride. A good amount of How To Be Hopeful’s appeal comes from its complete separation from everything else, and the wonder that comes from this band as a result. It’s fresh but familiar, but also it’s own thing, but also stuffed with the kind of melody that could ramrod through most around it on density and quotability alone. It is, as Johnny Foreigner themselves would say, a real humdinger. • LN
For fans of: Los Campesinos!, Dananananaykroyd, Yourcodenameis:milo
‘How To Be Hopeful’ by Johnny Foreigner is out now on Alcopop! Records.
Giant Walker
Silhouettes
Here we have what might be the first major outlier among the stacked Church Road stable. On a label best known for its excoriating, obsidian-dark hardcore, Giant Walker do the most by…not being that at all. It would’ve been true on their debut All In Good Time when they were more straightforwardly proggy, but Silhouettes steps further still, now placed between the blockbuster popcore of Dream State, and Black Peaks’ alt-prog that’s still thrilling even years from their dissolution. Of course, you would have to be a major sourpuss to complain about any such thing. Like, it’s a bit unorthodox for its context, but imagine having a gripe at emulating two of the more defining British alt-rock acts in recent memory.
Up to now, though, it’s not quite the exact sum of those parts; a bit of magic seems to have escaped the bottle when bringing it all together. The main summation is how a meld of this magnitude can be difficult to bring together, and Silhouettes can sometimes fall victim to wobbly footing. Round And Round feels like the most pertinent example, which is superficially big but plods a little below the stratospheric heights it’s reaching for. Steff Fish’s vocals are barnstorming in a way that’s more accustomed to galloping bluster, rather than the riffier climes she’s paired with that might appear to chain her down.
Note, ‘might’ appear. This is actually where Giant Walker show off how powerful they can be with the most resolve, finding some dexterity among the slab-dragging heave of instrumentation they’ve picked up. Time To Waste is a great starting point for that, as it takes what could be a Royal Blood riff in another universe and beefs it out to something with genuine teeth and tone. Later on, the jerks and knotted time signatures of Make Me and the towering power-ballad So You Say explore those lengths even further. The fact that the album universally sounds colossal definitely helps; the touches from the likes of Soundgarden and Karnivool are invaluable in gluing this in place. If there’s work to be done, it’s not in the execution, as a masterfully thick production job brings Giant Walker around into justified ‘ones to watch’ territory. The right morsels of excitement coalesce in such a way to feel substantive all on their own.
So it’s safe to say that, because of that, Silhouettes positively brandishes its potential. It’s not that far from coming to fruition, either; for a band who are still ostensibly new, Giant Walker are no slouches in the department of sounding the part. Maybe pitting them against giants of the craft is a bit unfair at this stage, but they could get there. Nothing on Silhouettes suggests otherwise, itself just like the lone island on its artwork, growing its foliage amid a bleak, desolate waterscape. Of course, said bleakness and desolation is by design for their labelmates, as is Giant Walker’s own fecund defiance, clearly. The growth isn’t about to stop here. • LN
For fans of: Black Peaks, Karnivool, Dream State
‘Silhouettes’ by Giant Walker is released on 20th September on Church Road Records.
The Calamatix
The Calamatix
Let’s put aside how frontwoman Raylin Joy spent a lot of her early life growing up in Scotland, and say that The Calamatix are a reggae / ska band from California who caught the attention of—who else?—Tim Armstrong, and are releasing this debut on Hellcat. Got an idea of how they sound yet? Like, an exact one? Yeah, the Rancid man certainly does have a type, as do the people who’ll react the most positively to this. It’s unquestionably a genre release, meaning that mileage depends on how much you like the set-in-stone ideas of values of current-day ska. If the answer is “very much”, then The Calamatix will be calling like a rhythmic, weed-odoured Green Goblin mask.
In that sense, this—like most other ska releases, frankly—feels designed to fit that exact sliver of a demographic. In a genre so reverent of the history and culture it came from, The Calamatix are treading firmly within those bounds, including the extent to which the modern upgrades can be utilised. The sometimes-customary gesturing towards smoother hip-hop is here, appropriately enough on a song called Boom Bap (even if it is more Afrobeats-leaning), but that singular instance is the furthest The Calamatix will stray. Otherwise, they’re committed to ingratiating themselves with an understanding and appreciation of ska’s heydays, the cast-iron prerequisite for today’s names. Still Rudy comes to mind there, not just for being a nominal sequel / branching / thematic flip of such a staple as A Message To You Rudy, but also in how free and universal their version of musical love is. (Plus, some additional punk cred from namedrops of Minor Threat and The Circle Jerks is always handy to have.)
The vibe is unquestionably the ‘standard’ one; there’s no debate to even be had there. Just a skim through the album will reveal the lighter tempos, the trills of horns, the rubbery clacks of groove and the temperate breeze that you could already intuit from the description ‘a ska album’. It’d be nice if some of their globalised angle could make its way in (even if the combo of horns and bagpipes might still be too ahead of its time, even now), but The Calamatix’s adherence to the baseline also extends to likability. They’re the kind of loose, lax outfit you’d want, led by Joy’s bell-clear voice to represent the free-flowing current of air that keeps them going. Other than the seedier Dread (itself a highlight for that exact reason), The Calamatix carry a general, light uniformity that’s well-built enough to remain pleasant, rather than insubstantial or immaterial.
Even if the closing cover of Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey may suggest an eleventh-hour reassessment of breadth of influence, it fits more neatly into The Calamatix’s box of a loose, good time with something they like. This album winds up as the purest encompassing of that—hardly inspired or scene-warping, but being really fun in everything it strives for. With ska being far outside the mainstream appreciation zone, it’s a must-have route to take that The Calamatix have nailed on their first try. At the end of the day, that’s what’ll draw you in, especially the ska-heads who can’t get enough of this stuff. Sometimes, doing the exact correct and expected thing is so objectively right that you’ve basically got no argument against it. • LN
For fans of: The Interrupters, The Skints, anything else on the Hellcat roster
‘The Calamatix’ by The Calamatix is released on 20th September on Hellcat Records.
Words by Holly Royle (HR) and Luke Nuttall (LN)
