LISTEN: ÅHM — The Mechanics of Falling Apart
ÅHM are a two-piece from Linköping, Sweden, playing alternative rock that grows out of 90s grunge. Their new EP, The Mechanics of Falling Apart, comes out on November 6 via Golden Robot. They recorded the drums and guitars without a click track. The lyrics deal with abuse of power, political disappointment, grief and personal collapse.
The EP is a rollercoaster ride. Heavy guitar riffs and aggressive, gut-wrenching vocals sit alongside quiet acoustic pieces where every single note is an event, and you find yourself practically suspended in mid-air, hanging on every note and waiting for the next one to come. Sometimes these dramatic shifts happen within a single song. I'd definitely recommend listening to the album from start to finish, but as often happens on this blog, I'm going to pick the one track that grabbed me the most and focus on that. And that would be the album opener, “Rotors.”
The song opens with a brilliantly performed vocal passage, several voices layered on top of each other to form a peculiar little choir. Then comes a monstrous guitar riff, sounding like a brontosaurus the size of a four-story building marching straight towards you, ready to trample you and carry on as if nothing happened.
Next, we get an anxious guitar arpeggio and a beautifully crafted vocal melody that reminds me of both the grunge greats and mid-90s Radiohead, particularly The Bends and OK Computer. Then the guitars get heavy again, and this time I genuinely feel like I'm falling into an abyss.
Of course, there's little point in meticulously describing every single thing that happens in this song. What you need to know is that these enormously powerful, emotionally charged sections keep coming, one after another, throwing you from one dangerous patch of this emotional minefield to the next.
I have to single out the guitar solo, though. I think it could quite seriously make my personal top 100 guitar solos of all time. It's that inventive and that brilliantly played. It scratches at your soul, and at some point you can't even tell whether you're hearing actual notes, noise, or some raw emotion crawling all over you like a snake. Sonically, it reminds me of those old dial-up modems from the 90s and early 2000s. If you were around back then, you probably know exactly the kind of sound I'm talking about. But the fascinating thing is what it does to you emotionally, and how wonderfully bizarre and unexpected it is to hear something like this in the middle of a rock song.
And then the whole thing ends in a gigantic wall of noise that seems to swallow absolutely everything. For a blog that regularly covers noise music, recently secured exclusive comments about Merzbow's latest release, and even did a collaborative post with him, we couldn't have asked for a better finale!
And the rest of the album is every bit as inventive, audacious, colorful, and gloriously unpredictable as this one song. Seriously, don't miss this little gem of a rock record.
The EP is a rollercoaster ride. Heavy guitar riffs and aggressive, gut-wrenching vocals sit alongside quiet acoustic pieces where every single note is an event, and you find yourself practically suspended in mid-air, hanging on every note and waiting for the next one to come. Sometimes these dramatic shifts happen within a single song. I'd definitely recommend listening to the album from start to finish, but as often happens on this blog, I'm going to pick the one track that grabbed me the most and focus on that. And that would be the album opener, “Rotors.”
The song opens with a brilliantly performed vocal passage, several voices layered on top of each other to form a peculiar little choir. Then comes a monstrous guitar riff, sounding like a brontosaurus the size of a four-story building marching straight towards you, ready to trample you and carry on as if nothing happened.
Next, we get an anxious guitar arpeggio and a beautifully crafted vocal melody that reminds me of both the grunge greats and mid-90s Radiohead, particularly The Bends and OK Computer. Then the guitars get heavy again, and this time I genuinely feel like I'm falling into an abyss.
Of course, there's little point in meticulously describing every single thing that happens in this song. What you need to know is that these enormously powerful, emotionally charged sections keep coming, one after another, throwing you from one dangerous patch of this emotional minefield to the next.
I have to single out the guitar solo, though. I think it could quite seriously make my personal top 100 guitar solos of all time. It's that inventive and that brilliantly played. It scratches at your soul, and at some point you can't even tell whether you're hearing actual notes, noise, or some raw emotion crawling all over you like a snake. Sonically, it reminds me of those old dial-up modems from the 90s and early 2000s. If you were around back then, you probably know exactly the kind of sound I'm talking about. But the fascinating thing is what it does to you emotionally, and how wonderfully bizarre and unexpected it is to hear something like this in the middle of a rock song.
And then the whole thing ends in a gigantic wall of noise that seems to swallow absolutely everything. For a blog that regularly covers noise music, recently secured exclusive comments about Merzbow's latest release, and even did a collaborative post with him, we couldn't have asked for a better finale!
And the rest of the album is every bit as inventive, audacious, colorful, and gloriously unpredictable as this one song. Seriously, don't miss this little gem of a rock record.