Clear vinyl, limited to 500
Albini's gone. ATP, that inevitably doomed high-wire-act idealist endeavour partly born of his ideology, went years before him. And to make matters worse, I nearly cried last Sunday upon hearing Joan Osbourne's 'One of Us' on Absolute 90s' countdown of the biggest singles of 1994 and not for the reasons you might imagine. The sense of lost time is inescapable. The horror of notalgia has me firmly by the throat. Something's wrong and it's probably me. But, for this week at least, there is Earth Ball, a relatively new three-but-sometimes-five piece from the Canadian wilderness of Nanimo who have emerged just when I need them to plug a few gaps/light some fires. In operation since 2021 and with just a handful of locally released cassettes to their name before this debut LP for Upset the Rhythm, Earth Ball are built around the improvised noise-making of John Brennan, Isabel Ford and Jeremy Van Wyck, and exactly the kind of band you can envisage having stumbled across mid-afternoon Sunday in a hangover-fogged upstairs room at Camber Sands.Their songs are 'auto-composed', their sound white-hot metal, a perpetually collapsing cacophony of psychedelic skronk, feedback and no-wave atonality. We know this ritual, we've heard (and loved) their like before - Sonic Youth, Bardo Pond, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Mars, Teenage Jesus...But still, to hear it reborn anew is a visceral thrill, a group of likeminded individuals testing the limits of their understanding, pulling things apart to see what new shapes and positions emerge into that void. If that is a familiar practice, so be it, but it is also a current one - this is happening now, their flame their own. The past is dead. The future, it seems, is too. So there is only now. It's Yours.
