cassette craze chronicles XVIII (triple A edition feat. A.A. WILLIAMS, ANDY FOSBERRY and ASSUMPTION)

Am I not spending enough money on music yet? Or is it just being delivered too slow? However, it has been a while since my last edition of the cassette craze chronicles, so here we go again with a special dedicated to the letter A!

A.A. WILLIAMS - Live At Tesla (2022)

Let's start with the rare one! Not that there aren't many tape releases with 100 or less copies, but this tape you also can only officially purchase from the merch stand at shows. Like the one last Wednesday night, when A.A. Williams opened for Mono in Hamburg. You will get a Bandcamp download with it, but it's private, there's no public digital version at this point. Maybe the video stream of this studio session from 2020 is still out there somewhere, but I have nothing to embed here.

So I guess you just have to take my word that the four songs (the opener of the session sadly was omitted) of this EP are a thing of pure beauty. "Love And Pain", "All I Asked For (Was To End It All)", "Melt" and "I'm Fine" are all presented in splendid versions which make you fall in love with their delicate melancholy, fragile emotion and post rocking grandeur each time you listen to them. Heartstring-pulling at its best.

If you see the British singer live these day, I can only recommend that you check if there's still a hand-numbered copy available!

ANDY FOSBERRY - Night Skies (2022)

This is not my first synthwave soundtrack released on tape by Spun Out Of Control, but its origin is a little different than Heinrich Dressel's "Shapeshifting" or Repeated Viewing's "The Family", because "Night Skies" isn't an imaginary movie, yet an abandoned one. Its director would have been none other than Steven Spielberg, who was under pressure to create a sequel to "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". A full script had been written, before the project ultimately got canceled. Some of its concepts however morphed into later works, namely "E.T.", "Poltergeist" and "Gremlins".

What reads a little all over the place at first actually is a very good basis for diverse and interesting musical storytelling. And indeed Andy Fosberry taking the original script and scoring it results in a very intriguing and entertaining experience, where just the outline of the plot and the combination of music and titles such as "Cattle Mutilations", "This Expanse", "The Light From The Orchard" or "Faces At The Windows" allow you to form a vivid story in your head. A great atmospheric horror thriller! 

ASSUMPTION - Hadean Tides (2022)

Italian death doomers Assumption are already regulars in these chronicles, which featured their debut EP "The Three Appearances" as well as the full-length "Absconditus". And while I seriously dig those previous works, "Hadean Tides" might very well be their greatest achievement so far. Most of the music on this almost hour-long album falls under the doom death / death doom (whatever you prefer) category, channeling the likes of old My Dying Bride (including the super guttural growls) or Sorrow, with lead guitars seemingly picked directly from the mind of Gregor Mackintosh.

Sometimes it slows down further to Mournful Congregation funeral gravitas, or - especially during the opening tracks of both sides - it speeds up to blasting death metal fury. This is all done with mostly simple yet catchy killer riffs in an immensly satisfying way. What pushes this concept work about the first lifeless age of our planet beyond "just" being a damn fine doom death celebration are the instances, where Assumption stray from that path and introduce different sounds. That happens mainly during the dark ambient instrumental "Breath of the Dedalus", which in shorter form could have been interpreted as a Morbid Angel style dungeon synth interlude. But due to its length of six minutes and the placement as the central turning point in the middle of the album it gains meaning beyond that and rather reminds me of Blood Incantation's "Timewave Zero".

A much less expected change of pace follows later with the sixth (of seven) track "Triptych", which starts - and goes on for a long while - just with a clean bass, minimal percussion and vocals that both performance-wise and lyrically seem like pure Einstürzende Neubauten worship. But in connection with the dark metal element this could also very much be inspired by Triptykon's avantgarde Roadburn masterpiece "Requiem". What a phenomenal track!
Yet somehow Assumption can still one-up it with the creepily crawling grandeur of the fifteen minute closer "Black Trees Waving".

In conclusion I can only ask: What's not to love about this? It's a masterclass of its genre.