Rock (All) charts

Review: It's taken some time to get here, and wherever that is, you can bet everything in your bank account Follakzoid are not done yet. Originally hailing from Santiago, Chile, but now based in Mexico City, over the past 16 years output has gone through various mutations and stylistic developments, shapeshifting depending on where home was at that time and who was involved in the production and writing processes. Melding post punk, psychedelic rock, Krautrock and electronica, largely improvised sessions give birth to mutant tracks that live in the dark, strobe-hued corners of industrial rooms and subterranean dens. Following up the critically acclaimed I (released in 2019), V represents yet another evolution in sound, as elements of techno are brought to the fore, accentuating the dance floor potential of all they do.

Review: German born Johanna Platow Andersson aka Johanna Sadonis returns with the aptly titled fifth full-length from her Sweden-based retro heavy rock project Lucifer. Written and recorded in collaboration with her long-time bandmate and husband Nicke Andersson (vocalist/guitarist for hard rock Swedes The Hellacopters and drummer for legendary death metal entity Entombed), V continues the band's unique coalescence of accessible, grooving AOR emboldened by elements of classic doom metal and proto-psych. Complete with macabre, gothic lyrics delivered with Platow's incomparable, sultry, almost Wiccan cadence, the project offers a hypnotic dirge of horror delivered with a gentle hand.

Review: It's kind of ironic that doom metal is so intrinsically linked to early Black Sabbath. After all, the British guitar wielding icons may have conjured feelings of despair and unease, but their formative years are more readily defined by high rather than low speeds. Saint Vitus, who joined the party later, around 1979, are a far more accurate reference for the genre itself, which was really just getting going at the time this lot got together. The often downtempo but powerful tracks match a similarly un-rushed work rate. 11 years after their incarnation, the Los Angeles group finally unveiled their logically titled fifth album, V. Thick and heavy riffs, a general feeling of weight and some wildly experimental segments mark this out as an example of how SV lost none of their edge in their first decade.

Review: Logic runs through the Unknown Mortal Orchestra back catalogue, even if that's just in terms of what the records are actually called. V, then, is album number five, a double-sized and long-awaited package that represents the first long form outing from Ruban Nielson and Co since 2018. In modern music, that's a hell of a long time. Rest assured, though, it seems like time was well spent honing crafts, polishing ideas, and coming out with 14 incredibly interesting and compelling songs.

In many ways V isn't a huge departure from IV, but - maybe because of that extended gap - you still can't shake the feeling this is you meeting the Orchestra for the first time. Packed full of surprises, running the gamut between blissed out, stargazing stuff, lo-fi funk steppers, and a kind of stoner pop-blues, it's love at first play. Again.

Review: New Zealand-born, Portland-based Ruban Nielson is well known for mixing up lo-fi, indie rock, psychedelic sounds and plenty of trippiness into unique and beguiling sound worlds. V is said to be the band's most definitive album yet and it was written between the dry freeways of Palm Springs in California and the much more lush coastlines of Hawai'i. As such it is drawn from a world of West Coast AOR, classic hits, weirdo pop and Hawaiian Hapa-haole music. This is the first double album in the artist's discography and it is well worth the extra playtime.