Sunswarm – Those Who Do Not Build Must Burn
Sunswarm – Those Who Do Not Build Must Burn
Self – Released
Release date: 22.07.26
Review by Dark Juan
Score: 486,875,953/10
Good afternoon, you poor mothers of youthful seamen! It is I, Dark Juan, here once more to talk to you about music, eventually. I have dragged the Platter of Splatter ™ out of where it was cowering, hiding from me, because I have recently discovered an overpowering and really quite disturbing love of the work of technicolour 80s Pop songstress Lauran Branigan.
…Calling GLORIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! GLORIA!
Mrs Dark Juan is threatening to leave me (again) because of the awful caterwauling she has been subjected to over the weekend so far (I, I live among the creatures of the NIGHT!) because of this sudden, and somewhat concerning attraction I have discovered for Ms. Branigan’s music, but we are buying a house together and quitting Crow Cottage in the near future and moving to higher ground – this because I have frequently overwhelmed the sex wee defence systems in place at Crow Cottage, and they are now beyond saving. So, Mrs Dark Juan is stuck with me whether she likes it or not, especially as the new house has a room set aside for her to have an art eyrie I shall have to extract her from with electric cattle prods.
So, I have chosen a record from the rolodex of awesomeness that is the Ever-Metal.com submission list to rid myself of the pernicious obsession of Laura Branigan and jangly 80s Electropop (it was great this morning, we had Laura, then Yazoo, the Visage, then Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark).
The poor victims selected for their music to be taken apart and closely analysed today are an Industrial Post-Metal duo from Southampton, UK, called Sunswarm. The poor sods are probably going to read this at some point.
Now, a disclaimer – if it says “Industrial” anywhere on the label, Dark Juan will dig it unless it is truly awful. Sunswarm are not truly awful, so they are off to a cracking start already.
If anything, they are the soundtrack to the horrors inside my head that pass for my imagination. ‘Sunswarm’ itself is a perfect example; it sounds like a massed tank assault over vast plains with machine guns barking at the cowering infantry before them. The album opens, however, with ‘Erasure’, a slow-burning, slowly building piece of aural nightmares that allows the listener absolutely no respite from terror or the nightmares boiling up in the heads of the band as they unleash devastation through the headphones clamped to their poor, unsuspecting heads.
Dark Juan fucking loves it. There’s a shock.
‘Inside the torn apart’ starts rather more gently. Downtuned chiming and some of the fuzziest bass I have ever heard gives way to some truly uncomfortable maschinenklang – the loud/ quiet/ loud dynamic being used to devastating effect throughout the song, discordant guitars merging with bass so heavy that Europe has just experienced an exciting new geological fault, the epicentre being wherever in Southampton the two deeply disturbed individuals who form Sunswarm are. Again, the percussion is also noteworthy – I have already used the simile of it sounding like machine guns – this time when it kicks in its more like the sharp report of fast-firing autocannon, small-calibre shells packed full of high explosive detonating as their contact fuses impact on body armour, shredding the flesh and leaving the stink of gunpowder and torn entrails behind it as the armoured fighting vehicle firing crushes what is left to jellied remnants beneath spiked tracks.
This is Industrial done right. The music is absolutely uncompromising, frequently painful to listen to and fantastically violent. The production on the record is also just so – Dark Juan thinks that Industrial music should only be clean and polished if it is electronic. Sunswarm are not clean and polished – they are covered in diesel fuel and lubricant, eyes staring wide and whitely from faces coated in grease and smoke residue as they feed a massive cannon with shells the size of their own torsos. The music is thick, cloying, uncomfortable and scarily claustrophobic. There’s no respite even in the quieter moments on “Those Who Do Not Build Must Burn”. Everything is as cold as Godflesh at their most misanthropic yet possessed of the same crushing power of Breton Industrial kings Fange, allied with the sheer bug-eyed madness of Poland’s Atrocious Filth. However, the music also is possessed of a curious humanity that brings to mind the work of JOHN 3:16.
This is not to say that the music is without subtlety, though. Every song rewards repeated listens, as underneath the jackhammers and roaring engines of the music there are deft touches, sounds that unsettle beneath the violence, stiletto stabs to the heart while grenades are exploding all around. It is a battlefield of sound where dynamic range functions as a compositional tool: songs move with weighty mass rather than conventional structure, seeing distortion building and crumbling into eerie stillness rather than following verse-chorus logic. While the band takes the classic Industrial and Metal foundations of the likes of Godflesh, Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, Sunswarm differ in chopping up traditional song structures and welding serrated arrangements together in ill-suited gestalts, releasing them in order to deal out carnage among purists.
This album is dystopian as fuck, slick, wet grey concrete on a rainy world where there is no respite from hard labour. Lifespans are measured in years rather than decades, armed guards oversee construction and have standing orders to shoot anyone not pulling their weight when they build the redoubts and fortresses ordered by a warlike leadership who stay far away from the front lines, sipping champagne and dictating orders while grey-faced soldiers and workers throw up yet another segment of poured, sharp edged concrete, casualties ignored and left where they fall after the crack of pistol shots, scarlet splashing the stone until even that vestige of humanity is washed away by the incessant, uncaring rain and another life is snuffed out…
Well. That’s certainly cured me of cheerful Pop music today. Now I want to go and kill people. Well done, Sunswarm, well done, gentlemen.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System is operating at capacity today – we hope the upgrades hold as it awards the mighty Sunswarm 486,875,953/10 for a record that has once more turned Dark Juan’s thoughts inward. This is never comfortable. The apogee of modern British Industrial Post-Metal.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Erasure
02. Sunswarm
03. Inside the torn apart
04. With your beautiful mind you deserve much better than this
05. Sour///
06. Rended
LINE-UP:
Rich Lee-Davis – vocals, bass
Neil Sutton – vocals, guitar
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
