Gnod – Mirror

Nothing if not prolific, Salford’s favourite Krautrock connoisseurs (let’s ignore The Fall’s I Am Damo Suzuki for the moment) follow-up last year’s triple Infinity Machines LP with a release more relatively acquainted with brevity. Yet Mirror is no less arresting; three tracks of heavy, tangential, sprawling space-rock indebted to the raw synergies of recording in just three days, with minimal overdubs.   

The Mirror – at just under eight minutes, the briefest of tracks herein – perpetually builds on a lysergic blueprint, surrounded by its own sonic barbed wire. Learn to Forgive (8m18s) arrives like a concrete jackboot, sirens wailing, its central riff bludgeoning the listener into submission. And if that’s not enough to whet whistles, the 18-minute epic Sodom & Gomorrah is head music clad in pseudo Arabic influence, the desperate, Aldous Huxley vocal coalescing across discordance eerily reminiscent of a 7” single played at 33rpm. Gnod continue to take no prisoners; play loud. [Duncan Harman]