Album Of The Week
Album Of The Week - 26/09/2026 - Track 2
IBM
1401, A User’s Manual – Johann Johannsson
A complete change of tone this week
as we feature the first of my three albums by Icelandic composer, Johann
Johannsson.
IBM 1401, A User’s Manual was released
in 2006 and is Johannsson’s fourth original album.
The album was inspired by a recording
Johannsson’s father made of an old IBM mainframe computer with its hums, whirls
and clicks. This recording subsequently became the foundation for this rather unique
work which became a major original work for the composer.
The IBM 1401 is a decimal computer
launched by the computer giants in 1959 and held a degree of reverence for its
place in the world of computing. To be fair, it’s not my area of interest and I
had not heard of it until this album came to my attention.
Johann Johannsson was also a renowned
composer of film scores during a period of 14 years, from 2004 to his premature
death in 2018 at the age of just 44 composed music for 17 film projects. His
later works were released posthumously which included the score for the film
Mary Magdelene.
I became aware of this work at a
time when I was taking more interest in contemporary orchestral music, including
film scores while also exploring the work of leading, minimalist composers such
as Ludovico Einaudi, Max Richter and Olafur Arnaulds.
I am not sure exactly how this particular
album came to my attention, but I remember thinking it seemed a bizarre subject
to base a work upon. However, I was impressed with the album and looking back
on it now, it’s an enjoyable listen.
There are times, when these sorts
of compositions can been labelled as pretentious and for me, they hold the same
place in one’s thinking as contemporary art.
With all that in mind, IBM 401, A
User’s Manual is an interesting listen with some glorious orchestral passages mixed
with electronics and spoken pieces from the machine’s manual.
As I have often found with what I
have heard from Johann Johannsson, there is an air of melancholy in some his
moments and that appeals to me very much.
My first selection from the album
is the opening track is Part 1 / IBM 1401 Processing Unit, a piece that
contains some beautiful, orchestral passages.
My final selection from Loud Like
Love is the closing song on the album, Bosco.
On an album packed with emotive songs
this quiet, considered song pulls at the heartstrings in a plea from a person
who is inflicting hurt on loved due to the ravages of addiction. The delivery of
the vocal from Brian Molko is full of pain and regret.
It’s a fitting to a classic Placebo
album.
My penultimate selection from Loud
Like Love is change of pace for Placebo following a dynamic opening to the
album.
The song, Hold On To Me, is an atmospheric
and emotive track focusing on the isolation and vulnerability of love. A song given
depth with guitar effects and orchestral layering and plays out with a spoken
text about transcendence of the spirit.
It’s a deep song that stands out on
the album both musically and lyrically.
My fourth selection from Loud Like
Love is probably one of most pained and tortured songs on the album.
Exit Wounds is song with a strong
rock track, backed with subtle electronics but it’s the desperate vocals of Brian
Molko that carry the track with its lyric of obsession, need and jealousy.
A quite stunning song.
My third selection from Loud Like
Love is the track Rob The Bank.
This is a very catchy, infectious
song about obsession and unconditional love.
The lyrics portray erratic personal
actions made acceptable within a relationship and is backed some dynamic bass and
discordant guitars.
My second selection from Loud Like
Love is the lead single from the album, Too Many Friends.
Despite some difficult lyrics, this
song contains the melancholy and irony that I like in Placebo, with a statement
very pertinent to modern life via social media.
Loud Like Love -
Placebo
This week we feature the second of
my 9 albums by UK alternative / post-punk band, Placebo, to be selected, with
their 2013 release, Loud Like Love.
As I stated back in February 2025 with
my piece on their Meds album, I was not really aware of Placebo until 2003 when
they released their fourth album, Sleeping With Ghosts. I was immediately impressed
with the directness and compelling melodies of their guitar driven sound topped
with the distinctive, engaging vocals of Brian Molko. His style of heartfelt,
often melancholic vocals reminded me of Michael Stipe of R.E.M., and this
complete package has made Placebo a very engaging band for me.
In my music listening progression
they fit perfectly into how my punk tastes developed into the wider post-punk
realm which goes right back to the early 1980’s with the likes of The Cure and
U2.
By the time we got to 2013 and the
Loud Like Love album, I was keeping up with Placebo releases and following excellent
prior albums of Meds and Battle For The Sun I was going into the album with
high hopes.
It would be fair to say that from
the first listen I was grabbed by Loud Like Love and 13 years on it is for me still
an outstanding album. There is a depth and variety in the delivery on the album,
with themes that tackle various aspects of love, touching on the romantic,
obsessive and the loss of love and subsequent pain.
There are moments of real beauty
balancing more direct rock offerings and if I had one little niggle and it’s a small
one, there are a couple of lines where the lyrics could have been a bit more
thought out. However, this does not detract from what is a quality album.
Although the album is guitar driven,
piano and keyboard sections from Stefan Olsdal, give the music some real
maturity and atmosphere which adds layers to the work.
Generally, the album was well
received for its clean production although some said there was a feel of “stadium
rock” about it. To me that seems an unfair critique as the ultimate test of any
band is how well they can deliver live, be it in a club, arena or stadium.
Loud Like Love reached number 13 in
the UK album charts and produced 3 singles, none of which made any commercial
impact.
My first selection from the album
is the opening and title track, Loud Like Love. A guitar driven, anthemic song
which focuses on the hope and redemption of love.
My final selection from Night
Eternal is the closing track, First Light.
As in keeping with the rest of the
album there of themes of gothic darkness mixed with biblical and mythology references
within the song.
The song delivered at a brooding mid-paced
tempo with clean and death vocals and is a strong ending to a very good album.
My penultimate
selection from Night Eternal is the track Dreamless (Lucifer & Lileth).
A song steeped
in modern biblical mythology of a doomed relationship between the fallen angel,
Lucifer, and former wife of Adam, Lilith.
It’s the perfect
material of gothic metal and delivered beautifully within this song.
Night Eternal - Moonspell
After our summer break we return to
my album of the week with the first of my 8 albums from Portuguese metal band
Moonspell to be selected.
As far as metal genres go, they are
labelled a gothic metal band but there are a wide variety of styles with their
output, which for me, goes back to 1999 with their Butterfly Effect album.
What there is with Moonspell is
power within their music from driving guitars and strong vocals from band frontman
Fernando Ribero who can deliver both baritone clean vocals and throat searing death
metal vocals.
Atmosphere is added, as with many
metal bands within these realms, from keyboards and sampling from long term member
Pedro Paixao.
With the addition of blast beats
and intricate guitar riffs there are moments when the band move into the realms
of death metal and black metal, genres that are generally out of my usual heavy
metal listening.
It’s this ability to move
seamlessly across various styles and influences that keep Moonspell relevant and
current over a recording career now in excess of 30 years.
Night Eternal was Moonspell’s 8th
studio album of original material, released in 2008 and for me, was well
received as I found their previous album, Memorial, a difficult listen as it
veered too much into black metal territory and made the album a little single
dimensional.
Night Eternal maintains the bands
power while incorporating enough melody to capture and hold the attention with
plenty of gothic metal influences and a variety in vocal delivery.
Without a doubt though, this is a
no holds barred heavy metal album and one that I rate very highly.
As well as the creativity Moonspell
display and the alternative nature of their music there has been sustained
commercial success for the band with Night Eternal being the 5th top
10 album in their home country.
For anyone looking to explore these
stalwarts of the gothic metal scene Night Eternal is an excellent place to
start.
My first selection is the album
opener, At Tragic Heights, an atmospheric and hard-hitting track that contains
a passage taken from the bible’s Book of Revelation.
Monster – R.E.M.
We return to my REM collection
again this week with their 9th studio album and the 8th
to be selected as my album of the week.
Released in 1994, Monster, was a
real departure in approach for a band, that by then, had built such a solid
creative and commercial foundation they could explore and expand upon their trademark
sound and style.
In that regard, Monster highlights
this perfectly with a record that was a huge stylistic shift from their highly
successful previous releases of Out Of Time and Automatic For The People, albums
that had endorsed the band as one of the leading alternative rock bands of the
time.
Whereas more recent releases had
seen the band incorporate acoustic guitars and strings, Monster was a back to
basics album that returned the band to a more direct, guitar driven sound as per
the 1988 album, Green.
The driving force on Monster is
Peter Buck’s no holds barred guitar which dominates leaving Michael Stipe’s
often oblique vocals further down in the mix.
Stipe said at the time the album theme
was about image, attraction and the need for identity reinvention, themes largely
set around celebrity culture, a culture that the band and Stipe in particular
had been quite scathing about.
Critics at the time said this was
REM’s attempt to embrace the “grunge rock” sound and there could be an element
of truth within this, especially with the emphasis on the down tuned, fuzzy,
aggressive guitars. However, REM could never be accused of bandwagon jumping to
gain commercial success, they had already attained a high degree of commercial
success by this time. Ultimately, the album feels like part of the reinvention
that is covered in some of the lyrical content of the album.
Stylistically, Monster is a challenging
album, a wake up album, in many ways similar to U2’s Achtung Baby, a record
that needed to break the mould to avoid complacency and in that regard, it
worked perfectly.
I loved the album when it came out
and 32 years later I still really rate it a key REM album in what is an impressive
array of 15 studio albums the band produced in their very successful career.
Monster performed very well
commercially in the UK for REM, becoming their 3 consecutive number 1 album. Six
singles were released in the UK from Monster, which is half the album. Although
this seems excessive the reasoning behind it was to keep REM in the public eye
ahead of their first major tour in 6 years.
My first release is album opener,
What’s The Frequency Kenneth, a song which Michael Stipe stated is about the
older generation being able to understand youth culture.
Heretics &
Lullabies - Frayle
We stay firmly within my metal
collection this week with a band that I had not heard of prior to the release
of this album in 2025.
Frayle are an American doom metal
band, formed in 2017 initially as a duo but since 2019 a 4 piece outfit.
The creative core of Frayle is
vocalist Gywn Strang and multi-instrumentalist Sean Bilovecky who between them
have constructed a very modern post-metal influenced brand of doom metal. It’s
a combination that reminds me of the approach from Swedish doom stalwarts, Katatonia,
but with a completely different result.
Heretics & Lullabies is Frayle’s
third full length studio album following on from well received album releases
in 2020 and 2022, with this album being their first on the major metal label
Napalm Records. A good indication of the reception of their albums within the
metal community is the scores received on Metal Storm, a comprehensive metal
database and news website.
My first awareness of Frayle was
online with a review of Heretics & Lullabies and the video to accompany the
single Summertime Sadness. I was instantly captured by the down tuned guitars,
the menacing undertone of melancholy and the ethereal vocals.
The video to accompany the single
was visually stunning and played heavily not just on the actual music but as a
complete work of gothic performance art. It seemed to draw heavily on the visual
aesthetics of the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale.
I had no idea that the song was
actually a cover of a well-known Lana Del Rey song and after listening to the
original I was very impressed with how Frayle had adapted the song while
retaining its core atmosphere.
I bought the album based purely on
this one song and reviews yet despite my reticence about impulse album purchases
I was delighted with Heretics & Lullabies.
Combining the elements of ethereal
doom metal with a drive and almost claustrophobic intensity from the unrelenting
rhythm guitars the album demands attention. Some may find the pacing a little
repetitive but it gives the album a sense of completeness and direction as
opposed to just a collection of songs pieced together.
For lovers of the doom and gothic subgenres
of metal there is a lot to like with this third long player from Frayle.
My first selection is the lead
single and album opener, Walking Wounded, a powerful song both musically and
lyrically, tackling themes of male power and misogyny.
The Awakening - Worhol
We stay within firmly within the genre
of symphonic metal this week with another selection from my array of metal
albums.
Originally released in 2015 and
then re-released in 2017, The Awakening from American band Worhol is, to date,
the only full length release from this outfit.
Worhol were formed 2 years prior to
the initial release of The Awakening by father and daughter, Larry and Ashley
Worhol.
Up to this point, Larry was a
prominent musician playing in multiple bands around his home state of Texas in
the USA. He is also known as a composer and producer and has written compositions
for orchestral film scores.
Daughter, Ashley, also has the same
orchestral and classical influences and well as writing and performing in Worhol
she also composes orchestral pieces for film scores as can be sampled on her
website.
My memory is a bit blurred as I
cannot remember exactly how I became aware of Worhol but I suspect it was probably
through a review on a metal website and as a result I added The Awakening to my
collection.
Similar to last week’s album,
Warhol, are on the more melodic, side of metal and rooted firmly within the
female fronted, symphonic and gothic sub-genres which on initial listening
reminded me of Evanescence.
Unlike Evanescence, Worhol’s efforts
on The Awakening is more basic without the benefits of more expensive studio production
meaning at times the album lacks a cleanness in the mix. However, there are
some very good moments on the album and the dynamic vocals of Ashley Worhol are
given plenty of room to breathe.
There is valiant attempt to incorporate
symphonic and quieter electronic and piano sections into the music and on the
whole it works well but as stated, sometimes gets a bit lost in the mix
To date, The Awakening is the only
album from the band although they did release a 6 track EP in 2024 entitled The
Catalyst and I would hope this will be a springboard for a second full album
release.
There is a very little news though
about future activity of the band and activity seems quite low but the band and
Ashley Worhol do maintain an online presence.
My first selection from The
Awakening is the opening song, Voices From Above.
There is no YouTube clip for the song so instead there is a link to the song on Spotify.
https://open.spotify.com/track/0I9kFcyIqgoyux5qiBimcw?autoplay_ok=1
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