REVIEW: MIEN—MIIEN (2025)
The electro-psych kraut-rock supergroup return for a second album.
If you like Black Angels, Elephant Stone, The Horrors or The Earlies, there’s a fair chance you’ll be receptive to the new MIEN record. Alex Maas’ monochrome tones have long been a source of delight on a whole sequence of Black Angels albums stretching back two decades now. Having him diversify into both a (obscenely brilliant) solo record, and now two albums with this supergroup over recent years is more than we could wish for. You’re spoiling us.
As with a lot of his projects, it’s a dense affair, and certainly not a record you’ll necessarily get instantly. But to help matters, it does the old front loading technique of sequencing the peppiest numbers right from the off. Evil People gets things underway, and of course gets the psychedelic promo video treatment to drive the point home. It reminds me a little bit of when Primal Scream got particularly dark and scuzzy in the early noughts, and threw a some electronics into the mix. Hell, they should have done a cover of Deep Hit Of Morning Sun. That would have been genius.
Track 2 Counterbalance is similarly one of the album’s most convincing numbers, keeping the tempo high, before slipping into the mesmeric Silent Golden, which then dissolves into a sinister kaleidoscope of sound to signpost a shift of emphasis.
Mirror takes things down a step, before How Could You Run and Empty Sun steer things into greater intensity. I’d be interested to hear how they figure this all out live. It has a real studio sound to it, that could be a real challenge to replicate—or could end up being a huge wall of sound live, and take the songs somewhere else.
Alas, they are not coming as far north as Glasgow, and will presumably be back to their regular bands after that, so I guess we’ll be checking the live videos on YouTube somewhere down the line. For now, though, this is a decent record—and a rather pleasing package from Fuzz Club, as you can see in the pics below…
