IAN – Come On Everybody, Let’s Do Nothing!

Dark Juan
Oct 21
6 min read

Released by: Human Worth

Release Date: 17.10.25

Running Time: 44:54

Score: 256,000,000,000/10

I am Dark Juan and Crow Cottage is in disarray. Not content with adopting a new Smellhound, Ivy the Traitorous (so named because she likes Mrs Dark Juan better than me, and I specifically wanted a bitch so she could be Daddy’s little Princess, and she has instead chosen Mrs Dark Juan and left me aggrieved, which hasn’t helped Dark Juan’s self-worth much) I currently have about half a kitchen, which means the rest of it is currently in the lounge. This makes it difficult to make cups of tea (as Six Feet Below keep reminding me I need to do as a proper Yorkshireman) as I DON’T ACTUALLY KNOW WHERE THE TEA CURRENTLY IS. Hence, I had beer for breakfast. It’s liquid bread, right? The yard is also in disarray because we have had Gordon (Ironrat, Dawn of Elysium and pretty much every other band in Bradford apart from Six Feet Below) round to fit decking. He is also building the kitchen. I nearly killed myself tripping up over the fucking stuff when I came home from wrangling young people and the staff who look after them. This was somewhat mitigated because I was his plus one on the guest list on the recent opening night of Paradise Lost’s latest tour with High Parasite and Messa. I might write about it.

It is in a febrile and slightly disturbed frame of mind I come to you this day. Therefore, it is only right that I am listening to some febrile and slightly disturbed music, lovingly placed with reverence upon the recently sadly neglected Platter of Splatter ™. Blame the Regulation 45 reports I have had to write. Today’s offering is the debut album from East Londoners IAN, entitled “Come On Everybody, Let’s Do Nothing!” There’s a record title that’s crying out for an Oxford comma, if there ever was one, but if you dig the heart-tearing, anguished ferocity of Amenra, the dirge-like repetition of Swans and the epic cinematics of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, I might have come across a bit of a hidden gem for all you good people who like their brains to be slowly liquidised by mountainous grooves and slow and prolonged audio torture. Like I do…

The record opens with ‘Manuel’, and some creepy and atmospheric, backward masked noise of general human existence, and some very dissonant, slightly off-kilter guitar before there is a brief pause for breath and then….

A colossal explosion of sound. A seismic assault upon the ears. Continents destabilised and colliding with each other, new islands forming in welters of screaming, superheated ash and lava, coastal communities devastated and the dead lying everywhere, underpinned with the violent, unhinged screams of vocalist and guitarist Ted Reynolds. Until there is quiet and introspection as survivors pick themselves up from amid the devastation, and take stock of what has occurred, mournful cello weeping over gentle guitar and quiet percussion, but there is menace building again beneath the surface… tectonic plates grinding against each other and pressure building in the rock, and then AFTERSHOCK. The distortion and the power build again and the listener is pressed back against the back of their chair with the sheer WEIGHT of IAN’s music.

That’s just one song. Fucking hell, I’m going to be a right mess when this album is done.

The next (I am already trembling and querulous after the overwhelming emotional attack of the opening tune) on the album is “Building Pyramids”. Now, I get the feeling that the sneaky bastards in IAN are going to do something completely different. I am actually a little bit afraid of IAN now. The power their music has is indescribable. They make Swans sound like a Power Pop band. And you all know how much I love Swans. The song builds slowly, a vaguely Eastern chime, repeated with an odd little motif every few bars until the mod becomes rather more predatory four minutes into the song – a looping guitar drone in the background repeats endlessly.

Fuck, I never saw that coming. Mrs Dark Juan is laughing at me as I jumped clear out of my seat because I was busy writing and was not expecting the cataclysmic musical big bang that just happened. Ted’s vocals sound like he is opening veins and screaming his lifeblood into some kind of vampiric ether, and the band play their instruments with such intensity that Dark Juan, a man used to extremity in many forms, and a perpetrator of most of them, is genuinely quailing before them. The production on this album is truly masterful if you want to experience power in its rawest form. There is finesse, yes, but the main focus of the sound of IAN is to jellify bones and reduce the listener to pink, frothy custard. The record skirts the ragged edge between listenable and overwhelming white noise. This is a Very Good Thing.

‘Fennel’ is notable for the interaction of heavily distorted guitar and cello (IAN have a full-time cellist in Hannah Asprey) and it is a thing of perverse beauty, how well Post-Metal Drone and a classical instrument such as the cello fit together. Each counterpoints the other with beauty and absolute sonic fury, yet neither is able to overpower the other.

This is not an album. This is musical entropy in action. This is the soundtrack to the heat death of the universe – slow, drawn-out, painful and utterly inevitable. IAN are the death of everything, the absolute zero of endless space that the barren rock that was once Earth screams through after it has been scoured of all life, wisps of remaining atmosphere and human detritus trailing in its wake. ‘Selma’ racks up the emotional intensity as well, a mournful, wailing piece of music that offers gentleness and introspection instead of howling, spittle-flecked madness and demented screaming.

Oh, wait.

That didn’t last long.

The heaviness is beyond extreme. It reminds me, in execution and sound, of the mountainous grooves of the first Pitch Shifter album, but where that was Industrial Grind, this is something more subtle, surprisingly. There’s as much Sugar as there is Amenra in IAN’s sound. However, the intensity, the bug-eyed madness behind the music leaks into your soul, and the bass. Oh, the bass. It’s like drowning in the blackest, thickest molasses. I haven’t even got to the arguable centrepiece of the album yet, being the final track, the THIRTEEN Minute plus ‘Not Erotic/ Cop Film (End Credits)’. Which, we can all agree is one of the best song titles there have ever been, and it is a deeply affecting work – the central motif of it being naggingly insistent and utterly compelling. Once more a gentler side of IAN is on show here – however, I am wise to their tricks now and I am on tenterhooks waiting for yet another world-ending explosion of sound. Instead, there is a drawn-out riff and cello (does a cello wail or does it cry?) mournfully weeping over it. Nope, here it comes! Another wave of all-consuming power overtakes your poor correspondent and yet again I am left, trampled, crushed and twitching in the wake of IAN… Before they change gear yet again and bamboozle me with more music for emotional wrecks, which I fucking am after enduring the chamber of horrors that is IAN’s work. Never before have I heard a band besides Swans who can combine this level of shock troop intensity with an ability to tug out your heart strings and play mournful dirges on them…

The words “epic” and “expansive” are bandied about far too often to have any real relevance nowadays, but I can think of no better way to describe the all-encompassing wave that is IAN. I demand you all make this band as huge as their sound. Dark Juan commands you!

The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System can’t possibly write about any music after this record, now. It is completely destroyed by pathos and power. The gauges are all fucked, the sex-wee alert system is blaring in Sowerby Bridge and the Calder Valley and the score the poor, abused machine has provided is 256,000,000,000/10.

TRACKLISTING:

Manuel

Building Pyramids

Fennel

Selma

Not Erotic/ Cop Film (End Credits)

LINE-UP:

Hannah Asprey - Cello

Anna Jones - Bass

Craig Murray - Guitar and samples

Ted Reynolds - Guitar and vocals

Bob D'Mello – Drums