Null (The Broadway to Boundary)

Unfair as this might be, it’s hard not to feel like Kōban has blown it with null. If you’re going to make a record where every song sounds like a can’t-miss candidate for the next edition of Unquiet Grave: The Ultimate Goth Collection, what in the hell are you doing releasing it in April, when the sun is shining, the trees are budding, and the grass needs mowing every three days? It seriously wouldn’t have killed the two-piece to wait until late fall, when all the world looks more gloriously dead than Bela Lugosi.

The 10 songs here are gloomier than a Glasgow graveyard and creepier than Michael Shannon. Think funeral-drone guitars, tell-tale-heart electro-beats, and chillingly disembodied vocals courtesy of Brittany Westgarth. (Samuel Buss, who no doubt moonlights as a gravedigger, rounds out the duo).

So if your idea of a good time is embalming fresh corpses in the cellar while listening to 45 Grave, Skinny Puppy, and Christian Death, the lost souls of Kōban are about to become your new favourite messengers of misery. But before you go cuing up death marches like “Down in the Well” or “Next Time We Speak” on Bandcamp, here’s a suggestion: spring for the album on vinyl, the favoured method of delivery for the group’s label, The Broadway to Boundary. Once you’ve done that, stick null in the cellar with a note that says “Do not open until October 31.” That way you’re pretty much guaranteed that during your virgin spin of this black beauty, the sun won’t be shining.