The return of Blue Sabbath Black Cheer. This time teaming up with fellow low end noisemakers Anakrid. For this tag team effort, each band gets a side, and uses mostly the other band's sound as source material. We weren't able to tell which side was which, but they were both awesome, and because of the cross pollination, either side could have come from either band.
The A side is a dark stuttery dronescape, bits of hiss and static, fluttering lowend synth, some sort of moody minimal new wave, a cinematic drone with a subtle underlying beat, murky and propulsive, creepy and throbbing, sounding not unlike Wolf Eyes recording for Kompakt. A buzzing lo-fi doomdrone black ambient sort-of techno maybe? Whatever it is, it's killer.
The flip side is more post industrial drone, a bleak barren soundscape, peppered with crumbling rhythmic crunch, all manner of grinding metallic whirs, deep ribcage rattling rumbles, almost like some slowed down caveman krautrock, blinding streaks of feedback melted into soft smears and strewn over boiler room hiss and no-radio-reception static, the track morphs into something much more lovely, a beautifully subdued percussive outro, but peppered with sharp bursts of demonic growls or thunder cracks or slowed down bullwhip cracks, or all three woven into super creepy blasts of harsh weirdness, made even more so by the beautiful drift lurking beneath.
Gorgeously packaged. Thick plastic sleeves, printed vellum inserts, the record pressed on thick coke bottle clear vinyl, the ink black and metallic silver. So nice.
LIMITED TO 324 COPIES!!
Blue Sandlewood Soap was unique in 1967/1968 around Minneapolis / St. Paul in that they had no lead guitarist and their use of crazy tempos and strange time signatures rendered their songs completely undanceable. They were also the first band in their scene
There's nothing on the gatefold cd sleeve to tell you much about who/what this is, besides the name Blue Water White Death (which for some reason makes us think of Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, though as it turns out they're not at all similar). There's just illustrations of a few frightening looking fishies, and some quirky song titles like "This Is The Scrunchyface Of My Dreams", "Nerd Future" and "Rendering The Juggalos". Hmm. Well it's enough to have made us curious about this, anyway, and that curiosity was worth it! This proved to be a weird and lovely, very dark avant pop record, quite compelling, indeed the first time we played this one morning, the only customer in the store at the time ended up buying it. Later we found out that BWWD is a collaboration between two singer/songwriter types from bands we certainly had heard of, none other than Jamie Stewart of SF's Xiu Xiu (and Former Ghosts) and friend Jonathan Meiburg from Texan band Shearwater. Should have guessed.
Together as Blue Water White Death (named after a '70s nature doc about the undersea dangers off the coast of Australia, apparently) these two have created an album that's gorgeous, shivery, and just a bit eerie. The delicate, breathy vocals carry fragile melodies over sparse sedate arrangements with ghostly background echoes, drones, and choirs. Acoustic guitars glitter in the darkness. Sudden bass notes twang reverberantly, expectantly, out of the near-silence. It's intimate, moody, emotive, hushed, and ultimately dramatic, with much "somber beauty" as we've previously noted about Shearwater's folky rock. For fans of them, and Xiu Xiu too, of course. Also we're reminded of Richard Youngs, for sure. (So if your name happens to be Loren Chasse, you definitely want this.) But it's recommended to everyone, actually!
Blueprint's first solo album pays homage to 1988, a year that brought us so many amazing hip hop records (from the likes of Eric B and Rakim, Biz Markie, Stetsasonic, Public Enemy... and so many more). Now, his use of samples of past hip hop classics is a little gratuitous, though the songs on a whole are well written, well recorded and well produced. And all by Blueprint himself! Two guests on 1988 are Aesop Rock (on "Lo-Fi Funk") and CJ the Cynic (on "Kill Me First"). Personally, the last song, "Liberated", is my fave. Solid beats, solid rhymes, awesome lyricism, no obvious or extraneous samples... it's totally rockin. Check it!
Fourth in this new series of super limited aural oddities, all of them amazing and sonically all over the map, from black metal (Throne Of Kataris, elsewhere on this list) to doom drone (past Record of the Week Hjarnidaudi) to gorgeously gloomy chamber music (Amber Asylum) to this, the first release, as far as we can tell, from epic Finnish post rock prog metal mavens Blueprint Human Being. That's right you heard us, FINNISH. As in from Finland! So all you Finnish music freaks best not dawdle, as you will definitely want to get your hands on this. Especially if you're partial to the sort of Krauty drone rock of Circle and the like, although that element is only one tiny aspect of BHB's sound. There's lots of post rocky drift, a sort of proggier Tarentel maybe, but then the horns kick in and we're in serious King Crimson territory. But there's also lots of fuzzy metal guitar wrapped around jagged loping Slintish rhythms, with strange sung / spoke vocals, all blending in some weird way that reminds us as much of Ved Buens Ende as Crimson. Some parts have the horns moving to the foreground, the music taking on a very jaunty garden party sort of feel, which makes us think of some damaged, sort-of-metal Penguin Cafe Orchestra or some bizarre Japanese what-the-fuck jazzdrone outfit or the stranger Circle side projects like Ratto Ja Lehtisalo. A bit schizophrenic for sure, but in a good way, a super dynamic sort of seasick meander through blasting metallic post rock, far out quirky prog, lilting almost RennFaire acoustic breaks, and blissed out repetitive krautrock. Be sure and stick around for the end of the final 11+ minute track, after a stretch of silence, comes a dizzying blast of freaked out psychedelic noise, all grinding loops, snippets of earlier songs, and all sorts of head spinning post production fuckery. Groovy laid back post-kraut-rock slathered in thick swirls of distortion and fuzzy effects, obscured by tape dropouts and strange damaged feedback, the whole thing warped and warbly as if broadcast through a thick cough syrup haze. So cool.
Limited to 750 copies, packaged in a mini lp style sleeve wrapped in a hand stamped brown paper outer sleeve.
All right! Unlike Blues Control, who might mislead just a bit with their name, this band Blues Addicts ARE indeed just what you think they might be from the moniker. Yep, reissue label Shadoks brings us the real deal heavy hippy blues rock here. And that is the sort of blues we like! Acid-rock blues circa 1970 from a Danish outfit definitely influenced by Cream and Hendrix. It's badass stuff, full of crunching chords and wailin' solos, approaching Blue Cheer levels of distortion n' heaviness, though with a jazzy side too, and some mellow moments. Blues Addicts' big thing was improvisation, as on the ten minutes plus of "Hailow". There's a singer, but really these songs are about instrumental musical expression, as you can tell from track titles referencing modes and methods like "Jazzer", "Bottleneck", "Electric", and perhaps even "(4/4+6/4)/�4"...
We mentioned these guys in our review of Shadoks' earlier reissue of another acid-blues item from Denmark, the Terje, Jesper & Joachim album. They were originally on the same label, Spectator, along with another, even fuzzier, band called Moses, which we hope will show up on Shadoks' reissue schedule someday soon too! Anyway, this is in that vein, and also fits in with other obscure bluesy proto-metal acts of the era like The Human Beast, Human Instinct, Speed Glue & Shinki, Skid Row, N.S.U., and many other fave raves of the same ilk.
Speaking of proto-metal, there's a high-contrast black and white picture in the cd booklet of hot shot guitarist Ivan Horn, whose evil facial grimace, long hair and shadowy brow makes him appear very black metal indeed. A man ahead of his time. Though, for looking so tough, he's also credited with playing the kazoo. The cd booklet also includes other photos and two pages of liner notes talking about the history of the band. Unlike the previous cd reissue we've seen of this (a few years back on the Karma label) there's no bonus tracks of alternate takes and the like, oh well.
The puzzlingly (and pleasantly) abstract New York duo known as Blues Control is back, making the jump to Siltbreeze with this new record, a spacey hybrid of Suicide/Velvet Underground droned out rock with more dreamy moments along the lines of Windy & Carl. They weave a lush tapestry of meditative sound collages warped with wavering piano flutters and beaming drones, all rising steadily toward the hazy sky. It's four songs, but almost 35 minutes, so dunno if this is a long ep or a short album. In any case, we'll take what we can get from Blues Control, and what we get here is quite nice indeed, a fine addition to their brief discography that includes the AQ recommended releases Puff on Fusetron and the eponymous one on Holy Mountain.
"Good Morning" (as in, little school girl?) opens up the disc with what must be the most actually blues-like thing that these guys have ever controlled. Kicking off with a single piano note (a la "I Wanna Be Your Dog"), they really shake it here, the track turning into a driving instrumental onslaught of gorgeously distorted guitar/bass fuzz, with honky tonk piano skittering o'er pounding drum beats... and then, horns! And electronic effects echoing the 13th Floor Elevators' famous jug. Badass. In part 'cause apparently garage-rock fiend Kurt Vile helps out.
The piano takes the fore on the next cut, the ambient jazz flecked loveliness of "Rest On Water". More a hazy soundscape than an actual song, it's like a lost transmission of a loose piano melody, with slow strings fading in alongside some acoustic strumming. More rhythmic is "Tangier", and more and more distorted and dubbed-out it also gets, as its eight mesmeric minutes proceed. It opens with a cool, lo-fi Casio kalimba sound, soon building upon itself before a huge wave of cloudy ambience comes in, along with a simple, steady rhythm with a dreamy keyboard melody floating on top. A thing of throbbing beauty. And then "On Through The Night" (which we don't think is meant to be a Def Leppard reference, though that would have been cool) takes up pretty much the entire second half of the disc, a 16:50 trip deep into Blues Control land, a realm of rumbling echo-effected dubbiness, woozy hints of string orchestration, creepy carnival organ, droned out drama, and pulsating mystery, their music looping like the multiple hoop earrings piercing the ear of the "primitive" person depicted on the cover, caressing YOUR ears though, rather than piercing them. The melody is murky, yet easy to detect, BC taking a thankfully melodic approach that many experimental bands ignore entirely.
Even at their most aggressive ("Good Morning") there's something gentle about Blues Control. That first track we'd especially recommend to the Wooden Shjips fans, and then elsewhere on here there's stuff to offer folks into the likes of everyone/thing from Eno to Sun Araw to Alice Coltrane Moolah to Expo '70. Elements of all of which combine uniquely within Blues Control's cracked and krautrockish DIY avant-blues experiments. A nice blend of pop catchiness and free-psych trippyness, the perfect record for a summer walk around town or a sunny BBQ burn out, this one is recommended!
The lp version of this came out earlier but we waited for the cd to come in before reviewing it. Maybe just 'cause Blues Control takes some time to digest, since they're so... different. And, we think, pretty darn cool.
You kind of have to listen to instrumental duo Blues Control as much for what's not going on, than what is. What's missing from the equation that suddenly makes 2+2 not equal 4 in Blues Controls' unusual math. Not by that to suggest that they're a "math rock" band. Nope, the name don't lie (nor does it tell the truth), they are a blues band. Of sorts, sort of. But playing the blues in an alternate, warped universe, where fragmentary fuzz guitars are friendly with tick-tocking clocks.
Sometimes they're subtracting stuff, leaving out the vocals and other usual blues signifiers and song structures and so forth. Or sometimes they work their magic by addition and multiplication (the layered looping of "Behind The Skies" ferinstance). It's all about abstraction, repetition, distortion. Suddenly 2+2 is an interesting problem to work out. And often, a pretty one.
The title track that opens the album features echoey percussive loops over which electronic notes gently cascade, reminding us of both Moolah and Cluster. Next, "Always On Time" proceeds similarly, with a recurring piano riff as centerpiece for soloing amidst a warm and gauzy bed of sound. That's followed by "Behind The Skies", which takes the disc to its darkest, grindingest depths. And then, "End Zone" is the sort of thing that Jimi Hendrix (if appropriately dosed with dowers) wouldn't mind jamming along to. Sleepy whale call electric blooze guitar from the other side. So much spaced out ambience, which gets even mellower, or mellowest, on the lovely album-ender "Call Collect".
Another WTF? release from this very much non-blues weirdo duo. As usual, but more so than ever, we're not quite sure what to make of it. Opener "Love's A Rondo" really threw us for a loop. A meandering rock groove jam lead by jaunty jazzy piano, ivories being tickled here in the vein of Vince Guaraldi of Peanuts fame, or even Bill Evans. The sprightly piano then mixes it up with distorted but mellow psych guitar wail. It's like Schroeder from Peanuts jamming with Wooden Shjips or something. Kinda confusional but we like it, an assessment that applies to the whole album. There's a soundtracky vibe to the heavier throb of track two, "Iron Pigs", which features happy but slightly dissonant sounding synth-horns and a steady drum machine thwack-thwack amongst other noises. As the album progresses, all these elements - piano, drum machine, guitar, electronics - woozily weave in and out, kind of mellow, kind of strange, kind of pretty, kind of queasy... It's tough to tell if it's "good" or not, but, well, we guess it IS, in that we like to listen to it, in fact it gets played in the shop quite a bit, and we're talking about it, even... Valley Tangents makes an impression as being not quite like anything else. They've successfully captured a true 'outsider' vibe here. It's like Blues Control decided to make a record today that, had it come out in the '70s, would for sure have wound up on the infamous Nurse With Wound 'list'. Or imagine Vince Vince Guaraldi making a krautrock record, with Brian Eno's help perhaps, one that's both pleasant -and- weird.
If you liked Blues Controls' recent collab with Laraaji, or their previous Local Flavor lp, well, you just might like this too. Or maybe not. We doubt BC are bothered much, they're just gonna keep doing their 'thing', whatever it is!
Don't let the punny name fool ya, this surely isn't "blues rock". Nor blues. Nor rock. Not really. Nor is it of Yugoslav origin, despite the biographical misinformation posted on the Holy Mountain website that claims Blues Control to be an obscure '70s psych band from Yugoslavia. Nope, Blues Control are an instrumental Brooklyn duo on guitar and synths and drums, making a wonderfully fucked up yet pleasantly listenable psych-squabble of a sound that's not super easy to describe, actually... let's just say that if it were blues rock, it'd be druggily confused, utterly EXPERIMENTAL blues rock. The eight tracks found on this eponymous debut wander through mellow, spacey passages, interludes of seasick synth symphonics, and blown-out epic episodes full of fuzzed-up motorpsycho guitar leads, drunken and damaged sounding. Blues Control's two-man trash team are up to something strange here, counter-intuitive creativity that can make a cool track out of some pretty piano dropped into a droney wash, followed up by a broken-amp bass solo and some off-kilter beats, ferinstance. This totally fits in on the out-there Holy Mountain label alongside the likes of Residual Echoes and Aufgehoben, especially considering how fractured and distorted they can get, almost like a fuzzed-out Starfuckers on the very first track. We're digging this a lot.
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When this latest Frkwys collaboration was first announced between New York psych rockers Blues Control and experimental new age composer, Laraaji (Edward Larry Gordon), we were curious as to what this would sound like. But ever since we got it in the store, it's fast becoming our favorite pairing in the series, which is no small feat, since we absolutely adored the Arp & Anthony Moore collaboration as well as the Juliana Barwick & Ikue Mori release. Blues Control has toned down their usual rollicking psych kraut chug, and instead create four long-form interconnecting pieces with tempered down cosmic guitar and electronic atmospheric manipulations, while Laraaji plays treated zither and African string instruments over them. Building from quiet oceanic ambiance to slowly evolving cosmically focused and tripped out deep spiritual meditations which feature choral and resonant vocal accompaniment provided by Laraaji. On the third song, "City of Love", a percussive momentum with a heavier guitar drone foundation briefly intensifies, while clouds of kora, kalimba and mouth harp vibrational tones bounce back and forth across the aural field to gently lilting psychedelic effect. For late night devotional listening for any fan of modern day psych and new age, this is simply stunning!!
When we listed a previous edition of this some years ago, it was back when our reviews were, um, a lot shorter. So all's we said then was that it was a proto-metal essential, from Japan's answer to Black Sabbath. And maybe that's enough, but since we dig this album so much, and it has at long last been reissued again, let's go for something a bit more expansive...
First off, Blues Creation's Demon & Eleven Children, their second and most classic album, dates from 1971. That's right, 1971!!! Of course it does. They'd started off in '69 with a record of all blues covers, but by '71 they'd heavied-up, and were ready with an album of originals, obviously influenced by the likes of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple's In Rock. And dig that cover art. If you're one of our many proto-metal lovin' customers, you NEED this.
Among early '70s Japanese heavy psych hard rock bands, THESE guys (next to, arguably, Flower Travellin' Band) were indeed the heaviest we've heard. And definitely the most Sabbathy (though FTB did cover Sabbath... and Flied Egg came close too, even putting albums out on Vertigo). But really, just listen to the opening track here, "Atomic Bombs Away". No question. Sounds like a song Sabbath wrote for their first album, but let Blues Creation have instead. Heck if you didn't know better, it really sounds like Iommi's playing the guitar riffs and solos, and Geezer's on the swinging, lumbering bass! Obviously, it's heavy, gotta be when it's called "Atomic Bombs Away" (we wonder if it was was weird for a Japanese band to title a song that, only about 25 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The song ain't actually about atomic bombs, actually, like most of the tracks on Demon & Eleven Children, it's about lovin' and leavin' (or being left). Which can be heavy stuff too. Sample lyrics from "Atomic Bombs Away": "First time I lay you in the rusty shack / Black night keep fallin' in your gypsy eyes / Keep on movin' till the end of time / Lord have mercy for my sin / Set me free from my destiny".
The next track is called "Mississippi Mountain Blues", complete with harmonica... but it's urgent and rollicking, and in any case about as conventionally blues rock as they ever get here. We call this proto-METAL for a reason. Just check out the rockin' riff-fest of an instrumental, entitled "Brane Baster" (aka "Brain Buster"), to see what we mean. It's not all about Sabbath emulation, either. They're proto-Priest in parts, too, or at least, they've got tight twin guitar action on here that'll impress the Wishbone Ash and Thin Lizzy fans. Definitely pretty badass for when and where they were from. Tracks like "Sorrow" do the slow and sad thing pretty well too. It's not all heavy - there's the gentle "One Summer Day", as lovely as its title suggests. But if you want heavy, '71 style, this album won't disappoint you at all, indeed, you'll be be freaking out. It concludes with the epic, and ripping, 9+ minute title track, and if you're not bowing down to Blues Creation by then, your name had better be, like, Ritchie Blackmore.
Julian Cope ranked this as #17 in his Japrocksampler top 50, not bad. From a proto-metal point of view, though, it's top ten material, and we're not just talking Japan. Up there with Bang and Dust and Buffalo and Leaf Hound and all the rest.
Reissued in one of those wallet-digi packages, numbered.
Japan's Blues Creation started off as standard late 60's traditional blues-rock band but quickly got all heavy and freaky and proto-metallic and sort of became their country's riffy acid-blues answer to Black Sabbath (well, along with a few others like Flied Egg and of course AQ faves the Flower Travellin' Band who covered Sabbath on their first album). We really wish we could still get a hold of the Japanese import cd version of Blues Creation's classic 1971 album Demon & Eleven Children. But at least, at last, we have a few recently obtained copies of this, a reissue of a live album that originally came out 'round the same time. It's got the title track from Demon & Eleven Children, along with a couple of Blue Creation originals not found on Demon, one called "Nightmare" being as good and metal as anything on that album. Plus there's a few covers -- "Understand" with guest vocalist Carmen Maki, who was kind of a Japanese Janis Joplin/Robert Plant hybrid, and extended-length versions of ol' nuggets like "Rolling Stone" and "Tobacco Road" (a mean version of that song for sure!). This is definitely not for those who hate the blues -- a lot of this is real bluesy -- but it's also pretty much always heavy and/or frantic. And the guitar work is KILLER, Iommi-worthy leads ripping out of yr speakers all the time. A live recording is just perfect for these guys. They have a super electric sound and that early '70s jamming aesthetic like the Sabs themselves.
Ok, a lot of bands are celebrating a 10 year anniversary this year. Some are more warranted than others. Let's just say that for now. Damage offers up the one-trick pony style of attitude encased blues licks in the EXPLODING way fans of Jon Spencer and his BLUES EXPLOSION (*bold and italized with !!!*) have loved and expected for a decade. Oh, so loyal to their sound and their fans! If you're still rockin' on the JSBE (now simply, Blues Explosion) you've got some brand new BLUES-type EXPLOSIONS!!! If not, well, then nothing to see here.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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The 12" has 3 songs, the cd has 6. I don't like Jon Spencer very much in general, but this record is really really good. Remixes by Beck, the Dub Narcotic boys, Mike D. of the Beastie Boys, etc. Lots of theremin and anaolgue synth sounds.
Sam Coomes of the fabulous Quasi takes a detour from his usual fuzzy pop stylings into totally raw, psychedelic blues-iness!! Somewhat startling and strange as it begins, but stick with it 'cause it proves to be an altogether engaging listen. Yelp'n'howl vocals. Trashy but totally tight drumming. Churning, bristly guitars. A little swamp / hillbilly, a little T-Rex-ish, a little bit of Quasi-ness (you can catch glimpses of their trademark organ sounds in fab songs like "Born To Die") and closing the album is a lengthy, reeling, jazzy free-for-all. Very very cool and super right-on recommended!
This disc (compiling two rare & expensive late '60s lps) reveals NYC's the Blues Magoos to be the missing link between the Count Five, the MC5, and -gasp- the new Monster Magnet! Sounds impossible but it's true! Squirrelly garage rock wrapped in farfisa organ and swirly psychedelia, tempered with a healthy dose of bubblegum pop and a silly sense of humor. The album titles are right-on, and 'the band was known for wearing bellbottoms trimmed with neon plastic tubes'! Includes an amazing cover of Maceo Marriweather's 'Worried Life Blues'. This welcome reissue has been a constant on the AQ-stereo ever since it showed up! This record reflects our growing interest in the drug culture of the late '60s...oops, I mean, their interest.
You know a record of nothing but flutes has got to be good!!! Well, actually, I suppose that's not entirely true. I like to think that an all flute recording would be perfect, but the harsh reality is it seldom is. But Eberhard Blum's Berlin To Buffalo is not only an amazing 'flute' record, it is an amazing record, period. Minimal and abstract, dreamy and hypnotic, drone-y, bizarre and quite beautiful. It definitely sounds '20th century classical' but it manages to be more than that. The first track is an extended piece for flute and electronics, but the focus is on the flute, and the piece is beautiful in a very traditional way. Lots of space and ambience and melodies are stretched to their limits. The second track of just electronic sounds (okay so the whole record is not just flutes) is really bizarre. Snippets of mumbling voices, far away tones and sine waves, with the occasional burst of polyphonic dissonance and gentle waves of electronic grit and buzz. Sounds quite contemporary actually. Would be right at home on Ritornell or Alien8 or as the soundtrack to an arthouse horror flick. The epic 41 minute final track for multiple flutes is a gorgeous wash of notes and overtones flodding your senses with sounds, warm and rich and thick and shimmering. Quite reminiscent of Phil Niblock, albeit a tad more melodic. One of Andee's favorite records of the year!
Germany, circa 1984. A gaggle of krautrock diehards were (we imagine) locked in a room with a plethora of instruments, toys and objects and not allowed to come out until they'd done some sort of justice to the communal freak-out legacy of such early '70s kosmische bands like Amon Duul I and Siloah. They might still be happily locked in that room, for all we know, but the disjointed, damaged, distorted recording they made was pressed up and privately released on vinyl in a limited edition of 100 copies in 1986. That LP, Karawane der Mystiks, has apparently become an extremely sought-after (or at least very hard to find) latter-day krautrock rarity, and has now been officially reissued on compact disc for the limited edition acid-folk cd-r lovin' / Arthur magazine readin' / "new weird America" who dig old weird Germany crowd to freak on.
This disc consists of sixteen tracks (including three "bonus-titel") of lo-fi, chaotic krautrock jamming that at its best achieves a sort of fucked-up raga-like trance state, like a retarded Franciscan Hobbies or a more raw and hippy Axolotl, perhaps. A few parts are a bit too peppy for us, or cacophonously annoying if you're not in the mood, but mostly this is a weird, wailing pow-wow that we're glad has been dug up from obscurity. Of course, it's still pretty darn obscure! And by the way, about the only thing in English on the packaging is the term "Camelshithippies" found in one of the song titles.
Morr Music continue their singular vision of keepin' you as relaxed and unriled as possible. Indeed, this German label have amassed quite a stable of like-minded dreamy indie pop-tronica artists, and here's the latest addition to their family. It's F.S. Blumm's Zweite Meer album. Psst, for those keeping score, it's actually his second release on Morr. His first was 2001's Mondekuchen, notably the first acoustic album released on that label. Anyways, his muted music immediately settles right in by the hearth with some ultra soft prettiness composed from a blend of acoustic guitar, glockenspiel, melodica, accordion, harmonium, french horn and more. Zweite Meer also snuggles in cozily next to the music by The Album Leaf. Just give this a back-to-back listen with A.L.'s recently reissued Seal Beach EP. So lovely!
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While it was obviously too much to hope for that the new Dean Blunt record could actually live up to its tantalizingly grim title, and contain ACTUAL Black Metal, it does end up being a sonic surprise anyway. Right from the get go, with the opening track a looped sunshine pop concoction of swirling strings, jangle pop guitars, and way-up-in-the-mix deadpan vocals, drawled and laid back, it's not ENTIRELY removed from DB's previous full length, the heartbreak comedown album The Redeemer, but things here get stripped down even further, and become further removed from Blunt's previous project Hype Williams. Black Metal is a collection of ultra personal downer pop, looped gloominess, a sort of fractured slowcore, the bulk of the record following the sonic template set by that first track, a series of looped pop jams, all swirling strings, jangle pop guitars, deadpan laid back vocals, Blunt's vocals almost comical in their awkward fit, which might rankle some listeners, but it's really what gives Black Metal its intimate, home brewed vibe, and if Blunt's vocals seems a bit woozy and warble, prepare yourself for the yowling, atonal female vox (a la Kim Gordon), courtesy of Joanne Robertson, which are even more strange and cold and more often than not charmingly off key. Robertson surfaces throughout Black Metal, occasionally lacing the proceedings with haunting guitar figures, but more often countering Blunt's wasted vocals with her own hazy narcoleptic call and response croon.
Highlights include "100", which sans vocals could be Galaxie 500, or some other similarly minded jangle pop outfit, but then Robertson and Blunt join the proceedings, and the song is transformed into something more off kilter, and home brewed sounding, still hauntingly intimate, but with a warped DIY vibe, Robertson's vocals in particular reminding us of early 4-track twee pop, but here set amidst a landscape much more lush and layered. There's the sprawling 13 minute epic "Forever", all stumbling, stuttery programed rhythms, over wheezing shimmers and delicate piano, Robertson crooning forlornly, before the sound starts to get a little bit dubby, with echoes and strange sound effects, only to eventually be joined by some (purposefully?) cheesy sax. Which is followed by the mesmerizingly creepy "X", all spidery guitars draped over softly billowing chordal thrum, a gauzy raga like drone, haunting and hypnotic, which unexpectedly blossoms into some woozy, warbly lo-fi electro, and again more of Robertson's endearingly off-key vocals, all driven by what sound like the hiss of a life support machine (!).
The rest of the record is populated by fantastic little electro-dream pop fragments, that again, sans vocals are alternatingly sweetly psychedelic or charmingly experimental, whether it's the cascading shoegaze shimmer of "Heavy", or the spare Doug Blunt styled (no relation? this song has us wondering!) skeletal funk groovery of the misleadingly titled "Punk", which is also laced with soft undulating swirls of faux strings, and some cool Appalachian guitars, the distorted electronic tangle of the also misleadingly titled "Country", which sounds like it could have come out on the Pan label, or the dizzyingly looped murk-pop ballad, again rife with "Careless Whisper" style sax, or even the synth heavy closer that sounds like Blunt and Robertson are channeling Angelo Badalamenti, the whole thing collapsing into some twisted synth dirge, driven by stumbling programmed beats, and Blunt sounding almost like SpaceApe (R.I.P.), a gorgeously bleak electro-jazz, gloom pop dirge that unwinds like the score to some lost Lynchian art film.
Fantastic stuff. And perhaps appropriately, minimally and confusionally (and handsomely) packaged in all black with practically no information, other than the track titles.
The latest Dean Blunt affliction, which is what he calls his music, is not what you might have been expecting. If in the past we've been prone to describe the afflictions of the artist formerly known as Hype Williams as drug music, then The Redeemer is the come down. At times it casts a harsh light on reality, but always in a beautiful, revelatory kind of way - like when the cold glow of day comes streaming through the drawn curtains. As with Black Is Beautiful (2012, Hyperdub), Blunt's eclectic-electric collaboration with cohort Inga Copeland, each track here flows into the next, so much so that pulling one from the line up would throw the whole thing out of wack (or at least come across like a major musical party foul). If nothing else, the dude knows the power of the segue and how to work you in and out of moods. Redeemer takes what Blunt's learned in the British underground club scene of dub and grime that informed his earlier work (or afflictions, if you prefer) but ditches the smoked-out hissy/buzzy beats in favor of vibrant strings, plucked harps, just a whisp of horn here and there, gentle wave undulations, and choir-like vocals. The weirdness of his beats have been forsaken for traditional rock kick drums. Does this mean that the provocateur known for playing live at lethal volumes, staging ruses, and comparing himself to Steve Jobs (before Kanye West!) has mellowed out and matured? Probably not. The opening track here, a synthesized string quartet, is colored with false rap bravado by calling it, "I Run New York." And one crucial inclusion suggests something more than mellowing is at play. Recurring answering machine messages (who still has an answering machine?) from a woman who is in the process of ending a relationship align with "Pedigree", in which Blunt sings in his croaky baritone, "Call me when your heart is empty. Happy we can still be friends." So perhaps the dude is just hella sad. After all, only two songs � "Demon" and "Imperial Gold", feature female vocals, and neither are attributed to Inga. Then again, there are no credits on The Redeemer, there isn't even a title on the cover � just two hands, held palm to palm as if praying or pleading. But is Inga gone forever? Is that her wispy voice on "Imperial Gold". Isn't Inga known for being a master of vocal imitation? Are they fucking with us again? That's reason enough alone to consider viewing this record on the same snarky anti-art (specifically anti-hip-hop) level as previous releases but now Blunt is taking on the act of making music itself. Or maybe he's just really sad. In any case, The Redeemer is gorgeously produced and wonderful to just give yourself over to.
Here we have the newest piece of hypnotized dream-hop, back alley drug murk, neuro-mantic soul collage from Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland, formerly (?) known as Hype Williams! And while the sound here is a little more "put together" than some of their previous works, its still filled to the brim with that fucked up what-the-fuck sonic cough syrup sound we have all grown to love! Still hazy as hell smoked out buzz and hiss, mixed with draggy beats and screwed up samples, droney and dark synth drifts, Inga's vocals dubbed out to the max, haunted and peaking in the red on those louder syllables. The songs here are a woozy sprawl, but all mostly under four minutes, making the whole thing really feel like an album "proper". The jams maybe a little more focused than before, and maybe a little more pop-tones in the vocals, but that otherworldly element in their music is anything if not more pronounced. It's just so nice to not be able to put your finger on something, and that is exactly what Hype Williams does for us here. Hype Williams' music is all about reference points on system crashing overload. A combination of sounds and textures resulting from many a late night/early morning YouTube wormhole, filtered through narcotic smoke machine fog, resulting in a sound that is totally confounding, but equally seductive.
Track 2 is a dark and sexy crawl through the moonlight, drum machine toms ping ponging from left to right, while a minimal synth outlines the progression. Honestly kind of reminding us of a gloomier, more damaged Enya (such a good thing!), but with Inga's voice being a little more breathy and spaced out. There are many hidden layers in such seemingly stark music. There is a lot of sonic space in the sounds at the forefront, but at about the 1:10 mark of track 2, a haunting little synth wash creeps in, WAY down in the mix, almost perfectly blending with the omnipresent tape hiss buzz. This sort of subtle sonic fuckery is a trade mark of Hype Williams, and Black Is Beautiful seems to exercise it to the point of perfection. Its understated psychedelic drifting, the sound lulling the listener into a sort of fugue state. Track 5 has very strange, euro-infomercial "world" vibes. A snappy little pop song buried in hiss, a gem that sounds like it would fit right in on one of those Sublime Frequency radio comps. Lo-fi dreamy, and catchy as hell. But it's tracks 9 & 10 that really have us reeling. The centerpiece to the album, and the longest songs here, we are treated to EVERYTHING that make Dean and Inga's sound so damn interesting. Track nine starts with a screwed up down-pitched voice (Dean?) talking about reaching the promised land with some homegrown, and then the phrase "Never Look Back" is repeated over and over and over again, kosmiche-y synth drones start to appear and build as the repetition of the phrase goes on and on. Really tranced out, stony subliminal message type of vibe. Than suddenly a song erupts! With Dean rapping the verse in his Houston via Hackney cough syrup drawl, and Inga singing an ear-wormy chorus. This is a pop song, albeit delivered through thick layers of opium smoke and TV glow haze. Hype Williams at their most accessible but still, WTF? Also AMAZING use of samples: "When white people tell other white people" etc. etc. LOL. Track 10 is a draggy slow jam, gothic sort of thing. An aphotic dub jam, slow and low with layers of synths gurgling and bubbling up. The beat just going forever while all sorts of disassociated noises creep in and out of frame, filled with feedback and tripped out dubwise vocal intonations. A jammy hypnotic drugged out creepy crawler of a tune! The rest of the record follows suit, an ecstatic tapestry of blurred vision, lo-fi yet space agey subliminal beats music!
Black Is Beautiful sees the duo growing musically without losing sight of their unique aesthetic. A sound track for the over-saturated information age. It seems like it has meaning and message, but whatever that is, is not plainly seen, instead buried under layers of obscure reference and abstract signifiers. And the music itself (our main concern, admittedly) is as fucked up and hypnotic as ever! So, fully recommended!
The first Doug Blunt release, Gentle Persuasion, we made record of the week almost a year ago and people went totally nuts for it. And it's really not hard to see why. Blunt's mellow brand of lo-fi outsider funk is both catchy and rather odd. Sounding like a smoother, Caribbean-inflected Wesley Willis, made with simple keyboard loops, congas and Blunt's own acidy guitar solos. It also had a off-kilter timelessness to it, where we couldn't tell if it was recently recorded or made decades ago.
Doug Blunt came in the store the other day with this new (?) release, Big Top, an ep composed of three songs and three instrumental versions. Complete with cheap color-copied covers of a screen shot from the one video performance we have seen on Vimeo of him performing,"Gentle Persuasion" with an all female backing band (it's totally worth seeking out if you can find it!). While these are new songs, the backing tracks sound almost exactly the same as the tracks on Gentle Persuasion, but with stranger lyrics mostly about being under the stoned spell of sexy freak show women. But the songs are still catchy and crazy as ever, and we may like these new ones even better!
As always it's hard to tell what the real story with Doug Blunt is. Though a super nice guy, sometimes we get the sneaking suspicion he's pulling one over on us. Every time he drops off more cds, he always leaves with a slightly mocking chuckle, as if to say, "those crazy fools". Indeed!
It's pretty phenomenal that this record went from getting the suspicious side-eye when we first took it in on consignment, to becoming one of our favorite "WTF?" records of the year! When it first appeared, no one seemed to know where it came from (it had been brought in by Blunt himself, one day). And we weren't too sold on the cover, a generic photograph that looked like it was shot in the eighties, of this fellow Blunt, standing with a woman (a close friend of his, in a head to toe orange outfit that looks like it could have been prison garb, and who as it turns out, may no longer be alive) in front of a Mercedes parked in front of the mural on the side of the O'Farrell Theater on Polk street in San Francisco. Also, whenever there's a bunch of "ASCAP" logos plastered all over the front and back cover, our internal "uh-oh" meter goes way off.
So it just sat on our new arrivals shelf for a few weeks. But then a couple of folks (one of whom runs the Gloriette label, who have supplied us with some Ariel Pink and Nite Jewel records) started asking about it, because they had heard about this record, so we gave it a listen and were pretty surprised and rather blown away by what we were hearing. A lo-fi but breezy outsider funk, made with repetitive cheap-sounding keyboards loops and tones (the kind being currently exploited by Dam-Funk, Ariel Pink, and James Pants), strange metallic tropical guitar tones that sound more like steel drums and flute sounds than actual guitar, and sly, laid-back vocals and catchy, infectiously naive grooves that work their way into our heads and never let go. Everybody here ended up really really digging it.
We sold one copy immediately to someone in the store when playing it, and then when we tried to contact Blunt to get more copies, we discovered that somehow we'd neglected to get his contact info, d'oh! The cd had no contact information, and searches online only revealed that the title track, a raunchy but coded come-on to a sexy stranger, was included on a James Pants mix. This only piqued our interest further, as Blunt's skewed Caribbean inflected songs would obviously be simpatico with James Pants' more recent tropical themed output. We could also see folks into Ariel Pink and Dam-Funk getting WAY into this. So we thought maybe this record was a rare private press record from the eighties. It does seem to have a strange hard-to-pin-down-time-wise quality.
Thankfully, Blunt eventually came back in and we got more copies and found out that he had pressed vinyl copies too. He also told us that this record was recorded ten years ago in 2000, but that didn't diminish our new found love for this record's questionable mystery, as it still predates all of the artists mentioned above that it reminds us of, though we're pretty sure Blunt probably has never heard of any of them. It also has the left of center oddness of other outsider funk artists like Tonetta, or Wicked Witch, albeit way more toned down than either of those two. Not that it's completely off the wall weird, but it's one of those records that we went into with such hesitation and were pleasantly surprised that we then became totally enamored with its home-brewed charm.
The lp is 5 tracks, with extra shorter versions of the songs "Fly Guy" and "Gentle Persuasion" and comes housed in an old school white cut-out 12" sleeve. The cd version has two extra songs and instrumental versions of four of the tracks. Oh, and the vinyl has a gold star sticker that boldly proclaims "HIT!" We couldn't agree more!
RECORD STORE DAY 2015!!
Here's one of this year's crop of Record Store Day releases we were most excited about, and thankfully managed to get a good number of - which was kind of amazing, since it is limited to just 350 copies!! So we have a bunch (for now) to review, which was also helped by the fact that, d'oh, we somehow forgot to include it on the list of RSD goodies we posted last weekend. Anyway, so glad to be able to list this now 'cause Doug is very special to us.
Faithful followers of the aQ list probably remember when we made Doug Hream Blunt's Gentle Persuasion cd and 12" a Record Of The Week a couple of years ago. A home-brewed breezy outsider funk masterpiece about woman's butts that was so catchy and infectious, likely recorded by Doug back in the eighties, but not widely released until around the year 2000 (we could never really get an official answer). We had no idea of the cult appeal of Doug Blunt's music when he one day dropped by and consigned the record, and apparently neither did he, or at least he never alluded to it or seemed to care much about it. But ever since we listed it, we have sold it quite regularly to many customers who seek us out specifically just to buy a copy, and seem quite surprised that we actually can get it. The cd version is out of print now, but we have and can still get more of the original 12".
Then, this Doug Hream Blunt release on David Byrne's Luaka Bop label was announced for Record Store Day this year, surprise, and it turns out Doug is on the brink of getting a full scale archival release of his music this summer (just like the label did for Tim Maia and William Onyeabor)!. Such great news for someone so super nice and low-key about himself, really we are super-psyched for him!. So with this special RSD 12" remixes of the song "Gentle Persuasion" by renowned remixers, British DJ duo Psychemagik and Hype Williams aka Dean Blunt (apparently Dean Blunt named himself after Doug), we sort of get a teaser of what makes Doug's music so cool. The choice of Psychmagik and Hype Williams as remixers are on point, because both are known for their less is more approach, taking out more than they put in and emphasizing and extending the money shots of the track. The Psychemagik "Move Your Butt" remix focuses on the groove, bumping up the bass and drums and reducing much of the main lyrics to just edited snippets like "Girl, Move Your Butt" in phased out psychedelic echoes while still including much of the steel drum keytar solo and female backing vocals of the original (see the original review for a sampling of the original track). The Hype Williams side "get choong and look at the sky" remix is much stranger, because if it is the same speed as the Psychmagik side, then this is the screwwwwwed version, totally slow and murked out, also editing the vocals completely out except for the female backing track and keytar solo in a strange dreamy "warts-and-all" twist. If it was meant to be faster, which it can be, than it is sort of a more stripped down version of the original. Hard to tell, because the release doesn't even mention who's doing the remixing, we had to go online to figure it out. But truth be told we prefer to hear it much more slooooowed down.
The 12", which is housed in a blank white single sleeve with only the Luaka Bop logo on the center label, does come with an elaborate album-sized gatefold "magazine", which is supposedly dead stock of an Italian sex mag from the nineties that has Doug's name written everywhere along with sexual fantasies and soft-core retro porn material reminiscent of Hustler's Forum, along with full color cardstock insert artwork. Weird. Not sure what that's all about, but it's quite (literally) cheeky!
But we also have a very special treat for our customers in that we got Doug himself to come in and SIGN every copy of this we had left (with the help of his young granddaughter Juanita who added cute hearts to Doug's name!). Sorry if you picked this up before it was signed, Doug didn't show up until the Monday after RSD! Needless to say this is very limited and likely all the copies we'll ever get, so do yourself a favor and move your butt on this!!!
We can't believe it's been five years since Doug Hream Blunt himself walked into our store and consigned his self-released recordings of home-brewed, proto-chillwave dance funk, recorded with washy and chirpy synths and genuinely out there guitar solos, with songs about dancing, fly guys and ladies' butts. Kind of a smoother Wesley Willis (ok, much smoother!) with Jimi Hendrix dreams, Blunt's genuinely infectious musical enthusiasm shined through on each track. We made Gentle Persuasion record of the week back in 2010, without knowing much about its backstory. Doug was very vague on details too, saying the recording was from 2000, but we believe that was when it was pressed, but not recorded. Having suffered a stroke a few years before, he couldn't go into great length about the recording at the time (he's doing much better now, as evidenced by our recent record signing event!), but we had an inkling that the recordings were known in certain crate-digger / DJ circles, which were immediately confirmed once we had it on our website and orders from all over the world started pouring in.
Seriously, we have sold tons of his release, and now lo and behold, Doug is finally having his well-deserved, big moment of larger recognition and discovery via David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, with this reissue of his complete recordings which include the two previously self-released discs we previously listed: Gentle Persuasion and Big Top, remastered and put together for the first time - these tracks have never sounded better! A lo-fi but breezy outsider funk, made with repetitive cheap-sounding keyboards loops and tones (the kind being currently exploited by Dam-Funk, Ariel Pink, and James Pants, all Doug Hream Blunt fans by the way), strange metallic tropical guitar tones that sound more like steel drums and flute sounds than actual guitar, and sly, laidback vocals and catchy, infectiously naive grooves that work their way into our heads and never let go. So delightful!!
And we finally get more of the story behind these recordings: Back in 1985, when Doug was 35, he decided he wanted to learn guitar and found an extended learning class called 'How To Form A Band' run by Victor Flaviani out of his garage. Victor taught Doug the guitar, even though Victor barely knew the instrument himself, and Doug set about writing and recording the songs with his other class mates. We remember seeing the video of Gentle Persuasion we found on Vimeo from a cable access TV video with Doug and what seemed to be an all-girl band, which turns out were his fellow classmates, which included Victor and his wife Angela too on drums and guitar respectively.
It's pretty phenomenal that this record went from getting the suspicious side-eye when we first took it in on consignment, five years ago, to becoming one of our favorite "WTF?" records ever. Not that it's so impossibly strange, but it's a genuine home-grown San Francisco DIY funk artifact with minimal ambitions that is finally being turned on to a larger audience, and we couldn't be happier for Doug! For fans of that Personal Space compilation of private press electronic soul, Dam-Funk, Ariel Pink or Dean Blunt, who apparently took the Blunt name in tribute to Doug!
Download code included with the vinyl btw. Also btw, if you missed the remix 12" that Luaka Bop put out as a teaser for this earlier this year for Record Store Day, we still have three or four signed copies of that left in stock...
There's an air of uneasy change on this seventh Blur full length. Undoubtedly this is greatly due to the departure of prominent member Graham Coxon from the band, leaving frontman Damon Albarn - perhaps a little overconfident following the success of his other fun-filled project Gorillaz? - at the helm of this formerly fantastic pop ship. However, Albarn's gift is at hooking up with strong artists with which to collaborate - case in point, Coxon, Dan The Automator or longtime Blur producer Stephen Street. Although he may believe he can run the show on his own, he quite simply cannot. Think Tank is distressingly awkward, seemingly unfinished and lost. Even stalwart Blur fans might find this rather difficult to endure. Produced by William Orbit and Norman Cook (aka Fatboy Slim).
Enter at your own risk.
A book chronicling the American hardcore scene, mainly 1980-86. Written in an engaging oral history collage style (a la Please Kill Me -- the book about the NYC '70s punk scene), this covers everything from the straight edge scene to Black Flag, Dead
Cosmosophy is the final installment in the 777 trilogy from French industrial black metal weirdos Blut Aus Nord, which began with Sect(s), a record that was sonically well in line with past BaN records, dense and heavy, ultra complex and darkly twisted. The second installment was where things got really weird, The Desanctification found their sound veering dramatically more toward the electronic, and the poppy, with one track sounding almost like nineties industrial electro pop, and a bunch of the tracks driven by programed beats. It definitely seemed like the least black metal, and the most challenging, at least for the grim true metallic hordes.
This final volume apparently is meant to bridge the gap between the two, fusing the gnarled blackness of the first record, with the experimental electronics of second, but in fact forges ahead into completely new territory, eschewing blast beats entirely, as well as traditional BM buzz, and instead weaves a lush, emotional landscape of dark metallic moodiness, sweeping and epic, minor key and majestic. The opener is a dark slab of gloom pop, the guitars heavy, the sound vaguely metallic, but sounding more like Alcest or Katatonia, crooned dramatic vocals over gothic heaviness, while the second unfurls a programmed rhythm, under a haze of crackly static, the vocals a weird spoken word, the background a blur of gauzy shimmer and angelic voices, super stripped down and minimal, when all of a sudden, the song erupts into a super dramatic, soaring, almost operatic sounding epic, chugging riffs underpinning crooned vocals all over wild drumming, the vibe equal parts brooding heavy rock and stripped down power metal. The song's joined by mysterious stretches of droned out static, and weird urgently whispered voices.
The Katatonia / Alcest vibe is huge on the third track, brooding, minor key, starting off hushed and shimmery, but building to something more bombastic, although the second half is the first hint of black metal, harsh vokills, droned out insectoid guitar buzz, it never fully blossoms into blackness, in fact, the guitar splinter, and the sound is transformed into a cool mathy stop/start groove, the chugging growing more and more dense, before the sound is wreathed in soaring melodic leads, the sound managing to be both melodic and melancholy, but also darkly malevolent.
The sound continues to evolve, moving even further into a more melodic direction, downtuned guitars wreathed in hazy washed out synth swirls, all draped over a skeletal mechanical beat, clean crooned vocals belted out, total blackened gloom pop, that briefly splinters into something blacker and dirgier, but still rife with melody and dark emotional energy, before finishing off with the sprawling 11 minute closer, all industrial programmed rhythms, epic muted riffery, and deep chant-like vox, it's almost like an outro (which it sort of is really), looped and cyclical, subtle variations in the sound, but overall, repetitive and tranced out, before fading out, and leaving just a creepy expanse of deep synth drone, that sounds remarkably like some lost Carpenter soundtrack, a weird, but cool way to finish off the trilogy.
And while more metal folks were most likely hoping for something much blacker, we have to say the sonic arc of all three records played out pretty much perfectly.
Latest from these misanthropic French black metallers, loooong time aQ faves, this is the first in a planned trilogy, and finds the band sounding more intense, corrosive and chaotic than ever, with some of the most twisted, gnarled riffs we've heard from these guys, all woven into epic sprawls of discordant, dissonant, hyper technical, drone drenched industrial flecked blackness.
Of course, their sound exists in a sonic space similar to their black metal countrymen Deathspell Omega, particularly in their obtuse riffing and dense masses of sound, not to mention their post rock tendencies, but BaN continue to stretch the boundaries of their already ever shifting sound, and straight away, they erupt into a head spinning, ultra complex wall of bludgeoning black metal, the riffs seeming to detune as they're played, the melodies unraveling, the whole sound teetering on the edge of collapse, tense and so so dark, some avant black hole buzz for sure, the first few minutes exhausting in its relentlessness, until finally the song breaks down into a weirdly melodic and slightly mellower post rock tangle, all wavery buzz and woozy harmonies, some strangely psychedelic leads, the sound oozing and melting, only to splinter and collapse right back into another dizzying blast of tangled riffs and impossibly chaotic drumming, the guitars almost sounding like their being played with a slide, slippery and warbly. The vocals kept to a minimum, letting the warped music carry much of the weight, but this is Blut Aus Nord, so the band slip seamlessly into a bit of industrial drift, all hushed low end shimmer, haunting sine wave like melodies, and programmed rhythms, and hell, that's just the first song.
The rest of the record follows a similarly dark and twisted path, although the band do infuses their bouts of grinding black density and spaced out post rock infused drift with heavy stretches of minimalistic dirgery, as well as some surprisingly melodic, classic metal sounding parts, but of course, the next burst of gnarled black chaos is never far off, the record constantly shifting from epic and majestic, to haunting and atmospheric, to furious and frantic, to smoldering and melodic, to crushing and absolutely terrifying. Definitely as good as any of their past records, and a killer start to the new trilogy, the record closing with a surprisingly not black metal closer, a serious stretch of slow building post rock, sounding like a slightly more metallic Mogwai or Explosions In The Sky, tense and dramatic, moody and darkly mysterious.
Anyone paying attention will know that in the past few years, the unlikely nation of France has been churning out some of the most progressive, intelligent, and best black metal around. There's Deathspell Omega, Peste Noire, Spektr, and of course, the mighty Blut Aus Nord, a shadowy group who seamlessly blends synthy ambience with a relentless, yet interestingly controlled black metal assault. Seasick guitar riffs, plodding, often midtempo drums, and vocalist Vindsval's vile black metal rasp (and occasional operatic chant, no shit) meet up in an unholy union of strangely structured songs that are at once hallucinatory, majestic, and beautiful.
Blut Aus Nord possess a unique, cyclical style of songwriting, and even though we have no idea what they are saying, it is evident through titles that each song fits within a well defined philosophical theme. With names like "This Formless Sphere (Beyond the Reason)", "...the Meditant (Dialogue With the Stars)", and "Elevation", it's clear that the band's interest goes beyond any sort of juvenile take on Satanism, instead seeking to make sense of an endlessly unfathomable universe. Their albums seem to exist as esoteric and surreal dream worlds, and the band's intense, psychedelic approach isn't as much furious as it is contemplative. Within this potent mixture, they are also surprisingly "rocking".
Memoria Vetusta II - Dialogue With The Stars (part I, Fathers of the Icy Age, was released waaaaay back in 1996) starts with "Acceptance (Aske)", a GORGEOUS synthscape that sets the moody atmosphere for the next hour. It was interesting to watch customers enter the store during such a beautiful and melancholy piece, only to be hit with the loping, super blackened approach that kicks off the next track, "Disciple's Libration (Lost in the Nine Worlds)", which over the course of 9 minutes, manages to perfectly encapsulate everything that is so great about this band.
The impeccable production on this album certainly adds to its greatness. Clear and spacious, the music within sounds as if it has existed forever, created by a group of immortal mystics, not, you know, a couple of guys from France. In the end, we are presented with what will undoubtedly be one of the best metal records of 2009.
If you thought the last few Blut Aus Nord records were weird, and freaked out, and fucked up, then this new disc is gonna have you either cowering in the corner with all the lights off and clutching some sort of talisman to ward off whatever the fuck kind of evil this record is emanating, or you'll be scratching your head wondering "What the fuck?" Or if you're anything like us, you'll be doing both, and loving it.
Any vestige of buzzing black metal has been shed and in its place a completely abstract, confusional world of muddy blackness. This music is so weird it's almost impossible to describe it in words. It's most definitely not black metal. It is certainly black, or at least some very very dark shade of gray, but it would be hard to definitively describe this as metal. Imagine all the super Slinty post rock parts from the most recent Deathspell Omega record, take all of those parts, play them all at once, some forward, some in reverse, run them all through banks of effects, and you'll have something like Mort. There are no blast beats, not mosquito-like riffing, in fact Mort hovers a lot closer to doom than to black metal.
But even doom wouldn't really begin to describe the loping lurching weirdness. Every track is a strange assemblage of damaged drum machines, dizzying circusy keyboards a dense oppressive swirl of guitars that sound like they are constantly being tuned and detuned. Super woozy and sea sick sounding. Completely and almost overwhelmingly chaotic. Like the songs are constantly threatening to fall apart at any moment. Which lends the proceedings a certain amount of tension and dramatic gravitas. Leads drift in and out, and sort of warble and wail, before breaking a part and sinking into the murk. The vocals are like another layer of low end rumble, a thick reverberating whir. Everything constantly shifting and blurring, pitches shifting up and down, swarms of creepy little FX appear and then fade away, long stretches of black ambience, punctuated by bursts of near industrial pummel. So weird. But it's mainly the riffs that make this record as fucked up as it is. They're not black metal riffs really, barely even metal riffs, some sort of gothy no-wave sounding deconstructed guitar torture. Sort of like if they had Greg Ginn come in and play a bunch of angular fucked up Black Flag riffs and then slowed them WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY down and doused them in effects and randomly adjusted the tape speed, so the band and the various instruments seem to slowly shift in and out of phase, occasionally falling together in one huge blast of black fury, only to slowly drift to pieces again.
So weird and dark, and strangely mournful and melancholy. Some bastardized mix of Abruptum, M83 and Nortt. A baffling and brilliant, blissed out no-wave black doom ambient post rock masterpiece.
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What is it about French black metal? Deathspell Omega, Mutiilation, Spektr, Alcest, Peste Noire, Amesoeurs, Nuit Noire, Antaeus, Malcuidant, S.V.E.S.T., Eikenskaden, Vlad Tepes� Sure there are other places that have spawned lots of great bands, but holy shit.
And of course, you can't leave Blut Aus Nord off that list. Beginning life as a furious blackened beast, Blut Aus Nord gradually began to incorporate long stretches of dark ambience, and haunting Wolf Eyes-ian industrial soundscapers into their sound, eventually even recording a whole disc of ambient drone music which was tacked on as a bonus disc alongside their album The Work Which Transforms God.
Their most recent record, Mort, found the band shifting again, shrugging off the buzzing blackness of their past incarnation, and weaving any buzz they had left into long slow loping post rock epics. Sort of gothy, definitely still metal, but a sort of plodding woozy dronemetal. Their strange riffing still intact, having once turned blazing blasts into something dizzying and bizarre, on Mort were turning doomy blackness creepy, demented midtempo dirges. It was unexpected, but it definitely grew on us, the key being that the songs were rife with all manner of fucked up chords, and convoluted arrangements, lost of layers, all woven and twisted and tangled and seriously fucked up.
So here we are a year later, and Odinist finds the band continuing down the same path. No blasts to be found here. The tempo stays pretty slow, sometimes jacked up to a furious midtempo, but just as often slowing down to a funereal plod, and much of the record is spent sort of swaying seasickenly, a lurching gallop, that perfectly compliments the murky melodies and the washed out riffs, the vocals barely audible, the drums pretty far down in the mix as well, only surfacing occasionally with a flurry of double kicks. The key as always is the riffs, and the riffs here are atonal and off kilter, minor key and angular, giving the songs a definite twisted no-wave vibe. But much of what made Mort so damaged sounding has been smoothed out a bit here, the weirdness more subtle, the sound of the record more static, many of the songs in the same key, so they sound like various movements in the same piece, definitely the sort of record meant to be listened to as a whole, but here and there some killer riff will surface, or some unlikely hook and will suck you back in. And keep you there, holding you under, as the black waves of woozy buzz wash over you.
Dark and droney, dizzying and dense, more grey metal than black metal, and if you couldn't tell by now, really fucking awesome.
We're not exactly sure what these French black metal experimentalists have planned for the final part of their 777 trilogy, but if this second installment is any indication, it's bound to be pretty genius / confusing / what the fuck. At the least, it will be seriously alienating for the hordes of metalheads who already find these guys a little bit frustrating. For the rest of us, we'd be hard pressed to pick a black metal group who more perfectly pushed our buttons, while in the process forging a seriously idiosyncratic, yet impossibly still pretty blackened path.
The first in the trilogy, 777 Sect(s), didn't sound all that far removed from a proper BaN record, a dizzying assemblage of gnarled Deathspell like riffage, their own penchant for industrial churn and droned out atmospheres, all woven into some serious sprawling expanses of black beauty, woozy and druggy, warped and fantastically tripped out, haunting and heavy, and once again establishing them as BM royalty, if they weren't already. And while even the grimmest of metalheads could love that record, they might have a slightly tougher time with part two, The Desanctification, which really, is not all THAT far removed from the sound of the first, but it definitely cranks up the weirdness a notch, mostly in the form of programmed beats, which drive much of the record. Opening track "Epitome VII" (all the tracks are entitled Epitome, and numbered), could be, and maybe sort of is, classic Blut Aus Nord, a warbly minor key riff, the sound sort of woozy again, melty and lysergic, the vocals though a strange garbled backwards speaking in tongues, and the drums, a Godflesh like mechanical beat, that's more skittery than crushing, the vibe is more sort of washed out and psychedelic than black and buzzy, but we dig it, super atmospheric and cinematic, and while the track does get more atonal and more black, with some actual human drumming blast beating entering the fray, the sound remains more firmly entrenched in a sort of twisted industrial dirgery than anything else. The next "Epitome" finds the band ditching those programmed beats and returning to something murkier and gnarlier, still hewing closer to a sort of melodic doom than buzzing blackness. After a super cool bit of psychedelic memser and another dirgey doomy expanse of dark riffery and moody murky swirl, those programmed beats return, and again the sound is transformed again into something closer to Nadja than black metal, a sort of metalgaze depressive doom, there's a distinctly shoegaze vibe going on, all hazy and gauzy and darkly dreamy.
"Epitome XII" might be the weirdest of the bunch, also the coolest, not sounding black metal at all really, instead some sort of industrial nineties pop, with cool melancholic melodies, all wreathed in a glistening swirl of synth glimmer, laced with ethereal vox buried in the mix, soaring psychedelic guitars, sort of had us wishing the whole record was so weirdly swirly and spacey.
And then finally, the record closes with another sprawling stretch of downtuned atmospheric doominess, minimal and moody, with clean vox, and plenty of melodies, but all blurred and smeared into a heaving expanse of blackened dreamlike heaviness, with a surprising final 40 seconds, those programed beats returning, skittering beneath a sky full of insectoid buzz and tense high melody. A cool warped finish, and just perhaps, a hint at what's to come in part three...
Super gorgeous artwork, which looks to us like it was done by the same person that did the art for the recent Ascension cd, that one all red and metallic gold, with lots of geometric designs and bold shapes, this one blue and gold, also geometric and bold, and with snakes and stars and a very mysterious occultic vibe. Cool!
The Work Which Transforms God, Blut Aus Nord's most recent release (originally released in 2001, but reissued in 2005), quickly became an all time AQ fave, with its strange mix of damaged off kilter black metal, caustic industrialism and droney dark ambience. Since then the first three BaN discs have gotten reissued and we're just now finally getting around to reviewing them.
The Mystical Beast Of Rebellion was Blut Aus Nord's third release from way back in 2001, immediately preceding The Work Which Transforms God and displayed more of a classic black metal vibe, very droney and mesmeric, a seasick buzz drenched blast, with warped epic melodies, all very minor key and melancholy, lending the proceedings a very moody doomlike vibe. Very reminiscent of classic Immortal or Satyricon. There is definitely some sonic foreshadowing of weirdness to come, slow slithery stretches of murk and mumble, abstract ambient breakdowns, long stretches of buzz slowed way down into truly harrowing lurching lopes, riffs that bend and seem to warble as if some invisible hand was altering the pitch control, dark and dreary miserablism twisted into very Nortt like mid tempo droney doom.
But The Mystical Beast Of Rebellion is more about the blast and buzz, the forst and fuzz, and if you're anything like us, that should suit you just fine!
We've been wanting to list this for a long time now but have been waiting for it to get reissued as a double disc with the new ep tacked on. Well, now the wait is finally over. This grim French outfit somehow manage to play some seriously convincing classic black metal, but in the process, do something indescribable to it, adding all sorts of off kilter guitar parts, industrial pummel, totally alien melodies, huge stretches of suffocating ambience, and totally convoluted midtempo dirges, turning it into some of the most demented, deliriously damaged black metal we've ever heard. Even when they sound like they're just blazing through a passage of straight up black metal, all these little bits and pieces just sound not quite right, which is what makes Blut Aus Nord so fucking amazing. When they slow down, which they do quite a bit, the guitars seem to splinter into jagged shards, malfunctioning and becoming what sound distinctly like SST / Black Flag riffs and licks, you know, all stumbling and angular weirdness. And when they kick out the jams and explode into a buzzing blasting fury, there are strange guitar sounds swooping and soaring everywhere, sonic shards careening past, drones and multiple layers of buzz and hiss envelop every blast like a graveyard fog. The record opens with a two minute track confusingly titled "End", two minutes of swirling ambience, chilly winds and distant chimes, all buried beneath a murky barely there drone, and then the record ends with the also strangely titled "Procession Of The Dead Clowns", a ten minute melancholy doom dirge, simple drums and a simple keening mournful guitar melody, relentless and plodding and totally dismally intense. Between the two are ten tracks of the above mentioned grim and evil, relentlessly repetitive confusional black metal, draped with all manner of bizarre moaning, fucked up guitar damage, weirdly sliding riffage, and all drowning in drones and dirge, howling blackened ambience and seriously bizarre blasting black metal brutality.
Also included is Blut Aus Nord's more recent ep release, Thematic Emanation of Archetypal Multiplicity, five tracks, 28 minutes of haunting, moaning midtempo dirges, bizarre industrial, drum machined drones, massive slow motion doom, and creepy experimental ambience. Essential.
For whatever reason, we were unable to get the first two volumes in the Liber series from longtime aQ faves, French weirdo black metallers Blut Aus Nord. One was a super limited cd, one was an even more limited 12", but we did finally manage to get our hands on part three, and thankfully, you don't need to have heard the first two to dig this one. And while it's been a while since we've heard from these guys, very little has changed in their warped and woozy blackened soundworld. The core of their sound remains the group's weirdly detuned, and slippery riffage, a gnarled, atonal sonic frenzy, wound around furious drumming, and laced with guttural demonic rasps, the songs proper, dizzying barrages of frantic buzz and blurry fields of tangled black psychedelia, all woven into sprawling black-prog grimnity, and as always, surrounded by plenty of black ambience, and sinister dronemusic murk. Each track, which ostensibly are simply parts of the Liber III songsuite, are separated by drifting sinister blackness, which finally overtakes the proceedings for the final part/movement, which foregoes the metal completely, but instead, unfurls a field of deep, rumbling ritualistic thrum, a blurred backdrop for ominous incantations, and all sorts of garbled backwards voices. But until then, Liber III is a relentless onslaught of impossibly dense black metal chaos, the tracks lurching from midtempo lope, to frantic blast, to dizzyingly obtuse, fragmented WTF downtuned churn.
Packaged in a super swank gold foil printed digipak.
It's only been a year, but it feels like forever since we've heard from beloved French black metal weirdos Blut Aus Nord, so we were super psyched to discover this 4 way split with 3 unreleased BaN tracks, and even though the tracks aren't brand new (they're from a super limited 2004 10"), they definitely hit the spot. In a big way.
But besides the BaN tracks, this comp also features a new Blut Aus Nord side project called Karras that totally destroys as well. And as if that all weren't enough the other two bands are just as amazing and fucked up if not more so.
Let's start with the Blut Aus Nord tracks, what else do you need to know, three tracks, you've never heard em, they are gorgeously twisted and blackened, the guitars slithery and spidery, everything wrapped in a warm cocoon of prickly buzz, long stretches of bleak black ambience, haunted rumblings, mysterious warbles, epic blasts of buzzing blackness, swaths of seasick synths, creepy minor key melodies, very dark and depressive, mournful and almost cinematic, definitely ranks up there with some of our favorite Blut Aus Nord stuff ever.
The Karras track, an massive 11 minute blast of confusional chaos, takes the already damaged and demented sound of Blut Aus Nord eve further, everything more twisted and convoluted, the drums a blasting splatter, guitars swirling everywhere, thick sheets of buzz, creepy processed vocals gurgling and growling, twisted squiggly melodies all over the place, the guitars buzzy, but also murky and muddy and thick like tar, this roiling black madhouse, peppered with long stretches of totally tranquil near static ambient shimmer. But that's not all, huge chunks of industrial pummel, more vocals croaking and mewling, the drums a never ending torrent of spastic beats, blasting and pounding, finally breaking into a funeral doom dirge right near the end before spinning off into a cloud of black hiss. Holy shit. We NEED to hear more Karras. A totally mindblowing and physically exhausting schizophrenic doomed and damaged black metal assault.
Like we said before, that would most definitely be enough, but there are two other bands to dig into. First, blackened Spaniards Bloodoline, whose blasting blackness is peppered with awesome moaning string bends and slippery riffage, that makes their tracks sound all funhouse mirrored and weirdly warped, especially the first track "Voyage Till Death". The beginning of their second song even sounds a bit like Chavez, with dual tangled highend guitar melodies, eventually exploding into a relentless keening crush. The third just seals the deal with another black hole slab of black mayhem, but with a strangely melancholy and poppy undercurrent.
Finally, there's another French outfit, who appropriately shared that abovementioned 2004 10" with Blut Aus Nord. Their sound is more in line with BaN's modern metallic melancholic murk. Slightly industrial tinged, mournful with lots of blurred buzz. Plenty of black metal riffing, but the sound is washed out and near ambient, huge expanses of doomic misery, bookended by gnarled black riffs, much of the two tracks spent drifting through a black haze, or plodding machinelike through some abject blackened sonic wasteland. Creepy growled and chanted vocals, thick swaths of chordal fuzz�
Way recommended obviously, as we think would be anything else that can be tracked down by all four of these bands (and fear not, you know we're already working on it�)
At first we were thought maybe this was gonna be a collaboration and not a split, either way it would be a pretty perfect match up really, of two weirdo industrial tinged French black metal outfits, and a split it is, offering up three songs from each band.
The tracks from long time aQ faves Blut Aus Nord incorporate everything we love about these guys: woozy, psychedelic riffage, haunting spectral vocals, and chaotic, intricate drumming. The opener is surprisingly slow and melodic, bordering on epic doom, especially when the soaring, melancholic leads swoop in, and that depressive doominess bleeds right into the second track, with a gloomy, slowly descending main riff, and monk-like chant vox, draped over stuttery double kick drumming, and another bed of undulating riffage, smeared into something bordering more on hazy black psych, and again, the song blossoms into an aching, mournful doom, plodding and depressive, culminating in the final BaN track, which cranks up the temp a bit, and gets super proggy, without shedding the doomy sonic pallor, instead, it's a twisted prog-doom dirge, rife with haunting melodies, lush textures, and twisted, constantly shifting arrangements, the final moments driven by some super creepy demonic vox, over moaning guitars, and sputtering rhythms.
Which leads us directly into the P.H.O.B.O.S. tracks, which begins with something that sounds more like some blackened Wax Trax 12", all fractured rhythms, over a swirling backdrop of curdled black blur and tangled, mutated melodies, it's really only the gurglingly demonic vokills that make this black metal at all, otherwise, it's some mutant strain of blackened electronica or black industrial, but it is cool, and creepy. The second track introduces some proper riffage, but it's all looped and layered, sounding more like the Young Gods than proper black metal, but again, it works, tripped out and hypnotic, the smeared riffage wound around an almost-breakbeat, gloomy and atmospheric, spaced out and heavy, those vox again the blackest element, which is true of the closer too, and there, even the vocals are more washed out, reverie and echo drenched, but eventually, that track builds to an almost Godflesh sounding crescendo, pounding and metallic, but that metallic pound sounding way more like some lost nineties industrial jam than modern French black metal. So yeah, while we dig this a LOT, metalheads might be a bit disappointed by the lack of actual METAL. That said, fans of either/both of these bands should know by now to expect the unexpected...
This is not new, but we only just discovered these guys and holy shit! Blutch are a Belgian trio who specialize in extreme heaviness, crushing downtuned sludge, but not ultradoom like Moss or Bunkur, instead, these guys go the Melvins route, spitting out, weirdly loping, almost groovy slabs of lurching, lumbering heaviness. Think the Melvins, Harvey Milk, even a little Torche. The Melvins comparison is especially apt, as the vocals tend toward that Buzz Osbourne sort of hushed croon, laid over stuttering start/stop chug, the songs loping and meandering, like some huge black wounded beast.
Some of the tracks slow down to a near funereal crawl, the guitars sprawling into clouds of SUNNO)))-like thrum, the drums less propulsive and more abstract, chords ringing out, riffs unfurling in thick black swells, peppered with little squalls of tangled guitar gnarl, or brief bursts of chug and thud, sometimes building to something almost epic and soaring, other times slowing down to a near glacial drone. The band lock into killer slow motion grooves, and the music begins to sound looped, totally hypnotic and mesmerizing, trancelike, the sound slowly, almost imperceptibly shifting, sucking you in, before an avalanche of crumbling distortion and collapsing riffage buries you alive. Here and there the tempo is jacked up and Blutch begin to sound like some classic death metal band playing at 16 rpm, but even then the songs usually morph into some tripped out abstract exercise in mathy metallic tension and release, or explode in a frenzy of almost grind level screamo fury, but always slipping back into some sort of blackened crawl.
The final track, at nearly 10 minutes, is the prettiest, yet least metal of the bunch, a swirling sprawl of blackened guitar buzz, of shimmering thrum and whir, strange reverbed percussion, moaning minimal melodies, all blurred into an epic slow motion crawl, the production muted and muddy and murky, adding even more to the lugubrious subterranean sound.
If this record wasn't 4 years old, we'd probably be screaming 'metal record of the year', but even still, since like us, probably most of you missed out on this entirely, no reason not to dig it like it was brand new, and like it really could/should be metal record of the year, cuz for those of you who aren't sticklers about such things, release dates and year end lists, well, no matter when a record came out, it's new when you hear it for the first time, even years after the fact, and based on how much we've been digging this heaviness, it's giving most of 2010's heavy releases a serious run for their money...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
