A slow soothing glide of string sounds opens Circus Circus Devils' fourth full length (yes, despite what you might assume from the title, this is not the fifth album!), but that's just their gentle way of easing you into the often bizarre, frequently cacaphonous world that Robert Pollard and Todd Tobias roam. If you're unfamiliar with Circus Devils (but dig the pop stylings of Robert Pollard and his former band Guided By Voices) we should forewarn you that this is definitely much more obtuse and downright strange than Pollard's other projects. That said, we totally dig 'em. In fact, their first album released back in 2001 was a particular fave around here (it was an AQ Record Of The Week). With the blurts of noisy guitar feedback, aggressive drumming, unstructured picked guitar lines, and slurred vocals that drift in and out of focus as if Pollard is talking/shouting in his sleep, this is just as weirdly wonderful. Oh yeah, and for those of you who are counting, this is #34 of the Fading Captain Series.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
While supplies last, cheap copies of the first two Cirith Ungol classics, Frost And Fire (1981) and King Of The Dead (1984)! True heavy metal cult material here, epic, rockin' and Elric-style doomed.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
While supplies last, cheap copies of the first two Cirith Ungol classics, Frost And Fire (1981) and King Of The Dead (1984)! True heavy metal cult material here, epic, rockin' and Elric-style doomed.
True '80s metal doesn't get much more cult than the late great Cirith Ungol, they're up there with Manilla Road and Brocas Helm in the realm of eccentric, epic-er-than-thou Swords n' Sorcery style metal mastery. With ripping guitars and rasping banshee wails, Cirith Ungol tore it up on four albums from 1980-1991, to little commercial avail. They weren't the mainstream of '80s metal that's for sure. If you're into traditional metal that is both hot rockin' (they were from LA after all) and also gloriously doomy, with a definite '70s vibe, and you haven't yet delved into the works of Cirith Ungol, then we'd recommend finding copies of their debut album Frost And Fire, and its 1984 follow-up, King Of The Dead... But, those are both sadly out of print at the moment. Which brings us to this, their rarities collection, an archival anthology entitled Servants Of Chaos. Originally released only in Europe, ten years ago, it's just been reissued domestically, in a digipack, now with an extra dvd disc of live video footage in addition to the two cds of unreleased demos, live tracks and other early ephemera dating back to 1978 that already comprised this set.
Obviously it's for fans. And if you're not (yet), well, maybe it's not the place to start - but then again, maybe it is! 'Cause we know there's a certain type of absurdity-loving AQ customer who will probably dig this MORE than Cirith Ungol's proper albums. Such as, those of you into the wackiness of the NWOFHM (Steel Mammoth, Pharaoh Overlord, Krypt Axeripper, etc.). And anyone who digs the somewhat trippy, outsider metallic stylings of such private-press gems as White Boy And The Average Rat Band or Dwarr, too... This will be right up your alley, 'cause a bunch of the tracks here, some of 'em songs that later did appear on later CU albums, are, in these demo versions, outrageously overloaded with psychedelic sci-fi synthesizer insanity! As the amusingly self-deprecating liner notes by original guitarist Greg Lindstrom put it, these date from "before [he] grew out of the 'I think this could use some more synthesizer' phase". Raw and ridiculous, these are. We played some of this stuff on Brian Turner's WFMU radio show a few years back, and we know that turned Brian, whose metal tastes run to the "weird" exclusively, into a rabid Cirith Ungol fan. Or at least, a fan of this collection!
Elsewhere, you'll find plenty of long lost tracks that were never again recorded, including several even synthier instrumentals, along with (on disc 2) lots of killer live cuts from the band in their heyday. Oh, and a couple quirky covers, including a version of "Secret Agent Man"! Though maybe the oddest track on this anthology is "Ferrari 308QV On Dyno At 8000 RPM", which is nothing but a 23 second recording of a revving Ferrari sports car engine. These guys loved Ferraris.
So, though some of this is a mite more bizarre than "real" Cirith Ungol, it'll give even the uninitiated a good idea of how and why these fantasy metal madmen ruled. Definitely check out their actual albums if you can, wherein they eliminated the silly synthesizer excess, but the songs themselves are rad either way, and always, in any case, pretty darn over the top. (As is the dvd footage, mostly from a show in '84, when metal was METAL!).
Warehouse find! Here's a great release from a few years back, released as part of Drone Records 10" series. Cisfinitum is the work of the Russian dark ambient practitioner Evgeny Voronovsky, who augments his sound design with a grim intensity with more than a few industrialist illusions. During a concert that Voronovsky presented in Germany for a Drone Records showcase, it's been reported that he managed to empty the room through the cross-contanimation of his deleterious frequencies. We gotta wonder just what the hell he did, as the audience who would go to Drone performance in 2005 would surely know what they're getting themselves into!
Devotio was clearly not the recording that he presented there. While psychologically dark, both of these extended tracks are sourced entirely from church bells. Voronovsky stretches out the incredibly rich resonance and compacts dense layers of these drones whose fundamental frequencies begin to detour away from harmonic purity and into uneasy dissonance. This isn't a dissonance of scraped metal or overblown distortion, but rather a finely tuned cross-hatching of frequencies beating against each other. Voronovsky couples this slow development of aggressively tuned minimalism with additional layerings from alarm bells (or he's processed his church bells to sound like alarms), and growling swells of blackened noise. Certainly for fans of Hazard, Troum / Maeror Tri, any of the more clinical aspects of Cold Meat Industries, and the headspace of Lustmord. Highly recommended!
For those of you who missed out on the first two solo singles from Al Cisneros, formerly of stoner metal heavies Sleep, and currently of heavy trance-lords OM, you might be forgiven for expecting this to fall somewhere right in the middle, maybe some minimal metallic heaviness, or droned out downtuned dirgery, and while Cisneros' solo sound does share some sonic similarities, this is not metal, nor not really even heavy, at least in the traditional sense. Fans of OM, no doubt hear the influence of dub on that group's sound, and if there was any ever doubt, well, all you need to do is give this a listen. Cuz it is DUB. Not 'metallic' dub, or 'doom' dub, just deep bass heavy old school reverb drenched minimal darkly psychedelic classic dub. Like the 7"s before, these two tracks find Cisneros creating his own strand of dubbed out musical DNA, one which while sonically similar to the dub that came before, also reminds us of other dub influenced outfits, in particular African Head Charge and Muslimgauze.
Murky and minimal, these two tracks are heady and hypnotic, with thick, deep basslines, simple percussion, drums doused in echo and reverb, everything hazy and spacey and druggy, the melodies kind of washed out minor key, a whirring organ unfurling a 4 or 5 note melodic refrain, very mantra like, the whole thing looped and cyclical, in fact, both sides/tracks seem to be essentially the same song, which is more than fine, cuz this is the sort of hypno-dub space out you want to go on and on and on and on and on and on...
Like his earlier 7" singles, housed in a plain white sleeve. And probably pretty limited!
The very first solo record from Al Cisneros, he of stoner sludge gods Sleep, and minimal doom heavies Om, and the first release on his Sinai label, which might have you expecting a sweet slab of downtuned heaviness, or slo-mo bass heavy minimalism, and actually you wouldn't be far off. But this is not metal, or doom, or even rock, this in fact a straight up DUB record. We're not surprised, as Cisneros has been ordering dub records from us for a while, but fans of OM at least shouldn't be that surprised either, as that group's sound was definitely heavily influenced by classic dub. And while Cisneros' first stab at pure dub is pretty excellent, it's also not hard to imagine it being reimagined as a proper OM track, but here, it's all dub, low slung woozy bassline, spare simple rhythm, what sounds like tablas, the vibe a little bit Muslimgauze, a little bit King Tubby, the sound lush and thick, rife with sampled vocals, chiming melodies, dark, droney, druggy and seriously dubby, crank the bass and blast this through your system.
And of course it's a dub single, so the flipside is the 'version', most of the vocals stripped away, or doused in echo and delay and spent swirling into the ether, super minimal and mesmerizing, the focus on the groove of the bass, and the rhythm, totally heady and hypnotic, WAY too short on a 7", it's the sort of jam you want to stretch out forever. Here's hoping there's a dub full length in the future, but for now, grab one of these before they're gone, as they're extremely limited. Housed in a plain white sleeve.
Two more tracks of swirling, murky, druggy dub from Sleep / OM frontman Al Cisneros, whose love of dub seemed fairly evident even in those outfits, but recently, Cisneros has been going full dub, on a handful of singles and eps. The time around, his take on classic dub remains darkly groovy, washed out and laid back, and like his other dub joints, definitely beholden to outfits like African Head Charge and Muslimgauze. The strange/cool thing about these two tracks, is that they sort of sound like the theme music from some obscure seventies cop show, but slowed way down, dipped in FX and stretched out into something way more lysergic and psychedelic. Like his other releases, Cisneros basically just lays down a simple, mesmeric drug-dub loop and lets it roll (we've compared his dub to a slowed down version of Finnish hypno-rockers Circle), tranced out and cyclical, with the variations subtle and minimal, this time around, the main loop/riff/groove is augmented by some distant drones, some hushed metallic swells, over which the ghostly, distorted, lo-fi vocals drift, ghostly and ethereal. It's fantastically murky and moody, as is the B side which is the dub version, stripping away the already minimal vocals, and letting the track itself just smolder and slither, a slowly swirling, head nodding dubbed out murk, that fans of classic dub will no doubt dig, with a sonic connection to Sleep and Om that seems pretty obvious to us. Druggy dubwise divinity that comes HIGHLY recommended.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!! And exquisitely packaged, with hand stamped vinyl labels, housed in a letter pressed chipboard jacket and dust sleeve, with a screen printed insert, all printed on a vintage 1910 press, with stunning artwork from artist David D'Andrea and released on his Samaritan Press imprint. Originally ONLY available on the OM tour, and from D'Andrea's website, we got a handful for the shop, but not sure how long those will last.
Oh, and FYI, we also just got yet another Al Cisneros dub 7", entitled Lantern Of The Soul, released on his own label Sinai. We'll list that next time, assuming we still have copies. Those are only $5.98.
With another new 7", the mainman from stoner doom legends Sleep and tranced out mesmer-metal outronauts OM continues to dig deep into his love of classic dub, a sound that has most definitely informed even his most metal of musical endeavors. But unlike the other singles from Cisneros we've reviewed, this one sounds like a full band, a little less straight up classic dub, and more a sort of subtly dubby, psychedelic jazz, a groovy skittery rhythm beneath a sprawl of swirling synths, hazy and dreamlike, like some seventies cinematic psych, the soundtrack to some lost foreign thriller, droney and druggy, melancholic and moody, the sound breaking down sometimes to just bass and drums, darkly propulsive and hushed, but those ultra minimal moments are balanced by the rest of the track (a single song, spread out over two sides) that unwinds languorously, two sides of laid back and hypnotic, tranced out retro dub-psych-jazz bliss.
Housed in a plain, white, jukebox style 45 sleeve, pressed on clear vinyl.
Solo single #2 from Al Cisneros, mastermind of tranced out psych-doom outfit OM, and former bassist for late great stoner sludgelords Sleep, who has never been shy about his love of dub, that dub-love influencing the sound of OM more and more with every record. But these self released 7"s seem to be a showcase for Cisneros to experiment with making proper, classic sounding old school dub, and it sounds as good as you might think.
The A side here is a loping, looped sprawl of hypno-dub mesmer, that sounds more like Muslimgauze or African Head Charge (much like the OM dub remix 12"s reviewed elsewhere on this week's list). The melodies are woozy, Eastern tinged, the beat is a motorik, almost industrial sounding shuffle, the bassline languid and liquid, the A side here almost sounds like a single measure looped for the whole of the side, totally tranced out and circular, in fact it almost sounds like old classic Circle slowed away down, that same sort of head nodding murky groove. The flipside begins with a bit of ambient drift, but soon locks into a similar groove, the sound reminding us also of minimal techno / heroin house, but way more murky and hazy, clouds of swirling ambience shift slowly above that main loop that could go on forever, and for the length of these two sides nearly does.
Like the first single, absolutely recommended, and also like that single, VERY limited...
Another platter of fantastically druggy, droney dub from the man responsible for the stoner rock epicry of Sleep, and the minimal psychedelic drone-dirge of OM, but who has always (obviously) been obsessed with dub, and who recently decided to start doing some actual dub himself, and over the course of a handful of limited releases, has crafted some pretty fantastic stuff, with a sound that's not so much classic Jamaican dub, as it is informed by the sounds that that music influenced. Like on Cisneros' other dub records, we hear lots of Muslimgauze and African Head Charge here too, loping, minimal rhythms, deep, throbbing basslines, tons of echo and reverb, each track essentially a single groove, stretched waaaaay out, the sounds dense and lush and layered, rife with Middle Eastern strings and melodies, total trip out, drone dub dreaminess for sure. Darkly psychedelic, but infused with a deep sonic warmth, the sound laid back and mesmeric, most of the tracks here are woozy and washed out and seriously stoney, but there are moments, where things darken and get slightly more industrial, with a vibe reminiscent of the post dub excursions of outfits like Vatican Shadow or Silent Servant. Housed in a plain brown 12" sleeve, and most likely quite limited...
It's been a couple years since Citay's great sophomore outing Little Kingdom, and since then the band has experienced significant lineup changes which included the loss of former guitarist Jesse Reiner who left to concentrate on his awesome new band Jonas Reinhardt. Luckily Citay mastermind Ezra Feinberg was able to get some bigtime heavy hitters to become part of this new incarnation of Citay including virtuoso guitarist Sean Smith and the multitalented and super-prolific Josh Pollock (3 Leafs, Auricle, etc.), joining the already present guitar powerhouse that is Tim Green, who was the original cohort of Feinberg when Citay was first born.
So while this is in some ways a more beefed up and full sounding Citay, the elements that made us fall in love with them in the first place still shine so bright. Their ability to create songs that feel epic yet never indulgent. The way they are able to inhabit so many worlds at once while never feeling disjointed. Citay truly are a gateway band. They can lead you to heavier psychedelia, they can show you the intricacy and dreaminess of West Coast pop, they can take you to the woods, the sky, the forest, and the backyard yet every turn they take feels so right and true to their own unique vision.
Dream Get Together has a rushing current of lush and full sounds that makes you want to blast it so loud and just get swept up in its sound. Long passages without vocals that let their wide arrange of instrumentation take center stage and then Feinberg's wonderful expansive vocal delivery adds another layer of depth to the experience. Meryl Press and Thaliah Harbour add their beautiful voices throughout, maintaining that awesome balance of masculine/feminine that has been such a refreshing aspect of Citay's sound. There is also a really nice guest vocal by Merril Garbus of Tune-Yards. Citay really have carved out such an instantly recognizable and unique sound that is so much all their own. We could tell you that Dream Get Together kind of sounds like Heart hijacked by Robert Fripp and Dungen, but the truth is Citay continue to create music that has its feet in so many musical worlds that the sound they've created is undeniably deep and exists entirely in their own wonderful world. Highly recommended!
It's quite remarkable that only two records into their existence Citay have managed to carve out a sound that is so instantaneously recognizable and distinctive. With their soaring guitars, glorious melodies and harmonies that sound as if they're raining down from the sky, this ensemble led by Ezra Feinberg has quickly become one of the shining lights of the San Francisco music scene, but we think that folks from all over the globe should be hearing them, so they too can be swept away by Citay's carefully crafted songs.
Little Kingdom is the follow up to their debut which was a unanimous AQ favorite when it came out around two years back. With a similar sound and feel as that first outing they have widened their reach as the songs descend with a much more expansive quality. Brimming with a crisp sensation Little Kingdom is matching our autumnal mood so perfectly.
We love how Citay always sound so monumental without resorting to the typical quiet...quiet...loud...eruption formula that so many post-rock groups use when they want to sound grand. What makes Citay so great is that they don't TRY to sound grand or monumental, it's just that the songs they make require a presentation that the band understand so well and do so effortlessly. Little Kingdom makes us want to run into leaves and feel the wind rushing against our skin, whisking us away, the sounds of the strings on guitars summoning us to a greater place!
Wow! We haven't been this excited about a new project in quite a while. Citay is a new band created by Ezra Feinberg (Piano Magic) along with Tim Green (The Fucking Champs, and about a million other projects). What an amazing exercise in how you can take from influences that have been exhausted by so many in all the wrong ways yet somehow find a way to discover the gold that's never been mined before. According to Feinberg, Citay is influenced by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Queen, and Heart...but wait don't think this is about irony or played-out 70's rock worship. Citay get to the blissed out acoustic moments of the above mentioned bands (think Queen II, Sabbath Vol.4) to create something that sounds so fresh, breezy and full of the right kind of dirt and sunlight. With an onslaught of guitars (mostly acoustic and including some 12 strings), nice textural sounds created by mandolin, flute, organ, piano, vibes and a an overall sound that is hard to talk about without using really over the top words like..perfect! They nailed how this kind of record should sound. The guitars are so sweeping yet intimate, the vocals seep into your skin and all of a sudden it feels like the longest summer day ever, the kind that you never want to end. We can't stop listening to this and each time we do, all we can think about is finding our old huffy and riding through dirt lots as the sun shimmers down on us and we pedal through twilight. So totally recommended!
For the debut release of Kip Ulhorn's (of Cloudland Canyon) new label, Intercoastal Artists, two of our faves, Citay and Cloudland Canyon, both pay tribute to one of their seminal but less obvious influences, Galaxie 500, with two amazing interpretations.
Citay's take on "Tugboat" (also featured on their last full length, Dream Get Together) begins with what is perhaps a straight forward take until the end, where Citay's baroque dual guitar lines recast the warm glowing evocative sheen of the original into a whole new majestic light.
Cloudland Canyon's lovingly lysergic version of "Temperature's Rising" begins with what sounds like a Mellotron line from another song before the familiarity of the song abruptly jumps in and takes off. Being one of Galaxie 500's faster songs, the cover serves Cloudland Canyon well as a single, that is both exploratory and concise, allowing just enough room to allow some hypno-psych flourishes, but keeping the satisfaction of a good pop song well intact.
Very limited!!! We're not sure we'll be able to get more after we run out, so act fast. Each 7" includes a uniquely designed sleeve - no two are exactly alike. Look out for future 7" releases on this label from Pocahaunted/ Eden Express, Sun Circle, and The Alps!
Housed in a cryptic and totally beautiful oversized booklet, the sounds within the dolefully monickered Cities Last Broadcast's likewise doleful The Cancelled Earth conjure an atmosphere of post-industrial hopelessness where you, the engaged listener, are the only human being left amidst seepia-toned urban decay. Empty, dilapidated buildings with broken windows sprawled out across a dusky horizon of condensed nothingness stand without any distinction as the city takes in its final gasps. Strange, creaking sounds, and washes of gauzy atmosphere creep out like a fog, cloaking everything in a thick, inescapable grime.
The work of Swede Par Bostrom, who also makes music in a project called Kammarheit, The Cancelled Earth is a collection of pieces recorded between 1999 and 2008. Though quite bleak, the songs move as if they are alive, albeit dying, like some sort of creature sticking its head out of the rubble to emotionlessly assess the end of a society. Hey, we'll be there soon enough. The swaying soundscapes may appeal to those who familiar with Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic, while they also bring to mind the murky ambiance of Wolfgang Voigt's Gas, without any sort of rhythmic propulsion, the movement of the pieces instead resembling a once mighty machine simply shutting down from old age and neglect. Though desolate as all hell, The Cancelled Earth is also quite beautiful and perfect listening for long, lonely nights...
Just in, straight from the source (yup, CF bassist Jasper brought these in to us), Citizen Fish have just issued their third collection of odds'n'ends on cd-r (the previous two were released on cassette). Not to be mistaken for their newest album out now
We all were really excited when we saw that Animal Collective had picked Grouper to open their tour, how cool that Grouper's dreamy and hazy sounds would reach so many new ears at all of their sold out shows. While it might not seem like an obvious match, we think there is much in Panda Bear's aesthetic that drew him and the rest of his gang to Grouper's daydream delights. Enter City Center, who we first heard on a split 7" with Grouper and who to our ears sound a lot like a much more slowed down and blissed out and dreamy Panda Bear. While using similar sounds and ideas, tons of reverb and the same sort of repetition that made the Panda Bear album so unique, City Center never reaches the same kind of ecstatic boiling point, instead keeping things in more understated and lingering. Like the perfect foggy Sunday morning or lazy laid back late night soundtrack, the sound of City Center floats and flows with such ease. Fred Thomas, better known for his band Saturday Looks Good To me, will probably now end up being more well known for City Center, building from his indie-pop roots into something a bit more atmospheric. Nice.
What might you expect from a group featuring members of doomdrone heavyweights Trees and Tecumseh? Something slow and low and lumbering... Probably, us too, but City Of Churches is anything but. Not slow, or low, or lumbering, instead, Memelust is 63 tracks (yep 63 tracks on a 7") of super hyper spastic tech-grind insanity. Some songs are literally one second long, a single harsh guitar-drums-shriek burst, others sprawl to 5 or 6 seconds, a few even longer, those 'extended' tracks jam way too many parts into way too little space, so each blast is a bursting at the seams micro-blowout of chaotic screamo grind fury.
The sound is so short and sharp, the songs so jagged and fragmented, that at times, when there are 5 or 6 2 second long tracks in a row, it almost sounds like someone is just fucking around with the volume knob, turning it down, then up, then down, and up again, creating the briefest of shards from a larger grinding whole. But that is not the case, these are all actual tracks, songs even... some improvised, others composed using an invented system of musical notation! City Of Churhes has been described as 'brutal prog', we might alter it a bit to GRIND-prog, equal parts Harry Pussy, Naked City, Napalm Death, Anal Cunt, Brutal Truth... we could go on, but you get the drift, this is about as UN-easy as un-easy listening gets. A dizzying onslaught of total grinding metallic fuck-you-up.
Packaged in gorgeous hand screened black and white and yellow on heavy cardstock sleeves, with a printed insert. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!
Record number two from this NYC abstract electronic alchemist, who as we mentioned in our review of his debut, Gray Panic, counts Porter Ricks, Skullflower, Techno Animal, Portal, Main, Pan American, Scanner AND Bark Psychosis as influences. And while lists of influences are generally impossibly hyperbolic, somehow Gray Panic actually did manage to live up to the promise of the groups that informed its sound. So when City Surgical got in touch with a new album, describing it as even murkier an druggier than the first, we were pretty much already sold.
And once again, we were not at all disappointed, after a brief opening of blurred shimmery and gauzy ambience, the sound coalesces into a sort of mumbled skitter, all muted throb and skeletal pulse, with the promise of some sort of impending big beat, but instead, the tension is gradually ratcheted up, the sounds swirling and ethereal, it's not really until part three of the opening four part 17+ minute title track song suite, that any sort of actual beat coalesces, and even then, it's a murky bit digital dub wreathed in gnarled static never fully coalescing, instead seeming to fade in and out like bad radio reception, giving the sound a lost ghost like quality, tending more toward Tim Hecker or Philip Jeck, with the beats existing more as some strange sonic artifact, the woozy pulsing synthiness which also surfaces in part three seeming to channel a little Goblin / John Carpenter too, before devolving into a deep murky pulse. Part four is like an ultra minimal reinterpretation of Chain Reaction style heroin house, peppered with strange bits of glitch and squelch, more ethereal and ambient than rhythmic, the various submerged rhythms more adding texture than propulsion.
The final two, non title track numbers, continue in a similarly woozy, washed out, dreamily druggy direction, draping chiming metallic melodies over rhythmic backwards swoops and a sea of thick gristly sonic swirl, a haunting robotic lullaby, that morphs into the gorgeous final track, a thick sprawl of gristled low end, roiling beneath some dark dubbed out rhythms, stuttering chopped and looped pulsations, and multiple layers of hazy and gauze and shimmer, the sound a constant dreamlike swirl that coalesces into a Raster-Noton like stretch of gorgeous electronic late night minimalism, that once again has us wondering why City Surgical is not a way bigger deal. So great!
Packaged in striking hand screened three color origami like sleeves, with color printed cardstock inserts. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
It's tough to argue with a band whose influences include Porter Ricks, Pan American, Skullflower, Techno Animal, Portal, Scanner, Main, and Bark Psychosis, and even tougher when somehow, against all odds, the band actually manages to sort of sound like a bastard mix of all of those.
Such is the case with NYC one man avant abstract electronica outfit City Surgical, whose sound is not so much electronica as it is created electronically, if that makes any sense, sure there's buzz and skitter and glitch, but the way those elements are assembled makes the sounds on Gray Panic sound more organic, more mysterious. Right from the get go, "Our Blood Will Roar In The Pipes" is a strange bit of pulsing ambience, but the pulses are thick rumbles and muted roars, wreathed in strange muffled skree, and in between there's lots of space, filled with some barely audible hiss and fuzz, like some lost transmissions, barely making it through the ether, very haunting and creepy, and with a definite nineties Pathological vibe. "Pi Needle" offers up something similar, a strange electronic buzzscape, the rhythms skeletal skitters, that slowly build to something more substantial, while the bass whirs and throbs, and smeared melodies expand and contract all around. "Low In Silhouette, Irregular In Shape", begins as a stuttery bit of low slung skitter, but then the track skids to a halt, and shifts gears, expelling think swaths of industrial creak and warm melodic buzz, a lurching start stop, that is soon joined again by a muted rhythm, and a woozy bassline, only to get more and more distorted and abstract as the track progresses.
And so goes the rest of the record, a twisted collection of post industrial electronica, of skeletal abstract bass music, of muted blackened ambience, Kompakt style minimal pulses wind around haunting late night drift and darkly groovy basslines, dubbed out minimal crunch splinters into fragments that are left to float through hazy fields of FX and ghostly melody, creaking, crumbling haunted house ambience is wrapped around little flurries of electronic glitch and tangled melody, while thick streaks of warm liquid buzz hover over moaning sheets of feedback and delicate rhythmic frameworks, super distorted hiss drenched buzz swirls around dizzying flurries of rapidfire skitter, and finally, the record unwinds in a tangled blowout of throbbing bass heavy grooves and seriously corrosive blasts of crumbling psychedelic soft noise...
Killer stuff.
CJA is one half of the NZ noise rock outfit Armpit that we raved about a few lists back. This 3" twenty minute blast starts off with a Sunn-ish slow-motion guitars-against-amps-feedback drone and soon dissipates into ambient shimmer, buzzing guitar hum with metronomic cymbal splatters, slow dour jangle, and strummed and miserable song fragments reminiscent of eighties NZ pop. Really nice.
MPEG Download: "Track Two" [/audio/cjatrack2.mp3]
Clayton Noone, aka CJA, has a long and varied history in the New Zealand underground free-rock scene. He's been making an unholy racket for years, is also one half of Armpit as well as a member of avant new wavers the Futurians. But Ironclad, a reissue of a long out of print cd-r, is probably his prettiest, and quietest record. And probably our favorite! A stumbling, shambling, purposefully strummed, sun dappled, reverb soaked, warbly voiced slab of simple and simply lovely bedroom folk. The guitars quiver and waver, barely in tune, creating shimmery folk rock frameworks, which in turn support subtle distant melodies, occasional flanged electric guitar, slurred emotional vocals, all hushed and mournful, dreamy and minimal. Notes climb warily from the strings and assemble themselves into repetitive figures, pulsing and drifting tentatively earward. CJA sounds a bit like Alastair Galbraith after a night of hard drugs and too much drink, holed up in the corner of his living room on a sweltering summer day, with the shades drawn tight, shafts of sunlight sneaking through the blinds, every mote of dust illuminated like a tiny musical note drifting to the ground. The guitar, the hiss of the four track and the murky remnants of the night before becoming one drifting dreamy dolorous set of notes, picked carefully one by one, becoming a sublty sleepy soundscape of bliss and beatitude.
We love CJA, aka Clayton Noone, aka one half of New Zealand free rock combo Armpit�as well as a member of weirdo new wavers the Futurians. CJA releases have varied considerably in tone and texture, from dark and contemplative dreamy drone, to more corrosive free and furious noise. We weren't really sure what to expect with this, the latest from CJA, a massive double cd-r called Pink Metal, wrapped in a super goofy garish hand drawn heavy metal style handmade sleeve. We were super psyched, imagining it might be some demented Kiwi freaked out what-the-fuck blast of damaged metal, and while it is heavy at times, and could most definitely be considered metallic in places, the 'metal' of Pink Metal has much more in common with bands like SUNNO))) and countrymen Black Boned Angel. And those chunk of metallic pummel are spread out, and scattered amidst all sorts of other strange sounds and mysterious soundscapes.
The opening track on disc one starts things off in a distinctly non-metallic style, it's all dark and quiet, expansive and shimmering, guitars unwinding into lazy drawn out swoons and shimmers, skeletal melodies spread out over barely there ambience. But the second track quickly sets things right, a sort of ultra lo-fi Godflesh style industrial trudge, huge booming trash can lid percussion, over murky muddy downtuned riffing. Not so much heavy as it is intense and relentless. But before you know it, Noone switches back to acoustic guitar strum, weaving a folky little interlude before shifting into a strange stuttering guitarscape, hypnotic and repetitive. There are a few brief blasts of buzzed out riffage, crumbling and thick, caustic and dense, but for the most part, Noone veers between haunting folk flecked lo-fi deconstructed pop and abstract ambient drone music, only peppering it with chunks of grainy heaviness.�
The�second disc is a similarly dizzying sonic spectrum, beginning with a cool, super tense, weirdly dramatic solo guitar drone, but instead of low end rumble, it's crashing drawn out chords, distorted and melodic, repetitive, and overlapping, riffs pulled apart into slabs of melodic sound, before coalescing near the end into a killer hook. Then we're off again, fractured twee folk, stumbling lo-fi strum and clatter, thick swells of industrial whir, Dead C style chaotic murky noisiness, finishing off with an extended low end hiss drenched slab of grinding, growling, throbbing, super distorted pummel, complete with sludge riffing and propulsive buried in the mix�drumming. As always, awesome!
Packaged in an oversized thick paper, black, white and purple multi page booklet, adorned with awesome high school binder heavy metal / Dungeons And Dragons imagery, huge muscled demon warriors, swords and�maces, and slain foes laying heaps on the ground, strange fiery aliens, Silver Surfer like creatures firing lazers from their fingertips, spike headed beasts, samurai warriors, cloaked demons, dragons, and growling�wolf beasts, ultra violence, and decapitations, skeletons, zombies, ninjas and more. All black and white, but with all the text in a garish bright purple (or pink maybe it's meant to be), blood dripping metal font. The cds housed in plastic sleeves affixed to the insides of the front and back covers.
This came out a while ago, and� it was of course pretty limited to start with. We have a bunch, but there's a definite chance that once these are gone we won't be able to get more...
`
We found a stash of these, and realized once again, that we hadn't listed these yet, it came out last year, and is now WELL out of print, so these are the last 8 or 9 copies we'll ever get.
CJA for those who don't already know is Clayton Noone, who also plays in aQ faves Armpit and NZ new wavers the Futurians. On past solo joints, Noone offered up a stumbling lo-fi bedroom folk, rife with all sorts of random noise and random production fuckery, and Vintermanederne follows a similar course, but manages to be even more abstract.
The opener is a 20 minute sprawl, that seems to be mostly field recordings of rainfall, occasionally interrupted by fragments of fractured lo-fi folk, underpinned by distant shimmer, which eventually builds to a roar (maybe that's the wind whipping by the microphone), before slipping back into some sort of murky dronemusic, ending with some folky flutter and still more rainfall. The second track is much more straight ahead, simple acoustic guitar, and sweet crooned vocals, soft downer bedroom folk for sure, really quite pretty. The record finished off with some lo-fi indie jangle, muted electric guitar, a gorgeous vocal mantra, all very reminiscent of Alastair Galbraith, before some percussion enters the mix, and song spreads out growing gradually more and more abstract.
Fans of Galbraith, Milton, Noone, Horton, Carter will definitely dig, and there's enough field recording sound manipulation weirdness to keep it interesting for the free-noise cd-r set.
And again, already OUT OF PRINT, these are the last copies ever.
Now on vinyl, the second, sort of self titled ep (aka CCII), from post Velvet Cacoon outfit Clair Cassis,
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES, and housed in ultra thick, case wrapped gatefold jackets, on clear vinyl while they last, here's what we had to say about the cd version when we first reviewed it back in 2010:
The final(?) twisted blackbuzz missive from outsider black metal weirdos Clair Cassis, whose -other- posthumous record we made our Record Of The Week a few lists back. Clair Cassis, for those who don't already know, was the short lived post Velvet Cacoon outfit, made up of essentially the same members, but whose sound was a poppier, prettier, and in some ways an even weirder version of what they had been doing in Velvet Cacoon. Whereas VC offered up sprawling expanses of droned out black buzz (originally purported to be played not on guitars, but on a diesel powered harp) and deep black ambience, CC take those same elements and craft them into more concise chunks of gloomy almost poppy black metal, with Joy Divisiony bass lines, chiming Cocteau Twins like guitars, lots of unlikely hooks, all woven into sheets of black buzz, galloping blast beats, and some seriously freaky croaked Gollum-like vokills.
This ep and the one before it barely crack 50 minutes combined, so this is essentially side 2 of CC's 15 track swansong. And like the first installment, this stuff is twisted, warped and bafflingly brilliant. The gothy post punk vibes even more pronounced here, the bass thick and sinewy, the guitars even more melodic, and the sound dangerously closer to blackened pop than poppy black metal, and it definitely suits them.
The record explodes right out of the gate a buzzing black blast, but even within those first few seconds, it's easy to hear that there's way more going on, the low end is thick and layered and lush, the melodies mournful and melancholy, almost like a blacker buzzier Lifelover. The first two tracks flit from melodic buzz to midtempo dirgey gloom, it's not until the third track "Praline Civet", that the band let loose and stop trying to disguise their sound as black metal, it soars and pulses, it's a glorious blackened gloom pop, surprisingly epic and emotional, for a band of legendary cynics and charlatans. "Bronzed Ash" might be the prettiest song here, a moody midtempo lope, that has strange drumming, lots of clean chiming guitars, lush washed out atmospheres, super blissy and shoegazey, and it ends way too soon after about 90 seconds. The final track too is super cool, and strange and not at all typically black metal, with trippy processed harmonized guitar melodies, over a churning swirl of muddy riffage and motorik drum pound, super psychedelic and dreamily noisy, and poppy and really sort of noise poppy.
So good. And might as well be considered another Record Of The Week, the second half of their FIRST Record Of The Week (their FIRST s/t record that we did in fact make ROTW), a moody, blissy, shoegazey collection of psychedelic, droney, buzzy tripped out blacknoisepop.
Record number three from this drug driven blurwave blackgaze Velvet Cacoon offshoot. Longtime readers of the aQ list are no doubt already familiar with that Northwestern horde, whose exploits, sonic and otherwise, included a ridiculous band backstory (eco-terrorists?), made up instrumentation (diesel harp?) some purportedly plagiarized sounds (a whole record supposedly stolen and redone as VC), not to mention a whole mess of angry, bitter and confused black metallers in their wake. And while we bought into it all, when the truth was revealed, that VC was in fact, just a guy and a gal, taking lots of drugs and making some blissed out black buzz, we actually thought it was funny. The for some strange reason, VC mainman Josh decided to disband Velvet Cacoon, and immediately created Clair Cassis, a band that was quite sonically similar, the same sort of washed out buzz, droney black mesmer, the biggest difference being that CC trafficked in WAY shorter songs, and those songs were WAY heavy on the bass (infamous for it's absence in almost all black metal) and traded in much of the drone and drift for something distinctly more poppy. And we were, and are, pretty into it. Dense thick whirling hazy black metal, formed into dark almost new wavy chunks of blackbuzzpop, sure still black and buzzy on the outside, but strap on some headphones, and the basslines become sinewy and serpentine, the melodies and buried hooks reveal themselves, step back and its a glorious blackened blur.
After two self titled eps, comes this, Luxury Absolute, another short (ish) collection of CC's unique brand of black and buzzy, midtempo dronegaze doompop, the sound here though even more tripped out and psychedelic than on past releases, with the bass MASSIVE, even moreso than usual, with the sound so blown out and in the red, that the sound continually peaks, and clips, the sounds distorting and crumbling, adding a strange sort of bleary, blurry decay vibe to the already woozy minor key proceedings. Just check out opener "Antique Sea Smoke", a warped lumbering almost dirger, with the guitar melodies swirling amidst grey clouds of whir and thrum, the bass thick, and driving, the drums distorting like crazy, all of that overblown sound pushing CC even further into shoegaze territory.
The rest of the record follows suit, barring a few creepy stretches of haunting rumbling black ambience, the rest of Luxury Absolute unfolds as a series of brief dreamlike black blurs, melancholic and mesmerizing, the drums a lurching programmed pound, the vokills a demonic croak, but the guitars, so warm and whirling, thick and layered, the doom vibe is huge here too, partially because of the tendency toward dirgery, but also cuz the sound is so thick and viscous, imagine diSEMBOWELMENT or Skepticism trying their hand and shoegaze cold wave, and you might be getting close. Either way, this is some awesome stuff. Occasionally frustrating, cuz the songs are so short (longest 3:31, shortest 1:51, 19 minutes total), and we would love to hear these jams stretched out into tranced out dronepop blackbuzz drifts, but the brevity seems to reinforce than in their own twisted and fucked up way, these really are just pop songs, albeit, buzzy, and sludgey, and dirgey and BLACK. Might be our favorite CC yet. Hope it's not their last.
Packaged in a super swank DVD sized digipak. LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!
When we first discovered mysterious Northwestern black metal outfit Velvet Cacoon, it wasn't just their blown out buzz that had us enraptured, it was all the rumors and weird stories about the band itself, that they were some sort of eco-fascists, who had built a huge gasoline-driven HARP which was responsible for their massive buzz. We later discovered that the whole eco-fascist / droneharp thing was a ruse, a put on, the band intentionally fucking with what they considered to be a contemptible black metal scene. It was then revealed that Velvet Cacoon were in fact a couple of drug obsessed dandies, who when they weren't crafting some of the most stunning black metal weirdness, were waxing about the various drugs they took, and their decadent lifestyle. But all that stuff only made them more interesting, and gave the sound a certain twisted cachet, coming as it did from these unlikely creators.
As it happened, the band got fed up with the drama and the internet message board bullshit, and decided to scrap Velvet Cacoon entirely and start fresh. A new band, a new name and a new sound. Thus we have Clair Cassis, whose sound really is not all that far removed from the washed out black buzz of VC, but does distinguish itself in some important ways. The first being the song length. The band described CC in an interview as being a more pop Velvet Cacoon, and so it is, the shortest song is under 3 minutes, the longest just less than 7, the band forcing themselves to be more succinct, to move through their musical ideas in a more structured and less unhindered way, instead of letting songs and parts drone on and on. Not that we minded before, in fact, we like it when our black metal drones and buzzes endlessly, but there's something to be said for the opposite approach, which tends to force the write to craft SONGS more than SOUNDS. The other big difference is the bass. And with that the above mentioned pop element. The lack of bass in black metal is practically a running joke, the brittle buzz and furious blasting of most black metal generally relegating bass to a barely there buzz, so when a black metal band takes the bass, and makes it as much a part of the sound as the guitar, it changes the whole shape of the sound, in the case of Clair Cassis, gives it a sort of woozy, gothic, cold wave vibe, black metal is dour and depressive by its very nature, but here it's gloomy and haunting, an emotional sort of darkness and depression.
This new sound/direction is immediately noticeable on opener "Ambercandle" which begins all warped and woozy, the riffs twisted and seemingly melting over the pounding doomy drums, when the track finally kicks into gear, the bass drives the songs, thick and dense, the notes slippery, haunting gloomy low end swells that add some pathos to the already loping minor key dirge, besides that it makes the sound so much heavier. Even on the next track, "The Feathered Fog" which begins with a somewhat standard burst of blackness, droney and relentless, still the bass is there adding heft, and a melodic counterpoint to the frenzied riffage, and then when the song switches gear, lurches into halftime, the bass swoops right to the front and the song transforms into a woozy seasick dirge.
And as you listen, the record definitely reveals itself as more than buzzing black metal, and knowing what we do about the folks behind it, it's not hard to imagine them creating this otherworldly pop music, and simply choosing to cloak it in black metal finery, which definitely explains the catchiness, the heavy bass and buried grooves, but it's probably best to not analyze it too much. A casual glancing listen will definitely provide plenty of black metal pleasure, the guitars are thick and gnarled, the drumming (real this time it sounds like) heavy and blasting, the arrangements trancelike and hypnotic, with long stretches of deep shimmering drone music, as well as plenty of pounding doomic dirgery, Velvet Cacoon fans won't be disappointed, but digging deeper reveals all the other subtle sonic alterations that make Clair Cassis simultaneously much more accessible, but also even weirder than VC. The songs may be shorter, but they're no less complex and convoluted, in fact in some ways, they're even more, considering parts don't drone on, the band flits from part to part, from blast to plod to drift to blast again.
"Pearls & Pinesmoke" is another standout, a soaring blasting droner, thick with bass rumble and throb, grim enough, the drums a little loose and chaotic, the vocals a creepy croak, and then the breakdown comes, and it's total melodic black nirvana, half tempo, the guitar still buzzy, but the bass unfurling an insanely melodic and ridiculously catchy part, that totally transforms the song, and then the sound shifts again back to blasting buzz, somehow the bass remains, adding unlikely melody to even the blackest bits, and fear not, a part that good comes back again, fans of Alcest and Amesoeurs will be in heaven. And after a strange interlude, the track shifts again, into another woozy, differently melodic dirge, laced with more melodic bass, but this time wrapped around spidery acoustic guitars, all still wreathed in crumbling buzz.
Finally the record finishes with the awesomely titled "Hazelhearted In The Seaparlour", which explodes immediately into a dense churning blast, heavy and harsh and layered, with a strange midtempo bridge/chorus, that features a strangely bouncy, and again surprisingly melodic bassline, way up in the mix, changing the focus of the song, before dropping out again and letting the guitars take over, before the track finally fades out, leaving nothing but the wheezing strains of what almost sounds like elevator music, or the music they play in the middle of the night at outside malls, the sound here replete with random bits of found sound, footsteps and other curious ambience.
And just leave it to the fickle folks who disbanded Velvet Cacoon at the height of their popularity to nip their new band in the bud as well, which apparently is exactly what happened. Clair Cassis is no more. But what a way to go. There is a second record floating around, who knows if it will ever get properly released, but for now, this one is not surprisingly shaping up to be a serious contender for black metal record of the year!
BACK IN STOCK!!
Yet another twisted blackbuzz missive from outsider black metal weirdos Clair Cassis, whose -other- posthumous record we made our Record Of The Week a few lists back. Clair Cassis, for those who don't already know, was the short lived post Velvet Cacoon outfit, made up of essentially the same members, but whose sound was a poppier, prettier, and in some ways an even weirder version of what they had been doing in Velvet Cacoon. Whereas VC offered up sprawling expanses of droned out black buzz (originally purported to be played not on guitars, but on a diesel powered harp) and deep black ambience, CC take those same elements and craft them into more concise chunks of gloomy almost poppy black metal, with Joy Divisiony bass lines, chiming Cocteau Twins like guitars, lots of unlikely hooks, all woven into sheets of black buzz, galloping blast beats, and some seriously freaky croaked Gollum-like vokills.
This ep and the one before it barely crack 50 minutes combined, so this is essentially side 2 of CC's 15 track swansong. And like the first installment, this stuff is twisted, warped and bafflingly brilliant. The gothy post punk vibes even more pronounced here, the bass thick and sinewy, the guitars even more melodic, and the sound dangerously closer to blackened pop than poppy black metal, and it definitely suits them.
The record explodes right out of the gate a buzzing black blast, but even within those first few seconds, it's easy to hear that there's way more going on, the low end is thick and layered and lush, the melodies mournful and melancholy, almost like a blacker buzzier Lifelover. The first two tracks flit from melodic buzz to midtempo dirgey gloom, it's not until the third track "Praline Civet", that the band let loose and stop trying to disguise their sound as black metal, it soars and pulses, it's a glorious blackened gloom pop, surprisingly epic and emotional, for a band of legendary cynics and charlatans. "Bronzed Ash" might be the prettiest song here, a moody midtempo lope, that has strange drumming, lots of clean chiming guitars, lush washed out atmospheres, super blissy and shoegazey, and it ends way too soon after about 90 seconds. The final track too is super cool, and strange and not at all typically black metal, with trippy processed harmonized guitar melodies, over a churning swirl of muddy riffage and motorik drum pound, super psychedelic and dreamily noisy, and poppy and really sort of noise poppy.
So good. And might as well be considered another Record Of The Week, the second half of their FIRST Record Of The Week, a moody, blissy, shoegazey collection of psychedelic, droney, buzzy tripped out blacknoisepop.
BACK IN STOCK!!
When we first discovered mysterious Northwestern black metal outfit Velvet Cacoon, it wasn't just their blown out buzz that had us enraptured, it was all the rumors and weird stories about the band itself, that they were some sort of eco-fascists, who had built a huge gasoline-driven HARP which was responsible for their massive buzz. We later discovered that the whole eco-fascist / droneharp thing was a ruse, a put on, the band intentionally fucking with what they considered to be a contemptible black metal scene. It was then revealed that Velvet Cacoon were in fact a couple of drug obsessed dandies, who when they weren't crafting some of the most stunning black metal weirdness, were waxing about the various drugs they took, and their decadent lifestyle. But all that stuff only made them more interesting, and gave the sound a certain twisted cachet, coming as it did from these unlikely creators.
As it happened, the band got fed up with the drama and the internet message board bullshit, and decided to scrap Velvet Cacoon entirely and start fresh. A new band, a new name and a new sound. Thus we have Clair Cassis, whose sound really is not all that far removed from the washed out black buzz of VC, but does distinguish itself in some important ways. The first being the song length. The band described CC in an interview as being a more pop Velvet Cacoon, and so it is, the shortest song is under 3 minutes, the longest just less than 7, the band forcing themselves to be more succinct, to move through their musical ideas in a more structured and less unhindered way, instead of letting songs and parts drone on and on. Not that we minded before, in fact, we like it when our black metal drones and buzzes endlessly, but there's something to be said for the opposite approach, which tends to force the write to craft SONGS more than SOUNDS. The other big difference is the bass. And with that the above mentioned pop element. The lack of bass in black metal is practically a running joke, the brittle buzz and furious blasting of most black metal generally relegating bass to a barely there buzz, so when a black metal band takes the bass, and makes it as much a part of the sound as the guitar, it changes the whole shape of the sound, in the case of Clair Cassis, gives it a sort of woozy, gothic, cold wave vibe, black metal is dour and depressive by its very nature, but here it's gloomy and haunting, an emotional sort of darkness and depression.
This new sound/direction is immediately noticeable on opener "Ambercandle" which begins all warped and woozy, the riffs twisted and seemingly melting over the pounding doomy drums, when the track finally kicks into gear, the bass drives the songs, thick and dense, the notes slippery, haunting gloomy low end swells that add some pathos to the already loping minor key dirge, besides that it makes the sound so much heavier. Even on the next track, "The Feathered Fog" which begins with a somewhat standard burst of blackness, droney and relentless, still the bass is there adding heft, and a melodic counterpoint to the frenzied riffage, and then when the song switches gear, lurches into halftime, the bass swoops right to the front and the song transforms into a woozy seasick dirge.
And as you listen, the record definitely reveals itself as more than buzzing black metal, and knowing what we do about the folks behind it, it's not hard to imagine them creating this otherworldly pop music, and simply choosing to cloak it in black metal finery, which definitely explains the catchiness, the heavy bass and buried grooves, but it's probably best to not analyze it too much. A casual glancing listen will definitely provide plenty of black metal pleasure, the guitars are thick and gnarled, the drumming (real this time it sounds like) heavy and blasting, the arrangements trancelike and hypnotic, with long stretches of deep shimmering drone music, as well as plenty of pounding doomic dirgery, Velvet Cacoon fans won't be disappointed, but digging deeper reveals all the other subtle sonic alterations that make Clair Cassis simultaneously much more accessible, but also even weirder than VC. The songs may be shorter, but they're no less complex and convoluted, in fact in some ways, they're even more, considering parts don't drone on, the band flits from part to part, from blast to plod to drift to blast again.
"Pearls & Pinesmoke" is another standout, a soaring blasting droner, thick with bass rumble and throb, grim enough, the drums a little loose and chaotic, the vocals a creepy croak, and then the breakdown comes, and it's total melodic black nirvana, half tempo, the guitar still buzzy, but the bass unfurling an insanely melodic and ridiculously catchy part, that totally transforms the song, and then the sound shifts again back to blasting buzz, somehow the bass remains, adding unlikely melody to even the blackest bits, and fear not, a part that good comes back again, fans of Alcest and Amesoeurs will be in heaven. And after a strange interlude, the track shifts again, into another woozy, differently melodic dirge, laced with more melodic bass, but this time wrapped around spidery acoustic guitars, all still wreathed in crumbling buzz.
Finally the record finishes with the awesomely titled "Hazelhearted In The Seaparlour", which explodes immediately into a dense churning blast, heavy and harsh and layered, with a strange midtempo bridge/chorus, that features a strangely bouncy, and again surprisingly melodic bassline, way up in the mix, changing the focus of the song, before dropping out again and letting the guitars take over, before the track finally fades out, leaving nothing but the wheezing strains of what almost sounds like elevator music, or the music they play in the middle of the night at outside malls, the sound here replete with random bits of found sound, footsteps and other curious ambience.
And just leave it to the fickle folks who disbanded Velvet Cacoon at the height of their popularity to nip their new band in the bud as well, which apparently is exactly what happened. Clair Cassis is no more. But what a way to go. There is a second record floating around, who knows if it will ever get properly released, but for now, this one is not surprisingly shaping up to be a serious contender for black metal record of the year!
Before the release of Rainforest, the first proper solo effort from New Jersey producer / beatmaker Mike Volpe, aka Clams Casino, he was primarily known for making tracks for hop hop icons like Lil' B, Soulja Boy and others, and here those tracks are presented sans vocals, revealing them to be pretty much fully formed as they are, and making it perfectly clear why hip hoppers were freaking out over these jams. The witch house vibe still looms large, as does that whole slo-mo RnB thing, obviously fans of How To Dress Well, not to mention the whole Tri Angle catalog will flip for these tracks, gorgeous, and low slung, creepy and haunting and pretty, deeply rhythmic, softly psychedelic, blissed out and a bit druggy, in some ways these tracks couldn't sound less hip hop, but again, that's precisely what made them stand out.
It's hard to imagine Soulja Boy rapping over "All I Need", with its hazy, woozy Portishead creep, slowed down vocal croon, and strange crunchy percussive skitter. Everything wrapped in an ethereal gauze, peppered with skittery high hats, hand claps, a spare simple drumline, it's all ballady and blissfully blurry. It's equally hard to imagine Lil'B rapping on "Real Shit From A Real Nigga", and it's just as difficult to imagine a track this pretty and washed out with that title, and the sound, all warm swirling synths, distant choral vocals, clouds of shimmering glistening melodies, and a low slung shuffling beat drifting amidst all manner of glistening flutter and smeared sparkle. And so it goes. The tracks here are incredible, and definitely have us wondering why more big names haven't tapped this guy for backing tracks, this stuff is totally next level, way more advanced than any of the stuff we hear on the radio, but as we mentioned before, these songs already sound essentially finished, totally fleshed out, expansive and lush and melodic, and in some ways, adding anything else would only take way from their power. And as much as we loved Rainforest, and we did, BIG TIME, we might be digging this one even more!!
Another killer chunk of outsider electronic music from Triangle, who has also given us amazing records by witch house outfits oOoOO and Balam Acab, and while Clams Casino, a twenty something hip hop producer from New Jersey who's done production for Lil B and Soulja Boy, is not technically witch house, it's easy to see why he ended up on triangle, cuz to our ears, many of the elements are the same, the sound woozy and warped, muddy and murky, washed out and ethereal, stuttering loops, disembodied voices wreathed in effects and layered into their own sort of rhythms, the sound a gorgeous creepy crawl, some seriously dreamy drag, everything blurry and indistinct, field recordings hover beneath smeared synths, and muted pulses, downtempo beats wrapped around sci-fi shimmer. Crumbling distortion envelops slooooowed down crooning, a sort of slo-mo soul laced with clanky percussion, and tinkling late night pianos, a little bit crunk, a little bit witch house, a swirling swoonsome sizurp vibe, that oozes into everything, the perfect wasted late night drift off zone out melting dancefloor alien chill out soundtrack for sure.
Definitely for fans of dark electronica, chopped and screwed hip hop, witch housers Salem, oOoOO, Balam Acab, and all the various strains of slo-mo soul and doped-up drag...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Latest blast of audial mayhem from Finland's grim buzz horde Clandestine Blaze. People around here forget what a metal stronghold Finland is. It's not all faeries and forests and drum circles and acoustic guitars. There is a serious black cloud hanging over the land. As is demonstrated by the various black minions who call Finland home. It's strange, for being one of our favorite BM outfits, we've actually never reviewed a Clandestine Blaze record before (not counting the split with Deathspell Omega), thankfully, this new one is as good if not better than any of the other CB releases. Frontman Mikko Aspa in addition to being the single soul behind CB, is also a member of Finnish ultra doomsters Fleshpress, and strangely enough, also sings for AQ faves Deathspell Omega.
But Clandestine Blaze is not doom, nor avant black metal, no this is old school black buzz, grim and frosty, primitive and necro.
Each track is based around a single riff, played over and over, inducing a glorious trancelike state, the guitars relentlessly buzzing, the riffing so drenched in reverb that the notes wash into each other becoming one long buzzing drone, the vocals a hellish croak, dripping with FX as well. This is true black metal for sure, but as with a lot of that stuff, a purity of vision often produces unintended sonic results, much like isolation, a sound develops, that while at it's root is indeed pure and true, contains elements that gradually seep in to the sound. Usually making the music even more special and unique. Such is the case for sure with CB, while a cursory listen reveals a simple buzzing black metal, closer listening reveals mysterious depths, layers upon layers, arrangements that coalesce into strange shapes. A perfect example is the 12 minute long, midtempo centerpiece "Ashes Of The Eternal Wanderer", a completely hypnotic blackened blur, the guitars and drums buzzing into a thick snarling drone, almost dreamlike at times, which is one of the reasons we love the buzz of black metal so much, that trancey dronelike element, and that is all over Church Of Atrocity. It's not so much about the riffs, or the arrangements, it's the sound, a whirling buzzing blackness that wraps your head in a dark cloud, fills your ears with black buzz and carries you off...
But heck, don't let all this high falutin' talk of drones and purity of vision, scare you off, Church Of Atrocity is just as enjoyable as a simple blown out chunk of brutal old school blackness! Either way, highly recommended.
Even though one band is from France, and the other is from Finland, you couldn't ask for a more perfect pairing. This split was originally released in 2001, and only recently was repressed so we could get enough to list, unfortunately it seems to already be out of print again so the 30 or so we got will most likely be the last for a while.
Finland's Clandestine Blaze specialize in ultra primitive black metal, paying homage to Bathory, Beherit, Darkthrone and the like, with buzzy sludgy riffs, thrashing and blasting mostly, but occasionally slowing down to a near doomy crawl. Their sound a buzzing murky blur, so much so that when they're not plodding along like Celtic Frost at 16rpm their black metal bombast smears into a gloriously hypnotic blur.
Clandestine Blaze are paired up here with Deathspell Omega in (appropriately) their earlier, more raw incarantion. DSO spew forth their buzzing blackened thrash, very much like the other DSO reissues, raw and grim on the surface, but with plenty of subtle compositional and sonic irregularites right below the surface, adding a definite depth not found in lots of similar musics and a hauntingingly unlikely catchiness very rarely (if at all) found in any black metal.
So good!!
When talk of this band comes up in conversation, some folks around here do indeed clap their hands and say "Yeah!" Others cross their arms and say "Meh." Some make a fist and say "Fuck no!" And still others simply scratch their heads and wonder what the fuss is all about. Sooo, with whom will you be sharing your Valentine's sweets this year? Not sure? Well, perhaps the new self-released album from these exclamatory tweaked popsters will help you decide. A sizable deciding factor definitely seems to be band leader Alec Ounsworth's winsome vocals which might be endearingly nasal in a David Byrne sort of way to some, and shrilly whining to others. Produced by Dave Fridmann, Some Loud Thunder is the sophomore release by this Brooklyn, NY quintet.
Eccentric, folksy, retro-tinged pop is all around us these days. Following in the footsteps of fine bands such as Hidden Cameras, Frog Eyes, Architecture In Helsinki and Arcade Fire, here's one of the latest bands to be causing a minor ruckus (and for once, it's not a Canadian band! haha!). This release hasn't been easy to get a hold of. Folks have been feverishly requesting it for weeks, but we've only just recently been able to track down the self-released, very sparsely distributed and not so readily available cd. So what's the fuss all about? We shrug. While we can certainly see the appeal in their very 'now' sound, when we put the disc on for a spin, our reaction was nothing short of tepid (there were even some groans). In the first couple of tracks, there's some very Television styled, emotively yelped vocals, but overall, it's as if Clap Your Hands, Say Yeah randomly picked the Talking Heads and The Violent Femmes from the pool of '80s bands, and fused the voices of David Byrne and Gordon Gano into that ubiquitous clunked-art-dance-punk sound. We'd recommend first visiting the music of the far superior bands mentioned above before heading in the direction of CYHSY.
Each and every one of Allen Clapp's songs exude a wide-eyed earnestness. Here's seventeen of 'em for you to cuddle up to! This was *the* indie pop sound of the early '90s -- sweet, pretty, strummy jangle guitars and boyish vocals filled with adorable charm. He was the male counterpart to Amelia Fletcher (of Heavenly, Talulah Gosh and Marine Research) or Rose Melberg (of The Softies, Go Sailor and Tiger Trap). The forecast here is nuthin' but sunshine and sweethearts!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Wonderful! Clarinet Thing is the collaborative project starring five formidable pillars of the SF jazz community -- Beth Custer, Ben Goldberg, Sheldon Brown, Peter Josheff and Ralph Carney. Yes, as you might've guessed, they all play a variety of clarinets masterfully, and their incredibly expressive performances are captured beautifully on these live recordings. So warm and crisp, you wouldn't know they were performing in a 'live' setting until the audience voices their appreciative applause at the end. The seventeen tracks on Agony Pipes And Misery Sticks document the group's fifteen years of reeded sister'n'brotherhood, and what a consistent delightful document it is!
The latest from local soundmaker Dan Vallor, whose last two releases we could barely keep in stock, including one that came housed in an actual tape player, and that tape player wrapped in a melted/warped vinyl record! We had long been a fan of Vallor's mysterious music, a music that eventually found him more than one home away from home on labels like Celebrate Psi Phenomenon and Ecstatic Peace!, so it's easy to imagine the sort of spaced out minimal abstract soundscaping and tripped out droneworlds Vallor has conjured up on past releases, although this new one is something else entirely.
As the title suggests, DNA on DNA is a track-for-track reimagining of DNA's legendary DNA On DNA record, and, as the cover art hints, Vallor is paying homage to those songs in the form of abstract freeform solo piano(!), with each track the same length as the original, but here, it really is just piano, and it's pretty fantastic. Not sure if DNA fans will necessarily dig this, but hell, some probably will, Vallor weaving strange, mysterious, and quite lovely landscapes of twisted melody, of lush shimmer and bombastic chordal pound, plenty of atonal free jazz freakout, it is after all meant to pay homage to one of the cornerstones of No Wave, but for every burst of dizzying minor key splatter, there are gorgeous stretches of contemplative moodiness, the sound shot through with subtle drones, swirling overtones, very minimal and spare, lots of space, the sound drifting, slipping into wild squalls, and then settling right back down again.
Included as a bonus, is a second disc called Retrospekt, which sonically falls more in line with other Clarinette releases, which makes sense since it is in fact a greatest hits of course, sampling tracks from EVERY single Clarinette release, as well as including a handful of previously unreleased songs. The sounds as you might imagine are quite varied, from experimental bursts of crunch and rumble, to beautiful sprawls of swirling shimmer, from spaced out psychedelic drift, to echo heavy distorted crumble, and from ethereal almost pop ambience, to dizzying modern minimalism a la Reich Or Riley. If you weren't a fan already, this disc will change that for sure.
LIMITED TO 125 COPIES, each one hand numbered, and housed in a super striking full color printed transparent plastic sleeve, adorned with some super cool (and funny) Peanuts / DNA artwork.
