This record is pretty amazing, if just for the fact that it sounds so much like the one before it even though it's almost an entirely different band. Which does make sense I suppose, as remaining original member John Gallagher sings and plays guitars and basically writes all the songs. Still, it seems pretty impressive that you could assemble such a crack team of death metal technicians two times in a row! But here's the proof. Grinding, thrashing downtuned death metal, convoluted, churning serpentine rhythms, impossibly precise and perplexingly tight, this band just destroys all comers. The only complaint is the new drummer. Don't get me wrong, he is unbelievable, and definitely sends me back to the practice space head hung in shame, but he had the unenviable task of replacing original drummer Kevin Talley, who is without a doubt, one of, if not THE, best metal drummers I have ever seen, hard hitting, ultra complicated, but still swinging. But that's really a minor quibble, 'cause once you're immersed in this record, you won't have much time to think about anything but how hard your ass is being kicked.
The cool thing about metal bands is that you can usually tell a lot about them before you even throw on the record. Take The Dying Light. They're on Willowtip, home to Watchmaker, Necrophagist, Crowpath, Cephallic Carnage, Gorod and more. Their record was recorded in Death Metal USA: Tampa, Florida! Produced by Eric Rutan from Morbid Angel and Hate Eternal. So now we're thinking death metal, but with some grind elements maybe, technical but still dense and aggressive. Fast but appropriately chugging. Let's go a little further and check out the band photo, four guys, three with short hair, one with really long hair, some tattoos, even a few hand tattoos(!), but it's the t-shirts that tell the real story, one Morbid Angel, one Dimmu Borgir, and one Wetnurse, who as you might remember are a weird East coast tech-post-rock-detah-metal outfit. A quick listen, proves that we weren't all that far off, with The Dying Light you've got a serious downtuned slab of chugging, thrashing, blackened death metal grind, awesomely intricate, bizzare complex rhtyhms, with some amazingly fucked up drumming, howled almost BM vocals, and leads! Solos! Squiggly, melodic tangles of shred, that almost sound out of place, but do a lot to add to the songs as most bands like this forgo the guitar solo completely. But as always it's the riffs. Always the riffs, that drive this record, a series of thick, dense, heavy twisting and buzzing riffs that make your head spin. Someone else listening to this just said "those riffs are killer but those guys don't own any of 'em" which is fair maybe, you can hear lots of Carcass, the Accused, Necrophagist, Slayer, Morbid Angel and a good heaping of NWOSDM, but the Dying Light manage to infuse each song with just enough of their own ideas to keep it interesting. They're certainly not the weirdest or heaviest or the most extreme, but if you're in the mood for any of the above mentioned groups, or especially some weird mix of ALL of 'em, then this is well worth checking out.
One of six new tapes from the always awesome Holodeck label out of Austin, Texas is a double album of intrepid dancefloor excursions divided into day and night moods. Dylan Cameron is the engineering mastermind behind most releases of the Austin underground, including Troller and Thousand Foot Whale Claw as well as most of the Holodeck catalog, but on Samsara, he brilliantly displays a knack for crafting rhythm and nuance. The A side, Causes, is all big four-on-the-floor house music jams full of bubbling acid synth textures and diva-ish vocal samples hearkening back to the Hacienda sound from the mid-to late-eighties with a more refined modern sense of compositional detail that one might find on Kompakt or Hot Flush.
The B side, Conditions, is a suite of more late night, two-step grooves that have a more ambient dub-step feel. The vocal samples are more filtered and hazy. The mood more pensive and dark, like an uptempo Burial, but a nice coming down counterpoint to the more high-energy A side. Also features a remix of an unreleased Troller song. Limited!
If you haven't seen the Scorsese documentary yet go rent or buy it asap! Whether you thought yourself a Dylan diehard or not you will be converted. This double cd companion is maybe the perfect Dylan collection for both life long devotees as well as those who have never totally bought into the myth. Disc one is all acoustic and features demo and home recordings of a young Dylan at his most raw. Disc two is what makes it though. The electric Dylan! Complete with the blistering live plugged in "Maggie's Farm" from the Newport Folk Festival which had all the traditional folkies angered including Pete Seger who actually tried to get wire cutters to kill the sound of what he thought a mess and betrayal of true folk. But truth is, when Dylan plugged in and showed he belonged to no one, he helped lay down a foundation of independent spirited rock/folk that has been carried on during the last quarter century and currently the flame can be seen in the hands of the likes of The Mountain Goats, Entrance, Bright Eyes, etc.
New York is home to Jeremy Novak and his mad sampledelic science fair project Dymaxion, whose stripped down collages resemble something like Peter Thomas redux by The Hanatarash by way of sampled and looped sound effects lp's on an old Califone. Or maybe a lo-fi Tipsy bearing a more sinister edge with emphasis on groove and fucked-up sounds. This disc (previously released -- and
Hey, it's just like old times! Jay Hinman, former editor/publisher of the music fanzine Superdope (1991-1998) has jumped back into the 'zine game with this new dead tree periodical. He does a Dynamite Hemorrhage podcast too, and Dynamite Hemorrhage was originally birthed as a blog, but it's great to see this new off-line, in-print 'zine happening. The debut issue is full-sized, with a color cover, b&w interior, 64 pages, in the if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it, tried-and-true fanzine format of olde. Desktop publishing, baby.
As with Superdope, Jay's focus here is on the garage/indie underground pretty much, old and new. The cover story is on The Flesh Eaters (appropriately enough, since "Dynamite Hemorrhage" is the name of one of their songs). Jay interviews frontman Chris D., specifically and in-depth about the 1977-1980 era, discussing the LA punk scene, his Upsetter label, Slash magazine where he worked, the Masque, etc.
More obscure punk history is unearthed in an interview with '90s Scottish all girl garage group Sally Skull, and recently reissued on Captured Tracks DIY popsters Bona Dish. There's also interviews with current-day bands too: Columbus Ohio lo-fi garage scuzz unit Sex Tide, and NYC minimal postpunk duo Household. Perhaps best of all though, is the contribution here from the folks who do the Fuckin' Record Reviews blog on tumblr, a retrospective feature about all of their favorite underground music fanzines from back in the day - Butt Rag, Crank, Opprobrium, Bananafish, and more. Ah, the nostalgia. We still treasure our back issues of all of those 'zine mentioned, and now know about some others we wish we'd read/collected back then.
Oh, and there's plenty of music (and book) reviews of course, in fact, the reviews section takes up almost half the page count! They're informed, amusing, and either enthused or acerbic as appropriate. That Sunfoot review, ouch!
Basically, Dynamite Hemorrhage #1 is a damn good example of just why we read 'zines. Looking forward to #2.
All right! The 2nd issue is here of this cool old school style music zine, from the guy (Jay Hinman) who used to do the fanzine Super Dope back in the '90s. Slick cover, 80 pages - even bigger than issue #1. Lots of great stuff about underground music old and new - NZ legend Bill Direen is on the cover, Dynamite Hemorrhage providing both an interview and a discography/retrospective. Also, you get stuff on great Goner-label Memphis garage punks the Nots, lo-fi popsmiths Honey Radar, the 'behind the scenes story' of the Back From The Grave compilation series, and the Punk 45 series too, a "Layman's Guide to 1970s Jamaican Dub" from Jay, a primer on obscure '70s-'90s female punk/post-punk, tons of record reviews, book reviews too, and a bunch more, basically all the sort of cool stuff you want in a music zine. Classic. And it hasn't even been a full year since issue #1, so we're hoping to see #3 sometime next fall!
There once was a hip SF trio named Dynasty. They were Jibz Cameron (The Roofies), Diana Hayes (Mono Pause, The Roofies) and Indra Dunis (Numbers) -- three ladies who made the scene in matching party frocks and fevered lo-fi dance tunes. For a brief spell they raised the roof, raised some eyebrows and kicked out their party jams. The three eventually split to pursue other flights of fancy. One of them moved to New York and formed her own one-gal band, revising her former group's name by adding the word 'handbag' and taking her sound off the dancefloor into darker, dislocated and downright strange territory. Jibz Cameron is the last lady standing, raising a ruckus all her own, make-up a little smeared but orange visor and multi-colored maillot intact. Foo Foo Yik Yik is a bizarre, twisted journey in pretty much every aspect. The stark instrumentation runs rampant from jutting guitars to minimal electro-pulse. Her vocals leap from badass banshee caterwaul to tormented scribble scrawl internal child speak. Imagine a chemically imbalanced, disheveled combination of pre-teen playing dress-up, fading aerobicizer, tantrum-throwing aged socialite... close but not quite! Freaky-scary in a Sandra Bernhard sort of way. Includes a cover of The Stooges' "Open Up And Bleed".
More cool music from China, this one a 7" from a duo called The Dyne, who deliver some cool droned out psychedelic post rock on the A side, all sinewy basslines and mathy drumming, anchoring clouds of distorted riffage, and pulsing guitar shimmer, motorik and hypnotic, laced with subtle FX and little sonic curlicues, but with some crazy catchy melodies, almost like it could the theme song / credit music from some super cult show, check out the segment at about 1:15, the sort of part you kinda want to go on forever, made all the cooler but only surfacing a couple times. The flipside though find the band crafting something more poppy and proper songlike, the sonic palette similar to the A side, but a bit more frantic and frenetic, with chiming melodies and jagged guitar crunch, the vocals buried in the mix, a little droney and croony, the song seesawing back and forth between crunchy indie jangle and more brooding indie rock drift. Cool stuff. And yet another band to add to the long list of recent discoveries from the impossibly fertile Chinese underground rock scene!
If you're a fan of virtuoso instrumental math-rock madness, look no further... there are two new releases on Relapse for you to nerd, we mean rock, out to! One is the long awaited fifth album from scene grandaddies Don Caballero (without whom...) and the other is from the more whippershapperish Dysrhythmia.
We're totally enjoying the new Don Cab, 'though the world has caught up with 'em -- wise ass instrumental math-rock is all the rage (these guys should get royalty checks from Hella, Chevreuil, Orthrelm, Behold The Arctopus, et.al.), and so this new album, their first in six years, can't have the same impact as their records did back in the mid-'90s. But lone remaining original member drummer Damon Che still has crazy chops and his all-new lineup does the Don Cab brand name justice, getting a bit more metal in the process perhaps ('cause they're on metal label Relapse now?).
And then for those whose heads want even more scrambling, Dysrhythmia's new one is also recommended. Their complex compositions are played energetically and octopoidally, and are maybe a bit more metallic than the Don Cab, though they do dabble in proggy, atmospheric passages here and there. Indeed, while both World Class Listening Problem and Barriers and Passages have plenty of the technical herky-jerk, they are also strangely relaxing. Not just the relaxation of sheer exhaustion when it's all over -- both records give the listener some welcome chances to chill while they're still playing as well.
Really cool, instrumental post-rock / metal with lots of super complex playing and weird jazzy-ish bits. Definitely check it out if you're into Don Cab, Bozart, The (Fucking) Champs, etc.
It's been a while since we've heard from NY math/post/prog metallers Dysrhythmia, but we're happy to report that very little has changed in the years since 2009's Psychic Maps (which for some reason we never got around to reviewing). Right out of the gate it's a glorious blast of heavily textured, dense and complex, super melodic metallic mathiness. Probably the closest comparison would be the late great Don Caballero, but maybe with a healthy dose of Voivod / Vektor, and of course, Dysrhythmia infuse their math metal crunch with plenty of epic post rockisms, making for a sound that satisfies our yen for both dizzying tech-metal mayhem and moodily melodic epic post-metal majesty.
The songs are lengthy and serpentine, the band insanely dexterous, unfurling ultra intricate landscapes of crunch and grind, chug and soar, buzz and shimmer, occasionally exploding into some seriously headspinning, angular / atonal / tangly avant prog freakouts, but somehow always grounded in something much more actually songlike, which is what makes this stuff so good, and keeps it from ever getting at all boring, which is always a BIG risk with purely instrumental music. Thankfully, Test Of Submission offers no time to be bored, heck, there's hardly even time to catch your breath, between songs, or even between parts, gloriously and relentlessly dense and busy and brutal, crazy catchy and super melodic, and really fucking great.
Here's a split release we couldn't have anticipated, but certainly are enjoying: a pairing of NY math-metallers Dysrhythmia and sleepy British soundscapers Rothko (longtime faves of ours). Really it's not so strange, both bands are instrumental and fall into the "post rock" category thereby. Quite a contrast though, how they go about things. On Dysrhythmia's half, they offer up "Earthquake", a quarter-hour EPIC of soft-loud dynamic math rock, that percolates through wound-up metallic frenzies and moody stretches of heavy-duty ambience both. Pretty amazing. Imagine a mix of Isis and Crom-tech, or Don Cab playing Mogwai. Then Rothko lets you catch your breath and relax with their two rather more ambient-sounding tracks, adding much more low-end hum and drone to the proceedings... beautiful stuff. An unexpected split this, but satisfying start to finish, showcasing both the technical and the textural (Dysrhythmia more the former, Rothko very much the latter). FYI, Dysrhythmia's song is a reworking of one from an early, self-released album of theirs (before they signed to Relapse).
It's all about tapes now. Underground noise, black metal, the real raw shit, the weird underground stuff, it all seems to be finding its way to us mostly on super limited cassette tapes. Apparently tapes are the new tool of the underground. The new OLD tool of the underground. Way more true and grim and cooooool. CD-r's are so 2005. Sheesh.
Anyway, we got a whole mess of amazing and demented and brilliantly fucked up black metal recently, so we'll be trying to get them reviewed cuz you all you AQ weird metal fanatics will not want to miss out on any of these.
Dyster is a French one man band, dark depressive and suicidal (the band logo even incorporates a razor blade) who buzzes and blasts with the best of them, and is very reminiscent of French black metal legends Mutiilation. Mostly midtempo, with loud drums and buzzing insectoid riffing. Thick and furious, with killer harsh howled vocals that sometimes become hellish hysterical shrieks. Strange arrangements with most songs veering wildly from frantic blasts to stretches of slow motion doom with haunting arpeggiated guitars to pounding old school black buzz.
Not sure what it is, but we have been listening to this over and over since we first got it. Very recommended.
SUPER LIMITED. Each tape hand numbered.
One of two amazing new records released by recently discovered (by us at least) Pest Productions, a record label in China specializing in mysterious outsider black metal of all stripes, from black depressive black buzz, to blown out shimmery shoegaze black metal drift. The other, reviewed elsewhere on this list is a bizarre bit of depressive blackness by a Chinese one man band called Heartless, this though comes all the way from Iceland, another one man band, but this one not so depressive as dark and moody. Beginning with a haunting and very cinematic bit of piano driven ambience, the record soon lumbers into the 10+ minute "Mirthless", a buzz drenched bit of midtempo blackness, the distortion super crunchy and thick, the main bit of riffage, laced with shimmery bits of crystalline melody, the vocals a harsh hellish shriek, the riffing occasionally stuttering into spurts of clipped chug, before slipping right back into the woozy buzz. Over the course of the track, the song veers from melancholy folky shuffle, complete with strange sound effects and clean minor key guitar melodies, to churning doomy plod, to creepy chanted vocal ambience. "Rotten And Diminished" begins with some stately strings, moaning cellos, orchestral percussion, and even after the black metal kicks in, the strings remain, underpinning the blast and buzz with some epic pomp, a strange black metal classical hybrid, with the track again constantly switching gears, one of the coolest parts is when one guitar unfurls a staccato chug, the other a sheet of distant high end shimmer, over which the vokills, gurgle and grumble, before the track finishes off with acoustic guitar, reverbed piano, and some creepy monstrous backwards growls.
The rest of the record continues in a similar vein, taking the melodic blackness of groups like Lifelover, Shining, Forgotten Tomb and the like, and twisting it up a bit, adding plenty of strange interludes, folky and drifty, classical and cinematic, but it's the songs themselves, the unique riffing, the melodies and arrangements, that make this stuff stand out. In fact, that guitars constantly do weird little things that are a bit hard to explain, but mid riff, they'll modulate, or transform into a little melodic trill before slipping right back into the riff, or slow down into a sort of slowcore drift, or suddenly sound double tracked, super dense and extra loud, and the way those odd guitarings are woven into blasts of black buzz, and washed out stretches of doomic plod and creepy expanses of blackened ambience, is exactly why Dysthymia's The Shivering Opus sounds so awesome. And why we can't recommend it enough...
The author of the exceptionally well-written Scrapyard Forecast blog which focuses on all things droned-out, Adrian Dziewanski has also been slowly developing an exceptional sensibility of his own tonefloat minimalism from acoustically sourced drones. There were a couple of cassettes and cd-rs which had been floating around, mostly under the moniker Empress; but Orbital Decay is the first one that has made it to aQ. In perusing his blog, it can be something of a Nurse With Wound list of stellar minimalists and dronologists who have all informed Dziewanski on how to proceed with his own music: Pandit Pran Nath, Andrew Chalk, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Manu Holterbach, Barn Owl, Organum, etc. The warm cascading shimmer that pours from the speaker is a timeless drone, reminiscent of those sustained harmonic intervals that any number of the high-holy minimalists from the '60s might have produced, complete with the rasping buzz of strings that could have been sourced from a sitar, a hurdy gurdy, or even a well-tuned piece of sheet metal. Dziewanski laces this central drone with monochromatic, airy passages of levitated white noise bathed in reverb. These wisps ebb and flow in melodic currents that work into a beautifully rendered hypnosis. Does anybody remember Jim O'Rourke's 1993 album Remove The Need, of prepared guitar drones? Orbital Decay is somewhere between that record, those Keith Fullerton Whitman albums of bliss-out on Kranky, and the Nurse With Wound ambient opus Soliloquy For Lilith. Very well done and very limited. Just 125 copies of this professionally replicated cd (not a cd-r!).
Hey all right!! We hadn't heard much from these local, long haired, lost-in-time rockers for far too long, 'cause their singing drummer moved away for a while, but is back in town, and now they have a new album out, however only released on limited edition vinyl, a European import (which by the way comes with a cd-r burn of the album as well). We just got some of the last few copies there are direct from the band. If we weren't already familiar with 'em, and didn't deal with these guys in person, though, we'd coulda been fooled into thinking it was a reissue of something from the early '70s proto-metal era, or ever earlier, as they so convincingly channel the likes of Sir Lord Baltimore, Blue Cheer, Highway Robbery, Speed Glue & Shinki, James Gang, Dust, and other inspirations of that ilk in their badass heavy psych groove, totally authentic circa 1969-'72 sounding (well, except that we think we hear 'em head 'em make an anachronistic reference to Beyonce in the lyrics to "Nasty Girl"). And amidst the lumbering riff-rock, they also get into what's simply fuzzed-up '60s garage, Nuggets style, so bands like The Seeds are probably big influences too. Plus, most of the lyrics pertain to girl trouble, a traditional, very garagey subject.
So if you're into heavy fuzz rockin', this is quite recommended. Furthermore, we were delighted to discover that side one contains a Rodriguez cover!! They do "Only Good For Conversation", the fuzziest one from the Detroit Dylan's cult classic 1970 debut Cold Fact, a track we described in our review of the Cold Fact reissue as a "stone(d) cold classic when it comes to heavy duty fuzz guitar crunch" so it's a natural for the Dzjenghis Khan boys. Very cool. Also very cool is that side two starts off with a recording of Dzjenghis Khan's best song ever, or at least our favorite, called "God Damn", we remember it from probably the first time we ever saw 'em play, always a show stopper, encapsulating everything rad about this band.
By the way, we still have a couple (literally, two) copies of their self-titled cd debut from a few years back, on the the now defunct Japanese stoner metal label Leaf Hound, otherwise totally out of print.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The European label Who Can You Trust? brings us two new tapes in their series of limited live cassette-only releases by some of our favorite heavy/psych bands, that began with their instantly-out-of-print White Hills live at WFMU tape last year. One from Massachusetts doompunk stuporgroop Witch (featuring J Mascis on drums), and one from SF's own retro-proto-metal power trio Dzjenghis Khan, basically the second coming of Blue Cheer, y'know...
Prehistoric Rock - Live In San Francisco is as advertised. The Dzjenghis Khan boys recorded live at the Elbo Room, a few blocks down Valencia Street from aQ, in 2006. And this is a band that's AWESOME live, it's what they're all about. We know, that's why we had 'em play our 40 anniversary party the year before last. They bring it, and amid the 8 tracks on this tape not only do their signature song "God Damn!" (which gives their singing drummer some) but also a cover of the classic "Green Manalishi" by Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac (a tune that's also been covered by Judas Priest, and the Melvins). Their acid rock here is raw and rollicking, as it should be.
Djenghis Khan are the real deal, they should be huge (and woulda been, say back in '71) but at least a few cool folks know what's what, and we wish they had more stuff we could push on you. But everything they've put out so far has been limited and is out of print. So, while they last, we're glad we have this tape and you will be too if you're quick enough to snag one, assuming you dig long haired, heavy riffing, cowbell knocking, bellbottomed, weed smoking good times.
Orange cassette, super limited (150 copies only!), and we only have a few...
This San Fran retro-rockin' power trio, a deliberate throwback to the proto-metal stylings of the Frisco ballroom daze's bad boys Blue Cheer, at last presents their debut album, a split release from Japanese label Leaf Hound and Dutch label Motorwolf, (both) home to likeminded heavies Orange Sunshine. We've been waiting for an album from this band for a while, having gone to see 'em play every chance we got, going on a few years now. We forget how we first discovered 'em, they were opening for somebody else at a sparsely attended show at the Hemlock, and we were like, Pentagram T-shirt, shaggy hair, vintage gear? Hmm, wonder if these guys will be good... oh yeah!
What other current SF band sounds so Blue Cheer? That'd be Parchman Farm... whose bass player extraordinaire, "Binksebus Eruptum", happens to hold down (and shimmy 'round and 'round) the bottom end in this band too. Live, his showmanship is part of the attraction, but the band's true charisma belongs to singing drummer Tommy Tomson, whose aw shucks, "God Damn", stoner authenticity talks the talk and walks the walk. Just like the rest of the band, who very definitely look the part. None of these kids were probably even born in 1971, but they sure seem like that's when they come from. It's not just Blue Cheer that inspires 'em, they're fully versed in vintage vinyl proto-metal from Highway Robbery to Road, Juan De La Cruz to Toad. Putting all that love of early '70s hard psych into this album, they've come up with a worthy ten tracks of fuzzed-out, blooze-based, badass guitar/bass/drums swagger, with raspy whisky vox, simple bashing beats, wah wah guitar rippage, and bellbottomed bass lines. It's a fairly raw recording, giving it a bit of a punk feel, reflective of their youthful energy and enthusiasm, not unlike seeing 'em live. The rather lo-fi, garagey production also makes it sound extra olden and all, as does the folky acoustic coda "Sister Dorien". Sure, you're not gonna feel like nobody's ever made this sort of music before, in fact the opposite is quite the point, but if you like proto-metal like we (and they) do, you gotta appreciate the purity of this band's approach, their knowing naivety. It's not just pot, these stoners are totally high on the Speed, the Glue, -and- the Shinki! Right on we say.
By the way, they wuz formerly known as Genghis Khan, the "Dzj" now tacked on at the beginning presumably both to try to differentiate 'em from what's probably about 10,000 other bands also named after the Mongol warlord, and also to reflect the lineup changes that have occurred since their inception (the drummer being the sole surviving member from the first time we ever saw 'em, which is fine 'cause he was clearly the star, though their original guitarist was responsible for writing some cool riffs it must be said).
