THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Not too long ago we made Austalia's Grey Daturas record of the week with their killer Dead In The Woods record (now available again for a limited time), a perfect mix of churning metallic rock, New Zealand style free noise, freaked out psychedelic space rock and buzzing rumbling drone rock. So so good. We knew there were other Daturas recordings floating around but we couldn't figure out how to track 'em down. Finally the band returned from tour and managed to dig up their last copies of their two previous releases, their debut record and a 30 minute ep, so we took all of 'em and they finally showed up. So act fast as these will be gone in no time.
This is the band's first full length from way back in 2002, and finds the band in a much driftier dronier place. The first two tracks are extended guitar workouts, slow shifting waves of distorted guitar and rumbling bass, alternately ominous and atonal, and lilting and lovely, it's not until track three when the drums kick in, just sort of offering a bare bones framework for the super saturated sludge guitar, a SUNNO))) worthy guitar drone indeed. Not long after that the band gets seriously revved and kicks out the drug addled psych space jams, with wild super nova guitars, acid fried riffs and pounding relentless drumming. The last two tracks, clocking in at 20 minutes each, are pretty much the core of the record. The second to last track "I Talk To The Voices" is a haunting soundscape of heavily affected guitars, simple percussion, that builds and builds and builds into a swirl of psychedelic fuzz, before splintering into a sixties freakout of delay and splattery free drumming. The final track "Bloodcloth", is about as heavy and harsh as the Daturas get, a full on freaked out ultra noise deconstructed Dead C sort of racket, strangled squealing guitars, weirdly atonal piano, layer after layer of fuzz and feedback and noise and hiss, all mixed up into a dizzyingly chaotic swirl.
SUPER LIMITED. THESE ARE OUT OF PRINT AND LONG GONE. WE HAVE THE LAST 30 COPIES. ONCE THESE ARE GONE, THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
NOW AVAILABLE AS A SUPER DELUXE, ULTRA LIMITED DOUBLE LP!!!!
You may remember a while back, we made the new record from The Grey Daturas, Dead In The Woods, our record of the week. And how could we not? We described their sound as: "blown out fuzzy psych rock. A blurry druggy mix of Hawkwind, the Dead C, Comets On Fire, Residual Echoes, Dead Meadow and Bardo Pond. From churning, throbbing fuzzdrug churn, with squealing feedback and choppy uneven riffing, to drifting dreamy stripped down post rock, all careening wildly between thick swaths of super overdriven psych fuzz, and drenched in crumbly distortion and all manner of wah!" Heck, that sounds so good, it makes us want to pull out Dead In The Woods and throw it on right now!! Well, the Daturas spent a couple months touring the US last year, and while they were in the Bay Area, they crashed with the guys in local free noise ensemble the Yellow Swans (now relocated to Portland). And what do two bands do when they have a week to kill together? Record a record! Or in the case of these guys, record a super limited double cd-r, now a fancy double lp! So what do you get when you mix the druggy free noise psych rock of the Daturas and the noisy clattery skree of the Yellow Swans? Well obviously noise is gonna play a big part of it. No real song structures to speak of, although occasionally a brooding bass line or a simple strummed riff will surface, this is mostly freaked out and free, ambient and abstract. Expansive swaths of guitar noise, amp buzz and electronic glitch and grit. Melodies drift and disintegrate while guitar and bass slowly unfurl all manner of rumble and drone. Definitely reminiscent of Skullflower, Sunroof!, Vibracathedral Orchestra, and all that sort of shimmery noisy goodness. Beautiful and droning and so so so good! Packaged in a super cool hand screened sleeves with pasted on artwork, with a creepy spike through the skull image screened on the front in metallic silver! This is a vinyl reissue of the long out of print double cd-r originally released in an edition of 200 copies on Jyrk. This 2lp version is also of course limited, to 525 copies this time, and those probably won't last long!
A while ago we were informed that French ultradoom combo Monarch had called it a day. We were crushed. One of our favorite purveyors of filthy slow motion doooooooooom, fronted by a woman, a rarity in doom for sure, and with a penchant for smiley skulls and Hello Kitty. A band that seemed tailor made for the very bizarre tastes of the AQ faithful, seemed to be no more.�
But before we could begin our campaign of mourning, black clothes spray painted with cute skulls, black Hello Kitty armbands, we discovered that in fact we were misinformed, or maybe the band had taken a break, or something, but we cared not, for whatever reason, Monarch was still alive, and would live to doom another day. And doom they did. Gracing us with more and more glorious downtuned heaviness, including their bad ass cover of Turbonegro's "I Got Erection"!
So now that we're pretty comfortable with the continued existence of our favorite cute doomsters, we can wait patiently for each new, massive slab of harsh slow motion glacial dooooooooooooooooooooom. And for folks new to Monarch, don't go expecting this to actually -sound- cute. They may be fronted by an adorable French girl, who spins playfully on the beach in their videos, but when she opens her mouth to sing, it's the sound of blackness and misery, a demonic caterwaul, unrivaled by most male metal vocalists. And sure the art on their records may be cute cartoon burning churches and big eyed ghosts, but the sounds inside are slow and black as tar, guitars tuned so low they rumble instead of roar, drum beats so far apart, the drummer can probably smoke a cigarette between beats.�And we're happy to report that this 16+ minute chunk of doom is all that and more. The more being the haunting ethereal female vocals partway through... Crushingly heavy, weirdly beautiful. A plodding symphony in slow motion. Essential Monarch beautiful brutality.
The surprise here is the Grey Daturas track, also a 16 minute epic, that on first listen sounds surprisingly doomy, and a lot like the Monarch track. The Daturas are often heavy, but rarely doomy like this, but it suits them. And they pepper their doom with all sorts of sonic weirdness, bits of electronic fuckery, strange modulated feedback, subtle FX, until about 13 minutes in, when the song suddenly morphs into a muted wall of smeared and crumbling white noise, a blast of blurred sound that eventually fades into nothingness.�
Pretty amazing stuff, from both bands. Doom hounds will be well pleased. Super fancy gold inked black cardstock gatefold sleeve too...
As always, let's get this out of the way first. This is EXTREMELY LIMITED. Only 200 copies were made, and we took about a quarter of 'em. By the time you read this it will already be out of print, so as always, act fast if you want one of these!
You may remember a few lists back, we made the new record from The Grey Daturas, Dead In The Woods, our record of the week. And how could we not? We described their sound as: "blown out fuzzy psych rock. A blurry druggy mix of Hawkwind, the Dead C, Comets On Fire, Residual Echoes, Dead Meadow and Bardo Pond. From churning, throbbing fuzzdrug churn, with squealing feedback and choppy uneven riffing, to drifting dreamy stripped down post rock, all careening wildly between thick swaths of super overdriven psych fuzz, and drenched in crumbly distortion and all manner of wah!" Heck, that sounds so good, it makes us want to pull out Dead In The Woods and throw it on right now!! Well, the Daturas spent a couple months touring the US recently, and while they were in the Bay Area, they crashed with the guys in local free noise ensemble the Yellow Swans. And what do two bands do when they have a week to kill together? Record a record! Or in the case of these guys, record a super limited double cd-r! So what do you get when you mix the drugg free noise psych rock of the Daturas and the noisy clattery skree of the Yellow Swans? Well obviously noise is gonna play a big part of it. No real song structures to speak of, although occasionally a brooding bass line or a simple strummed riff will surface, this is mostly freaked out and free, ambient and abstract. Expansive swaths of guitar noise, amp buzz and electronic glitch and grit. Melodies drift and disintegrate while guitar and bass slowly unfurl all manner of rumble and drone. Definitely reminiscent of Skullflower, Sunroof!, Vibracathedral Orchestra, and all that sort of shimmery noisy goodness. Beautiful and droning and so so so good! Packaged in a super cool hand screened cardboard gatefold sleeve, with a creepy spike through the skull image screened on the front in metallic silver!
And in case you missed that bit at the beginning, SUPER SUPER LIMITED!!!!!
Finally, the full length has landed, a killer collection of industrial, electronic flecked, dubbed out metallic pummel from Grey Machine, three parts Jesu, one part Isis, the long anticipated team up of Justin Broadrick and Aaron Turner. We were treated to a teaser in the form of a super limited 12". We still have a few copies left, actually, with an exclusive super rad dubby remix B-side. The A-side, "Vultures Descend" is found on Disconnected as well, we described it thusly:
"A wild cacophonous chaotic noise jam, that features crunchy post industrial rhythms wrapped around a thick blown out blast of dubstep style bass, the vocals fuzzy and lo-fi buried way down in the mix, some woozy dark descending riffage, the timbre prickly and abrasive, but beneath all the churning and roiling heaviness (and it IS heavy) are some awesomely melodic guitar lines and some tripped out spacerock FX draped over the almost jungle bass and drums (or should we say drum + bass)."
Sounds good huh? Cuz it IS good. Really good. Although the whole record isn't quite as chaotic and abrasive, every song is pretty dense and sprawling, much of it sounding quite a bit like Broadrick's former outfit Godflesh, but with way more weirdness mixed in, be it extra programmed beats, layered guitars, explosions of thick oozing psych buzz, whatever. The opening track is the perfect example, with its low slung bass and industrial drumming, weaving trancelike through clouds of electronic hiss, mysterious creaks and groans, the vocals processed and chopped up, the song a lurching, unstoppable beast, but all around it, strange sounds are surfacing, transforming, becoming tangled up in that lumbering crush, as the guitars get thicker and more distorted, but seem to be twisting and warping... Eventually the drums drop out leaving just a sky full of high end streaks and a feedback skree drone drift.
So yeah, the sound here is Godfleshy, definitely not as blissy as Jesu, although some of those elements still remain, wrapped around a dense rigid industrial framework, with some surprising bits of modern electronic music (dubstep!) deftly woven into GM's sound without sticking out or sounding forced.
"When Attention Just Isn't Enough" begins life as another gloriously plodding dirge, but chiming guitars and fat fuzzy dubby bass transform it into something much more moody and groovy. "Wasted" begins with that sort of super heavy synth bass that defines most dubstep jams, but here it's laced over skittery metallic percussion and squiggly psychedelic leads, and lots and lots of noise. But it does rear up and buzz wildly every few measures, making it almost feel like some sort of industrial metal dubstep. But the wah guitars and squalls of freaked out FX also give it a distinctly Loop / Hawkwind sort of drug jam vibe as well. A killer combination for sure.
"Sweatshop" is the only really electronic sounding track, still thick ropy basslines, but with a killer loping programmed beat, super distorted and sort-of-funky, the whole thing super skeletal and dubby, with tons of texture and ambience, before giving way to the final track, probably the most blissed out of the bunch, still industrial and murky and washed out sounding, but everything is wreathed in a warm haze, the guitars muted, the drums minimal, the bass rumbling and fuzzy, lots of tape hiss and amp buzz, almost dreamy, but still appropriately ominous and intense.
Killer packaging too, blacks and greys and metallic silvers, printed on transparent vellum, with the other pages of the booklet visible through the cover, inside all sorts of high contrast video stills, a look both modern and reminiscent of the old Earache / Godflesh days. Cool.
The long awaited debut from Grey Machine, the collaborative beast featuring Justin Broadrick of Jesu, and Aaron Turner from Isis, just two songs, it's a teaser for the forthcoming full length, the A side a track from the record, the B side an exclusive remix available only on this here 12".
So what exactly does Grey Machine sound like? Definitely not as blissy as Jesu, although some of those elements still remain, if anything, it's closer to Godflesh in tone, lumbering and industrial, wish some surprising bits of modern electronic music (dubstep!) which manage to be deftly woven into GM's sound without sticking out or sounding forced.
The track from the forthcoming full length is a monster for sure. A wild cacophonous chaotic noise jam, that features crunchy post industrial rhythms wrapped around a thick blown out blast of dubstep style bass, the vocals fuzzy and lo-fi buried way down in the mix, some woozy dark descending riffage, the timbre prickly and abrasive, but beneath all the churning and roiling heaviness (and it IS heavy) are some awesomely melodic guitar lines and some tripped out spacerock FX draped over the almost jungle bass and drums (or should we say drum + bass).
The B-side is a super stripped down dubbed out groove, tons of space, the beats spare and skeletal, rubbery and bassy, over the top of some howled distorted vox (a la Godflesh), in the background streaks of guitar buzz, blurred bits of droning ambience, all sorts of space-y effects, the track pounds away, drifting through little clouds of blissed out crunch and more of those seriously bassbin destroying, thick buzz drenched dubsteppy basslines. Super cool. Bodes well for the full length!
Old school 12" style packaging. Black vinyl, no labels, plain white sleeve, with a black and white sticker affixed to the front. And of course, LIMITED!
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.
Blood And Sand dates back to 1990 for The Grey Wolves, one of the more notoriously confrontational outfits from the British power electronics scene. The discomforting themes of misogyny, terrorism, fascism, and general hatred of the world at large are commonplace for The Grey Wolves; and Blood And Sand began as a missive against the Gulf War, as a collaboration / split release with the wholly unknown project Shock City. Grey Wolves revisited the material in 2002, reworking the material from that 1990 cassette that proved very prescient of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 as well as the NATO coalition attacks in Afghanistan in the wake of the 911 attacks.
Jump forward yet another decade, and the conflict continues in Mesopotamia. In crafting this album about the horrors of war, The Grey Wolves have manifested an album that purposefully encapsulates the lack of clarity when it comes to Western boots on the ground in dealing with the local populations as well as the self-perpetuating rhetoric of warmongering from all parties. Quite literally, the album is a sandstorm of military ephemera, radio communication, somatic fluctuation, and deeply plumbed noise. The treads of tanks and twin-blade volatility of attack helicopters are commonplace with the heavy drone from The Grey Wolves. Muddled radio communications, lock-groove surface noise, and tape-loop hypnosis flutter throughout the two long-form pieces, bringing a much more subtle compositional sensibility to The Grey Wolves arsenal of sound. There is an existential gloom and anger to the whole record, expressing a frustration and exasperation that 24 years later this album would STILL be a valid critique of geopolitical turmoil and not a time capsule of a war long since past.
The Grey Wolves, a British industrial, provocateur duo, has been in operation since the mid-'80s, presenting themselves with a patchwork of antisocial, right-wing images under the pretense of a critique against contemporary cultural paradigms. They make the case that if they can get anyone in their audience to "think" about the political implications that run amok through daily life, then their antagonism through Nazi imagery, Osama Bin Laden t-shirts, poses of sexual domination, and even their name (a Turkish right-wing political movement responsible for hundreds of murders in the '70s and '80s) are justified. Unlike Throbbing Gristle and Laibach whose irony and wit are self-evident in their darkened theatrics, The Grey Wolves play fast and loose with all of these allusions; and more often than not, they stand as sympathizers to right-wing causes rather than as cultural critics.
Given how much of black metal aligns itself with the far right and how some of those bands can kick-ass in spite of their politics, we can't wholly denigrate The Grey Wolves on their questionable politics attempting to disguise themselves as art. This is doubly so considering that the reissue of Judgement is a pretty great document of tape damaged, lo-fi murk and rumbling noise. Hospital merely states that Judgement was originally released "in the late 20th Century," but given that the Grey Wolves had yet to adopt the post-Whitehouse aesthetic of power electronics found on their '90s recordings, we can safely say this was one of their earliest documents from the mid-'80s. The blown out 4-track recordings enjoy a crackling, ominous hiss which accompanies plenty of lo-fi crumpled rhythms and minor-key melodies sculpted out of feedback. While certainly snarling and nasty, many of these sounds could easily transition into any of more abrasive moments from turntablists like Philip Jeck or Gum. The Grey Wolves were gifted in terms of sound construction; and this album is thankfully devoid of any overt political statement. If only the rest of their catalog had such foresight.
A dark and dreamy drift through a late night world of moonlit sound from this UK driftrock slowcore duo. Silky serpentine guitar lines, moody meandering dreaminess, hushed whispery vocals, simple brooding dark ambient swirl, disembodied melodies. So so lovely. Like your favorite Low songs, set adrift in outer space, reflecting the twinkle of distant stars, shimmering in the soft vacuum of space. So absolutely gorgeous and otherworldly.
Packaged in a hand numbered black digipak with a tiny square piece of mirror affixed to the front.
What may unfortunately be a one-off project, The Greys are (were?) a trio featuring Jed Bindeman, Barbara Kinzle, and Birch Cooper. Bindeman is a man-about-town in Portland, Oregon, having his avant-rock fingers in Eternal Tapestry, Heavy Winged, Operative, and Jackie-O Motherfucker; while Kinzle and Cooper had been recording as the heavy-dream-pop duo The Slaves. Unfortunately, Kinzle and Cooper broke off their romantic relationship, leading to the likelihood that their creative relationship may have also terminated. Meaning that The Greys (and The Slaves for that matter) may be just a brilliant flash of dissonant beauty which will offer the world this one and only recording. In The Greys, Kinzle and Cooper build off what they had done in The Slaves with those oceanic, engulfing song-drifts and crank that through a fucking huge wall of noise. On the first side of this tape, if Bindeman is supposed to be behind the drumkit, he's clearly been knocked on the floor by the heavy-as-fuck guitar churn that is somewhere between the industrial sludge of early Skullflower or Terminal Cheesecake and the accelerant buzz of Cascadian black metal. We suspect that Bindeman is actually adding to the frenzy of guitars. Kinzle's voice does flicker through the overblown mix, but it's hardly the ethereal beauty one hears from The Slaves. Here, she's uttering more of a shrieking caterwaul to complement the torrent of discordant noise. Side two opens with something closer to an unhinged Nadja with a slow-crawling riff that blisters with noise, distortion, and multiple lines of feedback squalor rising from below. Here, Bindeman is definitely heard bashing away at his kit, but even so, he's way buried in the mix, which has been recorded Les Rallizes Denudes style, with just a mic in a room, all oversaturated and overdriven. Seriously, SOMEBODY has got to convince this band to continue recording and making more of this awesome soft-doom-noise-blur-rock. Yup, this tape is pretty limited, too.
We've said it before and we'll say it again, but oh how are grindcore hearts were broken when Discordance Axis called it a day. Sure there were plenty of grind bands, but few were able to capture the magic, and conjure the sort of grind metal magic those guys could. Even the briefest songs were jammed with intricate rhythms, and incredible melodies, so impossibly fast and furious, but catchy as fuck. Various Disc Ax members went on to do other things, most notably drum god Dave Witte, but even with him behind the kit, none of the post-Disc Ax bands pulled it off in quite the same way. Until recently. Until vocalist Jon Chang joined the living, returning with his insane Japanese hyper metal outfit, Hayaino Daisuki, who melded the techgrind of DA with total over the top power metal. Seems like a bad idea, but au contraire, we hadn't heard anything that fresh, that fucked up and gloriously heavy in forever. So here we are with another of Chang's new bands, one that has been in the works seemingly since the death of DA, seeing as there was a Gridlink track on that posthumous DA collection that came out way back in 2005. Even then we were thrilled at how much Gridlink seemed to channel the sound of DA, they seemed to be THE band poised to carry on Discordance's art-grind torch, but then nothing. For three years. But now. Shit. We feel silly saying it was worth waiting three years for 11 minutes of music, but the more we listen to this the more we're convinced it actually was.�
This is mindblowing. So heavy and insanely fast, so complex and furious, more than 12 minutes would probably kill you. Or maybe not, as we've been listening to this on repeat nonstop. Beyond just being brutal and lightning fast, it's also insanely dynamic, and so catchy, little squalls of grinding metallic mayhem offer up unlikely harmonies, killer hooks, some Maidenish guitar parts, Chang's vocals a hysterical banshee like shriek. And actually, Gridlink does seem to be the sonic link between Discordance and Hayaino, the over power metalisms of Hayaino tempered into something much less over the top, and the obtuse artiness of DA reigned in a bit, both sounds forced into one swirling sparks-spitting white hot ball of mind melting metallic art grind genius. So recommended. As is setting your cd on repeat and listening to this 5 or 6 times at each sitting!
Record number two from Jon Chang's post Discordance Axis outfit Gridlink. Unlike his OTHER post DA combo Hayaino Daisuki, which was like a super charged hyperspeed power metal grindcore combo, Gridlink is more aligned with the avantgrind of Discordance Axis. A dense million parts a minute flurry of hyperblasts, hellish howls, and impossibly gnarled riffage. And like Amber Gray before it, Orphan is a dizzying micro-epic, 12 songs in 12 minutes, almost a minute longer than Amber Gray, and somehow more focused and even more intense than its predecessor.
A twelve minute full length might seem laughable to some, but not sure most folks could handle more than 12 minutes of this stuff, and we doubt Gridlink could keep up this sort of intensity for much longer, either. Each track is a furious, frantic, frenetic, frenzied blast of grinding proggy metallic mayhem, the guitars liquid and serpentine, slipping from chug to noodle to maniacal hammer-on's, spewing a million notes a second, offering up rhythmic heft and tangled melody. The drums are right there with the guitars, impossibly rapidfire bursts of machinegun beats, endlessly relentless fills, the tempo changing every few second, blasting and pounding, a confusional bafflingly brilliant sonic battle, a non stop guitar / drum duel, the musical version of the Tasmanian Devil, a roiling, churning black cloud of sound, laying waste to all in its path.
But for all the grind and shred, pound and pummel, blasting and thrashing, the songs here are rife with hooks, killer melodies, and kick ass riffs, all surprisingly catchy, and dangerously hummable for a 12 minute, 200 part, million bpm, grindmetal blowout...
Featuring members of Discordance Axis, Mortalized, Human Remains, Kill the Client, Burnt by the Sun, Hayaino Daisuki, and more, might just be one of our favorite metal (grind or otherwise) records of the year so far...
The limited lp version is pressed on 180 gram vinyl, and features BOTH Gridlink albums (Orphan and Amber Gray), at 45 rpm, one album on each side, it's housed in a swank full color gatefold and includes a coupon for mp3 downloads of all the tracks AND karaoke versions of the songs so you can sing along at home! The vinyl is limited to 500 copies. The cd version includes the downloadable karaoke versions of the songs...
Having roots in EBM and industrial dance klang, Gridlock's "Trace" settles down into the fertile soil of IDM plowed by Autechre. While not much in the way of originality, this album is a very well done piece of IDM, mirroring the distorto-crunch plodding breakbeats and minor-key half melodies pleading for melancholia found on Autechre's "Amber" and Bola's "Fyuti."
MPEG Download: "Front" [/audio/gridlockfront.mp3]
Took some close listening, with some serious headphones, to actually discern the black metal happening on this double vinyl epic from the mysterious Grief No Absolution, who traffic in their own brand of 'bleak metal', which to these ears, at least at first sounded less like metal and more like noise, but cool noise for sure, but after a few listens, the blackened underbelly began to reveal itself, this one is definitely gonna hit the spot for folks into black metal noise hybridists like WOLD or Nekrasov, people who like their blast and buzz obscured by hiss and crunch and rumble and skree.
The 7" is the noisier component of this twofer. Psychedelic squall, a buzzing organic fog of sheer white noise shot through with shards of melody, and jagged sheets of processed feedback, layers of grinding fuzz collapsing in a swirling black hole of sound, but every once in a while, a streak of Merzbowian crunch will become a howling vokill, or a smear of caustic hiss will morph into an icy bit of riffage, but never for long, always quickly swallowed up by the roiling blacknoise nipping at its heels.
The 10" component is the darker dronier of the two, and is all about the slooow and looow, deep rumbling tones, SUNNO)))-y swells of slow motion riffage, so slow it's rendered ambient, a gorgeous drifting doomdrone, soft edged buzz, swirling and blurring into lush expanses of blackened shimmer. Abstract, skeletal, deep and minimal, ambient and atmospheric, but still plenty grim and blackened.
From the Flingco label who last list brought us The Black Box. Cool packaging as always, black on black printed sleeve, with a printed Japanese style obi, inside, a white on white printed insert, and it comes with a download card as well!
We weren't familiar at all with Jason Grier, but seeing him teamed up with Nite Jewel on this outing definitely grabbed our attention, as she's for sure one of our favorite left-field hazy dance floor peddlers. Grier gives us a nice peek at how great Nite Jewel sounds in a more uptempo setting. But not to fear, there are still those great valium-on-the-disco-dance-floor moments, like the ten minute syrupy jam "On And On", and the sizzling slow burn of "Midnight Blue". In fact this ep has pretty much perfect pacing, starting off with the more poppy dance jams and then easing into a more atmospheric post-disco comedown. Nice.
T. Griffin has spent many a long night writing his restrained and ruffled-around-the-edges pop songs in his tiny Brooklyn bedroom. This singer/songwriter seems to be equal parts Elliott Smith, Tom Waits, and Calexico (he even samples Calexico on one track).
Collected unreleased demos and suchlike from the former Pentagram, current Place Of Skulls guitarist. He's a riff master all right. Interesting to compare his original demo versions of songs that ended up on Pentagram albums like Be Forwarned.
A look behind the scenes at the making of Radiohead's epochal OK Computer album. As with all the books in the 33 1/3 Series, it's a completely fascinating read. Sort of like the way MOJO articles are always totally awesome and readable even if you -think- you don't care about the artist. But if you DO love OK Computer, this is obviously essential.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We've been looking forward to listing this, holding off on getting the import 'cause we knew that the label it's on, Van, was working on a US distribution deal. Finally it's here, and with appropriately dismal delight we can share this digipack'd slab of supreme doom metal with you. The debut full-length from Swedish band Griftegard (meaning, "burial ground") is an impressive one. Massive, morose, melodic, epic doom, a bit like the early work of ultimate Swedish doomlords Candlemass, also reminding us of Trouble circa Run To The Light, Warning's Watching From A Distance, The Wounded Kings, Fall Of The Idols, and other class acts. Maybe even a little Nick Cave! One of the guys in Griftegard used to help run the I Hate Records label, so it's no surprise that his band knows how doom should sound from the get-go. Slow and plodding, of course, and with much depth of feeling. The ragged edge to the singer's voice gives these dirges extra emotion, as if the crushing riffage needed any help, so very lumbering and slumbersome it is. Quiet parts, piano and organ interludes, add to the atmosphere.
Solemn, Sacred, Severe IS the perfect title, and review tagline.
Griftegard, like many doom bands, have a religious vibe to them. We don't think they ARE Christian, but these songs are often ABOUT Christianity (and its discontents), in particular, the apocalyptic Jehovah's Witnesses sect. Lead off track "Charles Taze Russell" is in fact named after an important historical figure in that church. We first heard it in demo form, on a cd-r comp that came with an underground doom metal 'zine, and by itself that track put us on the lookout for an album from these gloomy guys, and again here it is, one of the most accomplished doom debuts in recent memory. Well, the Garden Of Worm we listed last time was pretty good too, and if you liked that you're probably gonna need to hear Griftegard's moans of misery as well...
Full color cover art by AQ-favorite Jim Woodring.
Japan's noise-junk / industrial project Grim began back in the early '80s, mostly as the one-man project of Jun Konagaya with occasional help from Tomosada Kuwabara and Yukio Nagoshi. All three had formed the politically charged noise-punk trio White Hospital in 1983, with that outfit being discontinued in favor of other means of expression. The project that Kuwabara and Nagoshi started was Vasilisk - a ritualistic, post-industrial project of much greater notoriety with Konagaya occasionally working in that ensemble as well. Grim went in an entirely different direction seeking the more violent and the more extreme forms of music making. Konagaya finds parallels in Japan obviously through Merzbow, Hijokaidan, and Dissecting Table (although Grim predates Dissecting Table by a couple of years), but also the classic industrial works of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Einsturzende Neubauten, and Whitehouse. In the mid-'80s, Grim issued three proper releases (two lps and a single) along with a handful of compilation tracks. This compilation features everything from those three releases plus a couple of the comp tracks; and we should mention that everything here is also found on the Vinyl-On-Demand 3lp boxset released a couple years ago. Yeah, the VOD box had slightly more material than found here, but that was crazy expensive, and is long out of print, meaning this is the only way to get a hold of this material for the time being. As for the contents of Grim's musical destruction, there's plenty of metal bashing, atonal synths, crude basslines, and blown-out, blister-pocked noise to accompany Konagaya's gargling-with-acid vocal discontent throughout. The rhythmic spines of Grim's noise tracks separate him from much of the freeform noise constructions from his fellow countrymen, although it's hard not to hear the Tetsuo The Ironman soundtrack emerging out of Grim's demolition music. This was the course of action for the first two Grim releases in 1986, but by 1987, Konagaya made a radical detour for into a bleak Japanese folk sensibility, akin to what David Tibet did with Current 93 around the same time. The songs are presumably still about war and death, although sung entirely in Japanese with a highly introspective whisper and quiet, gentile plucking on the acoustic guitar. The juxtaposition between the brutalist noise and the naive-folk stylings is quite disturbing, much more so than the C93 switch from the Crowleyan collages to the apocalyptic folk. When the noise returns at the end of this album, there is a very twisted logic that seems to become apparent... that this is just really dementedly fucked up. And of course, we dig it.
Ostensibly, this is a 'new' album from Grim, but in keeping with the obscurant aspect of Jun Konagaya's industrial noise & outsider folkmuzik agenda, there's no real way of knowing if he made this in 1986 or 2013. As we mentioned in our review of the Grim anthology Folk Songs For An Obscure Race (found elsewhere on this week's list), Konagaya's aesthetic alternates between noise-laden abjection and weirdly compelling Japanese folk songs, delicately performed for voice and guitar. The subject matter of all the Grim material - noise or otherwise - is presumably war and death. It would be hard to imagine those metal-bashed dirges with their bloodcurdled vocals to encapsulate the poetics of cherry blossoms in the spring time; so we'll take Konagawa at his word that the folk tunes maintain that interest in the bleaker aspects of the human condition. On Love Song, those folk songs are Spartanly performed on a small organ with gritty recordings of some sort of political speech laid over the somewhat sweet melody. The subject matter of the speech is unclear given that it's delivered in Japanese, but it has the same feel of any given power electronics appropriation of Nazi imagery. But these instances are few and far between on Love Song, for the most part, Konagaya bashes out industrial rhythms on junked slabs of metal with accompanying blown out synth-noise drones and impossibly corroded chunks of distortion. If anybody remembers the anarcho-industrialist outfit Missing Foundation who jubliantly smashed everything around them in the late '80s, Grim's Love Song is similar, but all the more septic and mutated. Or if anybody is longing for the days when Neubauten was actually threatening, Grim is neccessary listening. This lp comes housed in an oversized box, each featuring a handmade etching from Konagawa. Very limited stock on this one!!!
Not all that long ago, we got in what we thought could have been a new Grim album. That being the very unlovely Love Song album on the Japanese imprint Art Into Life, released in 2013. There was no information about when it may have been recorded; but the industrial nihilism for iron-fisted rhythms, eye-gouging noise, and those strangely saccharine organ drones which comprised the Grim aesthetic of the early '80s was wholly intact. It very well could have been that Love Song was a lost recording from back in the day, never released until Art Into Life dug them up. Regardless, we can safely report that Psycho Sun is in fact a new recording from Grim - the first since the mid-'80s (well, all of this is according to Steinklang Industries).
Grim is the nom de guerre for Jun Konagaya, an obscure pioneer of Japanese industrial music whose aesthetic slips outside the histories of Keiji Haino, Merzbow, Hanatarash / Boredoms, Incapacitants, etc. He began in late '70s as part of the equally volatile and even more obscure White Hospital (with Tomo Kuwahara later of Vasilisk), where the torturousness of Grim had incubated within a feral noise-junk crucible. Both in White Hospital and in the early incarnations of Grim, Konagaya would juxtapose these strangely ethereal, almost celebratory organ tunes with teeth-clenching pummel of metal-on-metal overdrive with throat-ripped vocalizations. This also defines what he's doing in the modern-day Grim, with a few minor tweaks - the organ tunes are augmented by detuned radiowaves bent through the electrically irradiated landscape of urban Japan, the metal bashing finds chunks of guitar noise to wrestle with at center stage, and the vocal range has deepened slightly. Despite these augmentations, Grim remains an uncompromisingly perverse project of brutality, violence, and nihilism.
At last, a two-on-one disc reissue of the 1st and 2nd albums by this mid-eighties British metal outfit. The first album's title track, a minor hit at the time, is now considered a cult classic, having special significance to our own Andee Connors as it is the first song he ever learned to play on guitar. Melodic, chugging heavy metal, with soaring, semi-evil vocals, that'll make you raise your fist and yell, see you in hell (my friend).
The name had us expecting something blackened and metallic, but the lineup gave us a more realistic idea of what Grim Tower might sound like. The duo of Stephen McBean of Black Mountain, and aQ pal Imaad Wasif (Lowercase, Electric Flower Group) is self described as 'death folk', and Grim Tower do most definitely deliver a sort of dark psychedelic folk, lush and laced with effects and electronics, trancelike and ritualistic, the sound obviously beholden to classic seventies acid folk, but with plenty of modern psych folk tropes as well. Opener "Soft Seance" sets the scene pretty perfectly, over a bed of backwards rhythms, and softly swirling FX, the duo lay down some distorted psych guitar buzz, and some steel string buzz, the vocals a moody echo drenched croon, all minor key melodies, cool vocal harmonies, some big drumming toward the end, and a heavy psych finish, all distorto shred wrapped chug and churn. The second track is all banjo and sruti box buzz, Wasif's keening vox a nice contrast to McBean's croon, the vibe super apocalyptic and swampy, reminding us for sure of Woven Hand / 16 Horsepower big time. And so it goes, the sound shifting from dark brooding folky psychedelia, to culty, ritualistic acid folk, to almost pop, all jangly and melodic (check out "Orpheus Light") with fluttery flute and fuzz drenched acoustic guitars, to broody, balladic folkiness, to strummy, almost classic rock sounding psych, even some buzzy Appalachia, but all of these variations are definitely woven into a fantastically cohesive whole, a dark, mysterious, death obsessed psychedelic songsuite that we're digging big time!
We loved what we heard on Grimes' split 12" with D'eon that we were finally able to review a few lists ago, but our love for Grimes really blossomed when some of us got to catch her/them live several months ago, in town opening for Austra. We could tell then that they were on the verge of creating something pretty awesome. Visions totally delivers on that promise, Grimes' glorious soft gaze synth driven sound creating not just a hazy atmosphere but producing memorable and mesmerizing pop songs as well.
Like the sounds of Gang Gang Dance and Glasser softly drifting through a smoke filled room, the sounds here manage to be both tender and sexy. While Grimes may too often be pigeonholed as a witch house band, there is something much more bright, melodic and sonically rounded about their sound and approach. Each song has its own distinct vibe and tonal color. Sometimes it sounds like Little Dragon doing the most seductive Blondie song ever and other times it's like Chromatics letting their hair down at an after hours '90s RnB dance party. Airy without being too light, addictive without being too saccharine. Visions definitely transports us to some fantastical sonic otherworld that we're digging big time...
We had never heard Canadian electro-soul experimentalist Grimes before, but had heard a lot about her, and we have to say, her sound definitely lives up to the hype, her voice spectral and girlish, a sweet high croon one second, a Kate Bush like wail the next, the vocals wrapped in ethereal atmospheric swirls and pulsing electro synths, skittery IDM rhythms, all subtly glitched out, laced with haunting pianos, everything hazy and reverby, a little witch house-y, but for all it's weirdness and experimentalism, it's also seriously poppy, and about as commercial as stuff like this can get without switching teams, like in some alternate universe, this would be all over the radio, and should be. Folks who dig Zola Jesus, Glass Candy, Salem, oOoOO, Cosmetics and the like will dig big time.
D'eon, whose Palinopsia 12" we reviewed a while back, drags things back squarely into some outsider soul / weirdo electronics netherworld, with a gorgeous, hazy softly psychedelic intro, all swooshy new age synths, and spidery barely there guitar, cascading melodies, swoonsome underwater bass, and a melodic refrain that had this sounding almost like a re-interpretation of the Twin Peaks theme, but laced with a skeletal rhythm created by glitchy cell phone interference, that immediately recognizable stuttery static...
But after that, it's back to the fractured fucked up retro soul D'eon does so well, super washed out, kaleidoscopic eighties flashback grooves, Terrence Trent D'Arby like soulful vox, draped over smears of synth shimmer, and warbly loops, an avant IDM soul that seems to gradually blossom into even more crunchy glitched out rhythms, almost jungly at one point, but never shedding its gloriously dated eighties haze. The closer, with its electronic bass, and electro handclaps, definitely sounds like some lost eighties VHS soundtrack, bouncy, soulful, groovy, and fracturedly funky.
Latest blast of buzzing black filth from this Belgian horde and it's a doozy. Nothing avant or freaked out, fucked or damaged, nope these guys are masters of the pure black arts, channeling the spirit of Darkthrone, through a wall of murky majestic riffing, blasting beats almost totally obscured and buried by the massive amounts of murk and buzz, the vocals a reverb drenched, an animalistic growl that comes as close to throat singing as any "vokills" we've heard, a raw rough sort of slow guttural roar.
Minus some awesome almost Sabbathy doom style riffing (complete with tolling bell right at the beginning of the first track), and some lurching woozy eighties style classic metal (sometimes underpinned by strange sounding double kick rumbles), the band spend most of their time in a wintry flurry of blown out buzz and furious blast.
Fast, primitive, ugly and raw, Grimfaug unfurl track after track of mesmerizingly hypnotic old school Nordic style buzz, and sometimes that's really all you want or need.
Tears streaked many a black metal fan's corpsepaint when they heard the news earlier this year that those stalwarts of the Norwegian black metal scene, the one and only Immortal, *weren't* actually (i.e. the band broke up). At least Immortal went out in glory, with their final album being the magnificent Sons Of Northern Darkness, one of their best. Now drummer Horgh From Immortal (that's his name, right?) has got a new band together, Grimfist, a trio with guitarist/bassist Ole Walaunet and vocalist Frediablo (Gorelord, Svartpest, Necrophagia, et. al.). Time to wipe away the tears, kiddies, 'cause while Grimfist is no Immortal, they're pretty good. As you might expect with Horgh From Immortal behind the kit, the velocities are excessive, and Grimfist's brutal music is like a grim fist in your face (where'd we get that simile?). At one point early on in the album, some power-metally clean vocals take over from the rough rasping growls, but as it turns out that was only a one-time occurence, which is kind of neat 'cause it keeps you guessing throughout, though it would take more than that to distract you from the full-on headbangin' this disc will precipitate. Death, black, and thrashin' eighties metal are fed into the Grimfist grinder, and the results are hard not to like, if nothing super original. But while we mourn Immortal, why not have a little fun with Grimfist?
Killer three way split of grim depressive blackness from the same label that brought us the new Pyha (reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), and while we were familiar with French outfit Grimlair, we had never heard of the other two. And while Grimlair have not made it onto the aQ list until now, the black metalheads around here have dug them for a while, their, woozy, mournful, melancholic buzz drenched miserablism, the guitars crunchy and softly corrosive, the vocals and anguished wail, the drums simple and buried in the mix, but the melodies, so dreamy and haunting and emotional, think Xasthur and Alcest and Amesoeurs, but way more raw and stripped down, a single riff spread out into a whole song, the melody winding through the churning murky riffage, not so much heavy as atmospheric, a gauzy, blackened sonic dreamworld, the last track a cool, reverby, almost classical clean guitar piece, love this guy. If you're at all into the sad and sorrowful side of the grim black spectrum, this will totally hit the spot.
The guy from Grimlair apparently also plays in Klar, who not surprisingly traffic in a similar sound, but Klar's sound is a bit more lush and full, the same sort of melancholic melodic grimnesss, but with a dour almost post punk undercurrent, the guitars reverby and echoey, with some cool, almost psychedelic sounding leads, the vocals more up front, and a bit more tortured sounding, with occasional bursts of almost blasting blackness, but for the most part, Klar creeps and crawls, crafting ominous and haunting slo motion metallic atmospheres, peppered with stretches of almost post rock sounding clean guitar jangle, and one long stretch of solo guitar that's super meditative and hypnotic.
Finally, there's Unending Hatred, a depressive duo from Mexico, who have their own take on miserable blackness, a full, heavy sound that definitely reminds us a little of Lifelover, but much more raw and grim, the guitars woozy and washed out, everything wreathed in thick buzz, the melodies sad and sorrowful, minor key and mournful, and the vocals, twisted mewls and wild falsetto shrieks, very alien and animalistic, adding a seriously demented vibe to the droned out depressive blackness, definitely want to hear more from these guys.
Three variations on grim black miserablism, all of them pretty great...
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So it seems like you can't be a singer/songwriter these days without having a bio involving, either Eastern gurus, nomadic quests or shamanic encounters. Larkin Grimm is definitely no exception, with her lengthy bio reading more like a fairy tale then a back-story. Between growing up in rural Appalachia and hitchhiking through Alaska, the elegant songwriter's magical lifestyle has inspired her vibrant career and her latest and most promising release, Parplar. Ms. Grimm has succeeded in conjuring a sound that is solely her own, haunting finger-picked, acoustic sorcery that cuts to the bone. But don't think this album is so easy to wrap your head around, it's dense with all kinds of instrumentation and fantastical production. With some songs that are stripped down, sparse and folk oriented, and others that are rather twisted in a child-like, whimsical way. Kind of like a fucked up Disneyland nightmare, or a malfunctioning carnival ride. Really bizarre and twisted, but unique and intriguing, Parplar is finely crafted and is the perfect addition to the Young God records catalogue.
Ex-Boredoms vocalist Yoshikawa's weird percussion/vox/synth crew captured live in Japan. Complete with JB's style MC introducing the band, Yoshikawa and Co. energetically bash out their drum-heavy exotica jams. While definitely better in person,
Long unavailable domestically, now back in stock thanks to the band themselves bringing copies in, here's the 1995 full-length debut from Osaka's Grind Orchestra. Not a noisecore collective like their name may suggest, GO rather is the outfit formed by
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Testosterone.
Yep, Grinderman are back with their self-explanatory second album, and it's a motherfucker. Just like the first one. If for some reason you've been living under a rock, Grinderman is a supergroup, if you will, comprised of Nick Cave, and his Bad Seeds cohorts Warren Ellis (also of Dirty Three), Jim Sclavunos and Martyn Casey. True to that pedigree, this record RULES. The best thing about this is how it bypasses the curse of the side project in ways that few records can (the same could be said of the recent Shrinebuilder and Twilight records). So yeah, the first record was no fluke, and this one is even BETTER. Punked out blues with a dirty mind, muscular riffage, pounding rhythms, and of course, Cave's psycho-sexual vocals delivered with just enough restraint to keep things nice and tense. Every song is totally dirty and sleazed out in the best way imaginable, and the album moves forward with an unstoppable swagger that just reeks of sexxx, sweat, and blasphemy. The production is top notch and perhaps the only thing "tasteful" about this record. It simply SOUNDS amazing, huge swirling psychedelic atmospheres for the band to immerse themselves in. Grinderman 2 is already sounding like a classic after only a few weeks on the shelf.
After a few seconds of pleasantly melodic reverse guitar, the album gets right to the point with opener "Mickey Mouse And The Goodbye Man", with some burly bass keeping Cave from completely losing his shit as he spits out memorable lines like "And he sucked her and he sucked her and he sucked her dry". Things soon morph into an aggressive stomp that simply rocks. "Heathen Child" sort of continues this theme with its psych blues vibe and more lyrics that involve some literal sucking. The boys know how to switch things up as well, like on "What I Know", the closest thing to a ballad that you get here. Of course, it's still creepy and weird as fuck before leading into the raucous "Evil", one of the album's most aggressive numbers. "Places Of Montezuma" sounds a bit like classic late '60s/early '70s Rolling Stones interpreted by Nick Cave. So in other words, it's pretty rad, setting things up for the perfect closing song "Bellringer Blues", a midtempo dirge with all kinds of psychedelic haziness thrown in with the cool group vocals.
If you dug the first record, this is a no brainer. Not sure if anyone was ever skeptical about Grinderman, but if they were, this should put all fears to rest. Accompanying this kick ass record is some equally kick ass packaging, with shiny blue foil lettering and a super thick booklet overflowing with amazing artwork from Ilinica Hopfner.
NEW NICK CAVE!!!! NEW NICK CAVE!!!! NEW NICK CAVE!!!! And for any fan of The Birthday Party, Bad Seeds, or anything else Mr. Cave has released in his vast and varied career, you will not be disappointed by this, the first release from GRINDERMAN!!!!
For this new project Cave has taken a turn towards caustically energetic. This record is frenetic and convulsive, reminding us a bit of The Birthday Party combined with the refinement of The Bad Seeds. The songcraft is definitely up to snuff with Cave's entire oeuvre, but what makes this album exciting is the fact that Cave has closed the lid on his piano (an instrument which has been his main writing tool throughout his career), and picked up the Stratocaster! The resulting sound is noisy and bombastic. The guitar lines are as hooky as they are interesting, and at points are actually trippy as hell. Phasers and wahs aplently. The other element that sets this album apart are the droney loops created by Warren Ellis, the best example of which is heard on "When my Love Comes Down" which starts with a scraping violin loop that remains throughout the entire swampy shuffle. That's not to say there aren't tender moments on this record. "Man in the Moon" for instance is a beautiful Fender Rhodes ballad, a sad little musical picture for sure.
All and all, this record is awesome. If you are an avid Nick Cave fan, as we are, you will love this record. Cave's lyrical content is consistent with most of his work...dark and sexual and greasy and smart. The sound of this record is also vaguely psychedelic, which is an interesting development that seems to spring mostly from the fact that Cave's guitar tone is fuzzed out and heavily effected... SO RULING!
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Another new release, and another incomprehensibly confusional band name from James Ferraro, formerly one half of warped soft noise duo the Skaters, now a bonified solo phenom, with about a million cd-r's and tapes and lps under various monikers, including his very own actual mom and dad approved name
For Grippers Nother Onesers, Ferraro does more than loop and sample, there seems to be some actual riffing going on, as well as lots of singing, a warbly warped reverb drenched falsetto, over fuzzy fractured riffage, even some drumming, but all the instruments are smeared and blurred and muddied, so instead of coming even remotely close to sounding like a proper rock record, it still sounds like a Ferraro jam, but this time it's got more of a Ariel Pink meets Prince vibe (mostly cuz of the vox), the music tweaked and twisted, the fact that it's actually being played and then buried under a patina of muted hiss and hum, makes it all the more compelling. We're sure there was actual playing on other records, but this one sounds the most like a band, albeit a damaged drugged out band from another dimension, where all communication takes place via busted up old transistor radios, and all record players shift from 33 to 45 constantly, so all sounds seem to twist and melt before your very ears.
The soulful falsetto crooning is the high point here, turning even the most disjointed fucked up Jeck-ian jam into a dizzying slab of alien soul pop. Fans of Ariel Pink and other warped poppers, if you're not already hip to Ferraro's groove, now's the time...
We loved the debut release from the band Niflheim, as much as you can love something that dark and dour and depressing and miserable, but love it we did. A crushing chunk of soul shearing Burzumic buzz, laced with strange drones, and bits of haunting ambience.
For some reason the band changed their name to Gris, and this, Il Etait Une Foret, is the first under the new monicker, but, it's actually the 2nd chapter in Gris/Niflheim's musical quest which is apparently meant to span seven volumes. But we're off to a pretty good start�
But with the name change, the sound has changed as well, pretty dramatically actually, but before we get into it, we feel that we have to preface the following with this disclaimer: we definitely get pretty hyperbolic about the music we love, proclaiming things the best ever, the most fucked of all time, the heaviest, but you know, there's nothing wrong with that really, cuz often, for that moment, whatever we're listening to really is. You're not playing things side by side, not comparing two records, you're letting a single record and the music within overwhelm you and engulf you and carry you away, so it's no wonder, that in the throes of that sort of listening, whatever that record is, it IS in fact for that moment the MOST. The great records are the ones that continue to be the most even on repeated listens.
Okay with that out of the way, this Gris record has some strange ineffable quality, some wondrous confluence of heaviness and prettiness, that in short order has quickly made it our most listened to and probably favorite black metal record of the year so far. It's not the heaviest, or the fastest, or the grimmest, but it is truly strange, beautifully unique, mournful yet majestic, depressive yet dreamy.
The sound is definitely Burzumic, a loping lurching almost midtempo buzz, the guitar super brittle and crunchy, the arpeggiated notes dripping with crumbling distortion, the vocals some of the most anguished we've heard, recalling Weakling for sure, as well as groups like Hekel and Malcuidant. A raspy near hysterical wail, always on the verge of cracking completely. The riffs are moody and melancholy, intense and emotional, often a second, acoustic, guitar, offers up a melodic counterpoint, giving the depressive dirge a strangely stately and classical vibe. The songs often burst into epic crescendos, the screams growing even more tortured, strings soaring, it's like a black metal opera, over the top and super intense, cinematic and totally heart wrenching. Rare is the band of any stripe, especially black metal, that is able to illicit that sort of response in the listener.
Some of the tracks are just acoustic guitar and drums, a loose skeletal framework, the vocals a howling banshee wail scrawled across the rhythms below, bursts of machinegun like double kick drum, soaring guitar leads, flurries of piano notes, those tracks occasionally erupting into walls of blasting buzzing neo classical blackness, but still rife with mournful melodies and strange sonic flourishes, choral vocals, drifting drones, but the core is this super intense, ultra moving heaviness that loses none of it's emotional impact even when it's furiously pounding away.
Other tracks find the piano picking out a sad melody beneath a crushing doomic plod, wrapped in yet more strings, and the vocals, continuing their harsh howling lament.
Then there's the closing track, a full on classical piece, none of that fake synth ambient classical bullshit, this is a dense chunk of modern classical, strings and piano, wound into tense melodies, weaving back and forth, creating an epic and moving coda, dark and evocative haunting and mysterious, gloriously emotional and so stirring and lovely.
Not sure what else to say, at the risk of slipping into hyperbole again (but you -were- warned!), this record is absolutely amazing, a definite contender for BM record of the year, and not only does it have already anxiously awaiting chapter three, it's got us all fired up to go back and revisit the first one as well. SO recommended.
